Category: Play
Sunday, Oct 21, 2018 | Big Thoughts, Death, Dogs, Fun, Play, Spirit |
This post is about two separate but related events in our family’s life. I’m going to tell them backward, out of order.
The second event that happened: We got a puppy. On Friday evening. This is Rose.
The first event that happened: We said goodbye to Suzi. Just a week ago, last Sunday, our family gathered to say a difficult goodbye to a dog we knew was sick and only getting sicker, but such a tenacious present soul. The house felt so empty when she was gone. We’d been wanting a puppy for a long time, but we knew that Suzi wouldn’t have been able to tolerate sharing our attention, and we didn’t want the end of her life to be plagued by anxiety, jealousy, stress.
Still, I think we all felt a little guilty about so quickly wanting to get a puppy. But here’s how I’m thinking about it: we aren’t replacing Suzi, we’re recognizing how much she (and her departed sister DJ) meant to us, and we’re filling the house with the presence of another little creature to hold, to love, to care for. Once you’ve become accustomed to sharing your space with a dog, your space without a dog feels empty (even with six people living in said space).
If I ever had to live alone, I would get a puppy. It seems like that would solve everything; or at least one very big thing — loneliness.
I would get a puppy, and I would zip it into my coat, like I did yesterday afternoon when Rose got shivery and cold on our outing. I would get a puppy, and I would watch it tumble over itself in the wet grass, picking up leaves, hopping like a bunny, sitting down suddenly and just as suddenly darting sideways. I would get a puppy, and I would hold it close and feel its body go calm and relaxed. Time would slow down.
Puppy time/baby time/small child time isn’t like adult time. I’ve been reflecting on the capacity for play that exists and expresses itself almost constantly in the newest arrivals on our planet. Puppies, babies, young children — their whole existence revolves around play. Play is how we learn, yes, and explore, and discover: it’s necessary for survival, no doubt. But play also contains a dimension of joy. (Is joy necessary for survival?) Joy is readily accessible to the pups of the world. Joy seems to emanate from existence itself.
I wonder at it.
Do we have to work for joy when we’re older? When experience has returned to us too many signs and signals of joylessness, grief, broken trust, the weight of responsibility? When we’ve become analytical, accustomed to living our lives from outside ourselves as well as inside ourselves?
Is joy even something you can work for? Or is its essence spontaneous, intuitive, magical?
I wonder.
My guess is that we can draw joy nearer, draw its possibility nearer, through conscious effort; but we can’t command it, no more than we can command grace, or trust, or love. To witness its vivid, effortless expression is such a gift.
I miss Suzi. I mourn that she was never able to relax fully, except when asleep, that although her trust in humans grew during the 6+ years she spent with us, her experiences before we knew her had done intractable damage. I’m glad to have a puppy upon whom only love will be poured; even while I mourn for all the Suzis of the world who have had their joy blotted and extinguished by cruelty and abuse. It was a hard task looking after two rescued dogs; I wasn’t up to the task again, so soon. So we start again with a puppy instead.
Give/receive. Maybe my spirit needs to receive joy, witness joy, in order to be able to give joy/give with joy.
xo, Carrie
Saturday, Jul 21, 2018 | Backyard, Big Thoughts, Fire, Good News, Meditation, Peace, Play, Publishing, Spirit, Stand, Summer, Word of the Year, Work, Writing |
FIRE is my word of the year, and its many meanings are very present with me at present. On my run this morning, I thought about how a fire can be an emergency, how it can burn down a house, or raze a forest. Going through fire is a metaphor for suffering and surviving, for being tempered by a painful experience. But after a fire, the soil is enriched by ash and carbon, and new life begins to grow.
Like fire that is an emergency, loss changes the landscape. Losing Marg was like going through fire. Of course, it was also like many other things, too, because Marg was extremely generous in her dying, and did everything possible to show her love and care for us, despite how sick she was. She had clarity about what was happening, and her wisdom gave us clarity, too. The fire tempered her, and it tempered us, too.
After loss comes grief. Sometimes grief comes even before loss — as we see loss coming toward us on the horizon. Grief isn’t predictable. It doesn’t follow a set timeline. At different points this spring, I recognized that grief was my companion, and that it was helping me to set my course.
Immediately after Marg’s death, I felt like a sleepwalker, numb, too tired to think, but slowly and steadily I drifted toward a different phase of being in the world — of being in the world. I began to meditate outside in our back yard. I let myself rest. I let myself not do next to nothing; listen, pay attention, breathe. Instinctively, I gave myself space. And with space, with breath, with oxygen to feed it, my interior fire began to flicker to life again. It was in that burnt out quiet space, in the aftermath and ash, that new shoots of green began to grow. I thought about (think about) Marg all the time. She was and is present in my mind, in my decision-making. Her clarity guides me, and her willingness in life to step forward, to be responsible, to take charge and to lead.
Because fire has another meaning, too — fire as passion, as heat and light and desire. There are times when I live without noticing how I’m feeling, numbed by routine and responsibility and the relentless obligations of being a mother to four children, a teacher, a writer, a volunteer. These are times when I’m dull, ticking boxes, struggling to keep my weak flame lit. And then there are times when I’m on fire! I’m paying attention — my attentiveness becomes acute, and I can see clearly what matters and what doesn’t matter.
From a place of quiet attention, comes clarity.
I have been tempered by fire, and my sense of purpose is strengthened. This I know: to feed my spirit, to remain grounded and whole, I must live creatively. Living creatively means improvising, sometimes; it means pursuing work that may not have a financial value; it means making space for others to play too. Since Marg’s death, I’ve found myself making choices from a place that feels powerful and certain. I ask: what matters to me, and am I acting on what matters to me? Next Sunday, I’ll be speaking at church because when I saw the call for volunteers, instead of questioning the impulse, wondering whether I had the authority to speak, or the time to prepare, or the courage to stand up, I just said yes: this matters to me, and I will do it.
Another example: This spring, as I heard about protests in Nicaragua, as the situation became ever more troubling and desperate, as protestors were being killed, I wondered: Why isn’t this news being covered in the Canadian media? What can our government do to help the situation? And then I asked: Is there anything I can do? Yes! I could use my resources, skills, and contacts to write an opinion piece appealing to the Canadian government and getting this news before the public, at least to a small degree — I pitched the idea to an editor at the Globe and Mail, and wrote the piece while sitting in a tent on a rainy afternoon last weekend. I consulted with Nicaraguan contacts to ensure my facts were accurate. I sought feedback. And the piece was published in today’s Opinion section of the Globe. It’s a small act, but it’s something.
I’ve discovered something powerful about acting on what matters to me: It gives me fuel for the fire, energy to do more.
There are so many small ways to be whole, to feel whole. I don’t seek a work-life balance, because my work and life are utterly intertwined. I’m not interested in the concept of balance. I’m interested in recognizing which fires need to be fed, and which should be smothered. That’s a different kind of balance. It means asking: what do I have control over and what do I need to let go of?
A fire can burn out of control. Some emergencies cannot be prevented or stopped, can only be endured, withstood, survived, contained. But there are many smaller fires: a candle, a campfire, the flame inside a wood stove. These fires draw us, warm us, soothe us, invite community. The constantly changing shape of the flame is meditative and centring. We gather with others around the light and heat.
I hope to have more news to share in the weeks to come. More irons in the fire. More heat, more light. Meanwhile, more summer.
xo, Carrie
Tuesday, Jan 16, 2018 | Adventure, Art, Big Thoughts, Cartoons, Death, Drawing, Fun, Lynda Barry, Play, Writing |
Title: Finding Footing
Captions: I ran with Heather this morning. It was snowing. The snow was so deep we couldn’t find our footing. We talked about our words of the year: fire and fresh. At home, I put unmelted snow from my hair on Annie’s forehead.
(What I like about this cartoon is the image of the snowflake that appears in each panel. It creates a visual motif that links the pictures with the text. The “on” should be “onto” but when writing in pen, mistakes get made and they’re permanent. So be it.)
The joy of embarking on a new project is the mystery of what its process will unearth. It’s too early into the cartooning project to guess what’s yet to be learned by doing it. What I’ve noticed so far is that already I have a sense of how many words can fit into each panel. Brevity and clarity are paramount. Thematic clarity is valuable, but sometimes a scattered cartoon, written and drawn in haste, can have its charms.
Title: Time-Challenged
Captions: This particular cartoon is very time-challenged. Things that happened today: Forgot to pick up Angus from work … Tuned out during scripture reading at church … Walked backward into the cold wind with Calvin.
(This cartoon was written and drawn in almost exactly 10 minutes, which I think is the absolute minimum amount of time required.)
Some days I’ve drawn two cartoons, one on a political subject, and the other more personal. For the purposes of keeping the project streamlined, I’m allowing myself to post only one cartoon each day (on Facebook and Twitter); so far, I’ve chosen the personal over the political. The political cartoons have gone into blog posts instead. I don’t feel that I’ve settled on a drawing singular style, yet. I like that. I like the freedom to experiment with both subject matter and style.
Title: Is It Like Climbing A Mountain Of Snow?
Captions: What happens if I don’t feel like drawing? Is it like climbing a mountain of snow to get to campus? Like doing the dishes and vacuuming? If I just show up, just do it, just keep going, it will happen?
(This was the one day so far that I really didn’t feel like cartooning. I’m glad that I did. It’s a good reminder to just show up and do it, even if you don’t feel like it; good advice for life in general, for writing in particular.)
Questions I’m mulling: What makes a good cartoon? What’s too personal, in terms of subject matter? Would these cartoons be of interest only to family and friends? Is it possible to find the universal in the daily? (Of course it is! The question, really, is how?)
Title: Messy House
Caption: “My house is messy,” Asmaa said, and I said, “I won’t look.” But she wanted to show me. On the coffee table, a pan of butter, markings where dough was rolled out. She brought me a plate of baklava. “Too sweet?” “No!” I ate three.
(Most of these cartoons pair random scenes from the day with largely unrelated captions, and I enjoy discovering how these two dissimilar things respond to each other, but for this one, all the scenes drawn come from the story described in the text.)
Something interesting I’ve observed: that cartoons have the capacity to envelope sad, difficult narratives in a way that eases the pain, I think. Something I think about quite a lot is how to write about trauma without traumatizing the reader. I see in cartooning a possible means of tackling challenging subjects in non-traumatizing ways. Cartoons remind me of poems, a bit.
Title: This Day
Captions: This day has almost crushed me, yet it hasn’t been hard, objectively. I felt close to collapse, inside and out. I felt swarmed inside by anxiety that was almost pain. Yet, I did all of the things.
(Here, I think the scenes from the day soften the description of depression/anxiety in the text.)
Things I like about this project: I get to draw everyday. It’s an opportunity to reflect on my day, and pay attention to it in a different, unusual, creative way. It’s also an opportunity to invent thematic coherence and narrative out of the raw material of life. Life is raw. We humans, we have a tendency to pattern. Pattern may be illusion, but it is powerful. Pattern brings comfort — order to disorder, shape to chaos, coherence to uncertainty.
Title: Suddenly I Felt That I Understood
Captions: Today, I baked bread and I read Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook. In it, she quotes a line from Emily Dickinson… “After great pain, a formal feeling comes —” Which suddenly I felt that I understood absolutely.
(The drawing of my hands kneading bread dough didn’t really turn out. But now you know what that panel is all about. Kind of looks like two islands separating in the middle of a lake … or, I don’t know; what do you see? I’m trying very hard not to re-do any “mistakes” in the cartoons, but rather to accept them as speaking from or to some secret part of myself I couldn’t otherwise reveal.)
xo, Carrie
Sunday, Jan 1, 2017 | Adventure, Art, Creativity course, Fun, Lynda Barry, Play, Teaching, Work |
Happy New Year!
I am gathering materials for my experimental 12-week creativity course based on Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, which could also be called a writing & drawing course, a cartooning course, or a graphic novel course; it encompasses aspects of all of the above.
Here are the materials I’ve gathered:
*Books: Lynda Barry’s What It Is, and Syllabus. The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. The Poetry of Emily Dickinson. (I’m still waiting on the arrival of Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, by Ivan Brunetti.)
*Materials: 48 Crayola crayons; 12 Primsacolor pencil crayons; Uniball vision pens, fine; Black flair pens; a non-photo blue pencil; pencil sharpener; travel watercolour set with fine brush, brand name Winsor & Newton; India ink; Elmer’s glue and a glue stick; scissors; a box cutter; 1-inch Chinese brush; nylon brush; cork-back 12-inch ruler; a Staedtler pencil set. (Note: most everything on this list was a Christmas gift from my family, and mainly from my husband, with help from the woman at the art store on our corner.)
*Paper materials: compositions books; index cards; copier paper; watercolour paper; blank sketchbook; scraps of different kinds of paper saved from a variety of sources.
I’m going to test out Week One of my course curriculum tomorrow, possibly with the participation of a child, who has expressed interest in joining in. I’m aiming for three hours of dedicated “classroom” work each week, for twelve weeks, plus smaller homework assignments.
This wall of colouring pages, which includes work by friends from last night’s New Year’s Eve party (yo, I know how to throw a rocking party….!), is just the beginning.
xo, Carrie
Wednesday, Nov 30, 2016 | Fun, Play, Spirit, Teaching, Work |
Yesterday, I taught my last class of the term.
At the end of class, a student asked, “Does every class you teach feel like this one?” And I knew what he meant. I said, yes, it does. Every class, by the end of term, feels like our classroom felt last night: a buzzing, humour-filled, serious, safe space shared by interested thoughtful equals. There’s magic there. Every term progresses in the same way, from nervousness and skepticism and even a bit of boredom and wondering what we’re getting out of this, to a gradually increasing warmth and trust. Trust is the most important ingredient. How to build trust among strangers? It doesn’t happen all at once. We’re hesitant to share. We’re afraid of being judged. We’re dealing with our own private stuff; turmoil, sadness, anger, loss, stress, anxiety. And we’re writing all the while, often deeply personal material, material we weren’t necessarily expecting to discover, material that we want to protect.
So we have to figure out how to share, how to trust, how to listen, together. And every class, every year, it’s been the same, in my experience: by the last class, we reap the rewards of our work. It’s so hard to say goodbye.
For the last class, I like to read from Ann Patchett’s essay, “The Getaway Car,” from her collection This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, especially the section where she talks about studying creative writing with the great short story writer Grace Paley:
“Grace wanted us to be better people than we were, and she knew that the chances of our becoming real writers depended on it. … She taught me that writing must not be compartmentalized. You don’t step out of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life, and who you were as a mother, teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person. People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say. I would not begin to know how to teach another person how to have character, which was what Grace Paley did.”
Wow, I love that. I could read it over and over.
When I started teaching, four years ago, I needed money, and I was grateful for work. But it turns out that money was the least of it.
I teach because I love the process, and because I’m excited by possibility and potential in all shapes and sizes, and because it challenges me to be creative and constantly learning, and because I admire my students, each one of them, for being brave enough to go through this process, which isn’t always easy, and which they may not have expected to go through when they first signed up. There’s magic in the classroom. I’ve witnessed it. And I’m greedy. I want to keep witnessing it.
Should I have gotten that PhD, way back when it was a real possibility? Have I missed my calling? In some ways, I know I’m not a great teacher, and I’m no academic; I’m more of a coach, setting up practices and games, or a trail guide, leading a group into the woods for an adventure, or a host at a rather quiet party. Maybe I should be exploring possibilities outside of academia. Maybe there are other routes, other pathways, to teaching.
Maybe you have brilliant, simple, creative, helpful ideas you could share. Please, and thank you.
xo, Carrie
Wednesday, Aug 24, 2016 | Family, Fun, Play, Summer |
This is what happens when the kids don’t have school and the parents lecture them sternly about taking initiative, while also banning them from the use of video gaming devices between the hours of 9AM – 4PM …
Introducing the Back Yard Olympics!
This is multi-day event, involving all six family members (dogs not included), with sports like Badminton Whack-It (pictured above), Racewalking, Tug-of-War, Header Wars, Basement Juggling, and today’s final event, Tricycle Time Trials. We’re just suiting up for the Tricycle Time Trials, and all I can say is, why don’t we take this one all the way around the block?
I’m back. We should definitely not, no never, take the Tricycle Time Trials all the way around the block. First of all, in tricycle terms, all the way around the block is basically a marathon. Second of all, refer to the photo evidence, below. Best kept to the back yard. xo, Carrie
*I got silver in the time trial. Not that I’m bragging or anything, okay, yes, I am bragging. I’m exactly this cool. Now you know.
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