Category: Spirit
Monday, Jul 22, 2019 | Big Thoughts, Confessions, Dream, Spirit, Work, Writing |
Not every day is a good day.
There are days when you will feel lesser than your usual self. Days when you will wonder what this darkness is you’re carrying and whether you’ll have the patience and the courage to dig into it, and maybe unearth it, learn from it.
You will feel like you have nothing to offer. Yet you will go on offering, as if pulling scarves from your sleeve, rabbits from your hat.
You will wonder at the raw stupidity of your own ambition. You will be infuriated by your flurries of self-delusion. Who did you think you were?
You’ll go for a run, trying to run out your misery, like it could be wrung from you like sweat. You won’t know who to blame. You’ll be all out of scapegoats, so you’ll turn on yourself and say, You, it was you all along, you and your inflated imagination.
And you won’t know what to say in return.
You’ll forget how to be kind to yourself. The mirror will show you failure and worse — self-pity. You’ll feel sick with nerves. Worthless. Empty, vacuous.
You’ll wonder: Is this depression?
You’ll wish you’d never started down this road. If you could go back in time — ah, but you’ll know. You’ll know that even if you could go back in time, you wouldn’t be able to tell yourself not to try, not to imagine, not to do the work. You’ll know this is part of the cycle, part of the deal. You’ll know it actually doesn’t matter how good or bad you are at this thing you’ve chosen to do, and that’s the trouble, that you’re going to keep doing this, this thing, for the rest of your life, and there’s nothing else for it.
You’ll need to pick yourself up, scrape yourself off, and pull yourself together. You can’t diagnose yourself. You can only write about it. Writing is what you’ve got. Even if, today, it means nothing to you.
Even if this is one of those days, one of those anxious, splintering days.
Tomorrow it might mean something again.
And if it doesn’t, wait till the next day. And the next day. You’re imagining an enormous crater where your dreams used to be, but even at the very bottom of that crater, you’ll poke around and find something to entertain you, console you, and keep you alive.
I promise.
xo, Carrie
Thursday, Jul 18, 2019 | Adventure, Art, Blogging, Cartoons, Drawing, Family, Fun, Siblings, Spirit |
For the past six months, I’ve been working on a 24-hour cartooning blitz once a month. The idea is that you draw a cartoon every (waking) hour over a 24-hour period. These cartoons are samples from my most recent blitz, which happened to be yesterday. I purposely chose a day in July when I’d be hanging out with my siblings. I’m hoping, over the year, to cover a representative sampling of the people, experiences, and events that thread their way in and out of my every day life.
I don’t know what this project will be at the end of making it … but I don’t question its value. How could I? Reflecting on and recording the every day essentially form the basis of most of the projects I undertake, including this blog.
Another project on which I’m currently working is a collection of stories based on events in my own every day life. At first, it began as a stylistic experiment — trying to record, faithfully, minutely, the vicissitudes of emotion and sensory experience in which we are immersed as we make our way through each day. But the project changed over time, and it’s become a place to experiment, instead, with the short story form. I play with structure. I play with character. I slip through time. I play, essentially.
Several of the stories from the collection have been published recently or will be published soon, and I’m seeking and receiving feedback from my teeny-tiny writing group on them, too. Again, I don’t know what will happen to these stories when I’m finished working on them … but working on them, reading them, thinking about them brings me deep satisfaction, which is all I ask of my projects. Making things is where the magic happens. Making things, and learning by making, and experimenting, and feeling frustrated, and getting exciting, inspired, surprising myself, refining, revising, trying again — all of this brings me joy.
This is where I flourish. (Where do you flourish?)
xo, Carrie
Sunday, Jul 14, 2019 | Blogging, Politics, Spirit, Stand, Writing |
I’ve been sitting down to write this blog post for a few days, but it keeps changing on me. Circumstances keep changing. Time keeps moving and things keep happening, and I can’t decide what, exactly, I want to say. I even wondered, last night, whether maybe it was time to stop publishing random inner thoughts on a whim, sending them into the universe without taking time to reflect on why I’ve wanted to share what little I know (or think I know). But here I sit again, typing words into a blank rectangular space.
I write in other places too. I write in my notebook, in pen, words few people could decipher even if they tried. I like not knowing what will come of that material; I like knowing it’s likely nothing will come of it, and it will just exist as a muddy river of unfiltered thought.
I also write stories, using Scrivener or Word, and that always feels like I’m doing something different, too, than what I do here, on this blog. There, I have time, I take time, sometimes years, going over and over the lines of neatly spaced words. I polish. I revisit. I consider. I restructure. It’s satisfying, and while I do write these stories knowing they could be published, someday, the outcome is difficult to guess and in some ways doesn’t matter. I have to work them over till I feel done with them, or they’re done with me.
This blog is a different space. Immediate. Gratifying. Immediately gratifying. When I skim through the years’ worth of postings (nearly 11 years, now), it’s like looking through a scrapbook. Quite pleasant, though I don’t do it often. It can feel like I’m looking at a stranger’s life, in some ways. I’ve been and done many things in the past 11 years, I’ve had my enthusiasms, responsibilities, interests, routines. I’ve been knocked off the path by fortune and misfortune. As ever, I don’t know what happens next, exactly, but I trust that more change will come, and I’ll be pulled onward, to new (or seemingly new) revelations, interests, insights, and errors. There will always be something to write about, in one medium or another.
I had an experience on Friday night that disturbed me; I can’t think what to do about it, so I’m writing about it here. On Friday afternoon, I went to Stratford with my sixteen-year-old daughter, who is off to camp this weekend for a month; we saw Billy Eliot, a musical that confronts ideas about masculinity, among other subjects. That same evening, Kevin and I went and saw Booksmart, a movie about best friends graduating from high school, that was also endearingly, hearteningly queer-positive without making a big deal of it. I could think and imagine that the world was becoming (had become) a better place, a safer place. And then, almost as soon as we’d left the movie theatre, Kevin and I found ourselves in between two groups of young people who were shouting at each other. Actually, it was really only one young man who was doing most of the shouting, and what he was shouting was disturbing, bigoted, violent. He was with a group of other young men, and while I don’t think they participated, they also didn’t intervene. They all looked the same to me: white, early twenties, athletic, clean-cut. The angry guy was shouting past us, at a teenager in a red sweater who was standing some distance away with two friends, a young woman and a young man. It ws the boy in the sweater who was the target of the other man’s rage.
I don’t want to repeat the language used. It was derogatory and homophobic. And finally, the kid in the sweater, whose body language said that he was tired of this, weary, not quite resigned, shouted something back. And then the other guy really cut loose. One of the things he shouted at that point was “you little bitch.” I turned around when he said that, because I wanted to shame him, because I wanted him to know that people were paying attention, and the angry guy said, “Ha ha, not you, you’re fine, I was talking to that other bitch, the one in the red sweater.” And then he started shouting again, possibly because I lifted my middle finger to him (not my finest moment), although it’s equally possible he didn’t even notice the gesture, and was still shouting at the kid. Kevin and I kept walking, and the group of young men kept walking too, in the opposite direction, and I thought it would be okay now, probably, the shouting was over. We passed the boy in the red sweater with his friends, and I wanted to stop and say something, but I couldn’t think what. They seemed to be trying to put the scene behind them and decide where to go to get a drink.
I said to Kevin, “This is the world our kids will have to live in.”
And he said, “They’re already living in it.
I’ve spent the weekend reading John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies, which follows the life of an Irish man from birth till death; it’s also the history of gay rights in Ireland, from the time of the protagonist’s birth when men could be arrested for being in a homosexual relationship (or beaten up, murdered, blackmailed or banished), to the referendum that legalized gay marriage in 2015. The trajectory is optimistic (which isn’t giving too much away — you should read it), but having witnessed what could only be called a disturbing scene of homophobic rage on the sidewalk on Friday night, when I got to the novel’s happy ending this morning, I felt my heart sink rather than rise.
Things are better. And things are still frighteningly not better.
And I don’t know what to do about it. Life asks us to be the best we can be under the circumstances. To use what talents we’ve got. To be true to ourselves. I believe that, just as I believe that every human being deserves dignity. That dignity is always worth fighting for. But the obstacles are enormous, and when you get right down to it, the horror of it is that the obstacles are almost all human-made. I can’t possibly list all the indignities humans are forced to endure, all the ways humans prevent other humans from being free, but it’s everywhere I turn, especially when I turn on the news.
Tap, tap, tap. I’ve typed for too long, and come up with too little. But I guess I haven’t yet given up on pressing publish, even when I don’t quite know what I’m trying to say.
xo, Carrie
Friday, Jul 5, 2019 | Holidays, Space, Spirit, Summer |
Summer’s here. You can feel it.
No big thoughts, no mini-meditations, just hot hot heat.
I hope you’re taking some time to take it easy, too.
xo, Carrie
Thursday, Jun 27, 2019 | Art, Backyard, Big Thoughts, Confessions, Meditation, Space, Spirit, Summer, Word of the Year, Work, Writing |
This is an ideal day, wide open, warm. I’m wearing shorts and a t-shirt and sandals. I’ve gone for a run in the park, walked the dog, hung the laundry, and meditated in the back yard listening to the birds and the traffic.
It is possible to be quiet and still.
And yet, there is an undercurrent of anxiety. Feelings of inadequacy, guilt, shame, grief, panic. When you strip away the layers of busyness, you have to look at yourself, pay attention, listen. Maybe you were busy for a reason. Maybe you didn’t want to scrutinize the uncomfortable emotions and their uncomfortable causes.
What hurts?
What a question. Oh boy. Rejection hurts. Not meeting my own expectations and hopes hurts. Feeling purposeless in my vocation hurts.
Is this true? Do you feel purposeless, directionless, or is your purpose and direction so attached to outcome that you’re standing in the way of recognizing what is before you? The here and now. Not what came before or what may come, but what is here before you in this very hour.
I come inside and draw a picture. I write this meditation.
I ask: Is my vocation, my purpose more closely related to being a writer, or to leading a life of contemplation? What connects these two points on the map inside my mind? What separates them?
A writer writes, of course, but more importantly, she publishes. Produces. Makes her ideas manifest on the page. Her work can be seen, recognized, appreciated.
What do you even call a person who leads a life of contemplation? How quiet and interior is a life of contemplation? How is such a life made manifest? Is it a life in which its purpose is entirely untethered from production, from recognition, from approval? Is it a life without notice? What would that mean?
xo, Carrie
Tuesday, Jun 25, 2019 | Big Thoughts, Family, Good News, Kids, Spirit, Success |
On Thursday, our youngest went to his first track meet and won a ribbon with his school’s tug of war team. Both Kevin and I went to cheer in recognition of our son’s excitement and pride about participating in the event.
On Saturday, my dad and I went to Toronto to see my little sister graduate from a college program in digital visual special effects (hope I got that right!). Afterward, we celebrated by eating some of the best Chinese food we’d ever had, randomly discovered by googling “restaurants near me”: I think it was called Halal Chinese Restaurant (near Finch and the 404).
On Sunday, our eldest was honoured at church, as a new high school graduate. He was presented with a quilt, and in return he had to prepare and deliver some words of response, which was a heart-filling moment for his mother. We made a day of it by riding the brand-new LRT, eating bagels at the City Cafe afterward, and then crowding onto a bus on the way home when the LRT was temporarily out of service. It was an adventure, in other words.
And finally, yesterday, on Monday, our younger daughter attended her grade eight graduation. Much planning and thought had gone into her preparations for the big event. She had two siblings in attendance, one of whom wondered out loud what the point of these ceremonies is, exactly?
And to be honest, I’m not entirely sure I could answer that question. They probably mean different things to different people.
For myself, a ceremony is an opportunity to mark a moment, publicly. Often ceremonies seem to skim the surface, as they follow a certain logic and ruthless purpose: get hundreds of kids their diplomas! My mind tends to wander, imagining back stories from tiny clues, enjoying the flashes of individuality.
A ceremony suggests continuity, repetition, a set of prescribed rituals that draw on historical precedent, which makes them a bit staid and unbending. And yet, and yet … we need these containers for our moments, especially our big collective passages from one thing to the next, our transitions. Ceremonies are human-made, imperfect, but they force us to sit idly in attendance, and perhaps to be a bit bored, which may be a state that induces reflection, maybe not, but it definitely slows us down.
Time slows, briefly. Crawls. Drags.
And then we clap for our beloved, photograph them, and wonder at how old we’re all getting; how is it possible? how has it happened?
And life flows on, again.
xo, Carrie
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