Christmas Gift

Here is a Christmas laugh for you:

Growing up in Edmonton we had a boxer dog named Sam. She was never properly trained; I took her to Obedience Lessons where she would get in fights with the instructor and only come when I called her after a saucy look at said instructor. She and I failed the course and since this was the first thing I had failed, I had to go outside and have a cry. Forever after when Sam escaped out the front door we had to grab a hot dog to entice her home.

Often my mom would drive downtown with Sam to pick up my dad from work. He worked in an office tower and she would park in the alley around the back. Being somewhat... um.... frugal, my mom had never bothered to get a dog license for Sam as was required by the City of Edmonton. However, the smallness of the license fee had an inverse relationship to how much she worried about not having it. One day my mom was parked in the alley waiting for my dad with Sam, of course, sitting in the driver's seat. A police officer walked by, knocked on Sam's window and jokingly asked if she had a license. Overcome with guilt my mom hastily said no, not yet, but promised that she would get one very soon.

John

This picture was taken summer 2009. This is an art installation by Kathleen Hull, part of Uncommon Art which was a series of different artists creating scenes in the outdoors in and around Wolfville. I see tears falling down, or maybe a screen hiding a dimension beyond what we know. What do you see?

You are my father, grandfather, uncle, friend, brother, son
You prayed to be free and light and floating

But sometimes your darkness won;

Yachanan (God is gracious) was your name before

You are the Lennon of the Beatles, tragic genius nevermore;

You are pure as John the Baptist who gave his life for God

And John the Apostle too, to whom Jesus gave a nod;

You are chivalrous and caring as the Order of St. John

But you can be querulous and difficult and hard to get along;

You are open and uncanny

You are Ivan, Juan and Giovanni;

You are the prickly pear with the sweetest juice inside

But there is a cost for you Sean, and sometimes you must hide;

You are Johann and Iain and we're never sure who's who

But once you set your sights on love your aim is always true;

Ultimately you are too good to live in this hardscrabble place

But you are in us, through us and around us

And you fill our lives with Grace.

Space

Children fill a lot of space, need a lot of time. My life would be so empty without my children. Without children I might, however, gain access to the computer more often!
I find that when I create space I create time as well. How? When I have less stuff to deal with I have more time to think and play. Yesterday I cleaned out a lot of detritus in the house and today I had time to write this blog and play around with how to download my pictures. I created wealth yesterday too by creating space around some beautiful things that I own. Our silver tea service was a gift from my parents when we got married, yesterday I dusted it and gave it prominence on the sideboard. Funny how getting rid of stuff makes me feel like a millionaire.
Losing weight creates air and flow and comfort, eating too much fills in all the space and leaves no room for breathing. What is it in North America that we are missing inside that leads us to fill ourselves with chemicals? And to fill our homes with chemicals?
This is a picture I took this summer when I went on a walk with my friend Pat. I'm so glad I had the space in my day to take this walk with her. And to play with my camera. And now to share with you.

On Loan

In the Globe and Mail on June 22, 2009 there was a neat article about a writer, David Finley, who was facing insolvency and was trying to sell on eBay a Dora award he'd won in 2005 for outstanding new musical. After a failed attempt to sell the award Mr. Finley was contacted by a retired financier who with his wife, gave him $5000 to hold the award until Finley was back on his financial feet. This very generous offer allowed Finley to think about starting a new theatre company whilst knowing that his Dora Mayor Moore Award was safe and ready to be returned to him when the time was right. I appreciate this idea of things being on loan, that we really don't "own" anything. Kahlil Gibran's first paragraph of his poem on children is:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you.

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

When things are on loan to us that signifies to me that special care must be taken of them, that there is a trust that we will treat things with respect, and love them for themselves and not for the fact of owning them. Michael Jackson died yesterday. His beauty and genius was on loan for the world. I'm afraid that the original complicated doll that was given to us to play with is now marked up, disfigured and lifeless, not the way we should be treating such a special gift.

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Come my friend and we'll sit for awhile;

We'll chat and nod and look away;

If it's right maybe we'll remove our masks for a few minutes and I'll look you in the eye and say,

"I'm scared" and you'll say,

"I'm scared too", and then we'll laugh knowingly,

and then we're gone.

Abundance

We recently joined a food co-op with a local farm, Taproot Farms. This time of year it's easy to feel grateful for all the colours, the flavours, the smells of our beautiful valley. Being a worrier I look ahead to the winter and wonder what will happen when the earth has gone back to sleep. Living in the moment is easier said than done, so I'll share a moment that happened this morning. I made eggs benedict for the family with a side of fresh asparagus (don't think we're normally this fancy, we have a visitor from Hong Kong whom I'm trying to impress, so far it's working, she's taking pictures of our meals, oh the pressure,the pressure!); I had a quiet moment of parental pride when my two oldest kids not only didn't comment on the fact that we were having veggies at breakfast, they just ate them! Number three child ate his eggs and when I suggested that he eat the veggies too, he curled up into fetal ball and made gagging noises. I learn everyday that as a parent, 2/3 ain't bad.

Success

What is it, to be "successful". Many of us at midlife start to wonder what that means exactly. Is it a fully funded pension (I hope not!); is it a paid off mortgage (again, I hope not!), ha ha. Especially for women this is a tricky question. "Having it all" means we fragment ourselves into a thousand pieces. I think in the past "success" to me was the acquisition of things: spouse, children, house, trips, stuff. Now, today, I will define success as being comfortable in my own skin. We all know those people who are just very comfortable with who they are and what they do. They are distinguished by the way they do whatever job it is with care and intent. This picture is a flower shop in our town. Is is "successful"? Well, it's been there for a long time and I'm sure has created many moments of delight, so I would say yes, without looking at the balance sheet, this business is very "successful".

Bicycle

I took this picture this morning. Here is a little mystery. This bike has been here for quite awhile; who left it? Someone cared enough about this bike to lock it to the post but they haven't come back to get it. They cared enough to put a big basket on the bike but there is a lot of rust on the fenders. What happened to the owner of this bike? The location is strange too. On the other side of the bike is a graveyard, no houses nearby. It seems so "random"; I love that word, my teenager uses it frequently. I'm sure there's a simple explanation. Often we see one part of the puzzle and think we know the whole thing. Sometimes it's about trusting that the big picture is as it should be.

Lupins

This is a picture I took down the road at our friends John and Beth's place. I thought the lupin would be somehow connected to wolves (loup in French), but in fact lupin(e)s are a member of the legume or bean or pea family. This explains why I see empty pods in PEI in late August. These little beauties just grow beside the road, oblivious to the traffic and the gravel. I'm going to be more mindful of the beauty around me. And speaking of John and Beth, friendships are the flowers beside the road, aren't they? So easy to pass by in our life traffic, but incredibly vibrant and life giving if we stop to enjoy. Mike and I feel so fulfilled because of the wonderful friends we have.

Haiku

Haiku poetry comes from Japan. I love its spareness and its references to nature. The beat is 5 syllables, 7, then 5 again. This is a picture I took of our backyard, in the early evening after the laundry was done.

At the drop of day

The light tips the tree tops there

God is good to go

This is a picture of my dad. He has Alzheimer's disease. You can see his face, his smile, but what you can't see is the humour, the intelligence, the attention to detail that I know and love about him. With this disease he is disappearing, a bit at a time. He's like a shimmering mirage, he's there and then he's not. It's like taking someone to the airport and saying good bye over and over again. It's devastating. It makes me question what it is to be alive; is it just to live and breathe? Or is it to plan and to love? Or maybe it's how others respond to us that makes us alive.