April 26, 2022

Gleanings

Surrender to knowing what it should look like or where it’s going to show up, how I’m supposed to do it, or who’s supposed to find it or connect to it or show up. Plant and tend to the seed. And surrender the rest.
My plans are mere sketches, a few chords on which to improvise; they delight me.
Seasons always reassure us that life in all its forms continues. It shifts, evolves, and readies itself for what is next.
This poached, cooled asparagus waits patiently until you’re ready for it and when you are… you just dump it on a plate. [“Nobody writes recipes quite like the Smitten Kitchen!” said nobody, today at least.]
In this part of the world, at this time of year, there is such a dramatic change in the way light fills our days. As winter ends, and we transition through spring towards summer, we are reminded of cycles – days, seasons, lives.
I continued with the business of daily living. I felt grateful to be able to. And that’s win enough.
I still have chilli peppers in glass jars in the freezer, but they don’t begin to compare to the fieriness of the ones I hung to dry in the window.
I carry my past, in ways I wish I did not. I carry the groceries despite having teens. I carry myself in dignity except for when I am swept away .
What you can’t hear are the fine grits of gravel ticking off the car doors and the wind singing in the barbed wire fences.
Today, I celebrate the gift of joy, of connection, of relationship. And, I’m so grateful for the reminder to stay open … you truly never know who is going to come your way, cross your path, and through their very being, create invitations and possibilities in your own becoming.
Like many people, I’ve spent much of my life seeking external validation, permission and approval, especially from my immediate family. I worked hard to make sure that wasn’t part of this process. I wanted to stand in clear ownership of my lived experience and the stories within it, to take responsibility for this being my story, not our story, hence my desire to inform and invite
What I’m getting at is – creating, exploring with curiosity, learning from the masters at their craft, experimenting and painting over – this is how I want to spend my days.
What became intolerable to me was devoting my life so fully to my kids becoming themselves, while losing myself so completely in the process. What kind of example was I setting? Who would they become if their mother was nothing more than a reflection of their wants and needs?

April 25, 2022

The Fell, by Sarah Moss

I am besotted with Sarah Moss’s slim and haunting stories, beginning with Ghost Wall, and then Summerwater, and now, her latest, The Fell, which I read on our plane journey home from England. (Interestingly, the one book I’ve read by her that wasn’t slim [Signs for Lost Children]) I didn’t like at all.)

Our plane journey home from England took place one year from the day that my husband and I received our first Covid vaccines, and while things since that day have not unfolded as neatly as we would have hoped, to have this long-awaited journey finally happening seems like the most fitting anniversary, and I just feel so tremendously lucky.

I think it’s easy to forget how many lifetimes have been contained within the last two-and-half years, so many plot twists, so many steps forward and two steps back. The idea of the pandemic is like an ever-looming dark cloud overhead, even though the reality of the experience has been much more textured, layered, unfolding, and even interesting. Interesting especially because the lack of certainty has been unmooring in fascinating ways, even while people stand resolute in their respective camps. (Whatever news sources you read, whatever your beliefs about vaccines–it’s all a story you’ve been writing alongside other people you trust about what this thing is and how it should shape our lives (or not). And in many ways, The Coronavirus has become a host story for a million other parasitic stories–our politics, our most intimate tensions, our economic ideas, our religious values, our parental aspirations. What a heavy frickin’ story, y’all. What a weight.)

Something that has helped me a lot in the last two years has been paying attention to the ways that life goes on in other places where Covid responses were different from ours here in Ontario—a former classmate in Shanghai, friends in New York City, my sister in Alberta, my husband’s family in the UK. The awareness (which I’ve written about before) that there really hasn’t been a way to get it right, that a virus is a formidable foe, and that most of us are just muddling through and doing our best under leadership that’s not necessarily nefarious (Boris Johnson’s lockdown birthday parties, notwithstanding).

It was interesting to be in England last week, which has decided to be finished with Covid altogether, where every fourth person we passed on the street had a hacking cough. I don’t think that doing away with Covid restrictions altogether is the right thing to do, but I also don’t really know what the right thing to do is, and I know we’re a public who has definitely lost our appetite for extreme lockdown measures. (Also, my youngest child testing positive for Covid yesterday, and her symptoms were a few hours of a low-grade fever and a runny nose, all of which have dissipated, and the rest of us continue to test negative, be symptom-free, FINGERS CROSSED. Hooray for vaccines.)

The Fell took me back to a different time though, when the skies were emptied of planes and the jury was still out on washing your bananas with Lysol. It’s November 2020, and Kate—single mother, waitress on furlough—has been quarantining at home with her teenage son after a Covid exposure, and suddenly decides that she can’t take it any more. And so off she goes on a walk on the fells near her home in the Peak District, strictly against the rules, even though the chances of her running into anybody else are nil. The trouble arises when she doesn’t come home.

Do you remember being irate about the idea of people leaving the house more than once a day for exercise? I sure do! Considering perhaps that even that was excessive? The sheer irresponsibility of young people gathering with their friends in the park!?!? An adherence to “rules” instead of any kind of pragmatism. In April 2020, I ordered a bouquet of flowers from a local business because somebody in my Facebook feed was squawking that any kind of “unessential” purchase was putting lives at risk, and I needed to defy her. Sometimes I was furious at the scofflaws, sometimes I was doing the scofflawing myself. All of it was so annoying, and much of it continues to be so.

The Fell is told from the perspectives of Kate, her son Matt, her elderly neighbour Alice (who’s had cancer, and therefore is considered vulnerable, in need of protection, and thus abandoned to her own company), and Rob, who works in Mountain Rescue and is called upon to look for Kate when her son reports her missing.

So much of the arguments against lockdowns and Covid government regulation has been so terribly idiotic that we’ve been deprived of the opportunity for proper reflection on what these responses have been. On what has indeed been their fall-out, the depravity. I think of elderly people left alone in care homes for months at a time. Of the mental health toll. Looking back, the fact that children in Ontario had to isolate for ten days each time they were exposed to Covid via a classmate seems needlessly excessive. The fact that small retail shops were closed for months in 2021, undermining faith in public health measures in such a dangerous way. It’s all be a lot of not great.

And yet the number of people whose response to this madness was supporting wannabe fascists?

It’s enough to make one’s head explode.

The Fell, however, is in lieu of that. A novel about risks and consequences, about community and isolation, about what it really means to protect each other, to save each other. About the risks of life itself, and what it means to take those risks, and unlike so much of the current discourse, it doesn’t offer easy answers. There are no easy answers, but asking the questions is the point.

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April 22, 2022

Wild Swimming

While we lived in England, I longed to swim, so much so that I ended up purchasing a plastic pool from Woolworths, setting it up on the tiny concrete slab that constituted the back garden of our terrace house. We lived in the Midlands, and didn’t have a car, which limited my perspective, as well as my geographical range, so that I really wasn’t aware of nearby swimming opportunities available to me, though there must have been some. We were also very broke. Once in the summer of 2003, we took the train to Skegness, which I knew about from the Adrian Mole novels, and we went swimming there. Two years later, we’d take a dip in the sea on our honeymoon in Brighton. But other than these experiences, my English life took place on dry land…save for the time we were walking through the University of Nottingham’s Jubilee Campus and I spontaneously stripped down to my skivvies and went swimming in a muddy pond.

But contrary to my experiences, England has a long and storied swimming culture (which I learned much more about in Jenny Landreth’s Swell: A Waterbiography). From lidos to the Ladies Pond on Hampstead Heath, there are plenty of places to swim, and my own swimming obsession has certainly grown out of the passion for #WildSwimming online, among UK women in particular. And so taking a dip during our holiday there became a preoccupation of mine, even though we were travelling in mid-April. Mid-April in England, I decided, was basically Canadian June. And my husband knows me well enough to entertain the possibility that my wild-swim might indeed happen, because to do otherwise would basically cement it in stone.

But even I wasn’t sure. I’m not a cold-water creature. I liked the idea of taking a swim, but knew I’d find it difficult to wade into icy water. I am not Jessica J. Lee, breaking ice with a hammer. Before I knew about her example, I had trouble jumping into lakes in July.

Fortunately, the stars aligned, or at least the weather did. “THE HOTTEST EASTER ON RECORD” blared the overblown UK headlines while we were there, even though it was only 21 degrees and Easter is rarely in mid-April anyway. But it was warm enough that me going for a swim wasn’t completely ridiculous.

And so last Sunday morning, we drove to Crook O’ Lune for a swim in the River Lune near Lancaster. (We were actually planning to stop in St. Michael’s to swim in the River Wyre, which was en-route to our Easter lunch, but then got caught up in Lancaster’s one way system, and the matter was out of our hands.) That everyone in the family was indulging my swimming whim meant that I had no choice but to go through with it, no matter how cold the water—they’d all scrambled down a steep ridge and climbed over a stone wall to get to the river bank in the first place, and were all slightly annoyed with me. If I stayed on the bank, they might have disowned me.

Crook O’ Lune was breathtakingly gorgeous, and the perils of fitting in a swim before Easter lunch is that there is no time to linger and take in the rolling green hills, sheep grazing just beyond. It wasn’t the wildest of wild swimming spots, there being a car park, toilets, and a snack bar, and plenty of people out walking, but there were signs advising against swimming at risk of death, so a subversive element was certainly in place.

I should have brought flip flops, but what can you do? I peeled off my socks and boots, jeans and blouse, revealing the bathing suit underneath. Climbing down the muddy banks and in I went, no sign of eels. Glorying in being one small person in the enormous landscape, hills and sky. Wading in to my waist, which wasn’t so difficult, but going further was hard, and once my chest was under water, it felt too close to whatever I suppose a heart attack might feel like for me to properly let go, but I tried to. Coming out and wading in again, because it’s always easier the second time. Floating, sculling, swimming in freshwater for the first time since Thanksgiving at Woodbine Beach partway around the world.

But then Easter lunch was calling, and it was cold. Overwhelmed with the fact that this thing I’d dreamed about doing had happened, which was kind of the theme of our entire week in England. My husband taking my photo, not that I was doing it for the ‘gram, but without the ‘gram, I might not have done it, it’s true, which I can say about many of the most excellent experiences I’ve had in my life. I climbed out of the water muddy and with hives (my arm had brushed something poison growing on the bank), which I’d say makes for a pretty authentic wild swimming experience all around.

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April 14, 2022

Mountains Beyond Mountains

“The world is infinitely complicated. You don’t have to catch up to the complexity; it will inevitably catch up with you. It will bury you with considerations, contextualizations, and unintended consequences. But if, in the midst of the rubble, you can resist explaining away your earliest moral instincts, then you will have preserved something good and true. You might make some people’s lives more livable, more beautiful even. You might make some people uncomfortable. You might feel sad in a sad world. You might feel mad in a maddening world. It’s not an easy way to be—especially if you travel between cultures and classes like Farmer did—but there’s succor in the resistance. It’s the best way I know to stay human.” Courtney E. Martin

I’ve been reading a lot lately, and not writing down nearly enough about any of that (which is FINE, really, because the reading is the point) but I wanted to note something about the wonderful experience I had reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, a 2003 biography of Paul Former, a global health pioneer whose untimely death shook his community in February.

I’d first learned about him through Courtney Martin’s newsletter, and then a couple of days later, CBC Ideas replayed their conversation with him while I was driving in the car, and I knew this was somebody I wanted to learn more about.

I am preoccupied these days with learning how to be properly human in the world, but also doing so without assuming political posturing, which had been my strategy in the difficult couple of years before the pandemic, a strategy that seemed less and less effective once things got really complicated and I began to understand that politics is inherently divisive and inadequate to meet the challenges of our current moment, which requires all hands on deck. And of course, this is impossible. So what to do in the face of that? And Paul Farmer’s life is an answer to that question. (Not THE answer. Kidder writes wonderfully about how Farmer is not a model to follow. Just an example that pushing against the impossible is possible.)

I signed up for a reading group Courtney Martin was running and had two days to read this 300 page book before then, which I knew would be challenge, but it turned out not to be, because I couldn’t put it down. Farmer’s origin story, the story of his childhood, is extraordinary—Martin writes a lot about consciously raising our children and Farmer’s story made me think about the unlikely formula for raising a human being into him, which involves a peripatetic childhood living, variously, on a boat and a school bus. And that he died young (he was in his early sixties) made me think about how fortunate it was that he seemed to emerge fully formed, his worldview solid by his early twenties, and he knew what he wanted to do with his life, working as an anthropologist and a physician. (The idea too about Farmer not being THE answer to the question. It makes me think about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez too being posited as THE answer—these are both extraordinarily brilliant individuals. Most people can’t live up these standards. But surely there is something we can learn from them all the same?)

Farmer couldn’t fix it all, he couldn’t heal everyone, but he went out of his way to help a whole bunch of people in his life, determining that every single life was worth trying to save. Which didn’t always make sense to others—what was the point of saving a handful of others when so many others are suffering? And yet. His story a metaphor of the rest of us attesting to the value of keeping going, of keeping trying, even when it seems it doesn’t matter. But it does. The trying and the outcome, all of it.

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April 12, 2022

Gleanings

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April 11, 2022

4 Great Essay Collections

Run Towards the Danger, by Sarah Polley

I’ve read a run of great essay collections lately, which kicked off with actor/director Sarah Polley’s bestselling new release. It was a book I regarded curiously, at first, because the premise was strange: six essays about various experiences from Polley’s life, in which an adult perspective circles back on childhood trauma. Polley is a former child actor and now an acclaimed film director and writer, and I wondered if the whole project might be a gimmick, but then I kept hearing from reader after reader about how excellent the book actually is. And they were right. I loved this one, its searing, visceral writing, its willingness to complicate, to circle back and around, its acknowledgement of darkness and light, often in the very same place. Brave, original, and interesting, Polley writes about growing up too soon after the death of her mother, about stage fright, exploitation as a child actor, about carrying the story of her experience abuse by a notorious celebrity, about a complicated pregnancy and introduction to motherhood. Polley has had a remarkable life and she owns both her privilege and her trials at once, demonstrating that our experiences and our perceptions of experiences are multitudinous and ever subject to change.

Spílexm, by Nicola I. Campbell

Celebrated children’s book author Nicola I. Campbell’s Spílexm (which means “remembered stories” in the language spoken by Nlaka’pamux in British Columbia) is a beautiful collection weaving poetry, memoir, journals and letters to tell her story of becoming as Nlaka’pamux, Sylix, and Metis, and the daughter/granddaughter/etc of residential school survivors. This is a story of grief and survival, and a testament to the remarkable powers of love, family ties and personal will to overcome trauma and design a better future for one’s self, and Campbell imagines the same for Indigenous people across Turtle Island. My favourite parts of the story are those where she writes about canoe racing, discovering her own power and the power of community. This is such a generous and achingly beautiful offering to the world.

Send Me Into the Woods Alone, by Erin Pepler

While this collection is subtitled “Essays on Motherhood,” it too is a story of becoming, a story of womanhood and daughterhood, and personhood. Truly it’s a smorgasbord of goodness, essays recounting a difficult pregnancy, the details of labour (that one is called “A Million Hands in One Vagina”), and onward through the years. At the beginning I wondered if these essays might suffer a bit from the desire to be relatable and inclusive at the expense of specificity, but such concerns fell away as Pepler delves into her own story and writes with such candour about her struggles with anxiety, and about how her own family experiences growing up inform her parenting now, for better or for worse. The collection is tremendously moving, but also very funny—I kept reading parts aloud to whoever happened to be in the room with me. Like motherhood itself, Send Me Into The Woods Alone is equal-parts light and dark, joy and misery, another writer who’s unafraid to be complicated and tell the truth.

I Came All This Way to Meet You, by Jami Attenberg

And finally this collection by American novelist Attenberg, the story of her Midwestern roots, her years in New York, and finding home in New Orleans, an unlikely outcome for someone who spent years couch-surfing, which turned into years staying in friends’ spare rooms as their lives stabilized but hers didn’t for such a long time. Coming later to writing, put off by an assault in her first year of undergraduate studies, a story she tells in connection to the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford about how Supreme Court nominee had sexually assaulted her years before. Attenberg writes, “Why do we believe these men are the best when they are the worst? Why do we hold on to them?” In this collection, Attenberg writes her process of coming to own her story and her voice, all of this underlined her her persistence in staying true to her art through the ups and downs of the writing life and her determination to succeed as a writer.

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April 8, 2022

Beauty

Poor lighting, really crummy phone camera, flowers just past their prime, and LOOK! The beauty.

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April 5, 2022

Gleanings

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April 4, 2022

Seasons

I am so grateful for seasons, and not just because some seasons mean I finally get to shake off my winter coat. I am grateful for seasons because they remind me that change is healthy and good, that cycles are an important part of being a living thing, and that nothing is ever standing still even when sometimes it appears to be.

I spent the first two months of this year having a restful season, with lots of spaciousness, room to reflect, and reconnect with myself after a difficult time. Believe it or not, all that quiet was fruitful, and all of it helped me feel like myself again, and then suddenly one day at the beginning of March, it occurred to me that what I was missing was writing and it was time to begin a new creative season, which has proven as wondrously restorative as my period of not writing had been.

If you too are feeling like it’s time to start creating, I’m happy to remind you that my online course, FIND YOUR BLOGGING SPARK, is ready whenever you are to help take your ideas in an exciting, inspiring direction. Email me with any questions and learn more on my Blog School website.

“I want to work more on the kind of writing the blog course helped to inspire. I feel like I am going to places that often I’ve resisted before, personally, and I want to stay in that space.” —Miranda Hill

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March 31, 2022

Loopy

The past two years have, in some many ways, had me feeling as though I were caught in a loop, and such feelings were really what drove me down in December. I remember feeling devastated by posters around my neighbourhood—a local church had organized a Christmas Eve carol sing, and now all the posters had stickers pasted over them that said, “Cancelled Due to Covid.” A friend’s child was playing music in a local show, and that event got shut down. Once again, so many plans were shifted, just when we were beginning to think it was time to venture out into the world again. It felt like a trick.

One of my favourite things about right now, even with case counts rising locally, is how far away most of us are from that moment in which the idea of other people having fun made everybody furious. As Miranda Featherstone writes in today’s New York Times, “I am tired of judging the Covid choices of strangers.” I got tired a long time ago. For the last year, as vaccines arrived, I’ve been overjoyed to see my friends returning to the activities and pursuits that define their lives. Even sports. I hate sports. But I’m overjoyed at the sight of a packed stadium, and not just because I don’t have to be there. It means the world. It means connection. I welcome every little bit of it.

And in some ways, even with the infernal loop of decline and rise of case counts, things are starting to feel a bit less loopy? That friend’s child got to play their show the other week. Plenty of pals went away for March Break for the first time in three years. The cookbook writer Emiko Davies, who I started following on Instagram in March 2020, when Italy (where she lives) went into lockdown, has finally travelled to Australia with her children to see her parents. All these people I don’t even know—Sarah Harmer’s FINALLY getting to go on tour for her album Are You Gone? There is a week in May when I’m going to two evening concerts and a theatre matinee!

I love it. I’m here for it. Get vaccinated and booster, put on your fucking mask, and let’s do it.

On March 16 2020, we were due to fly to Manchester to visit my husband’s parents, and our one-year-old niece. My husband’s father was very ill from cancer, which made this trip especially pressing, and I still remember, the week before our departure, talking with my dermatologist about how it was going to be fine, and it was Italy and Iran that were the hot-spots. I remember how stressed out we’d been the week before that, riding the TTC and anxiously applying hand sanitizer, and how I’d shout at my children not to touch anything. They just couldn’t get sick. Because a pandemic is very a bad time to be flying across the world with a bronchial infection.

But of course, we didn’t go at all. That week following my appointment at the dermatologist (the last crowded waiting room I ever sat in) was one in which we all lived through about a decade of shifts and radical change, it became clear that travelling at this moment would not be responsible, and it would have been halfway through our time in the UK anyway in which the Prime Minister would have implored us all to come home. It would have been stressful beyond belief, and I know that cancelling our trip was the right thing to do that moment.

Two weeks from today, we’re scheduled to try again. And in some ways that is driving me crazy, especially as case counts rise. As though I were the centre of a sci-fi plot and this elusive trip to the UK a destiny in front of which the universe is determined to throw up walls, make impossible. Like Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll every time she tries not to die. (Cue Harry Nilsson).

Although I even have a rational side that knows it’s probably going to happen. (!!) And knows too how wondrously cathartic it’s going to be when it finally does, to finally break the spell, to close that loop. Fingers crossed.

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