• Two Wheeled Joy

    • October 27, 2009 5:09 am

    I know that car ads tell us that the automobile will bring us freedom and independence and, to some extent, this is true. But I have found even more freedom and independence recently from the humble bicycle.

    Not coincidentally, I attended a recent workshop production of a show about bicycles wherein the performer, Evalyn Parry, presents the audience with stories and songs about the evolution of the bike. Part of the bicycle’s history is connected to the women’s movement and how it changed us and our attire.

    Evalyn and her historical sisters equate riding a bicycle to being free of the constraints of patriarchy and consumerism. Yesterday, I felt that equation most deeply.

    As a traveler, I am at the mercy of public transportation and taxis. This is fine, I do well with it and I get to where I need to go. But “at the mercy” means I have to follow bus schedules and wait for cabs and leave extra early for events and do a lot of planning. It’s not horrible, it’s just energy- and time-consuming.

    At the bike show the other night I ran into a friend who works at a fantastic bike shop here in Toronto. They rent bikes and he was adamant about setting me up with a bicycle for the rest of my trip.

    The next day I went into the store and he did just that. I am now riding around on a Batavus Bicycle, AKA a “Dutch Bike” and though a heavier bike than most it is a sturdy and safe ride, which sits the rider fully upright. Straight back, legs pumping jauntily, I feel like Mary Poppins with a helmet.

    I am now able to leave when I need to leave, get to where I am going for free, and whiz by taxis sitting in traffic. I am free. I am outdoors in the fresh air, getting exercise, enjoying the sights. It’s marvelous.

    Best of all, I ran into a friend from junior high in the bike shop and we got to reminisce and catch up while our bikes were being serviced. Hail to Curbside Cycle!

    Inspiring Message of the Day: Looking for a feeling of freedom and independence? Go for a bike ride!

    Taking the Sabbath

    • October 26, 2009 5:03 am

    I don’t blog on Sundays.

    I even try not to open my laptop on Sundays, unless it is to watch a movie. No email, no web surfing. I take a break from technology. I don’t do it perfectly, believe me, but I really commit to the practice and work it to the best of my ability.

    A few years ago I was introduced to the notion of a taking a Sabbath day and I began to integrate the idea into my life. One day of the week where I do no work.

    No work! That means if you’re a gardener you don’t garden. If you’re a writer you don’t write. It’s a day of rest, a day to rejuvenate your spirit. A day to enjoy your life without the burden of do-ing.

    Yesterday was a wonderful Sabbath day for me. Not completely restful but absolutely uplifting. I attended a spiritual service in the morning and a post-wedding tea in the afternoon. I went to hear John Irving read/speak at the International Festival of Authors and then I attended my friend Evalyn Parry’s workshop performance of her new show Spin at the Hysteria Festival.

    I was alone and I was with good friends. I was quiet at times and laughing my head off at others. I didn’t need to check my email. I didn’t need to be on line, staring at the screen, checking, checking, checking for what? It took me a while to learn that the world wasn’t going to stop if I didn’t turn on my computer.

    It’s a new day today. It’s Monday. I’m on-line and I have a full morning of business. But I am spiritually prepared for the day and for the week because I took a Sabbath day yesterday. I highly recommend the practice.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: Taking one day a week to let go of work, of do-ing, of checking email and being plugged in, is a form of deep self-care. It allows us to recharge our spiritual batteries and see the world anew.

    Ce-le-brate Good Times, Come On!

    • October 24, 2009 7:42 am

    Since I am on the road and do not have the cat waking me up at 5 a.m. I am posting these blogs a little later than usual. I’m also feeling a bit jet-lagged. Three hours is not a huge time change but if you believe that it takes as many days to recover I’m only on Day 2.

    My friend is getting married today. I blogged about her a while back. She’s the gal who was more interested in taking stock of her emotional process than her guest list. Two other friends of mine are turning 40 today. It’s a big day.

    I am not yet 40 and I have never been married. I’m imagining what it would be like to be my girlfriend, the one who is getting hitched, right now, this morning, a few hours before she says “I do.”

    I’d be freaking out!

    Well, maybe not. Maybe I’d be cool as a cucumber, ready to seal the deal, commit for life, tie those two loose ends into a knot.

    No, I’d be freaking out.

    I’ve been proposed to twice in my life. Once by a man in a bar in Dawson City and once by I man I truly loved and had a strong desire to marry.

    Neither one worked out.

    My mother, who has been married to my father for 41 years, raised me and my three sisters to be fiercely independent. She actually warned us against getting married for as long as the four of us can remember.

    “It’s a patriarchal custom meant to secure property and wealth,” she’d tell us.

    All four of us are now in our early-to-late-thirties. None of us are married. But the first one of us will be by next year.

    We’ve come a long way, baby.

    Today is a grey day. It’s not ideal for a wedding. Or a birthday party. But I will celebrate with my friends these rites of passage despite the gloomy atmosphere. The birds are still singing. I can hear them through the window, open just a crack.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: This is a wondrous life. There are so many possibilities. What is worth celebrating? Find something and rejoice in it. Look beyond the grey into the fullness of be-ing.

    Tell Me A Story

    • October 23, 2009 7:45 am

    It’s a wild and woolly day here in Toronto. The wind is whipping the leaves off the trees and grey skies blanket the city. I’m glad to be back.

    The airport taxi took me along a familiar route and memories from my Toronto life came back to me as we drove through the dark, passing various landmarks I’d known in my younger days.

    My early years were spent in the Yukon but Toronto is where I grew up. Here is where I left childhood and became an adolescent. I then left adolescence and became a young woman when I moved back to Whitehorse at the age of 18.

    Tonight I’m telling a story at the Festival of Oral Literatures – FOOL (www.foolfestival.ca), a new storytelling festival organized by an artist friend I know. The story is a stylized tale about a little girl whose innocence is ripped away after she moves from a small town in the far north to a big city in the south east.

    It’s an autobiographical piece. When I was 7 years old, just turning 8, I was sexually molested in a ravine near the elementary school I attended. It was the lunch hour jogging program and I was with one other girl. Somehow we’d gotten separated from the pack. My family and I had only been in Toronto about a month.

    You may be shocked to read this. It’s not a secret. I’m open about this part of my life. It’s been a long road of healing and every time I think I’m free of the shame that comes with this kind of abuse I discover yet another layer to discard. And so I do the inner work and find an even deeper sense of freedom. But it’s been a lot of inner work!

    The story I will tell tonight is about moving from darkness to light, from shame to acceptance, from blame to gratitude. It’s a privilege to share this part of my life in this way and I’m excited to have a new audience. The listening, too, is part of the healing.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: When we share our burdens, they are halved. When we listen, we invite transformation. The exchange is often sacred.

    Toronto Bound

    • October 22, 2009 7:02 am

    Today I set forth on a travel adventure, heading “Down South, Back East” to the Big City of Toronto.

    I spent ten years of my youth in Toronto and a couple of years in my 30’s living just outside of it, commuting into the city for work and play, and I find great comfort there.

    Lots of people do not like the place but I still love Toronto with all of my heart. It no longer feels like home but rather like an old friend I can return to who will take me in and entertain me for as long as I wish to stay.

    I will also spend a few days in Port Hope, a little town about an hour east of TO. That’s where I lived for two and a half years after leaving Montreal and before moving back to the Yukon. My mother’s family lives there and I still have close friends in the region. It, too, will be a homecoming of sorts, and I am looking forward to re-connecting with folks.

    Travel, as I have mentioned before on this blog, can be an anxiety-inducing experience. The loss of routine is challenging. We’re out of our comfort-zone, we have to rely on other people, we have to get inside large metal tubes that fly through the sky. My prayer life becomes very rich when I travel!

    I once wrote an article about walking through fear and in it I described my experience of being on an airplane and being terrified to die. My only recourse was total surrender. I let go of my life. I accepted that it was time for me to go. I said good-bye to all I knew and loved (sobbing as quietly as I could so as not to alarm the person beside me) and I actually grieved my own death.

    It was a life-altering experience.

    What was most amazing is that out of this came a desire to be of use. As my fear fell away I found myself asking for the courage to help someone else. The removal of my self-centred terror brought a genuine willingness to be of service.

    To know that I could take action against fear by serving the greater good of my fellow passengers was a revelation. That sense of purpose I discovered, and not just on planes but in everyday life, can truly free us of our fear.

    Of course, we didn’t crash and I’ve since been on dozens of other flights. But the experience has stayed with me and whenever I’m on a flight and get scared we’re not going to make it I re-visit this healing process. It works on the ground, too!

    Today’s Inspiring Message of the Day was sent to me by a friend. It’s lovely.

    “…When you travel

    A new silence

    Goes with you,

    And if you listen,

    You will hear

    What your heart would

    Love to say.”

    “…A journey can become a sacred thing:

    Make sure, before you go,

    To take the time

    To bless your going forth,

    To free your heart of ballast

    So that the compass of your soul

    Might direct you toward

    The territories of spirit

    Where you will discover

    More of your hidden life,

    And the urgencies

    That deserve to claim you.”

    ~ excerpt from John O’Donohue’s “For the Traveler”

    Hair Today

    • October 21, 2009 6:43 am

    I buzzed off all of my hair yesterday. Well, I didn’t do it, Stacey the hair stylist did it for me. It’s not the first time I’ve done it, either. I took some clippers to my hair about nine years ago and experienced the radical change, both on the inside and the outside, that can come with such a drastic move.

    Though the word “drastic” conjures up images of measures taken in extreme situations it really means “likely to have a strong effect” and that is exactly what occurs when a woman has a #1 buzz cut.

    The cut I sport today is not a #1. Stacey did a very careful job with scissors and though she did use a little device that made a buzzing noise the resulting effect is more of a #4.

    Here is the breakdown of lengths and corresponding blades, taken from Wikipedia, FYI:

    • #0 or bareblade (shortest)
    • #1 (3 mm)
    • #2 (6 mm)
    • #3 (9 mm)
    • #4 (12 mm)
    • #5 (15 mm)
    • #6 (19 mm)

    Yes, my hair is now 12 mm long. And boy does it feel good.

    I remember experiencing this feeling the first time I took the plunge and went this short. It’s freedom, pure and simple. Freedom from hassle, freedom from vanity, freedom from hair in the sink, on the sweater, in the food. It’s a joy.

    It’s also intense. It’s not easy to be a woman with a buzz cut. People have very strong reactions. I was having coffee with an ex-lover back when I had the #1 and he told me flat out, “I can’t look at you.”

    The Globe & Mail even went so far as to publish an article featuring a couple of high-profile women who’ve gone the Sinéad O’Connor route of late. The piece talked about how empowering it is for a woman to have a shaved head but how the style ultimately challenges people’s expectations of what femininity is supposed to look like.

    Funnily enough, I feel more feminine with this cut than the one I had previous, which was still very short but long enough on top to spike up or comb down. I felt really masculine with that cut. I felt like a guy.

    Now, with no hair, man, I feel like a woman.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: Despite the fact that I think my attractiveness has something to do with how I look, I am mistaken. We are not our hair. Our light comes from within. Shine your beautiful light!

    Trusting Guidance

    • October 20, 2009 6:47 am

    I recently said to a friend, “All will be well,” to which she responded, “That presumes that all is not well right now.”

    Well, yes and no.

    In the realm of the Spirit, all is well all the time. There is no illness, no suffering, no violence. There is only the perfect Life Force Energy of the Universe.

    Here on the earthly plane, we have these things called illness, suffering and violence. They are real to us. But are they real? Spirit says no. They are an illusion.

    There is a lot of reading to be done on the subject of the real and the not real. Marianne Williamson, Ernest Holmes, Florence Scovill Shinn, Emmett Fox, Caroline Myss and many others all have something to say about this subject. Some of it will twist your brain around. Not all of it is helpful but all of it is interesting.

    I have found that I need to take what works for me and leave the rest. Years ago I read Louise Hay and I started doing affirmations and found that instead of feeling abundant I was trying to force myself to be abundant. I ended up in control-mode and had no peace. If I got a cold it was my fault and I wasn’t doing enough to think healthy thoughts.

    It made me crazy.

    Years later I discovered a new piece: affirmations are powerful but not if we don’t have the belief system to back them up. If I’m affirming “I’m worthy” ten thousand times a day but I still have an old belief system that tells me I’m a piece of sh%$ then I need to clear that belief system out before an affirmation can do its work.

    I need help to do that. I can’t change my thinking all by myself. My mind is a dangerous neighbourhood — I don’t go in there alone.

    I have a team of people I rely on to help me sort out which voices to listen to and I need their steadfast guidance. I receive Higher Guidance through intuition but other people can often be the ground on which intuition walks.

    Gather a support team around you: coaches, sponsors, mentors, spiritual directors. Use your support team to find out what works for you, what brings you the most peace. You deserve it!

    Inspiring Message of the Day: It helps to read inspiring material written by great teachers but I need to find out what works for me. It must bring me peace.

    Dance Dance Wherever You May Be

    • October 19, 2009 7:54 am

    A few nights ago I attended a Dance Gathering. A Dance Gathering is exactly what it sounds like: the coming together of persons for the sole purpose of dancing. The outcome is often a form of Ecstatic dance, which is also known as trance dance, “a unique spiritual experience with roots in Shamanism.”

    It’s blissful.

    My love of dance goes back a long way. When I was a very young girl my mother gave me a book called A Very Young Dancer. It was about a ten-year-old student at the School of American Ballet in New York preparing for her role in the ballet “The Nutcracker.”

    I had dreams of being that girl. I even called up the Ontario School of Ballet one day and inquired about auditions. I never pursued the dream. Somehow I knew I’d never make it as a dancer. Or I was too scared to try.

    Today social dancing is probably my most favourite thing in the world to do. I love it to pieces. I have a gal pal who also loves to get down and boogie and we were talking recently about the dearth of opportunities in this city to social dance in a sober environment. Dancing in bars is fine but it’s a last resort for the non-drinker.

    So she and I were brainstorming ideas and we ended up discussing the possibility of renting a space, advertising the event and inviting anyone and everyone who wished to come. The iMac would be the DJ and we’d just get down.

    Exactly three weeks to the day, such an evening took place. Only she and I had nothing to do with it.

    I had seen a notice on a community listserv for an upcoming Dance Gathering and immediately forwarded it to my friend with the simple message “Ask and we shall receive.”

    We both showed up and danced our hearts out. It was ecstatic dancing at its best. A roomful of people shaking the booty and feeling the love.

    My friend had come in late and so it was only after it was all over that we hugged and began to laugh together. It was no joke: we knew we had manifested this night.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: Sometimes when you desire something with enough passion and commitment the Universe will move mountains to make it happen.

    Hamlet Saves the Day

    • October 17, 2009 6:57 am

    I just finished reading my friend Leanne Coppen’s blog on living with breast cancer and it brought to mind a quote that I dearly love from the play Hamlet, by you-know-who.

    The quote comes from the Dane himself in Act I, Scene V. Hamlet’s friend Horatio has just made a comment about the strange circumstances surrounding the events of the evening, namely Hamlet’s behaviour and the Ghost of Hamlet’s father showing up at the castle.

    In response to Horatio’s confusion, Hamlet says:

    “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
    Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

    (I have also seen it written as “there are more things between heaven and earth”, which I like better.)

    I often think of this quote when things in this world seem, as Horatio put it, just too “wondrous strange” for words. Leanne’s recent blog mentions Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, who wrestled crocodiles but was killed by a stingray and if that is not wondrous strange I don’t know what is.

    I especially love the quote because it allows room for so many mysteries. I can dream up anything, imagine anything and everything, but there will still be more. There will still be things for which I don’t have the answers. My thinking is limited!

    I’m okay with that today. Because despite the fact that I am a person who likes to have all the answers I have come to accept that which lies far beyond my ability to know stuff. This is the realm of the Spirit. And the realm of the Spirit is limitless, boundless, and wondrous strange.

    My philosophy about the way things are just doesn’t cut it. What I see and what I know (or what I think I know) is just a tiny little piece of the larger puzzle. There is so much more than I can imagine, so much more to the experience of life than what I can make of it.

    Isn’t that marvelous? Isn’t that mystifying?

    Perhaps it’s not. Perhaps it’s terrifying for some. For me, it’s like a balm. A healing balm.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: When life has become boring old life, drudgery, slogging, dragging life, find something, anything, to restore your sense of wonder. Embrace the mystery!

    The Speed of Life

    • October 16, 2009 6:56 am

    I’ve blogged before about STOPPING when I am running ahead of myself and back in that frenzy of trying to get stuff done. I’d like to expand the analogy further.

    I was speaking with a friend yesterday and when she asked how I was doing I said, “I’m on FAST FORWARD and I’m doing my best to get back to PLAY.”

    It was one of those statements that just comes out without any real thought but somehow manages to nail the experience perfectly.

    Being on PLAY means allowing my life to unfold, moment by moment, without leaping ahead to see what’s going to happen next. Since actually knowing what is going to happen is impossible (for most of us), being on PLAY is really the only way of being that makes sense. I can actually only ever be on PLAY. It’s the thinking mind that tells me differently.

    There is a woman I greatly admire called Sister Helen Prejean. Her experience as an activist against the death penalty was dramatized in a film by Tim Robbins called “Dead Man Walking” with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.

    The film was based on the book, which she wrote, and it’s a very deep study on forgiveness and unconditional love. I read the book and was so moved by her account, so altered by her argument that I actually started thinking about following in her footsteps and becoming a nun.

    Crazy, I know. A playwright who becomes a nun. Stranger things have happened.

    It was my admiration for Sister Helen that prompted me to buy a book (the name of which I have forgotten and a quick search on the subject ended up in a dead end) containing a number of interviews with women of faith.

    In Sister Helen’s interview she said something that has not only stayed with me since, and it’s been years, but I use often in a prayerful way:

    Thank you for helping me to never leap ahead of Grace. Thank you for helping me to instead follow quietly with the gentleness of your Spirit.

    That’s being on PLAY. Following quietly, not leaping ahead, letting the moments unfold at the speed of life.

    It is not easy to move at the speed of life but I can practice this way of being every time I remember to do so.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: When I am on FAST FORWARD I can press STOP or PAUSE and then press PLAY. I can follow the Grace of being alive with quiet, gentleness and awe.