Tomorrow I Fly

This has been rather a lovely time of saying goodbye to friends and colleagues before leaving for Mexico tomorrow.  I am often warmed by the expressions of tremendous good will that are being expressed, sensing that people are authentically happy for me and that they believe that this kind of break is something I both need and deserve.  I will be gone for a month, which is a bit long.  Once again I am wondering if I should shorten these trips or even phase them out for a while and really I don't know.  It is always great to have all this time to speak and improve my Spanish.  And the warm sunny days and the beautiful colours and the people are all lovely.  I am not looking forward to having to drink bottled water and take especial care of my health and I often suffer at least a few days when I'm on these long trips and I hope that the extra precautions I am taking will help.  The streets to wander on, cafes, plazas, parks to sit in, the opportunity to spend lots of time drawing, colouring, and in prayer and contemplation, this is all very attractive.  Of course this brief but drastic change in my rhythm of life is a bit disconcerting.  There are all the practical details, too: food, laundry, internet access, safety.  I want to slow down a bit on this trip, which will be a bit easier, since I already know Mexico City and Coyoacan somewhat.  Puebla is right now a mystery and I expect a real adventure there though I still plan to take it slow and easy.
     I seem to have all my ducks in a row for this trip.  And now I bid everyone good night.

Place

Now that I travel a bit more I am appreciating and respecting more the validity of how place affects and influences.  I have lived here in Vancouver, B. C., Canada for nearly my entire life.  I was born here and I grew up here in breathtakingly flat Richmond.  Except for one single winter that I spent in Toronto when I was nineteen I have always experienced more or less mild winters punctuated by perhaps one or two cold spells and less than a week of snow every year.  The memory of rain, constant nonstop rain resides deep in my mind.  The profile of Grouse Mountain, the Lions, Mount Hollyburn, Seymour and Hemlock are so etched in my mind that whenever I hear the word mountain that is the profile I always see.  The appearance of snowdrops in January, crocuses and daffodils in February, hyacinths and tulips in March brighten and delight the chilly damp days of our long spring.  I have no idea what it is like to live with uninterrupted snow until April, as is the annual fate of the rest of the country.  The rolling glittering waves of the ocean when the sun shines and the dark brooding outline of the fir, cedar and hemlock trees, all these and much more have sunk deep into my primal memory.
     With the grey rainy days, the dark afternoons from November to January, the dark brooding presence of the dense towering evergreen forest there is a sense of this place compatible with what Emily Carr captured in many of her paintings of the West Coast Rainforest.  I have noticed with many native Vancouverites as well as myself a certain deep pragmatism offset by a dreamy, brooding spirituality.  A luxuriousness tinged with sadness.  The raven's call, the croaking call of the great blue heron and the honking Canada geese with the crying of seagulls are the music that punctuate the cool, damp oxygen-drenched air of the Wet Coast.  There is also a certain absence of colour, or of brilliant colour.  The hues are dark, grey, green and blue with a little white and a little black.  This also tells us who we are.
     This is so different from Mexico where I am going.  I enjoy visiting Mexico but doubt that I could ever, even if I could, live there.  My sense of place is not Mexican, and even though I hugely appreciate and greatly admire the sense of the Mexican this is not the environment that has informed my DNA or determined the sort of person I have developed into.  Every year I go there for around a month.  The sun, the colour, the vibrancy and passion, so lacking in the ambience that is Vancouver, I soak up like a solar battery running on empty and I carry this beautiful warm and laughing energy with me while I readjust to living again in a city void of colour set in a landscape so dramatic, brooding and luxuriant and cool and damp.

Travel Nerves

Getting ready for a major trip is not work for the delicate.  Things need to be wrapped up at work, loose ends tied up and suddenly you're indispensable for ten days because for the entire next month you are going to be missing in action.  Every last detail of the trip needs to be looked at and attended to.  Flight times need to be confirmed, the hotels need to know that you are coming and at what time, transportation or transportation information from the airport needs to be arranged or confirmed and everything that will be needed for the trip needs to be remembered, accounted for and packed.  On top of that, apartment managers need to know you'll be gone, mail pick up needs to be arranged, pets if you have them need to be cared for, plants if you have them watered.  On top of that the apartment needs to be cleaned if you want to feel good about coming home and the fridge emptied of all perishable food.
     It is almost like getting ready to die.  Besides everything I find myself often micromanaging the state of my health because the stress of getting ready often appears in physical symptoms and I don't want to get sick on this trip.  I have reason to feel this way.  I have been sick on three trips, all in Mexico.  Once with severe Montezuma's Revenge, once I passed out after knocking out my electrolytes thanks to over hydration, and most recently I simply felt weird and crappy from not eating enough and over activity while breathing thin (seven thousand feet and counting above sea level) and polluted air and a skin tag on my butt rupturing and bleeding profusely. That was scary. 
     Nervous?  Yes.  And it isn't just about physical health.  There is often for me this weird sense of displacement finding myself suddenly lifted out of my comfort zone and into a completely foreign culture.  So, why do I go?  Perversely, because it is good for me.  It is true what is said of travel.  It broadens you.  Speaking Spanish for me is also a boon because this helps me connect with the people and the culture in Mexico and it also allows me to gain better fluency and confidence speaking Spanish.  This also gives me a month, or more exactly twenty-seven unscheduled and unprogrammed days.  I am excluding here the four days where I will have to arrive at the airport at time leaving and returning, and also at the bus stations between Mexico City and Puebla.
     I have become so used to programming and scheduling my daily life that I do feel a little bit nervous about not having this prop to support me once I'm in Mexico.  I can go wherever I want, whenever I want having only to watch the clock if I am meeting a friend for coffee or a meal together.  I will be outside a lot, walking, exploring, or I will be sitting in cafes with my sketch book, or exploring neighbourhoods and parks.
     It sounds enjoyable, and I expect it will be.  Meanwhile, this process of getting ready is for the birds.

Whistling In The Dark

These days I am feeling uncommonly well.  Even when I'm having a bad day it is still a good day, if you know what I mean.  Do I get angry at times?  Yes.  Miserable?  On occasion.  Grumpy?  Well, that's an occupational hazard of aging, isn't it?  I think what has changed for me in recent years is that I don't seem to fall into despair, at least not lately.  For example, one of my neighbours is playing her or his stereo rather loud and it is kind of annoying.  Is he going to go on playing it loud?  No.  Is it annoying?  Yes.  Overwhelming?  Not really.  If this were a wood frame building it would be a lot worse and if worse comes to worse I have lots of earplugs, which I am just now going to reach for...

     So, I wore the earplugs, briefly while eating dinner.  Now I don't have them in and it is nice and quiet again.  I have always been noise-sensitive, much worse now that I am older and have survived Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  I especially hate whistling.  The sound of whistling, that is since whisting is something that I never do, in fact am unable to do, and one might reasonably wonder if my distaste for whistling could be somehow related to this lack of ability and that would cast an entirely different light on the matter.
     For some reason, for me, whistling is the ultimate irritating noise, up there somewhere with police and ambulance sirens.  I am forcing myself to tolerate whistling more anyway.  Sometimes I have little choice.  At least two of my bosses are occasional whistlers.  They whistle off-key.  The other day one of the clients at Venture was whistling.  It was that familiar tuneless regular guy type whistle: "Twit-Twit-Twit.  I'm a Twit-Twit-Twit."  So, I grit my teeth, remind myself that I am getting paid to endure this, and just put up with it.  In public it is getting a bit easier.  It is only unbearable if the whistler is right behind me, then I try to get away as fast as possible.  And yet, I enjoy birdsong.  But birdsong comes from birds and I love birds, while human whistling comes from humans and...well, let's not go there, eh?  Even though birds are infinitely nicer than humans, unless they happen to be crows which are really flying people with black feathers, perhaps I could remind myself that God loves humans even more than he loves birds?  Oh convince me, please convince me.
     People are infinitely nastier than birds, even worse than crows.  But I am still reminded that God loves us according to his grace and mercy and not according to our desserts.  Or is it deserts?  Time to ask Uncle Google, who knows of course everything.  Just type 666...Okay, bad and rather stale joke.
     Okay, I have just consulted the Great Google and I have it now on authority that just deserts is the correct spelling of just deserts.  Not just desserts, which is a chain of dessert cafes specializing in multilayered tortes, perfect for busting any diet, and not just deserts, as in only sand dunes and rocks and searing heat from the sun and no water water anywhere nor any drop to drink.  And I sometimes wonder wherein I have sinned if enduring the whistling twits during the day is indeed the fitting punishment de jour.  Or maybe this is a golden opportunity for me to extend to bipedal beings without feathers the same favour that I have lavished on bipedal beings adorned not only with feathers but wings too.  And according to Our Lord Jesus Christ (to my non-Christian readers, do get over it if you don't like the terminology), God not only loves us as much as the sparrows whom he looks upon with tenderness and pity should any fall from the sky, but he loves us even more.  Even when we whistle.  And who knows, maybe Jesus even whistled.  And perhaps still does sometimes from where he is seated at the right hand of the Father.  But I'm also confident that he loves even crows.  And crows don't whistle.

The Vancouver Winter Olympics Revisited

Hey everybody:
I've been working my touch off getting some overtime in at work so I won't have to worry about it in March when I'm away in Mexico so really, my brain is too fried right now for me to come up with something fresh, new, original and interesting to post here on my blog.  So, I have just dug into the Zacharias Archives and pulled out this little gem from February 28 2010 when I was keeping a journal about the Vancouver Winter Olympics.  I thought this might make interesting reading given that yesterday saw the closing ceremonies in Sochi, Russia.

I think I am nearing the fifth and final stage of grieving: acceptance.  I have been through shock and denial, still wrestle with anger, I am no longer trying to bargain with God (please, please, please get those bloody Olympic tourists out of here and I promise not to swear at the next driver who cuts me off), and I seem to have gotten through depression okay.  Well, it isn't exactly acceptance, but I do like the pretty blue windbreakers that the Olympic volunteers are wearing, it has to be one of the purest blues outside of an unpolluted summer sky I have ever seen, and it is nice to see the joy and enthusiasm of the children, regardless  of what I might think of their parents.   And I don't fault the Olympic volunteers, whom I mostly have come to regard as good-natured dupes, and they must have to put up with a lot.  But I still think they're dorks.  The weather too is lovely, giving us an early spring and no snow for the Olympics and this gets my schadenfreud going. The crowds are inescapable, except in the early mornings before ten.  After ten, they all emerge out of their hotel rooms nursing hangovers from the night before and then the streets are again unwalkable.  It would be different, and perhaps interesting, if I found these people interesting (and yes, we are all interesting, each in our own way) but these people strike me primarily as consumers.   The bland and boring and socially conformist and politically reactionary or conservative middle to upper middle classes of mostly white people who have sold their souls at a profit hailing from wealthy countries or from the wealthy classes of poor countries.  They have nothing to offer us here but their money, and why else would our elected leaders invite them here? They seem to have little or no awareness or concern for the social cost of this ridiculous party, and how it is impacting on the quality of life in this city, especially for people on low incomes.  To them we have no existence.  Is it any wonder why they are not welcome here! To me this is also indicative of social cleansing in action.  We see here clogging our sidewalks only the very healthiest, financially well-healed and well-employed.   No working class trash in their numbers, no proles, but once you put enough alcohol into them (and, honey, it doesn't take much), you can't really tell the difference anyway. These games are for the rich, and only for the rich.  It's like that guy with the strange obsession for US Vice-President Joe Biden who got into the opening ceremonies on false credentials so he could get close to him.  He was identified as an intruder primarily by the way he was dressed.  He looked too poor to afford a ticket for this event.  Social cleansing. I am particularly struck by the displays of patriotism I see here on the streets and in stores, restaurants and cafes.  The Canadian flag is being displayed, flown, worn, brandished and abused everywhere you look.  It is even on display here in our own Vancouver Public Library and on one floor there are flags and red maple leafs everywhere.  And I ask, why this overkill?  Personally I have way too much respect for our flag to want to see it treated as wallpaper. What is this phenomenon of sudden and spontaneous mass patriotism?     And is it really patriotism?  Yes love of country and homeland is fine, and when not taken to extremes, probably a good thing.  So what is the quality of this love of country that I see on display everywhere?  Well, of course the nation is our place of belonging.  The Spanish word for nation, "nacion", comes from the same root as the verb "nacer", which means to be born.  So our sense of patriotism is really like a filial attachment to mother, our place of birth, our source of life.   However, a nation isn't simply a piece of land, a geographical location.  It is a collection of people.  Yes, there is a curious alchemy of the people and the land together that also binds interestingly with history, but primarily is the nation the land or is it the people? Ask any Kurd whether he or she is Turkish, Iraqi, Iranian and Russian and they will look at you as though you are a complete moron.  No matter where on God's Green earth they might happen to be at the time, they are Kurds. So then, even when we are not in Canada we are Canadian.  It is the people that define the nation. I will take this a step further.  What is the point of saying that you love your country when you don't love the people who live there with you?  Oh but the country is different from the people, you might answer.  It is like when a friend of mine tried to warn me off from visiting Italy because, he said, it is full of Italians.  (personally, I like Italians, by the way.) Even so the patriotism that comes with all the enthusiastic shouting over our athletes and sports heroes and all the flag waving, while not necessarily bogus, it could well be misplaced?  It is simply the reptilian brain working overtime, those subconscious, instinctive connections and links we experience with the land of our birth.  This is also the seed of fascism, by the way, where excessive patriotism becomes the idolatry de jour and opens the way to authoritarian regimes, a beefed up militarism, trampled upon human rights and freedoms and perceived enemies of the state(aka people who know how to think independently) disappearing in the middle of the night. Remember this all of you who live in Canada, and those of you who don't but have been deluded into believing that this country is Heaven on Earth.  History also tends to get revised or rewritten.   I find it strange that only since our government began pouring billions of extra dollars into the military and the "Mission" in Afghanistan (want to know where all our dollars for affordable housing have gone?) that various approved media began to declare that the First World War had become Canada's defining moment of national identity.  Oh?  But nobody ever said, or even thought that, before 9-11.  Curious, isn't it, how we reinvent the past in order to suit the needs of the present?  But we still remain grievously cut off from one another.  What is the point in celebrating and making earsplitting noise about how wonderful it is to be a Canadian, of how proud we are to be Canadians, while celebrating this absurdly expensive spectacle of the Olympics and forgetting entirely our fellow Canadians, poor, homeless and often Aboriginal  who languish in Third World style squalor while the rest of us step over their sleeping bodies on the sidewalks on our way to the next sporting event or pavilion, bar or chi-chi restaurant?  This is not patriotism, this is purely publicly-endorsed sociopathic behaviour.

Feed Grandma To The Polar Bears. Not!!!

Once again they are talking about assisted suicide, how close they are to approving it in Quebec, and that the Federal Liberal Party, the likely heir apparent of the Harper Conservatives in 2015 with popular backing have endorsed it.  Also I've heard news from Belgium that almost anyone can be euthanized now if they are sufficiently fed up with life.  I really wonder how carefully the many who approve of assisted suicide have thought out the issues and the consequences.  Speaking from my own background in death and dying, in administering palliative care I understand very well how easy it is to slip into the suicide and euthanasia trap when someone is either dying, or so hopelessly ill and in a steadily deteriorating state that to be imprisoned in a body wracked with pain and no longer functioning otherwise is utterly unthinkable.  I remember how close I came to overdosing a patient on a morphine compound because he was in such agony, and how bravely I had to fight from doing the deed.  I knew then as I know now that death, even facilitating death, is not my job, it is not anyone's job, that this is only the work of God and no one has the right to play God by even passively participating in ending a life prematurely.
     The Slippery Slope argument still holds true.  We are about to enter into one of the grayest epochs of our history as more and more Baby Boomers now are entering into their so-called Golden Years, and the increasing pressure upon younger hard-working tax-payers could become absolutely intolerable.  We are going to be a very expensive, even unaffordable liability as the labour pool shrinks and the populations in nursing homes and seniors' care and housing facilities explodes.  They are going to want to get rid of us.  Hello?  Why do you think we are having this conversation now?  Already the froggy's bathwater is being slowly and gradually warmed and pretty soon the bath will be boiling and the poor oblivious froggy is going to happily cook to death.
     Okay, I'm being alarmist.  But look at it.  Yes, it is a very horrible, and hopefully unrealisable scenario, but not implausible and we have to be awake and alert to this risk and the possible consequences no matter how terrible.  Even those who want to end their lives have to be encouraged to not give up hope.  Suicide is never under any circumstance acceptable and when I was fighting my own demons of despair I had to wrestle with suicidal thoughts and inclinations.  What we need is improved and enhanced palliative care.  Even though everything is done to ease or eliminate the suffering of the dying more research and more work needs to be done to improve the quality of end of life care.  Our future treatment of seniors and people with disabilities could well depend on this.
     This might sound like a bit of a stretch, but hear me out please.  I sometimes wonder why some people are so eager to beat God to the finish line when it comes to ending human life.  Yes we hear the usual stale arguments about compassion and wanting to end someone else's suffering but really folks, if we were really that empathic and compassionate we would have ended homelessness and child poverty years ago.  When we are faced with death and dying we are also being confronted by the complete lack of control we have over things.  We are forced to imagine the possibility of God even though the atheism behind this atomic package of assisted suicide and euthanasia tells us that there is no God and it is our role to do what we think we can do better than a God most of us no longer believe in.
     I have sat in on other people's deaths and journeys towards death more times than I am able to count and this is the impact it has had on me.  It has convinced me beyond any shadow of doubt of the reality of God.  This helpless, powerless facing of the reality and inevitability of death, completely outside of our control and timing has overwhelmed me and others with such a sense of reverential awe that I would only cheapen by trying to express it in words.

Preparing For Geezerhood

I will be fifty-eight in a week.  Two years before sixty.  Enough folks seem to have already relegated me to the grave or almost.  My face is still relatively young but I am balding with grey, almost white (in the front) hair.  In the stores that is what Junior at the check out sees when he asks me if I'd like the senior's discount.  On the bus that is what the young student sees when she gets up to offer me her seat.  Of course I accept.  I am in good shape for my age, I suppose, but I like to encourage good habits in the young and sometimes after a ten mile walk in the woods I really do want to sit down for a while.
     I don't mind getting older, it is not as bad as I feared and actually is much better.  I have greatly enjoyed my fifties.  I have lived almost twelve years in the same apartment and worked almost ten years at an occupation I love.  I do not make a lot of money, am statistically poor, but I have been able to vacation for a month or longer almost every year down in Mexico and Costa Rica since 2008 and I enjoy good enough health to do well on a foreign holiday.  I have become fluent in Spanish and enjoy a quiet though not boring life.
     I am single.  I have always been single.  And childless.  I have no family.  My parents are dead and I have been long estranged from my only sibling.  Aunts, uncles and cousins have never been in the picture, or at least not since childhood.  When I changed my name in 1995 that was the beginning of the death of my family for me, and me for them.  I have lost all the friends I had in my twenties, thirties and forties and have made new friends.  Now that I'm older I don't seem to need or want to spend as much time hanging out as I used to and I have noticed that many of my friends, who are more or less also in their fifties, are like this too.  We all work hard for a living and we need to rest more at home in order to restore our energy.  It isn't just that.  As one ages one becomes more contemplative, more prone to meditation and reflection, more in need of the still silent spaces.
     I realise that I am part of an at-risk demographic.  Aging single men on low incomes are highly prone to mental illness, depression and suicide.  I can understand why.  We have all on some level been abandoned, given up on.  We are the leftovers and no one wants us for anything.  We have lost our youth, good looks if we ever had them, our strength and sex appeal.  Being poor we are also as it were a burden on society.  At least that is the portrait that the statistician paints of us.
     Some of us old guys, I for one, have no plans of going quietly.  I for one intend to keep on learning.  I am ever expanding my personal library and reading in English and Spanish as well as hearing great news and information/education items on the CBC and Coop Radio or reading them on the Internet. When I hit retirement age and move to working part time I would like to take university courses and learn a third language, likely French.  I am going to keep on painting and will soon be doing more to gain exposure and marketing opportunities for my art.  I intend to continue travelling every year as I'm able and to meeting and making new friends of all ages and persuasions.  I am going to continue taking good care of myself, watching my nutrition and respecting my rest and sleep needs.  I have doubled or even tripled my intake of fresh fruits and vegetables and tend to crave broccoli and strawberries over almost any junk food except maybe chocolate, which I plan never to give up.  I am also going to continue at my church because for all their imperfections and mine there is a sense of ballast in being part of a faith community that cannot be easily substituted.  Last but not least I intend to go on enjoying the present moment and each moment of each new day and all the surprises and familiarity that every new day will bring me and I it.
     I feel as though I am finally getting my life in order.  I have let go of old grudges and resentments and have steadfastly refused to take on any new ones.  I know that my time is shorter than it once was, I have perhaps two good decades left, three if I'm lucky.  As a Christian I know that when I die it is not going to end here.  I will be standing before God who will judge me and I want to be ready to see him, I want to have as little baggage as possible to carry over that threshold.  I want to be ready for the party to begin.

Learning To Really Listen

I am a participant in a Meet Up Spanish conversation group at the local YMCA.  It is a great group with a wonderful range of people, volunteers from all parts of Latin America and Spain and almost every kind, class, age and ethnicity of members one could imagine.  The conversations and discussions can get very interesting, energetic and animated at times and even though we have a different theme every week it is not uncommon to stray far away from the topic de jour (sorry about the French, let's say el tema al dia?)  However, this post is not about Spanish but touches on an insight that occurred for me during our discussion.
     The topic this week was about the various kinds of food in Latin America.  We somehow strayed to the subject of how history is always written by the winners and how difficult it can be to accurately mine the truth about almost anything.  Our facilitator suggested that truth might be relative and I agreed with him, sort of, but I think mainly to avoid getting into one of those endless debates about details and language that never really get anywhere.  What I did say before, and actually believe is that the truth often exists on all sides but is often obscured, hidden and forgotten by the many lies and experience of trauma and victory felt collectively on all sides, by entire peoples and nations and by individuals, and this thread of truth can remain hidden and deeply buried, for years, centuries or millennia.
     I believe this to be largely true between individuals in the most mundane circumstances as well.  We all have opinions, our personal positions and insights, wisdom and blindness and what we all seem to hold in common is that no one, not one of us can ever see the whole truth, about anything.  I would suppose then, that to really learn the truth then one has to listen, to really truly listen.  This can be difficult, well, it is difficult and sometimes impossible or nearly impossible.  I have my own opinions, my insights, my blind spots and my own areas of stubborn refusal to change my opinions no matter how glaringly bright the light of truth might be shining in my face. 
     I think I would like to be a good listener, or a better listener.  This doesn't mean that others are going to return the favour, indeed, I am going to have to gear myself for having my patience and kindness tested beyond their limits if I am really going to set out to listening to others without reciprocity.  Only if I am really desirous to learn will I be able to pull this off, and to want to learn, to be teachable, requires humility.
     A tactic I sometimes employ at work with some of my clients is what could be called active listening.  My client might be spouting off about any sort of event or situation or experience and I could find her opinion absolutely obnoxious and offensive to all that I hold sacred.  But my client still needs to be heard and part of my job is to listen without judging.  It doesn't mean no feedback neither does it mean that I am not allowed to disagree nor vocalize that I disagree.  But this can only come if first I can really assure and reassure my client that I have heard her, that to whatever extent I can that I understand her and I respect and appreciate the time and courage she has taken to be so candid with me.  I have often found too that having heard her out that some of my opposing positions no longer seem so strong or necessary to defend.  I have even modified some of my opinions and taken different perspectives thanks to practicing this kind of listening.  This hasn't been easy because so often we use our opinions as ballast, or as a protective costume or disguise because they help tell us who and what we are.  And this isn't always a bad thing.  There are also some positions I am likely never to stray from:  for example the importance of reducing our carbon footprint in order to de-accelerate climate change.  Now I could be having a chat with a conservative, small c or big c, who thinks that creating jobs through industry and the free market matters above all else.  How can I listen to someone like this, especially when they are spouting what I think to be absolute horse shit while still hearing them out respectfully and attentively?  Well, I could try to focus on what we agree on, namely that people need jobs, and they need sustainable employment that will not only put food on the table and pay the bills and the rent or mortgage but will also help bring meaning into their lives and a sense that they are not merely wage-slaves but positively contributing through their work to the wellbeing of others and to the environment.  My opponent may or may not agree or maybe in part.  I might be given a counter-argument that I am not able to refute, or necessarily understand.  I think in this circumstance, de-escalating through respectful silence and an offer to revisit the subject at a later date could be appropriate.
     It is always easier to theorize these things from in front of the computer.  But these real life discussions can become emotional and heated and can even result in prolonged unpleasantness or worse.  So then it is a matter of learning how to listen respectfully but in a way that neither gives ground to nonsense nor creates discord and conflict.  Impossible?  At times, yes.  And then it becomes incumbent to know when to answer no further, change the subject, or politely walk away.  One day I hope to get it right.

I Bust Your Ass

I have nothing to write today, so I am going to write about blogging.  First, I still haven't figured out why I really do this.  I assumed for some time that it was to keep my head from exploding and to prevent me from yelling abusive insults at people who have the power to hurt me.  I suppose it's being effective.  Now I write this thing every day, well, because I have to?  Really, I am busting my ass working overtime to get a couple of projects at work ready for when I return from vacation in early April and frankly, today, when I came home from work to do more work while trying to make dinner without ruining it while still keeping my ducks in a row I almost lost it.  Then, mercifully, a dear friend whose visits I enjoy, cancelled our coffee appointment for tomorrow morning.  A reprieve!  Tomorrow morning I can work on those projects, relatively undisturbed and move forward a bit.
    It is always stressful getting ready for a trip.  Especially a long one.  Arrangements have to be made at work to make sure everything is in on time and clients' needs will be covered while I'm gone and also that I am going to get paid on time so there will be something waiting for me in the bank when I return.  There is getting my things ready, getting laundry done on time to ensure I can pack all the necessary clothes with me (I travel light, if you must know, maybe four shirts and two pairs of pants and maybe a dozen changes each of socks and underwear, extra shoes).  Also there is the need to remember everything.  Did I pay Telus on time, for not one month, but two?  Two months rent in for my darling landlords? Check.  All perishable food eaten with nothing left to turn the fridge into an illicit lab experiment?  Gotcha.  The landlords have my mail key?  Uh-huh.  And so on.  Ah...First World Problems.
     So, I write something in this blog every day.  It is, I suppose, a discipline because I am a writer.  Well, writing doesn't pay the bills but it is like an avocation.  Or maybe more an evocation, and in which case, what am I evoking?  Well, look at the name of my blog: Content Under Pressure.  Not contents because that implies material things, but content, the content of my thoughts and impressions and insights and reactions to things.  And yes, it is all under pressure.  Life can be stressful, my dear, very stressful at times, and I am not at all interested in advising anyone on how to reduce stress because it ain't goin' away for Sunday dinner.  I might have the rare insight on how to cope with stress, move with it, roll with it, dance with it.  We don't need less stress but improved skills of how to work with stress.  Kind of like a dance, a victory dance, a dance of defiance and resistance.  Yeah.  Kind of like Flamenco.  That lovely dance of fire and power, invented by Spanish Gypsies in their defiance against their dreadful Spanish overlords.  Ayyyyyy... Te rompo del culo!!!!! (I bust your ass)

Plain Beauty

The clinical supervisor in one of the mental health teams where I work mentioned today in the staff room during lunch that she thinks that all plastic and cosmetic surgery ought to be banned.  I largely agree with her, and both of us being of a certain age you could say that we look upon life with rather dry eyes.  We had begun the conversation talking about how some Asian women go in for plastic surgery to get their eyes done, where the characteristic fold is surgically removed giving the eyes a rounder more Caucasian appearance.  Then we moved on to a couple in China where the wife, before meeting her new husband, had undergone extensive cosmetic surgery.  When his beauty queen wife was delivered of two very ugly children and wifey fessed up about the surgery hubby sued her over the goblin offspring she had born him.  Then the conversation turned to how unrealistically perfect and beautiful celebrities, primarily female, look thanks to regular nips and tucks as well as the blessing of Photoshop and digital editing and what cruel, unattainable and impossible role models they become for women and girls.  There is an almost criminal sense of irresponsibility here that encourages women to hate their bodies and their looks and go to sometimes ridiculous extremes to look "beau-ti-fool." 
I'm thinking of my own mother whom, shortly after she crossed the fifty threshold began to consider getting a face lift.

My mother, Joyce Greenlaw, 1930-1991,

not for sale 

 

 

I painted this portrait of my mother sixteen years following her untimely death from cancer.  She would have about fifty-seven as depicted in this painting, or my age now.  Now what do you see? An aging woman?  Well yes, she is moving towards sixty here.  An aging woman with dyed hair and make-up?  Good one, Sherlock.  She is showing in this portrait the characteristic signs of aging that all women and men go through with the characteristic lines, wrinkles and sagging skin.  In my opinion she is also an attractive woman, good-looking, not just for her age, but simply good-looking.  She doesn't need to look young and I would dare to say that part of her beauty is in the art of aging that shows so unapologetically through the make-up.Here is my portrait of Screen Legend Marlene Dietrich, or "there but for the grace of high cheekbones go I".  In order to do this painting I sourced and work shopped a  number of photos, primarily a candid shot taken of her in 1963 during the funeral of her lover Edith Piaf, two months before her sixty-second birthday.  Whether or not Dietrich had cosmetic surgery (and surely she must have) what I have tried to capture in my interpretation of her is the real, the essential person, an old woman stricken with grief, peering through the mask of glamour.

Here is my interpretation of British Author and famed member and founder of the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf Without a trace of glamour or fakery here is an authentically beautiful woman. 

Here is British author and Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing at age seventy:

 

And here is Doris Lessing at thirty-six: The young Doris Lessing is merely pretty.  The old Doris Lessing is beautiful.

 

I find it interesting how disingenuous some of these aging tootsies can be.  Sophia Loren, for example who insists that she looks so spectacularly great at almost eighty because she eats pasta and drinks red wine every day.  Any practicing cosmetic surgeon can itemize like a grocery list the work she has had done on her face, her neck, her breasts, to the tune of around maybe fifty grand?  Likewise Jane Fonda, and all those screen goddesses and aging torch singers who continue looking inaccessibly beautiful into their eighties but only because they have the bank accounts and the vanity to get their aging hienies to the plastic surgeon every year.

 

In the meantime, for everyone, I am going to propose what my supervisor has already suggested: that we learn to celebrate the ordinary.  The vast majority of us look very ordinary.  But why stop there?  Perhaps there is something particularly beautiful in looking ordinary?  Maybe without disguising or erasing the alleged flaws that identify us as the awesome individuals that we are we should celebrate them? 

 

As some of you know, besides portraits, I paint mainly tropical and very colourful birds.  I have never been interested in painting the plain little brown jobs.  But when you look at a sparrow, or a robin or a hawk or owl you will find in the subdued earth tones of their plumage such an incredible if subtle range of shades and tones of brown, umber, ochre, sienna and black white and grey with a near dizzying range of tonality.  I may one day paint these little brown jobs.  but the brilliant bright colours of the rainbow still cry, scream and sing in my artist ears a little bit louder.

 





That's Not Funny

How many of you remember this famous light bulb joke: "How many radical feminists does it take to change a light bulb?"  The answer?  "That's not funny!"  I heard that joke years ago, in my early twenties (okay, more than years ago), and I laughed so hard I decided to try it on my radical lesbian feminist neighbour.  With complete poker face she barked back at me "How many CHRISTIANS does it take to change a light bulb."  She didn't realise she was being both utterly pathetic and utterly hilarious and I really didn't know what to say so I quietly and slowly backed away, as though I had just encountered a grizzly bear in the wild, and quickly found something else to do.
     I have always loved making people laugh and have often been successful though some of my efforts have fallen flat and sometimes for good reason.  Sometimes my timing has been poor, sometimes the intended audience just didn't have a clue what I was talking about or found so funny, or did not have a stomach for gallows, or cynical or off-colour humor, perhaps was in a bad mood or having a hard day, or simply didn't like me enough to recognize or appreciate my fabulous wit.        
     Humour can be sometimes so hard to get that it can easily turn into offense or worse and it is always important to take care with the way it is used.  One thing that is important here is to appreciate how humour can age and become obsolete, not funny, offensive.  Some examples here.  I just deleted an email from an ex-associate, someone with whom I have ended contact because, well, because he's an offensive and very rude jerk.  This man is older, around seventy.  He circulated an email featuring a very obese woman in a skimpy bikini on a motorcycle.  Not funny in my opinion, at least not at this stage in my life.  Like so many others I used to laugh at and tell fat jokes.  Now they seem insensitive and cruel and completely unnecessary.  We know now that obesity is an illness and that it is completely inappropriate to make fun of someone because of their physical appearance, especially if it's a disability such as obesity.  My father was a particularly egregious offender.  In the nineties when Lucien Bouchard, was leader of the federal separatist party, Bloc Quebecois, my father "joked" that "since having his leg amputated from necrotizing fasciitis, Lucien Bouchard no longer has a leg to stand on."  Even twenty years ago I did not find that funny and I told him so.  My father was offended by my response.  During a TV news broadcast there was a segment of some people in Seoul, South Korea falling from a collapsing stairway.  My father said "That looks almost funny."  I replied that I'm sure that for them it isn't.  If ever there was a moment in which I was sure that my father looked at me with absolute hate in his eyes, this must have been one of them.
     To cut my dear old dad some slack (died 2009 at the age of 81 from Alzheimer's; RIP Dad) he grew up in a very different time.  People of other races and different ethnicities were considered fair game, as well as people with disabilities, women and gays and lesbians.  It was really a backward, primitive and hating culture that he was part of and which we still seem to be slowly climbing out of.  It was an unfortunate symptom of the spirit of his times.  That this kind of "humour" was acceptable and generated laughter was all the more unfortunate and one likes to believe that we have moved forward since then.  It still seems acceptable to tell jokes about poor and homeless people and I long to see the day when this practice falls out of fashion just as the poorest and most vulnerable members of society are given the dignity of a basic guaranteed income and decent housing.
     This is not about "political correctness."  It is about treating people with respect and dignity.  It is about decency and basic good manners.  It is about being kind.
     Humour has an intimate quality.  When it works, it can really bring down walls and draw people together.  In fact, it needs to be used with great care and precision.  One misstep can ruin everything.  I always try to let the other person drop a clue or a cue of what makes them laugh, of where their funny centre is located before taking that chance and even then I try to do it with great care.  In the meantime if someone makes a misstep with me and my own challenged sense of humour I really try to laugh with them even if I find their attempt at humour to be lame, affected, or downright inappropriate.  I draw the line at humour made at the expense, or sexualisation of others and this doesn't always go down well
     Humour is an integral part of good functioning relationships but it must be approached with care, slowly and with patience, and, well, good humour.  We all want to be able to laugh and to bring others into our personal circle with us.  But we also all want so desperately to be heard and understood.  I say, leave jokes alone altogether, for a while anyway, and focus on things that seem to make us both laugh and smile.  Building trust and mutual comfort we are also going to find even more to laugh at, especially ourselves.
     And now, How many Christians does it take to change a light bulb?
Well, here is what I pulled from the Internet:

 Charismatic: Only one. Hands already in the air.


Pentecostals: Ten. One to change the bulb and nine to pray against the spirit of darkness.


Presbyterians: None. Lights will go off and on at predestined times.


Roman Catholic: None. Candles only.


Baptists: At least 15. One to change the light bulb and three committees to approve the change and decide who brings the potato salad.


Episcopalians (aka Anglicans in Canada0: Three. One to call the electrician, one to mix the drinks and one to talk about how much better the old bulb was.


Mormons: Five. One man to change the bulb and four wives to tell him how to do it.


Unitarians: We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own journey you have found that light bulbs work for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your light bulb for the next Sunday service, in which we will explore a number of light bulb traditions including incandescent, fluorescent, three-way, long-life and tinted, all of which are equally valid paths to luminescence.


Methodists: Undetermined. Whether your light bulb is bright, dull, or completely out, you are loved. You can be a light bulb, turnip bulb or tulip bulb. A church-wide lighting service is planned for Sunday. Bring a bulb of your choice and a covered dish.


Nazarene: Six. One woman to replace the bulb while five men review the church lighting policy.


Lutherans: None. Lutherans don't believe in change.


Amish: What's a light bulb?

 

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Fruits And Vegies

I have really been boosting my consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables this year.  This is part of my plan of losing weight through eating a healthy diet.  But really, I am simply eating more of food I have always craved like medicine.  I first began to notice this with blood oranges.  I first read about them in 1997 during the winter in a Globe and Mail article.  I was intrigued and fascinated.  A red orange.  When I tried some I was hooked.  They tasted like some kind of berry fruit mixed with orange, and I craved them like anything.  Perhaps because they were kind of, well, sexy?  Blood orange.  An image of passion and heat and warmth.  Red like blood.  I brought once a bag of blood oranges to a pot luck lunch at a place where I used to work.  Almost no one had heard of them nor would try one, and one, a squeamish female with a bit of an attitude, said, "Ewwww!" when I said they were blood oranges.  Not for the delicate.  I have since learned that it is probably due to their unusually high vitamin C content that I find myself jonesing for blood oranges by late December, when they become first available.



I have found this about other fresh foods.  Broccoli for example, and Brussels sprouts.  They are crammed with vitamin C.  As are strawberries, kiwis, and persimmons.  These in particular are foods, fruits and vegetables that I must have every winter.  As though my body has trained me to reach for what is good for me.  I stuff myself with these wonderful foods and I feel strengthened, invigorated and renewed.  Since increasing my intake I find it also interesting how my cravings for sugar and fat have really plummeted.  Which suggests that proper eating and a healthy diet (not dieting) is at least as much about what we do eat as what we don't.
      And for the record, having been eating this way for almost a year, I have already lost around twenty-five pounds.  Giving up butter and severely cutting back on cheese, butter, bread and peanut butter hasn't hurt me either.  I'm not going to live for ever, but I am going to live, and ever!

Loyalty

I have recently figured out why I have had so much trouble making lasting long-term friendships.  It is really very simple.  It is also the reason why it has been often and long so difficult for me to find suitable employment.  The reason?  I am not a consumer.  This doesn't mean I don't spend money on services or that I never go shopping.  Far from it.  But I don't think of myself as consuming these things.  Shopping and buying are not a huge part of my life.  In fact they are way at the bottom of my hierarchy of values.  So, what does this have to do with friendship or employment?  Well, more than what often meets the eye, I would say.
     You see, Grasshopper, we live in a consumer society.  It's all about money, buying, consuming, greed, covetousness, selfishness and addiction.  Treating others as a means to an end. We are a collective gaping maw that can never be satisfied.  As individuals many of us are kind, generous and altruistic.  Collectively, we stink, and we don't only stink, we are a collective and intolerable stench in the nostrils of God, or for those atheists and agnostics among you of all that is good, pure and loving.
     The urge to buy terrifies you but it also influences, shapes and informs who you are.  From our earliest childhood we are bombarded and taken hostage by advertising on TV directed at kids and forget about our parents holding back the tide because they have long been rendered helpless and useless since they were programmed and brainwashed the same way when they were kids.  You broke your toy?  Mommy and Daddy must buy you a new, better and more expensive one.  You're laptop is obsolete?  Get this spiffy new i phone.  I phone obsolete?  How about this i-pad with all the new apps.  New apps obsolete?  Spend money, money and more money whether you have it or not.  Extend your line of credit.  Meantime surf the Internet for dating sites.  Want a friend?  Look at friendship sites.  Tired of your significant other?  Get a new one.  Your friend is boring.  Check this new site, you'll find a new one.  Sick of your spouse?  Trade her in.
     In a consumer society nothing is sacred.  It is all about buying and spending and investing.  This thinking creeps into the way we treat others and in the way we perceive ourselves.  We remain superannuated children who must always be entertained, distracted and protected from boredom.  What is the point of loyalty in relationships when the raison-d'etre of our relationships is all focussed on what we need, what we want, on our own selfish, self-centred self-fulfillment?
     I have never been able to live with this consumerist model.  Through my teenage years and way beyond I eschewed pop culture, consumer values (sic), and TV.  I had become from the age of fourteen immersed in Christianity, and not simply immersed in a belief system but into a most powerful spiritual dynamic focussed and founded on principles of unconditional love and compassion.  Even in the wake of my parents' divorce, and disintegrating and splitting churches I had been involved in I sought in others and sought to be for others a stable, loyal and long term presence.  But we all change with time and in time we lose interest because there is nothing left to maintain our attention on the other.  There is no real enduring love there.  There never was.
     We are not disposable.  Nobody is, but we treat one another as conveniences and through this post I want to challenge each and every one of us to rise above this and start seeing others in a new way, not for what they can do for us, but for the opportunity to love one another as Christ has loved us.  This means that we don't discard one another because we have outlived our usefulness.  It also means acquiring eternal values that have squat to do with self-gratification and consuming.  For those of us who hanker for community this is where it all begins.

Embracing Joy

I have embarked on a major spring cleaning in my little apartment.  Even though I was passed over for other prospective tenants for the seniors' building I am on the wait list for, I am confident that my name will come up again sooner than later.  The timing in this instance was very inconvenient.  When I received an email about the availability of a unit it was for March 1 and it was already February 7 when I got notification.  It turns out that they tried to phone me using the incomplete contact information in our church directory (the building is owned by my church)  I subscribe to a voice mail service for low income people.  For only twenty-five dollars a year I have my own voice mailbox and one has only to call this service, key in my four digit number and Bob's Yer Uncle, which is one of my favourite little expressions.  It apparently hales from England during the late Victorian Era when the prime minister's nephew, (the prime-minister's name was Robert Something) was given a very plum position in Parliament, from whence sprang the saying for when everything happens so easily and quickly, "Bob's Your Uncle." 
     Somehow I had forgotten or neglected to include this information or the individual compiling the information had somehow left out my mailbox number.  It might have been intentional on my part because when I was included in the church directory a few years ago I was less than enchanted with a lot of the people there and even in the remote circumstance of anyone wanting to call me I still probably would not have welcomed them.  So omitting my mailbox number just might have been my own passive aggressive manoeuvre though who can know for certain?
     So, assuming that they will call me again, sooner or later about an apartment in this building, I want to be ready to move, so I am already getting my ducks together, going through my closet (all finished now) and after that, various cupboards and drawers and maybe even my library to see if I should cull it some more.  Three weeks notice was not enough to get ready to move.  I am preparing for my annual vacation to Mexico and I will be there for the entire month of March.  I am also going through a very busy and at times stressful period at work.  I really don't have time to get ready to move right now.
     As often happens while spring cleaning, I've come across some of my old journals.  I have been reading some of the entries from 1998 and 1997, sixteen and seventeen years ago.  I was not doing very well then and just seeing how much I was constantly repeating myself and going on and on about the same issues and people I was bothered about like a dog snapping at its fleas I don't really feel a lot in common with the person writing these rants.  I can honestly say that I have forgiven all those people who had troubled me and I hope they have found it in their hearts to forgive me.  I can also tell by the tone of my writing that I really wasn't emotionally well then.   Really, I no longer write a journal because I seem to have resolved a lot of the critical issues that made journal writing a necessary but ineffective way of coping.  I much prefer writing this blog instead.  I leave out personal and juicy details, not that they even exist these days, but I'm not complaining and I certainly don't miss them, but it just seems much better and more constructive to write things that I can share with the public, written in a way that will not come back to haunt me or bite me in the heiny.
     I think I'm going to save the journals.  Revisiting them from time to time is educational.  It helps me remember more accurately where I have been, how far I have come, and how much further I have still to go.  It is also a helpful way of recognizing patterns and to help me devise ways of breaking out of them before I become dangerously trapped.  It also fills me with a sense of hope and gratitude because I can see now that I am indeed in a much better place than before and my life is not the dead end that it appeared to be in those days.  In other ways it tells me also how much I haven't changed, that I am still the same person.  I have the same values.  I also had to accept and recognize that I was ill and needed treatment.  Journal writing was helpful up to a point but I kept going around in the same circle and after a while the exercise became counter-productive.  Four years of seeing a good therapist who provided me talk therapy without medications seemed to help break me out of these patterns and vicious circles.
     On top of everything else, I feel a lot happier now.  I mentioned to a friend the other day that a major factor in my recovery from PTSD was recognizing and accepting that I am fundamentally a joyful and happy person. Every since embracing this it all seems to be better, much better.  And it is much easier now to laugh, especially at myself.

The Show Must Go On

I am emotionally exhausted this evening.  Interesting how much someone else's crisis can wear one out.  My client fainted in a café and needed to be hospitalized.  Other customers and staff were amazing.  I was kind of quietly conducting everything and holding things together.  No wonder I'm tired.  I went straight from the hospital to my next professional assignment without taking time to debrief, other than walking nearly two miles to Venture, the small psychiatric hospital where I work two days a week.  Two of my bosses were on hand to debrief with on the phone, then straight back to work caring for others.  Two hours later I was finished and ready to go on to my Friday Spanish conversation club.  After a two and a half mile walk I got on the bus for the remainder of the trip.  As soon as I got on the bus and sat down I realized that I was in no shape to be around other people.  Inside I felt vulnerable, shaky.  I went straight home from where I emailed my regrets to the program coordinators, in Spanish of course.  I still feel not quite my best and will continue to take it easy.  Tomorrow is my day off and my rest day so the timing couldn't be better.
     What interests me is this process of emotional exhaustion, how it is caused, what it is made of, and how best to treat it.  I did feel better prepared for this crisis than last time which occurred a month ago with a different client had a seizure while we were out together and also needed to be hospitalized.   This hit me particularly hard, I think because I had not been through this kind of crisis in several years and had somehow lost my edge for dealing with such unexpected emergencies.
     I have just spent most of the last hour working on a painting and I already feel much better.  Lightened somewhat.  I am also deciding to enjoy the moment, which really does way more to help get me through the night that being morose.  Yes, getting my edge back in times of crisis.  Well, I was hoping in a way that these kinds of crises would happen oftener so that I can get better used to them.  Yes, I know, be careful what you ask for.  Well, I asked.  And really I am altogether handling the aftermath of this crisis much better.  There are no physical manifestations.  Last month, when my other client ended up being hospitalized on my watch I later had some very painful physical manifestations of the emotional stress I was under and actually felt emotionally and mentally disoriented for a while afterward.  Today none of this is happening and I feel that I was able to immediately handle my emotional reactions without having to suppress them.  But as I said, this being in the seat of responsibility and having to manage and monitor everything during an emergency is exhausting.  It calls for all one's energy and mental faculties and the huge amount of hormone that gets released in the body because of this as well as the inevitable tiredness from having to focus so carefully and so minutely on every single detail: the clients' wellbeing, the conduct of bystanders, the wellbeing and actions of helpful bystanders, the staff and management of the establishment where the emergency is taking place, the operator of 911, coworkers and supervisors I am on the phone with at work, the paramedics and the hospital emergency staff as well as carefully monitoring my own emotions, alertness and professionalism... that is a very tall but necessary order.  I ought to be exhausted.  I should be plastered spread-eagled on top of my bed or floor staring at the ceiling and whimpering inarticulately.  But no, I am writing in my blog, listening to the Current on CBC Radio One, intermittently painting or reading, from time to time checking my email or the comments section of a particularly obnoxious article on CBC Online referring to the Federal Immigration Minister's open invitation to Chinese millionaires to come on down and buy up Canada... everything is as normal and gradually I am feeling better and stronger.
     But I also needed to turn down a social obligation, the Spanish Conversation Group, knowing that now that I was home, safe, no longer needed and the adrenalin was settling down, that I am actually feeling fragile and whacked and in absolutely no condition to be receiving callers.  That is what is so important about properly handling ourselves in time of crisis.  In order to get everything done with the least amount of harm you have to put your own feelings and emotional reactions on the back burner, take care of everything and everyone around you, get on with your other obligations and duties.  The show must go on and this can actually be a valuable way of coping with stress.  Check your breathing and get exercise, walk a lot if possible.  Think positive thoughts.  Then, as soon as you can, get still and quiet for a while.  If you feel in no shape to carry on then stop, rest, but stay true to your usual domestic rhythm and don't worry, be happy.  It is not the end of the world, just the end of the day, and at the end of the day it is not my crisis, but my client's, and knowing this can be very helpful in learning to let it go.  The show must go on.

Boundaries In Balance

My clients and I are not friends.  This isn't to say that we could never be friends but friendship does not work within a professional arrangement.  When a client mentions to me the F word I always have the same answer.  I tell them that friendship with me is not a burden I would want to wish on them.  They would be every bit as obligated to have to bear and support me in my problems and complaints and this is something I would not wish on them.  Friendship can get messy.  So can professional relationships.  Especially when boundaries collide.  I have learned to treat my friends more like clients and my clients more like friends but always within certain, of course, professional limits.  It usually works.  Unless I am careless.
     In my profession as a mental health peer support worker I am engaging with people who are generally very vulnerable and certainly not at their best.  Today for example one of my clients left the café just after I'd bought our coffees.  I would find this very difficult to tolerate in a friend and it certainly wasn't easy to accept from my client.  As I was contemplating a fitting punishment for him on my way from the café I saw him coming back to apologize and explain that he wasn't feeling well.  Of course I accepted and forgave and walked him to his home where we parted with the best of mutual good will.  I recently had a falling out with three individuals and I have already documented this misfortune in earlier posts but I can't help but wonder if I might have shown them a more professional kindness, even though they were, in a way, friends, but they also each live with mental illness.
     With only a few exceptions one must never let down one's guard around others.  To cultivate a friendship where we are so mutually safe and accepted is really a very rare thing in life and if it ever happens for you then you are truly blessed.  Even within families unconditional love is a very scarce commodity.
     Of course I have to treat my clients with care and exceptionality and for many good reasons.  They are vulnerable and very fragile and there is going to be a power imbalance between us.  They carry enough sorrows and burdens already.  They don't need any of mine on top of their own.  I want them to do well in their journey towards recovery, therefore the focus is going to be entirely on them, their goals, their needs and their hopes and wellbeing.  I also want to keep my job.  Of course because it is my revenue.  I want to stay off of welfare, pay my rent on time and eat well as well as put away some money for a vacation.  But that is not the only reason why I want to keep my job or why I work.  This occupation for me, and for anyone who is good at what they do in their work, I treat as a calling and a ministry. Like any fully functioning human being I have a need to nurture and care for others.  On the other hand I do not take my clients home with me, not literally or metaphorically. When I am off work, once the paperwork is finished, and the phone calls and the emails are done I am MIA as far as clients are concerned.  I have to have time to rest, keep my life together and take care of myself if I'm going to be any good at my profession. 
      This doesn't mean that I never worry about my clients.  It is possible and healthy to care about someone without being preoccupied with them.  I also understand that whenever a client commits suicide it is very traumatic for his primary caregivers and support professionals.  This has never happened to anyone under my watch but there have been a few close calls and yes, this has been for me very upsetting and close to traumatizing.  We who work as caregivers are human beings.  If we didn't feel these ranges of emotions while working with our clients and patients I would dare to say that we are either severely burnt-out or we are sociopaths.
     Yes it gets messy at times, but the professional boundaries are sacred and they are there as much for the clients' wellbeing as our own.  In fact, I would venture to say that the boundaries are even more for the clients' because they are the vulnerable party.  We do not bring our friends' or family to work with us and we do not bring our clients or patients home with us.  But if we want to do well with both spheres in our lives then may I suggest that we carefully and selectively borrow from one and lend to the other while respecting the integrity of our roles in each other's lives?  How about a client who can feel safe, accepted and cared for with us?  We can actually enjoy each other's company, laugh at each other's jokes and find ways of brightening each others day.  You would be surprised how often this happens for me in an average work day.  And conversely, how about if we are gentler with our friends and loved ones, more patient with them, placing on them fewer expectations and showing more consideration towards their tiredness, weakness and vulnerability?  I'm going to try it.  How about you?

We're Heroes!

I am generally trying to ignore the Olympics this year, as always.  Not always easy.  I listen daily to programming on CBC Radio One and they provide a lot of Olympic coverage.  An awful lot of Olympic coverage.  The programming is peppered like symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome throughout the day with Olympic news straight from Sochi.  So, I know who is winning what piece of metal for which event almost as fast as I can forget their names.  Straight from Russia.  Without love, or much in the way of love given how the Great Bear of Eurasia is more or less confined to the penalty box until they get over their institutionalized homophobia.
     I always have a nice grab bag of excuses at the ready for ignoring this great international event of sportsmanship and peace.  Most of all, I don't give a shit: not about competitive sports anyway.  Of any variety.  They all bore me, not because I suck at almost all of them but really, sports bore me.  They always have.  I have never got this crap about having to be the best at something, of sighing because you won silver and not gold, of whining because you got bronze, or boo-hoo-hoo-ing because you didn't win anything at all. Hey, you got there.  Isn't that something?  Maybe you haven't been judged the absolute best, second or third best in your game, you have been judged suitable to participate in the Olympics.  Yes, the Olympics! The world's most prestigious amateur sporting event.  Never mind if your the best or not, you are good.  Love it.
     A lot of this has to do with how we gage and judge success.  Well, I'm a writer.  I have never published anything outside of a couple of articles for online publications and an essay on solutions for homelessness in the Downtown Eastside.  I actually won second prize for the essay, if you have to know.  Five hundred bucks.  Sponsored by the lovely activist lawyers of the Pivot  Legal Society. Nothing to sneeze at.  But big deal, I am simply happy that the essay got some attention, got a few tongues wagging and is being consulted as a credible source for information and ideas by those who make decisions on public policy.  The five hundred dollars came in handy too, if I must say so myself.  I have also written a novel, a whole whack of short stories and lots of poetry and this damn blog as well.  Hey, I got it done.  Now and then someone reads my rants.  Well done!
     I am an artist.  I have never won any prizes for my painting and have actually in my day heard some very hurtful and mean-spirited comments about my art, not many, but just enough to keep me humble.  I am not in a good gallery and I am nowhere near famous.  On the other hand without any help from anybody I have successfully sold almost one hundred of my paintings.  All under-priced, I would say, because I was generally poor, broke and desperate for revenue.  I now charge closer to market rate for my work and since jacking up my prices I have sold practically squat.
     I am a mental health peer support worker.  Have I won any awards?  No way.  I get tonnes of praise and support from colleagues, coworkers, supervisors and clients.  They're happy, I'm happy.  I go home every day from work satisfied that through my little bit I have helped make a difference for others or at least have learned something new about myself or how to improve at my job and boy does that feel good.
     Success is simply doing something well or adequately.  I got out of bed this morning.  That's a success.  I make my bed and clean the bathroom, the floor areas, and dust every day.  Yay!!!  I eat a good breakfast and walk a minimum of five miles a day.  Cheers and whistles!!!  I resisted the temptation of swearing or being less than civil towards strangers behaving like oblivious and invasive idiots today.  Absolutely spectacular.  And the beat goes on.
     Success, if it is anything at all, is doing our very best with what we have to work with.  We cannot usually determine the outcome.  That isn't our job. Often we will make mistakes and fall.  Then we get up again and keep on keeping on.  That is a success. If we can end each day knowing that we have done our best and that we are willing and ready to learn to do better and offer that same generosity to others throughout the day, then we're not just successful.  We're heroes!

Spare Beer?

Sometimes it is too easy to poor-bash. Especially when, like me, you've been there yourself and you know absolutely nothing about the person you want to bash.  Like this young punk seated in front of my building late this afternoon.  He had just lit himself a cigarette then held out his hand to me saying he was four bucks short for a case of beer.  Fightin' words.  Now I was just returning from the bank where I had been arranging for three thousand dollars worth of Mexican pesos from my chequing account in preparation for my trip in a couple of weeks.  Had that young punk known this he would have been doing everything he could to shake me upside down by the ankles.  And I do not blame any of you reading this for thinking he might well be in his rights to. But the truth is, I am on a low income myself and the only reason I can afford the luxury of travel is that I am very good at budgeting and very strict with myself about money.  Otherwise I could easily be competing with him for sidewalk space.  As I went to open the front door of my building I told the young man "I find what you're doing to be really obnoxious.  This is nothing personal, by the way, and also everyone who lives in this building is on a low income."
     I didn't feel very good about making this comment.  This doesn't mean that I shouldn't have nor that I wasn't entitled to, but it just felt plain darn mean speaking to someone like this.  Especially someone who is already vulnerable, though an absolute idiot.
     Why didn't I offer him money?  If anyone needs to ask this question then there must be something seriously lacking in your I. Q.  Besides setting up shop in my front yard he is not asking money for food or shelter.  He wants beer.  He likely wants to get drunk.  Probably an alcoholic.  He is also next door to the neighbourhood liquor store which is already a blight on our community.  If he wants money for beer then why doesn't he lie about it?  Or get a job and work for it?  But really, you can do all you can to convince me till youre blue in the face and I'm red in the ears but you are not going to persuade me that this guy is employable.  Seriously, would you hire someone like him.  No, don't lie.  Would you hire this young man who thinks nothing of sitting on the sidewalk begging for beer money?  Didn't think so. 
     Maybe because a lot of the patrons of this liquor store are young party animals for whom alcohol is not a privilege but a right and for this reason are likely to be sympathetic towards the young man.  The reason I believe this is from the unthinking adulation that greeted Toronto Mayor Rob Ford when he was here a couple of weeks ago.  For anyone reading this blog who knows nothing of Toronto or of their infamous mayor, Toronto is the largest city and centre of the universe in Canada and the capital city of Ontario, one of our eastern provinces, though they insist on calling themselves Central Canada but geography suggests that that status really needs to go one province west to Manitoba.  What of course has made Mayor Ford notorious is his use of illegal drugs such as crack and alcohol (he is often stinkin', snot-hangin' pissed).  This Mayor of Toronto has made his fair city and our country an international laughing stock for his antics.  And here were all those young twenty-something bone heads hugging him, getting his autograph, getting their photo taken with him.  So, it isn't a stretch to imagine that such young morons would be quite willing and eager to toss the young street punk a loonie or a toonie on his quest to get utterly stupid tonight, further damage his health, perhaps do something stupid or dangerous or make himself vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, violence or worse.
     I do not know how the poor kid ended up where he is.  Maybe he was raised by a series of foster homes, maybe he was abused by his father, so many maybes and always with the same likely outcome: a socially disadvantaged and alienated youth, unable and unwilling to hold down a job, with addictions, and mental health issues and a chronic tendency to lie because all he can think of is surviving for one more day and all because no one has ever presented him with any attractive or convincing alternative.
     Should I have told him off as I did?  Probably.  I am not going to indulge this kind of behaviour.  Would it have been better to ignore him?  Only two motives for ignoring him: fear and indifference.  Could I have more constructively expressed my concern?  Maybe.  But sometimes shock impact can work wonders.  It's always a crap shoot.

Happy Family Day

Today I saw a hummingbird.  I have mentioned in earlier posts that we have in Vancouver resident Anna's hummingbirds who winter here after spending the summer in the mountains.  I heard him singing in his thin wheezy splendour from a tree growing out of the cliff of Ferguson Point in Stanley Park.  He was too far away and the light was too dull to show the iridescent red of his head.  I have been seeing these tiny birds everywhere since I identified the first one two weeks ago.  This must be a kind of serendipity.  It happens often enough, oftener than many of us would imagine.  I have long believed that there is an entire unseen reality that underlines and guides and connects us.  We are so addicted to logic and rationalism that I think most of us have grown up with very dulled senses to these spiritual or transcendental realities.
     This is our first rainy day in a couple of weeks.  This has been an unusually dry winter.  It does rain at times but not with the daily monotony that usually marks a typical winter in Vancouver.  I was really happy to look out the window this morning and see that the water on the roof of the garbage room had melted and the surrounding pavement shining gently in the wet rain.  It has been warmer today, up to six degrees.  The promised snow we were all dreading did not come.  Just rain, and rain that is likely to continue throughout the week.  We need rain because there is very little back up water to keep the reservoirs full over the summer and just a little less than oxygen, to survive we need water.
     It isn't that I don't like sunshine.  I love sunshine.  The brilliant jewel like radiance of everything under the sun is such that it can leave me limp and helpless in a melting puddle of joy.  And the sky, all these lovely subtle and brilliant shades of blue.  I cannot have enough of it.  But we need the rain and the softened and darker colours of the day become soothing and restful to the eye and the smell of rain and pure oxygen drenched air is a tonic like no other.  Especially while walking by the water's edge.
     Today is Family Day, our second since last year when the February Stat was first inaugurated.  Even though I don't have a family I can still celebrate it.  I spent part of the day walking on the seawall and then into the forest of Stanley Park, followed by a little grocery shopping and nearly an hour in a coffee shop to work on a drawing.  I must have put in at least a seven mile hike.  At home I sorted through some of my clothing, finding three shirts to throw out and rediscovering other shirts and a pair of pants that fit me again since I started losing weight.  I will continue to make a project out of sorting and cleaning out my closet, then I will proceed to other parts of the apartment.  I am preparing to move.  I was given first notice Friday but I wasn't ready so I had to turn down the vacancy that was being offered in the Pendrellis, the senior's building that my church owns next door.  Now that I know that I am high on the wait list I will be occupying myself over the next several months going through all my belongings, getting rid of what I no longer need and bagging and boxing such things that I likely will not need right away.  I want to be ready for this move.
     I spent a half hour on the phone afterward visiting with my step-cousin who is bravely facing and battling cancer that could well be terminal.  She is bouncing back quite to the surprise of all the medical people and I suspect she is not ready to leave us yet.  After painting a little I prepared dinner, cabbage unrolled, using a large tin of crushed tomatoes instead of fresh tomatoes and it is surprisingly delicious.  Later I wrote an email to my friend Ana in San Sebastian, Spain, all in Spanish.  I am quite deliciously tired from all the physical and domestic activity today.  Even though I am alone I don't feel alone.  I am part of a huge great community and we are together, in the seen and in the unseen.  I have long believed that we are all connected no matter how different, distant or antagonistic we might be.  Our family extends well belong the claims of flesh blood and DNA.  Happy Family Day.

Our Consistent Inconsistency

We are very complex, us humans.  Walking contradictions.  Life supports for an oxymoron.  I have long been aware of this and only as I hit middle age did I really begin to accept that I will always be a hypocrite.  Middle Age Wisdom.  Ain't nothing like it.  There is a charming Turkish lady I know, from Istanbul who has been so kind as to buy three of my peacock paintings.  I will show one in this image:  let's hope that it displays on the published page.  One day in the vintage clothing store that she owns we were commenting together that for all of us hypocrisy is inevitable.  One of her staff, an idealistic twenty-something still in the green side of her twenties piped up "Speak for yourselves,"  My Turkish friend and I exchanged meaningful glances and one of us, I can't remember who, said, "But she will learn in a few years, wait till she's our age."
     Life seems to be for most of us an unbroken line of little compromises, small abdications, minor consenting to not only failing to live up to our high values but downright undermining them.  We slowly and gradually commit this long protracted spiritual suicide in order to keep on living.  I think here of the line from the Judy Collins' song "Albatross" "You must barter your life to make sure you are living." 
     I was more or less the young woman's age, twenty-three, when I first really began to think of this, not the hypocrisy so much as the utter lack of consistency to our human nature.  In the Mennonite house church, the Green House, of which I have already written in an earlier post this subject came up during a discussion period in one of our worship services and we were all roundly shocked to learn of the unnoticed humanity of some of the most brutal architects of the Nazi atrocities of Hitler's Third Reich.  The Fuhrer's officers and generals were not always, twenty-four/seven the evil monsters that their work turned them into.  No they would each go home to their happy Aryan wives and bounce on their knees their laughing little Franzes and Heidis, following their dinner of schnitzel and sauerkraut.  There was an absolute disconnect between the Jew killing monsters and the loving husbands and doting daddies they were at home.  It makes me think of how a mother tiger will not eat her cubs (but look out for dad!) even though any other smaller vulnerable animal would be breakfast lunch or dinner.
     I have my own share of inconsistencies and hypocrisies in my life.  I do try to live up to my high standards and often end up achieving this by lowering the bar however discreetly and subtly.  One example, I am vegetarian, but I also wear leather shoes and a leather belt.  I express concern about animal rights or at least that they are treated well in captivity but I still buy and eat eggs produced by battery hens.  I am strongly in favour of food sustainability and organic environmentally friendly farming prices but when I am shopping for food the best deal takes priority so that I am still likely subsidizing Monsanto and Franken Food through my self-interested food choices.  I am also on a low income and simply cannot afford to eat ethically.  On the other hand I could content myself with paying double what I pay for food and cut back on my annual travelling holidays, but this is the first time in my life that I have been able to freely travel like this, despite my low income, and I am nearing sixty, and even though I will likely enjoy robust good health into my nineties there is no guarantee of this.  I am a staunch defender of the environment and recycle almost everything but as I mentioned, I fly every year and even though I don't drive I still contribute prettily to air pollution and climate change through global warming.  I used to buy fair trade cocoa but drinking cocoa made me fat, I am loosing weight right now and settling for a few chocolate chips each evening to take care of my chocolate craving.  The chocolate chips I buy are not fair trade, may be the product of human rights abuses and while savouring the semi sweet decadence I am still haunted by images of children in the Ivory Coast being whipped and beaten for not producing enough on the cocoa plantations.  And the fair trade chocolate is whoppingly and scandalously expensive and often not very great tasting.  I am still a client of the Royal Bank and regardless of how awful they are I am just too lazy to shuffle over to a credit union.  I will say nothing here about how readily I fail to live up to my other ethics as a Christian but really I stink of hypocrisy.  I also work, struggle and scramble against being a hypocrite but, you know none of us is ever going to quite get there so we had might as well cut each other and ourselves tons of slack and compassion while never giving up the fight.
     This isn't to say that I will never change these things and perhaps having made this confession will even accelerate me into getting my ducks in a row.
     I am also thinking of the beautiful hypocrisy of my Turkish friend.  For a long time in front of her vintage clothing store she had a free box in front on the sidewalk.  Anyone could drop whatever clothes they didn't need and anyone could pick up whatever free garments that tickled their fancy.  She could have made a profit off many of these items but was happy to give back to the community.  While I was homeless and extremely poor I clothed myself handsomely thanks to her free box.  On top of that she bought three of my paintings.  There was a catch however.  For the first two peacocks I had to agree to spend half the price of each painting buying clothes from her store.  I couldn't help but oblige her.  I didn't have the heart to tell her that I found the clothes in the free box to be of superior quality and more to my personal taste.

Food Abundance, Food Scarcity

I am thinking right now of food scarcity and hunger.  Not in Somalia, not in North Korea, and not in Haiti, but here in our own beloved Canada.  It is a growing phenomenon.  I don't recall the stats and don't have them readily available but it is getting worse.  We are still one of the world's wealthiest countries with the highest GPD and the highest median income.  And we have a growing problem with hunger.  You wouldn't guess it to look at the local supermarkets and stores with shelves overflowing with abundance and selection such as earlier generations could only have dreamed of.  We also have more than ever poor and homeless begging in front of the stores while they're open and sleeping in the doorways when they are closed.  This post is not about the various causes of homelessness and poverty, though suffice to say that the inequality between haves and have-nots is growing alarmingly in this country.
     I have always been poor, at least since my parents' divorced each other when I was fifteen. Let's just say that for me shit went on happening for many years and I stayed poor.  To my surprise, I never once went hungry.  Luck perhaps?  I certainly can't figure it out.  I know that I was fortunate to have friends who were vegetarian when I was in my teens and I learned a lot from them about budgeting and doing well with little.  When I moved out on my own at eighteen I became vegetarian and joined a food co-op where for the exchange of four hours of volunteer work every month I ate well on discounted healthy food while subsisting on an incredibly tight budget.  I was very resourceful and developed a very good nose for bargains and deals which also introduced me to some amazing foods from all over the world.  I would often have to travel across the city to get the bargain I needed for the right kind of cheese or the perfect deal for fruit and vegetables or natural peanut butter. I prepared everything from scratch and became a very able and creative cook.
     While surviving on welfare for three and a half years I still did well.  I still don't understand how I did it.  I was fortunate in that I had only myself to look after.  I don't know who I would have managed if I had a kid to feed.  Not having a cigarette habit neither a taste for alcohol probably helped.
     I think God must have been looking after me or something.  How else could I have made it through this labyrinth of poverty and coping with a system that hates the poor and wants only to crush us underneath its heel?  I have never once had to visit a food bank.  I actually was able still to donate to the food bank, which I still do to this day.  I never once had to beg on the street.  Yet even at my very poorest I have given money to beggars.  Please don't ask me to explain how.  I absolutely have no idea, only that I was being taken care of.
     So then, if God was taking care of me, then why doesn't he look after everyone else?  A very hard question.  I think that he really desires to take care of all of us but somehow this is contingent on our trusting him to do this.  Faith, or more accurately, trust, is the key that opens the storehouses of heaven.  But I can't say that I really knew at the time that I was trusting God.  But I also think that when God is providing for us it is also with the proviso that we share the blessing with others, as channels of his goodness.  This isn't to say that everyone who trusts him or claims to have faith gets off as well as I did.  This is a question for which I do not have any answers.  It puzzles and troubles me as much as the rest of you.
     Even now, on my income (twelve bucks an hour for twenty-five to thirty hours of work a week) I am able, thanks to the blessing of BC Housing where I pay less than thirty per cent of my income for rent, to travel every year for a month or longer to Mexico, Costa Rica or similar in Latin America.  I am able to save money.  It doesn't seem fair or just, especially to moderate income earners who make more than twice what I earn in a year yet have to settle now for stay-cations because they can't afford even a trip to Vancouver Island (nothing unusual as the ferry costs soar).  On the other hand, I don't have a car, no expensive habits or tastes, eat almost all my meals at home, and buy my clothing second hand.  But it still doesn't seem to add up.  And while God has kept me well fed all my life he did not give me decent parents who knew how to raise a kid with special needs, didn't save their marriage and didn't protect me from becoming homeless.  I can say that despite all odds that he has protected and care for me throughout all these and other misfortunes.
     But how do we address and solve food scarcity when there is such an abundance of food but without equality of access?  I really get weary of the usual litany of excuses that come from our government officials mouths, rather like really nasty bad breath, that they don't have the money, they don't want to raise taxes, yadda yadda yadda... It is this same government that magically "found" a half billion dollars to fix the roof of a sports stadium and shelled out ten billion to host the Winter Olympics.  Oh but they love sports stadiums and Olympics and really care not a rats derriere for the poor.  If they cared enough they would find the money.  For those of you who care enough, yell it out and make your voices heard!