This Was Christmas 6

The coloured lights still festoon my window.  They adorn the lower half like a cretinous multi-hued smile.  A Christmas smile.  They have been up since the Sixth of December, St. Nicholas' Day, the beginning of Christmas.  I sometimes sleep with them on, or lying awake like a superannuated baby lying in his crib staring at a coloured fish mobile.

I watched and guarded and scrutinized myself throughout this month of December, knowing that depression would be lurking in the shadows, a hungry leopard ready to pounce.  I watched, I waited.  It didn't come.  Now it is New Year's Eve.  Still no depression.

I haven't had an extraordinary Christmas.  The early weeks of the month I dedicated to decluttering and cleaning and to include in my daily routine extra cleaning duties to make my place fit for company.  Then I proceeded to invite people.  My friends from Mexico for dinner, then for coffee, then my friend from Peru for dinner, then a Canadian friend for tea and dinner, then my Mexican friends again for brunch Christmas Day.

That was my Christmas Day, before going to work. I spent the afternoon and had dinner in the small psychiatric facility where I work.  This works well for me since my friends never have time for me Christmas Day and my family is either dead or missing.  Christmas Eve was very quiet, spent watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas on Youtube, baking cookies and preparing the bread pudding for brunch on Christmas Day.  I went for a long walk after dinner at work and spent the balance of the evening at home alone.  Boxing Day I attended the Open House of La Sombra Pesada, formerly known as La Bella Luz.  It was difficult and some of her friends are people who have caused me a lot of pain.  She did not approve of the way I blogged about her dear little idiots afterward and when I refused to apologize ended our friendship.

That was yesterday.  I am still watching for the dark grey beast of depression but I feel fine.  Not even my ex-friend has been able to summon it forth.  I had a good one and a half hour nap this evening just following dinner.  I didn't want to move.  Sleep wasn't great last night though it wasn't that bad.  I felt needed and my services well used to day.  Beyond that I'm not divulging anything.  Client confidentiality you know.

They say the Northern Lights are going to appear over Vancouver tonight but I am undecided about braving the cold outside.  We had an earthquake Tuesday night, the anniversary of my Christian conversion.  At 11:30 or so I was jolted awake but thought I'd merely had a bad dream.  I lay awake then checked the twelve o'clock news.  There was an earthquake.  A mild one.  Only a small photograph of Mother Teresa tucked behind the posthumous portrait of my mother I painted in 2007 had fallen to the floor.  I quietly dismissed from my mind any fear of aftershock (unlikely following a mild earth movement) or anything worse happening, then slowly found my way back to the chambers of slumber.  I was annoyed that the quake happened late at night on a week day.  I did have to get to work in the morning but the tectonic plates don't seem to know or care anything about our artificial rhythms of life.  If a major quake has to occur it should be in early summer at ten am on a Monday.  Absolutely no consideration or good manners from these quarters!

Of course I'm spending this evening home alone.  This has become typical.  I'm not sad about it and I'm not feeling sorry for myself.  Social isolation is a fact of life in Vancouver, this Dumb Blonde of Canadian cities.  I will likely stay indoors, finish writing this drivel, listen to the Ideas program on CBC Radio One, work on a painting and watch on Youtube the last part of a film version of the Count of Monte Cristo in Spanish dubbing.  Then I'll read a bit of two different novels: in English Timothy Findley's Headhunter, and in Spanish a translation of Sieg Larrson's Millenium trilogy.  I have tonnes of books in my home library (more than six hundred) and less than ten percent have I read. Tomorrow I have friends coming for dinner.  They speak English as a second language and I am now going to more diligently read my English language novels so I can pass them on to my friends from Mexico.  Reading novels in a second language is great for growing in your adoptive language.

This is my way of celebrating New Year's Eve.

I expect to be in bed by or before midnight.  There is going to be a fireworks display at midnight but I've seen plenty of fireworks in my time.  It's cold out, it'll be noisy and crowded and really for me it's just another night.  I don't make New Year's resolutions.  I try to make and live out my resolutions throughout the year. I find this method very effective.

Happy New Year everyone!

please pass this on to a few others.

This Was Christmas 5

Well, still no crippling depression.  I have just had to end or consent to the ending of a friendship.  La Bella Luz of the Boxing Day open house took strong exception that I would write unkind things about her cherished friends.  People who have caused me harm without explanation or apology but nonetheless they are her cherished friends, and since I have always been a low ranking friend on her gilded social hierarchy I am absolutely certain that had the shoe been on the other foot, had the Politically Correct Green Goddess or La Estrella Nuevo Yorquena written unkind things about your faithful scribe she would have just let it go or even praised them for putting me in my place.  And from this moment on the traitorous Bella Luz shall be known as La Sombra Pesada.

When La Sombra Pesada wrote me an email expressing her offence with me (I will not replicate it here since I still respect her privacy regardless of what she's done to me) I responded with these words:

I am not going to apologize about my experience.  Nobody was named. I did have a difficult time and made the best of it.

 I think you're taking this way out of proportion.  Or if you wish, we don't really have to be friends.  The ball is in your court.

best

Aaron 

 

She replied with one single word: "Goodbye."

 

Here is my response written in Spanish, a language we are both fluent in:

 

Me apena que las cosas vayan mal para nosotros.  Si quieras terminar la amistad conmigo no te echo la culpa.  Aunque no pueda justificar ni condenar mis acciones de mi blog por favor hagame caso.  Si supiera que asistieron la tertulia la Politically Correct Green Goddes y La Estrella Nueva Yorquena no me habria ido.  No quiero aburrirte de los pormenores tampoco perjudicarte en contra de tus amigas.  Ambas mujeres me causaron mucho dano en la iglesia.  No hay que divulgar las detalles porque si, por supuesto, respeto que sean las amigas tuyas!  Pero, ellas, ademas de otras personas me causaron mi salida de la iglesia.  Para verles en tu casa me apeno mucho.  Solo para dar a mis Amigos desde Mexico mas contacto a las canadienses acorde de asistir.  Por lo demas me hubiera quedado en mi hogar!

 

It saddens me that things aren't going well between us.   If you want to end our friendship I don't blame you.  Although I can't justify or condemn my actions in my blog please hear me out.  If I had known that the Politically Correct Green Goddess and the New York Star were going to be at your open house I would not have gone.  I don't wish to bore you with details neither set you against your friends.  Both women caused me a lot of harm at church. There is no need to divulge the details because yes, of course, I respect that they are your friends!  But, they, among other persons, caused my leaving the church.  Seeing them in your house caused me a lot of distress.  Only in order to give my friends from Mexico more contact with Canadians did I agree to attend.  Otherwise I would have stayed home!

 

Me sentia que me tratas como una persona de bajo rango, y con algo de hostilidad.  Tal vez seas en mi contra porque soy persona pobre? Porque sufria de algunas trastornas mentales? Porque tu iglesia me ha traumatizado y quizas decidiste aliarte a ellos en mi contra para aumentar mi dolor? y tal vez por eso te moleste mucho el ensayo de mi blog?  Tal vez desempenas conmigo de malas ganas la amistad y te  cupiera mejor que no nos veamos?

 

I have long felt that you treat me like a person of low status, and with some hostility.  Maybe you are against me for being poor?  Because I have suffered from mental health difficulties? Because your church has traumatized me and perhaps you decided to take their side against me in order to increase my suffering?  And maybe this is why you are so bothered by my blog post?  Maybe you have endeavoured to be grudging in your friendship towards me because you would prefer that we not see each other?

A me, he valorado mucho de tu amistad y abrigo la esperanza que nos superamos del desacuerdo.  Lastima que piensas diferente.

 

On my part I have greatly valued your friendship and retain the hope that we will both rise above our disagreement.  It saddens me that you do not agree with this.

En cuanto a mi no hay que terminar la amistad pero si no te peguen ganas seria inadecuado que te moleste mas.

 

As far as I am concerned there is no need to end our friendship but if you don't care to continue it would be inappropriate that I bother you further.

Si decidas pasar por alto nuestras diferencias espero que desempenemos la reconciliacion y volveremos a la amistad. 

 

If you decide to overlook our differences I hope that we can carry out a reconciliation and become friends again.

Pero, de verdad me parece que siempre me hayas desechado y no necesito tales amigos como tu.  

 

But really, Heavy Shadow, it seems to me that you have always despised me and I do not need friends like you.

 

Gentle Reader it is sad and too ironic that friendships end so easily, especially during the Christmas season where it is expected that friendships are affirmed but this is a season replete with irony.  I have come to see it more as a battlefield.  If there is any victory here then it is a pyrrhic victory and everyone loses.  I also take in consideration a hard lesson that I have learned today.  Never ever expect your friends to be loyal or trustworthy.  Friendship is often an illusion and it is often like making imaginary friends out of real people as a beautiful illusion that will protect us from the hard reality of our solitude.  I have to admit that when I first solicited the friendship of Heavy Shadow I was greatly in need of friends and she grudgingly offered me her friendship, I think, out of guilt.

 

I have better people in my life.

 

 

 

This Was Christmas 4

Today marks a significant anniversary for me, an anniversary that is very difficult to talk about since not a lot of people would have a clue about how to relate to it.  This is probably one of the most important anniversaries of my life.  At this date forty-five years ago something happened that would change the course of my life, that would change me for my entire life and, dare I say, eternity?  The meaning, significance and solemnity of this date is such that I could not explain the impact it has had on my life to anyone in the Anglican Church, even though this is a decidedly Christian anniversary, if I should use this word.  Today marks the forty-fifth anniversary of my spiritual birthday.

That's right, Gentle Reader, I'm what is known in some circles as a "Born-Again Christian."

.... Are you done gnashing your teeth?.....

..... Here let me give you another few minutes for your blood pressure to normalize...... 

.....That's it, ....breath deeply....., slowly....., breath in...one...two...three...four...

.....now breathe out...one...two...three...four...

.....Are you feeling better?.....

  Yes, I did write that nasty offensive term, let me repeat.  Now be prepared, I don't want you getting all upset again.  Born-Again Christian.

On this day, Tuesday, of this date, December 29, forty-five years ago, I was walking in the cold rain from the bus stop to the split-level house where I lived with my recently divorced mother and my older by three years brother.  I didn't feel particularly different, but I was aware that something life changing had just occurred in my life, but one and a half hours ago.  I didn't feel different but on the bus home I found myself fascinated by the strange beauty of the glistening rain drops on the bus window.  I had never noticed something like this before.  I knew my mother would kill me if she knew where I had spent the evening, for which reason I phoned and lied to her.  What she heard me say was that I had been invited to stay for dinner by the mother of a friend from school.  I'm sure she guessed but one can never tell with mothers.

The truth is I had been invited to dinner in a communal house full of young male Christian fanatics, many but recently converted from lives of drugs, alcohol and crime and who knows what other dreadful acts.  I was but fourteen years old.  Bait for the child protection authorities if ever there was any.  It was never my intention to do something to horrify my dear mother.  When I was to break the news to her two days later she would be horrified.  I did have to work up the courage.

I was already proving to be a difficult and rebellious teen.  During the previous summer I had smoked my share of pot and gotten drunk with various older acquaintances in the local park.  In October I attended my first ever protest demonstration.  It was against the War Measures Act recently minted by our federal government to contain the national threat of the FLQ who had just kidnapped two government ministers and murdered one of them.  Some guys on the courthouse (now the art gallery) steps shared their cheap wine with me while regaling me with tales of their experience hitch-hiking from Montreal.  I got quite drunk and then back on the grounds a funny short little man in his early twenties stopped me. gave me a piece of paper with a religious message on it and tried to talk to me about God and Christianity.  I'll never forget this strange little story he told me with a riddle attached: "Say you had an attractive sister wearing a tight mini-dress and some guy made a rude remark about your sister.  Now you of course would be very angry and would want to do something to this guy in protection of your sister's honour.  If you had magic power to turn this guy into something that would stop bothering your sister what would you turn him into?"

I thought for a moment while I allowed this strange question to turn through the rolodex inside my drunken little head.  Then I replied, "A rock.  I would turn this guy into a rock."  The funny little geek seemed very perplexed by my answer and asked why I would want to turn this guy into a rock.  I replied that rocks are very harmless and they aren't able to do anything, good or bad so I thought this would be the kindest punishment for him, a punishment that would leave also him unhurt.

The following month downtown a guy in a suit tried to persuade me to visit his Pentecostal church.  He had seen me chatting with a Hari Krishna devotee.  I must say that I found neither option attractive.

Then it happened, this date, December 29 1970.  A long haired and bearded Jesus Freak asked me if I believed in Jesus and Bob's Yer Uncle.  Two hours later in a coffee shop we connected like long lost friends, then I was at his house for dinner, then a sense of something so beautiful and wonderful began to overpower me, like being stoned on very good pot but sweeter, stronger, purer and more beautiful.  They prayed with me and I agree with them.  Jesus came into my heart.  I was born again.

Even when I have tried to turn back on this beautiful reality there has been for me no turning back.  Christ has come to define every facet of my life.  Even though for years I have deferred from using the words "Born Again Christian" to describe my experience this is exactly what happened.  Early on the Jesus' People, my first Christian mentors, had gone south and were coopted by Bible Belt fundamentalism who then coopted this most wonderful and life-changing experience, or simply the words since they turned the reality into a farce and a travesty.  Born Again Christian soon became a byword and the beauty of these words has never recovered from its desecration.

I am not a fanatic.  I have a life, a profession, past-times, friends, a social life, political and social opinions (not even remotely right wing if you must know) and a sense of humour.  God fills everything but rather than robbing me of my humanity this perpetual experience renews, restores, affirms and exalts my and our humanity, for this being born again, this Christian rebirth is simply being born into love, into the universal core that sustains the planets and stars and maintains the order of every subatomic particle in the universe.

Don't ask me about other religions and faiths.  I don't know.  I respect and admire them but I walk with Jesus.  Should Muslims, Jews and Buddhists become Christians?  I don't know, but if they want to I'm not going to stop them.  Should Christians become Muslims, Jews and Buddhists?  We do have such a thing as freedom of religion.  But these are questions that are not mine to answer, perhaps to ask but that's as far as I will go.

Likewise about how we got here.  Don't ask me.  I wasn't there when it happened.  Neither were you.  I respect Darwin and I respect the accounts in the opening chapters of Genesis.  Do I understand them?  Hell no.  Simply the wonder of it all and the rapturous joy this wonder can raise me to is enough to tell me that I really don't need to know.  There is one who knows these things already and if I need to know all the minutiae of how we got here then I'm sure that he will eventually reveal it.  This doesn't stop me from reading about Darwin and evolution and muttering "You don't say!" any more than it keeps me from reading the Bible everyday and whispering "Thank you Lord Jesus!"

In the meantime I walk in the joy and beauty of my spiritual rebirth.  I am not perfect, I am a work in progress and I make many mistakes which really is the way we all learn.  Each of our lives is a story.  We are all novels writing ourselves and writing the world around us.

It is four days after Christmas, Gentle Reader, and still I haven't been hit by depression. 

There is a God.

Please pass this post on to any five people whom you think might be interested in reading these words.  But only if you're sure they'd be interested, Gentle Reader!

This Was Christmas 3

Gentle Reader, I have received a bit of blowback for my last post.  It might cost me a friendship or two.  I hope not but I'm not backing down on anything I wrote nor am I going to apologize for the way I wrote it.  One matter seems to be somewhat misunderstood: I suffered through the Boxing Day get together with a couple of individuals who caused me a tremendous amount of harm at church, and trauma, and I had to struggle to cope while they were there.  Evidently it has been misread that I am out to attack someone's dear friends.  Rather this is my way of venting over the mistreatment and injustices to which I have been subjected to during my time in the Anglican Church.  No one is interested or available to help me find closure with this.  Clergy and friends have all backed away from me.  It seems that their precious friends who have harmed me have greater status than I do.  Protect the ranks.  So this is my therapy: my blog and your kind attention, Gentle Reader, and perhaps the hope that the Anglican Church will thanks to my posts find a wee little bit of public humiliation.  Some email exchanges with a friend will likely fill in the blanks.  I have carefully edited out any information that could reveal my friend's identity :

 

I've been away from church now since September and you know something?  I don't miss it at all.  It's like I never attended or ever needed to.  God feels very near and that's the important thing and everything else seems to be moving forward and unfolding as it should.  And I haven't grown horns so far so I guess that's a good sign.

 

I'm not sure if I've ever told you about my vision of the church.  

 

For me the church is not an institution.  It is an organic reality.  The churches as we know them help in some ways facilitate this reality but they are not the reality.  That is God and the people he has called to himself.  Some of these people are in the churches.  But not all of them.  Nor are all the people in the churches, not even the people on the church councils, not even the clergy, are all His, which is to say a lot of them are not going to be people who walk with God.

 

I imagine that I am one of those who don't really belong in the institution.  This does not cut me off from the body of Christ, which actually has very little to do with the church: Anglican, Catholic, Baptist or other.

 

Does this mean that the Anglican Church (or any of the other denominations) are useless to God?  I wouldn't go that far.  I think they are all useful and valuable and that there are many people who should and need to be part of these institutions.  But not everybody.  I just can't believe that one size is going to fit all and that it is just as injurious to try to fit someone in the church who doesn't belong as it is to take someone who belongs out of the church and expect that they'll do okay.  Look what it's done to me!

 

I really believe that the institutional church is much the same as the Sadducees and Pharisees of Jesus day.

 

 

Well, let's just say that healing is beginning to happen.  I'm giving it three years away from church and then we'll see.  I might visit a few places in the meantime but I ain't shaking hands with strangers and likely not sticking around for coffee afterward (ever see the bumper sticker: Save me Jesus from your followers ;-} ) After three years I have no idea what's going to happen.  My big mistake with the Anglican Church is that I went there in need.  That system to me seems very poorly equipped to handle or help people who need community unless they are prepared to work their butt off as volunteers and even that isn't a guarantee that you're going to be accepted or liked.  Someone told me that I cannot expect that church is going to be a safe place.  I suppose that's all well and good for afflicting the comfortable (the Anglican Church's target audience) but there is precious little for comforting the afflicted (those poor marginalized folk whom the parishes try to help but rarely become actually a part of the community).  So if you are recovering from trauma and mental health issues and people's insensitive or unkind behaviour triggers you left right and centre then it's your tough luck and if you can't cope then it's time to move on.

 

This does not at all resemble to me the Jesus that I know.

 

I can also see that there are people who totally thrive in church.  I would love to see something that would welcome include and nurture people from both worlds.  We have much to learn about taking care of one another, of being real community, of being family.  The Anglican Church as I've experienced does not, and I suspect is incapable, of accommodating this model.

 

My Spanish speaking friends have been teaching me a lot about friendship, humility, caring and accepting others, kindness.  Some of this has to do with the cultures they come from but I also have been blessed with some particularly awesome people.

 

There are Mennonites, then there are Mennonites and then there are Mennonites.  I was involved in a very radical Mennonite house church for a year 1979-80.  They were all artists/intellectuals and studying feminism and gay liberation and challenging gender roles and norms.  They were also strongly pacifist and of course radically socially progressive.  I would have lasted longer with this group but I also found them a bit twee and insular.  Generally other Mennonites are more like Baptists who are against war and do a lot of community and social development work.  They also tend to be anti-queer.

 

How do they compare with Anglicans?  Anglicans tend to be middle to upper middle class, and very status quo.  There is no definitive concept of a Biblically based Christian discipleship, at least not in my experience of Anglicanism and a rather morally and ethically flabby anything goes mentality.  It is a denomination that seems to celebrate mediocrity and conformity to secular values.

 

For me the strong area in Anglicanism is the liturgy of the Eucharist.

 

For the Mennonites it would be their pacifism and community development, justice and peace.

 

This about says it for me, Gentle Reader.  I have been coping the best I can from the blowback and have spent the day getting my Compass Card for public transit, buying a calendar, taking a good near seven mile walk, lunch at home and two hours in the local coffee shop with my sketch book.  Could do worse I suppose.  Apart from my feelings of sadness about the blowback I still feel strong and not prone to the Christmas depression that has been afflicting me almost every year save for this one.

 

Now if I can only remember to stay away from Anglicans!

 

Please pass this post on to others.

This Was Christmas 2

I will open this post by writing about the Boxing Day open house I attended yesterday.  This was in the home of a friend of mine who has been welcoming folks into her home every Boxing Day for at least six years(?)  I always enjoy and appreciate these get-togethers since I often have nowhere to go Christmas and even though the open house occurs the day after the big day, well, half a loaf is better than none.  I will call my friend, whom I am not going to name here, la Bella-Luz (if you don't understand Spanish then please ask Uncle Google). 

This year there was a little awkwardness.  There were two guests present with whom I do not get on.  This isn't to suggest that I would even think of asking la Bella-Luz to not be friends with people whom I do not like, nor to refrain from inviting them.  Actually I am glad they were both there, if anything, to disempower the rage and anger I have harboured towards them.  I was hurt by both of these individuals in church, an Anglican parish they still attend.  Both at different times have treated me basically like garbage.  Neither have been interested in reconciling.  Since there is a Biblical expectation that those of us who partake of Holy Communion should be at peace and in communion with one another, and neither of these women have seen fit to reconcile with me, I have had to leave this church.  I could not live with the perpetuating hypocrisy of disgracing the Body of Christ by partaking with people with whom I am in disaccord.  I know, this is the Anglican Church and Anglicans are generally too cowardly, too self-centred, and too indifferent towards real Christian discipleship to really want to care a shit.  Well, I care a shit and if it means that I have to stop caring about having good relationships with others in order to cope in an Anglican parish then I will simply think of some other way of occupying my Sundays.  In fact, I have already done this and feel none the worse for wear for it.

So, the fat chubby politically correct Green Goddess basically sat in a corner and made every possible effort to avoid contact with me.  She did greet me on her way in with a phony little smile and a forced cheery hello.  I simply responded with a toneless poker face hello and proceeded to ignore her for the rest of the evening.  Then came la Estrella Nueva Yorquena.  We didn't even give each other the time of day as she basked in the limelight of her own fertile imagination.  Only on her way out did she acknowledge me with a hasty good bye.  I just said good bye.

I know that whatever hobbled me about both these women was somehow disempowered for me last night.  I might visit their church again.  I am not shaking their hands during the peace, since that would still be an act of hypocrisy.  In fact, if I attend church there again, I am not shaking hands with anyone.  I might not even go forward to receive communion, since I don't feel a huge need for it.  For me it's all the same.

I brought with me to the tertulia of la Bella-Luz my two friends from Mexico and Spain, who have just immigrated to Canada.  I am very glad they got to meet some more Canadians and I do hope that eventually this visit will help them build a social network in Vancouver.

Also present was an elderly lady I have known for many years.  She is in her eighties now and frail.  It amazes me how she has come over the years to shine with the kind and loving light of Christ.  We spent a good part of the visit chatting together.  I don't know how much longer she will be with us and I hope I can get around to see her sometimes.  She was for several years a neighbour of Doreen with whom I was in intentional community for several years.  Doreen has been dead for almost six years now and the lady is still living in a self-contained apartment in the mansion next door to Snooty Church, or, St. James.  Many years ago I gave them one of my paintings for their common room, a landscape on which the lady still comments kindly.

Also present was Bella-Luz' mother, quite elderly and very sweet and nice to talk to.  The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree.

There was also Bella-Luz' boyfriend, whom I shall call el Guerrero de la Cruz.  El Guerrero is studying for the Anglican priesthood.  Together, they both make for me very treasured and valued friends.

There was another friend who is from a South American country.  He is a lovely person, very kind and highly opinionated and often laments about the political and social conditions of his country of origin.  He was lots of fun yesterday and really worked at helping everyone feel welcome and part of the party.  I don't necessarily agree or disagree with him about his country of origin.  Simply I don't know enough about the situation to be able to form an opinion.  Or, as I mentioned later after he and his partner left with the lady, "Opinions are like assholes.  Everybody has one."

I did mention later to a co-worker of la Bella-Luz that I'm kind of done with opinions.  It doesn't mean that I don't have any.  I think that I'm becoming a little more flexible.  I still take certain positions that remain unchanged and unchanging but I am less inclined to expect that others have to agree with them or that I have the corner on truth.  This I think is why I'm done with online debates, especially with strangers.  If we can only know one another by our opinions then really what's the point?  I would prefer to have these conversations in the same room with other flesh and blood human beings and I really hope that I can shut up long enough to actually learn something.  On the other hand I have to admit that I feel somewhat fatigued from saying things that no one is going to listen to and I would simply rather live out my truth as faithfully as possible.  I think this might be what I mean when I said to la Bella-Luz' co-worker, whom I think isn't even forty yet, a married father of one or two young children, "the need to express and debate opinions is something that some of us end up ripening out of (a bit different from "growing out of" I think) doesn't mean that he or anyone else shouldn't and I hope they can really enjoy this stage of life for as long as it will need to last for them because I think it's a necessary step towards the wisdom of age (waiting for me somewhere in a golden glow somewhere at the end of the tunnel).

The party got quite crowded and lively and noisy for a while.  I don't really do well in this kind of environment though it really cannot be helped.  I noticed that for quite a while I was the only person with no one to talk to.  This often occurs when I am in noisy and chaotic social situations.  I used to blame it on others, for being too snobby to want to give me the time of day.  Then I blamed myself for being unfriendly and remote.  I think I understand the dynamic a little better now.  I don't speak with a loud voice and often people in noisy situations have trouble hearing me.  I also don't enjoy raising my voice because it can make me sound and feel angry, upset or threatening.  I also become a bit paralyzed, feeling suddenly isolated and unable to reach out.  I am finding that the best cure to this is to try to find a conversation to listen in on and eventually participate in.  But it is even more helpful if there is anyone looking around the room to see if there is someone like me who needs to be rescued.

People left and eventually we were down to a little more than a half dozen souls along with the friendly and very curious cat of la Bella-Luz.  We were all talking together, gently and respectfully.  Everyone seemed to feel included.  The way I like it.

Today I woke up feeling that I would like to see people but knowing that I am not able.  I am simply too worn out from the socializing and work of the last couple of days.  This is why I am neither married nor live with a partner.  The thought of having another body there, all the time, sharing the same bed and bedroom, regardless the benefits, for me is a most horrifying notion, a prison, a kind of emotional slavery with no escape for treasured and valued alone time.  Voice of experience by the way just in case you happen to be muttering "Sour Grapes."  Given my grumpy short temper this morning I knew for a fact that it will be much better for me and the human race should I spend this day alone.

I listened this morning on the CBC to fascinating programs: one about the experience of recent immigrants here from Hong Kong and Mainland China.  I am especially intrigued by the idea that it isn't simply the rich Chinese buying houses here that are to blame for our skyrocketing housing costs.  It is also the greedy house owners who are so obsessed with getting wealthy off their equity that they will sell only to the highest bidder.  I also listened to an interview with Jim Wallace, the founder and leader of the Sojourners community, an activist social justice Christian community in Washington DC.  He was speaking of his concern that there is plenty of wealth to go around but it isn't being shared equally, and that the economy is there to serve people and not to enslave us.  I strongly agree with him (I count Jim Wallace and Sojourners among the most significant mentors to me during my twenties).  I only wish that he and others would take it a step further and say that the economy isn't simply there to serve us, but that we are the economy.  The economy needs to be thoroughly humanized and our understanding has to be totally revolutionized if it is going to really work for the common good and the common interest.  I did some work on a painting and emailed back and forth with my Venezuelan friend as we were cobbling together some ideas for helping her learn English.  She is also giving me invaluable support for my Spanish,

Midday I took the bus to Shaughnessy Heights were I spent two hours walking in the rain along the twisting winding streets flanked by beautiful mansions and trees and incredibly peace and quiet.  Then I stopped in a coffee shop on Granville to work on a drawing where I ran into a couple of clients of one of the mental health teams where I work.  We had a pleasant little chat and I realized as well that it is still a bit of a challenge for me to converse with my clients should I run into them on my day off.  In a way it does have me feeling perpetually on duty, just like last night when my friends from Mexico and I had just left my apartment building.  A tenant from my building, a very mentally ill man was standing on the corner ahead of us screaming incoherently.  My friends paused for some reason and I went on ahead to talk to my neighbour.  I asked him how he was.  He didn't look at or answer me but he went quiet and for a while stayed quiet.  I only hope that I was able to somehow penetrate his loneliness.  But you know Gentle Reader, being kind and being a good neighbour should not be professional duties.  They are part of the stuff and substance that make us human and that help make our existence on earth tolerable.  If I feel on duty seven days a week I'm sure it isn't going to kill me.  It also makes getting away to another country every year for a month all the sweeter where I can unwind and basically live on another wavelength.  But I also take care to not forget kindness if only to keep me open, if only to keep me human....

By the way Gentle Reader please pass this post on.  If each of you can think of five others to whom this writing would be interesting then please pass it on to them.  Don't worry, this is not a chain letter, but if I can play a role in getting people to think and explore then so much the better and your help is invaluable.

This Was Christmas

Not bad this year.  I have not been hit by seasonal depression, at least not yet.  Usually I would be feeling swallowed alive by the first week of December.  It is Boxing Day, the day after, and I feel...okay?  I still have to get past New Year's before I can declare myself healed.  I think I'm getting there.  There has been nothing special about this Christmas and really I didn't do a lot.  Never do. 

Christmas Eve I spent home alone, and listening to CBC Radio One was not at all helpful.  Everyone was calling in to brag about the wonderful Christmas Eve and Christmas Day celebrations with their families and friends.  A perfect Christmas such as to give Norman Rockwell a run for his money.  And it sounded as if every single Canadian but me was going to have a perfect holiday, all warm and fuzzy togetherness and eating and drinking and singing and playing, and that I was the only person on earth who was spending this holy night alone, reading, eating, writing my blog, working on a painting, listening to music, watching for the first time in my life the cartoon classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas and struggling not to feel sorry for myself.

I think I won.  I'm sure half the callers were lying and the other half were really massaging the facts about their perfect family Christmases.  People who are alone generally don't call in.  We tend to feel very sad and ashamed of ourselves as though somehow it is our fault that we are alone at Christmas and that we have no one to blame but ourselves when no one calls us to invite us for dinner or breakfast or even for a cup of coffee.

I did not spend this Christmas alone.  I have two friends who have recently immigrated here from Mexico and I invited them Christmas morning for brunch in my place.  None of my friends ever invite me anywhere for Christmas and I thought it would be nice for my friends from Mexico to have somewhere to go.  The visit went well, the food was good and later I went to work.

Working on Christmas Day, if you are otherwise alone, and if you can pull it off, can actually be a great idea.  I hung out with the clients in the small psychiatric centre where I work.  We went for a walk, then did art together, visited in front of the TV and had Christmas dinner together.  I was given some simple gifts by management then took an amazing walk through Shaughnessy the wealthy area where I enjoyed the light displays on some of the mansions and the full moon shining gently from the east.

When I arrived home I enjoyed the silence and read the remaining pages of a library book that I returned this morning.  I went to bed and slept beautifully.  Today my friends from Mexico came over for tea and cookies, then we walked together to my friend's for her Boxing Day open house.  My friends met a lot of new people which I hope will help enhance their experience of establishing themselves in my country and I got to chat and catch up with people I hadn't seen in ages.  There were also a couple of people present who caused me a lot of hurt while I was at St. Paul's Anglican.  We basically ignored each other.  Both tried to greet me with phony niceness and I simply muttered hello and stayed away from them.

I do wonder about the Grinch.  I in a way have trouble blaming him.  I'm sure he must have had good reason for isolating himself from Whoville the way he did and I suspect that he also had a mental health disturbance: perhaps a mood disorder, or PTSD, or depression and anxiety.  I know what social isolation feels like and how painful it is to be rebuffed and ignored by people that you love and how easy it is to withdraw and isolate and wind up hating.

Gentle Reader, for this season of Christmas, I hope that we can look with empathy upon the Grinches and try to understand that those who are alone and do not reach out are often the way they are for good reason.  I challenge each and every one of us to try to think of someone who could remind us of the Grinch.  It could even be me.  Remember not to blame the victim and don't wait for us to call.  Reach out to us because we are often feeling too miserable and ashamed of our afflicted condition to lift so much as a finger to help ourselves or to call friends or relatives who simply do not have time for us, don't care, or would rather not see us.

Next Christmas let's be a little less selfish and less focussed on our immediate circle and reach out to those who are alone.  It could be a new Canadian.  It could be a poor or homeless person.  It could be me.  It could even be you.

May the coming new year find us more generous, less selfish and more caring.

Candela Place 7

It is the night of Christmas Day and I have been living here for thirteen years and a few months.  This is the longest I have lived in one place.  I had an enjoyable day today.  My friends who have immigrated here recently from Mexico and Spain shared with me here in my little apartment a bread pudding I made for brunch and cups of strong coffee.  The afternoon I spent at work hanging out with clients, going for a walk, chatting and doing art work together then staying with them for Christmas dinner.  Later I went for a long walk in the cold night air, the swollen newly full moon bathing me in its tender glare as I walked the winding streets of Shaughnessy Heights where some of the mansions are adorned with lights.  I am home now, full of chocolate, pumpkin seeds and vintage Welsh cheddar and the silence of this Christmas night spreads its subtle heavy music through every pour, every nerve and every blood vessel.

I have been in the same job for more than eleven years.  This is the longest I have been in the same job.  I have no idea what the future will bring.  During this era of global and local instability I cherish having a roof over my head, a place that I can afford.  In Vancouver, now one of the world's most expensive cities for housing this is just incredible.  Had I not found this place to live I would have but few options: share a terrible apartment with unreliable roommates, untenable at the age of fifty-nine; find the cheapest apartment possible and endure unsafe substandard housing while never knowing if I have enough money left over for food; end up periodically homeless because of the tight housing market and the extreme difficulty of keeping a stable roof over my head; or move to another, cheaper part of the country.  While I feel nothing but gratitude to God and all those who have helped me find housing and sustainable employment I also fear for the future of this city, that it is becoming a place increasingly hostile to the poor.

I still hate the neighbourhood I live in.  Today, while leaving the building I was threatened by three young street youths trying to gain illegitimate access to the building.  This is not a safe area and I find that I stay home evenings rather than risk the nuisances and less than safe conditions outside at my doorstep.

The building is well-managed even if the fundamentalist Christians running the place can be a bit unreasonable at times.  On the whole we get on well and simply politely agree to disagree on certain nonessential (for me anyway) matters of faith.  We occasionally clash but there is primarily good will there and we all try to get along and work together.

Maintaining clear boundaries with mental health tenants with whom I have on occasion worked with as clients can be a bit of a challenge: like the tenant who was recently a client of a psychiatric centre where I work.  Recently in the elevator she began telling me all about her toe fungus as though she could not get it through her head that I was no longer her professional support worker.

I am very grateful to have this place, my little bachelor apartment, adorned with multiple paintings of mine, four book cases overflowing with some six hundred volumes in English and Spanish, and my window festooned with coloured Christmas lights, my Christmas smile.  This place is a Candela and my life has become a candela, a tiny light flickering but still shining despite the odds in the enveloping darkness.  A light of hope as I grow each day a bit older and yet somehow feeling nothing of age or of youth, but a timeless eternal rhythm, a balance that holds my life in balance with all the lives that surround me.

Candela Place 6

Because of the incredibly low rent that I pay here I have been able to quickly save money.  In 2008 with my recently minted passport I set out to travel for the first time in fourteen years.  Let us for a moment Gentle Reader heed this small disclaimer: international travel is a luxury.  It is not a right, not a necessity, unless you are a political hotshot globetrotting to sign trade deals or save the world.  Nobody needs or has the right to travel by air to a foreign country and there luxuriate in an all-inclusive resort for two three or four weeks while getting too drunk and debauched to care a tinker's damn about the local culture, the lives of the people or the political reality of your host nation.  This is not to say that travel can't be useful for opening one's mind, expanding one's vision and teaching one respect and empathy for other people living in other parts of the world speaking other languages and practicing other customs.  Unless one is staying in an all-inclusive resort, too drunk and debauched to expand anything outside of one's waistline, hangovers, and lines of credit (or maybe lines of something else?)

So, in 2008 I went to Costa Rica for the second time, for a month where I spent three challenging weeks in the capital, San Jose, and eight blissful days getting wet in the cloud forest of Monteverde.  I spoke tons of Spanish though my level was still but intermediate, made new friends and changed my mind about living there.  So I am cured now and feel content to live out the remainder of my years here in Vancouver, if this city doesn't become a home exclusively for the rich, that is.

In 2009 I spent a month in Mexico City, followed by nearly six weeks in 2010 in Monteverde Costa Rica, followed by three days again in Mexico City where I returned in 2012.  I was one month in Mexico City and two weeks in Chiapas where I saw the Mayan splendour that is called Palenque.  I spent another month in 2013 in Mexico City, followed in 2014 by two weeks again in Mexico City and two weeks in Puebla where I admired baroque churches and palatial architecture.  In 2015 I went to Bogota Colombia for a month where I plan to return in 2016.

I earn a very low wage.  I don't spend a lot of money outside of the bare necessities, have no bad habits and rarely eat in restaurants.  Twice I have given workshop presentations for our mental health clients on budgeting but I have often felt like a bit of a fraud.  It isn`t simply that I lack expensive tastes.  I think that in many ways apart from my job that God provides and opens doors.  I only wish I could explain that to the people at work when they express admiration for my talents with stretching money and getting blood from stones.  But I have learned that any religious talk in the workplace that does not involve Buddhist meditation, Hindu yoga, mindfulness, or Taoist Tai-Chi simply is not going to be welcomed.

Candela Place 5

I have spent time in various churches since moving to Candela Place.  I was attending First Baptist downtown when I moved here.  I lasted all of nine months feeling alienated by the virulent hatred of gay people that I encountered there.  Nothing was directed at me but it was hearing the hateful prayers of a woman in the church that convinced me to leave.  I spent several months attending nowhere then I was invited by the manager of Candela Place to participate in an art show in his church.  I thought I would try attending Grace Vancouver for a while, an American Presbyterian and to my discomfort fundamentalist church.  The pastor was obsessed with being right (in every sense of the word) and eventually sitting through his sermons came to feel rather like being punched repeatedly in the face while tied to a chair.  He was a nice man otherwise and I was sometimes a guest in his house.  His wife and their young adult children also liked me.  As did others in the church.  But they were right wing fundamentalists and there really wasn't a lot in common there.
I relocated to their Eastside church which I had somehow helped to "plant."  The pastor there preached a sermon against same sex marriage (it was Oct. 2005) and I left that church forever.

I moved on to a gay church.  It was a small fellowship in the West End made up of a few lonely and rather miserable middle aged and aging men.  They all seemed obsessed with finding their prince and the pastor and I did not get along.  He told me I was aggressive and angry, this on our first coffee visit.  It got worse from there.  In the late spring I left the gay church and found myself back at....

St. James, the Snooty Church!  It seemed open and friendlier and I decided to give it a try.  The old guard was dying off and there were people who seemed interested in my friendship.  However the shadow of the grief and trauma I accrued there in earlier years refused to lift and eventually my relations there were poisoned.  I did help out with a language exchange group for Latin Americans at St. James and made a couple of new friends there.  One of them, a man from Mexico, and I are still friends eight years later.

I returned to the gay church.  I left three months later.  I was having dinner in a Thai restaurant with the pastor.  His cell phone kept ringing.  Finally, after a prolonged conversation with a caller during our dinner I mentioned that I didn't like this.  He picked up his plate of food, had the server put it in a takeout box and left the restaurant and ended our friendship.

I was churchless again till September 2007.  On the advice of a friend I knew from the gay church I started attending St. Paul's Anglican in the West End.  Despite the priest befriending me I found it very hard to fit in and people in key positions seemed to particularly dislike me, especially some of the many gay parishioners.  I think word got out that I am anti free sex and pro monogamous marriages and that this I view as the desired way of life for all Christians who wish to exploit their sexuality, straight and gay.  My approval of same sex marriage is and always has been and always will be so defined.  I lasted till May 2014 when I left the church in tears.

I have managed to retain the friendship of two very fine parishioners of St. Paul's.  I will not mention their names but their friendship is for me a healing balm.

I went on to St. Anselm's, the Anglican parish church set in the University Endowment Lands or Pacific Spirit Park.  This time I thought it would work.  I was warmly received and welcomed and became friends with the priest and a couple of parishioners.  I joined the choir and it was downhill from there.  The choir director was a control freak and this drained completely from me all possible enjoyment I might have taken in participating in this sacred ministry.  One of the choir members is also a particularly powerful member of the church and was in the habit of delivering sniping insulting remarks at me.  Then she almost physically attacked me when I asked her if she could please keep a bit quiet during the service since she was chattering away in front of me with another church lady about her worry that there wasn't milk for the coffee after the service.  One day I decided I had enough, left the choir and proceeded to avoid her.  Then I demanded from her an apology,  She became rude, hostile and combative and of course refused.

No one in the parish would support me.  Both the church wardens have refused to see me.  They are all, it seems, afraid of this awful woman.  The priest took her side against me, and suggested I should leave the parish.  So, I have left St. Anselm's and I have renounced my confirmation to the Anglican Church.  I am exhausted from the lack of integrity, chronic dishonesty and puerile cowardice that I have encountered again and again and again.  I no longer attend church anywhere.

As I continue to live here in Candela Place I am aware that my life itself is church and ministry.  I will likely stay away from church for a while, perhaps for three years to give myself time to heal.  after that, who knows.  I might visit a few places in the meantime but given the built-in hypocrisy with the rite of passing the peace in the Anglican church I am not going to be shaking hands with any strangers.  Speaking of the rite of the peace this is something that the Anglican church completely abuses and gets wrong.  Strangers or people who don't ordinarily give you the time of day will warmly shake your hand and even give you a hug only to regard you afterward as dirt under their shoes.  Needless to say, Gentle Reader, I am weary and wounded from these multiple mind fucks.

In the meantime I have many blessings to remember and count.  For every false friend who has betrayed and abandoned me I have gained many more real friends and it is with such as these that I make church as we spend Sundays together in the coffee shop, going for walks, or having coffee and a bite to eat together here in my small Candela Place apartment.

Candela, by the way, is Spanish for a little light flickering in the darkness.  Story of my life.

Candela Place 4

A local entrepreneur opened a café on Davie Street just three blocks from my building.  While he was getting the place ready to open I stopped in to inquire about showing my art on his walls.  We hit it off right away, he liked my photos and for the three years he was open from 2004 to 2007 I was the feature artist and curator for guest artists.  It was my first gig as art curator and I have to admit it was lots of fun seeking out and interviewing and encouraging other artists.  It was also great having this place nearby as a local hangout and I soon became friendly with staff and regulars and even sold some art there.

In the meantime I began to flourish: in my job, in my art, in my psychotherapy/mental health recovery, in my Spanish.  Only my social life seemed to suck.  I lost in that same period all that remained of my old friends.  Eventually began the painstaking and painful process of finding new friends and developing from scratch a new social network.  I knew this would take years.  I gritted my teeth and got to work at meeting and befriending.

It eventually paid off but the process took roughly from 2007 to this year 2015 or eight years.  I felt often at loose ends during Christmas and Thanksgiving since no one seemed interested in inviting me anywhere.  I fell into a deep depression that repeated itself every December until this year.  Read my Grinch posts: Hanging Christmas Out To Dry, Gentle Reader, should you desire to refresh your memory.

In 2007 my bank account began to fatten considerably and I was aware that soon I could travel again.  I applied for a new passport and decided to return to Costa Rica, this time to see if it would indeed be a suitable place to live.  I joined a conversation blog for people who lived in or were interested in living in Costa Rica since I had entertained a dream of moving to this beautiful country since my first visit in 1994.

In May 2006 my psychiatrist retired.  He was certain that I was already well-recovered and would no longer be needing therapy.  I actually agreed with him.  Striking out on my own was scary, delicious and exhilarating.  I nearly relapsed on three occasions between July and October: the first setback lasted about a week; the second four days, the third two days.  I was aware of a pattern.  Using the tools that my therapist had given me I was able to put paid to years of life staunching trauma.  I still carried some of the wounds.  Even now I do.  But I am better, decidedly, unabashedly and inarguably better.

Candela Place 3

In 2004 I was accepted for training as a mental health peer support worker.  This would open up new professional doors for me.  It would also stigmatize and label me for life as a person with a mental illness.  And it would strand me for the rest of my professional life in low status low wage work.  My options were limited.  I had been homeless and afflicted with symptoms of complex PTSD.  Because of some of the difficult circumstances of my life I was never able to complete my post secondary education.  I had very few marketable work skills that a lot of employers would actually recognize as marketable work skills; this cruel irony despite my many creative, intellectual and social gifts.  With the rapidly skyrocketing cost of housing in Vancouver thrown into the mix it had already become virtually impossible for someone like me to be able to live or even survive without some kind of intervention.

This intervention occurred in the form of BC Housing.  My rent was subsidized by the government.  When I went off of welfare I was paying in excess of three hundred dollars a month plus cable.  This was of course very cheap.  When I found employment in the homeless shelter my rent was recalculated to a measly one hundred twenty-five dollars.  It went up and down with my income.  Never more than thirty percent.  Sweet.

I walked as often as possible to the training classes.  It was between six and seven miles and I had to be out by six thirty in the morning.   It was June and the weather and light were magical and fabulous.  I walked over the bridge then through the lavish neighbourhood of palaces and gardens known as First Shaughnessy then I would circumnavigate the exquisitely landscaped Queen Elizabeth Park and continue strolling among graves in the reverent majesty of the cemetery, then through another beautiful park, enchanted by the golden light, the radiant green of the trees and grass, the birdsong, and the silence of the early morning.

I learned a lot about working with people who were living with mental illness in these classes then spent the summer doing my practicum for the mental health team that ended up hiring me in September.

In the meantime my therapy continued and my psychiatrist provided me with invaluable mentoring for my new career.  I already knew that my life was taking an upward arc.  Sometimes I felt nervous.  So used I had become to being sabotaged, by myself and others, and falling again to even more wretched states than the ones preceding. 

Only little by little did I come to realize that I was now playing a different game with different rules.  My life was being rebuilt from the ground up.  I was not going to fall again.

Candela Place 2

I began seeing a psychiatrist the same month I moved into Candela Place.  We had our first meeting in July before I moved, then again in early August just after I moved.  I was referred to him by my family doctor.  I knew there was something wrong with me.  The lady who helped me get affordable housing tried to convince me that I suffered from depression and was determined to persuade me to go on medication and apply for a disability pension.  I knew that whatever it was afflicting me it was not depression.  I was sure that I suffered from PTSD.  My first meeting with my new psychiatrist confirmed this for me.  He agreed to treat me without medication.  Thus began a journey of recovery and of new beginnings.

It was like a divine intervention that the three most significant areas of need in my life: decent housing, employment and psychiatric treatment/recovery, should happen simultaneously, in tandem.  So I began to stumble forward.  In early 2004 I lost my job at the emergency shelter, but with encouragement and help from my psychiatrist and my employment counsellor I bravely moved forward into my next and current career choice as a mental health peer support worker.  Living in a subsidized apartment where the rent was cheap enough not to be a worry to me was also a tremendous boon.

I entered my fifties feeling already well, and better than I had ever felt at any other time in my life.  Not even the minor inconveniences of living in a bad neighbourhood or of having to cope with difficult neighbours was enough to throw me off.  I was moving in a direction of recovery, and not simply recovery but the most profound sense of wellness ever in my life.

I gradually lost all my friends.  They were used to and still loved the wounded and dying bird I once was.  Now that I was a phoenix emerging from the ashes they no longer knew me.  I gathered courage, hope and strength to push bravely into this new and sometimes troubling solitude knowing that I was at least moving forward, and trusting God to chart my course and clear and open the way for me, despite the loneliness.   It was at times exhausting.  I refused this time to give up.

Candela Place 1

I liked my new apartment.   I like it still.  I face the back of the building and not Granville Street which makes it quiet but for the she-elephant on the ceiling.  It's a concrete building but the floors aren't insulated so it could still be worse.  Living downstairs from that lead-footed cow stomping around upstairs in a wood frame building would be untenable.

I was busy during my first year.  In August I enrolled with the encouragement of Isabella my awesome employment counsellor in a pre-employment program.  It was a bit of a struggle but by December I was employed for the first time in five years and I could finally go off of welfare.  Thirteen years later I am still welfare-free.

I spent all of 2003 and a wee bit of 2002 and 2004 working in a homeless shelter.  It was a difficult and challenging job, usually involving night shifts and dealing with troubled and sometimes dangerous individuals and horrible burnt-out coworkers.  The pay was decent and despite the unstable hours my bank balance was nicely built up.  I lost my job at the end of January 2004.  There were horrible people who did not like me and I found it difficult, given my complex PTSD symptoms to keep up with the pace of the work.  I also did most of my training and work in the middle of the night.  Not a good time for learning things.

In the meantime I adjusted to my new building.  The managers were well-meaning fundamentalist Christians, but very conservative and annoyingly homophobic and right-wing.    I became averse to their community program.  It was too difficult having to work for a living in a difficult occupation and be expected to deal with difficult neighbours with mental health issues in my building.  I became resented by management.  They saw me as having a lot of gifts to offer.  I saw myself as being fed to the sharks if I didn't stay either locked in my apartment or completely away from the building at all times.

In the spring of 2003 I began attending the church of our building manager.  I lasted all of two years and left promising myself to never let myself be persuaded to go anywhere near a fundamentalist church again, and Gentle Reader, I sincerely solicit you to hold me to this promise!

Powell Street

Just following the attack on the World Trade Centre and the resultant carnage I like many was feeling traumatized and on edge.  I didn't fear the terrorists.  I feared our own governments, that they would curtail human rights in our own countries while launching vindictive destructive and useless wars in the Middle East that would in the long term worsen things for everyone and further hurt global stability.  So it happened.  In this climate of fear a new right wing government was elected to power in my province with a pronounced vendetta against welfare recipients.  They tried to force the unemployable into the work force while denying assistance to anyone who didn't fit their criteria.  Very quickly our homeless population in Vancouver alone mushroomed by almost four hundred percent.

My welfare worker, already an unfortunate excuse for humanity, became especially hectoring and sadistic.  While doing everything I could and more according to their new and strict criteria to find a job and convince skeptical employers to try to hire me she became particularly vile and persecuting towards me.  I left her two angry messages on her voice mail, fired her and demanded to speak to her supervisor.  The following day her supervisor called me in for an interview.  She took my side almost on sight, realized I was not well, had my file changed and assigned me to a new, and compassionate, worker. 

I began doing volunteer work in early 2002 in a church homeless shelter and soon was helping in their weekly breakfast program.  My name came up on the waiting list for a social housing building in the Downtown Eastside on Powell Street.  By this time my living situation was getting a bit precarious and dangerous.  The young crack head next door, while not threatening me was acting out very strangely and I was becoming concerned about my safety.  I moved at the end of March, without giving the Pakistani Slumlord his month's notice.  I simply gave him a lengthy and very angry voicemail message, and refused to respond to his request that I call him.

My new apartment was a small bachelor unit in a BC Housing building recently opened.  The kitchen was huge and dominated the unit so that I felt almost as though I lived in a dining room.  I managed to use my few sticks of furniture obtained free in a second hand store, thanks to a welfare benefit that no longer exists, and my art and textiles to make the place functional and in my way beautiful.  The noise from the drug addicts outside was deplorable and intolerable and the building manager turned deaf ears to my request to be moved to one of the many vacant units that faced either the lovely courtyard or the back alley.

I kept busy.  I enjoyed my weekly volunteer work and meeting and befriending others in the Baptist church downtown.  In June 2002, burnt-out from the Anglican Church's unhealthy obsession over gay marriage, I renounced my confirmation and began attending the Baptist church where I lasted nine months until, burnt-out from their homophobia, left church altogether for a while. 

Meanwhile, I enjoyed long daily hikes in the forest of Stanley Park, leisurely coffee visits with friends and painting and promoting my art.  I still house cleaned for Doreen, who lived just two blocks away.  In the spring and summer evenings I strolled in nearby Crab Beach Park especially enjoying the redwing blackbirds in the rewilded  marsh.  I had a friend in the building, a very clever but traumatized loser, kind of like me in some ways, and we often visited each other's suites.

Still, the noise and some of the difficult and occasionally dangerous denizens of the neighbourhood were getting to me.  In May I got another phone call.  There was a new building on Granville near the bridge run by the Mennonite Central Committee.  I was called in for an interview.  I was accepted.  In July I moved in to my new apartment where I still live today more than thirteen years later.

A Room In The Sky 3

Even with my limited resources I still enjoyed having friends over to visit for coffee, for dinner, to enjoy the view.  I have long enjoyed and done well with the challenges of my life situations.  Unable to upgrade to a more affluent or better appointed way of life I have come to celebrate the power of imagination and creativity. Every place where I've lived I have sought and always succeeded in making it beautiful as well as celebrating and drawing out the beauty that was already there.  I cannot imagine living any other way.

Generally the other men in the house and I maintained a careful distance from one another.  This was actually a very sad and pathetic way of cohabiting: this each tenant being picked without input by the others by an ethically challenged slumlord more interested in collecting rent than facilitating a liveable environment.  We lived each in his own miserable solitude.  The idea of sharing a meal was of course verboten.  Shortly after the young crack head moved into the room next to mine the grease monkey moved out.  He was succeeded by a young man, a hairdresser separated from his wife.  He took an immediate and rather scary liking for me.  He wanted to go out for coffee with me.  We had really a very enjoyable visit in Café Waazubee.  When we got back to the house Young Hairdresser (so sue me Earl!) wanted to know if I was gay.  I mumbled something noncommittal and he decided that I was and then he really wanted to hang out with me in my room.  I reluctantly invited him up but was somehow too naïve to weigh the consequences.  Earl was a Christian struggling with his faith and by his admission with his own sexuality.   I didn't know what to do or say but we were soon spending many evenings in my room or out for coffee, talking and praying together.  I did his portrait and gave him a large painting, thinking that I really didn't need it.  In those days I was recklessly generous with my paintings and soon saw a disturbing pattern: the surest way to end a friendship, sooner or later, was by giving any of my friends one of my original paintings, no strings attached.  Says a lot about my friends, eh?

During that time a young man who was a barista at a café on Main Street where I also hung out befriended me and agreed to model for a portrait with the proviso that once I showed it he could have it for free.  Earl saw him going up to my room with me.  He wanted to know who he was.  I told him.  The next day he turned viciously against me.  I was woken earlier than seven in the morning by his knock on my door and his demand that I return to him immediately my key to his room.  I had reluctantly accepted his key a couple of weeks before, never used it and never intended to, though he insisted I keep it.  One of the symptoms of the complex PTSD that I exhibited and suffered from at that time was an almost toxic passivity, a proclivity for letting people get away with murder with me, a tragic failure to set boundaries.  I slipped the key under the door.  I soon discerned that he was in a jealous rage and had ended the friendship based on my alleged whatever with the other young man. 

I never bothered to demand the painting back.  He had already paid for his portrait.  He soon after moved out, allegedly back with his wife.  I learned quite an interesting set of lessons here but I trust greatly in your refined intelligence, Gentle Reader, and I am sure you will not have to labour to read between the lines.

A Room In The Sky 2

The house is wooden and dark brown.  It is tall, the subject of a few bad renovations and situated on East Seventh Ave. just down the hill from Clark Drive.  The bottom floor contains an apartment, as does the second.  The third and fourth floors were where the five lost men were living.  There was the Economist, as I call him, an uber-conservative, older than me and apparently living with a mental health disorder.  He appeared to run the house and was already living there for a good ten years or longer.  The other fellow is the Recovering Alcoholic, there equally as long as the Economist.  They hated each other and only spoke when absolutely necessary.  He was generally affable, reasonable, friendly and had the unfortunate tendency of tying up the only bathroom for an hour and a half at a time.  The other bedroom on the third floor was occupied by four successive tenants, beginning with the Grease Monkey, who yelled at me on my first morning for asking him to please hurry in the bathroom (I had been waiting twenty minutes and nearly peed myself).  On the fourth floor, on the other side from my little room was an even tinier room occupied by a recluse with mental health issues.

I learned very quickly to keep to myself.  The Economist owned the living room furniture and the TV.  He did not like to be disturbed while channel surfing.  He in fact seemed so scary at the time (I was suffering at the time from very bad complex PTSD) that I opted to come downstairs only when absolutely necessary: to use the bathroom, shower, cook and wash my dishes.  Every one of my meals I took upstairs to the sanctity of my beautiful little room where also I had a coffee maker.

I painted, rested, prayed, walked for miles, met friends for coffee.  I was on social assistance and it was very difficult for me to find suitable work.  I knew that I was still too tired and ill to work.  I also spent a lot of time in the library downtown and taking long walks in Stanley Park.  I applied myself diligently to learning and studying Spanish and began attending very cheap classes in the evenings.  I made interesting friends and was sometimes commissioned to paint portraits.  I was showing my paintings in several different venues, so much the better for dealing with storage difficulties.  I lived frugally, simply but in a way beautifully.  My sense of myself as a Christian had simplified and I just thought of myself as a small spark of light in the universe, a feather on the breath of God.  I joined Amnesty International and wrote hectoring letters to delinquent government ministers practicing corruption and human rights abuses in developing countries.  I also wrote the final draft of my novel, serialized on this blog as The Thirteen Crucifixions, for your reading pleasure, Gentle Reader.

I also suffered from the last two of my seven nervous breakdowns.  Knowing that my family's repudiation of me was absolute I went through a prolonged and agonized grieving.  I suppose this was also complicated by 9-11 when the World Trade Centre in New York City was destroyed in 2001.  It seems that a certain sense of wholeness that I felt that I and the rest of the world were moving towards together was suddenly interrupted, disrupted, destroyed and disembowelled.  The Recluse in the next room disappeared and was replaced by a nasty young drug addict.  Fortunately I was already about to find a way out.

A Room In The Sky 1

The sun was already beginning to set when I saw the room.  It was tiny with a double bed taking up much of the space, white walls, a brown carpet and windows everywhere.  I had never seen so much window in one room.  From the roof of this tall four storey house I could see the world.  The fading light painted vivid strokes of red, magenta and carmine on the clouds and I was conquered.  The day after I phoned the landlord (a Pakistani slumlord), signed the lease and moved in to my new habitation.

The move was difficult.  Richard had become attached to me and didn't want me to leave.  So much the more must I get out of there.  He tried to convince me to rent a room in the house of one of his Czech compatriots as a way of maintaining connection and control over me. An untenable situation in a small garret room with a small window beckoned me and no bathroom access except for a shared facility in the basement. The bathrooms downstairs were strictly for guests in the bed and breakfast the house doubled as.  The bathrooms on the main floor were for the family only.  I saw visions marked only with horror, terror and impending disaster.

My friend Patty Perfect, soon to be ordained an Anglican priest helped me move but on the first round only.  We were threatened by a nasty case of road rage, she panicked and decided that there were limits to her friendship.  Richard was so kind as to help me move the rest of my stuff, mostly large paintings.  He also cheated me out of half of my damage deposit, accusing me of leaving paint stains on the walls and regaling me with the spectacle of him and his aged mother scrubbing the walls clean.  Of course he was lying, or exaggerating, and simply showing his true colours as a miserly cheat.  I never saw him again and honestly can't say that I've ever missed him.

I went to sleep that night looking up at the stars through the uncurtained windows and woke the next morning to the glory of white cherry blossoms surrounding my room in the sky, this first day in early spring of the year 2000.

Czech Embassy 2

Richard, the acting landlord in the apartment, seemed very anxious.  I think he was traumatized by his experience as a refugee and also from some family issues that will pass unmentioned here.  He was super clean, an absolute neat freak and absolutely obsessed over his health, taking supplements and nutritional additives galore.  He also had a keen sense of humour which for me redeemed him of his more irritating characteristics. 

My main issue living with him was noise.  He had a piercing penetrating kind of voice.  He would frequently be yacking on the phone for seeming hours and even with my door closed I was still serenaded by his water torture natter.  I eventually just went and closed his own door.  He didn't really like it but usually seemed to know better than try to argue with me.  Like many new Canadians scrabbling to get ahead he did seem to have a rather callous attitude towards our less fortunate Canadians and believed firmly in slumlord's, or should I say landlord's, rights.  I did take the trouble to explain to him that tenants generally tend to be the more vulnerable party, given that their very home can be put in jeopardy by a landlord's self-interest.  I don't think he really got it.

He did commission from me a family portrait of himself, his mother and his nine year old son, and their cat too.  This I did in exchange for two months worth of rent.  I also found that I couldn't trust him.  A friend of his was also my welfare worker.  I was selling quite a few paintings that I was exhibiting in a café downtown.  I made the mistake of telling Richard each time I sold a painting.  He would casually inquire how much I was paid for it, then I would discover mysterious deductions on my welfare cheque for unspecified income.

When I caught him one day in the kitchen playing footsy with his male naturopath he later insisted to me that he wasn't gay.  I was like, so what, but really methinks the woman doth protest too much!

The Czech Embassy 1

Eccentric would be an understatement.  He was already in his late forties but looked twenty years younger with the body of an Olympic swimmer and a proclivity for tight and revealing clothes.  He filled some of the worst stereotypes of a successful immigrant.  As a teenager he came to Canada with his family, refugees from the Soviet winter that ended the Prague Spring of 1968.  He had become a successful slumlord.  He somehow scraped together the money to purchase an older apartment building on the corner of Thirty-Third and Quebec (so sue me Richard!) and converted each unit into a small cluster of tiny bedrooms, renting out each bedroom to international students, new Canadians, to anyone too new or too disadvantaged to understand, fight for or even care about their rights as tenants.

I didn't live in that building, but in another one block away on Main Street.  He had made a special arrangement with the building owner and rented a two bedroom unit which he promptly converted into a three bedroom with the kitchen and bathroom being shared between the tenants.  Richard occupied the living room which now had a door on it.  I and a fellow from Slovakia rented each of the two bedrooms.

I never, before my very recent experience of homelessness would have imagined my living in this kind of situation.  But I was desperate for housing, for a room of my own, for a door to close on the rest of the world with no fear of being turfed out anywhere for having outlived my welcome.  I felt like I'd gone to sleep and woken up in heaven.

I moved there at the end of April during the chilly spring of 1999.  Everything was blooming late.  My first evening, a Friday, I walked across the nearby Mountainview Cemetery to the Mennonite Central Committee Thrift Store on Fraser Street where I purchased a plate, a spoon, a fork and a coffee maker.  Save for the coffee maker these were more symbolic items than actually needed by me.  I rescued my beautiful Laurel Burch mug  

Here are three separate angles of my beautiful coffee mug all of which I just pulled off of Google images.  I still have it and yes I still use it every day.

That morning I woke at dawn and lay in my bed (a mattress on the floor) and gazed spellbound at the coppery blood red light of the rising sun shining through the blinds and casting its pattern on the wall.  I walked in the cemetery, then following breakfast walked on Quebec Street surrounded by the newly blooming flowering crab trees, suspended in a state of exultant awe of the mercy that God had visited on me.