Life As Performance Art 30

¡Feliz Madrugada! I am up again a little too early. Feliz madrugada, for those of you who haven't yet encountered this little early morning greeting on my pages, are the Spanish words for happy wee hours of the morning. So, there really is no direct translation. I am not horribly under-slept today, though I will try to go down for an half hour or so before leaving my apartment this morning, and yes I will be attending church this morning. I have just filled out a survey about my church attendance, my feelings about my parish church and the direction I would like the church to go in. It has been an interesting process filling it out, but I do object to the tone of some of the questions. This way of asking questions seems to suggest that the church is merely one of many consumer choices that one might make, and I felt like I was being targeted as a consumer of the Christian religion, and my whole experience and understanding of the faith of Jesus Christ could not be more different. Not to mention, that there is absolutely nothing in the Gospels or in the New Testament that would suggest that one might want to become a Christian to fulfill a personal need, desire or appetite. Rather, I am in church for one reason, and for one reason alone, and that is to obediently witness to Christ in fellowship with like-minded and like-hearted others of good will and good character. For example, the question, why did I make this parish my church? As in, why do I prefer butter over margarine? My answer: "God seems to have led me here. Otherwise, why would we need another reason?" Or, how does attending this parish contribute to how I live my life in the world in general? I replied that I can't answer that question, since I don't attend to receive, rather to connect with others and share. Neither do I attend this church in order to "feel happy and fulfilled" but I do feel content there, but as a byproduct of obedience. Here is what I wrote in conclusion: "i really have trouble relating to some of these questions. The approach tends to be from a consumer perspective and that has nothing to do with my perception of church. I do not attend in order to satisfy any personal need or craving. I attend out of obedience to God, and any personal gratification is simply a byproduct of service and obedience. As his people, we have to rise above the consumer perspective." I am not optimistice that the clergy reading my survey, or this blogpost, are going to get my perspective. The Anglican Church seems to have really bought into a worldly and consumerist way of seeing things, and I fear that anything I will have to say about this will fall on deaf ears. Still might be worth a try.

Life As Performance Art 29

It is Saturday morning, 7:19, and all is quiet. The window is open, and apart from hearing someone's phone ring about a half hour ago, it is all very tranquil right now. I am going to enjoy this for as long as it lasts. The elephant upstairs is probably still asleep, and the douchebags next door are also likely sleeping it off and no one is muttering or grumbling or shouting from the pavement outside. Could it get any better? I'm not even going to turn on the radio, or not just yet. As usual, it will be CBC and I have no stomach for Sheryl McKay's boring North By Northwest program, which seems to be directed towards well-off and recently retired Boomers, which regardless of my age demographic, I am not. I have already mentioned in a previous post that I was born in 1956, making me Generation Jones, that generational gray zone between the Boomers and Gen X (the Boomers gave the world Woodstock, we gave you guys punk rock!) I am feeling well-slept, well-rested, and soon, with breakfast, I will be feeling well-fed. The air outside is a bit cool, but it is sunny today and we are promised a beautiful and slightly warmer day, and this kind of day begs to be spent outside. Being Saturday, today is Nothing Day. I have been observing and celebrating Saturday as Nothing Day for at least the past fourteen years or so, when I saw that in order to cope well with life, while working with people with mental health challenges, I would be needing a bonafide sabbath. Saturday, alone, seemed to work, being for many a day off. Sunday, not so much, since it is church day, and that means having to get social, which simply is not done during Nothing Day. This does curtail somewhat a social life, since Saturdays are often the only day that a lot of folks have available for hanging out and visiting, so it is a bit of a sacrifice. But I have found that I need this rest day of no appointments, not having to see or talk to anyone, and giving priority to rest and quiet recreation and reflection. Today, I will likely spend a lot of time walking in lovely neighbourhoods. I am not going to walk on the Arbutus Greenway, which is more or less parallel to my walking route, and largely for the same reason that I am never going to do the Grouse Grind. Those are publicly approved walking routes, which is to say, those are the places where we should feel that we are allowed to walk, as though we need civic permission. Well, I am going to walk wherever the hell I want. Not the Greenway, because, besides being butt-ugly, there are already plenty of walkers there, and they get noisy, annoying and distracting. Likewise I would prefer to do without the many bike-riders. I suspect that when Moonbeam was still mayor of my fair city, his idea for developing the Arbutus Greenway was to provide a lovely 11 kilometre route for bikes, but he also agreed that a lane should be painted in for pedestrians, just to keep us quiet (we are the Rodney Dangerfields of fitness, us pedestrians. We don't get no respect!). I also suspect that the good burghers of the wealthy neighbourhoods of Shaughnessy and Kerrisdale might have had a hand in helping to fund the Greenway as a ploy for keeping the Great Unwashed off of their precious and wealthy sidewalks. Well, too bad. I am going to stick to their precious and wealthy sidewalks, anyway, because they are quieter, more scenic, and there are lots of trees and shade along the way, not to mention lovely palatial homes sitting on money-laundered real estate and housing wealthy drug lords and other international criminals and similar scum and their various friends and relatives.

Life As Performance Art 28

The clothes are in the dryer and it is still only 6:07 in the morning. I used to do my laundry every two weeks or so, never on a fixed day or at a fixed hour. I was dependent on community laundromats and usually there was a coffee shop nearby where I could sit and wait, reading the newspaper, or a book, or writing in my journal, or writing whatever, sometimes visiting with whomever was present and wanting conversation. I would haul my clothes in a dark plastic bag, as though carrying my garbage with me. In one neighbourhood in East Van, I would go grocery shopping during the wash cycle, return to put the clothes in the dryer, take the groceries home, then return to take my clothes home. I often had poor luck with apartment laundry facilities. They were nonexistent, sometimes, or they didn't function very well. When I first moved here to Candela Place almost seventeen years ago, there were problems with the laundry machines, and I was often using the laundromat on Davie Street, but really for the last sixteen years or so, I have been exclusively, or almost exclusively, reliant on the laundry facilities in my building. At first we were armed with smart cards that had to be reloaded, often in inconveniently located stores. Following loud and strident lamentations from the tenants, our managers caved and for at least the last fourteen years, the machines have been coin-operated. At first they were a dollar a load. Now it is only seventy-five cents. Given that this is a social housing building occupied by people on low incomes, free washers and dryers would be nice, but let's be thankful for small mercies, eh? Given that there are but three machines for more than sixty tenants, the laundry facilities can get rather crowded at times. Many of our tenants are not particularly well-organized, nor are inclined to think of others, so that it is not uncommon for any one tenant to end up monopolizing all six machines (washers and dryers) I got really sick of this, complained to one of the managers and she promptly told me to get over it. This woman is from Nicaragua and has assumed that white Canadians have absolutely nothing to complain about, not even if they happen to be homeless and hungry, because they don't live in Nicaragua where it's always worse, much worse, and shouldn't we be feeling, oh so very privileged, for living in such a land of opportunity, plenty, and overflowing with milk and honey and maple syrup. This woman's husband tried to befriend me a few years ago. They are both, like many fundamentalist evangelical Christians, dreadful homophobes. When I heard her hubby wax loud and boring about the horrors of homosexuality and gay marriage, I distanced myself from both of them, concluding that if I was going to practice my Spanish, then it must be with someone not caught up in such loathsome views. By the same token, if I was married to a person of colour and trying to learn English, I would not accept help from a white-supremacist. Hell, not even if I was or not living with a person of colour, racism is horrible and completely unacceptable, and so is gay-bashing. Anyway, back to laundry. I have for many years been taking to doing my laundry in the early mornings. For a long time it was Sundays. Now it's Fridays, the first day of my three day weekends. This works well. Usually, I am the only person in the laundry room at 5 or 6 am, and then I can go back upstairs in the meantime to do my devotional readings, write this blog, and make a lovely cheese omelette for breakfast. .........Now it is 7:34, my clothes are dry, folded and all put away. And now I can relax, do some art, then take off for a deliciously long walk. Happy Friday, Gentle Reader.

Life As Performance Art 27

¡Feliz Madrugada, Gentle Reader! Or, happy small hours of the morning. I am paying for my active and highly energized day with poor sleep. I have logged three hours of sleep and almost two hours of light dozing, and after writing this and a bit of breakfast, I'm going down for a long nap, and we'll see how well I do with my clients today. Probably okay. Insufficient sleep never seems to get in the way of performing well professional. And I seem to be always able to leave my bad day at home. This works well, actually, because when I give my very best to my clients, my problems that I left at home are often much easier to resolve, or they have almost magically ceased to exist at all. There are things I am always going to dislike in my work, and my apartment, and my neighbourhood, my friends, my church, and myself. This is all part of life. We can't always get what we want, and sometimes it never seems to happen, but this isn't to say that we can't still have a fairly good time, and eventually, a downright enjoyable time. I had this kind of conversation yesterday with a new client while we were taking a walk together. That regardless of what's happened in our lives, how many mistakes, missteps and downright stupid blunders, that there always remains in our lives a kind of hidden thread, a theme that is going to continue to develop, a narrative that will go on being told. Nothing is wasted. I think it's very important to face our failures, or should I say, our sense or perception of failure, in this kind of light. We are not really in control of things, and we never were, never will be, and we were never meant to be in control. Does anyone here know the Serenity Prayer? Here it is again, as a refresher: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." It is as though God does give each of us our own tiny sphere of dominion or control. We can control a lot of our own comings and goings. But we cannot control what is going to happen once we step outside. I cannot control the tragic idiot who wrecked his life on drugs and now lies languishing between life and death from an overdose, neither can I control the volume of the siren I just heard outside. If I don't like the sound, and I don't, I do have control over closing my window and wearing earplugs, if I really want peace and quiet, and usually I do. I could also offer up a prayer for the first responders and for the poor imbecile's broken heart and broken life that may never be healed. I could also ask God to make me more loving and less judgemental. And he just might answer my prayer by sending more sirens until I have accepted that my ragged nerves and hatred of loud and shrill sounds are still something very small and unimportant, compared to all the pain and horror that surrounds us. And I can also control my perceptions by looking for, and actually finding, the beauty and meaning and love that lie at the very heart of the horror. There is light in the darkness, and indeed, the most brilliant and healing light will come from those black holes of most profound darkness. Now I have just put on two eggs to boil for breakfast, and I am going to give thanks again for the good food and the safe and decent apartment where I live, and for the lovely decaf French Colombian roast that is not going to prevent me from soon slipping back into some much needed sleep. And then I will wake up and restart my day, hopefully with joy in my heart and a song on my lips.

Life As Performance Art 26

Life isn't a joke. But life is so funny. We are here for a short time. Very true. Too true. We are all going to die. I am going to die. And so are you, Gentle Reader. When I turned fifty, I really began to consider my shelf life, my mortality. I was already accepting that I would not be around for as long as I had already lived, that I was already past the halfway point. I had already logged several years experience of palliative care, professional, voluntary, and with my mother. When you are still in your twenties and you are suddenly caring for the dying, this can be quite a useful if brutal lesson in life. It matures you, fast. It can also traumatize you. Usually it does both, and this happened to me. But I don't really think that it is possible to fully live life and also escape trauma. When people see their life's work and investments swept away by flood or incinerated by fire, they invariably get traumatized. Or, wait a minute. I have elsewhere on these pages written about trauma as being normative to our human condition, and that the idea that this is an ill that we can somehow escape or cure is very typical of the specious and escapist nonsense of the privileged classes who live in privileged countries where it is commonly accepted that we are above such misery. Until it happens to us. We have too many protective barriers and filtres that still keep most of us from fully experiencing life, and this has turned middle class white Canadians into a particularly loathsome brood of soft, protected and weak little sissies. Most of us just are not ready when life happens and throws the very best of its worst at us. Trauma alters you for life. It is not necessarily a bad thing. It can actually provide some of us with just the kind of ass-kicking that will rescue us from our pampered and odious selfishness. In order to become vectors for the change that the growing challenges of our world and planet are requiring, we have to risk being transformed and that is not going to be easy. It is going to be scary, painful and, yes, traumatizing. We cannot escape from it. Trauma is a surgical instrument of change, transformation and healing. I know this, as a veteran of trauma and PTSD. Having a concept of God in our lives is helpful, and necessary, for this change to be something healing and powerful. Unfortunately, there are very few people who understand God as the most primal and fundamental experience of our humanity, for whom this beautiful and most essential reality has been debased into various sets of beliefs and religious rules and norms. God is infinitely more than any of that. But to give way to God in our lives, we have to accept that we are not the controllers of the universe, and this entails humility, and humility is usually brought on by trauma, and most of us remain, oh, so afraid of letting God have his way with us. No matter how much we ruin our own lives in the meantime. Pathetic.

Life As Performance Art 25

It is quite a balancing act, this living between two realities, the personal and the ontological. We are caught between a volcano and a blazing desert, it seems, the desert being our personal lives where we are often scrabbling to find or create meaning, and the volcano being that world around us and we never know what form it's going to erupt into, but we are not going to like it. Sometimes we end up living right on the volcano, where the most fertile soil can be cultivated for crops, the most fecund and dangerous place. Like any metaphor, this is going to have it's limits. I think what turns many of us into such grumpy old men, and women, is that when we get to a certain age we know we have not done a great job of straddling this difficult balance. We have, at best, realized but a fraction of our dreams, and in most cases we have not risen to our level of expectation. Or we realize, too late, how we've been duped. A materially prosperous life with that perfect lovely home, two cars, career, fat pension and investments, lovely spouse, perfect kids and even more perfect grandkids, has somehow stymied our spiritual and moral development as complete human beings. We have drunk the Kool Aid, lived drunk on it, and now we are waking up with the grandmother of all hangovers. We have bartered our lives to make sure we are living. I have never known any of those successes and I live very modestly in a tiny subsidized apartment, where I just might end up having to stay for the rest of my life. My possessions include around five hundred books, half of them in Spanish, my art, clothes, dishes, kitchen utensils, the odd ornament, and furniture. Nothing else. I have enough. I am not like the prosperous burghers leaving their lovely big houses to be rendered uninhabitable as the Ottawa River keeps overflowing its banks. I have never had that much to lose. I rather feel sorry for them, they have never known the reality of loss, and now they are finding out how temporary it all is. I have no family, I have a few friends, but none of the ballast that most Canadians of my age take as entitlement. I am not envious. I enjoy good health, I have meaningful employment, and most of all, I am blessed with a grateful heart. I am very strong on gratitude, but I think that gratitude only has a lot of power if we believe in God, and if it is he, the creator and sustainer of all, that we are directing our thanksgiving to, because it's just giving credit where it is due. There is nothing we can do to change the world except in our own small spheres of influence. But we cannot let the stupid venality of our leaders and the destruction that is being wreaked on our planet to prevent us from rejoicing, because there is plenty to rejoice over. And that is better than nothing.

Life As Performance Art 24

I'm going to try to backpedal a little bit today. I was mentioning that noise from certain people nearby could really impact my ability to enjoy my home, which is true. I an noise sensitive, and seem to do best when there is lots of quiet. I was not intentionally slamming any of those people for living with mental illness, nor for impacting my own comfort and wellbeing while I am off duty, since I work professionally with persons living with mental illness. The thing is, this can get very tiring and draining, and when I am resting and recovering from some of my more intense professional sessions with some very challenging clients, the last thing I need is visible and audial reminders of my day-job. This is merely a complaint. It is not an expression of dislike or discrimination against people with mental health disorders. I also imagine this could make me appear as quite a hypocrite, given some of the Christian content in my blogposts, such as yesterday. I love my clients and my neighbours. But I also am human and just as fragile as anyone else, for which reason I also need to rest and recover, especially if I am going to do my job well. This can also get complicated given that I have a couple of friends who are also living with mental illness. I like to be available as a friend, and I enjoy them. Sometimes, if their illness is driving some very uncomfortable or negative behaviours, I have to distance myself, and for the simple reason of self-preservation, while acknowledging that I am not in a position to be their therapist, much as I do like to offer support where I can. It is a delicate balance, between self-care and being a good friend, and I am not sure if I will ever get it quite right. It is also rather difficult for me to separate between my professional engagements and my friendships, as there is going to be a lot of unavoidable overlap there, and it is hard not to morph into, by default, everyone's therapist. This is especially given my professed calling as a Christian and the ongoing mission I live with of sharing and expressing God's love to all people. This cannot be neatly shut on and off or compartmentalized because this is the very thing that sustains me. Despite my complaining at times of exhaustion and burnout. I think I am also fielding leftover stress from the two difficult weeks that followed my recent visit to Costa Rica. So, the noise sensitivity is a little bit higher than usual, but really, at times it is intolerable. I just had to shut my window in order to hear what's on the radio, because of a particularly noisy garbage truck outside. Really, I think that most of us are living with more noise than what is really healthy for humans and those who say they are not bothered by it are either lying, or they have become a little too used to something that is actually harmful. Like the frog in boiling water, anyone?