Solsbury Hill

I am listening to what might be my favourite song ever, by Peter Gabriel (favourite song changes a lot, depending on what I just listened to, but this is an enduring favourite). He says,

"When illusions spin their net
I'm never where I want to be.
And Liberty, she pirouettes
when I think that I am free ...

"Today, I don't need a replacement,
I'll show them what the smile on my face meant.
My heart going boom, boom, boom!
'Hey!' I said, 'You can keep my things,
they've come to take me Home!'"

I just love that song. He talks about feeling part of the scenery and walking out of the machinery, cuz the Eagle comes for him and says, "I've come to take you Home." And that's how I felt before -- part of the scenery. I blended in and hid, the best way I knew how, and that way was pretty good. I'd had decades of practice. Being fat makes you invisible. And I've felt caught in machinery -- I thought it was a bad marriage and family of origin and bad jobs ... But it wasn't. The machinery was the trap inside me. The Eagle came for me, God, in whatever way I fail to understand God today, came for me and is letting me walk out of that trap. He's taking me Home.

If you don't understand any of that, don't worry about it much -- I don't either. I'm just grateful for it.

My Cousin Michael

I was watching a news clip video this morning, at Mad Priest's. It was lovely, a lovely editorial piece, delivered with conviction and passion, about Prop 8 and love and God and everything. Thinking, my cousin Michael will like this and I'll send it to him. My cousin Michael lives 40 miles away. He was born in England, because his mother was English and his parents lived in South America, and his mother wanted him to have an English passport. (I may have mentioned that my family ranges from dysfunctional to off-the-map-lunatic -- nothing milder than that. One WOULD take a long boat trip, heavily pregnant, in 1951, to make sure one's eldest child had the correct passport.) Michael moved to Canada 35 years ago. We would talk on the phone sometimes, but the first time I met him in person was at my first stepfather's funeral in January 1993,


It was funny. He's three years older than me, almost, raised on a different continent, sent to school in England. Our grandmothers were sisters; he was some other order of relative than cousin, but he's my age, and that's how we call 'em in our family. We have very compatible religious and social and political views. We got drunk together one night, very early in our knowing each other, and had a hilarious time, describing the things about which we were totally unjustifiably unreasonable, and finding out that we both said the same horrible things to our life-partners because of them. Genetics, I guess. He's been on my mind and in my prayers a lot recently. In January he fell down stairs at work and busted up his collarbone badly enough that it took three surgeries to repair it. In one of the series of tests, they did a CT scan and found a something, a one-eighth inch something, in the top of his left lung. That was in the summer. We both knew before the test results came back -- he smokes three packs a day. Last week, he had a quarter of his left lung removed. They biopsied some other parts of both lungs. He'll get the results on the 25th.


Michael and my husband get along well, even after my marriage break-up. My husband called me just now at work, and said that Michael had called his place because he's lost (again) my phone numbers at work and for my cell. His father died in the night. Terry had a massive stroke, I dunno when exactly, and got recovered enough that they moved him out of ICU and into a ward. He saw all his kids, and I think all his grandkids. Michael saw him yesterday, and Terry died 15 minutes after he left. His wife and daughter were with him.


We don't know yet when the services will be -- Michael's mother and brother are going today to make the arrangements. Michael asked if I'd phone my mother's one remaining sister, and tell her. I did, but she was just leaving the Sailors' Memorial after the Remembrance Day service, and asked if she could call me back. I said sure -- there's no need to rush this news. I'll talk to Michael tomorrow and find out when and where the service will be. The aunt I called today may not want to go -- most of the family's been fighting with Michael's mother since 1951, when she did something unforgivable -- married Terry. As I just told my sister, "That doesn't mean one wouldn't do the correct thing in difficult circumstances." If she doesn't want to go, I'll take the train.


I'm tired again. Inside tired, not body tired. Thursday was my Mum's birthday; Friday was my husband's; this coming Thursday is the anniversary of my Mum's death. Today's the anniversary of me having her admitted to hospital, which she'd never wanted, but I had no other choice. I had lunch with an old friend last week, and it's shaken up what I thought I knew about myself and my life. Had a misunderstanding with my best friend on the weekend, and that's always an ache. I need to leave my job -- it's lost almost all of what was joyful in it for me, and I show up and endure days at work. I might find that more bearable if I was getting paid TONS of money, but I doubt it. I miss, ferociously, the kitten I left in Texas -- if you're feeling lonely, bruised and overtired (I played on-line Scrabble with a couple of friends way too late last night), a kitten's a cure-all. I miss life in Texas -- feeling like this right now, I could go lie in the hammock and look up into the trees, which always made me say, "Thank you," to the Force in the Universe that makes them, or I could go find something covered with rust and grind it off and maybe make it into something else. That's restorative, meditative too -- although I'd never have thought that makes noise and metal dust and showers me in sparks would feel meditative. It requires total mindfulness, or it'll tear the skin off your fingers. Ask me how I know. I'm sick of dead people.


What I don't feel is any desire to reshape reality -- either by doing my control-freak-drama-queen routine, or by swallowing something that'll alter my inner reality. I'm tired. Not tired, tired OF. The answer to that is to pray for God's will for me to be revealed and for the power to carry out the vision I'm given. And to share. And to be grateful. Because the truth is, if it never gets any better than it is right this minute, that's okay with me. God's giving me so much, it'd just be churlish to assume I need anything else.

Processing Culture Shock

Okay, that picture has little or nothing to do with the content of this post, except at the end of it, I tell about him being a joyful thing to come home to. His name is Yeshua – he yelled so loud for food that I thought the walls of Jericho could fall down. I eyedropper fed him from 12 days old until I got him onto a bottle, then started on solid food three days before I left, just before he was six weeks old. I couldn’t bring him home, but I’d have liked to.

This post is a letter I wrote to some friends while I was away on my trip. I was gone for a month, staying in northeast Texas. About a 25-minute drive from Tyler, which is closer to Shreveport than to Dallas. I was staying with a friend who builds knives, and there was a gun and knife show in Tyler the weekend after I got there. The timing was important. He’d never tried to sell his knives like this before, and I went to help get things polished and sharpened, and tagged, and make business cards, and mind the table.

Lots of times, I felt like an alien from outer space. I’m posting this with a few updates – it was written on the 5^th of October, to people I know well. There’s language in here I use, but not on the blog, and there’s language in here that I’d never use, except I’m directly quoting other people, ones I’m glad I don’t know. Now you know – here be dragons. The rest of this was written within 24 hours of it happening, while it was fresh. Oh, and it’s long, too.

If I'd grown up in the country, my life experience would be different, but I grew up in the city, mostly. Just outside the city -- lots of forest around, but owned by the Conservation Authority, so you could walk in it, but you weren't supposed to change it in any way. And Dad had a cottage in Muskoka and went fishing, and I'm used to that, but never hunting. My life experience with firearms is this: Grampa owned a shotgun and kept it at The Lake (summer home on Lake Ontario at Niagara-on-the-Lake) and once, when I was maybe eight, he shot it over the lake for effect. And then I guess it went back to the house when they sold the summer home, and the next time I saw it was after he died, when Dad had inherited it. He was giving it to Uncle Jerry, who did hunt, and it was standing in the dining room the day Jerry came to get it. Dad had put it there and that was fine, and Jerry picked it up to take it to the car, and MacDuff, our German Shepherd (who'd never seen a gun before either, and was unfailingly gentle, unless someone was gonna hurt the kids) was ready to take his arm off. So Dad carried it to Jerry's car, and Jerry drove away with it. That's it. My whole life experience with guns.

In Canada, firearms are restricted and registered, and you can't carry them around in public. If you're driving to the shooting range or going hunting, they're in the trunk of your car. Cops have 'em, but even those are discreet. People have shotguns and rifles for hunting, and hand guns are pretty much illegal unless you’re a cop.

So, just being at Bob's was already, different. I got in the truck one day after we'd been in the supermarket and moved the kleenex box on the seat and there was his handgun under it. I was looking for beeswax to do knife handles in the cupboards and there's boxes of ammunition in the kitchen cupboards, and I've seen long guns in the house, and dunno how to tell the difference between a rifle and a shotgun, so I dunno what I saw. The other night coming home, we hit a little armadillo in the driveway somehow -- neither of us felt anything, and he saw it when we were getting out of the truck, before I did. You could see how badly it was injured, and I said, 'You can't leave him like that,' but the little thing had died before he came back outside. And that was the first time I really understood why I had to know how to shoot if I'm to be able to live up north. There was no other kind option.

The gun and knife show was so out of my realm of experience; it was like a fantasy novel and I just found myself transported to another world, and hated a lot of it. There were handguns and automatic weapons tied to the tables, and signs up saying they had to be unloaded and tied so they couldn't be fired. What they were for -- handguns are only for shooting at people -- just kind of radiated at me, and I was, I couldn't even walk past the tables and look at them. I got to be able to spot those tables, and take a different route through the hall. The guy at the table behind us had a handgun in the back of his belt; there were people walking around with long guns in their hands and over their shoulders, and I found the people walking around holding handguns in the palms of their hands really scary. Some guys had multiple holsters and guns, and ammo belts. Sunday there was a guy who looked military to me, with a padded vest and just tons of pockets and weapons on his belt. It bothered me a lot, seeing women with handguns and short automatic guns. There were people carrying around plastic boxes, that I am familiar and comfortable with -- my husband had several of them for carrying cordless drills and things like that in -- and then I realized what people were carrying in them at the gun and knife show.

The long guns didn't bother me so much, esp. if they had a lot of wood in the stock. In fact, there was one guy who had some that were just beautiful. I went back to look at one in particular three times yesterday, and then this morning I told Bob it had dropped a hundred bucks in price overnight. It was still $1,300. But I didn't even know what it was -- rifle or shotgun, exc. it said 12 gauge on the card, and I thought that was a shotgun -- just googled the maker's name and that's what they make. I guess when it's time for me to need one, I 'druther have one that I liked aesthetically. And these aren't intended for killing people, and that made it easier.

I've stopped being scared of knives, because I've stopped thinking of them in terms of weapons, but there were lots there that were intended as personal weapons against people. Bob's got those little bearclaw knives, and they're pretty as jewellery. Saturday there was a woman who was looking at a lot of the knives, and she said of the bearclaws, 'It's a good personal defence weapon for a woman -- no-one could take it away from you.' Well, sure they could, if they had a gun, or were prepared to bust up your fingers for it, and I guess if he was okay with raping you, he'd be okay with that too. And I said to Bob after -- it reminded me of being told, 'When you're worried about what other people are thinking of you, remember that mostly they aren't.' There was a lot more fear, an assumption that someone would want to hurt you and you need to be able to, not just defend yourself, but make a pre-emptive strike, than I'd understood there'd be. I don't understand that kind of fear, and fear's been one of my best things most of my life. She'd said she didn't have enough money and would be back today and took his card -- but she didn't like that the one knife was called a Mill Bastard cuz it was made of that kind of file and he left the mark on it, and we think she looked at the website last night. Believes in Jesus in a way neither of us does, and Jesus doesn’t like people who use the word “bastard,” even about a metal file. Bob said he thought she'd see the prices were lower than on the website and not fuss about 'em again, and then we saw her a few times and she never came down our aisle the next day -- he said she'd seen the website and decided we were communists, and I said, "Yeah, it says so on the website, but it's prolly us likely being perverts that bothers her more." It was funny -- she was so friendly yesterday, and avoided us like we were Democrats today. He is, of course, and I would be if I lived here.

And then, there was racism. I'm not telling you there's none in Canada -- there is. But I haven't encountered anything like this. The man who was to have the table next to us got sick, and the organizers didn't want empty space, so we spread out, and the guy behind us, who sold holsters and gun belts he makes, did too. He had a shipment of 'Nobama '08' teeshirts, with an underneath line about stopping the change, or something. Takeoff on the Obama campaign line. So, they were right beside us, on a table with Bob's knives, and people thought we were selling the shirts, and overwhelmingly, they approved. There was a federal election going on at home too, and I'm used to politics -- this stuff woulda been okay if it was just politics.

But in about a 10-minute space I was walking around and there was a guy with miliary memorabilia, he had uniform patches and things, and there was, front and centre in his display case, and big, a Swastika. Nazi memorabilia. Then I came back to the table, and there was a guy wearing a 'Beat the Hell out of Obama' teeshirt, buying one of the other guy's, and they were telling each other a joke they both already knew, about St. Peter greeting Obama at the Pearly Gates, and asking what he'd done in his life and he said, 'For the last 15 minutes I got to be President of the United States.' And they laughed.

And then another guy came along, and was talking to Bob, mostly, but me too, about the election campaign, and well, if anyone said he was prejudiced he was, and he was too old to do it, but if Obama's elected, someone's gonna assassinate that nigger bastard ... Bob was being a lot more polite than I wanted to be, but I'm so far out of my element I kept my mouth shut. Bob got him switched onto the handgun on his belt instead, then, thank God, someone came along who really wanted to look at knives, and I could interrupt that conversation and the guy went away. We were kinda afraid he was headed back in our direction later. For the next morning, I'd decided what I COULD say, if anyone started it again, but another vendor near us got sick last night, and the guy behind us moved his fucking teeshirts farther away from us and no-one said political or racist shit directly to us again. Maybe, I just needed to be prepared with an answer -- I can use it again while I'm here, if I need to. I’da simply said, “I’m not from around here and where I’m from a man wouldn’t use language like that talking to a lady. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy looking at the guns for the rest of the day.” We didn’t have any guns at our place. And if that hadn’t been good enough, I’da said, “That was in Canadian. It translates to, ‘Shut your filthy mouth and get it the fuck away from my table.’” I was glad it didn’t come to that.

Some of it was kinda fun, and there were some people who were just a joy to meet, and had helpful information for Bob. Saturday I had a jar of beeswax and polished every handle except the antler and bone ones, and a bottle of Turtle Wax and polished all the blades except the Damascus ones after that. There were men, usually in their 70’s and 80’s, who'd make remarks to me about being careful around a woman with a blade like that, and I’d say, “Yeah, all the men have been real polite to me this morning.” They didn't want to look at knives, mostly. People had never seen the brass cable Damascus before and stopped to look at it and ask about it, and people who know knives said very pretty things to Bob and gave him ideas about places to go to sell his knives. There were some really sweet moments with little kids -- one was looking at one of Bob's knives, one with a wooden sheath, and his eyes got all big when he opened it and Bob just gave it to him. And there was a little boy, four or five, yesterday, with his Daddy, and he saw a knife in a pearwood stand, like the sword in the stone, and said, Daddy, what is it, twice, but Daddy didn't hear him, so I reached across and pulled it out and he looked like he got a puppy for Christmas. A couple of teenaged girls, who were clearly interested in the knives as ways to hurt someone, but generic someones, they weren't looking to do it today, and I wasn't above telling them what the other woman said about the bearclaws.

I walked around Sunday, mostly to go say hello to another knifemaker who'd talked to Bob and brought him a little block of bloodwood, to be neighbourly. There were some people there with a jewellery display -- pretty bracelets, like little cuffs, with the sides made out of the ends of matching silver spoons, bent, and in between a coin or a concho or something else. Mostly bracelets spin around so whatever's the prettiest part sits against the inside of my wrist and no-one sees it -- this can't do that -- I'd never seen anything like it and I liked one with a Statue of Liberty dollar in the centre. I went back to get money, and the man put an extra couple of chain links underneath where it fastened so it'd fit better. Later his wife walked past our table and we talked -- they're from Palestine, and they know who Bob's sister and her husband are, but don't know them. That was kinda nice -- to be able to introduce someone I knew first to Bob.

It was exhausting, and when we left after it was all done I felt like I'd escaped. I'd been singing, "We gotta get out of this place if it's the last thing we ever do ..." We came home, used all the really bad language we couldn't in a place like that with family standards for the vendors, and I fed the kitten again – he was just getting interested in more than just getting fed and cuddled -- he'd look around when he heard noises and just spent ten minutes rolling around upside down in my lap, wrestling and nibbling my fingers like he would his littermates, if he was with them. And he'd been grooming his paws a little. Good signs.

He was three weeks old when I wrote that. This picture was taken Thursday night this week – he’ll be eight weeks old tomorrow. I miss him and it hurts like a sonuvabitch. There'll be more about the trip -- I did really good things and there were other kinds of culture shock. This afternoon, my son's taking me to see Passchendaele -- I've gotta go get showered now.

I'm back -- sorry I was gone for so long and silent

I want to thank the people who looked for me and got in touch during this hiatus. It started because I couldn’t stand to read one more word about the American Presidential election or about Lambeth. Just wore me out.

And then it continued when I found out on September 11^th that I’d be leaving for Texas on the 27^th. I didn’t have a passport, I didn’t have a driver’s licence or a learner’s permit, I had one week’s vacation left at work and I was going for a month. I got everything I needed. You can pay $30 extra in Canada and get your passport in less than 10 business days – they have it the day before your trip, and you have to take proof you’re leaving. I went straight from picking up the passport when the office opened at 8:30 on the 25^th to write the test for the learner’s permit. Found out the 5:00 a.m. bus from Hamilton to Buffalo Airport only runs weekdays, so I left at 7:30 Friday night and sat up overnight in the airport. Took three planes to Tyler the next day. We had wireless there, but it was slow, and we were busy.

It was a HUGE culture shock. I will write more about it. I wrote down about some of it as it was happening, and I’ll reproduce here, with some pictures. While I was there, I learned to drive a pick-up truck without hitting anything; I learned why I need to be able to shoot something sometimes, and how to do it – with long guns and a lot of time, anyway, I can hit the target pretty well. With handguns, I anticipate the recoil and move and miss the page altogether. I can go out the back and poke through the metal collection and do something. Removing rust from sewing machine treadles with a wire wheel is VERY good for some kinds of frustration – if you don’t give the project 100% of your attention, you get hurt. I learned how to cut up railroad spikes, old files, and hardware cloth with a chop saw and a plasma cutter, and to put them back together different with a MIG welder – that was lots of fun.

And there was a 12-day old kitten whose mother abandoned him three days before I got there, who was being fed with an eye-dropper. I took that task on gladly. I fed with an eye-dropper and later with a baby bottle. I carried him outside and showed him how to dig little holes in the sand, and applied warm water while I held him over the hole til he peed in it, then told him how good he was. He started eating solid food three days before I came back. His name is Yeshua – when he woke up he was so hungry, he hollered and the walls of Jericho could come tumblin’ down, and almost all the other cats have Hebrew names, so so does he. I’ll post some pictures from the time I was there, and I’ll keep getting some and post them from time to time too.

Let’s see. I got scratched when we went for a hike through a thorny forest and I was wearing shorts. I stepped on a fire ant nest and got stung on the ankle. Got ringworm from the kitten. He’d hold the back of my hand for dear life when he was sucking the eyedropper, and I expected scars, cuz he always got the same place. But I didn’t scar. Took off skin and fingernails on the afore-mentioned wire wheel. Got burns on my arms from the welding, and once a big coal fell inside my sneaker and burnt the same foot I got stung on. And when Yeshua learned he could climb up pant legs, it didn’t occur to him that he shouldn’t climb my legs cuz I was wearing shorts. I’d be cutting up vegetables with the kitten hanging off my bare knee. Those are the marks on the outside. On the inside, I’m a whole new person.

Gotta go out tonight. I’ll post some of the other stuff on Friday or Saturday. Thanks again to everyone.

Goin' on a Lion Hunt; Gonna Catch a Big One

Well, maybe not, but I’d hate for anyone to worry. On Thursday morning, I’m getting in a car with one sister-in-law and one niece, and we’re going to drive about 170 miles north to another sister-in-law, who comes with one nephew, and stay for a week. There will be rocks (the Canadian Shield), water, an unknown number of dogs, snakes, bears, a trampoline … And I’m hoping to get out tomorrow to get a new battery for my camera, so I can share.

I won’t be back til late on the 27^th, and I have to work the next day, so DON’T WORRY. There are no computers or phones where I’m going, and my cell won’t get any signal either.

I said I'd write more about fear

Well, I said I’d write something more about fear, and I’m going to. Heaven knows, I’m an expert on it. And I’ve had a lot of practice with it in the last few weeks.

First of all, I’ve got something wrong with my left foot. It’s been bothering me for a few months, and usually in the middle of the night, or when I’m not near a phone. When I am near a phone and the doctor’s office is open, it’s not bothering me and I don’t think to call. That was my story, and I was sticking to it.

Finally, it got too bad to ignore, and I knew I was being an idiot. So in the middle of the night, I e-mailed two people, detailed the symptoms and the fears. The fears are from my expert medical diagnostic skills – it was Parkinson’s, MS, diabetic neuropathy, or residual damage from when a beer truck ran over my foot on March 1^st, 1993. Go ahead and laugh: it really WAS a beer delivery truck. He pinned the foot under the front driver’s-side tyre, and I fell under the cab, tearing up some ligaments on the outside of the ankle. (Someone asked me once what made it important that it was a beer truck, and not full of milk – it’s VERY important!!! This is funnier.) I promised to make the doctor’s appointment the following day, and I did – it was a week away. Having “confessed” my fears, I then prayed for God to relieve me of them. And I was not afraid between telling on myself, and the appointment.

The nurse practitioner did some tests. The high-tech neuropathy test – you close your eyes, and he pokes the bottom of your foot with the cut end of a short piece of fishing line, and you say “Yes” every time you feel it. Pressing on some things in the back of my knee, and on my foot, to see if they hurt. I am TERRIBLY ticklish, and the test was agony, but it didn’t hurt. Stand on my tiptoes. I can do that. Rock back on my heels and lift my toes. I can’t do that; I can with the right foot, but not the left. And I asked, as I always do – Did I feel it every time you touched the bottom of my foot? Yes. He said, I definitely do NOT have diabetic neuropathy. And he’s ordered some tests – I’m having an EMG early in September.

I barely got out of there and home before I flooded the place. Called one of my confessors, and blurted out, “It’s not neuropathy!” He said, “What is it then?” and I said, “I don’t know and I don’t care. They’re not gonna cut off my feet!” Holy cow, who knew THAT was there? I honestly had not felt fear all the time I waited for the doctor’s appointment, but the minute he said not neuropathy, I realized I’d held deep terror. Way down where it’s barely verbal, neuropathy to me means, “They’re gonna cut off my feet.” I am not at all afraid of whatever comes next.

Then there are the other people. My friends in their late 80’s. She’s ready to move into a retirement home, and he’s not. She asked for moral support. What I want for them is peaceful transitions. What I want for me is not to have whatever changes are coming. They have my moral support, and practical support too. and not least of the practical support is prayer.

Someone else I love has been having a lot of medical tests in the last week. One in particular was frightening me to the point that I cried every time I talked about it. And I DID talk about it – the things I’m afraid of are like mushrooms – they grow in the dark. I guess I didn’t talk specifically enough to the person who was having the tests – I totally misunderstood what they were looking for, and I was needlessly afraid.

But I was not constantly afraid. I would talk to someone out loud, and say, I know that fear is based in the future, and the future is imaginary. Roland told me in the spring that when I’m in the valley of the shadow of death, I need to remember – I’m in the SHADOW, not the reality. When I was afraid I’d ask God to relieve me of the fear, and then I’d go do something, like scrub the kitchen cupboard doors, to keep me stuck right in the here and now, and not let my brain wander around in the imaginary future.

The other thing I could do is remind myself that the condition I feared either already did or didn’t exist. If it did, it could get better or worse. If it didn’t, it could start to exist, or it could not. And even if it did exist, and even if it was getting worse right now, that didn’t mean that in six months, it would be what I feared right now. There are an infinite number of possibilities. The internal medicine specialist I saw for the first time last December, because my family doctor was retiring after being my doctor for over 25 years, said, “You’re hardly diabetic at all any more.” Everything changes all the time, and it’s only in my mind that things always only get worse. The fear went away, and it came back, and I’d pray again, and it would come back at longer intervals, and with less force. We get stronger with exercise.

These look overwhelming, because you’re reading them all at once. I’ve been living them serially, over a few weeks. Nothing here is unusual or makes me special; this is life. The answer is always the same – talk to people and pray. I have this feeling that most religions expect that we will gather together to pray and worship, at least some of the time. Jesus said, “Whenever two or more are gathered in His name …” The synagogue across the road requires ten men for a minyan. Muslims gather to pray at specific times each day. Even AA says the only things you need for a meeting are two drunks, a pot of coffee, and a resentment, and they always pray at the start and end of the meeting. The answer is to join together and turn to God and ask for help. It doesn’t even matter what name you call God. It works out – God is so good.

Things to Be Grateful For

It says in my profile, “newly thin”, and I keep saying I’m going to say something about that, and I don’t. Twenty-five years ago I was morbidly obese – morbid means you’re gonna die, and obese means fat. I know for sure I weighed 285 pounds, and I didn’t like seeing that on the scale. So I stopped getting ON the scale. (Sigh.) I didn’t stop eating the way I did to get that way, but I only count from 285 because I’m sure of that number.

I’m diabetic too (no surprise, eh?) and I got heart disease as a complication of that. Five years ago, I was on the waiting list for bypass surgery. Then the surgeon said that with my history of post-surgical infection, he wouldn’t DO surgery on me. He failed to mention that there were other options – I thought they only did a bypass if they couldn’t do anything else. I went home that day thinking all I had left to do was die. It was VERY bad coronary artery disease. They found an interventionist cardiologist, who performed a miracle on my behalf. My cardiologists haven’t even felt I warranted a stress test in the past two years.

In December 2006, the month after Mum died and before I’d moved out of the marital home, stress made my diabetes terrifyingly unpredictable. I was waking up at 4 a.m. with life-threatening low blood sugars, and I wanted to lower my insulin dosages, so I wouldn’t be so at risk. I have a friend who manages his eating disorder with a very low-carb food plan. I didn’t want to do his food plan – it’s restrictive and boring and bad for you and onanonanon and I didn’t want to do it. So I’d pray, “God, should I get Bob to teach me how to do that?” And the little voice would say, “Why wouldn’t you do something that would make you better?” Took a month, cuz I really, really didn’t want to do Bob’s food plan.

But I gave up, and asked him to teach it to me. That was January 21^st last year. That was the last day I took an insulin shot. I started eating the way Bob told me on January 22^nd, and thought, “I won’t inject cuz I don’t know how much I’ll need yet. I’ll just test a lot today, and figure it out.” Well, I NEVER needed an insulin shot that day. I was also on pills for diabetes, and they were enough. I went from four shots a day on January 21^st last year, to not one ever since. And in the months since, I’ve lost the last 60 or so pounds I had to lose, and I don’t take the pills daily any more, just when I need them, and they reduced my blood pressure medication too. I got a miracle. And I weigh less than I did at 15. Hot damn!

So I eat very low carb, and it’s NOT boring, and I love my meals. Yesterday because I’d worked hard, I splurged, and bought yogourt from Liberte Dairy in Quebec. All their products are wonderful, but I’d never seen the 10% milk fat yoghourt before, and I bought two containers. One is the amount for two breakfasts. Usually, I buy whole milk yoghourt and drain it in a coffee filter in a sieve overnight to get it thick – this is wonderful. Organic raspberries were cheaper than regular yesterday, and I bought a half-pint of those too. I added vanilla and a little sweetener (I know it’s bad for me, but it’s not as bad as sugar) to the yoghourt.

This picture only has a few berries on top, so you can see the yogourt, but I’m eating them all – while I’m writing this. The pretty blue glass bowl and the yellow placemat are from IKEA, but they’re both discontinued, I think. Blue and yellow together – I love that. They’re sitting on a wooden cutting board my Dad made me one Christmas.

What a life – I woke up happy, and said thank you to God before I got out of bed, and then I get this great breakfast. I’m about to shower with sandalwood soap, and get dressed and go meet friends for the afternoon. We’ll talk about God, and drink coffee, and hug each other a lot, and prolly someone will cry. Then I’ll go out in the sun for a while. Life doesn’t get better than this~

A Big Adventure

I’ve been so busy, I haven’t blogged, and I’m having trouble keeping up with everyone else. I’ve been doing housework-for-hire, to supplement my income. Who’d have guessed I’d LIKE it? But I do. Part of it is, I have clients I like, and they both need and appreciate the work. And part of it is, I’m good at it. And another part is, I work hard and really earn my money. That makes me feel happy. It also takes up time, and when I am home, I’m very tired.

On Monday, I had an adventure. A friend of mine lives with his parents. They bought that house a few years ago from a man who owned a wolf. He’d bought it illegally as a puppy, and as an adult, the wolf wouldn’t get in a car, so couldn’t move. Plus, the man was moving into the city. Now my friend and his family own a 12-year old wolf.

It’s illegal to own them. When my friend inherited him, his family obtained the necessary permit. I read on Wiki that the life expectancy for them in the wild is six to ten years, and in captivity, up to double that. This wolf is showing his age. His hindquarters and back legs are stiff and slow; he’s graying around the muzzle; there’s a few bald patches.

I fell in love with him. None of the hands here are mine – another friend took pictures of me and the wolf on his phone, and doesn’t think he knows how to forward them. I was too dumb to hand my camera to anyone else. I was awe-struck, really. I sat on the ground in front of him, and held his head (it’s huge) in my hands and rubbed his head and ears. He was pushing his left ear into my hand, the way dogs do. I didn't want to wash my hands, because I could smell him -- did wash before supper though. I’d have stayed for hours, if I could – I’ve been invited back.

More later, I promise.

Stilling Stormy Waters

For the last couple of days, I’ve been living with fear. As usual, I’m frightened about something that is beyond my control, and the answer is prayer. I’m not the kind of person who just naturally turns to prayer, you know? I’m the kind of person who knows exactly what the right thing to do is in any given situation, and I’ll tell you about that, or yell at you about it, and get bossy and manipulative about making sure you do what I know is right, and resentful if you don’t. Sometimes, that’s how I can TELL I’m frightened – I get all controlling and I scream at people. I want to DO something, and it’s hard for me to remember that praying IS doing something. The only thing.

I’ve spent a lot of time returning to the Serenity Prayer. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change …” And breathing. One of the teachers in my life says ANYTHING I try to do consciously is fighting, and what I need to do is just, once an hour or so, when I remember, pay attention to my breath. Not DO anything about it – just pay attention to it. It does make tension drain out through my feet somewhere.

Another one of my teachers says to me (I need to hear it often): “I wish you could see this as part of the natural order of life, and not as stressful and catastrophic.” When I first started hearing it, I just wanted to shout, “You’re not LIVING with this!!! It is F***ing stressful and catastrophic!” But he DOES know. And he’s right. When I notice myself and say, “This is as stressful and catastrophic as you allow it to be,” the stressful and catastrophic drains away too.

I do an ocean meditation. I’m on the ocean. Sometimes in a bathing suit, sometimes not. Floating on my back. A starfish float, I think little kids call it, except that’s face-down and I’m face-up. On top of the ocean. If you’re going to float like that, you have to relax everything – once your body gets tense, things start sinking. So the meditation involves staying relaxed so I float on top of the ocean.

And the ocean varies. Sometimes it’s calm and blue and flat, like the Caribbean. Sometimes, it’s grey and there’s big swells taking me up and down. Sometimes, I’m aware of the things that live in the ocean. “That great Leviathan,that you made for the sport of it.” I know they’re down there below me; I know some of them are carnivorous; and the only thing to do is keep floating, and trust. Sometimes, my ocean is the North Atlantic in full storm, and it sucks me down underneath it. Even that’s okay. Sometimes, I need that.

Last week, on Wednesday, Ellie posted on silence at Meditation Matters. I’ve gone back and read it several times this weekend. I have a friend who was an English major: loves poetry and writes it, and loves Rumi the best. Ellie’s post includes this: The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote, "Only let the moving waters calm down, and the sun and moon will be reflected on the surface of your being."

That’s a great line for someone who meditates and craves oceans.

I was thinking about it tonight, a little while ago, when I read it again. I thought, “I just need to remember to still the waters.” And then I remembered – that’s not MY job. There’s someone else who stills waters. There’s someone else who leads me beside still waters.

22 One day he got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side of the lake.’ So they put out, ²³and while they were sailing he fell asleep. A gale swept down on the lake, and the boat was filling with water, and they were in danger. ²⁴They went to him and woke him up, shouting, ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm. ²⁵He said to them, ‘Where is your faith?’ They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?’ – Luke 18:22-25, NRSV

So, it’s MY job to let go of all this, pray, and let God handle it. To pray, to be calm and still like the waters, inside, and to be loving to others as I go through the night and the day.

Thanks, Ellie.

What Is Your Dream? What Would You REALLY Like to Be Doing?

I tell myself a lot, “Everything changes all the time.” I’ve been through a lot of change recently, and it’s felt hard. I don’t WANT this change, I say. But everything changes all the time, whether I want it or not, and whether I try to ignore it or not. I’m not built to ignore it forever; I have to do something else.

There’s been a lot of change. Where I’m living isn’t home. My income’s insufficient for my needs, not for my wants, my needs. What I’ve been doing for a living for 15 years isn’t working for me any more. I’m so aware of how much it’s about serving an institution and not people. The Div College and ordination track I was on – well, I changed, is the truth, and God has different plans for me. My relatives – I’ve lost most of my relatives in the last two years. I have family, that’s a different thing, and it’s pretty portable. Very few of them are right here anyway.

And you know what? I’d love to have my mother and my aunt back. But being and being here while they were sick and dying changed me, and I don’t want to go back to what I was. This is better.

Do you remember at the end of The Wizard of Oz, when they’re getting ready to fly back to Kansas in a balloon? They slip all the guy ropes for the basket off their pegs, and the thing just lifts off. “Losing” the job, the relatives, the sense of call to ordination, the home … My guy ropes are being slipped off their pegs. There’s nothing to hold me where I am, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Freedom. I also feel it as a vacuum sometimes. But nature won’t support a vacuum. I FEEL it that way, but the vacuum doesn’t exist. There is something else that exists, waiting for me to start doing it. I just don’t know what or where it is yet.

Sometimes that’s discouraging. This little statement from Wayne Dyer helps.

Rocks. Lions, The Twelve Steps and Having Babies

There used to be a professional dance series every winter at the local university. One of the women I went to church with, faculty wife, would buy tickets and six or eight of us would go, and go somewhere expensive for pretty desserts after.

One time we had seats in about the second row of this really small theatre. We think about ballet as airborne, ethereal, delicate ... We saw sweat, and the muscles that tightened and clenched, nipples erect, heard the "thump" after she leapt and landed, and always the footfalls or the slide of her foot across the stage was audible. It wasn't ballet she was doing; but it's one of those, "You can never go back from knowing it's like this," moments.

She was very tall, too tall to be a ballerina in a company, blonde, slender, elegant. After the intermission, she was wearing a yellow leotard. Dandelion yellow. It was just her. She did this dance. She had no props, okay, just her and the music, but she made me see what she was doing so clearly.

She had a bag of rocks. She carried it or dragged it everywhere, and it bent her double trying to shift it. She hated the bag of rocks. And yet ... She'd put it down in a corner of the stage and move away from it, and all the time she was away she'd watch it, then go back and get it. She unpacked it and took out some or all of these rocks ... and then she put them back. They hampered everything she did: got in her way, slowed and bent her, hurt her sometimes. And she couldn't give them up.

There has to have been a transition I can't remember; I remember the ending. She squatted on the stage and her body strained hard and she reached between her legs with both hands and gave birth to this bag of rocks. The part I can't remember is how we knew it was inside her; it had been outside, but giving birth is unmistakable. I was in labour with Tom from two a.m. until they found out he was oxygen-deficient and did a section cuz the labour wouldn't progress, the cervix needs to open 10cm and mine never got past 6, even with the pitocyn drip they used from 9 a.m. to make the labour. I had hard contractions every three minutes from 9 a.m. when they started the drip til 8 or so when they said we have to do the C-section.

I have never done anything that was harder physically. It starts out being the kind of hurt your muscles GET from labour, from work. Carrying or pushing. I think now Lamaze breathing is a type of self-hypnosis -- it didn't work for me. It hurt more than I could have believed: full-intensity every three minutes, there wasn't time for me to get a normal breath in between and I was sweating and crying. Months later, the resident who'd been with me told me that there was something about the angles of the uterus and pelvic saddle bones. That baby would never have come out; I'da just kept doing that until one or both of us died, if it wasn't for the section, and I'd always have to have sections if I had another baby.

So somehow, this dancer convinced us she could give birth to this bag of rocks, and she did. After that she was able to treat it kindly or lovingly, and then walk away from it forever, and you could see in her posture that she WAS free, finally.

I've always thought of my own bag of rocks since then. The people-pleasing and the lies, mostly, for me -- they were a bag of rocks, heavy ones, I carried around all the time and they prevented me. And I couldn't leave them, and sometimes I was even aware, this is me putting another rock in my bag. And God gave me what I needed to put it down.

I did a course at Div College, we read St. Benedict’s Rule, and had to write out our own Rule of Life. “Shit,” I thought, “I don’t have one.” But I do. I had to learn, the hard way, the Twelve Steps, starting over 20 years ago. So in my daily life, I do things that St. Benedict would have recognized – I pray. I meet and talk and listen with others on the journey. I do something just like an examen. I read St., Francis of Assisi’s prayer, “God, make me a channel of your peace …” And I’ve been told that the way to get the things I want into my life is to LIVE that prayer.

One of the most important things, and hardest, was Confession. You know, Anglicans are kind of dry about confession. We do it all in a group in the service on Sunday morning, and no-one has to say anything out loud. There’s no private confession on Saturday evenings. That’s probably good – how would you STAY in a state of grace all through Saturday night?

Step Four is “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Step Five is “Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” Ugh. Step Six is “Became entirely willing to have God remove all these defects of character,” and Seven is “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.”

Four and Five were very hard. There were things I was deeply ashamed of having done. And the person I was going to tell – well, people who were supposed to love me had this habit of going away and leaving me alone when I didn’t do what I was supposed to. I had to tell someone I love the worst things I’d done – I was very afraid of what would happen next. He’d go away. I knew HE wouldn’t, but that’s what had always happened and I couldn’t see past that. What was more frightening was knowing what would happen if I didn’t. I’d be the one who went away. I’d have stopped being honest with the one person in my life I’d committed to myself to be honest with … and I’d stop being able to face him if I wasn’t. And, I’d go back to the life I had before, when I acted like a good girl, and did what I was told, and wanted to explode all the time. I didn’t, mostly, I did other self-destructive things. On the first Sunday in Lent, last year, I did it. I gave it all up to him. And that’s when I got free of that bag of rocks. I was like a bunch of helium balloons, that someone had let go the string of.

On the Thursday, I met with my Parish Priest, and did “The Rite of Reconciliation of a Penitent”. Confession and Absolution. I’d told him – I’m not telling you what I DID – I’ve done that. When the time came to fill in the blank, I just said, “The things I gave up to Bob on Sunday night.” It was enough. Steps Six and Seven. Then there was making amends … That’s a story for another day.

I go back sometimes and look at my bag of rocks and pick it up, and sometimes I even carry around new rocks for a while, an experiment ... But way deep inside, where babies grow, I KNOW that bag of rocks is NOT me anymore, and I don't have to have it, and I know how to put them down if I do carry them. And I'm upright and free.

All right, having a baby is hard, hard work. It was awful when I was going through it, and I'll admit, I begged them to turn off the pitocyn, just for 10 minutes so I could stop crying and get a grip. They couldn't. Poor Steve, the resident, was almost in tears telling me he couldn't.

AND I GOT THE BABY AND I'D DO IT ALL AGAIN IN A HEARTBEAT. Your body forgets pain. I remember that it hurt that much and it is impossible to go down inside and make it hurt again like that so I can feel it. Women have more than one baby because your body forgets and the end results are worth everything you give for them. I remember the shame and fear I had before I told someone what I’d done and who I’d been. But they don’t hurt me inside any more. And feeling like this is worth what I did for it.

All that was triggered by the Inward/Outward message in my e-mail box this morning:

It's heavy to drag...

William Stafford

It's heavy to drag, this big sack of what
you should have done. And finally
you can't lift it any more.
Someone says, "Come on," and you
just look at them. Trees are waiting,
mountains. You never intended
that it should come to this.

But Now has arrived and is looking
straight at you, the way a lion does
when thinking it over, and anything
can happen. It's time for the cavalry
or maybe the Lone Ranger. But they
won't come. Maybe the music will
spill over and start it all again.
Maybe.

Source: The Way It Is, New & Selected Poems

I was gonna share that with a friend and say, "I know what this is," and it turned into this post. I never intended “that big sack of what I should have done” to come to what it was, and the Lone Ranger isn't gonna be able to rid me of what's inside me. But the Now can if I'm prepared to cooperate with it. And the lion looking at you thinking it over ... Lions have been important for me the last couple of years – two years ago, I listened to Bruce Cockburn alla time -- "Had another dream about the lions at the door and they weren't so frightening as they were the time before and I'm thinking about eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me." And now, lions and ecstasy are linked for me.

You’ve heard this before, if you’ve been hanging around, but it’s a new video and a live version.