From the Frying Pan

I LOL’d at this pic. It might have been hysterical laughter, but it was genuine—and that’s what will keep me going into 2017.

If you believe life is going to be hard, it will be hard. Better to believe it will be all right, that you will be all right, than to condemn it from the get-go.

For me, 2016 was a year rife with uphill battles. Ter and I agonized for months to bring about something that has not yet materialized. Work was unsettling for us both, for different reasons. My left ankle locked up in January. My bones flared through the fall and winter. The Flyers missed the playoffs again. A baker’s dozen of musicians, legends and icons passed on. The world went completely crazy. Looking back, last year sucked out loud ... but it didn’t kill me. In fact, I have emerged (I hope) stronger and more immune to difficulty than I was twelve months ago.

Seeds were planted in the tumultuous soil of 2016 that will bloom in 2017. Some will produce challenging consequences, others will remind us that beauty and art and kindness still exist. Life will happen. We needn’t expend ourselves to seek the bad stuff—CNN delights in keeping us apprised of global disasters, and reality TV continues to bombard us with eat-or-be-eaten cupcake competitions and outback inbred family shenanigans. The night is dark and full of terrors, ’tis true, but it is also rich with moonlight and magic. Resolve to marvel at the moonlight. Believe in the magic. Refuse to accept the universe as a cold and hostile environment. Embrace the dark, let it liberate your other senses, and above all, do not fear it.

It’s only as scary as you want it to be.

New Year’s resolutions, I have said, are not my thang. Maintaining a daily practice of kindness, compassion, appreciation and gratitude for each moment is. Humans complicate everything. Nothing needs to be that hard. When you find yourself fighting upstream, do yourself a favour and stop. The river will take you where you’re meant to go; resistance is generally a sign that you’re going the wrong way.

Or that you’ve convinced yourself of life being unnecessarily hard. For you, a spark of divinity caught in a human experience, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Simplify as much as you can. Believe in the goodness of the Universe. Cherish yourself and others will follow. You deserve it just because. You are a good person, a valuable person, a light in the night that will cast a wide beam if you allow yourself to do it—and doing it is easy.

Just be you.

If you’re unsure exactly who “you” are, take some time this year to figure it out. Look inside rather than out. Listen to your heart. Ignore your head. (Hint: Your heart always speaks softly. Your head will chatter incessantly and even start yelling to make itself heard. The louder it gets, the closer you are to silencing it with a solitary word: Quiet.) Remember, given freely and without condition, love is never a mistake. Try it on yourself first. It’ll feel weird to start, but it gets easier with (you guessed it!) practice. And don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day. Or a week. Or a month. Forgive yourself and start again. And don’t wait for January 1, 2018 to do it.

I’m with you.

With love,

Viking Visdom

I admit, it’s harder to keep the faith when I’m hurting. This darned human experience sure gets in the way of my being a divine spark.

Thank the gotts for diversions like season five of Vikings. The character of Ragnar Lothbrok, played so hideously/beautifully by Travis Fimmell, continues to beguile. In almost every episode, he drops a line worthy of remembering not just because of his delivery, but because the words apply—seriously—to my own life.

Take the argument he got into with his grown son Ivar, for instance. Ivar is historically known as “Ivar the Boneless”. None of the saganistas knows for sure why, so the series’ writer has depicted the character as a cripple. He hauls himself around on his hands, dragging his useless legs behind him and fighting like all get out to be considered as normal as his well-formed brothers. The kid isn’t particularly likeable. He certainly isn’t a sympathetic character, not with that attitude.

Anyway, Ivar goes on a raiding voyage to England with his father and nearly dies in a shipwreck. He and Ragnar, along with the other survivors, end up trekking inland from the beach, and because of Ivar’s disability, he falls behind. Ragnar stays with him, but finally loses his patience and demands that the boy quit trying to be normal. “Let yourself be a cripple!” he says. Naturally (to me, anyway), Ivar loses his temper. They get into a fight, shouting into each other’s faces, the boy screaming that he can be normal. Ragnar screams back that he can’t be normal because he isn’t normal, and “only when you accept that, can you become great.”

Blink.

That line hit me as hard as Ragnar telling his sons in an earlier episode, “Don’t look behind you. That’s not where you are going.”

I embarked on this series because Ter was curious about it so I thought I’d go along in support. The first season was so awful that I have no idea why we came back for season two, but that was when things got interesting. I still consider it one of the funniest shows on TV—the scenes between Ragnar and King Ecbert of Wessex are truly priceless—but pearls are present if I listen closely ... and I maintain that Fimmell’s portrayal of Ragnar makes it all worthwhile. He has the best lines and he delivers them brilliantly. I can’t say I’ve learned everything about life from Vikings, but I’ve sure picked up a few gems to get me through my recent struggles.

Uff da!

Starlight

A light year is the length of time it takes for light to travel from its source to Earth. A star that shines a hundred light years away can die, but the light will continue to shine for a century before we’ll see it go out.

A lot of stars have gone out this year. David Bowie. Glenn Frey. Leonard Cohen. Prince. George Michael. (That one hurt more than the others put together because I have more of his albums than I do of all the others put together.) Then, in tragically quick succession, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. It seems to me that a mass exodus is happening, but I may only be so aware of it because these famous names are a part of my generation; after all, thousands of people die every day and most of us don’t even blink. At least the famous ones leave behind a legacy of work that keeps them alive in the hearts of their fans.

Truth is, the world is always a little bit darker when someone dies.

I like to watch Jeopardy! to test my memory banks and see how far out of the loop I’ve fallen with regard to pop culture. Once in a while, I’ll take an inexplicable shine to a contestant and root for that person through victory after victory. Halfway through December, a quiet young woman named Cindy Stowell won her first game and took her place as the defending champion. Her run took her through six wins and over $100,000, before she was inevitably defeated. She gave Ter and me more than one heart attack over the course of her appearance—she wasn’t always quick with the buzzer, but she consistently came back from the red to win the game with a clever bet on the Daily Double or knowing the answer to an obscure Final Jeopardy question. And she never lost her cool. She was a little mouse with big eyes and dark hair, a shy smile and sweet demeanour. Something about her was delightful and fragile and made you want to cheer for her.

On her seventh appearance, at the start of the game, Alex Trebek mentioned that her goal had been to win $100,000 and she had accomplished this with her previous win. My radar pinged with an uh oh, and sure enough, regrettably, she lost her seventh game. At the end of that show, however, a clip of Mr Trebek came up after the credits, in which he explained that, during the filming of Cindy’s shows a few weeks earlier, she had been fighting stage four cancer. She lost her battle with it on December 5, almost two weeks before her shows aired. In short, she had already departed when her championship run was broadcast.

Like a little star whose light took a few weeks to wink out of our sky.

The Next Two Weeks

This is my life for the next two weeks. With breaks for the new Star Wars film and hosting a visit with my wee and boy sisters on New Year’s Eve, the bulk of my remaining fortnight’s vacation will be spent writing. Yup, a typewriter and a coffee cup (actually a computer and a tea tumbler) are my constant companions as I devote myself to reconnecting with the Muse.

My primary project is the story of Caius and Aurelia. I won’t get it finished—there’s too much to tell—but now that I feel more like myself again, I’m eager to resume the writing of it. While I was doing the dishes the other night, the opening lines of Aurelia’s POV drifted in on the winter wind, soon followed by a third character stepping up to tell his version of the tale. I was so excited I forgot about the dishes and stood with my hands in the hot water, watching the pictures in my mind’s eye. With that much meat on the bone, I’ll be feasting well into 2017!

Reconnecting means more than with the Muse, however. I lost some serious touch with my daily practice after accidentally igniting an auto-immune reaction to a homeopathic flu preparation in November. A natural alternative to an annual flu shot, which I have never had, I decided to get back with the program after some years of going without—and I wish I had gone without it this year, too. Within 48 hours of the first dose, joints were flaring all over the place; and while there is no definitive proof that the medicine was the culprit, the timing is too suspicious to discount it. Over the five week course, my arthritis progressively worsened, started to recover, then worsened again. Three health practitioners had three different theories. None of the treatments made it better. One or two made it worse. I decided to finish the flu program rather than quit halfway through—it may or may not have been a good idea, but four weeks after my final dose and my body appears to be recalibrating. Oh, my joints still hurt like tiny star flares, but the frequency, location and intensity are diminishing and, as I say, I am beginning to look outward with more interest in things than I was through the past couple of months.

During those interminable weeks, it was all I could do to get out of bed, get to work and hang on until fatigue sent me to a premature bedtime. Christmas only happened with the help of tea fairy Treena and my angels—thanks to them, I was able to pull off the coup of Christmas prezzies for my beloved Ter, who was my stalwart rock the whole time—but anything else requiring energy or focus fell by the wayside. Weekly yoga sessions, daily meditations, attention to detail at the office (I’m sure my mistakes will show up later in January), and writing anything other than my name were sacrificed in the name of survival.

Though I did finish my annual reading of The Night Circus. And the Christmas cards got done. Priorities, you know.

So, my fiendish plan for the rest of my vacation also includes reconnecting with Ru. Gradually, gently, I mean to reinstate my twice weekly yoga sessions and practice more frequent meditations. Ter has wryly warned against “over meditating”—she has as many gurus as I have doctors, and in helping to make her point with me, she realized that she has a similar proclivity to spiritual maintenance as I have to physical. And it’s true: too much of a good thing can be as harmful as too much of a bad one. The pendulum on maintenance (physical for me, spiritual for her) swung a bit too far and messed us up in 2016. Between us, we intend on simplifying our practices as we move into the new year, aiming for balance in all things.

With love,

The Day After Christmas

It was fun, but now it’s over. No more shopping, no more wrapping. No more jingle bells. No more Santa runs to friends and family. Holiday movies have been watched and Christmas CDs are back in the rack. No more prezzies to open—the tree now shelters the unmasked goodies bestowed on us by our loved ones. Ter and I are stuffed with December treats and the kitchen is jammed to the rafters with the surplus. We live in such abundance, we are most grateful to be so fortunate.

There is, however, an oddly hollow sense when all is said and done. Sated and exhausted, we awake on December 26 to the perennial question of “Now what?”

Luckily, I have a plan—but that’s tomorrow’s post.

Last night I wondered what the day after the first Christmas was like. If it had been as anti-climactic as the day after every Christmas since.

The answer is a no-brainer, really. What can possibly outdo a heavenly choir and three wise men dropping by with gifts of gold and rare perfume? Like it’s awaited everyone else in all the centuries to follow, real life awaited the little family in Bethlehem. I bet Mary wanted nothing more than a bath and some peace and quiet, but no—she was expected to preside over the festivities. Apparently none of the kings was able to wield any influence with the local innkeepers, so the party stayed in the stable. The next morning, the kings would have departed, the shepherds returned to their fields, and Mary was faced with a newborn son of God unable to articulate his wants and needs, and she a new mother with no experience to guide her. Worse, she had to get back on that donkey for the trip home to Nazareth—bad enough while heavily pregnant, but trickier now that the babe was on the outside. She’d have to nurse him, clothe him, and cuddle him, all the while thinking how nice it was that everyone turned out to praise the birth but didn’t stick around to help with the clean up. Once they got back to Nazareth, they’d have been welcomed home by the community and life would fall into a new routine, and pretty soon the royal visit and Hallelujah chorus would have seemed like she had dreamed it.

No blasphemy is intended here. Whatever happened on that night all those years ago, life went on for the players as sure as it goes for each of us. The baby had a singular destiny, but what baby doesn’t? We are each born of divinity, each on a path designed specifically for the individual, and while few of us will change the world as radically as Jesus did, we will change our little corners of it, hopefully for the better but sometimes not.

I’m a day late, but the sentiment is no less heartfelt: Merry Christmas.

With love,

You Can’t Go Home

we were here

Not when you rented the place, anyway.

Ter and I spent 17 years on the top floor of a grand old Victoria mansion, circa 1885. Two of those years were lived in #15, a two-storey loft with a gargantuan kitchen and a gorgeous view of the city skyline. The main problems with that suite were the paper-thin wall between us and #16, and the appallingly disrespectful tenant who took up residence there a year and a bit after we moved in. So after a bunch of the tenants got together and the girl was evicted, Ter and I moved next door to avoid a similar scenario down the road. (Being a two bedroom, #16 ran the risk of becoming home to another roommate situation unlike our own, where one was never home and the other was a party animal.)

Both suites were stunning for having been renovated to reflect the era in which the house was built. The walls were a soft sage green trimmed with plum, and the bare fir floors rippled gold and amber when the sunlight crept across them. We had ghosts in the hallways and tons of closet space, and a cute little rooftop deck between the gables. It was accessed by a little mullioned door on the far side of the vestibule, where we stashed our wine and root veggies in the winter (the vestibule got very cold!) Ter put pots of herbs and pansies on the deck, and often sat outside on a summer night, watching the stars until well past her bedtime. We stuffed both beds into the smaller bedroom and used the larger one—with the cathedral ceiling and identical view of the city skyline as #15—as our main living room. We used what was probably meant to be the living room as a quiet room, where we lined the built-in bookshelves with our hardcover coffee table books and plugged an electric heater disguised as a wood stove into the faux fireplace.

At Christmas, we draped greens over the doorways and put up a tree in every room. Pillar candles were stood in corners and glass bowls of potpourri scented the whole apartment with pine and cinnamon and orange.

The Julian and Therése story was written there in 1998. Lucius was born there in 2002. The Cassandra series was started and countless other projects completed. Ter did some artwork, but discovered a passion for cooking in the little kitchen that had only two electrical outlets plus the one in the stove.

We held countless afternoon teas. We walked up the road to Government House and Craigdarroch Castle, and down the road to town. The resident ghosts ranged from a mischievous schoolboy with red hair to a young girl in a flowing gown to an old lady with a bitter attitude. Ter often heard a distant choir singing in the dead of night, and once I felt someone squeeze my heel as he/she/it passed by my bed.

We had squirrels, wasps and rats too, over the years, not to mention a plague of silverfish that was never really solved because the plumbing leaked so badly. We froze in winter and sweltered in summer. Neighbours—some good, some annoying—came and went until we became the dowager tenants who had survived four property management companies.

What we did not survive was the change of ownership in 2007.

I often wondered what happened to #16 after Ter and I abandoned hope in 2011. The place needed some serious renovation, as no maintenance had been done in years and the ceiling around the skylights remained open to the shingles after the new owners put them in that first winter. Whenever a tenant left, the suite was upgraded and the rent appropriately jacked. But Ter and I pulled a fast one by handing in our notice, so they had to rent it as it was because they needed the guaranteed income. One evening close to our end date, the property manager showed up with a viewer in tow (so much for 24 hours’ written notice), and we suspect the kid took it because, at that price and in that neighbourhood, he was young enough to endure rougher conditions than open ceilings and leaky pipes.

We were done. It was not a particularly peaceful parting.

After all these years, #16 is on the market again. Advertised as 1000 feet of loft-style living with geometric ceilings and industrial light fixtures, they have ripped out both the closets and the chimney in the bedroom hallway, torn out the wall that created the first bedroom, torn out the wall that created the second bedroom, filled in the bookcases and covered over the faux fireplace, knocked out the doorway to the kitchen and opened up the “ghost crossing” where the little red haired kid liked to hide ... in short, the place is gutted. Soulless. Everything is cold and sharp and jutting. The floors look great; but I dare anyone to keep the place warm with Shredded Wheat in the outside walls and ten foot ceilings at their highest point.

Not my problem, I know. It’s just that my heart broke a little more when I saw what had become of our charming, beautiful former home; the home we had loved and made our own even though we didn’t own it.

Sadly, it’s not always a tenant who destroys a rental suite.

Merry Christmas to Youbou

We think it’s about the prezzies. We run around like headless barnyard fowl and dig ourselves into debt for things we hope will fix us permanently within people’s hearts, or prove to them how fixed they are in ours, and it’s almost a guarantee that on Christmas morning, if the planets are aligned and you were in psychic tune with the Universe while shopping at the mall, you’ll be a rock star for the moment.

And that’s okay. It happens to everyone and everyone does it. We all have those magical moments when something we’ve always wanted is gifted with love and gratefully received, and vice versa. Once in a while, a gift will stay with you for years, as fondly remembered as the person who gave it to you, though I’m willing to bet the majority of things given and things received can neither be recited nor matched to the proper person before two Christmases have passed.

And that’s okay, too. Tangibles are truly fleeting.

We remember traditions because they happen every year. Traditions, I think, are more important to us than the prezzies; we just don’t realize it.

When Ter and I lived in our gorgeous old Victorian suite, my mother once said it didn’t feel like Christmas until she and Dad came to us for our annual holiday tea. I have to say, we decked those halls in spectacular magazine-spread style, and it was a pleasure for us to host the parents for a visit over seasonal savouries and sweets each December.

One of my most memorable holidays, however, happened the year my parents were unable to come because Mum went down with a hella cold and Dad was on the brink of following suit. At the time, they lived 90 minutes out of town, over the Malahat and left on Highway 18, and it made no sense for them to try and travel all that way for a couple of hours with us, especially when neither of them was in partying health. It was disappointing, but also the wiser course.

On Christmas morning, after we’d opened our presents and had our breakfast and spoken with our loved ones both in town and out, we decided on the spur of the moment to go see Mum and Dad. Why not? It was a beautiful sunny day, we had no other plans, and it bugged us that they were both sick at home on Christmas Day.

So we loaded their gifts into the Camaro, blasted up the ’Hat and turned left on Highway 18. One of the things I loved about Jules was how he proved the theory of time slowing as speed increases. I swear, the faster he went, the slower the scenery seemed to flow past the window, and in top gear, he was all but airborne along that stretch of asphalt.

Right off Hwy 18, with the forest closing in on a twisty-turny road, Porky Pig’s rendition of “Blue Christmas” came on the r-r-r-radio. Between laughing and singing along, we arrived at the parents’ place in seemingly record time. Dad was so surprised to see us at the front door that he forgot to feign dismay. We ambushed Mum in her sickbed (she drew the covers to her eyes and ordered us from the room before we caught what was catching), then sat with my father in the living room until, unable to keep herself in isolation, Mum joined us for a cup of tea and a present exchange.

I don’t remember what we talked about or for how long we stayed, but I do remember the joy I felt at surprising them that Christmas. It was one of the happiest holidays of my adult life.

And though I don’t recall what we gave them, I’m pretty sure my prezzie was a bottle of Bailey’s.

Snow What?

photo courtesy of Ter

I am a snowmantic. I love the idea of snow. A pristine blanket of sparkling white, evergreens draped in a thick layer of frosting or a cityscape glazed in royal icing—any or all of these images will excite my creativity and set me to fantasizing. I am often inspired to write snowy scenes. I adore the mental images of winter furs and dappled grey horses in a black and white wood. More compelling is the comfort of a scene in a cafe, of Christmas shoppers taking refuge from the weather over steaming eggnog lattes or peppermint hot chocolate.

Snow at night is even better than snow in sun—it’s a joy to be bundled in your jammies or wrapped in an oversized sweater, cradling a mug of spiced apple cider or sweet milky tea while snow falls thick and soft outside the window. Creating the mystical glow that brightens the dark and makes the stars seem sharper in the sky.

The crunch of your boots breaking the crust on that first foray outdoors. The bracing scent of Arctic cold and the shock of it reaching your lungs. Skating outdoors on a frozen pond. Slinging your skates over your shoulder and hiking home in deep drifts of snow. (Okay, I’ve never done that, but Ter did when she lived in Alberta.) Brightly coloured parkas and Nordic patterned mittens, striped scarves and tasselled toques, sleds and toboggans and snowball fights in the schoolyard.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

What I tend to forget is ... snow is cold. It is usually accompanied by a colder wind. It might be fun as it gathers on your hood, but once inside the drugstore where you’ve trudged to get batteries for the flashlight in case the power cuts out, don’t lower your head or melted snow will pee all over your summer sneaks because this is Victoria and who needs winter boots out west?

Chances are, a pair of good ones won’t pay themselves off because it’s so rare, but when snow does arrive in the Garden City, it is not the snow you knew when you were a kid in Alberta or Quebec. It is wet, heavy, slippery, stubborn snow with a mercifully short shelf life but a brutally obstreperous nature. It melts fast and freezes solid. Walking an icy sidewalk becomes an extreme sport unless you have cleats. Driving is okay if you have proper tires (Tiggy’s were upgraded to all weather from all season last year) and no one else is on the road, otherwise it’s demo derby on the highways and byways. As little as two centimetres will stress us out and shut us down.

I had the idea for this post before the winter hit us last week. We only endured a few days of light-by-Canadian-standard snowfall, but it was rougher than it was a pleasure and all I can say with any certainty is our plan for retiring to Canmore has been relegated to the Hall of Doof Ideas.

Merry Christmas.

Hygge Days Are Here Again

It’s a Danish word that has no precise comparative in English. Like umami, it’s a sense rather than a solid; one of those mysterious intangibles that everybody understands not by intellect, but by spirit.

Hygge (clumsily pronounced “hue-gah”) is defined as “a complete absence of anything annoying or emotionally overwhelming, and/or the act of taking pleasure from the presence of simple, soothing things.”

It’s the feeling you get in front of a fire, when the cold dark winter closes in and folks gather together for warmth and comfort. It’s the light of a single candle after everyone else goes to bed. The pleasure in a cup of hot chocolate spiked with Bailey’s. The joy in sharing a blanket on a snowy sleigh ride. The sound of jingle bells. The smell of cinnamon and cloves. Little kids laughing. Your favourite sweater. A hug from a friend. Exchanging smiles with a stranger. Coming in from the cold and scenting shortbread fresh from the oven. Listening to carols while looking at the Christmas tree.

It’s not exclusive to the winter, though it probably lends itself best to the time between fall and spring, and it’s not really about the components of circumstance, either. If I understand it correctly, it’s about how you feel. I suspect I feel it more when I am myself, not necessarily alone, but with my trusted posse, those who know me best and love me as I truly am. A feeling of belonging, of acceptance and connection; of oneness with something greater than the individual.

It feels good. It feels warm. It feels comforting and safe. It feels ... wonderful.

They say the Danes are the happiest people in the world. Hygge knew?