The Place We Are In

I’m back at the cottage for a few days. I watched the water current move all summer long almost exclusively to the right, or eastwardly, but now I detect an unmistakeable shift to the left. Fall is here. Something about the current, the way the water is moving, is reminding me of this global pandemic we are in. The water moves swiftly, as temperatures drop lower and lower, until the water temperature becomes untenable, deathly. For the time being, the water is hovering around 60 degrees, and most people wouldn’t go in. I did. With a wetsuit on. But not everybody has a wetsuit, protection. Many people can’t even swim. For many, the simple act of being asked to float would lead to drowning. Right now, people are being asked to float and people are drowning.

I listened to an audio book on the way up to the cottage, Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. What I’ve heard so far is fantastic, but there is one detail she got wrong. She likens depression to drowning, “but at least,” she says, “with drowning there are signs: arms flailing, noisy splashing, cries for help, etc.” I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the picture. While I appreciate the metaphor and the point is not lost on me, the notion of drowning being loud is incorrect. I was shocked to come across a pamphlet on drowning when I was researching water safety (as mothers are wont to do) when we bought the cottage. Drowning is known, by those who know – by lifeguards and the aqua-savvy – as a silent killer. Most people who drown never make a sound. They slip away, unnoticed. We are in a pandemic, there are people drowning, and they aren’t making a sound.

It’s fall and I’m in a three-season cottage and it’s cold so I’m trying to light a fire. Again, I have resources. I ball up paper and lay down kindling. Put a few bigger logs on top, one or two, not too many. I’ve been educated by those who know in the art of fire building. I asked my local neighbour who lives in the house he grew up in about wood stoves. After I’ve asked my many questions about indoor fire maintenance, he at one point grows quiet and still.

“Please,” he says, “let me know if you need help anytime.”

My question of, “so I leave the door open and then…?” left him feeling anxious.

“I don’t want you to burn down the cottage.”

Step one, pull the lever to open the flu (door at the top to let air out) all the way. Step two, get the fire going, use kindling and a fire starter as needed. Step three, once the fire’s going, close the door and close the flu three-quarters of the way by pushing in the lever, that will keep the fire from burning too hot, which could lead to a chimney fire. Step four, turn on the built-in fan in the back to disperse heat and temper the flame. Be careful what you burn. Always hard wood (maple, oak), not softwood (pine), which burns too hot and fast and can lead to said chimney fire.

Build your fire and watch the flames burn. Revel in the warmth, enjoy.

And I’m trying. I know all the steps, I’m doing the things, but the fire just won’t catch. Smoke pours out of the chimney, inexplicably flowing to the east, but nothing is catching. I’m flickering, flickering and now the flame’s out. I’m cold. Chilled to the bone. I add a layer of protection, but I’m not moving, not going anywhere and so my temperature drops like the lake outside.

And there’s something about being behind the glass and looking out at a lake I can’t touch that unnerves me – a fire I can’t hold. I want to go swimming in the lake everyday like I did before, but everything is different now. I’ve had to readjust my expectations, my way of being. I’m shifting direction from east to west. I’m going a different way now.

The fire, of course, is not for me to hold. But is it not just like me to want the things I can’t have? The very things that will burn me?

A career in writing is like this. Did I mention I’ve received a few rejections lately? I did not win the CBC Creative Nonfiction Contest, I did not place a particular story in the newspaper, I did not land that coveted agent. Burn, burn, burn. In truth, the agent hurt the most, although there I probably had the lowest odds. But here was the thing: this agent gets 10,000 pitches a year and mine was one of the 400 she asked to read further material. I was not one of the ten or so she chose to sign. And that hurt because the first hurdle felt SO monumental, to have made it so far, like getting our cases down so low, only to fail to complete the job. Those outside of the writing industry will say they’re sorry for my luck, and I thank you, really, I’m fine. Those inside of it will nod their heads in understanding and recognition, congratulate me on the rejections. I collect rejections because it means I am getting my work out there, and at some point, there come acceptances too. At some point, this will all be over. But arguably, we’ll be in a different place by then.

I will continue to swim in the lake as long as possible; hold my head and hands up, and warm them by the fire.

The lake by the shore is still now, motionless. As darkness descends, a flash of light and stone, a memory darts into my mind. One last reminder that I am not safe. Taking my dog out this morning, down a trail and beyond where I’d gone before, past the ‘no trespassing’ sign (I know, I know), into the beyond, in the dirt there lay an animal track. Bigger than my hand. My neighbour warned me of the potential for bears, but I just had to see for myself. And there it was, a sign as clear as day. I had been warned. These tracks were fresh. Except, this wasn’t likely to be a bear track, not based on the shape. The shape was more reminiscent of a wolf’s paw. A very large wolf. I followed the tracks, one, two, three, then stopped, came to my senses, and scrambled back through the brambles, back the way I came, thorns tearing at my pants. Turns out that was not the direction I wanted to be headed. I’m still figuring it out, which way to go.

The fire is lit now, burning steady. And I’m thankful for that because the temperature continues to drop with the sun. I’m warm and cozy inside, tucked away from wolves that hunt and the monsters, mostly men, I conjure in my mind. I am finding my way and this is the place I am in.

 

 

Living On A Cloud

I spent the summer after third year university inhabiting une petite village in Quebec as part of a cultural exchange program through Western University. I was joined by students from around the world, but mostly other Canadians like me. The summer was rife with love affairs and love triangles, some that lasted months, others that lasted five weeks (the duration of the program). I meant to leave after five weeks but was having so much fun immersing myself in Quebecois culture, I planned to stay the entire summer break. I spoke in French every waking minute and when my parents came to visit late in the summer, English felt heavy on my tongue, stuck in the back of my throat.

At one point, while visiting a campground where my host family had a trailer, I was riding on the back of a golf cart with a friend. My friend turned to me,

“You know this isn’t real life here, right? We’re living on a cloud.” We laughed; he was right. Our love affairs here didn’t really matter, because this wasn’t real life, right? Real life was where we towed the line, where our decisions impacted our actual reality. Quebec life was…elsewhere.

This summer, once again, I am undoubtedly living on a cloud. Life at the cottage hasn’t been perfect or without its dramas, but it’s been safe, sheltered, illuminating, often peaceful, infused with beauty, nature and life. The proximity to the lake, mere meters, is my greatest joy. I swim every day. Living here has felt more real than my real life.

The realities of school and Covid and returning home to rebuild our past life feel heavy, stuck in the back of my throat. I feel like I’m heading toward a different kind of life on a cloud, a storm cloud, not the kind of cloud you want to be on at all. No love affairs, only the heavy fog of disease that surrounds us. The reality of children being sent back to school, only to be exposed to illness; the slight sign of their humanity, a dripping nose, sending them straight home again anyway. Is there even going to be school for families who have young children, especially families, like mine, with a child who is more susceptible to getting sick? I can’t help but feel the words, “only the strong will survive” like a punch in my gut.

On the storm cloud, it rains every day. It rains down responsibilities, broken promises, false hopes and dashed dreams. While the school system in place isn’t perfect, I feel like I have to try, working parents, parents who are full time students, we feel like we have to try to send our kids back. What’s the alternative? Who’s going to look after them at home? Apple tv? Their iPads? Yup and yup. Technology is both a blessing and a curse. And we’re lucky, LUCKY, to have access to that technology that is both a blessing and a curse. What about those kids who don’t have access? Who aren’t so lucky?

Normally the start of a new school year is like the sight of a rising sun ahead, all blustery blue skies and white fluffy clouds. The sun-man is wearing cool black shades and a big smile with happy sunrays shooting out of his head, a backpack on his smoldering shoulders. I feel like Covid killed the sun-man. I picture my children, their cute faces hidden behind masks, sequestered at their desks all day long, afraid to touch one another, just hoping to be able to attend school because their parents are so tired of looking after them, of trying to be everything to everyone that they can’t keep it together anymore. School is what they desire; that’s what we’ve come to.

Nobody chose this, I know. I also know I will be one among many mothers who are pulling out their magic markers and drawing a squiggly sun-man in their kids’ skies, trying to keep things together, to keep those clouds above looking glossy and bright. I will simultaneously draw a happy face across the squiggly line of my own mouth, because that’s what mothers are expected to do.

But I won’t be happy, and my kids will know that.

I will not be happy to give up my time to write. I will not be happy to put my future on hold. I will not be happy to do half a job. I will not be happy with having people in my workspace. I will not be happy with a disgruntled, stressed out partner. I will not be happy to see my kids at home when they should be at school. I will not be happy if someone in my family gets sick. I will not be happy when there is an outbreak in my community.

My unhappiness is but a drop in the bucket, but I wanted you to know. To the mothers and parents feeling stressed, you’re not alone.

A Summer Affair

I’m listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The clash of classical instruments banging against the soundtrack of my mind creates a space for focus. The music draws something out of me. From where I’m sitting at my desk, the lake looks like a Monet painting. Not quite real. The colour is off. Ripples of slate, blue, grey and white. A cottony clouded sky.

The temperature has taken a turn in Barry’s Bay. In the coffee shop in town, five minutes away, the locals tell me it’s been a nice August compared to usual.

“A few years ago, the third weekend in August,” a woman tells me, “it snowed at my cousin’s wedding.”  Snow – that dirty word.  Who wants to think of such things mid-summer? Certainly not I.

But as I stood at the end of my dock earlier, there’s no mistaking nature’s reversal – yes, reversal – because that’s what this is. Not really a cycle, more of a reverting back. In June, when we arrived, the same temperature, 17 degrees Celsius, felt warm. The cold was being ushered out, the warmth ushered in. Now the heat is quietly making its exit. First July’s humidity dissipated, but the heat remained, warm and friendly. Now warm air is slipping away, I fear we’ve almost reached the encore of this show, and soon she will exit stage left to make way for winter’s frost. I can feel cool air filling the room, permeating, taking her place, chilling my fingers to a pale yellow, numbing, stripping me of summer’s caress.

Summer here is like a searing, passionate fling – it was never meant to last, it never could last. Too hot to hold.

“Blink and you miss it!” the local woman laughed.

Like an affair, summer here is like a best kept secret, a dance between lovers producing heat that fades with time. As quick as it arrived, it’s over. Only that first kiss lingers. I would do anything for that kiss.

I feel like a scorned lover. “But wait!” I cry, “we’re here until the END of August, can’t summer last until then?”

No, it can’t. No more than the relationship that’s fizzled out can be rekindled. Once the fire’s gone, the flame’s extinguished, that’s it. There is no going back to what was, you have to wait to find it again. The reversal of falling in love is falling out of love – the latter seems to happen much more quickly; the way I’ve blinked, and summer is leaving me.

Come August first, the air told fall’s story, a few weeks earlier than I would normally notice back home. What is beautiful about spending so much time outdoors and taking notice are the cues nature sends to make herself clear. She is not a shy lover. The seasonality of the bugs. First they’re here, now they’re mostly gone. Come August, cue the grasshoppers. Where were they all of July?  I’ve not a clue, but my friend the farmer tells me his chickens love to eat them. One hopped into our van, as we left the farm. The most alert and alive and humongous green cricket I’ve ever seen.  He rode shotgun over Dan’s shoulder all the way home. The next morning, when Dan got back in to drive Louie to a trail for a jog, the cricket was still there, like a devoted pet, waiting for another joy ride.

Then there are the dock spiders. No sooner had I announced to a neighbour that the dock spiders left us, then one faced me down. The dock spider, the size of my palm, one of the largest species in Canada, sat in the middle of the ladder I needed to climb up to get out of the water from my swim. I took the long way around.

In the spring, when we arrived, the dock spiders ran amuck, in and out of their crevasses, all over the dock, which had become their kingdom. We sat shyly on our towels, double checked chairs, regarded our shoes and shook out every garment and linen with vigour. As summer progressed, as it did so quickly – too quickly – the dock spiders seemed to cower away from our cries of joy and splashing cannonballs off the dock and visitors trampling down their lane. They left us be, golden sun creatures that we are, preferring the gallows below, I imagine. A reversal of habitat. But come August, if you’ve read the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, you may have an inkling of what the water spider I came face-to-face with on the ladder of our dock intended. A large sac of eggs, soon-to-be spiderlings, now rests itself wedged between ladder and dock and momma spider sits astride it, proud. I am loathe to remove that sac and its spider, even if it means I need to swim the long way around, through the lily pads.

There was a time I would have crushed any and all spiders that crossed my path, such was my right, or so I thought. But through another form of reversal, I feel differently now, quite differently. When I find a spider or rogue moth or ant in the cottage, I mostly fold the creature into a napkin gently and take them back outside, where they would prefer to be anyway. I do what I can to avoid killing, I think it’s gentler on my soul this way.

As the cold floods in, won’t enough creatures die anyway? That spider astride her sac, won’t she perish short of seeing her newborns? Or is that just a story we tell little children?

Dock spiders belong to the family Pisauridae, closely related to wolf spiders. They do not bite. They lay their eggs in a silken egg sac, which can then be carried around by the female until it’s time for the young to hatch. She holds the egg sac in her fangs like a wad of cotton. The female dock spiders, pisaurids, build a silken, tent-like nursery for their spiderlings, and so they are known as ‘nursery-web’ spiders. This glorious tent is what I can see between my ladder and dock. When you start to think of the spider as building a nursery, she becomes harder to kill, does she not?

As they typically start nesting in the spring, this is likely our spider’s third egg sack, her third cycle of spiderlings. Each sac can yield 1,000 spiderlings. I check on those babies every day. Dan thought maybe a fish would come and eat them, nab the sac, but apparently, dock spiders are the ones who will eat minnows, sticking their two front legs in the water, awaiting the right water vibration. The perfect kill. A reversal of expectations.

“I feel like the end of a long day,” says Charlotte the spider, at the end of E.B White’s Charlotte’s Web. And can’t we all relate – especially lately?

A summer passed by too quickly; a pandemic that’s arrived and decided to stay. The leaving of school and the coming back. A reversal of fortunes.

I will embrace the cold the best I can. Pull out my tough jeans and hooded sweatshirts that I’ve had tucked away, tucked away but not forgotten. Instead of dressing down, I will layer up. I will throw a few logs on the fire, the trunks of trees that once grew strong.

I will hit play on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and write my way to the end, with images of Monet’s hayfields and summer days tucked into the back of my mind, for when the heat returns, I will be ready.

Until then, winter is coming.

Blog Post: On Observing Humans

We learn in a multitude of ways.  Directly, from others.  Directly, from ourselves, from the front row seat of the skins we inhabit, with our bodies, our five senses.

I’m standing at the end of our dock in my underwear.  I have de-clothed after a forty-minute run in an attempt to convince myself I should jump into the lake.  The air feels cool, it’s fifteen degrees Celsius and there’s a breeze.  The lake temp is in the seventies – that’s not bad.  Already, here, up North in the Madawaska Valley, fall is sidling in.  A smattering of trees are painted in hues of warm colours.

My toes hang over the edge of the dock, and I’m wrestling with myself over going in when a large white orb torpedoes by under the water right before my eyes.  My first thought is baby sea turtle!  But of course, there are no sea turtles in our lake.  The creature seems too big and moves too quickly to be a snapping turtle.

I don’t have to guess for long.

The beautiful loon crests a few meters to my right.

Wow, I think, surprised a loon can move that fast under water.  To have read the fact would not have sufficed; experiencing the loon move with such streamlined speed and grace is now forever etched in my mind.

I jump in off the dock and feel the water against my skin, warm and not unpleasant as expected.

Recently, we had my sister-in-law and her family visit us at our cottage.  My brother-in-law is a trained and practising ecologist, an environmental consulting expert.  I ask if he’d like to join me on a grueling hike, in the rain; the ascent goes skyward, but the lookout at the summit is dazzling and worth the exertion.  He agrees.

The hike has become a right of passage, an initiation of sorts, to life at the cottage and an introduction to the stark and startling beauty of the area.  On certain days, the climb involves blazing heat and humidity that leaves your neck and t-shirt soaked and bugs sticking to you like Velcro.  On other days, as was the case when my brother-in-law agreed to hike with me, the rain renders the path muddy, the rocks that protrude slick.  On the way down, my foot gives way beneath me.  I catch myself, elbows in the mud on either side of the rock that would have bruised my spine.

“You okay?” my brother-in-law asks.

“Yep.  Close call.” It’s all part of the climb.

I can tell a lot about a person by the way they make it up the mountain.

I power through the path, half at a run pace, treating the hike as sport, legs strong, hopping off rocks with vigour.  Sometimes I pretend I’m flying, while keeping a solid pace.

Dan, my husband, keeps pace with mine, never pulling ahead of me or falling behind.  He knows I like to take the lead and that I expect him to keep up.  We talk amicably, easily, on the way up and congratulate ourselves for exploring and for breathing heavy when we arrive at the top.

“Good exercise!”  We both agree, cheerily enough.

He empathizes over my attire; I would not have chosen to wear a summer dress had I planned this unexpected detour.  He understands my need to plan.  He takes my picture at the summit when I’m not watching.  He offers me a sip of his water, even though I have my own.  He pets our dog and does most of the caring for him.  He poses in pictures with me, even though I know he doesn’t particularly like to do so.  He kisses me, a quick peck, back at the van.  We’re both sweaty.

My brother, my little brother as I call him, sets off up the trail ahead of me, head down, and at a fast pace.  We take turns chasing one another up the mountain.  I think that we are racing and having fun.  We sweat equally hard.  We discourage the dog from biting at our fast heels, equally.  He really appreciates the view at the top, as do I.  At one point, he worries about the dog being too close to the edge.  I agree and we rein him in.  We are both parents.  He is okay with me snapping a few pictures of us, but even having owned a photography business, he takes few to no pictures himself.  I think it’s because he has owned the photography business.  We talk little on the way up, neither one of us can much breathe, but we engage in friendly chit-chat on the way back down.  Afterwards, we chug back water and he thanks me for taking him there.

My friend, a woman my age, approaches the hill with wonder and excitement.  She asked to do it once I mentioned it.  I feel the urge to check back on her as we make our way up, but she shoos me ahead, insisting she’s fine.  She never complains, though her ankles give her trouble.  She is excited about the view before we even get to the top.  She takes many pictures.  She snaps my picture from behind – an action shot – and I pause to take a few of her, too.  I hold the dog and keep him moving ahead so that he won’t bite at my friend or knock her off the edge of the mountain.  The dog is incredibly strong.  At the top, she orchestrates a photo shoot and I oblige.  She admires the view fondly, fully.  She expresses some regret – guilt? – that her husband is not also enjoying this activity, the climb and the view.  She worries about him.  We pick our way back down the trail slowly.  She tells me I remind her of a spry woman in her sixties she sometimes hikes with who blazes along the path, while she often trails behind.

“I want to be fit like her when I’m that age,” she says.

We talk about fitness, how my friend has lost weight – and she has, noticeably – but that she doesn’t weigh herself.

“That’s just a number,” she says.  She goes by how she feels.  I completely agree, though I know my number, more or less.  I know best by the way I feel, too.

At one point near the end, I spot a harmless house fly against her neon green tank top and calmly reach to flick it off.  My friend’s happy and calm demeanor changes, her face drains.

“Is there a BUG on me?”

“Yah, but it’s just…”

She’s flailing her body, shaking her head and hands.

“A fly.”

The offending beast is gone, close call.  We share a little laugh.

My brother-in-law is happy to tag along behind me up the mountain, and I enjoy looking back over my shoulder at the scientist at work.  He is completely lost studying the local flora and fauna.  The ecologist in him shines.  He reminds me of my toddler, always lagging behind on our family hikes, bent over a branch to examine this leaf, or that blade of grass.  His childish nature is glorious to witness.  Simultaneously, there is a meta-analysis happening: the ecologist observing plants in their natural habitat, the writer observing the ecologist observing the plants; the writer taking a snapshot of the scene in her mind; the ecologist collecting samples, “I’ve never seen this before,” he later exclaims, photographing a generic-looking stem he’s collected.  His very words become the evidence of the writer who is the documenter of human behaviour.

I frequently stop climbing and wait for him to catch up.  His eyes never leave the side of the trail, his hands are busy delicately grazing this or that greenery.  We ascend mostly in silence.  He seems unbothered by any physical discomfort the climb is costing him; he’s too busy observing.

Predictably, I reach the lookout before him.  I double back with the dog to make sure he’s okay.  When he arrives, he exclaims, “I want you to show me where this is on a map so I can take (my wife) and kids.”  Also, so that he may document the plant species he has discovered, single samples of which he grasps like a bouquet.  I admire his passion, understand it, recognize it in myself.

“That was great,” he says when we’re done the hike.

I ask my brother-in-law to identify tree species on my property.  I learn that a hemlock, an evergreen wispy tree with droopy limbs and numerous short needles, is one of my niece’s favourites, and where the forest of red pines is at the top of our drive, and how to tell the difference between the white and the red pine anyway: the white pine needles are long and in bunches of five, whereas the red pine have a reddish trunk and long needles that gather in clusters of two.

My favourite new piece of knowledge from hanging out with my brother-in-law the ecologist pertains to the beech tree.  This is where the writer and the ecologist collide.

“They say the trunks of beech trees look like the feet of elephants,” my brother-in-law tells me.  The feet of elephants.  Somehow this line reminds me of a piece I wrote about the souls of dinosaurs.

I have a look at the beech for myself and I have to agree.

 

The Absence of Something

Do you give yourself time to be creative in the way that you need?

A storm blows in.  I’m sitting beside an open sliding door and there’s the smell and warmth of fresh rain in the summertime wafting in, and the pitter patter of water droplets hitting leaves and branches creating a cascading effect all the way down to the forest floor.  The sound of the waves lapping the shore is overshadowed by booming skies, crackling thunder.

With overcast skies, the lake’s the colour of a silver coin.  The sun wants to push through.

Bright, hot, and sunny this morning, cloudy and thunderous this afternoon; the day’s as undecided as I am.  With the children visiting their grandparents, the pressure to enjoy the absence of something becomes too great.  One minute I tell Dan I’m going to focus on writing, use the time to get some work done, the next we’re packing up the car to take our dog Louie for another hike.  We hiked sixteen kilometers total the day before, but yet, somehow in the absence of something, more was not enough.

So we hike again, then after the hike I plan to visit the dock.  I pack my tote bag full of books, notebooks and pens, silicone earplugs and oversized black sunglasses.  I slide my pink flip flops on then get sidetracked writing a poem.  The poem complete, more or less, I scoop up the handles of my tote just as the rain comes pouring down.

Dan and I spend more time talking about what we’re going to do next then actually doing anything.  We talk some more, and we talk some more beyond that because in the absence of something the space must be filled with everything else.  An onslaught of words and ideas rushes forth.  We could talk for years.

Dan has committed to running a few errands.  He waivers, attempts to tell me one more story about his conversation with a local dog trainer before heading out the door, but my mind is already elsewhere, onto the thing it is I will be doing in the thunderstorm in the absence of something.  I wish to fill the space perfectly, deliberately, with an activity of my choosing – not of necessity.

“Do you want to hear about the dog trainer?”

My husband has caught me tuning out, moving into the space and sphere of my own consciousness.  Did I reply, “not really,” or “how about you tell me later,” or plain “go ahead,” I can’t recall, but what I do remember specifying is my desire for him to be in charge of that project.  I’ll take part, do my duty, but it’s not my show.

A hummingbird suspends itself in front of my window, hovering long enough to have a good look.  Its wings beat so fast I can’t see them, and I think, yes, that is the speed I travel in the presence of everything. I beat my wings fast and hard so that I too may look in on the writer.

I shoo Dan out the door and turn to my pen – or should I type on my laptop?

At Algonquin Park, where we hiked, I picked up two books from the visitor centre.   One titled Braided Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and the other a lovely illustrated edition of The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben.  In lieu of picking up my pen, I sit down on the couch with the latter, open the front cover and notice the author’s name written on the page.  I decide I should follow him on social media and so I sit back down at my desk to pick up my cell phone.

But instead, I reach for my pen and fill my life with the presence of words, the absence of regret.  Time well spent.

I squint looking outside, the day is now bright.

The storm has passed.  The water’s calm and the skies are clear.

I hear a few measly drops, the soft hum of the fridge.  A truck passing by in the distance.

A lone moth flutters by, otherwise the world is still and silent.  Not even the birds sing.

The sun peaks out.

I think I’ll go back down to the dock, but who knows.

A single bird breaks the silence with its melodic trill.

An echo beating in the sky, the sound of base drums, reverberates in the distance.  This isn’t over yet.

Good, Bad, Who’s to Say?

There are two sides to every coin.  Heads or tails?  Well, depending on the side you are rooting for, which way you’re betting, one side is perceived as ‘good’, the other side as ‘bad’.  This narrative of good and bad plays into so many aspects of our lives, but lately I’ve been thinking about it in the context of how we view others.

I came across an engaging well-thought out TED talk by Heather Lanier (thanks Sue Robins for introducing me to her work) about the problematic nature of framing stories as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  Lanier explains through the use of an ancient parable that “’Good’ or ‘bad’ are incomplete stories that we tell ourselves.”

The ancient parable of the farmer goes like this:

There once was a man who lived on a farm with his son and his horse.

One day, the barn door was left open and the horse ran away. When the nearby villagers heard about it, they ran to the farm to tell the farmer how sorry they felt for him.

“How will you work your farm without your horse?” they asked.

The farmer simply shrugged and said “good, bad, who’s to say?”

A few days later, the farmer’s horse returned, and following it were two more horses. The villagers were so excited for the farmer’s luck, they ran to his farm and told him so.

The farmer simply shrugged and said “good, bad, who’s to say?”

The new horses were not broken in, so the farmer’s son worked hard to break them in so they could be used on the farm. While doing so, one of the new horses threw him off and his leg was broken.

The villagers again ran to the farm and expressed their deep sadness about the son’s broken leg. “Now your son can’t help you on the farm,” they said with their heads hung low.

The farmer simply shrugged and said “good, bad, who’s to say?”

As the son was healing from his broken leg, a war broke out in the countryside. All the young men were sent to fight. Many died or were seriously injured. However, since the farmer’s son had a broken leg, he was not able to go. The villagers again came to the farm, to say to the farmer how very lucky he was that his son didn’t have to go fight in the war.

Once again, the farmer shrugged his shoulders and stated, “good, bad, who’s to say?”

This parable teaches us to simply be a witness to life’s events.  The idea being that peace is found by observing the events of life and removing all judgement; by sitting back and witnessing without trying to attach labels, and avoiding life’s dramas.

The principle tenant of Buddhism is that craving leads to suffering.  Either craving for something good to last or craving for something bad to end.  One who does not crave, does not suffer – or so the idea goes.  In meditation, the goal is not to judge the thoughts that come into your head, but to let them flow through your mind and watch them from a distance. Thoughts are not labelled as good or bad, nor are they held on to.  They are let go.

Wow.  This all sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?  Letting go of notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’; meditating and watching all kinds of thoughts float by without attaching meaning or significance.  As a writer, I often try to do the opposite: I latch on to words, haul them in, examine them to death, then stuff them into a basket full of other used thoughts and ideas.  But perhaps I need to loosen up, disassociate from my body a little bit more.  My body is so needy, temperamental; it’s cloistering to the mind.

I received a rejection note this morning for an essay I wrote.  Good or bad, who’s to say?  Maybe the piece will go on to be accepted in a more reputable journal or will lead me to a connection and long-lasting friendship with an editor – who knows?  Maybe it’s eventually printed at a time when the person who needs to read it, reads it.  I can’t help but yearn toward the positive.  However, maybe the essay never gets published.  I have to be satisfied with the idea that the essay just is.  Pain and pleasure, bad and good.

The other day, out on a drive, I turned right at the last minute onto a path I hadn’t planned to go down.  I discovered a beautiful trail; the kids loved it.  Later that day, I swatted at a bug on my knee, assuming it was a horsefly, and got badly stung by a wasp.  So the story goes.  Good or bad, who’s to say?  The key is to remain open; to abstain from judgement.  This is not the same as being passive.  Even meditation – sitting being, seemingly doing nothing – is an intense exercise of the mind.

When I leave for my run this morning, I will either feel good or bad and I’m going to try to not attach meaning to those feelings.  Today’s run doesn’t necessarily signify that I’m a good runner or a bad runner, that I’m in good shape or bad shape, it is just how I’m feeling today, at this particular moment.

I see the value in letting go, but a part of me needs to rebel against this notion of watching our feelings pass by without judgement.  I’m quite attached to my feelings.  I’m all for letting the feelings that are hurtful and painful pass through me, but I’m not so willing to let go of joy and happiness.  I want to fully inhabit my body in these moments.  But we don’t get to choose.  One minute, joy, a new path; the next minute, pain, a wasp sting.  Life is just like that.

When it comes to people though, I see how this principle need apply.  In my own life, the good/bad story has played out like this: the initial Down syndrome diagnosis – pain, bad; getting to know people with Down syndrome – joy, good.  Over and over, in different contexts, the story repeats itself.  My greatest realization of all, through years of reflection and learning to withhold judgement, is that: Down syndrome just is.  And so the story goes.

 

Hold on Tight to this Earth

The hiss of the tea kettle steaming its siren call rattles me awake.  There’s a small lever on its spout to flick back the lid and once, only once, instead of touching that nubby rubber extremity, I put my finger on the steaming metal.  Only once.  Accidents happen.

Is it a curse/burden or the wild imagination of women, of mothers, to constantly worry/fear/have daymares about the horrible way their loved ones may die or be injured?  Do men have these same fears?

Safety is the illusion, the comfortable narrative we tell ourselves as we hum our way through our days – a hum that can easily turn into a scream.

My brother and his family visit on the weekend.  We go on a day trip to Algonquin park.  Our cottage is situated about forty-five minutes from the east gate.  On our way, as we careen down another steep incline, the speedometer reaching over 100 km/h, I see the sign warning for deer, then I see the sign warning for moose and I can’t help myself, “please slow down.”  I can see the moose appearing from nowhere, hear the crash; I think I’m going to be sick.

On our hike, we spot a stack of boulders with snakes happily coiled up in the sun.  My toddler leans her face in close.  What if a snake were to simply recoil and SNAP.  She isn’t afraid.  She pokes him with a stick, and he slides away.

On the last evening of their stay, my brother and my husband set off to fish in a leaky tin boat at sunset.  Our lake is quite small, but it has pockets of depth, some say up to ninety feet.  Mostly the whole lake is visible, except for a few hidden bends.  As the sun dips further, I walk away from them, turn my back on the water, and walk up the steep incline of our gravel driveway with my dog.  I think, I hope they brought the lifejackets.  We are new to cottage life.  It’s easy to forget your own safety underneath the camouflage of bliss.

I walk back down the driveway with the dog and scan the horizon.  No sign of them.

They had a few beers, I remind myself.  What if they tipped?  The water is calm and secretive.  The lone eerie call of a loon rings out.

Back in my kitchen, as the tea kettle wails, I return a large knife by sliding it into its holster.  What if I missed?  And instead sliced into my hand.  Instead, I am careful, deliberate.  The throaty call of a crow caws out somewhere overhead.

They are around the bend, my brother and my husband, and as the sky fades to black, the stars twinkling overhead, they come back safely to us with fish stories to tell.  The baby fish that ate their worm and caught the monster pike, will someday turn into the monster fish that caught the whale, but there’s no danger in that.

“You don’t have any snapping turtles up here by any chance, do you?”  My sister-in-law tells me a story about the snapping turtle that bit her toe as she dangled on a pool noodle in a lake.  Her turquoise nail polish was to blame, she thinks.  She shows me the scar and I try not to think about it as I swim alone, far from shore, cutting across the lake.  I also try not to think about what if, at this moment, my heart stopped beating.  We do happen to have a lovely snapping turtle, the caretakers of the lake, who likes to visit the fish underneath our dock.

The kids fish and catch fish.  The fish go into a bucket.  The kids and other adults go up for lunch; I am the last one to pull myself from the lake.

“What about these fish?” I call up.

“Leave them, the boys want to eat them.”

I hesitate.  The fish don’t look like they’re doing so well.  One is floating up sideways near the top.  I push aside my instincts.

Over lunch, we ascertain nobody knows how to clean or prepare the fish.  And it seems especially clear that no one is volunteering to kill them or deal with the mess.  Another time.  My brother is the first to head back down to the bucket and the news is grim.

“I think they’re all dead.”  He dumps the bucket of water into the lake in a panic and then realizes he’s just dumped a bucket of dead fish beside the dock.

“No, look!” they’re still breathing, they are just in shock.  Fish swim so that water will pass over their gills.  The bucket provided not enough space, not enough air.  No room to breathe and live.

I am outraged on behalf of the fish.  I can tolerate fishing, but I cannot tolerate cruelty.  That our carelessness has caused the fish distress near death is unacceptable.  Take only what you need.  Still.  One by one they eventually swim away, they live.  Lesson learned.  It’s clear to me who poses the greatest threat and it’s not the snapping turtle.

“How do you keep them safe?” Elyse’s speech therapist is asking me a pointed question, the pointed question, about life at the cottage on the water’s edge.

“Strict rules,” I say.  There’s no going outside without letting an adult know.  No going on the dock period without an adult.  Still.

There’s a sort of marsh on one side of the dock and a beach for swimming on the other side.  The edge of the water is shallow, its deepening slow, only up to four feet by the very end of the dock.  We allow the kids to play at the beach by the marsh.  Still.

One day Dan and I are finishing our dinner.  We sit in the screened in porch with a view of the water and the girls are playing outside.  For one moment, they forget themselves and step onto the edge of the dock.  One peers over the edge into the water, probably looking for minnows, another leans (pushes?) into them and SPLASH!  On one side, our dock is lined with rocks, likely the remnants of an old dock.  Her head avoids the rock by inches.  Dan and I hear the splash, jump to our feet, in time to hear one complaining about being soaking wet, but not hurt.  Not this time.

Louie, our rambunctious pup, weaves through children at warp speed, occasionally deciding to take one out.  We know he does this.  We prepare for this exact scenario.  Keep him on a leash we can grab onto at any time.  Our children, who cling to his neck and pull at his skin and love him dearly, have learned to brace themselves when he gets into this wild state.  Still.

My youngest nephew is but a wisp of a child.  Small for his age of three, which is in itself small; I worried about him the most with Louie.  Sure enough, with our vigilance, which is not vigilance enough, Louie at some point over the weekend, knocked him down two stairs, bulldozed him over in our driveway as we were all saying goodbye, and narrowly missed knocking him off the dock, more than once.  Louie charged full speed right at him on the dock, having escaped an adult grasp, in a frenzy of excitement, and my nephew’s little life flashed before my eyes.  The lake in relief, Louie swerved to the left at the last minute and I scooped my nephew up safely into my arms.

Later, the two of us, just the two of us, took Louie for a walk up the incline.  My nephew didn’t say a word, but held my hand tight, trusting me, as I warded off the dog who wanted sticks thrown for him.  A dog that comes in hot.  I felt like with my hand, I was tethering my nephew’s small soul to the earth.  I daren’t let go.

 

A Rustling

I’m lying in bed.  My mind is swimming with thoughts about circumstance and what I’ve been writing, keeping me awake.  Never a good thing when you’re planning to get up at 5:00 a.m. the next morning.  And how did that go, the getting up at 5:00 a.m.?  This morning – it didn’t.  I sat down at my computer close to seven.

Time to take stock.

I smell like campfire.  My hair, pulled back in a messy ponytail, is falling loose and I have an itchy bug bite on the skin over my left ribcage.  I can’t re-read that sentence without wanting to scratch the bite.  I touched it again, just now.  My face, which has grown darker in colour these past few weeks, feels a bit oily (I haven’t washed it) and I’m groggy with sleep.  It’s colder outside, yesterday and today, a surprising yet also obvious factor of living further North; the cold seeps up through the floorboards as we sleep.  We are not insulated here, though we’re nice and cozy in our beds under down comforters.

There’s a giant pot of water standing on the stove that Dan boiled before bed, which I used to rinse off the Ontario strawberries and blueberries for my cereal this morning.  Our water comes from the lake and it’s unsafe to drink.  We’re having our mail forwarded here, to our cottage address this summer, and when the mailman came out to assess whether we could have a rural mailbox or not, he reported back that it would not be safe to do so along the stretch of road above us.  And so we will fetch our mail from a communal location, much farther away, the same as we did at home, only different.  Only the UPS guy is crazy enough/forced to drive his big truck down our laneway.  Our internet hub arrived this way, in the middle of the day, seemingly out of nowhere.  A young uniform-clad man in sunglasses delivered our package with a knowing smile, bent down to pet our puppy, then made four attempts to peel back up the steep incline of our laneway.  He made it out on the fourth attempt and for that I was glad.

The previous paragraph is not entirely true.  The septic system guy also made his way down our laneway, but having experience with such properties as ours, he parked at the top and walked down to assess the situation.  The mark of a pro.  Then, in a human feat – and with a driving ability I never hope to master – he reversed his large truck down our laneway (backwards!) and made it out no problem.  For those who plan to visit, don’t worry, managing the driveway isn’t as hard as I’m making it sound.  You will arrive safe and sound.  You just won’t want to leave.

Wildlife surrounds us.  Wolves come here in the winter, bears abound (though we’re unlikely to see any), moose – so we’re told – and deer, definitely deer.  I’ve seen several deer already.  And a miraculous thing:  when we arrived to look at our cottage late spring, I noticed the ring of trees around the lake all sat neatly trimmed at their bottoms.  Somewhere along the line, I made an assumption that treelines around lakes looked the way they do because of rising and falling water levels, the way rock is eroded by water over time.

“No, no.  It’s mother nature’s hedge clippers,” our real estate agent informed me.  The deer trim the trees by eating them.  That’s as high as they can reach, craning their necks, while standing on the ice.

The people who owned the cottage before us put out birdseed on the balcony to feed the blue jays, and so we do so now as well.  They left nuts they used to hand feed a chipmunk, and while we’ve been dallying, getting our bearings around here, the chipmunk runs around twittering and swearing at us; I imagine something along the lines of “Give me some F*%$ing nuts!”  Ariel is keenly working on repairing that relationship and building the trust that has been broken back up.

I will probably do laundry today.  We have an old washer here, a top loader – a luxury for a cottage – that can process small loads.  There has never been anything light about our laundry loads before, and so we adapt, we do less laundry more frequently.  We re-wear the same clothes like they’re going out of style.  And we check the weather.  Thunderstorms coming.  Better get the laundry washed and hung up now.  It’s a windy day, loads of time for our clothes to dry.

And yes, there are bugs you must prepare for.  The blackflies are particularly pesky as the sun is setting.  Those little vampire bugs are relentless.  Our children’s’ necks and behind their ears are mottled with scars, entry wounds that itch, but they don’t seem to mind too much.  Bug spray helps, so does a windy day like today.  Overcast days with clouds make the bugs all too happy and so we lean toward the sun.

On the day of their arrival, I took the kids to the dock with the sun shining down.  They dipped their toes into the mushy sand of the beach.  Penelope was the first to dive forward and swim with Ariel close behind her off the dock into dark waters.  Elyse came in once with me, dangling her legs off the water mat we bought for them, but proclaimed the water to be too cold.  They’d just spent a few days enjoying the luxury of my parent’s pool and I sensed Elyse’s reticence involved more than just the temperature.

Cottage life involves a rugged wildness, an embracing of nature in all its glory and horrors.  On the day Dan and I arrived here, I had been walking through the muck of our beach, picking up sticks and leaves, clearing the sandy path and then swam out into the deep.  I felt a tingling between my big toe and as I treaded water on my back, I held out my foot to take a look.  There was a slimy black thing.  At first, I thought it was a leaf, but then, as it shimmied to the bottom of my foot, I could see it was no such thing and I proceeded to remove it, which I did with some difficulty.  If you ever happen to get a leech on your foot, for future reference, look for the small end of its body – that’s where its mouth and main sucker is located – then gently use your finger to lift the sucker to the side, thereby ensuring its tiny jaws do not remain lodged into your flesh.  I had no such issues but was certainly put off by the incident.  I asked our new neighbours on both sides, “Hey, have you noticed leeches around here?”  Both sets were surprised.

“I’ve been coming here my whole life,” said a woman with grown children, “and I’ve maybe ever had two.”

“Nope! None over here.  I guess it’s just at your leech beach!” another man teased me.

Well, I’m glad I got my leech experience out of the way, and even if there’s more, now I know what to do.

But what can I see right now, as I write this.  I see my children catching fish with their father, one right after the other, off the end of our dock.  Just beyond, the two loons, the true owners of this lake, are gliding, diving down for their breakfast.  I see an entire glass window filled with waves; their lapping seems almost to reach my feet from where I’m perched above.  The waves stretch far across to the shore on the other side where they are greeted by trees lining the shoreline and thick up over the hilly terrain that reminds me of a roller coaster ride.  Even on an overcast day, brightness lights up the periphery of my workspace.  On days when the skies and the water are clear, it’s hard to tell the lake from the sky, the reflection a heavenly mirage.  Frogs croak, the loons croon – their eerie calls echoing into the night – blue herons fly overhead while the crows caw out in their raspy voices.  The air around here is thick with dew and I often think this is what fresh smells like.

Someone’s fish just got away.

The pines and the birch branches on our piece of land are blowing, swaying in the wind, the leaves high above rustling, irrespective of whether I’m here or not.  But bearing witness to this all, it’s quite something.

 

 

Forget Normal: a case for the MFA

Normal life.  What does that even mean anymore?  Did such a thing ever exist or perhaps the term has become as outdated as ‘normal families’ and ‘normal children’ has for me.

Normal life would suggest a pattern of specific behaviours.  I do ‘x’ and then I do ‘y’ and then I do ‘z’.  Lately my life has looked more like: SJgahhjkgSA$#@IFS(F?US?J0u8472.

Not much of a pattern, more of a free-for-all, more like one of my computer passwords.

Going from being a ‘normal family’ to redefining what that means and looks like, to accepting ‘normal family’ encompasses a whole variety of situations – or rather that a ‘normal prototypical family’ doesn’t really exist – helped me make one of the biggest mental shifts of my life.  If I didn’t have to be normal and my family didn’t have to be normal then that opened the door for a whole host of other exciting avenues.

I’m not knocking normal, rather I’m opening the door to the great unknown and saying, “why not go in here?”  I’ve become rather fond of wild places, of the great unknown, of showing up at houses with appealing entrances.

And so I dived headfirst into my Masters program.  You know when you have a great idea and you get really excited about it, and maybe even mull over the possibility for years and wait for the timing to be just right and then that thing you wanted, you are ACCEPTED, you GET IN and IT’S HAPPENING.  Then you defer for a year, because life isn’t quite right, and then it’s here, that thing you really wanted and YOU’RE DOING IT.  I’m struck by that moment when it arrives, the momentous occasion of going from dream to reality.  But I’ll skip to the point.  The doing is tedious.  The doing is hard.  The doing is work.  No matter how much I like the dreaming, the doing is the fun part.  And so my former ‘normal life’ as a mom who wants to write is no longer.  I wrote before now because I wanted to, and for many years with urgency, but now I HAVE to write.  Not that this is the judge and ruler of my behaviour, but we are literally spending thousands of dollars for me to do so.  Money talks!  Money talks!  Now I am part of a writing community.  Now I’m in writing groups with editors and published authors who are looking to me to hear what I have to say.  Soon I will be face-to-face with agents and publishers.  There’s no time for remembering what normal used to look like, this is my new normal.  The glittery, dazzling literary world.  I feel like I have been knocking on the door for years, and somebody finally let me in and is showing me the way.

A writing program, such as the MFA, is a writer’s dream not just because of its focus on the craft, but because of the writers themselves!  The people!  I am so fascinated by my fellow classmates.  The cliché, in this case, is so true: every one of them has a story to tell.  And that’s why they’re here, beside me, engaging in the normal task of writing in the extraordinary setting of the MFA.

Things will never be the same.  This notion, this idea, comes up over and over in my memoir, a repeating theme, but over time, through my transformational journey of understanding what it is to become the parent to a child with Down syndrome, with much self-reflection, the tone of that messaging changes.  Things will never be the same and I wouldn’t want them to be.

Change, for me, has become a mark of growth.  How much more could my life possibly change over the next two years of this Master’s program?  Who knows? Chances are, at some point, I will settle into some kind of neat and tidy routine.  For a while.  Then the world will tilt, and I’ll have to stumble back onto my feet again.  But our world is constantly spinning, we only think we’re standing still.  Our sure-footedness is the illusion.

Our ‘new normal’ after the pandemic may not look like our ‘old normal’, but can we use this as an opportunity to change something maybe we didn’t like about our ‘old normal’?  Can we find the silver linings?  Can we step one foot in front of the other and knock down that door we’ve been eyeing.  You should know that Elyse, my seven-year-old daughter, never hesitates when it comes to knocking on strangers’ doors.  Ringing their doorbells, too.  She wishes every day were Halloween and so she makes it so, by declaration and by ignoring our cries of protestation.  Unfortunately, it isn’t always enough to declare our wishes, we need to take action, step through the threshold, fully commit to our objectives, and often we need others on board.  And timing.  Halloween only works one day of the year.

Living life is like turning the pages of a book; once you’ve experienced the story, you can’t unread it, it’s there inside of you.  There is no going back.  Nothing will ever be the same.  You can flag a passage, return to highlight your favourite lines, but ultimately the story doesn’t change.  You have to pick up a new book for the story to continue.

I’m somewhere past my title page, floating in a sea of ideas that I will shape, with time, into a sculpture of ice.  This endeavour of becoming makes me wildly happy.

I will leave you with a vision of my ‘normal life’ stranded on an iceberg, floating gloriously far away from me out to sea.  I’m in a speedboat with the people who matter and my new writer friends, heading in the other direction, and I don’t look back.

What Would Happen?

What would happen if you followed your dreams?

 What would happen if you followed not just your dreams, but that little voice in your head, the one you want to ignore because it completely throws the balance of your life into chaos; that voice with the cord that attaches itself all the way down to your heart.  And when that heartstring is pulled, there is no ignoring its song because it’s playing your tune, the tune of who you truly are.

What would happen if your baby was born with Down syndrome and that caused you to question many long-held beliefs that had you standing on shaky ground.  Would you then look around at the people standing next to you anew, with a startling clarity?  Would you live your life differently, follow a different path?  Maybe.

What would happen next?  Well, your baby would be born and you would be a mother or father, of course.  Personally, I have never really embraced the term ‘special needs mom’, but if that floats your boat, you do you.

You would research the proper use of language to be able to use it correctly with your own child.  Was it ‘Down syndrome’ or ‘Down’s syndrome’?  A person with Down syndrome (lower case ‘s’) is the correctly spelling and usage in North America, while in the UK, Down’s syndrome spelled with an apostrophe is the norm.  You would read and you would learn and, something new – or perhaps, not new, just reimagined – you would write.  You would write a blog and one day – today! – you would have been writing that blog for almost nine years, because you started when your first born came along as a way to keep in touch with family far away.

Then what if that blog became something more to you?  What if that blog became a story you needed to tell the world?  What if you wrote a newspaper article, just one.  Just one measly article – what could it hurt?  And what if the rush from that one published measly article and your hope to help create a more just society for your daughter would then inspire you to write more, to keep going, to dig deeper, to settle right into advocacy work.  And what if then, you joined a board of a local Down syndrome association and you met families, many wonderful families, who have children with Down syndrome, families you may never have been fortunate enough to have met otherwise, but they didn’t really have a regular place to meet – so what if you set that up?  What if you coordinated a meeting place and what if you showed up there, who else might you meet?  And what other stories would be told?  Many.  And what if those stories filled your head and some danced for joy and others sank with sorrow into a sea of tears that needed to overflow onto the page?  What if you could write about…all of this.

What would happen if you looked for a memoir on the bookstore shelf written by a mother who had a child with Down syndrome…but there were none, well, when you dug deeper, there were a few, but none quite as young or Canadian or as uniquely…you.  None with your story to tell.  Well then.

What if, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, you began to write your story down.  What if your story were to unfold before your very eyes as you devoured books on disability and memoir.  What if you read one hundred books a year, for three years in a row, mostly memoir – would you know how to write your own then?

What if you could receive an education by doing, by living, and by reading voraciously?  What would happen if you threw in every ounce of emotion you ever felt (leaving room for the emotions of the reader: pro tip), and let it simmer for a while, for a few years and then when you were in the exact right place in your life, which is to say, pregnant and planning to move, which is to say – right in the middle of it – you were to write that book, the story of receiving a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome with your daughter?

And during the process of writing a memoir, what if you were to learn something?  About storytelling, and time management, and publication, and copy editing, and narrative arc and plot and weaving in themes and cutting out crap.  What if you were to learn something that could be useful to others beyond the obvious of getting that book about Down syndrome out into the word?  What if you could find your voice.

What if, in the process of writing your memoir, you dreamed up a whole new career for yourself.  What would happen if writing became more than therapy, if it became your lifeblood?

Just what might happen if you decided to take writing seriously?  You couldn’t do that, could you.  That might be too selfish, play too directly into your deepest desires – or could you?  Well, if you keep writing, if you work hard at it, you might just face a whole lot of rejection, and then you might get published in a magazine or two, and you might see more of your name online and in print, and one day, (hopefully soon), you will see your book published, the one that took you three years to write.  And by that point you may very well think of yourself as a writer.

You might decide that while writing is writing and writing is everything, that money and making a living is important too.  You might become an editor on the side and of course, given your background and inclinations, you might consider furthering your qualifications and continuing your education to better be able to teach writing.  You might then consider getting your Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction, because you’ve always wanted to do your Masters, you love education, and while you’re waiting to do that, because your children are still growing up, why not travel the world with them?  You never know what could happen, so better plan that trip fast.  What if your travel agent should tragically pass away, would that thrust you into action?  It did for me.

And what would happen, if you decided that you love to write so much you’d like to attend a writer’s retreat?  Let me rephrase that with the truth.  You want to go to a writer’s retreat so that you can learn how to run your own.  Then what would happen if you just went ahead and ran your own writer’s retreat anyway?  Would anybody come?  Would anybody care?  In other words, if you build it, would they come?  And would you come into contact with more wonderful writers?  Would you have a chance to share new viewpoints and explore the world through the eyes of these dazzling women?  You would.

Then what would happen if you wanted to keep your retreat going.  If running a writer’s retreat became an important way to connect with others and use your skills as a teacher and a learner and a writer.  What would happen if you one day envisioned hosting retreats of your own, in your very own special place?

Then one day, what would happen if the world as you knew it fell apart.  If all sense of normalcy was erased.  Would you crumple to the floor and refuse to get up?  That would be understandable, if that’s where you needed to lie.  And some days you do.  You lay there motionless, watching the world pass you by.

But what if you held onto hope, and let the heartstring pull and listened hard to your own inner music?  Might you remember your retreat, and the second book you are going to write and the MFA program you got accepted into and the people who are counting on you?  Even if no one is counting on you, what would happen if you rooted for yourself?  Became your own biggest fan?  You’re #1 – go me!  What would happen if the cheers in your head became louder than all the noise of the outside world?  Not in denial, but in defiance and with reverence to all that you are and can be.

What if you thought about buying your family a pool with the money from all the cancelled plans of the summer, but then instead you thought, no, I want to buy a cottage. What if that would cost you everything you had, but would bring you closer to the people you loved?  To the nature and the water you worshipped?  To following your dreams and dancing to the tune of your heartstring.

Would you listen?

I think I just did.