Moving blog sites

I moved everything else -- might as well upgrade the blog quarters too. Have migrated all of my old posts from here to:

http://cateinbc.wordpress.com/

(Wave when you show up?)

The ferry in the moonlight

I had a really magical weekend, with the longest first date ever. Very much about letting what was in front of us unfold.

The plan was for me to pick M up at the ferry late afternoon, to have a walk and some food, and then for me to drive him back for he las crossing.

(damn, my key I use mos is NO WORKING -- I spilled coffee bu hough i was okay

compuer OFF

Recursive random

I have one reader on this blog (that I'm aware of) that I haven't had any contact with in some other context. I like this. It's about the level of OUT THERE ness i'm comfortable with ;-). Thanks for delurking, Donigan.

So this is going to be random in response to your comments on my random.

A country nobody ever paid attention to before ... try Slovakia; lived there for seven years in the 90s, and everyone thought I was either in Slovenia, Yugoslavia, or somewhere in the Baltic or the Balkans. Oddly, Bratislava is about 25 miles from Vienna, on the same river. You could try there.

7 years? Interesting. I love this mystical mythical hidden country idea. Although the guy I had the longest-first-date-with-ever on the weekend grew up in Moldavia. Definition by what it is not (not romania, not ukraine). Like my friend from Montenegro.

I think there might be more DOGS in slovenia than in Iceland. And dogs are not the friends of cyclist.

What is a slut in the Victorian sense?

A bad housekeeper. A woman of questionable virtue because DIRTY.

Isn't internet dating kind of dangerous? What's wrong with readings, cafes, and nice bars?

It's pretty isomorphic -- it's what people do now, so it's what you do to meet a pool of single people. It's how I met F, and my friend Shay, and other people whom I dated brieflyYou get a good sense of who a person is from how they communicate online or on the phone before you meet them, and for the most part, you meet them in public. . I realize as I write that that I've violated my own "only in public" principle for the last two dates, by picking them up at the ferry, but we'd talked on the phone and I had their professional credentials.

It's always interesting to me that it has this reputation of "danger" -- IME, no more so than someone you meet in real life. When I think about it, I had more scary experiences with drunk people I knew in my late teens/early 20s than with people I've come to know online in one way or another.

As for readings and the like, see upcoming post on the poet I met at a reading a few months ago.

What is a CMM community?

"CMM" is the shorthand for the communication theory I work with -- coordinated management of meaning. The work that my mentor (the one who is sick) started. The community is the gang of us who were taught by him and who are carrying on his work.

Random random random

1. Can I just say how annoyed I am that Iceland is so much in the news because of the economic collapse, all when I was quietly plotting to go off to a country nobody ever paid any attention to ever before?

2. I bought my first pair of gardening gloves ever today. I still have no clue what it means to do yard maintenance, but my little yard is a jungle. Also, there are dandelion fluffs in my kitchen.

3. There seems to be a tall ship out in Semiahmoo Bay.

4. I can't figure out how to make my camera do what I want it to do, so I can't capture any meaningful colour in sunsets. Is it churlish to think that the very nice camera F gave me for my birthday isn't the one I would prefer?

5. I've been hanging my organic white cotton sheets on the line, and they smell AMAZING. Unfortunately, they also now have some sort of clothesline schmutz on them. Does it make me a slut in the Victorian sense to put them on my bed anyway?

6. I've been on (counting) five internet first dates since I moved here. One lunatic whose profile I should have read more critically before I drove to town to meet him, one philosophy prof who will become a friend, one pissy former physicist I thought might be interesting but who didn't deal at ALL well with my trying to change subsequent plans, one guy who was promising but became clingy rilly rilly fast, and one guy I like but who has revealed to me that yes, it is WAY possible for someone to be far more driven by the carnal than I am. A girl could get discouraged. What on earth does tomorrow, with the Russian guitar-maker, hold?

7. In all of this, as I sit knitting a sweater that's at my edge of knitting competence, thinking about the work with the CMM community and so much else I have in front of me, I'm realizing I pretty much have everything I need. It's a remarkably sweet spot.

Ducklings (and #300)

My friend Paula asked me if I'd started to establish community out here. Not really, unless you count my shouting "SHUT UP" at the ceaselessly yapping dog behind me yesterday as a way of connecting to the neighbours. I do feel like I have enough people in the region to be able to scare up someone to do something with if my need to be alone wanes, but for the moment, the combination of recovering from such a busy time and the amount of connectivity I have via phone/wifi pretty much fills all of the space I have right now.

I'm trying to make sense of all of the different strands of work, and in some ways, it feels like I am really living two or three lives, even more than when I was doing my phd and working. A pile of Toronto-based client work, an enormous amount of energy right now in the CMM sphere, and then this untended BC-based project. Emails slurping in constantly, with new leaps in the conversation before even I -- multitasking queen of the universe -- can tend to them.

I had an experience about 12 years ago that's kind of a metaphor for how I feel about my work these days... I had gone to Regina for a work meeting, and I had a long stretch of empty time before my flight left. There is not really a whole lot to do in Regina on a spring day ("you could go to the Mountie museum," suggested the visitor person), so I chose to go walk around the provincial legislature building. (Experiencing it geekily as a shrine to Tommy Douglas).

So there I was, walking around the sparkling white leg building, through winding roads with little lakes and trees, and I came across this little family of squawking ducklings. They'd run out of this lake/pond and hopped down a fairly high curb, and couldn't get back up. They kept hurtling themselves against it but couldn't hop up, couldn't get back to the water.

So of course I decided I needed to help. I scootched down to try to pick one of them up... and he slithered away. Hand clench -- slither. Clutch - slither. The little ducklings were hopping all around, squawking, as I repeatedly tried to grab them and found the edge of feathers and then empty air.

I was starting to get frustrated and worried (and I looked like a crazy person, hopping all around), and another woman walked up. She instantly assessed what I was trying to do, bent down and scooped up five of them at once.

:-|

I fluttered around behind her, finally caught one more, and we returned them to the pond and their oblivious mother.

Yesterday, I felt like the competent duckling-grabber... today, not so much.

(And PS -- this is blog post #300... possibly the most consistent thing I've ever done, writing-wise. And now that I don't have someone in my immediate life to process my days with, sometimes a really useful place to work out what I'm trying to do. Waving at my few consistent readers -- appreciate all of you ;-)).

Grace II

Yesterday was a day of Travel Unpleasantness. I was traveling back from TO to BC, and everything minor that could go wrong did. I left in a torrential downpour, and my cab navigated sheets of water pouring off the gardiner and axel-high floods on the lakeshore. The first plane was broken, then there was a gate change, gnarly children, delays. I ended up with a squishy middle seat next to a trembling vodka-sucking man because a family with tiny children had been split up and I gave the mom and baby my seat. My little seatback tv didn't work. I lost my debit card, at a time that my bank account holds ALL MY WORLDLY goods, in the form of the proceeds from my loft sale. My online community was having a meltdown, a kind of aftermath of an intense-supporting-someone time that sort of ... dissolved... in a kind of unsatisfactory way.

And. I had a transforming day. I was working up quite a head of irritability when we were sitting on the hot tarmac waiting for fuel, and I decided that instead of aimlessly flicking through podcasts and knitting grumpily, I should read a chapter that KP had written for our book, on CMM as a spiritual practice.

The piece is magnificent, and it instantly elevated me. K was exploring our transforming communication work as "spiritual" practice, through a very personal reflection of identifying moments of grace through the aftermath of BP's cancer diagnosis. It shunted me immediately to my higher self-concept as "person who seeks complexity and can therefore metabolize complications easily," and I was able to relax into the rest of the trip... and toast my arrival with some ahi tuna and a glass of chardonnay down at the waterfront.

I'm happy to be back here, and things seem so much more possible.

Yearning

Last day in TO for a while. It was a busy errand day (waxing/polishing/haircut/colour/coffee with kat/late lunch with B) kind of day, punctuated by torrential rain, navigated mostly on my bike, until B took pity on me and drove me home.

Then it was a puttery early evening, laundry, packing, cleaning my wee place so I can leave it for 5 weeks. And while I was cleaning and poking about, Josh Ritter came on my itunes. All of the songs from Animal Years, which I so associate with my sojourn in portland three and a half years ago, sitting in the coffee crutch coffee shop beavering away on my human development knowledge area, trying to make meaning of my shifts in identity.

There was such a YEARNING in that music, especially Here at the Right Time. It fixed itself on F, but in some ways, the free floating anxiety I've had as long as I can remember has been counterpointed by a free-floating yearning. I felt it again today, in this music, and couldn't even figure out what I was yearning FOR. I remember once buying a card that had a fragment of a poem on it -- I think sappho -- I yearn and I seek (google is a help here: kai` poðh'w kai` ma'omai -- I yearn and I seek). I think I bought this years ago, while I was still with B; thought about sending it when I was adoring K; ended up, I think, sending it to someone I had a mad online flirtation with that didn't sustain into actual meeting. But it's something I've been carrying for so long that I know it doesn't really have a lot to do with F. There are things we did together that I keenly feel the absence of, and aspects of who we were together that I'll always miss, but the real heart of it is losing the *possibility* of intimacy... and today, I think I'm sad that I've lost sight of myself in a way as a hopeful person about that.

Renee pointed this out, and I think in some ways it's true -- building myself the perfect transitional life where I try to balance and bridge my grounded, open west coast self with my dynamic, busy, successful TO self, where I plan trips to africa and iceland, co-edit books and position myself as part of a broad theoretical community -- all of these are things I want, AND they are tropes for a life structure to essentially compartmentalize and fragment intimacy, to close off the likelihood of meeting someone whose day to day can fold around mine. I can't quite figure out if this is a substitution that I'm not truly comfortable with, or whether it's genuinely grabbing a brass ring of claiming full life. And of course, it's both. Some days the ersatz nature of it has a stronger aftertaste than anything else. Which, maybe, means it's time to go back to BC.

Pages

Nearing the end of my first sojourn in TO in my new place, and I really do love this perch up in the sky, this 15th floor nest with the amazing sunsets.

I had dinner with Shay the other night, and I brought her up here to see it, and she crowed about the cosiness. It is cosy. I like it. It's pretty tiny, but it doesn't have that sense of echoing, untapped vastness that my loft did. And I don't think I'll ever want to live in a place ever again that doesn't have access to the outside -- even the little balcony here makes a world of difference.

I left my loft in good shape, with flowers for the incoming girls, as I posted before.



I feel a tiny bit wistful about it, but I've really taken to this condo life. I like having a concierge, I like feeling far away from the ground and its many noises, but still being in touching distance of shops, NICE restaurants, plush gelato, good theatre, should I want it. I like the pool and the gym and the sauna, even if I don't use them. I like having 15 flights of stairs to walk up to try to force off a tiny bit of the plumpness that's taken over in the high moving, high stress time.

There are a lot of milestones here as I finish up my move and hie myself off out west for august. I went to Pages today, for the last time, I think. It's closing at the end of August. It's funny -- it was never my favourite bookstore, exactly, but it always made me feel *smarter*. I bought stuff there that I aspired to read, that made me think, rather than tripe.

And over the past 25 years, I've bought an endless supply of notebooks there. I always loved these Clairefontaine ones with the plaidish covers -- again, talismans of hope that I'd write something, do something, make something meaningful, worth recording. Tracey was the one who introduced me to Pages and to these notebooks, and it's a funny little synchronicity that so many of the journals and notebooks I threw away last week in my first purge of all of that stuff were these books.

It doesn't make me wistful, exactly -- although I don't know who else would be such a meticulous buyer of cultural theory, the tables of books that made me think and aspire. But it does feel like another closing point, another click pointing me to the recognition that any aspirations I have aren't really nested here, anymore. Like the realization that I didn't have a single qualm tossing my high school yearbooks down the chute, or unloading a whole bunch of these notebooks. They were me then, moment in time that don't mean much in the preservation. I know what I'm drawing on and taking with me, and holding onto them is more of a weight than an anchor.

I did buy one thing today that I hope will push me forward -- an uncategorizable book called The Importance of Being Iceland. A book that has the inexplicable symbol on the cover. My hare-brained plan to hie myself off there next year needs some kind of shape, and maybe I really need to start to learn something about it. Read in bed for a while instead of yacking online.

Here with you

Surreally, I find myself in Kansas City yet again, talking my way through workshops and other conversations about the future of the communication theory I work in with my compadres, at the tail end of my school's national summer session.

Tucked up in one of the Westin truly heavenly beds, mid-afternoon, instead of running. Listening to one Laurie Anderson's Here with you, a short piece that slows me down and stretches time for me. I'm really really tired after these weeks of moving and emotion of so many different species, but elevated at the same time by the conversations. Months and years of accumulated stories, word in word with one of the people with whom I can truly be the Cate I most aspire to, trying to map a path for the next few months that lets me enact this scholar and world-changing self.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the fact that I am a "serious" person. I don't know why I feel so compelled to label myself that way, but maybe it's something about being intentional about carving out a purposeful life. There's more to be revealed there.

3.5 years

At YYZ once more, bizarrely bleary eyed, considering that it’s nearly 1pm. I really need to improve my sleep hygiene with these time zone issues – stayed up waaaaaay too late talking to Mr. Victoria and then watching the last three episodes of season 1 of Damages.

My loft sale closes today, and even as I’m conscious that there are two young women having a big emotional moment when they unlock that door for the first time, I’m feeling pretty detached from the whole thing. Maybe it’s the effect of the endless bloody tedious steps of this move – I was still tossing and organizing and making decisions about stuff on Tuesday and Wednesday (what the EFF could still be there after all of these moves? Books to donate, a fridge and freezer crammed full of stuff, expensive Tupperware filled with rice & flour, a few things under the bathroom sink, the cd rack bolted to the wall that B decided she wanted, etc.). Or maybe it’s just that the loft really was a transitional zone between my divorce and my future life, and it was time to move on.

This space did bracket my relationship with F, as embedded with possibilities and hopes in the front end, scene of dusty sleepless nights and those fleeting moments of half-asleep recognition that things with F were never even sewn tightly enough together to be frayed, knowing the inevitable in that hypnogogic zone of freefall.

Lots of facing of self, finding of feet in the slap slap on the cork floors, encountering simultaneously the Cate who wanted to live in a pretty unfettered way and realizing how much the chaos and noise of the market agitated me. Facing self as a time-compressed person against Kat’s creative all night explorations.

The best aspect of those 3.5 years was Kat, in fact – loving reminder to slow the hell down and notice things, enjoy my quirks, let in the music (and the Indian Jinx-be-gone potion). Also finding Jess, the hairdresser who really found my hair. The worst – well, the facing of all of the angst, although it was also the scene of facing it down and learning to hold it more loosely, with more humour. Really entering my phd and owning it and all it could mean.

I did a final sweep last night of the place, leaving a few eccentric items behind that I hope won’t annoy the new girls – a couple of mops, some lightbulbs, mango gelato and packaged smoked salmon in the freezer. A box of latex gloves that I acquired from a paramedic friend who had a vision of me as somewhat more inclined to random hookups than I am. (Her vicarious hopes, I guess). I also left some flowers and a friendly note wishing them well – though my gut is that buying an open concept loft as a young couple (especially one with two damn much outside noise) is probably a Mistake. (Cynic, I am).

So that scene is faded, and I have my perch in the sky with the inky north west sunsets, and my cottage by the sea, and a pretty strong sense of how I’m navigating the world solo. Missing F from time to time – especially in TO – but every moment of felt loss is infused with immediate reminders of the painful, always-chafing bits. Realizing my time with him and my time in this space left me with a sense of myself as a serious person with lots to do, but also such a strong need to intimately connect, be playful, seize it all.

Not a bad thing to take away from those three and a half years in that space.

YVR -- YYZ -- MCI -- YYZ -- YVR

At airport, heading back to TO. Thinking about the paradox of my life, general and overall happiness and contentment mixed with immediate crankiness. High auditory sensitivity because of hormones, lack of sleep, and wanting to pinch the guy whose hiking boots are going SCHLUMP SCHLUMP SCHLUMP, while reveling a little bit in the iphone-captured photo of my windy, chilly seawall walk last night. I'm going to miss my little house.

Sometimes it feels

as though so much of what I've collected in my life led me to this little house. I don't even remember acquiring this -- I found it in a box of photos -- and it's a bit twee for anywhere else I've ever lived. But it fits this corner perfectly.

Dusk

I've been trying to walk or run the WR seawall every day. Am finding a rhythm where, on the evenings I'm home, I go out around 830 for an hour or so. On a cooler non-holiday night, the seawall is almost empty, the tide is high, the sky pink. I really feel calmer and more peaceful than I ever remember.

Cautionary icons

I’m not sure why I’ve been so non-posty since I got here. I’m happy, so not feeling all reflecty-angsty, but I’ve also been relatively solo, so not full of Amusing Stories. Just me, liking my little house, liking what it does for me, relaxed and feeling like life is ripe. Duck’s back, water, about most things.

It is odd living in a town that feels like I’m visiting it for so many reasons. WR is very white, and the average demographic is downright elderly. I venture out into the town itself to buy food, to buy gelato and eat it on the seawall, to use the landscape as my own sprinting/breathing/striding/riding platform. There’s a tall hill behind my house that I can march purposely up, strengthening legs, and a seawall to run along when it’s not thronged with moseyers. In some ways, the town and the people blur for me, and it’s not that different from living in the country – I orient myself to my view of the water, my sweet house, the hills or road under my feet or tires, google maps to figure out how to get elsewhere, my people in the computer.

One of the effects of this has been to test my mettle on what I can do on my own. There’s been a lot of Assembling required in this move, flat ikea boxes that pop up into bookshelves, bedroom furniture, a little table to trap my keys and glasses at the door so I don’t lose them for good. Too many of the instructions for my furniture started out with a little drawing of the sad man with the aching back and broken pieces of wood around him, much happier when he has a little friend to help him out. Not hard to find symbolism in that.



Nor hard to find symbolism in one of those pieces being the building of my own bed, after I got home from a pleasant but uninspiring online date the other night. Determination, stacks of books, a lot of swearing, especially when I dropped the box spring into the room at large, taking out my alarm clock permanently. But I got it together, along with the dresser and nightstand, my ridiculous snow-white duvet cover,



inordinately proud of myself for figuring out the things that in my previous life have belonged to my competent brother in law, or butch and handy ex. Just me, creating the space that is ineffably soothing, ineffably promising.

Fireworks

I had a puttery canada day, after having french toast and bacon on my deck. Recreating the most perfect breakfast I ever had anywhere, in Queenstown New Zealand in 1996. Then some work, and an abortive bike ride (didn't realize until I was 5 miles out that I'd forgotten my helmet), then more work, then a really miserable run (every step a plod, leavened only by concentrating on the month's old Canada Reads discussions that highlighted The Book of Negroes, which I just read and was utterly immersed in). Then, after shaking the peaches of the tree of plenty of fish, took myself out for dinner on the deck of my local seafood shack. Was gifted with a sweet server named Lizzie who encouraged me to stay until the fireworks. So I had a second glass of wine and did.

And thought about my dad, who loved fireworks, along with amusement parks and freaks, and F, who didn't let us break up just before the holidays partly because he didn't want to think about watching the New Year's Eve fireworks off the space needle by himself. (Not, without ME, mind you, but by himself). And instead of feeling wistful, I was just noting. People of my past, me on my own, decent and unspectacular fireworks, people in couples and families, and me, just fine. My dinner, my engrossing Ian McEwan novel, the sweet young server. The residue of the pink sky over the water. All just fine. Maybe for the first time ever.

To be honest

I'm happy. Despite the fatigue, the yappy dog, and the swamp-moss mold dripping from the shelves in my fetid fridge filled with bacterially exploded salmon (nice treat to come back to), I really love being in BC. I cannot state sharply enough how much my chest fills when I see the sea as a part of everyday life.

I'm having a kayak lesson in the morning with some dude from the internet, and I took great joy in being all Organized and Competent and putting my racks on the car myself. If I can load the boat on my own... well, that will be a whole new level.

I'll let Billy Collins speak for me

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Billy Collins

Maybe it's the weather

But I'm finding that my little way-up-high perch in Toronto is giving me the same kind of fresh aspect and sense of possibilities that I had in my borrowed space in pdx 3 years ago. No hills on the edges, but discovering a new neighbourhood is feeling good. I do miss the scruffy uncertainty of the market -- the guy chasing another guy down the street yelling "he's a peeping tom!", the unexpected interpretive dance in the street behind Kat as she sang On the Highwire at Graffiti's, the bird lady with her odd little tiny-wheeled bicycle and careful costumes, the flakes of coffee beans settling in your hair when Moonbean was roasting. Here it's a little sterile, a lot yuppie, very full of couples. But being this high above gives me a sense of breathing space I didn't have from the 4th floor.

Very conscious that doing the things that are hard *always* gives me energy in the end -- so really not understanding why I handle the stress of doing it so very very badly. Renee commented that I was as tense about going to Africa as I was about this move, and that turned out to be magnificent. Now to somehow be heedful of that.

Off to a family wedding, feeling a little bereft to be dressing up without someone to twirl for. Beginning to think about the concept of going on a date again. Not as hopeful about that as I might have been three years ago -- but edging into it.

The horse you're on

We had the third session of our course today, and just like last time, a participant said something to me I had such a hard time processing. I couldn't even remember this woman's name, and she came up to me at the break and said, "I enjoy you so much -- and I wanted to tell you, you remind me of -- or rather, my daughter reminds me of you." Then she proceeded to tell me about her 10 year old daughter, and how unusual and bright and connected and *energetic* she was, how she drew the best energy from what was around her. Her name is Rachel, this daughter, and L said that she recently said to her, "mom, you have to ride the horse you're riding. Fight the duel you're dueling."

I found this delightful... and it also smacked me like a paradox. Several participants in this course have given me this kind of feedback, this "you make everything seem possible" kind of feedback. In really amazing, astonishing terms. And yet, I feel like my way of collaborating with my colleagues has been strangled at times, I feel tired so often and not particularly energized or insightful, and I feel like I've wandered through my weeks feeling bleak and bereft. So often on the verge of tears, or beyond frustrated, unable to find the rhythm with the people I'm supposed to be close to.

It's such a weird paradox, and echoes so much in my life -- that I have these full, loving, rich, powerful relationships with people who are at arms' length, but that people in my intimate space get my full, prickly, scratchy, tiresome, tiring self. Especially right now, when I'm playing out the complaints and pains of this move that would normally be inside the partner space on so many people. When I played out the devaluing I was feeling with F, the knotted dissatisfaction in being angry when I wasn't getting what I needed with "safer" people. I don't know how to bring these things together.

I am trying to hear the wisdom offered by this 10 year old. To ride the horse I'm riding. To remind myself of the joy of this move, not the fatigue and endless, ENDLESS difficulty of logistics, not to feel exasperated and angry when people don't see the rawness of it. To be grateful for those who do, and to surpass it. To revel in the opportunity of a year of shivasana, instead of feeling resentful and angry that this is so different than my pdx sojourn three years ago, when I left two casual lovers behind in TO, was full of anticipation about my phd work, and had the opening up of the connection with F flickering at me. I have somehow absorbed a story that there isn't much ahead of me... and I need to look at the horse that's moving and really grab this for the adventure that it is.

I think it just hit me

that locals will expect me to be, well, local. I'm on my way back to TO, and I had a set-to with the shuttle woman. The phone woman told me 6:15, and she came at 6:00 and was grumpy about it, then she didn't take credit cards, or an out of province cheque. All of my stress over the last couple of moving/not sleeping days bubbled out.

Yesterday was hard. Receiving furniture, trying to unpack as much as possible, F delivering my kayak and other stuff, such tension and sadness between us, not knowing how to say anything that wouldn't just lead to mis-steps. Work, travels, family and a strangled goodbye. Then D&F visiting, warmth and casual presence. Then more unpacking, and calling F to try to have the conversation I'd hoped for. And being able to have it, shifting the sadness from wound to the seaweed at the edge of the tidezone, liminal and forlorn.

Before bed, finishing unpacking the kitchen, hanging one picture in the bedroom, trying to do another above the fireplace, but realizing it was really time to stop when I hit concrete with my drill and was just making a mess. Staggered into bed.

Today, stressed, time-zoned, no energy for going back to TO and all of its work gabble. Need a day of sleep. Tuesday?

Planes. A path that will become familiar, I think. I don't even know yet if I am supposed to transfer my car reg to BC, but if so, I think I'll get a vanity plate. YVR*YYZ. And a local chequing account.

Saltwater Random

I'm here, heading into my third night. I'm simultaneously grounded and floaty since I got here, noticing things in an unlinked way, not feeling very shape-ful of writing. So, random.



1. The first thing I did when I got here was to unload my car. The second was to walk down to the water and take a picture of my feet on the edge. And yet, it only occurred to me this afternoon that this water I'm looking at when I wake up, when I go to sleep, is saltwater. Inland girl indeed.



2. The most delightful present F ever gave me was a swiss watch he picked up on impulse in the Geneva airport. It suited me, he was thinking of me, it's made me happy for more than 2 years. Today, just before he comes to do the dreaded exchange-of-stuff ritual, it stopped.

3. I think that bump of land I see through the haze across from me is Saturna. Or Mayne. Not sure. I think I can see the south tip of Galiano, my old friend, as well.

4. I will never, ever want for fish and chips. I went for a walk along Marine drive today, and there were at least 20 shops.

5. I've been reading this book, called A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman. She's not really my type, and she's of a much different life-shaped-by-the-needs-of-marriage-and-kids-never-felt-passion genre, but it's a good book to signal my own year by the sea. Kind of creates the possibility that being pretty much solo for four full seasons can be rich.

6. That vanished, blown up plane is haunting my dreams.

7. I was feeling ebullient until I had 3 hours of work phone calls today. And my furniture came but couldn't make it up the street so has to be parceled out. Then I felt all flattened. Not sure if it's because now I'm *here* and not traveling, or because of the prospect of seeing F tomorrow and all that stirs up, or not having my own shampoo, or the weird dissonance of being in two places at once and not having a rhythm yet. Just noticing.

8. Not sure why I thought I live a life where an organic snow white cotton duvet cover makes any sense at all, but I truly love the way it looks in my wee, multi-windowed sage and white bedroom.

9. I can see the sunset from my bed. Note to self: add box spring to bed order so bed is high enough.

10. Yes, White Rock is full of septuagenarians and older. I have never seen so many "Veteran" license plates in one place. Clearly the saratoga of the north, divided between young women on marine drive in bikinis and flip flops and white haired ladies with narrow shoulders valiantly pushing their rolling walkers.

There's a feeling you get

When Linda and I did a little road trip down the california coast from the bay area to santa barbara a couple of years ago, she had this amazing ability to slow time down. "Tell me all the fun things we did," she'd ask, as we drove along. And we'd replay: first we stopped at that place with the bridge and took pictures, then we stopped at Andrew Molera beach and walked along..." Etc. It was cementing and gratifying, reliving the moments in recursive waves as we were creating more.

That's what yesterday felt like for me -- just about every moment memorable, and the in-between moments sweet savoring of what went just before.

It was one of my favourite days ever. I packed up in banff, went for french toast, had a little chat with the waiter about the best place to stop for a short hike. Took back the pants I'd bought the day before because a snap had pulled out and they promised to repair and mail. Drove off with the sunroof open, intending to go back to Louise and do the around-the-lake hike. Instead, on impulse, I pulled off the transcanada onto the Bow Valley parkway, which also said "to lake louise," and found myself in a gorgeous canyon. Paused for a wapiti on the side of the road, rolled along more slowly, savoring the peaks and the trees. Loved my car some more. Then again, on impulse, pulled off at what I thought was a lookout -- Castleview Lookout I think it was called -- and then realized it was a short, perfect hike. 3.7 km up, through the perfect blend of forest and openness, rocky snowy ranges off to the west, a soaring "castle" of rock above. Glorious sun.



I paused for a bit at the top, ate a nutty bar thingy, and laid in the sun. When I'd arrived, a couple of other hikers had just climbed down to a lower ledge. I was taken with the idea of scrambling down a bit, though I had a moment of trepidation about doing it on my own. I was itching to get my feet into the rocks, to feel the hand grip. I looked over the edge, saw that there were two ledges, and realized that if I fell the worst that would happen would be some scrapes and bruises. So I lowered myself over, scrambled down about 15 feet, admired the different view, then pulled myself back up. Short taste of bliss, promise to self that the mountain hiking I love isn't dependent on anyone else.

Down skipping, sweaty and off to Louise for lunch. Pause to try to assist a rueful cyclist with a shredded tire -- not a speck of space in my car, alas, and no service on the i-phone. Louise, bookstore, lunch, car keys left in bookstore and returned by frantic bookseller before I noticed they were gone.

Then, onto the pass. Truly the most breathtaking driving I've ever done. Car perfect, nimble, responsive, awe at the blend of engineering and the stunning, stunning mountains. Curves hugged, all passes perfect, fast enough to feel the road but always in control. Going across a bridge (Kicking Horse River, maybe?) I literally welled up with a moment of awe -- and giggled out loud simultaneously.

There's a lot of construction on the transcanada between Lake Louise and Salmon Arm, and there was a fair bit of stopping. But I drove with the sunroof and windows open most of the way, music, sometimes Kat's amazing cd, construction dust coming in with the warm air, perfectly happy.

The last bit of the drive to kamloops was tiring -- sore from the hike, weary -- but it was joyful to discover how glorious the interior is. There's an untouched vocabulary for me -- what exactly is each region? where does the okanagan start? what are the names of those mountains? what's that river? is that a salmon cannery? Realizing that "belvedere castle" is just french for "castle lookout."

Last night, a crappy but sufficient Howard Johnson's in Kamloops. Today, my new home.

Grace

I've been kind of obsessed with the idea of grace lately. I have this very high consciousness that I am not very graceful. Not physically -- I trip, spill, break wineglasses, I'm always finding mysterious bruises on my body -- and not emotionally. I feel things strongly and I squall, I overflow my sides, I confront, I agitate. I never just quietly muse on why I'm feeling something so strongly, it bursts out in a big Ruth Fisher-type blurt, and then I get more insight into it and am able to calm down. Because of this, I've become a good repairer -- and I need to be in relationships with people who are willing to withstand the moments of agitation and then to repair.

I hate this in myself. I don't use this word lightly. I put a lot of energy into wanting to be more graceful, to have more poise, to not show reaction in every line. In some ways, I've learned this in work -- but maybe I'm just much more familiar with the things that come up in most of my work situations, can tuck them into meaningful contexts more readily. I have a fair bit of poise when I'm in front of a group, and I have a certain kind of amused self-deprecation for the moments when it's not smooth. But I've certainly been triggered a lot in the early part of this year in some work situations, some places where the detachment I usually practice has been shifted.

This all feels particularly poignant right now, because my own personal avatar of grace -- my mentor and guide, bp -- is ill. He's like a constellation of grace, a complex, familiar, trustworthy enabler of presence and poise. I was talking about this with Pamela the other day -- we talk about grace a lot, and she said something that gave me pause. She thinks that I am graceful, in that I keep "showing up" to what's there. It's an interesting reframing -- grace as presence and openness, not perfect poise. The conversation really entwined for me with the work I've been doing with the nurses in one of the toronto hospitals -- where one of the things they surfaced is that the best of nursing is "staying when you want to go."

I haven't always stayed when I wanted to go -- not even last week when I got so upset with my not-listening friends for reasons that I can't even really explain now. But it's really resonating for me as a frame, as a way to hold grace as a possibility for myself.

I was meditating on this while I was hiking yesterday. I had been warned that the trail that I was going to do might have snow on it, but I'd decided to try it anyway, to just be careful. I've hiked mountain trails that had lurking snow before, and mostly it's just wet.



Yesterday was a bit different -- it was a pretty short trail -- about 3.5 km each way, switchbacks up a short mountain -- but it started out very steep, and the snow became deep quickly. For the most part I could hover on top without sinking in, so I kept going.



I was really conscious of my thought process as I slogged along. First, the usual resentment when a trail starts so steeply -- remembering the much more gradual long entries to the Cuillin on Skye, where your body adjusts to the pack and the movement before there's real climbing. And a bit of a nagging question about whether it really was safe to hike alone in the snow, especially in grumpy bear late spring time. And then a big tension about whether turning around would be because it truly wasn't safe, and should I waste this opportunity, or was I being stupid and eastern and ignoring genuine danger, or was I being stupid and eastern to even think it was real danger, or would I be turning around just because it was unpleasant?

As I stepped into the wet snow, the phrase "staying when you want to go" clicked in for me. And I realized that it IS in the doing of the difficult that I find the grace in myself. One thing that F recognized and valued in me -- that I do things that I find hard -- and thinking about how this frame had created "affordances," to use the annoying theoretical term. That because he did witness this about me, it freed me to imagine things like moving west without a real plan, and learning to fix my bike so I can ride alone through iceland. For a few minutes, as I felt this, I experienced deep grief. Panting with the effort of moving upward through the snow, suffused with sadness about losing someone who saw this and fostered this in me. And then, for a moment, watching myself stumbling, falling, post-holing and getting wet, sliding on my butt to get my stuck leg out, I saw this as grace. This sprawling kitten-on-the-ice upward hike *was* grace, it was finding in myself the meaning and drive for it. Upward because I wanted to be above the trees, wanted to see a peak, wanted to feel the air. Upward for that moment that made the drive across the plains, the agita of leaving behind community, the misshapen fear worth it. Where I am going, the sense that there is always something more ahead.

This is another thing P and I talked about -- the mid-life waves of deflation when you think you might have had your bursts of creativity, of new love, of creating possibilities, when you worry that there might not be more. I have had a lot of... deflated anxiety about this, particularly around Romance. Thinking that it might be "too late" to co-create life with someone. Not exactly because of age, but because of an awareness of the fullness of what's been lived, and not being sure how this can mesh with someone else's fullness. The smaller pool of available people when the ones ahead are sliding into assured old age together and the ones behind are still really looking for that "this is it" relationship.

As I stumbled up the hill, I felt real exhilaration. Rhythm in the arrhythmia, trust that my feet would hold me. And, I knew the moment where I needed to turn around, an open swell with snow at least 4 feet deep, where I post-holed up to my thighs 4 steps in a row. The moment where I knew, yeah, even enthusiasm isn't going to carry me forward here, and I really could end up with a broken leg and become bear bait.

So I went down, noted what I'm sure was a bear print in the snow, skipped and tripped down the part where the snow thinned. Went up the little extra trail to the gorgeous view, where I had 15 minutes alone on a platform looking at the lake. Grace.

When my people came west

they didn't come any further than this, and they only stayed for a couple of summers. My mom was a chambermaid at the Banff Springs Hotel for two summers when she was in college; my sister has a fantastic picture of her and her friend Rosemary (they called each other "Sis") in very early 60s trenchcoats and careful curls, hitchhiking their way to Banff.



I had dinner at the hotel tonight, in pilgrimage. It was mediocre and expensive, as I expected, though the duck confit appetizer was good, and I was surrounded by seniors on coach trips. (Of course, I'm still kinda on eastern time, so I was eating mighty early). But I enjoyed every minute of it.

It was a good day. After spending a really nice evening with my remarkable cousin in Calgary, I kind of took the day off, drove just 90 minutes, wandered banff picking up things like a much-needed new wallet and a pair of hiking pants, then went for a snowy hike in Lake Louise. Will write separately of the hike -- but realized, when I had a chance to slow down, that this trip has been amazingly restorative. I'm loving my country, and my car, and the sense of driving too fast toward the mountains, my friend Kat's voice serenading me and out the open sunroof.

Also

according to my cousin, those oil thingies are called "pump jacks," and they're used for extracting whatever can be got from an aging well. I see a metaphor in this.

Addendum:

Sodium sulfate is mainly used for the manufacture of detergents and in the Kraft process of paper pulping. About two-thirds of the world's production is from mirabilite, the natural mineral form of the decahydrate, and the remainder from by-products of chemical processes such as hydrochloric acid production.

First glimpse

of the rockies, between strathmore and calgary, just a faint shadow through the clouds. I thought it would be a "short" day today, but i still logged 714 km, and I'm not at my cousin's just yet -- pit stop in a starbucks to try to finish the nagging unfinished piece of work that is today's version of the big Unfinished credits that have followed me throughout my life. (There's always one thing I have to push to its limits; in this case, it's a report on some focus groups we did at one of the hospitals).

Renee asked me yesterday what I think about when I drive. It's not very profound. I think about driving, and the little friendly competition the A4 with BC plates and I had where we both hovered at 160 km/h throughout western saskatchewan, and why the guys on harleys had to block both lanes just to be contrary outside calgary, and how the landscape in western SK and eastern AB off the transcanada looks so prosperous, and what exactly those driller thingies that look like this:



are called. (Oil well pump, google image tells me).

And what they are mining near Chaplin, SK, that looks like snow:



(Sodium sulphate, apparently, whatever that's used for).

And I think about the month's worth of Sunday Edition podcasts that drifted through the car, and whether I should stop and try to buy a phone for my new place at Staples in Swift Current, and whether they sell wine in grocery stores in AB, and whether the Safeway in MooseJaw has a starbucks (it does), and whether my tummy hurts because of the eggs or the bread in my breakfast panini.

And of course, I think about my life, and the cyclists on the transcanada (all heading east; 2 sets of m/f couples and one solo man with a little trailer), and what I will have to do to get ready for a real pilgrimage on my bike, and all of the books I've read about women traveling solo on bikes, from Dervla Murphy to Josie Dew. Thinking about how the travel problem-solving even at the simplest level -- where to get a coffee -- will be so magnified, and wondering what I can mine to get the nerve.

I'm tired of driving, so tomorrow will be a short drive to Banff. I booked a room for tomorrow night there, and will go for a hike tomorrow afternoon. The mountains, finally.

There are no buffalo

in north dakota anymore, but I did stop in Buffalo, ND to get gas. I left Fargo with a too-hot americano in hand and didn't really pay attention to the gas gauge; by the time I did, it was inching down, and as soon as Fargo was three sips behind me, it was pretty much farmland on both sides of the road. I developed that itchy worry about how long I could keep driving with the quarter tank, trying to calculate distances to likely nodes of services with the shifting "your tank will take you this far" number on my dashboard. It's such a weird little tension when driving, the desire to keep going and not to get off the road, wanting to push it, and the surging anxiety about the Unknown and possible empty miles.

So I pulled off at an exit that had the little gas pump icon, and followed it down a flat winding road, to a completely empty, dusty town. I spotted some people loading folding chairs onto a truck and asked them where the gas station was. I'd missed it completely -- just a couple of pumps, one diesel, one not, with no sign at all, deep ruts. Friendly woman, non-premium fuel that I tossed into the audi recklessly.

A drive this long is so intense and intimate, such a sway between Big Expansive Thoughts about the Big Expansive Landscape and all of the people in them, and the intense moments where you get locked into a tractor beam of relationship with the big wide truck in front of you that is stuck behind a small car, with not-quite-enough room to get between them. This becomes the Total Focus for what seems like an indefinite, forever period of time. And then, you pass, and suddenly you're in the landscape again. Moments where the google-approved border crossing turns out to be a Bad Idea because of a static long truck lineup, and setting off to look for another maybe-border unmarked on the map seems both just sensible and anxiety provoking.

I didn't expect to find North Dakota so stunning -- yes, the flat plains that look remarkably like where I grew up, especially around the cottage, the familiar memory of running in blazing open-sky heat, where the one tree 2 km down the road was a sought after oasis for the 5 seconds of shade as I passed under. This part was familiar, but the flow of rolling hills, green green green was surprising, somehow. High plains, stunning. Beside the road, high water still, sloughs that are probably not always full, the residue of the only-dimly-noticed floods of last month. The sparkling blue of inland lakes in the west that is so different from Ontario's dark green-blue, or the grey of the greats.

So many stories hinted at -- the class years gouged into the hills near Kenmare (state champs in 68!), the empty shells of farmhouses, the first oil drill I noticed as I was nearing the border. I stopped in the town of Kenmare, lured by the promise of the Historic Mill! Sunny saturday afternoon, completely empty town square. The choo choo cafe closed down, another empty store next to it, one woman carrying a take-out container across the square, a couple of rough looking red-tanned guys muttering about how it was too nice a day to work heading into the windowless Beer Bob's bar.

As soon as I crossed into Saskatchewan, the landscape was radically different -- people doing saturday things in pickups, recreation areas, a different kind of farmland, dustier, populated. Dusty not-green golf courses with holes on crazy lumps of land, golf carts perched on top. Driving more slowly, the opened up throttle on the empty land of ND far behind me, just trying to stay alert enough to pass sensibly, grateful for the zoom of the german engine but perhaps a little too scottish in my recklessness.

The day, to moose jaw, 924 km altogether, and a tatty hotel because the slightly more cheerful ones were full or available only to smokers, spying on the Vanier Grad of overheated parents in suits, girls in Fancy Prom-type gowns, one accessorized by a weeks old baby. Dairy queen chocolate dipped cone, sleep. Momentary reflection on how there is no time to reflect when you're busy driving and noticing. Wondering where I'm going to.

No Cream Cheese

I don't notice my blood sugar while I'm driving until it's too late, sometimes. I waited too long for lunch today, and pulled off just before St. Paul to a Chipotle. I realized I looked deranged when I kept saying "no cream cheese" to my burrito maker when I was trying to say "no cheese or sour cream" -- and then couldn't figure out which of the spouts contained iced tea. (To be fair, it was the unlabeled samovar-like thing that would have held *water* in Canada).

It was 850 km worth of almost-prairie today, all straight road, sunny blue clouds punctuated by an occasional sudden storm, pickups and cars with boat trailers, small sparkling lakes. Big blonde people in the Chili's in Fargo where I ate dinner.

I had an email from F noting that a long drive gives you decompression time with no obligations, no need to interact in any way you don't want to. I think I need that... and I think my life really doesn't lend itself to that. I was listening to a piece on CBC the other day about how with the current array of technology, you can't lose yourself in a foreign city the way we did even five years ago -- the stream of tweets and fbook and wifi means that you are as hooked into other people as anywhere else. I've kind of arranged this trip on purpose to be relational -- and it's got an accidental but perfect symmetry where my stays started with my childhood home, then the familiar bed at P's, then the familiar-but-new space of my first real-life meeting with the miraculous Amy. Then tonight, a never-before seen town (though of course, it looks like every other edge of a mid-size american city, though the full double rainbow in the parking lot of the Target was pretty unique to the northern mid-west). A funnel from the known to the new. And, a need to respond to an email about work, and one about a requisite signature for my rented place in TO, and a call about community response to bp's illness, and a nagging realization that I haven't responded to stuff about the orphans. Hard to lose myself when I have destinations, no time to just roll free, the wifi hook.

I think that tomorrow and sunday I'll just undo it all and try for that decompression. Being with the people who care about me at the beginning of this trip was invaluable... and now I think I need to just drive until I'm done, and not talk. Hurt and hope are still washing over me as I go, punctuated with license plate bingo, gratitude, the voice of david sedaris, the two or three songs iconic of this trip so far: AC Newman's Ten or Twelve, Arcade Fire's Keep the Car Running, Alison Kraus & Robert Plant's Gone Gone Gone.

One warm line

I'm in chicago, being thoroughly taken care of by my dear friend pamela, who just made me a bowl of buttery salty popcorn and left me to read for a while. So far on this trip I've slept in already familiar beds, tracing a one known line. 857 km is barely a dent in the map. But I did cover a stretch of michigan I don't remember seeing before, scrubby with intense cloudbursts and many lurking speedcops. Today was mostly listening to david sedaris, being a little dreamy, driving in as relaxed a way as you can when the cargo is shifting uneasily behind you and you're wondering if the bike is puncturing a painting and the clouds are opening up violently and unexpectedly. I realize I still find toll roads weirdly exotic, attached to the kind of gleeful excitement I felt when I first started driving the NYS thruway to in the Pursuit of Romance.

Threaded through the day of mundane drive is an undercurrent of sorrow about bp's health. P showed me a dvd interview of her mom one of her students did shortly before her mom died, and we cycled again through the "so vibrant one minute, gone six months later" sense of shock. I was thinking that this past few months is the first time I think I've really been conscious of aging. Not for any tangible or "rational" reason, but just a sensation that there are only so many five year chunks in one's life, and I may have edged toward having fewer left than behind me. The thwarted interlude with the married poet was another chink in this sense -- the idea that after a certain point, the potential for new connections and sustained intimacy becomes thinner. And then if you find someone you become truly enmeshed with... well, the possible narratives that could fan out have the horrible potential to look like bp's -- life that becomes truly joyful, then dashed to the ground by a turncoat body.

Despite this undertow, I *am* feeling increasingly hopeful as I head west. The chokingly humid run with beth this morning reminded me of what I want to leave behind -- something cloying, something sticky, the churn of leftover stories -- and what I want to run toward.

Day 1

My sister told me that any road trip needs to begin with a song played loudly, and that your journey should take shape around it. I decided to goofily play Canada's Really Big as I ping-ponged my way out of the recklessly parked cars in the market. For a few minutes, I contemplated rewriting the plan and actually staying completely within Canada instead of my half-and-half itinerary, just for the romantic satisfaction of rounding the lake and threading across the prairies. But I opted for the friends-as-stops plan as written, and pointed myself toward the QEW.

It doesn't feel Significant yet, especially the first 55 km that I traced so many times going to rochester, before the turn off in Hamilton. The familiarity of the 401 wasn't overshadowed by the shiny new stores on Manning road (more coffee, a bottle of wine for dinner).

Visited my mom briefly, then to B&J's where I did a conference call on my BC project before my mother came for dinner. They gifted me with a new burr coffee grinder as a housewarming present, which was bloody nice -- and still the distance isn't real. 387 km out of 4922 -- barely a divot in the map. Starting to find a rhythm of audiobooks, new music and the radio. And realizing just how much my car likes to urge itself forward in 6th. So far avoided the many speedtraps, but I can't imagine this trend continuing through the revenue-thirsty interstates.

License plates spotted: Manitoba, Quebec, NY, NJ, OH, MI, MO, CO, MN.

Scratchy

F's term for people bickering and at odds is "scratchy." And I seem to be scratchy with everyone in my world at all these days. It's trite to talk about the stress of moving, but it's real -- and here I am again, on the brink of some adventure, and instead of feeling graceful and brave about it, I've got my mouth open in a big yowl of anxiety and fret and sullen stompiness that I am alone in feeling this.

I have a slurry of emotions about this move and its magnitude, and somehow every moment of loss and fear that I've had has encrusted itself to this moment. And I have that dark inversion happening where I can't see the bright spots, can't stay focused on that image of the goat cheese and arugula salads and the ocean, can't hold it in the centre. I'm just agitated, sad, worried and -- oddly enough -- feeling abandoned, despite the fact that this loony move is my choice.

I think part of it is just the disorientation of watching three strangers drive off with all my stuff, and being experienced enough to know that the disgorging will mean weeks of not knowing where anything is, wandering around holding a single spoon and feeling its existential, dislocated angst. And part of it is a sort of constant inner dialogue about realizing I'm on my own and that the people I've imagined spending my life with are off on their own rides, just as beset as I am in different ways, but far away.

I'm also really conscious that the intensity of my physical presence when I'm scratchy can be so hard to digest that the people who are best able to support me are the ones at arm's length -- either the ones I talk to in small doses (thanks, Kat ;-)) or the ones at the streamlined end of a data line.

In real terms, it's been a extremely overwhelming week. Ian's funeral, and the waves of people who call me by a name I don't even recognize as my own anymore. Then the strange little interlude with the other Ian, the poet, and the sudden choking off of the effusive interest, fantasy burst before it even formed off the end of the bubble pipe. Then of course, the news about bp, which suffuses me with inarticulable sorrow and a kind of panic at losing my touchstone to grace. Trying to articulate my untethered feeling to my here-community, and finding myself so out of sync, a blast of angry agitation that is so much about feeling alone. Then the absurdity of believing that I could be light-hearted with someone, find a balm in the physical, with my young courier boy, when I'm feeling like this -- and our sunday afternoon date turning into "I've met someone else." And, ironically, his showing himself able to stay and talk about the intimacy of fear and death -- more digestible small bursts of me.

Me, scratchy, preaching so eloquently about embracing the uncertain and emergent to the learners in my course, drowning in so much abstract anxiety about what's in front that I can't pause to form any kind of appealing story of possibility. Pause, breathe.

One more

At the funeral the other day, Carol Anne comment that she didn't want to cry, because it wasn't "her place." Well, I could argue that -- she was Ian's caregiver, she's not close to her own parents, she's been part of that family for a long time. But I get the impulse, the desire to not put yourself in the centre of someone else's grief.

I'm feeling like that today. I got the news that bp is sick, has what is likely advanced bone cancer, unknown primary. I'm trying not to second guess prognosis, or to claim the grief and numbness. But I'm bitterly sad and worried, for him and his family and for me. His concepts have reshaped how I see myself, and how I aspire to engage with the world. He's not just a friend and mentor, but a meaning-maker in the best sense. A master of generative living. I feel an atavistic sense that if he isn't there as an avatar of generative presence, I will be less.

Anxiety

I have been reading Patricia Pearson's excellent and clever book about anxiety. It's illuminating. I'd come to realize in the past few years that much of what I'd thought of as "fear of X" in my life (insert any number of concepts here) was more of a free-floating anxiety. Among other gut-crackling observations, Pearson writes about phobias (like, fear of peas) as objects that can become totems for *all* of our fears. The woman who runs away from peas has found a convenient container for everything she can't handle.

When I was at Ian's funeral the other day, I was reflecting on how the ceremony of farewell to someone -- even sparely Catholic -- has taken on the power to be about all the accumulated loss in the world for me. About the person, yes, but also about generalized, blank, untethering loss. Of people, of potential. The more iconic the rituals, the more wrenching. On Tuesday, I was fairly placid -- until Gillian, after painstakingly pulling flowers out of the arrangement on the casket as directed, briefly fell into disintegrating sorrow. Then, plunged into all the loss and sadness I've had.

I have those moments as I'm packing and finding books or clothes that evoke stories, nodes of intimacy offered or grasped, still at bedtime when there is a gap where there used to be night-time calls with F I for almost the entire time I lived here. It's not the calls themselves, so much -- so often they were scratchy or unsatisfying -- it's the ritual of bidding goodnight to someone who cares about me as I turn my body over to the edgy, unpredictable dark of the night.

During all of my time with B, we had a constant conversation about the things I was afraid of, that she helped me avoid and manage. Unlocked doors, people vomiting, the turkey that harboured killer bacteria, being alone, fire, heights, people out of control, the maniac who would jump out of the bushes at women's only events, driving too fast, that the stranger offering us a ride on his sailboat in new zealand was going to kill us, clients wanting too much from me, thuggish boys who would beat us up, friends and their untold anxieties that played out in social weirdness. All dating back to my nightly prayers as a little girl that the bathtub wouldn't overflow (I thought the house would fill with water and I would drown), that the attic above me wouldn't burst into flame and crash me into a firey death. Pearson describes the spinning, the churn, the playing over and over of the same scripts that trap and paralyse and push your relationship with fear into the centre of any social dynamic.

It was really freeing for me to start recognizing that it wasn't the specifics I was afraid of, but that I always carried an abundance of anxiety that could fix itself to anything. A very small regime of drugs threw a muffling blanket over the constant threat of metaphorical flame. Now I can greet the anxiety as a somewhat reasonable character -- oh, I'm anxious, okay. Interesting. Rather than spin agonize repeat.

In this move, I'm starting to recognize sadness as having the same free-floating properties. Yes, I'm specifically sad about the loss of potential with F, sad about moving away from B, sad about regrets and moments I've had in my life where I haven't lived into my best self, where I've been self-absorbed and uncompromising in ways that freeze possibilities. I lift the sadness off a shelf with a fleece that triggers a memory of climbing on Skye, the drawings of Trixie the goat that B had made for me, a faded polaroid that falls out of a book of J&S&B topless on hanlan's point (where I stayed on the sand reading while they got on a stranger's boat). But I am learning to fondle the sadness a bit, shape it, put it away, recognize it as a reminder to settle into, value, feed the connections with the people and possibilities that actually surround me.

I just shoved a copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into an empty wine box, box #28 or so in the endless parade of "does this come to BC or stay here?" decisions I've had to make about practically everything I own. I've only sketched out the vaguest notion of what this life I'm going to have in BC will be -- the one where I might dip into Wittgenstein, cook with mindfully selected goat cheese and arugula, light candles scented with faux sea air. My life here, crammed into my 550 square feet hovering above the city, is a little clearer -- fast, money-earny, bursting with people and stories, cheap sushi on the grass in front of UHN with a client talking about care models, coffee thrown down the gullet.

The books at hand evoking the time in the eyrie in Portland, fusing words to F for the first time. Another sigh, another piece of tape RPPPPPPPPPPED across the top.

West is just a question posed, a hint of an echo of a desire. A suburb on the sea, not of anything in particular, just a house in which to be and write and find. A blank, with shadows of people I'm linked to on the edges.

I'm multi-phrenic at the best of times, but in the past days it's been Work Write Talk Knit Renee Pack Finish Blankie Pack Liz Pull out knitting Pack Drive Arrange Drink beer with B Work Pack Drink Vodka and Watermelon Ice on date with GB Ice Knee Pack Talk to Sister Pack. Bashed up against a funeral and three different sets of encounters with people I haven't seen for two decades. A reunion shooting itself at me one bb at a time. Lots to ponder there, torrents of different possible stories lived, unlived, untold, unexpected, foreseen, unseen. A possibility held out in the form of the enamoured poet from the pub the night I sold my loft, cross-purposes revealed when his ardour turned out to be of the cake having and eating variety. I'm not opposed to the cake-mouth-stuffing of course, but as with Neil the surreptitious foot fetishist, I like to know which part of me is being eyed lasciviously before agreeing to try to bend in that direction.

Life. Trying to grab onto just one piece of yarn that's mine.

Bossy

Renee told me to post on my blog so she can test the RSS feed.

We've had such a good weekend.

The end.

Wistful

My cousin's boyfriend did a FB status update about being bored. I don't know if I've ever been bored. Restless, impatient, frustrated, sleepy -- but not bored. I do do wistful though. And there is nothing more wistful than remembering back 17 years to a humid august night at the Michigan womyn's music festival, a field of women teary-eyed as Ferron sang the quintessential wistful dyke breakup song. Flash forward, dinner at my ex's house-that-used-to-be-mine, with my online friend who also used to be a lesbian but isn't any more, Ferron at my kitchen table because the woman who lived in my ex's basement after we split up brought her because her friends, the documentary film-makers, made a film about her. Talking to my dyke friends about what to wear on my first date with some man I met at a pub. Life don't clickety clack down a straight line track indeed.

I've been faithful

to the wee diary book for a week now, and I like the practice. But what I notice is that I can't think of what to write, and then I start to write and then POOF the spaces are filled up. And no backspacing.

My car is all nimble, and in it and with it I'm all nimble. I went to ikea today to get some outside furniture, certain that it would disappear seasonally if I waited. I wasn't sure if the chaise would fit in my car, and in fact, in the box, it didn't. But taking B's creative persistence about these things, and what F taught me about tying things down so they don't flap about, I ended up removing the chaise from the box, levering it and propping it up at an angle with two other boxes, and securing it with my kayak strap to the front passenger seat so it didn't whack my head off. And then I proceeded to shove six folding chairs, a folding table and several armloads of towels, sheets, pillows, a duvet etc. into the space. Then ably hopped up and reaffixed the bike rack to the roof, because it would have become a trajectory in that mess.

When I got home, first I ran off to give K a cheque for my new place I'm renting. Then I steeled myself with some fruit berry candies and managed to wrassle all of the furniture upstairs, hyperactive elevator doors be damned.

In the bath, I was reading Heather Malick, whose vitriol can run away with itself but who is often caustically funny. This is what I wanted to fit in the wee diary:

Trust me to enshallow my love. But I fell in love with France because of the sunlight hitting the Seine in a certain way as I sat at a café drinking table wine. As usual, I qualified my love and this is why I am not what they call a "fun" person. Perhaps the sun is glinting off the corpses of the two hundred Algerians tied up and dumped in the Seine to drwon in the riots of 1961, I thought. But I still fell in love.

Victoria and Nancy-Ann

Two women named Victoria and Nancy-Ann have bought my place. I am guessing these are not the names they use in the world. What a weird mix of euphoria, delight that it’s two women, relief that I can move on (and that I made a modest profit on the whole thing) – and sadness and wistfulness. Walking home from the pub, having a burger and one too many glasses of wine with B, totally happy -- then totally weepy and sad.

Seems inevitable, me with my complicated feelings. (The other day, Alan-in-Moonbean said to me “you know, you light up a room – you have that spark… and then you realize how the wheels are turning and you think, “that is one complicated woman”). Yeah, yeah. Always with the ebullience and the wistfulness.

But, that’s me. Celebrating selling my place by eating hamburgers with my ex at the pub I’ve only discovered in the last year, getting chatted up by a guy named Ian (what the hell IS my demographic, anyway?), fretting about reading in too many different and stupid places about how women “become invisible” in their 40s, trusting that the universe turns up what you need when you know how to ask for it. Trusting that the stance of abundance is the right one.

Example: I did this jiggery pokery trade with L for the lease on my car, content merely to not have the car on my plate anymore – and then she reflects on it and gives me an extra cheque. I decide what I’m comfortable with at the bottom line for my place, and the first offer is exactly that. I end up with $38K above what I paid for it 3 years ago, which is not too bloody bad for this economy.

Oh, and I love my car. But that will have to wait for some non-burbling time.

5 years

I was wandering around my neighbourhood today killing time while more viewers (probably #20 or so) looked at my place and decided not to fall in love with it, and I went into this quirky little store in the market that's kind of a bookstore, kind of a cooking-stuff store. I had the notion that I might buy something for my new kitchen. Instead I picked up this 5 year diary.

It's tiny -- doesn't give you much room for any day -- but I like the idea of the flow of days over time. I was thinking about how different I am today than I was 5 years ago, and all that's unexpected about my life right now. I was wondering of course what May 1, 2014 would look like. I can't imagine.

I've never been great at the every-day-discipline stuff, but I think 3 lines -- a gutenberg-era twitter space -- should be doable. Not quite sure *what* to capture, though. Food? Dreams? (Let's not even GO there, given the horrifyingly explicit electra dream I had last night involving my father and a flowered bathing cap). Sensations? One dominant thought?

Now I just need a really good PEN.

Rain run reset

Today I left my loft in viewer shape, did a focus group in a hospital @ 730 am, took my car for service (summer tires and vacuum, in prep for handing it over to Liz), took cab home in pouring rain, made phonecalls for car insurance and to book a flight for Renee to visit me in May. Hovered over my workspace to not leave even a fingerprint and designed and did slides for a meeting tomorrow, crammed myself into the pandemic anxiety of the crowded streetcar in chinatown , ran off to my tax person (owe too much), went to bank to get certified cheque for Audi, and am heading back to the hospital for another group.

Oh yeah. Then I have a date type thing. Distractions, possibilities. Hum. Unless of course Suzie's anxieties are valid and he's a Craigslist Killer. In which case... bye!

Myself at this station

Once when i got off the phone with my sister, F commented that I had a sort of nest of people who cared about me that he lacked. It was during one of the not infrequent weekends where the space between us seemed to conjure up violent and sudden storms, spring on the prairies -- and he dipped into a fairly rare moment of a kind of regret, noting the way I seemed to pass from hand to hand among warm configurations of people.

I think I've always known that, but deep in the heart of yearning for a lover, the emotional impression of people outside that centre is a pretty thin watermark. But in the last couple of weeks, I've really felt those hands in a new way. Suddenly I trust the constellations around me, feel anchored in them in a way I don't know if I ever have before.

When B and I broke up, I stumbled through an orbit that felt more like the breathless gravity of a black hole. The people around me were really holding me up -- D, Suzie, B, my online community, J&S, R, M -- the many people who gravely and patiently listened to me howl with angst, with fear, with deep sorrow, nodded and encouraged as I patched life together. Then, I gulped at them, wanted to feel like there was something mutual going on, but I was voracious and endlessly needy. That certainly got thinner, but it continued to stretch itself out as I strived to find my feet in work, meaning, writing.

Ending a nearly 3 year relationship with someone you've never lived with is obviously a massively different thing than stumbling in tears out of a 14 year relationship your life is scaffolded around. But even so, I'm bruised, I'm sad, I'm a little lonely. But my world, my night sky? It's complex and unbelievably profound. Multiple constellations, each one signaling love, caring, endurance. Beams of light in silico from my people across the continent, the ocean. Warm chaotic life around tables, food, music, arms around me. Dinner and narratives and hilarity and new lives. Just... all there, all in orbit, keeping me in gravitational pull.

If I flick back through this blog 3 years, I realize that I nested a lot of emerging identities in the push/pull with F. The passion pulled into being first by a Leonard Cohen song years before I met F that formed the underthrum. The StraightCate persona who could navigate and hold the cultural warmth of the dyke community and the hand-in-hand couple across a table, heels of hot boots tucked neatly under. The academic with purpose, drive. Work that comes from someplace bigger. And I think what I've realized is that I found a way to live into those stories that was enabled in the dance with F -- but not shaped by or limited to him. Recognizing that the emotional self of me isn't separate from those parts of me.

This week has been wearing. I flurried my way through decluttering, getting my place into the crisp template of desirable locale. LIsted it. Hoped to sell quickly, resigned myself wobbling hope and disappointment through my fingers like trying to carry too many wineglasses by their stems with every viewing. Fled the place while people tried to imagine themselves here. Planned the business life with D & J. Worked. Hit walls of fatigue. Felt the whiplash shock as every night at bed I faced again the complete disappearance of the person I'd processed my days with for 3 years. Found sleep, imaginative dreams. Launched new stories, a co-edited book, kayak lessons.Felt loved.

Pics

The slightly creepy, smoke-smelling guy with the excellent clothes who came to photograph my loft today left his reading glasses on my bed. He was the sort of fag who, at dinner parties, would definitely fall into some of the worst misogynistic comments about women and their Parts. He made comments about being scared of women, in a sort of mocking moue. I did not enjoy finding his glasses camouflaged on my duvet cover.

However, he took some excellent shots, and now my place is listed for the whole damn world to see.

I'll miss my cork floors and the smick smick noise they make under my bare feets.

Mango Gelato

When I was in BC last week, I think I was simultaneously clenched and open. I think it was kind of like that moment of paralysis that happens when you're scrambling on kind of scary rocks -- where you hang too tightly onto the ledge above you and have to force your fingers off painstakingly one by one, even as you know that as you step down that welled up sense of fear will just vanish. That paradox where I knew how damned sad I was, agitated with emotion, but still able to slow myself down to walk along the seawall (is it a seawall?) and eat a mango gelato.



I'm still hovering in that space a little bit, sped up emotion like having a birth induced. All happening faster, contractions more intense, eagerness to see that baby shot through with waves of pain. In this case, the baby seems to be full package life adventure. Since I got home late thursday night, dragging sadness and metallic exhaustion behind me, I've managed to visit with my sister, get a new iphone, accidentally buy a new car, deal with the recursive loop of problems in Uganda, toss an endless supply of unneeded stuff out of my place (from jigsaw puzzles to paper to clothes), meet with my real estate agent twice, get my place in shape for listing, have it photographed and listed, hang out with my slightly chaotic and sweetly loving chosen family (bosoms indeed), buy some outdoor furniture for my new place, decide NOT to buy a new place in TO but to rent... and do some much-needed work. Phew. My eyes are truly glazing over, but it's not manic energy -- just, putting the pieces in place for what comes next.

I'm heading out to buy some yarn to finish the blankie for paula's almost-here baby, and then to meet D at the gym -- and really, my bed is beckoning, despite the fact that it's 3:36 pm. But it's all okay. Really reminded of the amazing, supportive and loving people in my life with whom I'm pretty much able to be my best self, in all its complicated glory.