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Thursday, July 30, 2015

Breathing and Smiling

Remember that old joke?

The one about how you shouldn't judge a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes?

Because that way, when you judge them anyway, you'll be a mile away and you'll have their shoes.

I've been thinking about that old chestnut a lot lately in connection with my further experiments with a meditation practice I mentioned in an earlier post.

I picked the technique up from the book Reconciliation by Thich Nhat Hanh. (A dear friend sent me the book this winter, when she knew I was really struggling with depression.)

The meditation is simple:

Breathing in, I am aware of _______________________.
Breathing out, I smile at _______________________.

It can be used for mindfulness around anything – addictive behaviours, obsessive thoughts, one's mind and body.

It is a way of cultivating friendliness and joy, or, if that is a bit much to shoot for, acceptance and tolerance.

Some examples:

Breathing in, I am aware of my toes.
Breathing out, I smile at my toes.

Breathing in, I am aware of my hurt.
Breathing out, I smile at my hurt.

Breathing in, I am aware of my craving for sugar.
Breathing out, I smile at my craving for sugar.

Breathing in, I am aware of the sky.
Breathing out, I smile at the sky.

One of the most interesting things I am finding in this experiment is the large range of smiles I have inside of me: rueful, wistful, kind, bitter, fake, angry, hollow, joyful, giddy, pure, shaky, twisted, hopeful, hesitant, longing, passionate, contented, uncertain, wounded, smart-arsed, disappointed, smug, sleepy, hostile, gentle, sweet, down-to-earth and wholehearted smiles. I can feel their nuances playing across my face as I try smiling at many different thoughts, body parts, behaviours, things in the world around me.

Perhaps, if I get very brave, I will try doing this exercise in front of a mirror. 

I do this meditation as often as I remember to throughout the day. It doesn't take very long. Although the feelings it stirs up can be a bit overwhelming.

But I am full of those feelings anyway. And, in parallel with that old joke at the beginning of this post, now I'm also breathing and smiling.

Friday, July 24, 2015

Chainsawin'! Day 2

It's taken me a few days to write this post.

I wrote my Chainsawin'! Day 1 post on my phone during the evening after the first day of the course. At the end of the second day, I was so tired I just wanted to be able to drive home safely. I was so tired, I almost stopped by the side of the road to have a nap in the middle of my 50-minute drive home!

And it's been a very busy week – so much typesetting and also a family BBQ with some visiting relatives.

But I really do want to report on the second day of my Chainsaw course – so, better late than never!

Our second day was focused on falling trees.

Again, breakfast was at 8am and we got going pretty promptly after eating. We spent a little time in the classroom and then went out to the "simulators" to practice our notches and back-cuts.

A fellow participant practicing a notch in the "simulator"

I think these are my notches, but I can't really remember...


The weather was cool and grey. Around lunchtime, it POURED! We went inside and ate and the rain had slowed up by the time we were ready to go out into a stand of trees and fall trees for real.

Our instructor, Patrick, felled the first tree in a semi-clearing to make a bit more room in the hope that none of our trees would get hung up.

Then, each participant took a turn falling a tree – relatively big ones – maybe between 8-12 inches in diameter and 30-40 feet high. Once it was down, each tree needed to be limbed.

A fellow participant notching a tree.


I put down a spruce: notch, back-cut, hinge, pushed it over with my shoulder and stepped back into my escape zone. Then, the limbing. I had safety glasses, but I wished for a face mask as the chips flew up into my face while I took the limbs off the top side of the tree. The sides and bottom where easier and more comfortable to do. Limbing felt like it took forever, and I was very physically tired by the time it was done.

Tired and also exhilarated.

It was a really good course – thorough and a nice mix of hand-on and theoretical learning. And the food was awesome! And so was the company: I had great conversations with our volunteer hospitality co-ordinator, Anne, and the other participants in the course.

Good times.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

Chainsawin'! Day 1

End of Day 1 of my two day chainsaw course at the Harrison Lewis Centre in East Port l'Hébert.

It's 9:20 pm, twilight, and I'm sitting in my non-electrified cabin, looking out at the shoreline. It is beautiful here. 



I have a cabin to myself, which is lovely. So peaceful and quiet – it feels like home. Except of course, that I miss Salinger.

What a full day! Breakfast at 8 and a full morning of classroom stuff started at 8:30. Lots of safety rules and explanations about how chainsaws work and how they are to be maintained.

Then, out to the big pile of wood where we all donned chaps, ear protection, safety glasses and of course, our chainsaw boots and everybody got a chance to start a saw and buck up some wood – compression on the top, tension on the bottom, then the reverse and finally a bore cut.

The saw felt awkward to me at first. I'm very left-handed and the saw is a right-handed tool. Our instructor, Patrick, strongly recommended that I learn to use it right-handed in the interests of safety.

The adrenaline pumping through me, I made my first few cuts. When I enrolled in this course, I suspected that I would love using a chainsaw and I was so right!

Over the past couple of weeks, I've had several people warn me seriously about the dangers of using a chainsaw. I definitely have a healthy respect for the saw. However I feel that in time I will become a good chainsaw user and I'm excited by this prospect. While my first few cuts filled me with adrenaline, after four or five cuts, I could already begin to feel myself gaining confidence in my skills and relaxing into it.

We spent the evening sharpening our chains and chatting. Now it's early to bed for me as I expect I will be awake early in the morning (as usual) ready to enjoy the beautiful surroundings of the Harrison Lewis Centre, before we resume our work at 8 AM.

Friday, July 17, 2015

The things I saw the day my iPhone broke

I'm on vacation.

But with the tethered nature of western digital culture, sometimes it can be a little hard to tell.

I work freelance and despite having told all of my clients that I was going to be on vacation this week, some of them have continued to have urgent loose ends needing to be tied up. So, I've still been keeping an eye on my e-mail. And I've still been doing some work in the early mornings. (I'm spending most of my holiday hanging out with some of my YEFMs – young extended family members – and fortunately, they are late risers, leaving me time for work – and blogging.)

Truth is, I find it a little hard to let go of work. I know this is one of my challenges in life. Focusing on work is seductive because it is (almost always) safe territory for me. I enjoy it. I'm good at it. And it is the source of money and often, approval and appreciation.

These are not bad things. I feel very lucky that I have work that suits me so well. But it's important to be able to let go. And sometimes I struggle with that.

The gift of broken technology

Yesterday, I was given a gift. After one of my YEFMs and I set off for an outing, my iPhone broke. The screen turned to a bunch of horizontal lines and was unresponsive. I couldn't try a soft reset because the power button has been broken for months. Basically, its built-in obsolescence just kicked in with a vengeance.

It was awesome.

Instead of panicking and heading for the nearest wireless solutions store, my YEFM and I continued with our planned itinerary. First we went to the magic phone box at Luckett Vineyards to call my YEFM's mom. After a brief chat in which I asked her to spread the news to other family members that my phone was out of commission, my YEFM and I sat on the patio at Luckett's and drank lemonade and ate cake, soaking in the gorgeous view of the Gaspereau Valley on a breezy, fresh, sunny afternoon. We commented on how very lucky we felt to be enjoying such a luxurious treat.

Here, with brilliant serendipity, we ran into a friend of mine and I asked him if he could please send a message to a mutual friend of ours with whom I had arranged a beach play date for her youngster and my YEFM later that same day. I asked my chance-met friend to let her know that my phone was broken, but that we would be there! Who needs a smart phone? (Though I guess if my friends hadn't had theirs, that would have thrown a spanner in the works...)

Off to Blue Beach Fossil Museum to look at fossils and then whiz bang over to Kingsport Beach for our play date and supper at the Tides In canteen. We went for a long walk on the red muddy beach and saw more hermit crabs than I've ever seen at one time – dozens and dozens of them. Plus a live green crab and lots of little shrimpy-looking things.

My friend and I talked about feminism and work and life plans while the youngsters ran and splashed and smeared mud on themselves and one other. We all got into the excitement of spotting hermit crabs, picking them up and watching them curl themselves tight inside their shells with just the tips of their little, pink claws showing.

WE ALL GOT VERY MUDDY!

The kind young women working at the canteen gave us a couple of tubs of water to wash the worst of it off with. And then we all had ice cream. And said our farewells with hugs and smiles.

My YEFM and I had a scenic drive home as the sun was setting – particularly scenic because I wasn't 100% sure of my way back to our family's cottage from Kingsport and we ended up taking an inadvertent detour around Baxter's Harbour and Hall's Harbour. With sunset views of the Bay of Fundy, it was almost indecently pretty. Score another point for not having access to Google Maps, which would have pointed me to a shorter, more pragmatic and less picturesque route.

At the end of our drive, hot chocolate and a few hands of Snap! completed a very full day of which I have absolutely NO photographic evidence, but plenty of vivid memories.

Zero Consequences


And guess what? No clients were freaking out because they couldn't reach me. Family members were informed and relaxed. And I already had an auto-reply message set up to answer any incoming email.

I'll replace my phone later today. Realistically, I'm not prepared to live without one – but I'm tempted to "forget" it at home more often and have more fabulous, fully-present days like yesterday.


Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Troubled Thoughts and Nightmares

Every couple of weeks, I do a gig typesetting several pages of an independent arts and culture newspaper. Timelines are tight and content often becomes available in the middle of the night and has to be ready for the early morning, which means getting up in the wee small hours and doing some work.

Tonight is one of those nights.

Mostly, I find this gig pretty fun – the typesetting is right up my alley: intricate and detail-oriented. Sometimes, it feels a bit strange to get up in the middle of the night to work. Today, I had a long and busy day, with over 10 hours of work on various projects. (I'm getting ready to go on holiday at the end of the week, so there is a lot that needs to get done.)

At 9:30 this evening, I had worked through all of the available content for the paper and decided that I would go to bed and have a nap. With the amount of work left to do, I knew I would need to get up around 1:30 am to make my 4:30 am deadline. I find I work better after some sleep than after none.

So I went to bed – I brushed my teeth and followed all of my evening routines. I put the mosquito net over me to protect myself from beautiful July's seedy underbelly and went to sleep.

I woke up at 11:30 pm from the worst nightmare I believe I have ever had in my entire life. I won't go into too many details, but it was set on a magic island and involved a loop of repeated murders, suicides and infanticides. For good measure, sabotaged computer hard drives and giant, dead birds were also prominently featured.

There is no way to combine those things pleasantly — and my nightmare didn't even try.

What's up with that?

I don't usually have nightmares. At all. My dreams are usually extremely lovely, actually: whimsical, weird, funny and definitely comfortable and friendly. I am a frequent dreamer. I usually wake up from my dreams feeling highly amused and/or intrigued by the wonders of my subconscious mind.

This sudden plunge into the horrors feels like a wake up call. It forces me to look at the fact that I've been focusing my mental energy in dark places over the past several months. I've been letting my mind wander a lot of the time and it's been journeying in mostly unhappy and mean territory: thinking about mistakes I've made, feeling resentful about some of my recent experiences, writing imaginary hate mail, listing grievances.

I had been making a good effort to be mindful about how I was thinking over the winter and especially in the first few months of the year. I knew I was struggling with depression and tried to be really conscious about not feeding the beast with malignant thinking. I read a wonderful book by Thich Nhat Hanh which a dear friend gave to me. I was meditating on kindness and forgiveness. I started to see improvements in my mood. But as summer came in, I fell off the mindfulness wagon, right back into my old habits of anger and resentment.

My nightmare tonight felt like a signpost that said: "The high road is over that away. The view is much better over there."

I get the message, loud and clear (it was a very emphatic dream!) I'm getting back on track.

I choose mindfulness and compassion

To adapt a meditation from Thich Nhat Hanh:

Breathing in, I am aware of the memory of my nightmare.
Breathing out, I smile at the memory of my nightmare.
Breathing in, I am aware of my angry feelings.
Breathing out, I smile at my angry feelings.
Breathing in, I am aware of my resentments.
Breathing out, I smile at my resentments.
Breathing in, I am aware of my hurts.
Breathing out, I smile at my hurts.

It's amazing the impact of those four mindful breaths.

This is where I want my brain to be: free to fully appreciate the night sky, the warm summer days, all of the glorious pleasures of being alive, of being present, of letting my heart accept, forgive and be kind.

In closing, I must say thank you to that horrible, horrible nightmare for telling me something very important. Anger and resentment are powerless to make anything better. Especially the past. And the only person I am punishing with my dark thoughts — is me.

Breathing in, I am aware of myself.
Breathing out, I smile at myself.
Breathing in, I am aware of my mind.
Breathing out, I smile at my mind.
Breathing in, I am aware of my heart.
Breathing out, I smile at my heart.

And now, time for another catnap before more content is ready and the typesetting resumes.

Fingers crossed for a dreamless sleep!