Beginnings and Endings

I'm currently taking Firefly Creative Writing's online Coming Home to Writing course – for the second time. It's the kind of course that I could take an infinite number of times and ​I think I would ​get something more out of it each time.

In last week's class, our facilitator, Chris Kay Fraser, distributed her awesome Life C​ycle of Creative Projects. We discussed it as a class and ​I found it very interesting to see the many similar and different takes people have on the process. (If you're interested in exploring this yourself, I encourage you to take the class!)
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As a second-timer, I've seen the Life C​ycle before, but this time through, It led me ​in​to an epiphany about my process and about myself.

I hate beginnings and endings

The stuff in the middle is all cool. I love all the ideas and chaos and the processes of writing and editing. But I hate the fallow stage before a project and I hate the process of finishing a project and rendering it up to the world.

This holds true in my life as well. I love living my life and I don't mind tweaking things here and there, but starting and ending – jobs, relationships, homes – makes me feel crazy. Just ask anyone I've ever dated if the first two weeks were not stupidly insane and insanely stupid? So much so that many people have opted out after the first date or two​. (Or I have run like hell – anything to escape feeling so awkward).

Once I get over that initial ​hump, I don't do too badly, but getting in​to a relationship is hard – it stirs up so many difficult emotions.

And endings, well, I tend to drag those out – desperately postponing inevitable changes.

Given my life experiences, these tendencies make sense. My infancy was crappy, much of it spent in the hospital. Not a pleasant beginning. The first major ending I experienced was the break-up of my parents' marriage and the upheaval of ​our family when I was 7​.​ Also not fun.

So, my initial experiences with beginnings and endings were difficult. I was too young to make any sense of them, so instead I developed other strategies: a tendency to try to​ JUMP over beginnings and to DRAG out endings. My aversion to major transitions has led me to make some poor life decisions when my avoidance of beginnings or endings overruled my desire for what I wanted or muffled my understanding of what was right for me.

This feels like a challenging pattern to try to change.

Cultivating love and grace in beginnings and endings

I saw this meme on Facebook this week:*​

From https://www.flickr.com/photos/kaysha/9641391266/
​*Please note that according to fakebuddhaquotes.com,
this quote was not actually spoken by Buddha – it is adapted
from Jack Kornfield’s Buddha’s Little Instruction Book.​

It strikes me that I live pretty gently as long as I'm in the middle of things. But in beginnings, I fail to love (embrace, welcome) and during endings, I fail to have grace (I clutch, I balk).​

So here is work for me to do – learn how to relax into beginnings and endings. To cultivate more love and more grace. There are more beginnings coming (hopefully) and definitely more endings, (including the ​BIG ending: Death).

​It's never too soon or too late to work for internal changes that cultivate greater peace and open up more opportunities.

Woodpile Wisdom: 6 things I learned about woodpiles this winter

This was the first winter that I was in charge of my own woodpile. With my housemate turned into a mostly absentee landlord, ordering, stacking and burning the wood was down to me.

"Get six cords," my housemate told me.

"Six?" I thought. "Isn't that a lot?" And when it arrived, I thought it even louder: "SIX?!?! That's a lot of wood! I'll never burn all that! Surely we didn't burn six cords last winter!"

But I gamely stacked it all, with a little help from my friends.

The woodpile in all its glory last September/October.

Then I covered it with plastic sheeting and felt smugly ready for winter. 

What followed was the hardest, snowiest, coldest winter I had seen since I moved home in 2010 (which admittedly, is not a very long time – but it's also been the hardest, snowiest, coldest winter that people who have been here all along have seen since the early 90s).

Here is the woodpile now:

The ravaged March woodpile.

I learned many things about woodpiles this winter. Here is some of my accrued wisdom. I hope you will find it helpful.

1. Always shovel the snow away from your woodpile. It may seem like a lot of work, but it's worth it. Also, if your plastic sheeting reaches the ground, keep it free of snow or it will freeze to the ground and trap your wood.
2. You can't burn wood that is frozen into the ground. (See point #1)
3. If you are covering the pile with plastic sheeting or a tarp, do not leave gaps between the stacks, at least not at the top of the stacks. Ventilation is all well and good, but at the top of the pile, gaps must be bridged by the plastic/tarp and those bridges trap will trap snow, which will melt into water, that will turn to ice. It weighs the plastic down into the gaps, pulling the plastic off of the top of the pile from the edges in. 
4. Make your woodpile small enough that you can reach to clean snow off of the top. By the time I realized my well-ventilated pile was trapping snow and losing plastic coverage, there wasn't much I could do about it because my arms were too short to clear the centre of the pile.
5. Build strategically to shed snow – like a pyramid, high in the centre and sloping down to the outsides. 
6. Always get more than you think you need! With the bitterly cold temperatures this winter, I have been very glad to have all 6 of those cords! Thanks for the good advice, roomie!

Today, the temperature hit a high of +4 and I gladly went out and tried to sort out the woodpile. Some of it is still frozen to the ground, but I freed the trapped plastic sheeting and covered the side of the pile that was bare in the picture above. A couple of sunny days and it should all be dry and good to go. And that's good, because I'm expecting a few more chilly days before spring.