Less Crooked, Less Wooded

At the same time that I've been stressing quite a bit about this building project, things are moving forward. 

A little over a week ago, my dear friend who is an artist with a chainsaw came over and in about two hours felled six large trees – two dead and four living – all too close for comfort to the site for the house (especially with all of the big storms that we can expect to keep threatening the Atlantic coast). 

Two spruces felled meticulously right on top of each other.

The smaller spruce was riddled with ants. All the more reason to be glad that it's no longer towering over where the cabin will be! 

The spruce that got taken down by my compost pile was a giant. It's hard to count the rings exactly because the ones in the centre are so tiny, but my guesstimate is about 120 years. *bows head*

The giant on the ground.

There is quite a comfy spot to sit in the branches of the downed tree.

From the perch pictured just above, there is an excellent view of this crooked pine. We left this tree standing as it is obviously leaning dramatically AWAY from the site for the house and is highly unlikely to fall on top of it. 

Two steps forward and one step back: my clothesline had to be dismantled temporarily, as it was attached on one end to a maple tree that was leaning sharply toward the site for the cabin, a maple tree that can be seen here lying at feet of the other end of the clothesline. Installing the clothesline was my first DIY project on this land and it has been consistently useful;
I will miss it until it can be set up again.

Salinger was surprisingly unfazed by the changes. He seemed happy to be the conquerer of the newly felled trees, including the "clothesline maple" pictured here.

There is much more sunlight now in the Crooked Wood. It feels a bit odd, but I'm sure I'll get used to it – and I'll be especially glad to be less shaded during the brief winter days...

Last week was a hard one for me.

I felt really crappy about deciding to kill those beautiful trees. I didn't expect to feel that way because I didn't feel anywhere near as bad when we felled many more trees to bring in the driveway and the power lines. Not to mention all of the firewood I've burned to keep warm throughout my life, each chunk of which came from a beautiful, living tree and to be honest, I never really even thought about it...

Perhaps my overall state of mind, my anxiety about the build, is what made me feel so guilty and sad about these trees. Or maybe I felt so bad because I knew these trees. I've lived here for two summers now and those trees have been some of my closest neighbours.

They were beautiful. They were my elders. They were here first. And I had them removed because they were in my way and because I could. They grew here for sixty, eighty, a hundred+ years and then each came down in a matter of minutes.

And although we honoured and embraced them before they were felled, and although they will live on, becoming furniture and/or hugelkultur beds and/or firewood and/or beautiful decomposing logs and brush that will nourish this land and give life to other trees, to fungi, mosses and insects, I mourn them. (Their deaths have made me look at some tricky questions around my own sense of entitlement, but I think I'll save those thoughts for another blog post).

As things stand now, "Them's history," as my Nana would have said. Fortunately, I'm recovering from feeling guilty and sad about deciding to cut them down. I'm doing this – I'm making a permanent dwelling for myself on this piece of land and there is no point feeling bad about it. Since I'm going to do it anyway, it's better to do it with love, gratitude and celebration than with self-doubt and regret.

This attitude adjustment has arrived just in the nick of time: we're breaking ground today. 

Fresh start

I have posted on this blog at least once a month since 2013. But this winter, I hit a dry spell. I hit the wall. I had a number of ideas for blog posts, but the gravity of my mood kept bearing them to the ground before they could get from my brain to my fingers through the keyboard and out onto the Internet. 

I don't know about you, but I found this past winter extremely demoralizing. 

Between Trump and the rhetoric of division, constant reports of war and oppression, more symptoms of ongoing environmental collapse – ugh – it felt heavy. It felt horrible. 

It felt like the winter of "why bother"? And worse still "Why connect"? I could feel my circle shrink. Social media lost its appeal. For a couple of months, work and Netflix owned my soul. I wanted so desperately to escape.

• • •

And now here comes spring, both literally and metaphorically. 

For better and for worse, humans have an aptitude for bouncing back. Surprise, surprise, again and again, we turn out to be resilient enough for our lives, for this world and all of the ways in which we distort and devastate it. "Oh, so this is the way it is going to be now," we say to ourselves as we begin to adapt to whatever: the horrible news, heartbreak, health problems, loss of loved ones or work or money, and/or a deluge of loved ones, of work and money, healing, falling in love, exciting news – whatever the change, challenge or circumstance, no matter how hard it knocks us down, shocks us, knocks the wind from our sails, we struggle back to our feet and try – try to figure it out, to adjust, to decide: "What next? What now?"

Seeds sprouting on my window sill.
(In my low-rent toilet paper roll "jiffy pots".)

• • •

I biked to the Farmer's Market last Thursday.

It was snowing.

The world smelled the way it does when there is a summer rainstorm – you know that scent? It's unusual here at this time of year.

I wondered if there was a word for it and discovered there is: 

Petrichor (/ˈpɛtrᵻkɔər/) is the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil. The word is constructed from Greek πέτρα petra, meaning "stone", and ἰχώρ īchōr, the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology. (Wikipedia). 

Isn't that an amazing word (and concept)? The life energy of the gods falls upon stone. And creates a scent that is evocative and thrilling, that wakes us up to our passion and potential.

I feel it everywhere now. It's in the return of the sun, the flowers, the osprey. 

Shy daffodil.

It is the return of hope. 

Welcome back. 

Let's do wonderful things together.

Turning the corner

It was forecast to go down to 8 degrees Celsius last night. And judging from the temperature this morning, I believe it did.

But, I stayed comfortable despite my lack of a heat source. Last night, I gathered all of the blankets that I had taken off my bed about 6 weeks ago and spread them back on top. I closed all of the windows - except for Salinger's back door - and all of the skylights.

There was something very cozy about cuddling back under all of my blankets last night. And something even cozier about waking up this morning and staying in bed for a bit before getting up to make a hot cup of tea to drink in the brisk morning air. There is so much love and safety, as well as warmth, stored up in these blankets.

Left to right: "Nana's Ocean" (the quilt I completed for my grandmother in 2001), the quilt made for me by the mom of my best friend in grade 8, and "My Favourite Mistakes" (the first bed-sized quilt I ever completed, started in 1998 and completed in 2000). 

The forecast says it's going to go back to being 17 overnight for most of the next 10 days. So this was only a forerunner. But, along with the ever-shortening days, it's a warning that my time here for this summer is drawing to a close.

That's a melancholy feeling. My sweet, happy, quiet, mostly solitary, summer in the woods is almost over. In a month or so, I'll be moving back into my winter digs in town. 

I feel determined to build a winterized cabin here next summer so that next year I can stay. I'm not sure how I'm going to manage to do that. But then, I wasn't sure how I was going to manage to get my house moved or power and high speed internet hooked up this summer and it all came together, with the help of many friends and friendly professionals - so I'm sure I'll figure all of the necessary steps out somehow - and receive all of the help I will need!

Fear or Love? (A Tiny Home Dilemma)

I don't know if you've already seen this amazing convocation speech that Jim Carrey made at Maharishi University. I know it's been making the rounds on the interwebs.

Here's the clip that's inspiring today's blog post:

I saw this for the first time a few months ago and I'm slowly realizing that this clip sums up the dilemma with which I've been grappling over the past several months.

If you've been reading my blog over the past year or so, you'll know that I bought a Tiny Home in December 2013. I set it up on some friends' land last spring and lived in it through the summer. Then, as winter approached, I realized that winterizing it was going to be a pretty big task. I had gotten depressed and all of the things I needed to do felt like too much work. I could barely put one foot in front of the other, let alone figure out and manifest all the things I needed to make my house work over the winter. The prospect of living in a draughty, small, thin-shelled structure for the winter felt out-of-control, risky and unsafe.

Running scared

So, I decided to abandon my tiny house for the winter. I found a house that I could rent – a place with central heating, electricity and running water. And I set myself the task of deciding what I wanted to do about my living arrangements going forward.

I was full of doubts – I doubted that I could handle the challenges of Tiny, (semi) off-grid Living; I doubted that I was living in the right place. Part of me wanted to bug out, move to Montreal, Ireland, South America – to get away from everything. I batted around a half-a-dozen locations and ideas. Everywhere from West Dublin to Québec City to Galway to Buenos Aires.

I weighed many pros and cons.

Fear had me in its clutches. Every option I considered felt scary, unsatisfactory and just plain wrong.

Embracing love

While some of my fear is perfectly rational, the worst of it was probably a by-product of my depression. When we feel like we are all alone in the darkness, of course we are afraid. Nothing feels possible – to stay, to go, there is no good option.

Finally, I am coming out of my depression and starting to feel more like myself. Love is starting to raise her voice again. I love my friends and my community on the west bank of the LaHave. I love the beaches, the quiet, the sky. I love my house. It is adorable! Every time I go to check on it, it glows its warm heart at me. It hugs me. I feel absolutely at home.

As usual, it's not Either/Or – it's Both

I'm still scared. I'm not a particularly handy person nor, frankly, am I that interested in becoming one. This is a hard challenge to take on as a single person. I need help, and asking for help is not always my forte. And, at the same time, I want to embrace this challenge and see if I can make it work. I want to engage in the experiment of winterizing my home and living in it through an entire year.

I don't know exactly how I'm going to acheive this. I have some ideas. More will come to me. But I don't know if I will succeed. Maybe it will work for me and maybe it will not. Time will reveal the answers, but only if I try. If I don't try, I will never know.

And while fear is still a factor, I know that this decision is being made from a place of love.

PS: Jim Carey's convocation speach is worth watching in its entirety.

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!)
​ ​
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.

Relationship Epiphany

I didn't used to be a lying-in-bed-in-the-morning-and-musing kind of person. I'm an extreme morning person and I pride myself on my ability to go from zero to sixty the moment I wake up. However, Wholehearted House is a great place for early morning contemplation. Because I don't have electricity, if I wake up before the sun is up, it is simplest to lie in bed until there is some light. And that lends itself to either going back to sleep or to lying awake and thinking. I have been doing more of both of these things lately.

Thinking in the quiet and the dark can be very productive. The other morning I had a real epiphany about my past relationships.

I'd say that I've had four serious romantic relationships in my life. One of them lasted for 12 years and after it broke up (more than seven years ago, now–wow!), a good friend gave me a beautiful book called Love Listography. I looked at it, thought about what it would take to figure out what I actually wanted in a relationship, and put the book up on a shelf. Something about defining what I wanted scared and repelled me.

I fell into my next few (brief) relationships by default, not by design. And then I fell in love. And that was a total disaster (for more details, you can listen to this song, which is one of many I wrote about that particular relationship attempt: 11 kinds of itchy). And then I fell in love again. And that was awesome for a while, but it didn't work out very well in the end. It's been an often frustrating few years, and I'm not sure I even understood why until the other morning.

Here is my epiphany: I saw that all of my relationships (including the brief ones and the ones way back in the distant past) unravelled in a similar way: communication failed. Things were going along okay and then my partner and/or I would start behaving differently. Gaps started appearing between what I wanted and what I was getting and/or what my partner wanted and what they were getting.

I can't speak to how my lovers may have felt, but I felt like I was expected to know and understand things that I did not know or understand. As a result, I acted with a lack of empathy toward the unknown and/or misunderstood issue(s). This was interpreted as a lack of kindness and understanding and was met with withdrawal, frustration and/or anger. I met this response with my own withdrawal, frustration and anger and POOF! Each relationship spiralled from love, kindness and mutual respect into discontent, frustration, terror and/or rage – and then each was (not surprisingly) over.

Although this is a sad pattern, I'm pretty excited about being able to see it clearly for the first time. I think there are a number of things at play here.

1. I'm generally smart and empathic and I think I "get" things when sometimes I really don't. I need to be a better listener.
2. I'm a fairly "judgy" person and sometimes people are afraid to tell me things because they aren't sure how I'm going to react. And sometimes people do tell me things and then feel judged, vulnerable and unsafe.
3. I can have knee-jerk reactions to things that stir up my own vulnerability and I don't always know when (or have the ability) to keep my mouth shut about it or take a few deep breaths before responding. Also, I can flippant at exactly the wrong moments.
4. I tend to be a "problem-solver" so people don't always tell me things because they know I'm going to tell them what I think they should do and they don't want to hear it (just as I don't want to hear advice when I'm doing the best I can and someone else has a better idea for how I should live my life). I need to learn how to mind my own business and concentrate on solving my own problems.
5. Sometimes, other people are really bad at communicating what the hell is going on for them, often out of shame, fear or confusion. There is nothing I can do about this because it is outside of my control. The most I can do is stay aware of when I don't understand what's going on and adopt a stance of open-hearted, kind and curious inquiry. I can ask questions and work to accept the situation if people don't have answers, or don't have ways of sharing their answers.
6. I am not very good at identifying or communicating what I need. I am a big-time coper. I can get by on very little (at least for a pretty long time), but that doesn't mean I should have to. And it doesn't mean that I don't get resentful if I am in a relationship where I feel like I am continually giving more than I am receiving.

The good news is that many of these things are things that I can do something about. And everyone of them that I can improve will make a big difference in my relationship with myself.

Getting back to the Love Listography, what I think I need is to be in a relationship with someone who has some extra energy to invest; a little extra patience to grant me while I improve my relationship skills. I need to be in a relationship with someone who is a communication and tenderness ninja.

Hey, wait a minute. What I really need is to become my own communication and tenderness ninja. I can be so hard on myself for the mistakes I make. I need to adopt a stance of curious inquiry toward my own heart and heal some of the old habits I've listed in this post. They may make themselves obvious in my relationships, but they are also at play inside of me all of the rest of time. And the place they need to be healed is inside of me. And the only person who can do that work is me. Maybe looking for too much understanding and healing from a partner has been one of my biggest problems all along. It is easy to become frustrated and dissatisfied when one has unrealistic expectations.

So here's to putting my new dedication to tender communication to work in my own life. I'll let you know how it goes.

The 24-Hour Non-Sectarian Church of Banjoy Manifesto

1. Banjo music makes everything better. Need to wash the dishes, scrub the tub, feed the cat, dance, make love? Say. No. More. You need BanJOY.

2. Kindness is a way of life. One of my Mom's friends has a saying: "Be kinder than necessary." That means to everyone. As much and as often as you possibly can.

3. Like Michael Franti says, Nobody Right, Nobody Wrong. "One man got a jet fighter, the other got a song. Nobody right, nobody wrong." (I think this is the hardest one for me, as I am prone to be a leeeeetle bit judgy. I struggle with it - and it's worth struggling with).

4. Love with all your heart. When you give your heart to someone, do your best to do so fully. Love them with all their flaws and imperfections, and do yourself the same favour. 

5. Tread lightly on this earth. Limit your environmental impact. Try to avoid airplanes and cars, maintain a compost pile (or worm composter), sh*t in a bucket, shop local, avoid single-use containers, reduce, reuse and recycle.

6. The love of money is the root of all evil. Exercise caution and restraint when longing for the next toy or gadget. Is it really going to make you happy? Aren't there independent artists or rainforests somewhere who need that money more? Be generous. Let money flow. Think about the things you can live without and live without them.

7. The impossibility of purity is not a reason not to try. Yes, I still drive my car to see my boyfriend who lives a couple of hours away. Whaddayagunnado, I'm in love with him (see #4) and we don't have public transit out here. It doesn't mean I'm not still trying to be an eco-warrior. Remember Harold and Maude: "Consistency is not really a human trait." Just do your best.

8. Embrace Life. Put your TV out for Heavy Pick-up and spend your time creating. Sing. Dance. Write. Talk. Paint. Draw. Sculpt. Cook. Invent. Build. Love.

9. Make a lot of noise. Let everyone know what you care about, and that you aren't cynical or defeated, because the world needs people who hope and care. To quote Shane Koyczan "You've got to care about the world, because it doesn't care about you." And, as Billy Bragg said on Q a couple of weeks ago, "The antidote of cynicism is activism." 

10. Take personal responsibility. Not for all the problems of the world, or anything, but wherever you can. There's a lot of talk about what is wrong with the world today. And a lot of theories about how to change it. There are also a lot of actions that people skip. Think the banking world is corrupt and awful? Switch to a credit union, or invest your money directly in a local business. Think the government is corrupt and awful? Run for office, if that's in your skillset. Or support someone good to run. Or, at least write a letter to them, telling them what you would prefer to see them to do. And don't forget to vote next time.

11. The world is full. If you don't have a desperate longing to have kids, don't have them. If you feel an intense calling to have kids, I'm not going to argue with that, but if you're just having kids because that's what people do, or because everybody's doing it, or because "Whoops!", please don't. Having children is optional. Support charities that distribute birth control and birth control education throughout the world. Believe me, all of our scary problems would be way less scary if there were only 4 billion of us on the planet, not 7 billion going on 12 billion.

12. We're all going to die. Yes, all of us. Even you. And even me. Try not to be in denial about death: other people's or your own. Live your life as a celebration and make a point of coming to terms with death before you have to.