Idea #34
Plan "theme nights". Possible themes: Western Night, Hockey Night, or Eskimo Night. Plan your food and decorate your bedroom using the theme idea. With simple, yet appropriate decorations, props and clothing, you can turn an ordinary night into a real celebration. Keep your partner guessing what your bedroom will look like next. Have great fun in the confines of your own home!

(Did she say Hockey Night? --Hey baby, how do I look in this goalie suit?-- Who does these things?)

Idea #30

Find two mismateched socks and wrap them up with the following note:

"Two socks seldom match for life...sure glad we are!"

Several Valentines days ago, my mother in law - MY MOTHER IN LAW! - gave C and I a basket wrapped in celophane as a gift. We thanked her and after she left, we opened it.

We were somewhat shocked to find that it was a basket for a "romantic night", full of dollar-store items including furry handcuffs (I'm not making this up!), a door-knob hanger that said "GET IN HERE!", one of those cardbaord arrrows that you spin when you're playing a board game, only this one landed on various kinky activities to engage in (they were very mild but STILL, that's not the point) and a bottle of sparkling non-alcoholic apple cider.

The funniest part was a small book titled "Romance 101: 101 Creative and Fun Ideas to Keep Your Marriage Alive and Sparkling!"

The ideas in this book are so APPALLINGLY lame and ridiculous, that I thought I would post them here for fun. I still have this book for one reason: because sometimes at parties we pull it out and read some of the ideas out loud and we all have a good laugh. (I'm sure my mother-in-law meant well.)

From now until Valentine's Day, I will post, daily, one of these ideas in case you want to get your love life sizzling (or, more likely, drive someone away).

Idea #10
Wrap up a pair of large oven mitts and attach a note: "BEWARE! YOU SHOULD PREPARE TO WEAR THESE TONIGHT!" - YOUR MATE MAY BE TOO HOT TO HANDLE!..." This is sure to bring a chuckle and a smile! Or, wrap up some hot peppers, attaching a note: You're hot stuff too!"

Oven mitts? Hot PEPPERS?
Oh dear dear dear dear dear.

Things have been getting clearer for me.

I have been asking for help where I need it. I have a tendency to do things alone, without reaching out, and it has only served to make me feel isolated and cramped up inside.

My intention to change things this year seems to have set something in motion. The right people, books and mentors seem to be finding their way to me.

What has surprised me is the layers of revelation I have been getting about my own perfectionism. I have always secretly known it was stopping me from doing more of what I wanted to do, but I had no idea, until recently, how deep that went.

My 7 year old went ice skating with her class several times in the month of January. I joined them a few times, and it was difficult and painful to see how timid she was on her skates.

She has always been very late to reach milestones--for example, most toddlers begin walking when they're 12 or 13 months, some even earlier. She didn't walk until she was almost 17 months. But she NEVER fell. While all the other kids were hurtling themselves around on their wobbly legs, crashing into coffee tables and sidewalks, she was clinging to things (and me) and NOT FALLING. Only when she was dang sure she could walk without stumbling did she go ahead and walk, and she has walked perfectly ever since.

Watching her learn to skate, I was reminded of this. While all the other students whipped around the ice, she clung to the walll, shuffled ever-so-carefully across the edges of the ice, trying her hardest NOT to FALL.

It's hard to watch, because she misses so much fun. And while perfection is achieved, by ruling out the chance of failure she makes learning harder and slower.

But then I realized that in many invisible ways, I am exactly like that. I have spent far too long trying not to fall as an artist. I have spent far too long clinging to a wall.

This, more than any outward circumstances, is what needs to change if I am to move forward.

I am not talking of worldly success here. This is an inside thing. Whatever the outcome might be, for better or worse, I must let go of the wall and let myself fly and fall and spin and fall and run and fall.

Learning this has helped me to further pinpoint the deadness I have felt these past few years. Somewhere after the release of my first album and the publication of my first few poems, I began to think that I needed to shift my focus over to "getting it out there". Which changed my whole focus from process to product, and I inevitably started to get tangled up in things I had not anticipated.

"Fame is a poisonous word for an artist." Julia Cameron wrote.

William Blake said: "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art."

And while being a singer and songwriter is very much ABOUT having an audience (I suppose I could sing to the cat, but that's not really what I feel I am here to do) I personally feel really really messed up when making art becomes more of a business than a path.

Van Gogh wrote in a letter: "My only anxiety is what I can do...could I not be of use and good for something?...in a picture I wish to say something that would console as music does."

I feel something inside me coming home, remembering why I sing. I want to console, to ease suffering somehow through my music. How and when that happens is none of my business. It feels like such a relief to name this, to say it out loud.

January brought a warm snap (is it called a snap when it's warm? Can't think of the right word this second...) and I'm gloriously thrilled to notice that the dull winter despair that nearly overtook me last year has not reared its ugly head. And it's nearly February!

I vowed to run, or at least take walks, all winter, even in cold snaps, but it hasn't gotten that cold, and maybe I'm just getting used to it, or maybe it hasn't been as bad this year, but the usual greyness of winter doesn't feel as dreary and paralyzing for some reason.

A few days ago, I took a walk to the water, and saw five wild swans bobbing out on the waves. I have had time to walk downtown with a cup of hot tea as I look up into the bare branches of the Chestnut trees and I have been painting a little and writing more than I have in a long time. Happy happy days.

A new song scribbled in the car:

Waiting for Christmas,
we drive as the sun lights the backs of the hills
blue and gold
The ice on the river looks just like candy, you say
and your eyes slowly close
I want you here with me always
Asleep in the backseat against the door
On this long drive home

The clouds form a line across the horizon
Streaks of pink as the day closes up
A train whistles loud as it passes
And there, the streelights at the edge of town
Oh, I want you here with me always
Asleep in the backseat against the door
On this long drive home

......................

Last night, Ella couldn't sleep, kept calling me from 4 am on. Finally, I brought her into bed with me.

"There's scary music playing in my head." she told me.

I totally get that. The scary music in the dark hours before dawn.

Anne Lamott calls it the jungle drums beating in her head. I settled Ella into my heavy duvet. I was wide awake by then, so went into the kitchen to make tea and realized that I have not had that scary music playing in my head for some time. It used to be a cocophany of cellos and violins sawing out thin lines of grief and sorrow and loss.

You find answers to these things as you grow, get older, crash into a few walls, get too close to a few too many dark holes. You learn that the scary music is just that--music. You can reach for the knob, shut the radio off, or put some new music in your head, happy music about things turning out as they should, about being cared for and seen and loved, despite any inability to prove it.

Ella is not nearly old enough for me to explain any of this to her. I tell her to sing Raindrops on Roses, or Rudold the Red Nosed Reindeer. I tell her to think about Christmas.

She slept in late the next morning, and when I went in to find her awake, she said: Mommy, why was the room purple when I woke up? I told her the sun was shining through the clouds and came through the white curtains and fell on the white duvet and turned the room a litlte bit purple. She didn't understand why, but seemed pleased nonetheless. It felt like a small happy ending. Or, if nothing else, the life lesson that, when all else fails, things do tend to look much better in the morning.

After a few long days, I left the kids with C yesterday and fled the house.
Found myself at the mall where I intended to buy slippers with Christmas money, then wondered why on earth I chose the mall. Such a sad, depleting place!
Wandered store to store until I found some delicious brown, suede slippers at The Bay (40% off!)
Fully intended to leave.
On my way out, passed the MAC counter, where my friend Jenny was working. She demanded that I sit in the black swivvel chair, proceeded to brush all sorts of things onto my face.
Found myself purchasing (what am I DOING?) a set of fake eyelashes, then getting brushed some more - bronzer, turquoise eye shadow, irridescent lip gloss.
Left feeling like a movie star.
Went grocery shopping.
Then home to slip into my new suede slippers.
Felt like a million bucks.

Last night it was snowing, and I sat for a long time at the window before bed, staring out at the snow flying and swirling under the street light. The wind kept pushing the flakes up, then sideways, then down at a rapid, violent rate. I sat there until the noise in my head died away and I suddenly knew (I think maybe I had forgotten) that there was nothing here in my life that shouldn't be here, and nothing that wasn't here that was supposed to be.

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

-- David Whyte
from Songs for Coming Home
©1984 Many Rivers Press

A poem I fell in love with this week
via Andrea

In the meantime, I am putting the finishing touches on my video for the SOAR SCHOLARSHIP for photography. One more leap...

Yesterday was one of those days when I was home alone with my girls and had that horrible but familiar feeling that comes to me once in awhile: that I'm living in a babysitting job gone awry—I keep waiting and waiting for the parents to get home, but they never do.

Years ago, when I did a lot of waitressing, I used to dream I was at work and my section was getting slammed and I was forgetting orders and dropping drinks and the customers were mad at me and people were leaving without paying. In the dream, I was always rushing frantically around, gathering plates, printing bills, taking orders, but could never seem to get on top of it. I would wake from these dreams feeling exhausted.

Some days, life with small kids feels like that dream, like I can never get on top of it, no matter how hard I try.

Yesterday was full of the usual monotony of making snacks and sweeping up crumbs and breaking up spats over whose Barbie is whose—tasks which, on a good day, feel sacred, or at least manageable, but which, on a bad day, feel torturous. Iryn kept complaining about every little thing under the sun and Ella kept banging into things. “I wish we didn’t have this sharp house!” she exclaimed in her tiny, sweet, exasperated voice after one too many toe stubs.

In the afternoon, I wished for a nap, but there were too many interruptions and it never happened. At around three, in an attempt to foster some good cheer, I brought the box of Christmas decorations up from the basement for the girls to look at and instead, spent 45 minutes telling them not to wing the glass balls around before confiscating said glass balls and putting the box away again.

Sometimes the noise gets to me. I’ve done a little reading about “The Highly Sensitive Child” because my 7-year-old is definitely highly sensitive. But what I’ve learned more is that I am highly sensitive too. This plays out when it comes to noise and too many things going on at once, and sometimes, at home with the kids, I feel like all the emotions and noise and voices are like darts ricocheting off the walls and inside my head and I long to get away but often I can’t.

The house felt sharp to me too, but in a different way.

At 6:30, C got home, and I said “Tag, you’re it,” then proceeded to lock myself in the bathroom. Later, I drove downtown to see my friend NORM perform, and joined him for a couple of songs and started to feel like myself again.

This morning, Sunday, we woke to snow covering everything. It was a morning of chocolate chip pancakes and decorating the Christmas tree. C made a fire and steamed some Egg Nog.

The darts are not flying around in my head so much now. Out the window, the snow is softening all the sharp edges.

It is a great pity we don't know
When the dead are going to die
So that, over a last companionable
Drink, we could tell them
How much we liked them.
-Bernard O'Donaghue

There was a boy named Andre that I carpooled to Kindergarten with. He lived just below my hillside, in a small house with a street name that had to do with a tree - Maple maybe. Or Walnut.

Sometimes the two of us went to Mrs. Marple's house after school to get taken care of until our moms could pick us up. Mrs. Marple had a husband who had been electrocuted and had creepy pictures of Jesus up everywhere. I remember watching her teenage daughter wash her face at the bathroom sink - she told me that if I always washed with cold water, I'd never get pimples. I was five and didn't know what pimples were.

Andre kissed me on the cheek once in Mrs. Marple's basement. He was pretending to tell me a secret, but then he kissed me. And I laughed and wiped my cheek off and ran up the stairs.

He used to kick me on the soccer field and I would get infuriated and tell my dad and my dad would say: Oh, he probably just really likes you. And I would say: Why on earth would a boy want to kick me if he likes me?

Andre played the violin and always got in trouble for reading in class when he was supposed to be doing his work. And once, during show and tell, he lied and said that his sister Michele got kidnapped by the Pizza Panda but she was home safe now.

But I liked him.

In grade six, I slow-danced with him at the sock-hop to Mister Mister song called Take These Broken Wings. Both of us kept looking all around while we swayed back and forth.

In grade 9, I changed schools and never saw him again.

But then, last spring, I facebooked him for some reason. And I asked how he was doing and he said fine, that he was working and playing violin in a roots/bluegrass band and writing songs. And we emailed back and forth a few times.

And just the other day, I thought: I need a violin player. I should facebook Andre and see if he wants to move here. But I thought: No. That's too pushy. He's probably happy where he is.

But today my dad called with the news that Andre had killed himself and the funeral is tomorrow. And all I could think was: No, it's okay. I'll facebook him. I'll talk to him. I'll ask him how he is and... But then I remembered it was too late. Then I'd think the thought again: Hey, wait a minute! I'll just facebook him, and.... wait. no. never mind.

And after I hung up the phone, and the whole "I'll just facebook him" thing stopped looping in my head, I thought: If only I had emailed him when I'd thought of it. Maybe it would have given him hope, to know he was wanted somewhere, maybe the thought of making music out here where the winters are not so long would have cheered him up. If only...

I've heard this is what happens to people when they lose someone to suicide. They are forever left wondering if there was something they could have done... if only I'd called, if only I hadn't forgotten his birthday, if only I'd been a better parent/friend.

I wish now that I had said more in my emails. I wish I'd said that even though he used to kick me on the soccer field, I always liked him. I wish I'd asked him if he remembers carpooling together and how we used to wiggle our baby teeth and count how many we'd lost so far. I wish I'd said something about how being five years old together in a basement waiting for your mothers to come and pick you up never ever leaves you.

Figure out what the #*?! is the matter with my daughter.

It’s clear that the first thing that needs to be dealt with around here is the problem of my daughter. To be clear, I’ve been trying, in various ways, to deal with it for awhile: she’s intense, angry, snappy, and chronically miserable. She picks fights all day long and sometimes even wakes up yelling in her sleep. I’ve been reading books about highly sensitive children, have been trying to be firm with consequences such as taking away TV time or play time, or doling out chores if she has a bad attitude. I have gone the other way and just tried to foster connection—hug her and affirm her every time she starts the day out badly or throws a fit. Things always seem to get better for a few days, then worse again. For awhile, I was seriously losing hope. I was bracing myself for living the next 15 years of my life plotting getaways, maybe doing a little pot on the side to take the edge off.

So a few weeks ago, I decided that it was time to stop TRYING to do something about it, and actually DO something about it. It had become non-negotiable.

I made an appointment with a counsellor who worked for the elementary schools. He was no help really—just hemmed and hawed and said no-brainer things like: “Well, I guess you just have to do what feels right” and recommended various books whose philosophies I disagreed with. But he did give me the number of Child & Family Services who could, he said, provide “affordable family counselling”.

I called, and made an appointment with Dr. David Jones (name changed), a counsellor who has a good reputation in town.

I spent the first half an hour sobbing on his couch while he nodded and handed me Kleenex.

“I’m sorry.” I said, after 15 minutes of crying. “I told myself I wouldn’t fall apart today and here I am doing it.”

“Don’t apologize.” He said.

So I cried some more.

I told him about the girls’ fighting, about how Iryn wakes up hollering at night, about how I worry she’s clinically depressed. I told him about how I walk around with knots in my body anticipating the next outburst and about how joyless life seems when she is around and how powerless I feel to change any of it.

I cried and cried and cried and he listened and asked me psychiatrist-type questions and told me his professional opinion of the situation. He was good. He was really good. In one hour, this psychiatrist blew my mind.

But I won’t get into it here, because, well, this is not a parenting blog. This is a blog (of late) about me and how I am going to change some things this year.

So what I am really here to say is this: that at one point, in relation to something about my daughter, he looked me straight in the eye and asked me when it was that I started doubting my intuition.

And at the moment, I couldn’t think of an answer. Because up until that point, I hadn’t realized that I had.

But the truth of it washed over me, not just in regards to mothering my children, but in regards to….everything. My whole life. Somewhere along the line, maybe not that long ago, I stopped listening.

I think it may have been after we moved here (to Kelowna) from Winnipeg. Something about that shift, that change of landscape, totally uprooted me. For the first 2 years, we were living in a tiny one-and-a-half bedroom basement suite with no sunlight. All the walls were beige. For months and months I would wake crying for what we had left behind. I would stare out the window at the blue hills and the pine trees and ache for the flat prairies and crooked Elm trees of my old life. I would write poems about my old front steps and about how my daughter and I used to eat blueberries on the sidewalk on our way home from the grocery store and about the thunderstorms that would split the whole sky in half.

At first I thought it was those things that I missed. But I soon came to realize that what I really missed was myself. I had left something precious of myself behind and I wanted it back. It’s taken me this long to start finding it again.

And so what I’m here to say is that if I’m going to change anything, anything at all, I’m going to have to learn to trust myself again.

When I got in the door after the counselling session, puffy eyed and rattled to the core (in a good way), I took off my boots and sat down at my piano. The tenants downstairs were out, so I released the soft pedal and began to play. I started softly at first, floating between tiny high notes and low, swelling crescendos. Then I was pounding, rattling the floor with a song that came from deep within me. I played and played and played, as if I was trying to wake someone, as if I had just remembered the notes to some long forgotten song. I played until I was exhausted, emptied out, then sat hunched over the keys feeling utterly spent, like I had just run a great distance.

Already it is well into the fall. The fall always feels to me like the beginning of the year, more so than January 1st ever has. The fall is when I look back on the year before, reevaluate, set goals, make intentions for the year to come.

Often, I go down to the water and write words on stones and chuck them into the waves of Lake Okanagan. They are prayers, wishes. Things I am looking to find.

But for the past few years, with me alone at home with 2 small children and a partner who has had to work 70+hours a week to pay the bills, I have felt very close to losing my mind. I am tired of having too few moments for reflection, tired of doing all the home stuff myself while stealing too-small slivers of time for my own creativity. I am tired of renting a house where my daughter, a devout cat-lover, can't get a cat and where addicts shoot heroine across the street.

And see, it's not even THAT, really. I can live with the drug addicts. I actually like them. And I'm tremendously grateful for our little house - we're close to the water, we have trees across the road, a little deck to sit on in the sun. And those slivers? I work well withing them. Some of my best songs have been written while my kids were napping. Something else is wrong, something I can't quite name. It is about me. About something that hasn't been allowed to live yet. I keep seeing myself in a different life.

I've been hitting a wall for some time now. I am just not sure how to do life here in this city, how to manage everything, how to keep holding on to the things in my heart, or, converserly, how to let go. I've been looking for anwers to so many questions for what feels like a good, long time.

And so here's the thing: I am declaring this my year of BIG changes for the better.

I don't even know what this means, really.

I know it has something to do with doing more and dreaming less. I know it has to do with seeking some support for my tragectory instead of plodding along all alone, which is my usual way. I know it has something to do with letting go of some fear of failure, and some perfectionist tendencies, and getting my creative work out into the world, come hell or high water.

For the next year, I will be writing about this on my blog. Somehow, by stating this out loud, I feel I am committed to finding a way to make it happen. There's a saying I have typed out and posted above my desk: LEAP AND THE NET WILL APPEAR. I still don't see the net. But I am leaping.

I'll keep you posted...

Today I gave Ella (age 4) a small, pale yellow chewable vitamin and told her to eat it. Ella: What will it taste like? Me: I think it'll taste like lemon. Ella: I think it'll taste like moon.

The alley cat comes.
She looks like a ghost floating
across the grass in the mornings
before the sun has been pulled
through the trees.

So it has come to this again:
one small blessing named, counted,
forgetting yourself in all the usual places.
The cat curls around the table leg,
peeks around the corner of the house.
You want to walk through life this way too--
as thought the morning were an open door,
as thought the light brought something with it.

-September 18th, 2009

Tonight, the final night of summer holidays before my kids go back to school, I went for a run at dusk. I stuffed a $5 bill in my waistband, thinking that I would pass Leo’s Video store on my way home and grab a movie.

When I got to the movie store—a scrungy little hole in the wall with the cheapest rental prices in town—I found the movie I was looking for (Rendition with Meryl Streep) and went to pay at the counter.

Looking over the counter I saw a movie that I had rented the week before, and seeing it there reminded me that I had found the disc earlier that day under my bookshelf and had realized I'd returned the case but not the disc.

“Oh!” I said to the girl with candy apple red hair behind the counter. “I think I know why that’s sitting there! I forgot to put the disc in the case. I’ll bring it by in the morning.”

“Oh great!” she said, cheerfully, grabbing the empty movie case.

“And then do you think you could take it back to Rogers Video too?”
…………………………

This is one example of the many balls that start falling at the end of summer holidays when I have grown tired of the lack of structure, of waking up every morning to a child asking: What are we going to do today. (I don’t know? Why don’t you just color for 6 or so hours?)

I am so ready for my kids to go back to school.

It's been unbearably hot since the second week of July.

Without air conditioning, the temperature in the house is sometimes 30 degrees when we go to bed. And that's after it's cooled down. One particularly sweaty night, with all the fans on, I dreamed I was eating salt out of the salt shaker, pouring it right onto my tongue.

During the day, the girls mostly just want to stay home. They are spending every spare moment drawing at the kitchen table and running back and forth to the neighbor's house. And the truth is? I like staying home too. I love not having to plan as many things, not having to rush out to gymnastics and school.

But sometimes, after lunch, when the thermometer in the house says 32 degrees, I actually get confused about what to do. I'm learning that the only thing TO do is to pack things up and walk down to the beach. As we approach the water, we can feel the wall of heat lift. We're starting to get to know a lot of new people - people we've never met before, but who live in this neighborhood not far from us. At the water, I lose track of time. The girls play and swim and the grade of the sand is not very steep so we can walk all the way out to the buoy and back. Sandcastles take awhile. And before we know it, it's way past supper time.

Since the forest fires have begun, there's been a lot of smoke in the air. In the mornings, there is a thin layer of ash on our patio table. Everyone is waiting for it to rain. In the mornings, I get up and think it's clouded over finally, but it hasn't. It's just smoke now, getting thicker so that today it's completely blocking the sun.

I'm eating fresh blueberries from a roadside stand. Mmmmm....

Last night the heat was nearly unbearable. I tossed and turned and kept dreaming I had slept too late, only to see that the clock read 2:02 am, then 4:20.

This morning, up early, I've opened all the doors up to let the cool air get in.

The summer so far has been crazy, a little too crazy, with my kids home all the time, and I find myself wondering how exactly, I am supposed to live these 2 lives inside of me, the artist and the mother. Summer is wonderful, and I love the heat and walking to the beach and even the sand tracked all over the house. But another part of me goes missing a little bit. And maybe that's okay. Even writing it that way - 2 lives - shows I'm disconnected. It's not 2 lives. It's one life, a life that is meant to encompass many things at once. Seeing them as seperate and divided from the rest never helps.

I admit there are times when I feel tired of trying to balance so many things. Sometimes, I'm tired of being grateful and present and laid back and flexible. I want nothing more than to hole up alone in an art studio for weeks and just paint and write and scribble songs. Sometimes I get tired of trying to scrape together something from the scraps.

But then, the flip side. How I wake sometimes and remember that there is no getting this back. Now will never return. Ella will never be three and a half again, in a lemon-yellow bikini. Iryn will never again be seven in her orange checkered sundress learning to ride a bike in the back alley. I want to be here for this, while it is here.

Besides that, there is this almost inappropriate sadness over the loss of a cat. The neighbor's cat, not even ours. But he slept with Iryn at night and he showed up at our window like clockwork, early morning and after school. His owner moved, and so he did too.

We are waiting for something to come and fill the hole he has left, but in the meantime it sits here, yawning wide open us.


And in the meantime there is the slow walk down the street to the beach and bags of cherries in the fridge, picked fresh from a friend's farm, and the peas in the garden, grown much too tall for the stakes, now all hunched over and tangled and cherry tomatoes in big pots that will ripen soon.

It's raining this morning, and it comes as a bit of a relief from the long, hot days we've been having. Also, the garden needs it. Although going to the beach and lounging in the yard for days on end is my idea of a good time, I need a day to do some plain, old running around. To browse the second hand store, to stop for a latte. The rain gives me permission. Plus, the air smells really good.

Out my window, enormous daisies are in bloom. There are sweet peas climbing up the stair railing. My floppy sunhat is hanging on the metal trellis, awaiting the next beach day. There are tiny droplets on the Jack Pine. I just watched a crow fly out of the alley dumpster with a grapefruit peel in its beak.

In June, I drove up to Cortez Island to attend a 4-day writing workshop at Hollyhock, with one of my favorite award-winning Canadian writers, Sharon Butala. It was HEAVEN, eating dinner on the deck overlooking the ocean, writing in the garden, and walking to classes through the warm-pine-scented paths. After returning, my music publishers flew me and a few other singer-songwriters out to Nashville for 4 days. Things are starting to settle now, as much as they can possibly settle with 2 small children underfoot, and I am looking forward to long lazy summer days and long evenings on the deck when everything is quiet and all you can hear is one single lawnmower in the far distance or the faint beat of the park music floating over the trees.

I have nothing much to say.
I am writing new songs.
I am scribbling poems every day because it makes me happy.
I am trying my darndest to live in between so many things.
I am watering my wildflowers.
I am getting up early because I can't get enough of that early summer light.
I am trying to take care of my children.
I am trying to say yes to everything else inside me.

Found this tonight, via my friend Jen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hee7T8MbHGs

Oh! One more thing before I go...
Emma Alvarez Gibson has a delicious blog that I like to visit called OLD SOUL INK. A few weeks back, she interviewed me and it's UP NOW.

We have finally crossed over to spring here. I feel euphoric at thinking that we have a long, warm spring and summer stretched out before us.

I went running all winter this year. It saves my sanity, I'm learning, but winter running is NOTHING like a good, long run in warm spring sunshine with all the buds barely out. Everything seems extra bright and alive, the water extra sparkly, the air extra fragrant.

I am headed off alone for a whole week today. How can this be? I got a bursary to attend a 4 day poetry workshop with my favorite poet Lorna Crozier, and after that I will be heading to a forest monastery for 2 nights to be completely and utterly SILENT and take long walks among birch trees.

Iryn was teary and falling apart this morning as I exhorted her to water my seedlings, which are now lining the windowsills and which I am hoping (against hope?) will still be alive when I get home.

I always go a little nuts this time of year. I get paranoid, and think I'm dying. Last year I was horribly afraid of pollution. The year before that I thought I had a brain tumour. The year before that I was terrified we had a carbon monoxide leak and summoned - accidentally - the fire department and an ambulance to my house.

Today I'm scared about my teeth. I read something in a book last night about some lady who had an undetected bacteria infection in one of her teeth and it made her tired and gave her low immunity.
I've had a few colds this season, and winter always makes me tired. My brain knows I'll be okay once the spring hits, but in the meantime, I can't stop thinking about the dental bacteria thing.

A few nights ago, I was crying on the couch to Craig.
"I'm scared and sad. While I was putting the groceries in bags today at the store, Ella took my wallet under the bagging station and opened it up, spilling change and credit cards everywhere, then she cried all the way home. I mean, what is the point? Is this really how I'm supposed to be spending the prime of my life?"

"Are you sure it's not just... you know... " Craig weighed his words carefully. "...the time of year?"
Craig knows. He knows I get this way.

Something about that made it all okay.

I sit and stare out the window in the afternoons. The ducks are huddled across the street by the creek. The willow branches look stiff and tired.

The tulips I had planted in the house are all done. Now they are just wilting brown stems in their pots by the back door. I've planted dozens of seeds and they sit invisiby in their little boxes by the window. I'm impatient. I pick at the dirt with my fingers to see if anything is happening, once in awhile wrecking a seedling in the process.

After some months of changed plans, some loss and a dry spell, I wonder: Do the trees and the flower bulbs ever panic at the end of winter? They've been so long underground. Do they start to lose hope? Or do they just carry within them some deep knowing that winter, even a long one, never lasts forever.

Me? I panic completely.
Not just weather-wise, but as seasons pertain to the soul, and to creativity. Daily, I have to tell myself that something more is coming. Remember that old Eric Carl book about the tiny seed? I often feel like that seed, always flying, never landing.

That's not to say I haven't been busy with good things. I've been busy writing and preparing for an upcoming poetry retreat and sending my songs off someplace good... But really? This time of year I always feel half awake, like I"m just biding my time until the earth melts and I can push up out of the ground to meet the sun.

The neighborhood cat is sitting on the arm of the couch. He visits every morning and every afternoon. He seems to take care of us, knows exactly when to come - when one of the girls is sad, or when I am homesick for something I cannot name, like today.

I heart, I esteem, I nearly worship ELIZABETH GILBERT.
( Link comes via my friend Jane)

This morning was a rush out the door, running late and a million things forgotten. Me trying to do my makeup in the car at the stoplights. To borrow a phrase from Oprah, what I know for sure is: when you're trying to do your makeup in the car, the lights will never stay red. I have actually thought of applying this principle when I really need to get somwhere in a hurry... just bring some mascara along to guarantee a steady stream of green lights.

It's approximately 100 degrees below zero. The wind hits you in the face like a thousand tiny little pins.

Last week it was the gardening books. This week I can't keep myself out of the plant section of the hardware store... Yesterday Ella and I took a long stroll through the greenhouse section at Rona. Ella pushed her mini grocery cart around, in and out, through the tropical plants and I bought some discount windchimes, which I hung in my kitchen window. I'm scouring 2nd hand stores for old plant containers... Yesterday I bought some tulip bulbs so I can force indoors. By mid-February I should have summer-white tulips blooming on my bookshelf.

At night I close my eyes and see images of spring; sun-warmed soil, rivers of just-melted snow winding through the sidewalks, leaves opening. Is it just me, or is it more than a change in weather that I am intuiting?

The on-line skin cream I ordered finally came. It is strange and gooey and makes my face fell stiff.

New songs posted on myspace here.

Somehow it has gotten to be the middle of December and I've hardly noticed.
Before Christmas, I decided to take some time off. I had not noticed how hectic my year had been until I slowed down and let myself feel the tiredness. I regret that I did not give into this sooner. But the cold and the days and days of snow allowed me to stop. I didn't write, I didn't play music, I didn't pick up the phone. I just sat by the fire and looked into the flames.
I took lots of naps on the couch by the fire. It snapped and crackled and before falling asleep I would look out our big picture window and watch the snowflakes drift down. I learned that the big weeping willow across the street starts to shine orange with light around 3 pm, and the mix of light and shadow makes the bark look like leopard skin. I watched the shadows of ducks and crows dart across the snow. Then I would fall asleep and wake up and watch the snow again.

Stopping was so good that I just stayed stopped for awhile. I burned some dreams in the fire. I read some really good books. I let myself feel for new direction. I ignored the voices that chided me about needing to get something done.

Now it is mid-January and I am ready to begin some new things, ready to set out in some new and old directions. But I'm having trouble getting going. Usually, I dislike being on the computer for any length of time, but I find myself clicking on links such as: Chris Martin named "sexiest vegetarian" or celebrities without makeup.
The other day I was looking up submission guidelines for a magazine and kept following random links until I found myself ordering a free skin cream sample from some obscure beauty website.

It's procrastination. And it's feeling a little "winterish". Now that Christmas is over, it seems like winter stretches on forever. The skies have been grey for days and days. There are frozen slush puddles everywhere. If only I could find a way to stay in bed until mid-February when the sun comes out.

Today the house smells of burnt stove because I keep forgetting that when you put a pot on an element you're actually supposed to put something IN it.

We're just recovering from infections and back-to-back colds around here, and we've been overdosing on Disney movies.

Finally feeling a little better yesterday afternoon, I took myself out, alone, to a bookstore and found myself standing in the gardening section, perusing pages and pages of bright pink peonies, pale white roses, green trees so blindingly green it almost hurt my eyes. I stayed there until the light outside the window turned to dark and was late for dinner.

So the winners of the CD Giveaway contest are as follows:

Anne Stimming
Sue Walters
Shandra Smith
Schuyler U-W
and Julie

If you haven't already done so, please email me your mailing address so I can ship those out soon. And thanks to all of you who got your CD orders in in time! It makes it a lot easier on "the elves".

Warm Wishes to you alll...

~k

Okay fellow blog readers....

As a Christmas promotion, I am giving away five (5) Little Grey House CDs. This is your chance to win a copy to give to a friend or sister or wife or the lady down the road who does your nails.

I enabled the comments for this entry only.....ALL you have to do is enter a comment in the comment section below and you will be entered in for a draw. You don't even have to say anything witty, although witty comments are certainly welcome.

The winners will be notified by email and will receive a copy of Little Grey House in the mail in time for Christmas.

And speaking of Christmas... I got lots of orders last year that came a little too late to send in time for the holidays. So if ordering a CD is on your to-do list, you'd better do it pronto, so me and my team of elves can get them sent off. (Hardy har har. My team of elves. More like the team of me and my 2 kids asking if they can draw felt pen stick men on the envelopes. I'm sure a few of you have gotten a package with pen scribbles across the top.)

All for now...

~K.M.

My attempt to cook tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for supper while talking on the phone and doing a few other things. (You have to look closely to see the charred piece of sandwhich.)


How could I have possibly said the CD would be out by Christmas? This is never going to happen.
In fact, things are a bit of a mess in that regards.
But I won't bore you.... all will be well and the songs will find their way somehow. Eventually. One of these days.
The wind is blowing tonight. Every day we wake and look out the window to see if snow has come, but none so far.
Most of the trees are bare, and there's a little snow on the hills.
Today I am wondering why i even DO this. Why? Why the need to put songs into the world, or books, or poems or anything for that matter?
Why can't we all just sit around in our cozy houses, sipping tea, telling stories, reading books (er, I guess that's a bit of a glitch in my theory... someone actually has to write those books, but you see what I'm saying...)?
If you want the truth, I ask myself that question more frequently than I'd like to admit.
But the other day, I got this wonderful email from a a kind man who serves at the Utah State Prison for Women. He said that during song time, the women prisoners frequently request a song I wrote some years back, and that it touches them deeply.
So I remind myself of this now and again. And I am reminding myself of this tonight while the wind blows against the panes.

After a long pause in the record negotiations, I think we're finally getting rolling again. There is talk of the CD being out by Christmas. Maybe. There are a few final, vital things to sort out. But many of you have been asking. And the answer is: It's coming. Just so you know.
.........................................................
Today I dropped Iryn off at an hour-long sparks meeting and then tried to make it through rush hour traffic to the grocery store before having to be back again to pick her up.
Crazyness.
Ella helped me carry the block of cheese into the car, and I forgot she had it until I looked in the rearview mirror and saw her gnawing on something. I confiscated the cheese, which Ella had nibbled a hole into, and eaten almost one whole side of.

When we all got home, the phone rang. It was my dear and long-time friend Sherri, in town on business.

"How ARE you?" She said.
"Ugh. Worn. My kids are crazy tonight. I'm thinking about taking up drinking."
"Really?" she says.
"I would, but I don't really like alcohol that much." I say.
She laughs. "I love alcohol."
"You'd be an alcoholic in a minute if you were around here right now." I tell her.

I'm always aware that I might possibly sound ungrateful, so just to clarify: I adore my girls. I mean, tonight when Iryn started singing in the car, she sounded like a sweet angel, making up the words as she went along. And Ella is totally into helping me sweep the floor. Like, she actually gets excited about it. She makes messes sort of on purpose, so she can sweep them up. And the cute level around here gets so over the top sometimes. Like the other day, Ella put on her bright yellow underwear on sideways, so they were riding up her bum--which looked a little painful--with one whole butt cheek exposed. And you should have seen Iryn at the clinic the other afternoon, when she had an ear infection, and she was quiet and scared, and said: Am I going to go deaf? and I remembered that even though she acts 13 sometimes, she is only 6, and I promised her she wouldn't go deaf, and wrapped my arms around her tight until the doctor called us in.

But sometimes it's hard. Like, really hard.
It doesn't make it less beautiful. Just hard too.
And that's okay.

Last night Iryn was really angry and frustrated and letting it out on everyone. And finally, I said: Here is a piece of paper and some felts. Draw a picture of how you feel.

She drew a picture of her and me. She drew her arm pointing out at me, like she sometimes does when she is mad at me, and she drew a sunshine over her and a raincloud over me.

But - I'm not kidding - it seemed to make her feel better.
So whatever. She can draw pictures of suns and clouds and me with Xs for eyes until the cows come home. As long as it helps. Maybe I can even make it into a business and sell books full of all the pictures. I might make some money.

Today, at the grocery store, I bought some new fancy felts to entice her to draw more. I left them on the table for her.

She didn't use them, but after the girls went to bed, I picked them up and drew a picture of how I was feeling. I drew a stick girl with a frown, and my arms up in the air, one hand holding a spoon (domestic life) and the other holding a star (my creativity and things I love to do). I stared at it for awhile, then crumpled it up. I remembered an exercise I sometimes did with a workshop I used to teach. It's called "opposites" and you're supposed to draw a picture of a negative posture you feel you are in, and then you're supposed to draw the resolved posture.
So I took the pens again and drew another stick girl, but this time she was smiling and her hands were empty, but inside her heart there was a swirl of aliveness and pure being, and I drew it spinning around and shining and radiating however it wanted to in each moment.
This is how I want to live.

The other morning, at around 7 am, I heard someone clanging around in the recycling out the side of the house. I was getting the girls up and dressed, and I stopped to open the window and peer out. I saw a bedraggled looking woman with bashed-out teeth going through our bottles, stuffing some into her coat. I said hello through the screen, and she looked up at me and laughed sheepishly. “I’m just taking a few bottles.” she said. “I hope that’s okay.” “Sure.” I said. I decided she obviously needed them more that we did. “Take all the bottles you want.”
“What do you get for bottles now, anyhow?” she asked me, as if making casual conversation in a grocery line-up.
“Uh, I’m not sure.” I said, backing away from the window to help my 6 year old untangle her pants.
My 3 year old poked her head around. “Hi.” she said to the woman going through our bottles.
“Hello sweetie! What’s your name?” the woman said.
“Ella.” Ella answered in her tiny voice. “What’s yours?”
“My name is Eileen. How old are you?”

The whole thing had started to get a little weird. The whole situation was a little too “chummy” for my liking. I didn’t want her thinking she could come back for the lawn chairs or the kids’ bikes. Also, the idea of my kids befriending the local transients made me slightly uncomfortable.

I told Ella to get down from the window and to start getting dressed. But she really wanted to talk to Eileen. I insisted she get down—explaining that the woman was a stranger and we shouldn’t talk to strangers—and Ella was visibly upset by the whole thing. Iryn, my 6 year old, was confused too. “But you were talking to her!” She said adamantly.

I closed the window and started getting the girls ready. The whole interaction had felt strange and confusing—not really the part about Eileen, but more how I had reacted to my fear and had not known how to respond. I tried to explain it to the girls: “The woman was stealing from our yard. And I think she had a bit too much alcohol to drink, so I don’t feel comfortable with you talking to her.” I said.

But this felt so inadequate. Was I teaching them to turn a blind eye to suffering? Worse, was I teaching them to put people into categories—all of a sudden now every homeless person in the world drinks too much alcohol and steals bottles?

But at the same time, she was in our yard, going through our stuff—okay, our garbage—but still. Something just felt a little bit off to be saying, “Hey! How’s it going? Top of the morning to ya!” You know?

In my pre-kid life, I probably would have invited the woman in for breakfast. Or I would have maybe suggested we grab a bite to eat downtown. I used to do things like that. But with kids, it’s not so easy. I can’t just invite some unknown and intoxicated woman in for breakfast anymore. But I don’t want to teach my kids to be overly afraid either.

Later that afternoon, Iryn didn’t want to go out into the back to look for the cat, as she usually likes to do. She said she was scared of “the lady”.
She said “the lady” in a ghostly sort of way, like she was saying “spoooooky”.

“Laaaayyyyydyyyyyyyyyy”.

Now, see that’s exactly what I didn’t want to have happen.
It’s hard to know what to do sometimes. I reassured her as best I could, explaining that our yard is safe, but that if a stranger ever came around, it would be best to come inside just in case. I mean we DO live right across the street from a very happening drug deal spot (Iryn calls "them" druggers)

“She seemed nice though.” I said. “I think she was just hungry.”

Iryn looked thoughtful. “She could take our tomatoes and cucumber.” She was referring to our anaemic looking vegetable garden across the yard, where a few pale cherry tomatoes and one single cucumber were dangling pathetically from their vines.
“Yes, I guess she could.” I said.

“Then, out of the blue, a few days later, on the way home from school, she said, “Mama, I know what I would do if I was a mom and a homeless lady came into our yard. I would get some food and I would get a towel and I would put the food in the towel and wrap it around a long stick.” I knew what she was talking about. She was talking about making a “hobo stick” which we sometimes do with a bathroom towel and piece of old doweling. I thought ‘how sweet’.

She continued. “And then I would go out and say, ‘Here. Take this food, and then, please leave. And if you don’t leave, I will knock you unconscious with this big stick.”

Right. Who knows where she comes up with these ideas? But at least it’s opened the whole topic up for conversation, and I guess that’s better than nothing.

It has started to feel cold in the mornings now. Yesterday I noticed that summer had just up and left, all at once. I have that achy, slightly fluttery, heartbroken feeling. I miss it already—the bathing suits hung on the backs of doorknobs, the open doors early in the mornings to let the heat out, the hot, afternoon dullness when we’d escape to the nearest beach for a quick swim. I even miss the sand on the floors.

Also, school starts this week, which always feels so final. But truth be told, the bittersweet feeling there leans more toward the sweet. I am tired of doing so much event organizing—or should I say “not event organizing”, because although I have carried the weight of my 6-year-old’s boredom around on my shoulders for most of the summer, I rarely succeeded in doing much about it.

If she’d had it her way, we would’ve had play dates all day, every day, with little time for much else. Life would be party central around here if she was in charge. She’s always asking me if we can have this or that party:

“Mama, can we have a banana theme party where we make everything out of bananas?”

“But you don’t even like bananas” I answer.

“I would if they were mixed in with other food—like banana cake, banana milkshake, stir fried bananas.” she lists, and for a split second, it brings to mind Bubba in Forest Gump: “Shrimp Creole, shrimp gumbo, pineapple shrimp, coconut shrimp…”

“That sounds like an awful lot of bananas.” I say. But what I’m actually thinking is: That sounds like an awful lot of work. I imagine myself as one of those “good”, energetic moms—like the woman I saw at the beach this summer who, for hours on end was scooping up sand, singing Raffy tunes, hooting and hollering about something or other, and organizing games with all the 3-6 year olds that seemed to gravitate around her. She would do the banana theme party, I know she would. She would also let her kids help her make everything—she wouldn’t care about all the flour spilling across the floor and countertops, or the banana peels that mysteriously found their way to hanging across the arms of the couch.

When I bake with my kids, I always—every single time—reach a point where I want to scream like Lola in Run Lola Run, where she breaks all the windows. That mother at the beach would never want to scream like that. She would probably sing some version of “Peanut, Peanut butter, Jelly”; only she would find some witty way to substitute bananas instead.

Anyways. I didn’t for a second consider doing the banana theme party, and needless to say, it hasn’t been party central around here, and that’s how I like it—usually—but with little kids, I keep learning that good ol’ stay-at-home days don’t often pan out. I wish for them desperately—for long, slow days where we just take things as they come, maybe wander out for a coffee, then home again to read a book for, oh, I don’t know, 8 hours, under a tree. But the girls are not really into this. They have energy to burn.

So there’s this pressure to plan activities, but then on the flip-side, me pining for slow at-home days like I used to have often, before kids, resulting in me sabotaging my good planning intentions, resulting in too many frustrating, unstructured days when we all go a little nuts. Why don’t I just recognize this and get my act together?

Well, for one, I don’t want to be one of those families who can barely stand to be with themselves and each other because they’re so addicted to frantic activity. Like the guy my husband and I saw last week on our way down to Penticton—we were just in time for an hour-long highway closure, and the guy behind us went berserk—I actually thought he might punch the poor lady in the hardhat—and it was clear that the idea of just sitting still for one hour was too much for him. He proceeded to blare techno music from his truck stereo and then he went over to the side of the road—which looked onto sparkling Lake Okanagan, blue mountains and a beautiful dappled summer sky—where he chain smoked and fidgeted until the hour was up. We headed over to the ice cream/fruit stand, and agreed that there were worse things to be doing on a Tuesday afternoon than walking down a road in the sunshine to get ice cream.

So I don’t want to nurture that very thing in my kids. I want to be able to hang around the house a little while my girls make up plays like the sisters in Little Women. I want them to wander off and play like the pastel-painted children in Child’s Garden of Verses where you wonder where on earth the parents are. I’m told that one of these days, I’ll get my wish. I’m told that one of these days, they’ll actually want to take it slow too, instead of needing to go climb metal bars or hunt down all the neighbourhood cats.

But in the meantime, I’m sort of counting on school being back in to help take the edge off.

Craig keeps bringing up the fact that we should get rid of the rocking chair. We’re getting ready to put the girls into one room, and he’s gotten all organizational—spending far too much time on-line looking at closet dividers and bookshelves and things. He wants to discuss lamps, and duvet covers, as well as all the stuff we’re going to get rid of—the clunky old change table, the plastic baby toys that never got played with, the annoying toys that the girls did play with but which we can’t stand, like the pink singing pony with no volume control. And, also, the rocking chair.

But I’m so attached to the rocking chair.

“I nursed my babies in that chair.” I say, as if there’s no more need for discussion.

But he doesn’t see how this is relevant, seeing as how I don’t actually do that anymore.

“It’s ugly.” He says.

“Yes. It’s very ugly.”

He says: “Can’t you find something to replace it with?”

“There’s nothing.” I say.

It feels true. The houses where my daughters were born are gone, the windows where I nursed them, also their baby hair, the blankets they’ve outgrown.

He says, “Why don’t you take a picture of it or something?”

So I think about the picture. See, I don’t really like that idea. A picture would imply the time is passed, and now it’s just a memory, preserved for all time in a photograph. As in: ‘Oh look. Here’s a picture of the rocking chair we had when the girls were little.” As in: that’s all done now.

But if we keep the rocking chair, then it’s like it’s still in the present, as in the girls are still sort of babies, and are just barely past the needing-to-be-rocked-in-a-rocking-chair stage, and might still need it sometimes.

Except that the truth is, it just sits there.

So this is ridiculous, I know.

But I have this fear. This fear that if the girls are not small, then it’s just a short climb until they’re big and will want to move out and I will be old. Or maybe it’s better said this way: I’m afraid that if we get rid of the rocking chair, then it won’t be long now—just around the corner in fact, an eye-blink away—from the time when I will be old and die. More specifically, I am afraid that if we give the rocking chair away, then I will die.

Which is, also, ridiculous.

I mean, was I ever not going to die? This life was always going to be temporary. That’s the deal. But I think I had tricked myself again into believing that it was permanent—or at least semi-permanent, as in I would die eventually, but not for, like, a gazillion years.

Iryn asks me often: Mommy, do you promise:
1) The roof won’t fall in
2) A tidal wave won’t come
3) You won’t die today
4) No one will kidnap me
5) I won’t get cancer
6) We’ll go to Disneyland one day?

And I never know what to say. I imagine that a good parent might pat their child on the head and say: “I promise honey. Now you just quit fretting and go play with your Barbies.” I mean, if ever there was a time to trust blindly, to be free of worry, isn’t it now? But I just can’t bring myself to do it.

So I tell her the truth: “Sweetie, the sky could fall down on us at any moment. No one knows what will happen. We just have to trust that whoever put us here will take care of us.”

Maybe this is too harsh. I’m not sure. I could probably leave out the part about the sky falling down on us. But I want her to learn the truth early on. I imagine it might soften some of life’s blows. And at any rate, I would feel terrible lying to her.

But I lie to myself all the time. I pretend I’m here for the long haul, which relatively speaking, I very well might be. But still. There’s something about knowing that all of this is temporary, fleeting, which causes us to wake up, to pay close attention. I mean, if we could lose it at any moment, don’t we want to take more in? Doesn’t this jolt us into really being here?

So I’ve been thinking about the rocking chair. It takes up so much space. It really does. As does this other thing inside me—I’m not sure what to call it. I wondered if maybe by letting go of the clutter of the chair, it might clear out some of the inner clutter too.

It was a sad thought. Like someone had died. But then I remembered that no one had died at all—that they’re both right here—the girls sleeping in their beds down the hall, Ella curled up low down on her mattress in her new big-girl bed, Iryn long and lanky and slightly sweaty across the hall.

More recording.
And then, I return home to what feels like monotonous tedium.

Cutting up snacks. Folding laundry. Gathering the crayons from under the table.

I come home to conversations like this one:
"Mom, I'd like to be a reptile."
"Hm. Really? Why is that?"
"Because then I would be born in an egg."
(pause)
"And also I wouldn't have to go to school."

Or this one:
"Mom, can a worm marry itself?"
`Hm. I`m not sure. I"ll have to ask daddy about that one."

I get a little grouchy coming home after being at the studio, I have to admit. It is wonderful beyond words to be able to concentrate on one thing, one SINGLE thing, for a whole day.
I can sing my parts until I get them right, without any interruptions. I can make tea whenever I want. No one sits on the bath tub with me while I pee. I get to FINISH MY CONVERSATIONS, instead of having a thousand unfinished thoughts floating in the air like lost feathers.

Oh, what is to become of this double life of mine?

Just spent a week in the studio recording what will (hopefully) become another release. The producer is kind, and whips up gourmet meals while regalling us with strange stories of his rock and roll tours "back in the day". He knows all kinds of famous people and when I walk through his door, I make tea, and then place it on a picutre of David Hasslhoff, who is standing on a big stage wearing the most awful pants I have ever seen in my life, tight black with patchy black and white material on each leg and over the crotch.

Every day, I go down, like a spider, into a dark room. I sit there until my parts are done, and then I emerge into the too-bright light, squinting. It's almost 100 degrees here, but I wouldn't know it. They keep the air conditioning on, and I walk around in a sweater, with my hands wrapped around my warm teacup.

Making things (dare I say art?) is so vulerable.
Every day I have to go in and try my best while simultaneously letting go of the best, because often the best is just fantasy. Theory. The process is, at times, unbearable. I hear orchestras, symphonies, gospel choirs, horn sections in my head. But eventually, you have to let go and let it be what it is. Letting go of some grand idea is heartbreaking. But controlling it only makes you mental.

This is my struggle as a writer too; It has recently occurred to me that for years I have been waiting for that "just-right" feeling to descend upon me like a light beam from Heaven, and THEN... then I will know how to write the perfect song or the best-selling book or the great poem. This has never happened and I have come to believe that it never will. The very nature of art making is not one of glory, but of humility, and this means you have to be absolutely willing to say: "This could very well be total crap. But on I go."

Because of a need to express oneself. Because remaining silent has become more unbearable than saying it out loud.

And then, just when you've resolved to be okay with the mess, to do it anyway, something happens. And you realized it's the "just right" feeling you've been waiting for, but it only came after you'd been digging in the dirt a while, and it didn't come the way you expected it to either, it took on a different form, but there it is. You breathe a sigh of relief and realize, with finality that THIS IS THE ROAD. This is how it works. And so, at the end of the day, you see that not much of it is your business. In fact, the only part of it that IS your business is the showing up.

Some (hopefully) beautiful new songs coming soon....

I am torn today, between wanting to do a thousand things, and wanting to do nothing. I suppose, in the end, I will have to settle for doing just one thing, as is always the case. I read a book once where the writer confessed that as a child, she was very angry at being locked in her body and not being able to fly. I seem to have a similar condition in which I am angry that I cannot be in several places at once, doing multiple things. Right now I would be writing a book and shooting photos and taking a yoga class and scribbling poetry and playing guitar on my deck and riding my bike by the water.

But my 2 hours are almost up for the afternoon, and soon, my 2 year old will wake up and we'll go and play on the swings and maybe pull some weeds from the garden and then Michelle will come for supper and then she'll put the girls to bed while I take my bike (I don't care about the rain) over the the board walk and take some pictures of the weeping willows I've been longing to photograph for days. Evening is the perfect time, when the sun shines low and the green colors seem to vibrate.

This overwhelm of wanting to do everything all at once has always been a thorn in my side, and I have to believe that destiny saw my problem and sent me children. Children require undivided presence, which frees me from my obsession. Left to my own devices, I'd probably never comb my hair and go to the grocery store in my pyjammas, maybe I'd end up like the old homeless woman who lives here in the summers who walks along the road sides, cursing at the cars and pedestrians (What are you looking at you Mother F#*%er!) between rousing choruses of "Life is a Highway" or "Blowin' in the Wind".

As it is, my 6 year old lost her 2nd tooth the other night, and I completely forgot to leave her toothfairy money. She woke the next morning and came into my room, distraught, holding her sad looking tooth: "Why didn't the toothfairy come?" She said.

I moaned. I sympathized. I suggested that maybe the toothfairy didn't see it because it was so small, that we should try again.

I forgot again. And then again. Still my daughter, full of faith, kept believing. Although by now, her version of the toothfairy has changed from a shiny, smiling magical lady, to a fat old many who smokes too many cigarettes and misses work shifts due to hangovers.

I finally remembered on the 4th night, and left a note, apologizing:

"I'm very sorry I kept you waiting." said the toothfairy (whose handwriting looked remarkably like mommy's and whose pen had apparantly stopped working half-way through and had to be replaced with another pen of a darker color)

"So many kids lost their teeth this week, I just couldn't keep up. Some kids had to wait a whole week. Here is something a little extra." I left her double the regular price for a tooth. This morning, she crawled into my bed, smiling her little gappy smile.

I have been so tired the past few weeks. I feel like something within me is consciously draining me, making me have to lie down and be still with my thoughts... in a way I feel like something is trying to get born in me right now and it can only happen in stillness, not in the frenzy of my doing doing doing.

Which means I have had very little time for doing.

The other day I sat down at the piano to sing for 2 minutes. It's all I seem to have right now, stolen moments. Before 2 minutes was up, Iryn let me know that Ella had crawled up onto the counter and dumped lemon juice into the half-made cookie batter that was sitting there awaiting an egg. The lemon juice reacted with the baking soda, which Ella seemed to find quite interesting.

Yesterday I played piano while Ella watered my plants with a spraybottle. She also sprayed the entire window behind the plants but it kept her busy for awhile.

The new album is progressing... Ella sings along to rough tracks in the car: "If I had my way/These walls would be blue/and not this lonely color/Of me without you..."

It's a rough mix, so there is one part where you hear me cough into the microphone, and Ella, singing along, manages to do the cough too.

I cleaned up pee in 2 different places yesterday.

Then, in the evening I went to a party. A good friend threw herself a fancy birthday party at a winery and we had an 8-course dinner with wine pairings. People kept asking me: So what have you been up to? And honestly, sometimes I don't know what to say. All I could think of right then was about how, just before I left, Ella had peed on the kitchen table. It's not exactly impressive. I feel the pressure to make myself sound like I'm being useful or ambitious. Shouldn't I talk about my new record, or the writing I've been doing or SOMETHING? But alas, I couldn't get past the pee.

Today, with the girls away for a few days, I slept in. I pressed snooze 20 times.

I walked downtown for a misto.

I browsed in Value Village and found a turquoise velveteen jacket for spring for only $10.

I bought frozen organic blueberries and ate them at the kitchen counter.

I looked through a music contract and thought about my crappy blue couch covered in stains and wondered if one day, I will not have to play in bars with the blender going in the background, wondered if maybe I could actually own a nice couch one day.

I sat on the front steps in the sun.

I took a nap.

I read from my favorite book.

I made tea every 5 minutes.

I did not check my email or even turn the computer on.

I ate a delicious salad made of chick peas, sprouts, walnuts and organic greens.

I ran along the water. No one was out and I could hear it lapping at the sides of the cement walls along the boardwalk.

I saw a red-winged blackbird in the reeds of the marsh, and then another, and then another. I heard them too, their song which sounds a little like a referee whistle 3 octoves too low.

I swallowed a bug. It came too fast and before I knew it it was down.

I imagined it drowning in my half-digested salad.

I went running this morning, in the first warm sunshine. It feels like it's been a hundred years since I've felt the sun. The past few days has been gloomy and cloudy and rainy... and before that it was so cold. But today, there are rivers of melting snow everywhere, running through everything.

You'd think that after all those years of living in the prairies, I could handle the cold. But when winter comes, I stop my running routing, and go for snowy walks instead. It has to do with slipping in running shoes, and also that horrible ache that happens in your lungs when you get all huffy and puffy breathing in cold air.

So I don't run in the winter. And every year, it's like an awakening, to pump my legs and move across the road with my heart beating hard in my ears.

I often get little bursts of revelation when I run. Today, running along the waterfront, my mind started to wander. I was thinking of how Iryn, my 5 year old, loves to complain. It's exhausting to be around her sometimes. It doesn't take much for her to find fault with the world. Craig says when she was born, her first thought was: "This could be SO much better."

Sometimes it breaks my heart to see her this way. I'll plan a lovely picnic and she'll complain about the location I've chosen. Or I'll say we're gettting dressed for a walk in the snow, which I know she'll love, but she'll complain about having to get her snowpants on. Sometimes I want to shake her and say: You're going to like this. Can you just trust me for once? I also want to say: You know, life is gonna be a lot easier for you if you can learn to take it as it comes. If you can look for the beautiful instead of the ugly. Take it from me.

But as I thought about her, I remembered what I've read in so many places I can't even remember where now. It's the theory that everything you experience is a reflection of you. What you love in another is a quality you yourself posess, and what you despise in another is something you posess, in some way, as well.

It hit me: I can be exactly like her. How many times do I resist life, thinking that something could be "so much better", and missing the good that is right there in front of me? I imagined a kind motherly version of the Universe blowing out ever-so patiently, going: Kim, Kim, Kim... Can you just trust me for once? You're really going to like this.

I pondered this while I ran by the boats in the harbor and the locals out walking their dogs. For weeks now, the harbor has been frozen solid, but there were cracks in the ice now, split every which way like a road map, rivers and highways and sidestreets crisscrossing in all directions.

This is a photo I took of the girls last fall, eating apples on the front steps in the sunshine. This is the time of year when I feel I might burst into tears everytime I see a picture of a beach or a sunlit field.... The other day I wandered into a bookstore and found myself in the gardening section, looking at large, bright books of colorful japanese gardens. I cried at a picture of a wildlife reserve in Delaware, blossoms falling across a pond and sunlight streaming through the trees. By February I am so done with winter.

But here it remains. Yesterday I took the girls on their sleds up to the beach, where I pulled them along the sand. We decided to walk down to the shoreline to see the seagulls on the ice floes, and on our way, we suddenly saw a Great Blue Heron perched in front of us, right where the water washed up against the sand. As we got close, it opened its wings and took off further down the beach. We followed it and reached it again, and sat watching it for awhile. It looked strange there among the boat docks and the geese, out of place, like a creature from another world.

Again, it took off, this time disappearing from sight. We played with sticks in the water, breaking apart the chunks of ice. As we were leaving, an old woman came up from behind us. She had 2 Paris Hilton-type dogs wearing little knit coats. She asked us if we'd seen the Blue Heron.

"Yes," I said. "Wasn't it beautiful?"

She told us there were swans out further, and we could see them, their long, thin necks stretching out above the other geese. There were a few white ones and some black ones and we watched them open their big wings and fly off.

She told us she lived way up the road, and I imagined her to be like me, needing to get out, feeling cooped up. She said the Heron was probably there because by now it is usually spring.

"Really?" I said. "I don't remember that. Is it usually spring by now? I haven't lived here long." She said there were usually crocuses coming up in her flowerbeds.

I realized suddenly that I didn't mind. I was oving these long sled walks down the the beach we've taken so many of lately. A part of me didn't want the winter to end.

We walked with her a ways down the beach. She said: Well, a Heron and some swans. It's been a good day.

And I remembered that that's all it took to make a day good. A few small things, nothing big. It was nice to remember this. We've had so much ordinariness around here lately.... Kindergarten runs and trips to the grocery store and time-outs and checking email. It felt nice to remember that a good day could just be about getting out and seeing a few beautiful things, nothing more.

Still, I am anxious for those crocuses. We have bright purple ones in the backyard that, apparantly, should be up soon if the snow ever melts.

The girls are away this weekend. I've been Value Village shopping for vintage skirts, on a few short, cold walks, and spending a lot of time holed up with my books and my guitar. I've wasted much too much time looking at THIS and trying to figure out how to save the world.

Again and again, I find that I am much more efficient with only a few hours. But I have to admit, I'm enjoying the empty time.

Also, some lovely hours spent at the recording studio on Saturday where I'm working on a second album. I love being there, it's quiet, and surrounded by apple orchards full of snow.

I've been at my desk a lot, trying to finish a project I've been working on forever, scribbling early in the mornings when my mind is clear and calm.

My window looks straight into the window of Greg's small house next door, which has been sitting empty for over a year, the lonely FOR SALE sign still up in the front yard. I've been plotting about how to buy it. It is a beautiful house.... a lovely little tutor-style place with a small rose garden in the back yard and a sun porch. There's a tiny room upstairs that would be my writing room. It has slanted walls and I would paint it pale citrus and put flowers in the window.

All I need to do is sell 25,000 more copies of my CD and the place is mine. Anyone know how to get on Oprah?

The ducks across the street are getting bad. When we pull up in our car, they all start to crowd in. Lately I've heard myself saying: "Let's hurry up and get in the house before the ducks get us." The lady 2 houses down says "It's like that Alfred Hitchcock movie, Birds." They have become quite agressive, despite the fact that we all feed them, or maybe I should say because of the fact that we all feed them.

I have exactly 4 hours left until everyone gets back, so I'm going to put on my coat and head out for a walk before I return home and try to get a bit more work done.

I'm making Winter Squash & banana soup, and the smell is wafting through the air.

It's snowing again... It has been the most perfect winter, really. Not too cold, piles of snow for Christmas. It has been hovering around freezing most days, and many mornings we wake to freshly fallen snow all over the roads.

Yesterday I pulled Ella on her red sled down the road to the beach. No one had walked much yet, so we made footprints across the long stretch of snow-covered sand. We made a small snowman and threw snowballs in the water and watched as the waves washed them away. There was a clear-blue sky and the light was almost blinding on the snow. I wanted to just sit there and let all that light melt my S.A.D away.

I'd thought about renting a lamp this year. I've heard it works. But then I won... I WON!... a tanning package in the library Christmas draw. This only MILDLY compensates for the hundreds of dollars I have paid to them over the last few years in library fines. They have no idea that I, and I alone keep them afloat. But this tanning package will allow me to sit in some sun - albeit fake sun - for short bits of time... I am, theoretically against tanning for the sake of tanning... I mean, who wants that sickly orange glow? But I think I will use it in these months when sunshine is scarce.

I am still mostly floating along after my gorgeous stay at the Monastery. I stayed for 2 days, although it felt a lot longer. I meditated and read books and took many long walks in my snowpants through the forest. On my first walk through the snow, I felt this unexpected rush of joy... I felt 12 years old again, with not a care in the world. Why? Walking in snow is not something reserved just for kids. I realized, with a wee bit of sadness, that probably the last time I went walking like that was when I was a kid. After leaving home, I moved to a rain-drenched fishing community for 3 years, and following that, I lived in the city in the prairies where you rarely wanted to venture out in minus 30.

So here I was, finally walking again in deep snow, in snowpants. They made that swish swish noise I remember so well.

I did not work. I did not work on one single creative project. I just did things that brought me joy. I've had headaches again the past few months, and when I asked myself what I needed, the answer always came: JOY.
So I've been doing things out of joy. At Christmas, I read a Joan Didion book about her husband dying, strangely, because it brought me joy...the beautiful way she tells her stories. I thought: What a depressing thing to be reading at Christmas." But I coudn't argue. Everytime I had a spare moment, I rushed to the book to see how it unfolded.

At the Monastery, students had the opportunity to talk with the head Monk. I made an appointment. We mostly talked about Bob Dylan. We talked about my writing and about balance. The one thing that stuck in my head in the end was something I already knew. It was a reminder, really. That art should never come first. Life comes first, and art flows out of that place. I realized that's why I write here. Despite poeple encouraging me not to talk about my family, my kids, etc... I write about it here because I think that as a society, we've divorced ourselves from our lives enough. And I am not going to contribute to that.

Notice I spare you the dull potty-training stories though. And trust me. There are many.

Being back home, it is definitely harder to find those quiet moments that abounded at the Monastery. Right now my 5 year old is being sort of mean. Yesterday I said: "You need to learn how to say things nicer. No one is going to want to be your friend if you talk to people like that." She said: "Mom! Of course I don't talk to anyone else like that!"

Right. Just me. How nice.

So we are working on that.

It's one of the 10 perfections; Energy. "May I strive diligently until I achieve my goal."

I"m working hard on #10: Equinamity: "May I be ever calm, serene, unruffled and peaceful."

Unruffled.

As much as I would LOVE to move to a Monastery and move about in perfect quiet all day, that is not my life. A quote I found in the Monastery Journal downstairs said this:

When Mother Theresa received her Nobel Peace Prize, she was asked the question: What can we do for world peace? She answered: Go home and love your families.
This, then, is my task at home.
And, of course, to write. After the girls go to bed, I plink on my piano and have been writing many lovely things.

A kind producer has befriended me and we plan to make a record soon. He gave me a painting for Christmas of 2 ladies in big hats. They are both looking off to one side. They look the same, but with opposites: One has a red hat, the other orange. One has orange flowers, the other a red shirt.

I can't help but think of those ladies as ME. Me doing the kindergarten run, and then, me at my writing desk after their bedtimes, scribbling away on paper. This painting reminds me that both can exist in one frame.

What else? Just that the ducks are here with a vengeance this winter. Over a hundred of them are living across the street, and when we get home, they crowd around us, pecking at our shoes. One actually attacked Iryn, my 5 year old, the other day, jumped up and started ripping the bread from her hands. People see it and think it's strange...a tourist attraction...like all the pigeons in Times Square.
They give me the feeling of living in the the pages of a book when they all gather in our yard, and the cars slow down to watch. I can't help feeling special, like the ducks stayed just for me.

A long drive along a gravel road plus 2 5:30 am meditation sessions plus 3 long walks in deep snow in my snowpants plus 2 long afternoons to read and write, plus a little photographic adventure, plus a bluer-than-blue sky and a whole lot of tea equals one rejuvenated girl!

Christmas was nice, but my 2-day stay at the retreat centre was amazing.

I'll be back to share more later...

I am sitting at my computer while the girls have gone walking with Craig. It is snowing hard outside. They left in their mittens and snowsuits. I should be packing, I really should. It is less than an hour before we are supposed to leave to spend Christmas holidays in my home town of Kamloops and there are 1/2 empty suitcases all over the house.
But I know I must post now or I won't until the new year.
For some reason I decided to do this horrible cleanse thing. Don't ask me why I chose Christmas time to do this. Last week I was convinced it couldn't wait... I was feeling tired and kept catching things....but now all I can think of is everyone sitting around drinking wine and eating fudge without me. Also, I can't have my most favorite things: tea, bread, cheese (is: cheesetoast, my staple food) and salad dressing. I have seriously lost my motivation for making salads now that I can only drizzle it with olive oil and lemon juice. It's not exactly exciting. Also, I am forced to eat weird gluten-free, wheat-free inventions that taste like cardboard. Only 18 more days to go. I hope I last.

So Christmas is here.
I have my gluten-free snacks and my green tea packed. After Christmas I will go stay at a Monastery just outside of Kamloops. It is located in the middle of the forest and they employ very strict guidelines, like no makeup, jewelry, eating at improper times (other than twice daily!) and above all.... we must refrain from using luxurious seats and beds (whatever that means...does that mean I can't bring my duvet???)

I was disappointed to read in the guidelines that no music is allowed either. So I won't be writing any songs. And no drinks in the meditation hall. I guess that means I'm going to have to quit my habit of carrying around a cup of tea from morning 'til night.

In the living room the tree is lit. the middle string of lights don't work, so it looks lopsided. It is mostly filled with kids' decorations now... cookies and pre-school projects. I have my bag of books waiting at the door and snacks for the car. I wish I had something more profound to say, so I will leave you with this line from the Secret Garden that I read last night.

"Of course there must be lots of magic in the world, but people don't know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen."
-Frances Hodgson Burnett

I'm off...

Last week was a struggle to keep my thoughts positive. Maybe it was the moon. I don't know. The world seemed doomed, and all I could think of was about moving into the forest, away from the car fumes downtown, away from the addicts (or druggers as my 5-year-old likes to call them) who shoot up in the vacant lot across the street. Life felt precarious and frightening. I felt too human and vulnerable.

On Friday night, as I was giving the girls baths, Craig called me out into the hall and said we had to get the girls outside immediately, because there was a gas leak. I kicked into mother-hen mode, gathering the girls from the tub, wrapping them in their robes and pulling them outside. It was especially bothersome that we had a fire in our fireplace going, but what can you do? We called the fire department and waited out on the road for our house to explode.

The trucks came and the gas company tested our house with little tiny machines. We had definite traces of carbon monoxide in the house, and they advised us to find somewhere else to spend the night while they condemned our furnace and the house aired out.

We went to stay at our good friends' place. They had extra blankets and beds and all of that. They made tea. I got the girls to bed and then I went to bed myself.

As I crawled into bed, Ella woke up. She was scared of falling and began clinging to me like a little lobster. She would not let go. I laid down and managed to get her to sleep with her on top of me. But every time I tried to move her off, she'd wake up crying, clinging. I was trapped. And really uncomfortable. And cold. I desperately wanted to sleep. Because I was tired. But also because I couldn't shut off my brain. My mind was a battlefield full of dead bodies and bombs. The world felt like a scary, scary place. Had we been breathing in carbon monoxide for days and days? (I had had a headache.) Could your house just randomly explode with no warning? Yikes.

I kept trying to move Ella, but she clung and cried. I was pinned to the bed. It was driving me crazy. By now it was 2am. I actually considered knocking her head with something, not TOO hard, just enough to knock her out so I could sleep. One thinks such things at 2am with children.

It suddenly and clearly came to me, all at once: Ella is me. I am Ella. I am a screaming, afraid child. I imagined God becoming equally impatient with me, blowing out air, saying in her kindest voice: You're being rediculous. You're fine. You are JUST FINE".

Finally I got Ella off me. I fell asleep, trying to trust again, for the millionth time. It feels like my life is all about this. Maybe all our lives are, really, come to think of it.

Morning came. Things looked a little better. Ella looked out the window and saw dandelion puffs on the grass and called them bubbles. We went upstairs and made tea, ate the last of the strawberries and cheese I'd bought on our way over the night before.

We drove home. The house was cold. Freezing cold. We lit a fire. I made a little bed in front of the hearth and slept again. The girls watched a Winnie The Pooh movie.

There is this one part in the movie where everyone thinks Christopher Robin is in trouble. They go on a perilous journey to find him. But what you learn in the course of the story is that everything they're afraid of is really just shadows and illusions. Nothing real.

I tried to remember this. My mind started to calm down. I started to get quiet for the first time in awhile.

Then I went to the library and got a book. A book I'd been waiting 2 weeks for. It was everything I'd hoped for. I started it in the evening and finished it the following afternoon. God only knows how, between napping and making meals (okay, we had cereal for dinner) and taking care of the girls (okay, so maybe they watched a little more tv than usual). I laughed and cried and sighed out loud while the fire crackled. That's what I love about reading. Good books have the ability to lift you out of you own mind, and into another place. But stangely, after you're done, you see your life a little more clearly than you did before.

What to say?
It's cold now. I forget. I take the girls out in light jackets, no hats. They shiver in the crisp air. It's hard to let fall go. We wake to frost white across the grass. The geese are loud sometimes as they cross over the house, leaving.

Today was a headachy day. A write-off day. I meant to get so much done with some time off, and ended up sleeping, brooding. I wish for a good book, for wood for the fire, for a long afternoon alone, in and out of sleep. I wish for a long walk in a warm hat, for tea in one mittened hand.

Today I am making peace with my own limitations. I always trick myself into thinking I can accomplish so much, get so much further down the road. The girls went away for 3 whole days last weekend. THREE WHOLE DAYS. Somehow I believed I'd get so much finished, I had a list a mile long of all the things I'd do without interruptions. But I forgot how strange I feel without them here....I miss them like a ghost limb. I wander around lost, overwhelmed, unable to focus with more than my usual 2 hour increments to work with. I always picture myself writing long into the night, or becoming lost in time for a whole morning and afternoon with my paints and poetry. The truth is, I'm incredibly scattered and never was very good at focusing for long periods of time. (In school days, this meant I was terrible at doing my homework. After 6 hours in a desk, how could I?) The truth is, my life works best with my kids at home, for now, anyway. Maybe one day, I'll learn to use hours and hours, but for now, I am okay with my pieces.

In the summer of 2000, in a 2nd hand bookstore in Mendocino, California, I found a book where I woman wrote:

"For me, the balance between doing and just being is the most important and dangerous question. If I am guilted or lured into achieving too much and lose the stillness at my centre, then it takes me a long time to regain it, and I do violence to myself and those I love because of fatigue and pressure. I have had to give up 'winning big' because I love my life when I am connected to it and I hate it when I get caught up in competition and deadlines."
................................................

In the evenings, we pile every cushion and pillow in the house on the floor below the couch. We lay the big, white, Queen-sized duvet across it all, and the girls jump onto it, first from the desk behind the couch, then onto the couch, then finally into the pile of pillows. They laugh, like they are landing on clouds. They get some pretty good airtime. Tonight they took off all their clothes and put their tutus on. They always put them on backwards, so their little butt cheeks hang out. I forgot to close the blinds. I can only imagine how it looked to the people across the street who must have seen it through the big picture window. 2 bright ballerinas flailing, then disappearing, then appearing again, aglow in the dim lamplight.

It rained all night. This morning I woke at 6am and made tea, went out and sat on the couch and watched the rain pour.

It's been a brutal week. The kids are out of control. We got kicked out of the library yesterday. I'm not kidding. It was because Ella was screaming and I couldn't get her to stop. Also, she lost her pink cowboy boots in one of the book isles, and we couldn't find them. We left with Ella walking in only her socks, screaming. Then I "beeped". I had forgotten to check out some books that I had been carrying around the library in my diaper bag. So of course it looked like I was trying to steal them. I felt like an unfit mother.

People can be so unkind. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but it seems like the old bitter ladies that work at the library have never been married or had children and because they live in the perfect, unmoving silence of the library all day, when a normal child comes in, they go mental.

Also, before we walked into the library, out in the parkade, the woman who was parked next to me called to me and said I dented her van with our car door. I dragged my kids over to have a look- I was sure we'd been careful getting out. I opened the door, and the dent on her van didn't match where my door would have been, so it obviously hadn't been us. I was relieved.

Now where I come from, people would usually apologize for inconveniencing a person, and especially they would apologize for falsely accusing someone of denting their van. I certainly would. But she said nothing, just turned her back and got into her van.

"Okay. So take care then." I said under my breath.

It really does give a person reason to worry about the state of the world.

Some beautiful things are:
The red snapdragons in a mason jar on the windowsill
The lavender oil I bought yesterday
Waiting for the kettle to boil for tea
The green, wet world
A nice new friend I met at a show on Friday
Reading my Annie Dillard book for the 2nd time
My old, ugly but warm red sweater
The leftover remnants of mudpies made today in the back yard.
A long drive "home" tomorrow for Thanksgiving weekend.

Today, I feel a little calmer. I spent the morning alone, writing. I wrote a terrible song on guitar and then patted myself on the back. "Good girl." I always say when I show up and write.

It's late. The rain is starting again. It's cold. Snow on the hills this morning. The girls are sleeping now. Thank God. They wore me clean out today. I have nothing left.

.......
"I guess what I am trying to say is that it's okay it's okay it's okay. To just be still and even confused and not have to move."
-from the lyrics of September Afternoon, which I wrote last week.

"Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing."
-Euripides

Summer is losing out to fall now, I saw the first pale yellow leaves yesterday as I ran along Abbot Street. The Maple leaves are losing their color too, drying out along the edges.

Two nights ago, Iryn (age 5) got out of bed after I'd put her in, and came out crying, saying she was too hot.

"I'm too hot and I can't get my pyjammas off...." then, "What if I'm not real?"

I hugged her. She seemed scared.

"Pardon?" I said.

"What if I'm not real? I'm scared I"m not real." she said.

"Trust me. You're real." I poked her in the ribs with my finger.

I was tired and not in the mood for the philosophical chats that she always seems to initiate before bed, in the dark, when she's WAY overtired. I know all about it. I was exactly the same as a child. Something about the darkness makes you want to know the answers to things you didn't need to in the light.

I rubbed her back.

"I know what you mean. I used to wonder that too."

(I didn't dare mention that I STILL wonder about it now. It was too late at night and she was tired...)

"What helped you?" She asked as we sat on the edge of the bathtub.

"Well..." I thought for a minute. I am so not into the pat answers. But I"m also not into complicating the explanations so that she has no idea what I'm talking about. I don't believe truth is exclusive. It has to be simple, or there's something wrong.

I wanted to tell her about all the things I know now. The things I know in my bones. The things that have become, what author and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg calls "abiding faith". I wanted to tell her that you can test truth in your body. That if it feels bad, something is off. I wanted to tell her that if it makes her afraid, she can dismiss it and know that it's not something she needs to worry about right now. I wanted to tell her that truth feels like warm water or a sunset or like watching snow fall out the window. It rushes through your body and feels healing and spacious, not cold and rigid and frightening.

But how to explain these things to her? I decided to give it a go.

"It's good to ask questions like that." I say.

"Why?" She wants to know.

"Because if you don't ask questions, you end up going through life believing everything everyone tells you, and not everything everyone says is true. Even if they say they know, they might not. You have to find the truth for yourself, and know it inside you. So asking questions is good, because it means you'll find out the truth about life...But when the questions start to feel bad, when they start to make you scared and afraid, when they start to feel too heavy - do you know what I mean by heavy? (she nods) - then that's when you have to open your hands and let them go for awhile."

I have told her before that I sometimes imagine God as a kind mother, and we are all her babies. Iryn likes this image, and she relates to it. It always makes her smile.

"Sometimes you have to let God take the questions and just let yourself be taken care of for awhile. Not worry so much. Do you think you can do that?"

She nods. "I just did." She says.

It gets her to bed.

But afterward, I can't stop thinking about it. She is five, for crying out loud. How do I explain to her that this is a part of what being a human is? Feeling scared, feeling lost, questioning the world, lying in bed at night and wondering if you are real.

.................
This afternoon, we drove across town to the grocery store. Iryn and her little sister were sitting in the back seat. The car was hot and the traffic was heavy. Suddenly, Iryn says: Mom, I keep trying to feel not real, but it's not working. I guess I let it go too good."

I hope to God she'll remember this. I hope to God I will too.

Suddenly, the light is leaving early, too early. After I put the girls to bed I go and sit on the wooden deck on the side of the house. I look out into the sky, into what is left of the day fading into pale colors and orange-edged clouds. There's only a bit of sky, with a few telephone wires in the way, but that's all you need sometimes. Just a place to see the evidence of the day's end. There is an enormous chestnut tree across the alley, and when the sky gets dim, it grows dark and looming, its huge leaves like hands, waving in the breeze.

Every Saturday and Sunday morning, from 7-9am, I have been leading workshops down at the beach where we sit on blankets and journal. It has been wonderful. Today, after the workshop, the girls and I hit the farmer's market and I bought some fresh-baked bread, a bottle of natural body scent spray that smells like blackberry pie and some tiny polished stones for the girls in little hand-made bags.

There was a lovely woman selling lavender products, and I have always dreamed of owning a lavender field, so I asked her: is it as lovely as it looks? She said it was a lot of work, but wonderful work. She told me about how, several years back, her son died, and it shook up her life and made her decide to live it in a different way. She quit her life-long nursing career and started her lavendar company on an acre of property.

Tonight there is noise out on the street. There is some festival going on and tomorrow the park will probably be trashed, scattered with smashed-up bottles and chip bags, stray shoes and cigarette butts. As Iryn said when she was only 4: "Some people just don't know how to take care of the world."

I am inside, with the windows open, trying to learn to play the banjo. Annie Dillard once wrote of writing books that it feels more like sitting up with a sick friend, hoping she will get better. I feel like that about the banjo at the moment. It has taken me nearly 3 hours to figure out how to tune the thing.

Tonight I had a few hours off alone and I rode my bike to the library for a stack of new books. Then I went and sat by the water, my legs dangling over the edge of the wall, as I have done so many tiimes this summer.

.............................

Conversation between me and Craig the other day:

Me: Oh, I'm so glad we finally have a new can opener. I LOVE this new can opener. I actually look FORWARD to opening cans now.

Craig: mm hmm....

Me: Seriously. I used to dread opening cans. But now, when I remember that we have a new can opener, I actually feel excited about opening a can.

Craig: Yeah, er, okay... I think it's time for a holiday.

(In my defense, the old one was really terrible... It gave out half way around, and I usually ended up prying it off with a butter knife. I almost stabbled myself a few times, and the whole process usually took about 10 minutes.)

Today was an ordinary day. My daughters and I were out in the front yard in the sun, reading books on a blanket after lunch. My 5 year old said "Let's look for 4-leaf clovers." I remembered many a summer day in childhood spent searching for 4-leaf clovers in cool grass. As a child, I never found one, but looking sure was nice. So I agreed. Within 2 minutes, we had each found a four leaf clover, to my utter amazement. it felt odd and magical and too good to be true. And call me superstitious, but I'm going to take this as a sign of things to come...

Hello dearest fans who are so faithful to check back here.... Since I am so terrible at updating you on things, I will post my recent eVent Life column.... It is a bit of a journal entry of sorts.

You can also check out my recent interview with legendary folk singer Ian Tyson here


Seedpods

On Saturday, I woke to tiny seedpods falling from the Elms outside. It was beautiful, and normally I love this time of year, love to sit on the steps and watch them spin from the sky.

Instead, I found myself terribly cranky. A creative project I’d been working on for a long time felt disastrous. It was clear I’d wasted years of my life when really, my time would have been better spent learning dentistry or interior decorating or the trapeze.

As an artist, these creative valleys tend to come and go. Normally, my initial reaction is to head to the cupboard in search of chocolate, which I did, but all we had was a bag of chocolate chips, which were, frankly, a poor excuse for chocolate and didn’t do the trick at all.

I abandoned the chocolate chips and opted, instead, for a run, which normally has the ability to shake off any and all yuckiness. Somewhere around the half-hour mark, something happens and I become light and free and carried along by something so much bigger. But not today. I just felt antsy and strung out the whole way, and afterward, I sat in the kitchen, mired in my own despair.

My favorite writer on creativity, Julia Cameron, writes a lot about how artists get cranky when they’re not working enough. “It’s not the working that’s hard”, she says. “It’s the NOT working.” So, I went to my desk and opened a notebook and tried to continue from where I’d left off the week before. I looked up at my bulletin board and read some of the quotes I’d pinned up to help myself along. One by Agnes De Mille says: “Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how… the artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” Another by T.S. Eliot reads: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Usually this helps. Usually just showing up makes all the difference, is just enough to turn on a switch and get the juices flowing.

But not today. It was SO not working today.

I abandoned my desk and headed for the teakettle. My husband returned with the girls, and they were loud and a little grumpy, armed with bags of groceries to be put away. Iryn, my 5 year old wanted to tell me about a kitty she saw out the car window, the potato bug she found in the garden. That’s the thing about children. They have this amazing, almost transcendent ability to bring you down to earth. Once, a few years back, I was lamenting to my husband about my recent lack of musical inspiration. “I don’t know if I’ll ever write another song again.” I complained. Iryn overheard and piped in, “Don’t worry mom. Just sing Row Row Row Your Boat!”

When the girls went to their rooms for their afternoon “quiet time”, I made myself some tea, and tried to unravel my thoughts. They were all twisted up like so much string, and for the life of me I couldn’t find where to begin. I was almost more frustrated by the fact that I was frustrated because I have been here before. I have done this creative block thing a million times. I know the rules. You fill up. You listen. You go for a walk. You press on. These are the things that I know work.

Then suddenly I remembered one I had forgotten. Or maybe I’d consciously left it out because our ego selves badly want to believe that the harder we work, the more we get done. This is not the case, as the deeper parts of our selves know. Seasons of unproductiveness, of latency and quiet reflection often yield the greatest results in the long run. But we forget this. I forgot.

I sighed and grabbed a great book I’ve been reading, called “The Joy Diet”. I opened it up to a quote by Lao Tzu:

“When 2 forces collide, the victory will go to the one who knows how to yield.”

The author goes on to talk about yielding to life the way water yields in a stream, finds the path of least resistance. “It means that we should surrender to relaxation, to flexibility, to the balanced state of mind and body that makes doing a job, raising a child, negotiating a deal…feel like dancing.”

Right then, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I grabbed my mug of tea, and headed for bed. I didn’t need to work or walk or read. I needed a nap.

It felt good to slide my legs under the covers. The light in the room was soft and muted and ever so slightly blue. The window was open, and a gust of wind came up and sent the seedpods flying from the treetops outside. They blew in torrents across the glass, some slipping under the sill and onto my writing desk. They fell so hard, and for so long, I almost thought it was snowing.

Okay. So it has been a really long time since I've posted. But I've been SOOO busy.

After New Music West, I came home and threw myself headlong into a project that is turning out to be a new job. I'm writing my own column for a local newspaper and doing feature stories. Last week I interviewed the legendary Ian Tyson. Tonight, I attended a hard-core boxing club. Part way through, I caught a glimpse of myself in the big mirror, and I looked so silly that I collapsed onto the floor in hysterical fits of laughter.
But I think I have quickly become seriously addicted to it, and I plan to return on Sunday for the womens' class. I left dripping in sweat and stinking to high Heaven. I have a feeling my whole body is going to feel like I was hit by a truck tomorrow or the next, but it was well worth it.

What else? Tonight is warm, and as I sit here at my computer, a cool breeze is blowing through the window and I can hear the hum of the traffic up on the highway.

I love summer. I love everything about it. I love the roses blooming by the fence, I love keeping my doors open in the morning, I love sitting on the steps in the sunshine, I love riding my bike everywhere, I love wearing flip-flops and I love watering my pathetic looking vegetable garden. I don't know what I've done, but the lettuce did not transplant well and one of my cucumber plants has wilted. I am a little afraid for my garden this summer. But I will keep watering it and hope some kind of miracle happens. I was counting on a profuse abundance of cherry tomatoes to last me until September. I might have to move them into a place where the sun hits longer, because we have these horrible huge cedars that seem to be blocking out the light.

That is all...

Well dear friends.... I am off to Vancouver tomorrow, where I will:

a)Perform a great show with my dear friend and cellist, Richard St. Onge at New Music West, a huge and critical music festival

b)make a connection which will drastically alter the state of my career for the better

c)find a great new pair of boots

d) eat more sushi in 3 days than I have ever eaten in my entire life and love every minute of it

e) If you're wondering, yes, I have been watching "The Secret", maybe a little more often than a person should be allowed to.

If you have no idea what New Music West is, I will tell you. It is a big music festival where new music is showcased and is also a big chance to meet key industry people and strut your stuff.

I am prosperous.

I am a diva.

I am filthy rich and have weekly pedicures.

Wish me luck...

"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. "
-Rainer Maria Rilke

Okay. I can't stand it. I'm here to tell you about my friend Michael Peters and the songs he has just posted on his myspace. He is releasing his album soon, but these are little peeks. They are so achingly beautiful I can't stand it, and the chick singing in the background aint' so bad either (er, in case I'm not being clear enough, it's me.)

I can't decide which is my favorite, DARK STAR, or LAST WORD

Check it out here

When I was a kid, my brother would always say "Kiiiiiiimmmmm.... You're soooooo gullible." Well apparantly, he was right.

I was so pumped about a free photo contest I found on-line a few weeks ago. I have been trying to find a way to buy myself a new Canon Digital Rebel camera for the longest time, and the cash prizes on this contest looked significant. I entered a picture of wild daisies I took a few summers ago when my daughter and I were strolling through the park.

Yesterday, I got an email that said I had won! Imagine the joy. It went on to say that I could attend the big event in Arizona where my photo would be prominently displayed for professionals to view. (This is where it began to sound a little sketchy....) Then it said that I had won an enormous trophy (valued at $300!) and some sort of membership fee and other such useless things. THEN it said that they would be happy to send it all to me if I would cover the basic cost of processing of $169!

Are there actually people in the world who send them the money? That's what I want to know.

***
Life these days has been busy with good things. I was scheduled to perform at a venue out in the boonies last week and got hopelessly lost. I stopped to ask a farmer for directions and he drew me the saddest looking map I have ever seen. His directions were right up there with, "Turn left where the old water shed used to be... Then right at the old Jones' farm"....

I finally made it in one piece. I have been writing songs about the II World War, imaginary letters between a couple separated over a long period of time. I sang one of these songs, and the next day and wonderful lady named Myrtle called to get my address. She said she had a book full of diary entries written by a woman during the war. It is full of wonderfully ordinary details like:

"A warm and pleasant day- that is if one had nothing to do. This morning Jack had an incinerator fire and burnt up all the rubbish, and I turned over the orchard bed ready to plant out wallflowers this evening. We had tea in the corner and were much worried with one or two wasps till Jack went in and came back again armed doughtily with the fly swat looming like a knight of old."

After that show was a trip out to Cochrane, to play at the best folk club in all of Canada, the Cochrane Valley Folk Club, opening for a few older, but apparantly sort of famous folk singers. One was the lead singer from the old band Chilliwack, which I remember hearing on the radio of my dad's blue Chevy. After the show, I hung out in Calgary for a few days, sipped Chai Lattes at the Oolong Tea House and took the train while the sun was setting all across the prairie sky.

Things are finally blooming here. The Magnolia trees are starting to open and there are little frail daffodills in the front flower beds. They look cold and uncertain, but they are opening anyway.

THIS is a very interesting article about plastic bags.

I have recently become very passionate about eliminating plastic from the world. Plastic does not biodegrade, and suddenly, one morning as I threw a piece of plastic in the garbage, it occured to me that all of this plastic was going to go SOMEWHERE and sit there. It felt enormous. To be ever-so-slightly dramatic (and I swear I am not wearing tie-dyed anything right now) I almost felt the earth weeping.

I imagined it filling up our forests and rivers and oceans, plastic bags flying everywhere like so many leaves. So although, yes, there are people dying all across the world and horrible things happening, far worse than plastic bags, I am bringing it up.

I think many times we use all the horrible things happening in the world as an excuse the keep throwing away plastic. "It's not important considering..." we say. But it is. And by forgetting the little things, we soon forget the big things. There are a million tiny things we can do every day to better our world. It is the little things, in fact, that add up to create something wonderful or something horrilble. Think of icicles and fossils and ants making ant hills all over your front yard.

Across the street, in the creek that winds through my town, there is a beaver who is trying his darndest to build a dam. If the dam goes in, it'll screw up the whole creek, and the city workers know this. They keep tearing down the beaver's work. There are teeth marks on many trunks along the creek for, from what I can see, miles. They have had to put netting around dozens and dozens of trees along the edge of the creek, so he doesn't chew them down, which I'm sure has been a lot of work for them. When we walk by, we laugh. I guess that's where the saying 'buisy little beaver' comes from.

One little, insignificant beaver, has caused such a stir.

So the next time you cause yet another plastic bag to be thrown into the universe, think of that beaver. The little, seemingly insignificant thing you can do is ask for paper bags at the grocery store, get a travel mug for your to-go coffees (you even get a discount sometimes), and, as they say, reduce, re-use, recycle.

Okay. I'm down. That's really all I had to say.

It seemed like spring was here. I've been riding my bike again now on the bare, dry roads. Riding a bike again for the first time after a long winter feels so good, almost like I could lift off into the sky like they did on E.T. Fly over all the buildings and the trees.

But today, snowflakes started to come down again, lightly at first, and then some more, until the whole sky was filled with the wretched things.

The woodpecker is back. He was here last year when we moved in, knocking furiously on the neighbor's chimney pipe, day in and day out, and he's back again, at the same house. He seems to never rest, and I can't imagine what it must sound like inside the house. I imagine the owners plotting ways in which to kill it, becoming more and more violent as the days go on. I wonder if it keeps them awake at night. Even with my windows closed, I can hear it in every room.

My little girls are beautiful together now. Ella can say a few words, nods and shakes her head, laughs at Iryn's bizarre antics. In the afternoons, they sit on the couch eating popsickles, side by side, and I find myself a little jealous, wondering what it would've been like to grow up with a sister in my life.

Maybe not much different. I dressed my little brother up in girls' clothes and painted his nails, like all good sisters do.

Sometimes Iryn is afraid to go down the hall to the the bathroom by herself so she asks Ella to come with her. They reach out to each other and walk hand in hand down the semi dark hallway. It is the most perfect thing.

I dreamed of Kelowna the other night. I dreamed I was outside the public library downtown and it was spring, and I was running down the sidewalk with the sun shining.

They say that you have become fluent in a language when you begin to think in that language. I think that when you begin dreaming of a new town, that town has become home in even the smallest way. I feel settled here, if only for a while. I walk around these streets now like I have been here always, and it is good to not feel like such a stranger, though I still get little aches for the places of my past, but it doesn't hurt like it once did.

Now the snow has stopped and all the roads are wet. The sun is out a little again, behind the bare grey trees, and it feels like everything is on the edge, waiting to open any minute now.

It's such a pretty day. The running season has begun again (I don't go in the winter when it' really cold) and I forget how high I feel afterward, how ideas descend on my like birds. How full and awake and transcendent running makes me feel.

The other night, I went running alone, as the sun was going down. I ran down along the waterfront, and geese were taking off from the water as if in slow motion like they do in dramatic National Geographic movies. All the trees looked old and weary, but in a beautiful way. Beautiful because you know spring is coming and so it is a redemptive kind of weariness.

Every winter's end, I have to shake off all my own weariness. Things accumulate over those cold months, and by the end of the first good, long run, they're gone, and I am weightless again.

As I was running, the sun fell behind the mountains. Sunsets in the prairies always seem to take forever. The sun sinks slowly toward the horizon, the colors start a good long time before the light is gone, and they linger a long time afterward. But here, I live at the base of a mountain. All you have to do is blink, and the sun has fallen behind it, and that is that. Everything is in shadow. You have to savor it a little more.

After the run, I went and sat on Greg's steps. I'll explain. Greg is the guy who lives next door, but he's never there much. I want to buy his house. So I've taken to sitting on his steps, pretending it's mine. His yard is surrounded by roses in the summer, and there's a big Magnolia tree in the middle of the yard, which will soon be covered in stunning, pink flowers. It's a little old house, with tiny bedrooms upstairs and slanted ceilings. There's a porch in the back overlooking the rose garden.

-------------------------

I haven't written much lately, because things are changing dramatically inside me. There are no words yet. I'm finding them, but they're still not here.

All I know is I'm grateful. I'm grateful for all of this and the sun right now against the trees and that spring always comes, in a metaphorical sense as well, and there is that glorious feeling of something blooming.

"Ever since Love heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you." ~Hafiz

A miracle has, in fact, occured. The offer fell through, in a strange and random way. Then, a few days later, another offer came through from some people who want to keep renting this little house out, which means... we get to stay!

The FOR SALE sign now contains stickers that say SOLD, and for awhile longer, I can breathe a little easier each morning as I get up and see the sky lighten through the windows. The boxes can stay in their places for another while. The plants can stay on their windowsills and I can keep watching the ducks that waddle around out in the front yard.

Had a fantastic show with Twilight Hotel last Wednesday night. A good time was had by all. Thanks to all who showed up.

Outside there is the tiniest bit of snow falling. The evenings are stretching out a litte, it doesn't start getting dark now until almost 5. Halleluiah for that. Sometimes it feels appalling to think that I spend almost half the year waiting for warmer weather. Maybe I should consider relocating to Mexico.

The winter seems a little empty. My days are filled with happy work, though. Work on projects and new dreams starting like little tiny buds. I feel them there, under the ground.

Life has been a little monotonous these days. Words have not come easily. Songs have not been winding their way through my brain like they usually do.

Today I found myself browsing in the health food store again. What is it with me and health food stores? I feel I could spend hours there, trying on face creams, reading the yoga magazines, looking at all the ingredients in the salad dressings. It's a little wierd.

There is a part of me that has always wished that I smelled like sandalwood and wore long, linen dresses and made crafty things like beaded necklaces or crocheted scarves. I would shop in organic food co-ops and walk slowly all day long with lint between my toes and live on a little island selling handmade things forever and ever and ever.

The health food store has these amazing dark mint-chocolate bars that it would seem I am heavily addicted to. They're costing me bigtime, but I can't stop. I drive across town just to buy one for $3.25. It was really stumping me as to why I was so in-love with this chocolate. I started to wonder what kind of strange drugs they secretly make it with, and then it hit me...

SERATONIN.
Every year in January, I get the winter blues. Dark chocolate produces seratonin, which, if I'm not mistaken, is the hormone you lack in the long, winter months. I have not had the winter blues this January for the first time in years, and this may be a crazy theory, but... I think it's the CHOCOLATE! So now I can stop feeling guilty. It's either dark chocolate or therapy, and the chocolate is (slightly) cheaper.

After the health food store, I went to a yoga class down the road. I got there a little early. Before class starts, everyone sits on their yoga mats while the candles burn on the windowsills and soft whooshy music plays. I sat there, stretching a little. Other women began to arrive, and most of them were over 50 or so. They were beautiful, fit, grey-haired women who all knew each other. They whispered and talked and laughed and hugged before class started. I found myself watching them, something inside me wanting what they had. I could see it; they knew who they were. They had learned a lot of lessons. I could see it in their eyes. I wanted to be 50 in the worst way.

I have days when I know some of my own answers. I have days when I know where I'm headed and why I'm here and what matters and all of that. I have days when I am sitting in the sun and I look at my daughter and think: I have everything.

But lately I've been feeling so ready to be done with self-doubts and the questions; not the big ones that will never have anwers, not the big ones that we all have to come to peace with or the ones that are SUPPOSED to be there. But the ones that are not. I'm ready to be loosed of the feeling that sits with me often lately: like I am driving in a car, not quite sure where I'm headed and not even sure I want to be in the car. Or like being at a grade 7 girls birthday party sleepover and everybody's playing Truth or Dare and you're all pretending to have fun, but really you all just want to be in your own bed in your own house with your mother sleeping in the next room. If that makes any sense.

So I found myself watching them, wanting to be part of them. Wanting to know what they know. Wanting to stop spinning and stand firmly on the ground like they seemed to do.

The class finally started and I suddenly remembered how terrible I am at yoga. I am always the person the instructor keeps correcting & adjusting. She is always moving my feet and my legs and my arms because I seem to do so many things wrong. And I guess that's why I go. Because every class I get to the point where I want the clock to tick faster and I want the end to come, or I want to pretend I twisted my ankle and have to leave early. But I keep going. And at the end, I am so glad I did. I feel fantastic, like I have just climbed an enormous mountain. And my face is sticky with sweat and my muscles are a little shakey, but I am on the ground. And this class was no different.

Afterward, I wandered out into the dark, little tiny bits of snow falling in the air. I thought: if I can just do my whole life like that. Sometimes I get caught in the trap of believing that everything that's right is supposed to come easy, is supposed to come "naturally". Suddenly, I remembered something the instructor said to me as she corrected my foot position in one pose. As she moved my ankle, I said: "I don't think my foot DOES that." She told me that just because our body doesn't do something, doesn't mean it's not SUPPOSED to. Sometimes it wants to, but it can't because there's years of resistance in our muscles, years of tension. It's our job to work at it and over time, things change.

I climbed into my cold car. It is as cold as the North Pole right now. My breath made clouds around me. And I reached into my purse and pulled out what was left of my chocolate. It was warm and soft and it melted against my tongue.

Snow is spinnning outside under the streetlights, and there, in the semidarkness, sits the FOR SALE sign. An offer has been made on "our" house. I am trying to believe in miracles today, oh I really am. It might be working, I don't know.

When the realtor brings people to look at the house, I want to tell them it's a terrible neighborhood. I want to tell them there are spiders in the basement and drug addicts across the street and people staggering in the alley. And it's true, there are. (And I do throw hints.)

I don't care, I love it here. And who else will love it like me? Who else will love the addicts across the street, who only hang out there because there's trees and a small creek and ducks, and they need something beautiful, they need it in the worst way, and so who am I to want them to go? While all the rest of the neighborhood calls the cops, we let them be.

If the house sells, if we have to move somewhere else away from MY walls, MY tree, MY sparkling water, I don't know what I will do. Life can feel like a kick in the butt sometimes, but I don't think it stops there. I have to believe something bigger is at work. I have to believe there is an order, a story, an adventure scripting itself out in me. I've lived once before with no faith in anything, and let me tell you, it's a lonely. lonely place.

So outside, as the snow spins and as the FOR SALE sign sits, awaiting the verdict, I am here. Here inside, boiling the kettle for tea, tapping keys.

What I'm trying to say is that tomorrow is an illusion. Things could change in a second. The offer could fall through, or a tsunami could splash across the land or we could find an even MORE beautiful place to live. No body knows. But for now, here I am drinking tea while the snow blows outsid the window. And this moment is perfect, without all the fears, without all the 'what ifs". Without worrying about what may or may not happen. It's perfect.

Send prayers and good thoughts my way tonight....

There are still ducks across the street. I thought ducks usually leave for the winter. But there they are, hanging out by the almost frozen creek, taking bread from the little old lady in the black coat.

It's less than a week until Christmas. I had the strangest memory the other day. When I was in grade 5, someone gave me one of those enormous candy canes, the ones that are an inch thick and a foot and a half long. I kept it in my closet up on a shelf, and every day, almost out of duty, I would slide my desk chair over to the closet, hop up and suck on it for a few minutes. By the next fall, it was half gone. It ended up getting covered in dust and lint, and I threw it away.

Just when we were getting settled into this lovely little house on Water Street... the landlord has decided to put it up for sale. We don't have the money to buy it at this point, so when I first found out, I felt like I had lost my best friend. But it's exhausting living in fear of what might happen. It might not sell. Or we might be able to afford to buy it one of these days. Or the new owners could choose to rent it and we could stay here.

I had a good cry over it, and then I felt awash with gratitude. I felt this divine peace enter my system and since then, I am enjoying every moment here. We may get kicked out in 2 months. Or we may be here next summer, walking every afternoon to the beach like we did last year. But either way, this moment is all we've got, and it's made me see again how precious it is. I've heard of people getting a terminal diagnosis and afterward, they claim they feel more alive than they ever did, taking nothing for granted. It's a little bit like that I suppose. Albeit slightly overdramatized.

In the book I finished reading a few weeks back, "The Secret Life of Bees", the Beekeeper tells the girl that in order to not get stung, you have to send the bees lots of love. In the mornings when I wake and wander out into the quiet kitchen and boil the kettle and stare out at the trees, I think about how much I adore this little house. I love it and, if I'm not mistaken, it loves me. I love the way the floors creak, I love the way the sun shines sillouettes of the venetian blinds across the wall. I love the cedars out in the back yard and the bare Chinese Elm in the front. I love the chipping stoop and the wide windows. I love the ducks and the little old lady in the black coat.

And then I send the house lots and lots of love. Maybe it will help us to stay somehow.

It's rediculously beautiful outside. More beautiful than beautiful. Snow is balanced on every tree branch, every edge of fence, every railing. It's still falling now, and, as Iryn said this morning, "everything looks painted".

A fire is burning low in the fireplace and I have just finished a great book that I have loved with my whole heart and now that I'm done, I feel as though I have lost someone close to me.

This always happens.

After a good read, I wander around the house in a daze for awhile, wondering what to do next, jolted by my own ordinariness, unsure of where the book ends and my life begins. When I'm reading, I mistakenly believe that I'm part of the book, that what is happening to the characters is actually happening to me, and when it's done, it takes awhile to realize it is just me on my couch in an old pilling sweater beside a cold cup of tea.

So today I stoke the fire one more time. I blow on it the way my dad taught me when I was 14. Get right underneath and blow, bring the flames to life until they snap and rage and become so hot I have to back away. Sometimes when I do this, I imagine I am blowing on myself this way too. Bringing something to life again.

Sitting here by the fire, my fear of winter (leftover from my 7 years in the prairies) is pleasantly absent. It feels good to get quiet, to not have to run, to not have to rush out. It feels good to look out the window and see the brightness of the whole wide world.

Plus, I found $5 in my winter coat pocket this morning. That always feels like a direct order from the universe to go buy a really yummy coffee drenched in whipped cream.

But that's for later. Right now, the fire needs blowing on again.

There's snow on the hills now. Not down here, but it's coming close. You can feel it. The Chinese Elm in the front yard is completely bare. Not a leaf left. They were hanging on for dear life, but they're gone now. The wind has blown every last one of them away.

It's windy tonight, the kind where the house shakes a little, the windowpanes and the walls. Where strange shadows blow outside in the darkness.

I have a head cold. At night I dream I am suffocating. I wake at 2 am horribly thirsty and confused, drowned in strange, busy dreams.

I can't smell anything. Which means I can't taste anything either. I made a nice dinner for myself tonight and I might as well have been eating a plastic bag for all the pleasure it gave me. It makes one wonder what goes into smelling and tasting and how all those nerve endings work in there, the little tiny chords and circuits and buttons way inside us all.

I had to see a nose, ears & throat specialist once. I thought I had something wrong with my vocal chords and he had to stick a little tiny camera down my throat, which made me gag and almost puke. It ended up that I was fine. I don't think I would ever want to be a nose, ears & throat doctor, all that poking around inside people's heads with tiny instruments. I can't imagine it would be a very fun job.

So It's mid-November. Winter is coming. There are already Christmas trees in some of the windows and Iryn's eyes get wide as we drive by. She is thinking of the magic of Christmas morning, of cookies and snow and shiney tinsel and surprises and new toys. I hope the magic lasts a long tiime for her. Because it hurts so bad when it's over. You wonder if there is any magic left at all anywhere, or if this whole life thing is just one big sham too. (I've since gotten over this. No need to worry...)

On Friday, I played a wonderful show to a room full of people who were actually listening. The whole lot of them. I wasn't background music or dinner entertainment or the opener that no one comes for. (I have been all of these things before at one time or another. ) They were there to see me and I heard my voice and my guitar and my lyrics float out from way inside me across the room and I knew it wasn't wasted. It's so good to sing to people who listen.

Thanks to all those out there who are really listening...

I am waiting for a delivery man to pull up outside my house to deliver my new guitar. I won it, plus some studio recording time among other things, in a songwriting contest a few weeks back. There's a good chance it is Pepto Bismol pink, in which case, I'll probably sell it and get the guitar I've been pining for, a Washburn classical with a pickup.

There are still a few roses blooming around here. Barely. On the street behind us, the enormous Maples are starting to turn color noticeably. Upon close inspection, the leaves look the color of lemon-lime pop with rusted edges, but from a distance, especially when the light shines against them, they look like bright, raging flames.

I find myself trying to piece myself together a lot, trying to figure out who I am and what it is I do. Am I this? Am I that? One moment I am one thing, and the next I am another. One moment I am cutting up apple and cheese in the kitchen while Yankee Doodle plays in the background, the next I am flying above the trees.

Oh, to be in one piece again, to be just me, to be still and quiet, but mostly, to be okay with all the pieces of myself, to see it from a distance and see it as a whole picture, like the Maples out the window.

I was thinking of this today, and then tonight I read a line that Walt Whitman wrote: "Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes."

Glorious runs the past few weeks. I have been pushing myself again. I get into these spaces where I just go, I don't think, and I forget to push myself, forget to insert moments of speed. I have a neighbor who runs enormous 32 hour marathons, where she has to run all night and sleep in the ditch when she gets tired.

I want to do something I think I can't do. Somthing brave. Something that requires effort. So I'm pushing myself in running, trying to go further and harder. I say: Run hard to that tree. When I get to the tree, I slow back down, then I say: Run hard to the docks.

Always there are seagulls cirling above me and waves hitting the beach and beautiful light on the water. Sometimes I'm afraid there are too many beautiful things, I can't take them all in. I'm afraid of missing something. When I run hard, I feel everything passing through me. Fear, despair, ambition, wonder, worries. They pass right through me. They can't stay, I am running too fast.

It's getting cooler, and I find myself "nesting" for the winter, trying to gather my resources in preparation for the cold and the early darkness, and the cloud cover we get around here from December until February.

I found a new delicious tea, called "Black Forest Cake". I thought you should know. It's a Rooibos tea, and, I'm not exaggerating when I say that it tastes exactly like Black Forest Cake. It has some cherry in it and actual pieces of chocolate, which melt in the cup. It is so ultra delicious that I just had to tell everyone about it.

On further research, I discovered that there are zillions of different chocolate teas in the world, and I plan to make trying every single one of them my goal for this winter.

Okay, so I won the award.

The night was fun. My name was pronounced wrong, as usual, when they announced the nominees. And after I stumbled somewhat clumsily through my acceptance speech, and wandered hazily off the stage, I noticed it had been spelled wrong too. Oh well. They offered me a new one, but I said I'd keep the misspelled one. It'll make a good conversation piece.

The last time I got an award, was when I was 9 or so. I was on a softball team after school, and everyone on the team got tiny trophies at the end of the season. I got a "best attitude" trophy. Which means, of course, that I sucked. I'm not sure which is worse, no trophy at all, or a "best attitude" trophy.

The other time I remember winning something was in grade 7 when Cabbage Patch dolls were in. The local mall opened its doors on a Sunday exclusively to every single Cabbage Patch Doll in the city, and their owners, hosting a Cabbage Patch Birthday Bash, with performers, draws, and an enormous birthday cake. I found a quarter in my piece of cake, which meant that I had won a prize. It turned out to be a crystal quartz necklace from a jewelers in the mall. About an hour later I left it in the bathroom, never to be seen (by me, that is) again. I wonder if someone in the world still has that crystal necklace tucked away somewhere all these years later. Do they tell the story of how they found it lying on a wet, slimy counter in the girls bathroom during a Cabbage Patch Doll Birthday Bash?

So last night it felt nice to win something. I have been plugging away for so long all alone in my little living room, that after awhile, one might begin to wonder if one is somewhat delusional to think her songs might mean anything to anyone. So this morning, when I woke up and saw the sharp, pointy plexiglass trophy sitting on the edge of the piano, I smiled quietly to myself.

Later, I went for a walk. It was warm again, almost like summer had returned. There are yellow leaves falling and spinning everywhere. It was a perfect, perfect morning. Down on the waterfront, everyone seemed to be on top of the world. Old men were out in their hats, sporty women were speed-walking through the park with their trendy walking sticks. Kids were feeding the ducks. People were donning their new fall Lulu Lemon wear. Everybody was saying hello and smiling and shouting "beautiful day!" I passed a bush of raspberries and picked a few. There is nothing in the world like sun-warmed raspberries. I almost had to stop and sing a few Hallelujas.


Everything seemed just a little bit brighter than usual.

But awards, shmawards.

I just try to keep remembering something I read once in a great book called Zen Guitar. The writer tells a story of how, in Japan, there is a flute that monks play, and the goal of the flute playing is to become so present, that there is as much enlightenment in the silence as there is in the notes.

Which means, of course, that everything counts. The ups & downs, the dry and the fertile times. The awards and the afternoons of struggling through some lyrics in a little living room. It's all the same & it all matters. And, after all is said and done, you just have to keep going and keep trying to remember to keep doing it day after day.

So for future reference, or in case you were wondering, it's like this: Mick - meck - un.

Okay. So I was apparantly nominated for an Okanagan Music Award for Best New Artist. I will be heading to The Okanagan Music Awards on Tuesday to hang with fellow local singer-songwriters and hear some good local music and... well, we'll see.

Somewhere along the line here, I manage to somehow get some songs written and some guitar played and some shows booked, though I hardly know how. I spend a great deal of time these days cutting up apple and putting goldfish crackers into little containers for the park, so how anything else is getting done lately is beyond me.

Today was a bad day. I'll just say it. My 1 year old is cutting a tooth and I seriously can't handle the noise sometimes. The inane conversations I have all day long with my 4 year old about fish and cats and witches. God knows I'm grateful. God knows I could barely live without these 2, I'd have to throw myself off a bridge if I ever lost one of them. But today, I want to quit my job. I hate my job. I hate being a mommy. That's today. Today I feel like Ashly Judd as the mother in Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood. "I want to run away... I want to be famous..." I imagine myself escaping to some little shack by the sea, and sleeping sleeping sleeping the way she did for 3 days, waking only to smoke cigarettes and stare at her weary complexion in the mirror.

Today I became semi-conscious to find myself at the kitchen counter eating peanut butter on crackers, over and over and over. God knows how many I'd eaten. I was accutely aware of the fact that I was trying to stuff something down. keep myself from feeling the emptiness gnawing away at my insides.

Yesterday, at the park, I watched the ducks for a short while, watched them floating along the water, not wanting to be more than just ducks. And something inside me said, Yes. Get me some of that.

It was cold again this morning. I think beach days are over. Summer ended abruptly there with all that rain, and now I find myself smack dab in the middle of fall, not quite knowing what to do with myself.

Around 10:30, I decided I needed a walk. I was slightly headachy and tired and worried. I'd had strange dreams all night, busy dreams, dreams where you wake up tired. As I headed ou the door, I saw that it had begun to rain. I almost stayed in, but reluctantly, I forced myself to put on my rain jacket and head out anyway.

There were yellow leaves blowing across the roads. I walked for awhile and crossed a little bridge that goes over the creek. The water was dotted with raindrops. I stood there, watching the raindrops, watching them come and go, watching them move all over the water.

It was exactly what I needed then. To just stare at the raindrops while they dripped around me.

How sometimes we resist the very things we need. How I almost didn't go for a walk. Too cold, I thought. I don't feel like getting wet and cold. How many times do I do this, I wonder?

It's cold tonight, the windows are closed. I have a sweater on. The leaves are still mostly green, but a few are beginning to change and fall. The mornings are cold too. I go out with my tea and sit on the front step at 6:30am and it's still half-dark out. Oh, sunshine, I will miss you!

I always want to go back to school this time of year, look for some new shoes. My favorite shoes were the pink & white runners I had when I was eight. They had tiny white zippers up the side. I got them at Sears. I also loved a pair of blue & white Adidas runners I had around the same time. For about a day, and then they got dirt on them from playing in the hills, and after that they weren't special anymore.

I have always loved something when it is brand new, perfect. Maybe that is why I have a hard time accepting myself in my flaws (as we all do, to some extent). I like the term that SARK gives it: Perfect imperfection. More and more, I like myself with the bits of dirt and the stains. The things that make me me.

Tonight I am sitting in my little room. I made a big bulletin board to hang on my wall above my desk and 2 smaller ones for pictures and reminders. Of the two small ones, the top is filled with images for my life, bits of magazine articles that are helping. Last Monday's: Martha Beck writing about perfectionism, quoting an old proverb - "To be enlightened is to be without anxiety over imperfection."

There is a photograph of a woman sitting on a rock by the ocean because the sea is so symbolic for me, and a picture of a singer I admire for her songwriting, and a list of fun things I want to do before it gets too cold.

On the other smaller board, there are to-do lists and goals and reminders of things & ideas. There are little tiny pieces of paper with nice, encouraging quotes on them, such as: "Self-criticism inspires shrinkage", and "Just trust yourself, and then you willl know how to live."

On the big board, there is a "project" I am trying to finish. There are black & white photos of my daughter and bits of scribbled words and things crossed out and some empty space. Every day I come here to try to finish. I try to be brave. I try to tell myself nice things, kind things, hopeful things. But mostly, I try to finish.

Starting is scary. But finishing is one of the hardest things.

Sometimes I get afraid that it is too late, I have waited too long, and the time has come & gone. I didn't get on the right boat, and now I will forever be at the dock, watching it sail away. But I try not to listen too much to these things.

As I look up at my bulletin boards, I remember the day I made them. It seems small, but mechanical tasks intimidate me to no end. I've always been terrible at crafts. Mine end up looking like someone in grade 2 made it. They come out mangled and crooked, with glue everywhere. I wanted to make myself a bulletin board, a nice one, with hemp cloth or something. I wanted it to be big. So I took the measurements. Then I went out and bought the supplies, got the board cut by the guy at the back of Home Depot, stood there while the sawdust flew around, coughing. I took it home on the top of my car (it nearly flew off at an intersection) and stapled it all together. With the really good kind of heavy duty staples. And when it was done, I walked over to my fridge and took a quote down and pinned it to my new, huge, handmade bulletin board. It said:

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do." (Eleanor Roosevelt)

So here I am again. I will sit here again tonight for awhile, looking up at my bulletin boards, trying to do the next right thing. Reminding myself that baby steps lead to big places. But all you can focus on, is that next baby step. The one to be made right now, this minute.

So it's September now. Already last week I noticed the Poplars down by the water beginning to turn. And although it's still been warm, the nights are getting cooler, sometimes we even have to shut the windows.

It's been one of those summers where sleeves feel strange to wear now after having had bare arms for months on end. It's been long and hot and glorious. Sand in hair and toes and across the floors, dragged in too many times to bother sweeping up some days.

By this time in the prairies, the Dutch Elms along the roads would be turning gold. I remember sitting on my front steps, admiring the bright trees lined up like glowing torches on the boulevards. This year, my house is surrounded by towering Maples, and it occurs to me that I don't know what Maples look like when they change color, so I'm excited to see, excited to walk in all the crunchy brown leaves that will soon be covering the roads. However, I feel a tiny sadness at seeing this lovely summer heading out the door. And although the locals insist I'll still be swimming late into September, it feels different now. It's dark by 8:00 and I won't be able to ride my bike down to the beach to watch the sun go down.

Last week, Michael Peters came and stayed for a few days. Weirdly, he got dropped into town a block down from where I was just beginning to play a show, and he passed by, heard my voice, and came in. I happened to have my electric guitar plugged in beside my (playing acoustic) so he joined me for the evening. What are the chances? Gawd, it was good to play with someone else... I really think my thoughts of quitting have more to do with the aloneness I feel than anything else... He taught me some stuff and we showed each other our songs. He made us some yummy chick pea wraps with cumin. Mmm. Mmm.

This week has been a week of reading books and visiting family and playing some guitar on quiet evenings. My baby girl has begun to give hugs now, and she wraps her arms around me, squeezes, and pats my shoulders with her two chubby fists. It undoes me. When I look at her sometimes, so small, eating a popsicle on the kitchen floor, I think of how she will never be as tiny as she is today and it reminds me of this bit of poem by Mary Oliver:

Oh, to love what is lovely, and wil not last!
What a task to ask
of anything or anyone.

So I found my shirts. The tenants living below us moved in in July. We share the laundry room with them. They are nice. Very young. And apparantly cleptos.


I won't get into the sketchy details. They were my last resort, the only remaining possible solution short of passing it off on really large moths. They HAD to have the shirts. But every time I asked if they could check, they put it off. One would say the other did the laundry, and then vice versa. But the good news is, after much persistance, I got my shirts back.

Note to self: Keep doors locked at all times.

It's hot. Not the unbearable kind of heat that we had back in July, but hot nonetheless. This morning I rode my bike downtown to a bookstore I wanted to check out, but alas, the radio was blasting top 20 hits, so I rode down the road to the cafe where I always go. I hope they're not getting sick of me. I went home early because I had a headache.

Now it's afternoon, and I am looking out my bedroom window. The birdfeeder hangs empty. There are spider webs everywhere. They are woven between the trees and the fence posts like so many tightropes. The big orb webs stretch and bend like tiny trampolines. It's a virtual spider circus out there.

It's actually quite beautiful. When they catch the light, they shimmer like water. It's as if somebody has strung silver streamers up everywhere. It's amazing how something so tiny can be so strong. I read in a book once that spider webs can withstand storms and hurricanes, and that some webs are as resistant as a steel wire.

Amazing.

Tonight I have a show downtown. I'll be playing outside at 7:30. It's sure to be beautiful. There is not a cloud in the sky. I think I'll wear one of my long-lost shirts.

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant
thoughts while eating a home-grown tomato.
-Lewis Grizzard


There are about a hundred green tomatoes in the garden, weighing down the plants. Luckily I tied them up with string before they got too big, so there is some sense of order out there. I picked the first sweet ripe cherry tomatoes last week, and now every afternoon, I bring in a few for my salad. There are a few sugar peas still left and the green beans are beginning to get tall, which means I will have beans all the way into September.

Walking around a lot downtown, you notice the strangeness of a city. There is a sign along the highway that says: Cheese Sculpture,That Way (an arrow pointing right). What pray tell is a cheese sculpture? There is an old woman who paces along the main road, singing her lungs out to the cars. She waves a newspaper at people and bellows toward their windows accusingly. The other day she was singing "Golddigger". Sometimes it's Bob Dylan. The thing is, she can really sing.

2 of my very favorite shirts are missing. I don't own a lot of clothes, so when 2 go missing, I really notice. I had thought they were in the dirty laundry for a while, and then the other night I discovered they were nowhere to be found. I scoured the house for them. I unfolded all the towels and bed sheets, went through all my drawers, looked behind my dresser, the computer desk, the washing machine, the piano for crying out loud. Nothing.

I knew I had not left them anywhere. For starters, I haven't really GONE anywhere for awhile. I am in desperate need of getting out. But secondly, who goes out wearing a shirt, and comes home without it? Well, maybe some people. And if you're into that, then by all means, who am I to judge? But I am not generally one to do that sort of thing. When all the girls in highschool were getting drunk and sleeping with boys in the backs of pickup trucks, I was going to bed early so I could get up for vocal jazz choir and hoping someone would be my friend.

So anyways. It's been driving me mental. Men. Tal. I woke up at 4 am the other morning, racking my brain to figure out where they could have gone. I don't think the dryer can eat whole shirts, can it?

The days are getting shorter. I miss the long light in the evenings. I wish this summer could go on and on and on and never end.

n: A large sea creature believed to be roaming the depths of Okanagan Lake. Originally named "N'ha-a-itk" by the Interior Salish Native people over 100 years ago, the monster has since come to be regarded more with amusement than fear. Much like the creature immortalized in Loch Ness, Scotland, Ogopogo is believed to have a snake-like body, including several humps, a green outer skin and a very large head.

***

Rode my bike downtown this morning with the sun casting long shadows along the lawns. It seems I am always worried about something or other, and these things play over and over in my head, be it the cleanliness of the lake water or pollution or money or my future or... well no need to go there. I have tried so many times to let go and I am trying still. Some days I don't quite know what I'd do with myself if I didn't worry. (Perhaps just be too happy for words? And what would I do then?)

As I rode by all the stores along the main street, I passed a little baby in a stroller. His mother was pushing him, and he was delirious with joy, smiling and laughing and flapping his arms all around. For no apparant reason. It was really the most beautiful thing ever.

I rode past the water. I swear, every single minute of the day, there is someone getting their picture taken with the big cement ogopogo by the waterfront. Kids climb all over it, and the little Japanese tourists LOVE it, and I mean LOVE it. I saw one cute little Japanese man almost hyperventilate when he saw it, and he then proceeded to gather his family members around it and snap about a hundred photos.

I stopped in at a cafe for some tea. As I waited in line, I picked up a paper and there was a full page story featuring Ogopogo. Maybe its his birthday or something. There were photographs taken of pedestrians and the question was asked of them: What would you do if you saw Ogopogo?

Interestingly, all of the adults said they would scream/swim away/crap their pants. Most of the kids said they would give it a hug/pet it/get on & go for a ride.

How do we lose this? How do we become these timid, afraid, worrysome grownups?

On my way home, I passed the concrete statue again, heard someone shout: Say cheese!

I couldn't help thinking that many of the worries that circle in my head are, in the end, about as real as the legend of Ogopogo himself, and instead, maybe I should just hug them/pet them/get on and go for a ride.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in you."
-Rilke

So now that my life feels like ME again, now that I feel I am IN my life and not waiting for my life to happen like I was up in Dilworth where everyone had those shiny white rocks in their gardens and there were no leaves that changed color and no water lapping at the shore, where people washed their cars every Saturday... now that I am here with the roses blooming in the back alley, and neighbors who talk to each other in their pyjammas and birds on the fence, I wonder: What was that whole last year about?

I have, in the past 5 years or so, come to believe in the abundance of the universe. I've let go of the idea that God is cheap and withholding, and I've come to believe that I always always always have everything that I need. It might not be what I THINK I need at the time, or what I WISH I had, but when I break it all down, I realize that I DO have everything I need right that minute and most of my fears are based on worrying that I won't have enough down the road. But when down the road eventually does come, the same rule applies: I always, always have enough.

But last year, it sure didn't feel like it.

I was sick and my body hurt and I was terribly lonely with no clear way of escape. I felt poor and achy and miserable and couldn't write and couldn't run and it was, I would have to say, the worst year of my life.
What's more, it wasn't necessarily the circumstances that made it bad; it was the complete and utter absence of any sense of purpose in it all.

But now. The move here (among other things) has created a shift. And although I spend most of my time now writing and riding my bike and feeling grateful for the roses and the water shining through the trees and the slow walk to the beach and the coffee shop down the street that sells the best chai tea I've ever had, I have been wondering what the point of all that misery was.

Then the other day, I was on my usual morning run. And if I've learned anything from running, it's that if you get out and do it even when you don't feel like it, you are always glad you did. And I've learned that you can't LOOK for something to happen, because if you do, you miss what IS happening.

So the other day, I began again, and I let go and I tried to see what WAS happening, and what was happening was the maples were blowing around a little and there were a few crows in the sky and the really tall bright brown-eyed Susans were blooming and swaying in peoples' gardens along Abott. And I crossed over a small bridge and went under a tunnel, and then, out of the blue, I KNEW.

And what I knew was this:
Sometimes you go through tunnels in life too. And you might get scared thinking the darkeness is going to last forever and you will never see the sun again. You might turn around and go back. You might think you can't go on, so you stop and stay right there in the dark forever. But what you don't know is that if you just keep going, you will be out in the sun again. And the darkness, the tunnel, was just a passage to a new place. And you had to go through it to get to that new place.

So I felt like that was my answer. It was just a tunnel, Kim. Don't make a big deal out of it. Don't try to make it more than it was. It was just a passage. And a little time in the dark to make you grateful for the sunlight on your face.

***

I'm feeling a little blue, as they say. Some dear friends from Winnipeg have just left for home, and I have this little ache left over.

On Wednesday night, a bunch of us got together to eat food and sit around on a little deck overlooking an orchard. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Just things barbequed and casual conversation, some kids who were a little bit noisy, and a baby (mine) who kept knocking big jars onto her head.

Over the years, I've learned that it is not necessarily the extraordinary things that bind people together, but rather little things over and over and over, like beads threaded onto a piece of string, until they become something unmistakable.

When I got home, I thought about the bit of history we have with them. I thought about the time I locked myself out of the house at 7 in the morning in my red satin pyjammas and bare feet, and Rik drove the car over so I could drive downtown and get Craig's keys and let myself back in. I thought about all the bad movies we have watched together, which I have mostly forgotten except for something about Richard Geere being a gynecologist??? I thought about all the Thanksgiving dinners we spent together and our final farewell party at their house, which was supposed to be a potluck dinner, but mostly everyone brought the apple pies that were on sale at Safeway for $2.50 and so all we ate was apple pie and a small, sad looking casserole.

Sitting in my kitchen, I was left with the bittersweetness of seeing them and then saying goodbye again for another few years, and I thought of a line I read once by Brian Andreas:

"There are things you do because they
feel right & they may make no sense
& they may make no money and it may
be the real reason we are here: to love
each other and to eat each other’s cooking
and say it was good."

This morning I woke at 5 am unable to sleep. I got up and made some tea and sat out on the deck for awhile. Yesterday was hot, almost unbearably hot, and all night I slept fitfully, tossing and turning, unable to get comfortable. This morning though, opening the door, I found that it had cooled off outside, that I actually needed a light sweater, and I sat writing for a while at the little table while tiny soft pink clouds scattered up in the sky and the first birds started to sing.

Yesterday was a good day. A perfect summer day. A day of going to the beach, of swimming in cold water, of meeting friends, then back here for a barbeque and drinks and long talks. My dear friends Rik & Zara are here for a few days. Rik and I have toured together a bit, and he is a little more experienced in the whole music biz than me.

I told him I'd like to overcome my constant up & down rollercoaster relationship with my music. How I go so quickly from "I'm going to go for it!" to "What's the point?", back and forth, back and forth. I told him how most days, I just want to sit and play my guitar and write songs and sing and not have to worry about all the other crazy stuff, like promotion and applications and trying to describe who you are in a 3-line bio. That stuff can feel so limiting and distorted, like a house of mirrors at the carnival. You go in there, and everything is crooked and misshapen. It messes with your head. You can forget who you are and what you're really about in there, and I wish I never ever had to go in.

Rik said something that really helped. He said: "You want to sing songs & be a songwriter? Great. No rules. You can do whatever you want. Sky's the limit. But you want those songs to get on the radio, you want to play festivals & sell albums? Lots of rules. You have to know that there's a difference."

For me, it helps to separate these 2 things. It helps untangle ME from the whole struggle. It reminds me that I never have to doubt who I am. I am a songwriter and a singer and an artist and have been since the beginning of time. I have a gazillion memories of walking up in the hills as a kid and making up stories in my head, songs that made no sense at all. There is a line of a Mary Oliver poem I read last week that goes:

"It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over & over in joy."

And when I read that line, I thought of those days up in the hills, and I thought of running by the lake when the wind has picked up and all the maples are blowing wildly and noisily. And I thought of me & my guitar.


***

Today there are so many headlines, headlines everywhere about tsunamis and terrorist attacks, and of course the bird flu... There are just too many things to worry about. I can't keep track of them all. As for me, I will be running down by the water letting the wind carry my troubled heart for awhile...

It was a morning of napping , then a slow afternoon reading Annie Dillard, then a walk down the street to get a Chai tea before becoming trapped in my third downpour this week... the first was on a run, the second was followed by enormous hailstones that had me standing for a rediculously long time in my vegetable garden under a pathetically small umbrella in the hopes of saving the tomatoes. Today's storm stranded me & my 10 month old under a walnut tree while we watched it fall in torrents all around us, watched the roads turn black, then turn to rivers, while cars passed by, their passengers laughing, or sending looks of sympathy. We stood there and watched the rain fall and fall and fall, with no sign of subsiding until we finally ran for home, me in my long black skirt (that thing keeps gettting me into trouble) which, by the end, was like lugging a sack of potatoes around, and my flip-flops. I ran home, laughing, dripping, laughing, dripping. I might as well have gone swimming with all my clothes on.

Afterward, we sat on the front steps listening to the thunder & watched a spider eat another spider in a web beside the rose bushes.

I love Sundays.

So they found my bike.

The downtown bike patrol guys discovered it abandoned in a creek bed a few blocks from my house. The chain was all tangled when they found it, so it must have come off on-route and whoever had taken it decided to ditch the bike rather than fix it. When they told me this, I imagined angels catching their wings in the chain.

All hail the bike patrol guys. They even fixed the chain for me. There is still kindness left in the world.

After I retrieved my bike from the station, I went and rode past the water, stopped at the waterwalk and read my new favorite book about Italy while whispy pink clouds sat still like painted brushstrokes on the soft blue sky. It was so quiet except for the lapping of the waves, and I thought: I love you little green bike. You will carry me to many beautiful places this summer. Never ever leave me again. And I will always always take care of you.

My bike has taken on a rather personal quality since the near-loss. I have caught myself referring to it as a "She", have noticed myself wafting kind thoughts of affection her way as if she were now a child of mine, or a soft, furry cat who curls up on my lap before bed.

The days have been hot, almost too hot, and sometime between 4 & 7 o'clock in the evening, I find myself down at the lake, wading into cold water, soft sand on my toes and I notice for a minute such a perfect perfect happiness inside me that I want to freeze the world just like this for a little while, hold my breath, and say: Nobody move.

Tonight there are pink clouds striping the sky again, the color of cotton candy the year I rode the Gravitron for the first time when I was 12 and puked up florescent pink all over the pavement afterwards.

So it occurs to me that I should really be out there, watching those clouds before they are gone gone gone forever...

Someone stole my bike.

I was downtown yesterday morning for a few hours, having the most perfect time of it. I had the whole morning to myself. I grabbed a Chai Latte and sat in the early sunshine at a table outside in front of a cafe, writing, reading Jason Heroux poems, and watching people pass. A little bird came and landed on my chair. Then, me and the bike made our way to my favorite clothes store up the road, which had a sale on. I parked it against the window right out front, and went in, for all of 5 minutes. When I came out, the bike was gone.

I am so sad.

I feel like someone has died.

Someone I loved a lot.

I am furious at myself for having been so careless, having believed I could leave it unlocked out in the open like that. You sort of want to believe the world is a good place, full of good people.

There's nothing to say because all my energies are being poured into wishing the bike back. Waiting for the call. The downtown biker patrol guys are on the lookout.

If you see my bike, pretty please let me know. It's turqoise green, with white lettering, and a black... sniff....seat.

All for now.

On Monday, I got back from Saltspring Island where I had a show at the Treehouse.

I love islands. I'm trying to figure out a way that I can go live on a little island and walk down to the harbour for capuccinos every morning and stroll around in tie-dyed dresses (even though, I hate tie-dye on me) and make a little fishing rod from a stick and a piece of string and fish for cod off the docks. I could do that for the rest of my life.

On the way over on the ferry, there was a tuba player on the top deck. He wasn't serenading everyone, although every single passenger could hear the low rumbling notes floating around in the wind. I imagined he was heading over to Victoria for a high school music festival and he was needing some practice. He sat on a bench up on the highest deck, going over & over his parts. I don't think that band is going to win at the festival on account of that tuba player. But it was nice background music.

When we got to the Treehouse Cafe, Craig said, "Oh! Your name is on the chalkboard."

I laughed. "Wow," I said. "You know you've hit the big time when your name is on the chalk board."

The show was fine, minus a few technical glitches at the beginning. One day I'll have my own soundman and won't have to contend with other peoples' tangled chords and strange speaker set-ups.

My dear friend Amanda came over from Vancouver to see me, and we stayed up late drinking local red wine and talking. She is one of those friends who sometimes tells me when I am being ridiculous or obsessive or, as was the case on the weekend of our visit, selling myself short. She's honest and hilarious and my life is richer with her in it. She's been around for many of my accident prone moments (many of you may remember my almost burning my house down with a piece of cheesetoast) and so of course, the next day, while we rode the ferry off the island together, another one happened. I got bit by a seagull.

As a kid, my mom taught me how to feed the seagulls on the ferry. I never saw anyone else doing it, and people would always gather around and watch us. We would get a few packets of Saltine crackers from the cafeteria down below and then toss bits into the air until the seagulls caught sight of them and would swarm around the rails, balancing in the wind, waiting.

Sometimes you can hold a cracker up high and a seagull will swoop down and grab the very tip of it. But this seagull was brave, grabbed the whole cracker and my finger too. I got a small cut on my pointer finger.

So of course the whole next day, I was wondering if you can get the Bird Flu from Seagulls. I imagined flu-like symptoms on Tuesday and decided I was dying. When I told Craig that afternoon, he laughed.

He said that's kind of like thinking you can get the chicken pox from getting bit by a chicken.

***

On Monday night after we got home, I had my writing class. I rode my bike there in the spitting rain. I'd heard that it had hailed that afternoon and I could see all the flowers in the backyard had taken quite a beating. The roads were wet and shiney. I rode my bike in a long, black skirt.

Note to self: Never ever ride a bike in a long black skirt again.

I barely made it to the class in one piece, and sure enough, on the way home, after 2 hours of writing and warm sips of Chai tea, as I rounded the lake towards the bridge, my skirt caught in my wheel and I nearly sent myself sailing over the handlebars.

I haven't ridden a bike in 10 years.

Oh, no. That's not true. I rode once on holidays to the San Juan Islands. I remember my butt was killing me afterwards.

But other than that, I haven't ridden a bike in 10 years.

My mom let me have her old bike. Now that we live downtown, so close to everything, I thought it would be nice to have one. It's old and green and chipped and a little stiff. I put the chain on and oiled the wheels and pumped up the tires all by myself this afternoon.

In the evening, after supper, I loaded up a big pack sack full of magazines and books and paper and got on the bike. I had a writing class to teach at a cafe downtown. I headed out, a little wobbly with all the stuff on my back.

I forgot how beautiful it can be. I forgot about the wind whooshing by your head. I forgot how fast you can go. I felt 12 years old. The good part of 12 years old, I mean. Not the braces and awkward hair part.

All at once I remembered how I used to ride my bike around Hornby Island as a kid, up to the market, down to the beach, out to pick blackberries, down to the beach in the evenings. My family used to spend a few weeks there every summer. We'd go for long rides up steep paths and over to the fishing docks.

Sometimes, we'd climb these huge, steep hills and when we'd get to the top, if there were no cars coming, I would let myself coast. All the roads had tall fir trees on either side, and their shadows would be striped along the roads, and in between, quick patches of sunlight would filter through. There would always be this deep quiet in the air, and I would get going so fast, my bike would start to shake and the wind would be loud in my ears. And for a moment, I would close my eyes. Not for very long. Just a few seconds. And in those few seconds, I could see the light and shadows rushing past my eyes through my eyelids and all there would be was those patterns flicking past me and the wind cold against my skin.

I decided I'm going to bike everywhere this summer. I'm going to get one of those nerdy baskets and attach it to the front like the wicked witch of the West. (Or was it East?) and make up reasons to go to the grocery store. I'm going to get a bell and some sparkly purple tassles for my handlebars.

At the class I wrote with some amazing women. We scribbled and glued things and drank tropical green tea while the rich smell of dark roast coffee wafted into the room. It was perfect.

On the way home, I took the long way along the lake. I passed couples walking arm in arm and kids playing late at the park and 2 people making out on the sand. There was a guy in the tunnel playing some strange kind of wooden flute.

The whole time, the wind was blowing my hair back. And as I rounded the lake under some big oak trees and gained speed, I closed my eyes. I had to stop myself from laughing out loud.

I feel surrounded by so much beauty here where I live now. There are big pale pink flowers blooming in the back yard. Orange roses climbing up my front stair rail. I hung the birdfeeder up on the neighbor's tree on a branch that juts out just outside my bedroom window. There are birds swinging on it, little grey birds and birds with bright red in their feathers and woodpeckers too.

On Abott, where I run, there are miles of peonies and bright fire orange poppies swaying in big yards where the houses are made of brick, where you can see the lake through the cracks in their trees and driveways. The water shines. It is so close. When it rains, you can hear it, can feel the cold blowing up off the water.

I have also been washed over by waves of grief. The girl who was kidnapped in Armstrong for 2 days and molested. How could such a thing happen? A show I saw on tv with Elie Wiesel, who wrote "Night", a book about the Holocaust. He filmed some old sites where torture took place, gas chambers where Jews were led to take "showers" only to be killed with gas, holdiing their childrens' hands. I close my eyes when I think of it. My head says, Look away. Look away. I am not nearly emotionally stable enough for programs like that.

I've been thinking daily of my friend Jada who is 90 pounds and at death's door. She is in deperate need of a miracle.

How can all this beauty & pain exist in one place? I guess that's how it works, though. It's all mixed in there together.

Sometimes I wake at 3 am and am afraid that I'm dying. I hold my arms around myself and say, No. You're okay. Then i remember that, yes, I am dying. All of us are.

Things go downhill after that for a bit. I mean, it's late, it's dark. I begin to wonder if there's possibly a carbon monoxide leak in the house or if I'm displaying symptoms of SARS. I start to hope to God we will all be okay. I start whispering tiny prayers.

After awhile, I remember that there are millions of people being brave all over the world, little sick kids losing their hair and people with broken bodies running marathons and abused girls helping other abused girls to heal, and so I should be brave too. I remind myself to be brave, and for awhile, it seems impossible, like we are all little tiny helpless kids whose mom has left all alone & lost downtown in the dark & the rain with no way to get home.

Things were sort of going this way for awhile the other night. I fell into a fitfull sleep, woke up the next morning feeling shaky and afraid.

Then I went for a run.

When I run, I let go of everything. Or maybe everything lets go of me, I'm not sure which. Either way, it all goes. I run and run and run and all there is is my feet pounding against the road and my breath in my ears and my body moving, moving forward.

And all I can say is that somehow, something makes sense afterward. Maybe for 45 minutes, I become a bird. Maybe I leave the ground. Maybe being under the sky with the wind and the trees heals the soul.

I don't know.

But I realize that in that one moment, I'm okay. I'm alive and I feel free.

Afterwards, I thought of a line I read in a Patrick O'Connell poem once, that said

It must be this light coming throught the crack
that keeps me asking
that keeps me yearning to be born

Today, rain. It's been raining all morning. I woke at 6 am and went to rescue the blanket on the lawn, the patio couch cushions.

Everything is shining.

I feel a small sense of the day unfolding to me. I'm watching to see what is going to happen... So far, lots of rain and some banging going on downstairs where the landlord is putting in drywall. Blackbirds on the telephone wires, sharp against the clouds. A guy walking on the sidewalk with a black umbrella and a piece of... motorcycle?? The sunflower seeds in the window have sprouted. A new book sitting, waiting for me on the coffee table.

The break in heat comes as a relief, all the windows and doors open to let in the breeze. Finally the house has cooled off, the sounds of rain and cars driving through puddles are coming in through the screens.

I have a long list of things to get done today, but that book on the coffee table is calling to me... No point in fighting it.

Summer has come all at once it would seem. One day it was sweaters and blankets, closed windows, today it's fans and ice cubes and iced capuccinos.

The week has been filled with dinners with friends, wine outside on the deck after dark, trying to escape the heat. I don't miss the air conditioning. I prefer open windows and the hum of fans.

On Wednesday we ate tacos with Ari Neufeld and his new wife & daughter outside on our stone table. We had a strange conversation about men nursing babies, something about how men have mammary glands too - I told him about a story I heard once about a man who nursed his baby when they were trapped underground, and he actually began producing milk. Ari seems to be seriously considering nursing their next child. I told him there is a hormone drug for women who want to nurse adopted babies, said maybe he could check into it.

Then he said his cat always tries to nurse on his nipples. The conversation got a little weird after that.

I wish I had something profound to say.

I'm just trying to keep plugging away on a few projects that need finishing. Some days, I envy those with normal 9-5 jobs, where they can go in and know what the day's work is going to be, and that it's non-negotiable. Plumbers fix toilets, mechanics fix cars, but an aritst is faced daily with wondering if they are headed in the right direction, no rules or lists to lead them on.

Someone once said that you can't look to anyone else's path to show you how to get there, that you must be faithful to your own path. I think this is what we are all trying to do. Maybe we are all just fumbling around in the dark. Come to think of it, I don't know of anyone who doesn't contend with self-doubt at least part of the time, and I'm not sure I would want to be friends with them if they didn't.

Today I am just trying to do my best to fumble along. But some days, some days, I am gloriously aware that perhaps I am getting somewhere, that perhaps part of the joy is in the fumbling. And when it all comes down to it, I have chosen this. And I keep choosing it, all of it, including the financial unpredictability, the uncertainty of where this train is headed, and the extra moments I have to write about my friend whose cat tries to nurse on his nipples.

This is the way I like it. A good day is when I get a little work done, and if I can stop feeling afraid to write, this is always possible.

Yesterday evening, before the sun went down, I walked a few blocks over to a cafe to buy Swiss water-processed decaf beans for morning lattes. It feels like summer now. People are out walking their dogs, smoking on patios, buying ice cream at the little shops downtown. I passed some little tiny stores I'm going to go wander in this afternoon, a clothes store with turquoise flip-flops in the window, a rickety old second-hand bookstore which I anticipate spending hours browsing in.

Afterwards, I came home along the walk way by the lake, then along the shore and the light was shining on the water. I passed a guy meditating on the sand, someone reading under a tree, boats bobbing in the harbour.

I love it here.
There are so many things to make you sigh. I used to make little lists of things I'd see on my runs, and I started doing it again last night.
A dogwood tree.
Enormous maples.
Purple irises.
A little old lady working in her garden.
A furry grey cat sitting in the shade watching me.

When I go for runs, I run through little pockets of scents, and they're continuously changing. Lilacs and tulips and woodsmoke and things I don't recognize but that smell wonderful. All the gardens are bright and alive here, not like the tidy flower beds in my old neighborhood, perfect manicured shrubs surrounded by shiny rocks. You always had the feeling that people were trying to compensate for something. Here, things are a little messier and wilder, the way I like them. There are trees that are a hundred years old and ferns spreading into the alleyways. All the streets have nice names. Lake Road, Beach Drive, Robin Way.

I've noticed myself rushing through life the past little while. There is so much to do, boxes still to unpack, things to mail out, a writing class I'll be teaching soon which requires some prep. Even in my dreams I am rushing, missing deadlines, late for everything, running frantically to get somewhere.

I want to slow down. I get so tired of hearing the same old punitive voice in my head screaming at me to do more and be more and get more done, get further down the road. For what? What is the point if at the end of the day, all I feel is frantic? I have moments and days and seasons where that voice is quiet, but when I begin listening to it again, it takes awhile to regain my balance.

If nothing else, I want to be here for my life. No body else can do that for me. And although the whole world keeps saying go faster, go harder, do more, be more, get more things on your resume, I want to move slowly. I want to be aware of every small thing.

The interview on CBC, will be airing on Friday morning, May 19th at 8:20am Pacific time, on Daybreak.

It’s been a little crazy around here. Boxes stacked everywhere, waiting to be unpacked. We got here to find water leaking in the basement. Then there was the steady stream of repairmen. Somehow the horrible telephone company hasn’t given us a phone line until now (which is why I can post) and there are no payphones within walking distance, we discovered. Not even at the 7-11. What is the world coming to???

On Saturday, because of sewer problems, we weren’t allowed to flush the toilet. I was tired and took a nap in the afternoon only to be awakened by either the electrician or the plumber—not sure which- who are both very sweet men with thick accents named Fluvio or Enrique, or something like that. One of them was pounding away right under my bed. There has been nothing but banging and drilling and leaking going on all week. I feel like I’m Frances Mayes in Under The Tuscan Sun.

Strangely, I don’t mind. I’m happy to be here. There are so many windows in this little house. In the mornings, the light comes in filling all the rooms and I walk around listening to all the floors creaking under my feet. The previous owner planted flowers everywhere and I wander out with my cup of tea and slippers, like a little old lady, and look at everything that is blooming or going to bloom—Delphiniums (the tag says), Peonies (the neighbor told me) and dozens of tulips, which I pick daily and put on the windowsill in my kitchen.

Some good news recently:

I came up in the top 10 on CFBX’s playlist in April.

And I’ll be doing an interview on CBC Radio tomorrow. I guess I should figure out when it’ll actually be getting aired so I can let you know. I’ll get back to you on that…

Brown-eyed Susans blooming all over the hills.
Some wind.
The ticking of my clock on the table.
The floor heater going, warming the cold house I woke to this morning.

It's my last week here in this basement suite. Boxes are beginning to gather, books coming down, leaving the shelves empty. Everything looks so much nicer now that I am leaving. The apple trees down the hill are starting to open. Soon they will be blooming. But I won't be here. I'll be running down Abott Street, past rows and rows of old brick houses with vines climbing around the doors.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. I was telling her how glad I was to be moving somewhere flat. I said "Running is practically my favorite spiritual practice. It's been so hard to tune out with all these hills."

The next morning I remembered this and thought, Did I miss the lesson? Did I miss a great gift by failing to surrender to this place? Was I supposed to learn to love those hills? Was I supposed to have gotten some great wisdom from them instead of longing for something else?

But maybe life is just like that. Maybe sometimes the only lesson is that you have to keep showing up for your life. Keep showing up even when you don't like where you are, or how hard it feels. And finally, to change what needs changing.

We move into the new place on Sunday. When I'm downtown, I drive past and there are flowers blooming all over the yard.

I've been rushing around lately. Whenever I do this, I start to get clutzy. I burn myself, I spill things. There is a big splash mark across the side of my (black) car because the other day I left my teacup on the top again and drove off. The cup didn't even break. I'm getting good at this.

Then today I went out for a few groceries, and got distracted at the check-out, filling out a ballot form to win a trip. When I got home, Craig said, "The store called. You forgot your groceries."

(An image I found in an old book in my grandmother's attic)


It rained today. It feels like the kind of rain that washes away the last bits of winter.

I had a slow morning yesterday by the window with tea and quiet dripping outside. I turned on CBC Radio to the nice surprise of Sarah Harmer & The Weakerthans sharing a live show.

A solo show at The Laughing Moon on Friday night. Sincere thanks to those of you who put $20 bills in the hat. You make life worth living!

Finally found a house on Friday. Such a relief after weeks of searching through the papers. It's a little old house with hard wood floors and windowsills, a deck off the side and lots of sunlight. There's daffodils growing in the flowerbeds already.

The landlord said I could plant a small vegetable garden in the back yard. I don't know why some people think gardening is cheesy. There's is nothing like walking barefoot out to the garden and picking lettuce and cucumbers for a salad and eating it 3 minutes later.

The house is in an old, pretty neighborhood with tall trees and big houses with vines growing up the walls. It's a 5 minute walk from the beach, which I've just now decided, is where I'll be all summer long when I'm not away. Toes burried in the sand and sunshine on my shoulders, as the old John Denver song goes.

Life has been quite busy with administrative details surrouding the CD. I'm not sure I would have done it had I known. It bores me to tears. Lots of mailing out packages and sending out copies for reviews. The good news recently, is that CBC Radio has approved Little Grey House for their music library, which means it will be distribued to 30 stations across Canada. Hopefully this will mean more than having it shoved into a litte tiny dark room to collect dust. Hopefull it will mean that they will play me and get me some shows.

We'll keep our fingers crossed.

It's raining again. There's nothing more to tell. I'm off...

The sun is shining but the wind is still blowing cold. The flowers on the hillside don't mind. They are popping up all over the place, the tiny bright yellow buttercups and others I don't know the names of. I want to plant some flowers in the hillsides that weren't there before I got here. I thought about bright red poppies, which are my favorites. I could plant them and forever more they would grow there on this mountain and it would be all because of me. I don't know if they'll grow in the dry dirt, but I'll give it a try. I want to leave something behind.

I have done nothing this week but eat, sleep, and look for a new place to live. I hit a wall a few weeks ago. I have not liked where I live for months. It's too hilly and hard to run. It's lonely. I miss small neighborhoods where you talk to old ladies on their way to the grocery store. I want a little place on a stoop to watch birds and cats and poeple mowing their lawns.

It's lonely up here where I live. The houses are huge and rich and empty because everyone has to work 55 hours a week to pay the mortgage. I look out onto a pine forest, which has been lovely. But not enough reason to stay. I need sunlight coming through a window (this place is dark). I need my own tree (or a rental tree).

Kelowna has officially been declared the richest city in Canada, or so I hear from reliable sources. I was invited to a new friend's house one morning. Her place was unbelievable. She had FIVE bathrooms. What on earth anyone needs 5 bathrooms for is beyond me. She said she had to hire a housekeeper to get them cleaned every week. Her whole house looked over the lake and the hills far away in the distance and there were enormous windows absolutely everywhere. She had a movie theatre in the basement, and I'm not joking when I say a movie theatre.

She, like her house, looks perfect. She mostly wears LuLu lemon. Her children look perfect in Baby Gap everything. The huge underground pool built on the cliff is perfect.

Everything was so perfect.

You almost wish for bad things to befall a person like this. You at least hope that they will be mean, horrible human beings so you can feel good about yourself. But she is actually very nice and warm and enjoyable to talk to. I really liked her.

I thought about all the houses I have lived in. Small houses, mostly. Places to sit by a window, back yards with little tiny gardens. I lived in a house once that smelled of cat pee and another one by a river where loons would come and you could sit out on the back deck and hear them calling. I have lived near trees and smack dab in the middle of the city away from trees. I have lived in basements with spiders and upstairs with creaky floors.

I don't need much. Just a little place to sit in the sun. Just a room to go to be alone and quiet for awhile each day. Just a few trees and a place to run where I don't feel like I'm hiking Mount Everest.

So maybe before I go, I'll scatter poppy seed everywhere. Maybe some of them will grow and I'll be able to look up to this hill years from now, and know that for a short time, I was here.

A pink scarf left on the deck.

A new robin hopping around the front yard.

The wildgrass blowing.

It's been a slow, rainy day. A sun shower earlier, water running down the glass. Now the clouds seem to be clearing.

Spent a few days last week at my grandma's. The drive there was beautiful. Huge mountains and layers and layers of snow. piled up like frosting on the sides of the roads. We stopped for icecream. The wind was cold.

My grandma's house always smells like chicken soup. She seems tired. She talked about where she will go after she can't care for herself in her tiny house. She seems scared. She is mostly all alone. Moving around her house, putting the kettle on, peeling potatoes, reading her Harlequin Romances and watching The Young & The Restless and curling, getting all riled up because the Canadian women wear skirts.

She has an old, creaky attic. As a kid I used to love exploring all the old boxes and trunks up there. Everything was covered in dust. I used to wonder what would make my grandparents keep some things; old scarves, practical jokes like the snake that jumps out of the can, porcelaine figurines.

As I explored on this recent visit, I found some old, books. Books with interesting illustrations and diagrams (see above). Survival books about making fires and hanging deer, probably from when my grandpa was in the army. When I hold an old book, I always wonder where its been, how it got there, what the person was feeling when they read it, and what they felt when they stuffed it away.

I've hit a strange patch. I have found myself standing in the self-help section of bookstores reading self-improvement books, you know the kind that teach you about goal setting and taping mantras to your bathroom mirror.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it's very unlike me. That's all.

The strange thing is, it's kind of helping.

It's the end of winter symptoms. I know it. Once I get outside for any length of time, these signs should clear up in a jiffy.

Jiffy. Where did that come from?? Oh, I know. My mom was just here visiting. She's always saying cheery things like "in a jiffy" and "keep your eyes peeled" and "Isn't that a hoot?"

How do you tell your mom she's wearing mom jeans? I mean, she's your mom. It's her right. But still. The pleats. The tapered legs. You really wish you could help.

It's been such an off day.

I'm not sure what to say. I thought maybe if I came here and pounded the keys, some revelation would come. There were a million interruptions. I kept trying to remember something Julia Cameron says in one of her books, that interruptions are actually divine interventions.

I like that.

I believe that.

It doesn't help me right now.

I looked everyhwere all day for some clarity. But none came. And here it is, almost 9 pm, and I wish I could just erase the whole day.

I've been reading a lot. Maybe that's the problem. I feel like I'm just too inside my head. I know exactly what would fix this: a good 45 minute run. But alas, the snow is covering the roads and the sidewalks. And a cold wind blows.

Save me.

Today everything I wrote was crap and every piece of toast burned and every cup of tea was forgotten and got cold and every pot boiled over and every note was out of tune and every word came out wrong and every flower seemed to wilt in my hand.

Just after 5:00 I turned on Oprah. There was a man on the show with his son who was in a wheelchair and together, with the father pushing the son's chair, they have run hundreds of races. Marathons and triathalons. The son in the wheelchair just loves it, sits there, swinging his arms with the wind in his face, smiling like a three year old with icecream. The father said that his son's not disabled, he just can't do some things, so he himself has to be his arms and legs.

You'd think that would have been enough to stop me from feeling sorry for myself in a hurry.

It was, really.

But I still feel off. I wish my head would clear. I wish the snow would melt. I wish I had a river that I could skate away on...

It's quiet now. Maybe I can gather myself together. Quiet quiet quiet. Lovely. It's too bad the clatter in my head is so deafening.

Is there an off-switch in here?

The week in Winnipeg was nice.

There is a bakery called Tall Grass that makes the most heavenly whole wheat cinnamon buns in the universe. M & I swung by there and grabbed 2 and went and ate it in a cafe looking out onto Broadway, all the traffic whooshing by. I thought about the day I saw Robin Williams in that cafe and he walked up the block to his hotel with a double espresso while passers-by gawked. Poor guy.

I had dinner with a dear friend at The Magic Thailand Restaurant, which is a scrungy hole in the wall near the worst area of town. But they serve the cheapest, most delicious green curry stirfries. We talked about the "old days" and the time I backed his car into a dumpster.

For the most part, the sun was shining like it does a lot in prairie winters. But it got cold. It was minus 30 with windchill a few times. The kind of cold where your nose sticks together. On the last night I was there, I slipped and fell on some ice and nearly knocked the side of my head on some cement stairs. I thought: Okay. I can go home now. I've gotten the whole Winnipeg experience.

Felt nose hairs sticking together? Check.

Drove frustrated around downtown unable to find parking? Check.

Almost get knocked unconscious slipping on ice? Check.

In Winnipeg someone is always getting their car towed and someone is always staggering along the sidewalk. Someone is always rushing with coffee in their hands and someone is always waving, late for a bus. Churchbells are always ringing somewhere and a taxi is always cutting you off and pigeons are always roosting in the house next door. People leave their Christmas lights up too long and the sky is always too bright and there is always a trail of smoke spiralling into the sky and there is never any parking.

Drove by my old house. The windows were dark. No one home. A small sadness.

On Saturday, M & I did a show at Vesuvio. It was good to see old friends who came to the release of the new record. Everyone stayed late. No one wanted to go back out into the cold.

When I got back to the house afterwards, I saw that I had a poppy seed stuck between one of my teeth. From dinner. 5 hours previous.

Thanks a lot everyone! Could no one have slipped it into the conversation that I had a big black something in my teeth? Does our friendship mean NOTHING?

Flying high over my new city as the plane pulled in, I saw the wide lakes and the farm land, the mountains and the valleys. Getting off the plane, the air was warm and spring-like. It was nice to be home.

I'm upstairs in my room at M & L's house in Winnipeg. I'm here doing some tracks on M's new CD. The windows are covered in frost. Outside, there is snow piled high on all the roof tops and the branches of the bare elm trees are all tangled in the air.

This city is so familiar. I feel as if I could just get in the car and go home to my old house, go inside and make toast. But someone else lives there now.

This room I'm in is stange alright. It belongs to M's old uncle and it's full of his old things. Ancient photographs, dusty magazines from 1968. There are old postcards taped to the back of the door. I pulled one off to see in the writing on the back (1976) and found that the masking tape had petrified, there was no stickiness left, it had become dry and brittle like an old leaf.

There are old books lining the shelves; Doctor Zhivago, Arabian Nights, every Shakespeare book under the sun, works by Beckett, CS Lewis, Flannery O'Connor, Dickens. A book called "Do You Sleep in the Nude". One wonders what that would be about.

I wonder what would cause this old uncle to hold onto so many things. I find myself wanting to know more. Does he come here to remind himself of who he is? Does he wish he could go back to that year, 1976, when someone gave him a black & white postcard of two boys walking down a long prairie road?

The wallpaper is stained in one corner from water leaking in, bubbled and raised. That's the thing about Winnipeg. There is always melting snow seeping in through the walls, basements flood, lines get etched on the paint. Ceilings crack. Foundations shift.

It's nice to know nothing has changed. Winnipeg is still here with its old windowsills & frost on the glass & bare, crooked trees.

-Patrick O'Connell

It seemed as if spring was on its way but all week its been snowing. It's nice to wake to snow, there is something so quiet and stilling about seeing it spread out all over the grass, falling between the thin pines behind the house. The wild grass has been blowing like thousands of tiny white flags. But I'm anxious for spring. Anxious to be running again above the orchards, anxious to hear my own breathing loud in my ears again.

I'm not one of those hard-core runners with the fancy-schmancy outfit that matches the shoes, the kind that go even if it's minus forty. When winter comes, I close up like everything else, stay inside with a blanket and lots of good books and something warm to drink. But this time of year, I always get restless. I begin obsessively checking the weather channel and dreaming of that burning in my lungs.

One of the most perfect moments I've ever had was last summer. I was at a little farmer's market at the coast and there was a professional reflexologist who was offering 15 minute massages for $10. I decided to get one. The reflexologist was a beautiful woman, not typically pretty, but beautiful like a weeping willow tree. She sort of reminded me of a dryad. I imagine she did a lot of dancing under the mooon and wood carving and chanting, that sort of thing. She had long hair that had gone naturally greyish and she spoke very softly & gently. I have always wanted to have a soft, gentle voice like that. I've always felt stuck with my low, strong radio announcer's voice. I once actually got kicked out of a place I was living partly because I talked too loud. The other part was that I used too much hot chocolate mix or something. But that's a story for another time.

The reflexologist woman sat me down on a reclining lawn chair and rubbed some sort of nice-smelling essential oil all over my feet and legs. It's probably important to metion here that I was 9 months pregnant with my daughter Ella, and so any comfort was heightened in my large, weary state. She began to speak of how important it was to be kind to ourselves, and then she shared her own story of her childbearing years and even though I felt swollen and puffy and tired, I also felt beautiful. She made me want to go dance under the moon and pick wildflowers and wear ribbons in my hair.

She went way longer than 15 minutes, and when she was done, and it was time for me to get up, I found I could barely move, that I was in some sort of pleasure-induced coma.

After I was finally able to get up, I wandered slowly around the market, fingering handmade jewelry, smelling fresh cut sprigs of basil and lavendar at the produce stands. That was a perfect way to spend an afternoon.

But lately I have been having a lot of perfect moments on Sundays, taking naps and having dinner with friends. Yesterday was one such day. I drank way too much tea and fell asleep after reading something mindless for awhile. Then, it was coffee and dinner with some dear friends who live on an orchard. They have a fireplace and huge windows that look out to where the sun falls behind the bare cherry trees and the rows and rows of apples trees and when I'm there, it's not hard to remember that it's the simple things that are the best things in the world.

Soon it will be spring. Soon the snow will be gone and the sun will be warm and the apple trees will bloom and I will run with the wind whooshing past me and breathe deep again.

-Brian Andreas

This morning it hailed
and I stood,
walked over to the window,
watched it fall,
a hundred thousand pieces of styrofoam
scattered on the grass.

Unfold to me, day
like the sky emptying out
and the garden swing
cold and creaking
in the back yard.

It is enough to wait by a window.
To stare out at the butterfly bush,
brown and stiff in the February air.
It is enough to watch the hail turn to rain.
Puddles on the concrete.
To boil the kettle for tea again
and think of you
out there
with no umbrella

So the Cd release is over now. It was a good night. It was amazing to look out into the crowd and see so many friends & fans who had come out to support me and buy Little Grey House. There were friends that were new and friends I have known for years & years and friends I hadn't seen in a long long time.

As per usual, the evening didn't go off without a few hitches. For starters, the soundsystem we rented didn't work. The sound board didn't turn on, which, if you know nothing about sound systems, is pretty much the piece of equipment that runs the whole thing.

Yes, I was panicking my head off.

It wouldn't have been so bad if the odd person was straggling through the door. But before starting time, the place was packed. It was in a downtown cafe, but there were over 80 people, standing in the back, waiting to begin, and nothing would turn on. It was a little maddening. At one point, 4 guys with cell phones were pacing around the stage area. Finally, finally, Ari Neufeld, who was my opening act, pulled through for us and called a friend, who brought us a new soundboard.

I had a friend there who came to look after Ella, my 4 month old. The plan was, she would take her off my hands so I could focus on setting up and doing a soundcheck before the night started. It didn't work. I think Ella could hear my voice but couldn't get to me and she screamed and screamed and screamed.

So there was the screaming and the panicking and more people coming in the doors and no soundboard in sight yet, and then, even though I wanted to be a superstar just for one night, I ended up walking around with my baby on my hip. And at one point I found myself wandering through the crowd with a bottle floating in a container of hot water. So rock & roll.

And in the middle of it all, a girl came in with a group of her friends and she looked about 14 but I think she was more like 17. All of them sat in the front and talked very loudly and I had no idea who they were. I smiled at her and she came up and said "Yeah. Like, my friend called me, and she was like, Ari Neufeld is playing on Saturday with some lady."

She called me some lady.

So the night went on, and I felt a little elsewhere for most of it. And now the record is out and there is nothing to do but mail it off to various radio stations & newspapers. There are envelopes lying all over the place around here. And when I send one off, I kiss it and say ever so dramatically, Go.... GO little Cd. Fly into the world and find your place... And I feel a little bit like Kate Winslet in Titanic, standing at the front of the boat with the wind in her hair.

A special Thank You to all who came out and toasted the record with me. It was great fun...

January 2,

This past year has been a grey sort of year. I haven't laughed much. I have cried an awful lot. I have wanted to throw things. To throw things at the walls and for it to break through the paint and the plaster and the gyprock.

But I can't. I'm renting.

Do you ever have those days? Those days when you look out on the blue sky or the trees blowing in the wind or the rain reflecting on the roads and you know you should be grateful? You know you should be grateful because you have so much. You really do. You know you should love the sky and the wind and the light on the roads, but you don't. You can't see through whatever is in the way. You can't figure out what's broken. You can't quite get the pieces into the right holes. You shake your head but it's still unclear.

And then, one morning.
Or evening before bed as you stand by an open window.
Or maybe it happens slowly, so slow you hardly notice, opening like leaves.
Whatever. It happens.
And you realize how rich you are. Not rich as in "I have a car and my health and a house and a bed..." but rich like the way you feel right then looking out that window, or sitting next to someone or waking too early in the half-dark. A feeling that if only you could see like this all the time, you would see you own the whole world.

Christmas was sitting by a fire with Chai Tea, visiting old friends, one who was long lost, my very best friend from elementary school whom I haven't talked to since seventh grade. We met for coffee and I saw her sitting in the window as I walked up to the little Italian cafe where we met, and I knew her instantly, her naturally curly hair exactly the same as I remember it from years ago. We talked about how the 8th grade was the worst year of both our lives, how we are both crazy about self-help books, how we're both still slightly bitter at Melanie Sondergaard who was always the teacher's pet in elementary school.

It was strange. I suddenly felt 11 again and it was nice and I wanted to sit with her on the monkey bars again and talk about boys and whatever else girls talk about when they are 11. I thought about asking her if she could sleepover at my house, but I didn't. We just said goodbye and walked out into the melting roads.

My inlaws have this hilarious screen saver on their computer that kicks on every few minutes with dramatic symphony music and pictures of the apostles across it, and some guy quoting the Bible. I was down there wrapping presents late at night and it scared me every time. Cue dramatic music: "A CITY ON A HILL CANNOT BE HID, THEREFORE LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE..." etc... etc... Then the music would end abrupty and the basement would sink into silence again.

It was a little weird.

My mother-in-law has one of those, Oh, what are they called… a lint remover with batteries. A lint razor? Anyways, I have this black sweater that I really love. It’s not terribly beautiful, but very cozy and soft and it’s my favorite. It had years of accumulated lint on it and when I found out she had a lint remover, I went at it. I swear, I spent around 6 hours with it buzzing. I found it very therapeutic. Very Zen-like. It really brings you into the moment. Everything else disappears and all that exists right then is that next piece of lint you’re going to suck up.

I think I became addicted. I did it all the way to White Lake in the car (over an hour), for another hour in front of the fireplace one evening, and during a really long and way too drawn out game of Clue. Who even plays Clue anymore? It was all we had. To compensate for the dullness, I got out the lint remover and everyone had to keep telling me when it was my turn because I was so absorbed with said lint-removal.

There was of course, the ordinary sadness always associated with Christmas. Small reminders that things change, and there are some things you can never get back.

Yesterday was so warm, 6 degrees in the afternoon, snow melting everywhere. Unusual. I wonder if winter is over here. After so many long, prairie winters, it is hard to believe such a lovely thing could be true.

I did some errands downtown, a trip to the radio staion, putting up a few signs for the CD release on January 14th.

Then, driving home up the long hill, I looked over and saw the blue hills covered in snow like a painting.

You forget. You forget how beautiful the world can be.