Category Archives: Random Musing

March 6, 2011 · 8:02 pm

My Last Week of Forced Relaxation. Next Stop: Retirement

For someone who didn’t know how to relax I sure have come to love it and am now wondering when my next long period of relaxation will come.. .unless we win the lottery it will be retirement. Wow, I now know how enjoyable life is when you can:

1. Spend endless days on the couch with your dog/best friend and do nothing.

2. Hang out with Dave and do nothing.

3. Discover awesome urban trails in North Van and beyond.

4. Cook like a maniac.

5. Discover yoga.

6. Discover doing absolutely nothing.

7. Go skiing with human best friend (also known as my husband).

8. Discover a love for plants and flowers and gardening.

9. Go to yoga and coffee with my sister and my girlfriends.

10. Meet my good pals for dinner at various locales about town.

11. Not do any real exercise for a full year (aside from yoga and skiing).

12. Make time for friends.

13. Repeat all of the above over and over again.

The key will be to maintain my newly learned calmness and carry it over into my non-retired life.  Thanks world, for giving me time to enjoy you.

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February 23, 2011 · 5:23 pm

The Days of Forced Relaxation Are Coming to An End

Last year at the end of March my boss took me into his office and told me that our unit was being closed down due to budget cuts and that I would no longer have a job after three months. Admittedly, I was in shock. I loved my job and the people I worked with and was looking forward to the next big project to work on. I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect situation than the one I was in. Continue reading →

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February 22, 2011 · 4:50 pm

Weekly Poem: High Tide by John Hodgen

High Tide
– John Hodgen

A man I know named Watters commanded riverboats during the war in Vietnam. He drilled through the heart of the Mekong. Now he teaches peace studies to wide-eyed kids, the arc of his life having turned him this way, utterly, as if by design. They stare at him, silent as fish. He says he is casting his nets. He says power corrupts, peace through strength. He says MIRV, SEATO, NATO, MAD. He says new submarines, launching platforms, multiple warhead killing machines, Ohio Class (Ohio so centered, so far from the sea, except in the Ice Age, the glacial moraine), the new Ohios under icecaps again, circling the world smoothly, almost silently. He says there are things he cannot say. He says expiate. His eyes fill up. He turns away. And this man with whom I am comfortable kayaks in the summer all over the world, in Alaska, the Aleutians, where Inuits since the Ice Age have hunted whales the size of submarines. And he has married a woman from Ohio, whom he loves smoothly, almost silently, more than he can say, even loving her name, Edith, a name that doesn’t sit well among popular women’s names, a name she herself doesn’t like, but one that he loves just because it is her name. I tell him he is the only man I know who can have his kayak and Edith too. Like a fish out of water, I tell him, like Onitsura’s haiku. He smiles, says sometimes he flips his kayak deliberately over and over in the Bay of Fundy, turning the fragmented world on its axis again and again, smoothly, almost silently, world into water, water into shimmering light.

Weekly Poem comes via my friend Janet who, in turn gets them from Alison McGhee who curates and gathers these beautiful word sculptures.

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February 21, 2011 · 4:50 pm

Spring

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February 16, 2011 · 3:41 pm

Poem of the Week from my friend Janet: Help by Arthur Vogelsang

Lay down beside me I signaled to my wolf

Three pats of the sofa in the early morn

Then two pats of the heart to say why.

He did it silently, no reply when one does

What’s to do. I must rest my hand on you

For a while for the usual reasons. This

Is easy to say between wolves or wolves and people

And difficult between people. For instance

A person might not want to absorb by touch another’s pain

Then. The wolf loves to. The person might say

Oh all right, but clearly a burden to ease another’s pain.

If you keep a wolf, there isn’t much more they do

But they are specially good at it

Like the surf loves to be splashed with a whole bottle of poison water,

Try that and see if the waves don’t turn over embracing without end,

Try that and see if you can find any poison after two seconds,

Or slowly slide your fingers through the first layer

Of your wolf’s coat to the second layer and move fingers

Head to tail, tail to head, slower than slowly.

Anything could have happened to you yesterday

And you’d soon be okay. But first get a wolf.

Thanks to Alison McGhee for her weekly curation of these wonderful poems.

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February 14, 2011 · 4:18 pm

Savour That Chocolate While You Can Still Afford It: Globe and Mail

I found this article by Jessica Leeder on environmental geo/political issues regarding chocolate in the Globe on the weekend. It’s quite interesting. Read the whole article right here.

In the not-too-distant future, chocolate will become a rarefied luxury, as expensive as caviar.

John Mason, a Canadian expert on cocoa, first made this prophesy six years ago from his base in West Africa, the epicentre of production. He was confident enough to repeat it, over and over, to the directors of the biggest chocolate companies in the world.

MORE RELATED TO THIS STORY

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January 26, 2011 · 7:25 pm

Forced Relaxation: Darn it, I love my bulbs!

Well the excitement just never seems to end over here in North Vancouver. I have thrown myself full tilt into bulbs and spring flowers. In the fall I bought tulip and garlic bulbs and planted them. Knowing nothing, I tossed them in the dirt and was quite surprised to see them peeking their heads up in December.

I didn’t think this was quite right so I kept putting more dirt over top until finally I had something of an unmanageable mountain and they still kept coming up. Anyways, the tulips are growing like crazy.

And wait, the excitement doesn’t stop here. Then I looked in my garlic container and started rooting around in there, and noticed that sure enough, they too are doing something that looks suspiciously like growing. My new relaxation ritual currently involves a daily visit with some rambunctious digging on my part just to say a quick hello and then goodbye at least until tomorrow to my little garlic bulbs. I can’t contain my joy when I’m around these things and every day I drag home another little plant.

Is this what it means to be relaxed or is this what it means to get old? I’m not sure but I’m liking it.

PS am I harming my garlic by digging around for it everyday?

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January 25, 2011 · 9:44 pm

Forced Relaxation: Now that I’m over the terror I love it!

When I was first laid off last year it took awhile for the panic to set in. I had been given a ‘working termination’ so I had 3 months with pay that included the opportunity to work with my employer to find employment at the university. I met with HR, talked to them, took the re-employment workshop, re-worked my resume and avidly applied myself to finding work asap.

I went for quite a few interviews and remained ever hopeful that I would quickly find a new home. Well, as it turns out, this wasn’t quite meant to be and 7 months later I am still looking for work.

There was a period of time, and a fairly long one at that, that I went through a feeling of complete terror at what was happening and not happening in my life. It corresponded at the same time with my mom being diagnosed with terminal cancer. The sicker she got the more desperate I was to find a job. Dave said to me one day, “be careful what you wish for” and he was right. As my mom’s illness progressed I started to let go of my panic realizing that trying to work at a stressful job 3,000 kilometres away from my mom would be devastating for her and for me.

While I continued to keep my eye out for work I started to allow myself to seize the day. And for me that meant spending as much time with my mom and my family as possible.

I am still looking for a good home but in the mean time, the idea of ‘seizing the day’ which I learned during this difficult period is now spilling over into my life without my mom. A friend called the other day and asked how I spent my days. I laughed and said that I had developed wonderful rituals around the many ways I have learned to relax. It’s odd but once you let yourself just be you can unfold into the universe in a very beautiful kind of way. I feel my creative self returning, I have a new appreciation for things like flowers. I bought bulbs in the fall (garlic and tulip) and planted them. Every day I stand outside and look at them and am shocked at how crazy it is that you just drop these things in soil, stand back and do absolutely nothing and then boom, there they are peeking their heads up. Sometimes I find myself rooting around in the dirt, ”Where are you, you little devil? I’m just saying good morning.” As I gear up to enter work life again I’m going to remember this moment, to just take it as it comes. To seize the day, the moment, the hour.

This has been a message from the “glass half full brigade”.

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January 19, 2011 · 7:47 pm

Moods: Variation II

I probably was more than a little sad when I wrote this sad little song in the dark months following my mama’s passing but it I kinda like it.

 

The non-mathematical inequality of grief
that the person who dies
rises to the occasion
in an unexpected way
that the person
who is dying
grows into their death, into their dying-ness
like a hero
like a person who suddenly
understands
what it is to die
what it is to have lived
who accepts
graciously
the gifts
that life has given them
that they know
there is no point
in painful exploration of why, why, why
although they are only human
so they are afraid
not of dying
but of leaving behind
of not knowing
what twists their illness will inflict on them
that the person who is dying
who rises graciously to the occasion
helps you discover
more about them in these last moments
hours and days
than you ever thought you would
that you learn that the capacity for joy, love
and laughter
is no way diminished by their dying-ness
that their love of music, life
shines through
even in their gravest hour
that you never expected to be so engaged
feel love so fully
want to know this person even better
in these final hours
that when they suddenly take your hand
and swing it to the music
that this effervescent life force
this magnificent zest
continues
even in the dying person’s darkest hour
that this feeling of sheer unbreakable unknowable
and crazy love increases as each moment passes
making the chasm between life and death ever greater
knowing that the inverse proportion of wanting to love more is
in direct opposition to the ability to hold life
that death is the only state in which there is truly no hope.
that everything now can only exist in your heart
that there can be no more conversations
no more handholding
no more wry observations on the passing of life
no more sweetnesses
no more declarations of this is it
no more drinking of wine
and no more motherly assurances
that yes everything will be okay.

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January 13, 2011 · 9:19 pm

Headaches By the Glass: Why Wine Isn’t Always a Pleasure (Globe article)

Wine drinking allergy sufferers there’s hope! I found this article in the Globe and Mail written by Beppi Crosarial the resident wine monger there.

“Wine is synonymous with pleasure, yet it’s a source of pain for many frustrated drinkers. Allergic reactions, including headaches, skin rashes and runny noses, affect as many as 8 per cent of wine drinkers, according to some estimates.

Now, recent news out of Denmark could spell hope for many sufferers. Scientists have isolated molecules in wine that may be the source of a large number of these allergies. And here’s the twist. They are substances unrelated to such usual – and often falsely accused – suspects as sulphites, tannins and pesticides. The discovery could lead to new winemaking techniques that would reduce or remove the culprit molecules, ushering in an era of headache-free merlots and pinot grigios for those with sensitivities. Continue reading →

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