Rants at a Picnic

What is this ugly desire within all of us to “be right”, or “one up”? I love debate, I have always enjoyed passionate conversation, but there is a huge difference in my opinion between engaging in spirited discussion and being argumentative. It baffles my mind sometimes how people can be so achingly unaware of the nonsense vomiting out of their mouths. This kind of unproductive reactionary ego driven jockeying on behalf of some half read article or self serving hypothesis is what keeps us in constant mental chatter, an endless cycle of suffering.

We all have within us the sore loser, the sore winner, and the humble versions of both. Throughout the course of a day we all engage in status or power plays to one degree or another, and I am not above this. But I do try to be aware of what my triggers to play these ridiculous games are and where I fall short of humility, true listening and productive passivity. If I practice this awareness maybe I can shorten the time it takes me to become aware that it is happening right down to the moment itself and then stop it before it happens and begin to change the pattern. I try also to identify my personal boundaries and know when I should “just let it go” or when I should stand up for something I believe in.

I am one of the least confrontational people around. If you manage to push my buttons enough to get me to lash out in the moment then good for you! You must be really skilled at being irritating! I am certainly an advocate for myself but where frustration and anger in social settings is concerned, I like to sit with the feeling for 24 hours and then decide if something needs to be said. I find that there is always a part of these feelings that is ego based (pride, the desire to be right or be in control etc) and then sometimes it also goes beyond that, permeating my core. When this is the case I try to confront the person in a productive way that lets them know what it is I am uncomfortable with without being fueled by self righteousness. On the odd occasion when I do react bubbling and bothered in the heat of a moment, it usually means someone has crossed a particular line three times too many and needs to know that my openness and jovial nature does NOT equal me being a door mat or an energetic recycling bin.

The subject of finding the balance between being open and having personal boundaries is a fascination of mine. But we’ll save that for another day :)

By now it is probably apparent that I had a “run in” with such a conversational predator today and it left me disappointed in the true intelligence of that person. I doubt there will be a reconciliation, I am not interested in an apology or trying to have a better relationship. It is in my nature to let everyone in right off the bat, to hand out mountains of respect; but once you shred the last of it: GONE. You are no longer allowed anywhere near this burning ball of light. My severity is not driven by ego, I can say that sincerely. It is driven by my passion for the human experience of communion. I love connecting with people and when someone opens up to me and allows me to experience their unbridled truth I never take it for granted. But those who choose time and time again to take axes and knives to the picnics of the human heart will no longer be invited. We have too much work to do and fun to have to indulge such disregard and toxicity.

My prayer is to continue to grow in light, to be willing to unravel myself and let go of my need to be right or the centre of attention at the cost of an opportunity to connect with another. I am not perfect, nor am I trying to be (there is no such thing) but I hope for a better, less polluted collective mental landscape. And I am willing to start with my own.

Cry Baby

Why is it often only crisis that brings us to our knees? When life beats down, obligations come a calling, health deteriorates or personal relationships fail we finally surrender and ask our own soul, and perhaps the sky, God, or a therapist for help. It is in these times we realise that years of unexpressed/unexplored feelings are marching towards victory and our mental and emotional defenses aren’t going to hold any longer. But where did these defenses come from? And what was so terrifying about feeling that we had to construct them in the first place?

When I am feeling strong, when I am in my warrior self and have the energy for all of life’s outer tasks I often find myself missing the times of my greatest sensitivity, when I’ve been tired and raw with my heart unravelled in my open palms in search of peace. These times are uncomfortable, and we are raised to believe that happy means good and sadness is bad. I prefer the word sensitivity to sadness, because I am coming to find that when I feel this way it is because I am resonating with life, sometimes its my own and the obstacles on my journey and sometimes it is the old lady's next door watering her plants and my contemplation of her fulfilled or unfulfilled ambitions. And it is this kind of essential compassion that is the delicate and passionate art of a life well lived.

As artists we strive for this kind of emotional overload and rough sandpaper-against-our-skin sensitivity. Its where we get the juice from. And the patrons of our art come because they want to feel through the work they see or hear or read. We all want to feel. It is my mounting belief that by judging some emotions and rewarding others we are creating a/contributing to an already existing paradigm that blocks everything up, only allowing the most extreme circumstances to break the dam.

I crave the heart of it all. I yearn to rub up against the magic in all things. I want to live from a place of greatest sensitivity. My idea of the good life includes, belly laughs and heaving cries, smiles that hurt my face and hugs that break my arms. And if that means some days where I feel like I’ve had the shit kicked out of me then so be it. I’m not waiting for another quarter life crisis to find out that being repressed and British ain’t for me.

Post Script: In the glorification and condemnation of the extremes we tend cling to the times we remember as being the best or the worst. Free in the present moment to feel whatever comes to pass means that life will find its rhythms in the expression of this life and I won’t need to hold on to know that I am alive.

Perfect

I want to say that I always know what’s best for me; that in the moment I will choose ultimate acts of self love. I will choose that which fills me, grounds me, sets me at peace, makes me proud to be in this skin, proud from deep in my star shine right up and out of my eyes. But sometimes I choose things that are not good for me, sometimes I reveal to myself the dark side, show myself I’m not all free yet. I rip myself open, I fray the edges and pray for healing, I get lazy, I live in past or future, I dwell or indulge or hold too tight or just plain miss the point, miss the wonderment.

I know the truth of things. The core of me has always been able to see what I am growing towards. And its a marvelous place and time and state of self, and it will shift again and again and I will reach beyond even that furthest stretch of my inner imagination. And its not so much that I imagine it as I intuit it, I know the woman of my future, I feel her feelings, I see myself unravelled further, freer, clearer, more thankful. Which makes some of the current underdeveloped or over-indulged parts of my personality, psyche and ego stick out awkwardly to me all the more. I know I’m growing towards the goodness, but that knowledge doesn’t mean I get a free pass. I still have to live through each phase and stage. Each year the lessons get harder and I know less and less who I am and what my purpose is. My mirror is getting cleaned by someone up there and I have no doubt in the process but I feel this giant wave of surrender that still has to happen. And that means never trying to be somewhere or someone I’m not, even if my soul knows all the inevitable future destinations.

And then I remember. It is happening. I am not sitting around waiting for this process to begin... it is happening. And its not always blissful, or comfortable, and the awareness of the weird or unhealthy or selfish choices is part of the growing. I don’t feel like I am growing up... I am growing in. I am making a comfortable home here in this body, in this little life. I spoke with a friend today about the pressure I often put on myself to make these “right” choices, to be this perfect manifestation of truth all at once, right NOW! And its a beautiful thing that I know what living from that place would feel like, but I am an inside-out person. When its ripe on the inside, the outside will reveal it. Discipline is a beautiful thing, it can be. But being ready to discipline oneself from a place of self love rather than self loathing is a whole mountain in and of itself.

So many times we localise these “problems”: eating, smoking, exercise, mental states, sleep patterns. We put them, these parts of ourselves and our relationships to them under a microscope and say: this is the bit that is bad. We seek to change it, convert it, and often we project all of our fears and insecurities of not being “good enough” (for what?) onto this particular part. As if by dissolving this one thing, pattern, habit we will become whole. Guess how much anxiety and frustration this heaps on to this already very difficult task? One time, in a deep and foggy depression I realised that the judgement of myself for being depressed was actually far more debilitating than the sadness or low that I was experiencing. Once I was willing to release the judgement of that “side” of me and let it just be what I was experiencing at that time, the heaviness began to rise.

I am all for healthy minds and bodies, for feeling good and being at peace. I think the revolution of health, consciousness and looking inward is awe inspiring. But I fear that the ego, that many minds will take this journey, take the books and the cleanses and workshops and use them to try and eradicate parts of the self and therefore perpetuate pain and never truly learn acceptance and love of self. But in the spirit of living from a love based place, I release that fear and switch the intention to: I love that there are other people on the path to healing and wherever they are at with that and themselves is perfect. Where I am is perfect.

A Full Life

Focused on the hands

Moving swift and soft

Across the frets

Fingers pressed tight to the strings

I want to learn the guitar

I want to play the guitar

There is an unknit sweater in me too

A delicious case of homemade jam

blackberries picked by my babies and me

in some far flung future August

On the perimeters of my farm

There are dirty hands,

Worn from work and seeking holding,

There are books and plays and poems

Poems enough to fill the fields of that farm

from the earth to the sky

Words scattered and free to fly and make

their own sense

So many dances

Fast and slow and alone and

pressed up against the one for me

Too many brushings of my tangled mane

How many hair colours?

How many cities?

Teapots?

Bumpy flights and sleepless nights?

Belly laughs to the wall or the window

or the steering wheel, all alone and crazy?

Lonely to the bone moments?

Perfect perfect pots of rice

cooked without a care?

Worth the wait are all these things

Though some I hurry on,

Some I chase like tigers

And with some I play it cool,

Knowing it will trickle down my spine one day:

a bead of sweat well earned.

I am growing at the rate of freedom,

Willing to be out of time

And fresh to the feeling that I am

I am there, I am that I am, I am that I am there

I am that I am here,

And I am that I am everywhere

The Show Must Go On

Being from the most beautiful part of the world, adjusting to life in Ontario (specifically Toronto) has been a bit of a struggle. Always one to try and find the silver linings I have turned my face to the sky above my current coordinates in search of gratitude and found here not silver linings but big dark grey electro-magnetically charged ones.

The best part about Ontario is the thunder and lightening. There is an abundance of energy in the summer, it pulses through the sky and explodes at intervals into strips and sheets of pink, purple and white light. The sky rocks big base beats and as it gets closer the storm gets further in, when right over head you can feel it in your bones. Sometimes these sights and sounds come out of a dry sky, other times (like now) there is a flash flood than can last for 5 minutes or 5 hours. I have never seen anything like it (and having hometowns on Vancouver Island and Northern England, the two rainiest places on earth, that is a BIG statement). And I LOVE it. It is inspiring, shocking, sexy and full of the guts of life. And sometimes it will catch you just at the moment when you need the hand of Thor (!) to pull you up and dust you off and in some way renew or surprise you into living in the cracks again.

Today is Saturday, which means a two show day. 2:30 matinee and 8 o’clock evening performance. The one I’m working on right now is pretty full-on in a lot of ways, my character's journey spans from age 7-24 and in every show I re-discover how physical I can get with it; for example today I thought that I pulled my groin halfway through Act II. I did not thankfully! But something else completely unexpected happened during the matinee, something so big even me in my “show must go on” mind thought it would derail us or as a result the show would be stopped by stage management.

I had just run off stage right followed by the lead character in an effort to stop her son/my husband from killing his brother (tricky tricky... they don’t know they’re brothers! Twins! She gave one of them away at birth and they found each other and became friends, well we all did... until my husband went to jail for assisting in an armed robbery turned murder, got addicted to anti depressants after which I started up an affair with the secret other brother... CRAZY!). So its the last 8-10 minutes of the show, we have just run off and the Narrator is singing and BANG! The power goes out. He doesn’t miss a beat or a note (even though lights disappear and the monitors and speakers for the band cut out and he had no music to sing to) and the next scene begins as dim emergency lights kick in. Back stage and side stage we have front of house people and stage management running around trying to make decisions as to whether to continue or not. At this point I am usually at the back of the theatre waiting to enter at the final moments to witness both my husband and lover die (serious Greek tragedy style). Three of the front of house ladies enter the theatre from the back with giant flashlights, shining them on the action so the audience can see the scene unfold. I guess we are pressing on.... So I put all thoughts of: “What will happen when the band is supposed to come in for the final number?” “Will we sing acapella?” or “What if the power kicks in mid scene or song” or “Is the audience so far out of the suspension of disbelief that all of this will be a farce now?” as far out of my mind as I can and follow the lead of my fellow cast mates.

In the bare minimally lit theatre it got more real not less. There was no band, no lights, nothing but people telling a story and it burned me under my skin. A haunting, harsh, and visceral portrait emerged from the raw acapella song of a mother in anguish. There was nothing to hide behind and there could be no pretending that you weren’t just a person on a stage telling a story, there could be no trickery, no big show. It didn’t matter that the sounds of the gun shots had to be yelled by our stage manager, it honestly didn’t. Live theatre is a magnificent thing when its on this sort of cusp of vulnerability and paper thin flooring. Everyone did their part, the final number emerged from within every member of the cast without help of piano and at times imperfect in its harmonies but so much more perfect than any other time in my artists soul opinion. I didn’t feel badly for the audience who saw the show that “went all wrong”, because it didn’t go wrong at all. I was so proud and so pleased that truth was born; and shoved into the present moment the cast was unified in the simple purpose of fulfilling the journeys of these characters and closing the book on the bed time story we had started.

It will never be for me just “that show where the power went out”, this afternoon restored some mis placed faith and reminded me that this work is a valid offering and has potent and powerful potential. And when I changed out of my costume the hairs on my arms and neck were still all pointed upwards to the sky, to the thunder, to the lightening, to the gods, to the rains that came to wash away the excess and leave me naked and new again.

my ten hour head ache (i wish i was down with taking asprin)

when nothing feels a comfort

no pillow, tea, or song will do

not even a lullaby written especially for you

when the body is heavy

but the mind wants its turn

the two are at odds, union has to be earned

when lonely is scratched vinyl

and only the the sad songs will play

but even then you can’t bear to throw it away

when a dream’s hiding itself

trouble seems to call off the search

you’re not in a cage but you’re stuck on your perch

when synapses are firing

but there’s no sense to it all

and you keep trying to jump when all you need is to fall

You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows - B. Dylan

Isn’t it strange how somehow it seems okay to harshly criticize those who have achieved some sort of public renown or material success? When going to see the work of an independent artist, a film maker or songstress say, I am very reluctant to pass any kind of judgement unless it is very well considered and coming from a place that understands how difficult it can be to single handedly manifest one’s creative vision. But when going to a movie at the Cineplex or listening to what fills the radio waves I have no problem turning on my critical eyes or ears.

But, the offering is still the offering. There is still intense vulnerability (often even more so once the expectation of producing “good” work is heaped on) for those who have to some degree been “successful”. To be clear, I must say that much of my critique of pop culture or art that is produced for the masses comes from the place of: you had THAT MUCH money to play with, THAT MANY people to support your creation and really? Thats all you could come up with? And the frustration that accompanies having a lot of ideas I’d love someone to throw some money at, and very talented friends around me who given those kinds of opportunities would work tirelessly until they had something truthful and well crafted to offer.

Perhaps its that old adage “If you don’t really try, you can’t really fail” that is at the heart of why so much of the art in pop culture is, to be blunt, shitty and hollow. Its pretty scary to dig down deep into one's mental, emotional and physical pockets and give it everything not knowing how it will be received or for the sensitive artists among us (I'm pretty sure that's all of us) if we will be able to match our personal aesthetic expectations (but that's a whole other entry). And if you know you're decent at something, that you can get a B+ without really trying, why try then right? Maybe its a collective adherence to mediocrity and shallow efforts, easy listening as a way to remain always somewhat unconscious and unchallenged. The more of us that subconsciously agree to stay buried in the blankets the easier it is to live a day that is patterned and habitual requiring little thought or innovation. But often we go to art, the theatre, the movies, and concert halls to be inspired, informed, to feel. But there is a fear out there amongst a lot (not all!) of artistic directors and producers alike that if the piece is too “heady” or “different” or is played with any level of subtlety or intimacy, that the audience will get bored, and that by requiring them to be involved and actively thinking will drive down ticket sales. And maybe it will for while, but serving that fear season after season, film after film, album after album will only thicken the veil and make it harder to emerge from. Pure entertainment is a valid service but at the cost of substance? I have no interest in contributing to this in the world. And it is my belief that they are not mutually exclusive and that in fact one informs and enriches the other.

It is funny to me that it is so often the singer songwriter with his or her evocative soul pulling melodies that awaken and inspire even the sleepiest and unexpected listener to “listen to the words”. Music speaks a language of its own, and maybe because its the original instrument and the same tool with which we cry sorrow, love, and all kinds of hunger, the human voice has the capacity to draw people from deep in the soul upwards to the cognitive functions of the mind and trick people into thinking, into contemplation. Why do you think music is one of the first things to be attacked or prohibited in times of oppressive government? If the goal and role of government is to get us all to tow the line and agree to the fact that this way is the only or best way, then keeping everyone from jumping up and wriggling their hips and moving out that stuck energy, keeping us all in nap time is probably a good idea.

But to bring it all back, I actually feel for those who have achieved great success and continue to contribute. It must be very difficult not to let the expectations of investors, critics and the public cripple the creative freedom. I don’t appreciate abuse of power or neglecting of responsibility that comes with power or the taking for granted of the resources given to help create; but as far as the humanness that comes with exposing one’s ideas, dreams, fears and desires and serving it up in a 90 minute story or a 3 minute song (or any other such form of public expression) I understand how pointed that can feel, how raw, and I understand the simple need to have it all affirmed, to want the head nod or the standing ovation. There are some lessons that I expect we probably never fully evolve past, and the need for approval and reward is in my opinion, one of them. My goal is to find my way to a space where where it is not a block or a toxic force robbing me of my power where that desire to be "good" or "liked" is immediately recognisable quite simply as mis-directed energy and be able to manipulate, or better yet- set it free to become pure creative energy.

I pray daily to continue meeting my tribe, my army, of fellow creatives who are in search of the balance between contemplation and expression, provocation and service to the uniting of the humanness and effervescence that connects us all to this mixed up experience on earth.