All Souls Day

I was in Zermatt this year at the end of October. Life and death seem to touch in this place of high altitude where the Matterhorn dominates the view from cobblestone streets. The trams up the mountain are full of joyous healthy skiers, starting the season early. Travelers of many nationalities and age walk trails and through the streets, marveling at the Matterhorn and history of the village. No matter where any of us walk, we pass several graveyards, all well kept. The largest is flanked by the river and any day, at sunset, there are several people clearing leaves or windswept brush and lighting candles. Almost every grave is marked, not just by its headstone, but by care. Evergreens and heather are common in late fall, but in any season, there are flowers and natural offerings to remember the climbers, residents, and visitors who are buried there.

A few days before I left, an arrangement of greens, pinecones, and purple flowers adorned by two white fleur-de-lys was delivered to the hotel. I asked why. The receptionist, now in her sixties but who in her youth had climbed the Matterhorn three times, explained, " We are Catholic. Monday is All Saints Day". Later as I walked through town, I saw similar arrangements; some for sale at the grocery, some already placed on graves.

I am home now. The remnants of Halloween are apparent. Candy wrappers fly in wind. Jack o'lanterns shrivel in the cold. I recall learning the origins of All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day and All Souls Day when I was about nine years old. I remember being fascinated how the combination of old English, Irish, and French traditions led to carving jack o' lanterns and trick or treating. I remember learning that the customs of Halloween provided protection and that the next two days were very holy.

This Thursday is Remembrance Day in Canada, commemorating the armistice of the First World War and paying tribute to all who have lost their lives in war. This year seems especially somber to me. Even the teenagers who carry boxes of poppies to pin on collars for remembrance have a gravitas that I do not recall. 2010 has been a year on on-going war and natural disasters. Many have unexpectedly lost their lives, and many others have suddenly lost friends or family.

I think of those that I loved that are gone. I think of friends and family who have lost their loved ones. I think of the passage of seasons - the abundance of summer, the barrenness of late fall, the purity of snow in winter, and the blossoming of spring - and I think of nature as a great teacher. The traditions of how we recognize passages change with each generation but we still do revere the cycle of life. I am grateful to have been in Zermatt to be reminded of All Saints Day and All Souls Day. I am grateful for these lessons.

Battle of the Blades

I like the CBC television program, Battle of the Blades, in which ex-NHL hockey players are paired with world class figure skaters and compete in weekly pairs competition eliminations. It brings together many aspects of what I have loved through different stages of my life.

My mother (and you'd have to know my mother to really appreciate the subtleties in this comment) used to say that I was not graceful with shoes on but put skates on me and I transformed. I do know that skating was freedom for me as a child. I was the ultimate in self-consciousness, which meant that off-ice I lived in my brain, without mind/body/soul integration so perhaps there was an element of truth in what my mother said. My brothers played hockey; I figure skated, and a large part of our family life centered on the trips to the outdoor rink where we trained and competed. The road to the rink was circuitous, hilly and dark, the kind of road that was rife for nightmares. In my memory, even those moments of worry were positive as they meant I was going skating.

Activity was an escape from dysfunction inside the house, so I would join my brothers and practice wrist shots and slap shots on the driveway. A few years later, that practice came in handy when I was in the first class of girls attending a prep school that had been all boys for the previous 100 years. There were a number of figure skaters among us and we would spin and jump on the limited ice time allotted. We compared our amount of practice time to those of the hockey players, and formulated a plan. We would form an ice hockey team. Recruiting players was easy, and one of the coaches agreed to help us. Our first game was against the freshman boys. I recall the fans leaning against boards cheering but I do not remember the score. I believe we played that first game in figure skates and were then told that if we wanted to play again, we would need to be in hockey skates.

The transition from figure skates to hockey skates is not as challenging as the opposite. No toe pick but a slightly different balance point. I became a hockey player and a figure skater, a pioneer of sorts, doing anything for ice time. At university several years later, the same principle held true. Hockey was the way to ice time. It was the mid '70s and women's hockey was just emerging. There was no official team, but enough women came together to create a league. The pictures from that time are amusing...helmets, gloves, jerseys, and shin pads layered over tight blue jeans. I continued to wear my figure skates to open ice every Friday afternoon, and still have those well worn skates. The padding on the tongue is dry and the leather full of scratches. I prefer them still to my new skates. Those old skates helped shape who I am.

Watching The Battle of the Blades hockey players trip over their toe picks and laughing as they joke about making fools of themselves on national television is a good lesson for us amateur athletes. It is a joy to see seasoned professionals learning something new. They are like the rest of us. They fall, they laugh, and they get up. They have fear but it's not stopping them. It is also a joy to see these strong and capable women teaching the hockey players the sport they love. The addition of music to movement frees up some of the athletes; constrains others. Choreography - training the body to respond in certain ways time after time - is new to most of the men.

The initial segment highlighted some of the back stories of the athletes, reinforcing that the images we see on Olympic or NHL arenas are only part of the person. The story of Theo Fleury's past addictions, the story of Russ Courtnall's father's depression and suicide, and tapes of Ekaterina Gordeeva's youthful exuberance eating an ice cream cone after an Olympic win and then skating alone without a partner, when her husband and partner, Sergei Grinkov, died suddenly of a heart attack at age 28, all shift our perceptions of professional athletes. With their stories, they again are like us. They have pain and challenge but they go on.

I love sport for its inherent life lessons. I love sport because it reveals greatness in ordinary people, and when two of my favorites sports are combined into one corny but incredibly fun television show, I am happy.

Facebook profiles

When I was a child, I often heard the phrase "Don't judge a book by its cover". One of my favourite songs now is "Diamonds on the Inside" by Ben Harper. This song and, indeed, the whole album have resonated with me for over seven years. The lyrics are nuanced, taking on new subtleties as I grow and change. For a number of reasons, I have always been sensitive to the idea that what matters is on the inside. I believe this now more than ever.

I believe that we often hold ourselves back from living life the way we are meant. Sometimes, we hold ourselves back because we fear what our parents or friends or associates might think. "You want to do WHAT for a living? Do you really think you can do that?" might be the reaction to a child who tells her parents " I want to be the next Ellen DeGeneres". We hold ourselves back because we fear what we want is impossible to achieve. We hold ourselves back because we fear that what we want is not good enough.

One way of dealing with the fear is to create a personna. We hide ourselves behind these masks.
They protect us. You can't see into my soul or even my eyes if I am wearing a mask. I have a personna...mother, skier, climber, yoga practitioner, MBA, teacher. My personna has shifted over the past ten years but I still have one. Some days it is more apparent than other days. If you talk to me, and you hear my vocabulary expand, my mask is probably slipping on and I am relying on my intellectual personna.

When I first started using Facebook, I deliberately tried to be open and authentic. No credentials, just me. Over time, this has changed. My facebook page now shows pictures of me outdoors, generally when I happiest. My facebook page does not show me first thing in the morning as I awake bleary-eyed. My facebook page does not show me worrying. Facebook gives me glimpses into old friends' current lives, but we are all showing only what we choose to reveal. I am a personna on Facebook, not a person.

This is important because having the confidence to be yourself is a task that many of us struggle with throughout life. Certainly, lack of confidence haunts me but it is not apparent to many of my friends, Facebook or otherwise. I am myself enough of the time to know that external symbols of success ( diamonds, degrees, cars) do not make me happy. Facebook can play into fears...it's keeping up with the Jones in 2010...and we all know what happens when you keep up with the Jones and your name is Smith or Chevalier or Raj or Adewaki. You are not being you. So, focus on being you more of the time and being less aware of your neighbors. I will do the same.

That all said, one of the things that troubles me about this blog is that it also creates a personna. By writing, I move into my head and my intellect. I try to be honest but my ego gets in the way. I sometimes feel that I write as if I have answers. I definitely don't have answers. I am writing about my personal experience with the hope that it shines a light so that others question the thoughts that bind them still. I write because I need to, because it is part of who I am.

Namaste.

To everything there is a season

One of the things that I like about Bikram yoga is that it is the same 26 poses every time. One of the benefits of this is that I really get to know what is going on for me on any given day. On Monday, I might be struggling to stay balanced for a full 60 seconds in standing bow pulling pose, but ten minutes later I might find my flexibility increased and my head closer to the ground in standing separate leg stretching pose.

Bikram yoga occurs in a closed environment. The room temperature and humidity should be the same no matter where in the world I practice. The dialogue should be the same. The variable is me. The lessons are profound. I am slightly different each day in my strength, my balance and my flexibility. Sometimes the differences are in my body. Other days they are in my focus and mind. No matter where the difference is, I see and feel yin and yang. The truth of this resonates in my body. When I extend a muscle, the opposing muscle contracts. When I lose a fraction of balance, it may because I have gained strength or flexibility.

One night, not too long ago, as I was falling asleep, my mind turned to standing bow pulling pose. I said to myself, "there is no reason for you to fall out of it as often as you do". The next day, I stayed in the pose, with my leg held high and my torso moving parallel to the floor, for a lot longer than usual. Mind over matter. Belief makes a difference.

Life does not occur in a closed environment yet similar lessons are inherent... just harder to see and feel when so many variables are in flux. I wrote recently about patience. When I am finding it challenging to be patient, something else is growing within me. Perhaps, it is conviction or confidence. The seed is there and with time (patience), it blossoms into a gift. Other times, I may be feeling sad. The sadness may be because I am out of sync. It is fall and I want it still to be summer. The key to understanding life' s lessons is to listen to our whole selves, body, mind and spirit.

A favorite song of mine, and one of the few I have learned to play on the guitar, is "Turn! Turn! Turn! ( to everything there is a season). The lyrics are taken almost verbatim from Ecclesiastes:

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace"

Do. Do not...Strength; Vulnerability... Striving; yielding....Firmness; flexibility... Be. Just Be.

Namaste,
Ginny

Patience

Certain words irk me. Patience is one of those words. I hate being told to have it and I hate being told that I have it. Either way it irks me.

I have been home from skiing in Chile for nearly three weeks and my knees are still sore. I know that I am lucky that my knees are as good as they are, but I am impatient for them to get better. The problem is nothing that I do will help. In fact, most of what I do harms. So, I must be patient and allow time and gentle stretching to loosen and heal tight muscles, ligaments and tendons. Heat and rest also speed recovery but I am impatient.

The first night that I was home from Chile, I was so sore that I climbed up the stairs using my hands and knees like a toddler. I knew that my calves were tight but I thought I was stretching them every night. I suspect the issue is that I skied for eight days in summer and then sat, with my knees bent, on a plane or bus during the twenty-four hour trip from El Colorado, Chile to home in Edmonton.

I expected that, once I got back to yoga, I would loosen up quickly. For the first day, I focused on locking my knees, even when just standing. This proved to be a challenge, and I realized that it would take more than a day to loosen. There was a lesson for my ego as well. I began Bikram yoga seven years ago, and one of the first poses for me to relax into - Fixed Firm - suddenly was hard. My knees and ankles did not yield when I asked. I sat up and leaned forward. I could not do what I was used to doing. My ego wanted to yell out " this is usually a piece of cake for me... I am just stiff today", but I did not yell out. Part of yoga is learning to put my ego aside and do what I can in any moment.

I am generally patient. I have learned to persevere in difficult circumstances. I do not often respond in immediate anger when provoked. Part of patience is learning when to act and when to let things evolve. I suspect that I am currently impatient because, for so many years I was overly patient. My patience reserves are out of balance.

There are so many inspiring quotes about patience being a virtue that I feel "un- virtuous" by proposing that there ever can be too much patience. So, I scanned quotes and found a few:

• "I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.” - Lao Tzu
• “Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience.”
• Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you and scorn in the one ahead. ~Mac McCleary
  
• "Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.” - Victor Hugo

And, ah ha...perhaps my patience reserves are not truly out of balance. It is not patience that irks me. It is my own self-talk. Patience comes from within, and the reason that I dislike being told that I am patient (or impatient) is the perceived external judgment of others and the internal judgment of my ego. Sore knees don't even qualify as a small sorrow so I will go to sleep grateful for the trip that I took, grateful for my strong body, and grateful for my (over)active mind.

Namaste,
Ginny

Summer of '10

Sunset - El Colorado, Chilean Andes







It never got hot this summer where I live. The temperature never reached 30 degrees Celsius (approximately 85 Fahrenheit). The weather where I live was an anomaly in North America. Most of the continent sweltered in high temperatures and humidity. My friends in the East are saying " I am DONE with summer". I'm not...I yearn for a few more days of warm mornings. I want my tomatoes to ripen. I'd like my zucchini to grow (yes, even my zucchini has been stunted by the lack of heat and sun). There are only two fruits on the plant. One is the size of a baseball; the other of a pickle. I'd like to mow the lawn at least three more times, and I'd like to gather about thirty sweet pea blooms into a posy.

Pleasurable as summer is, autumn is on its way. Gusts of wind cast some yellow leaves onto the ground. There has been frost outside of the city, and snow in the mountains. School has started and the pace of life is picking up.

This summer felt different to me, and it wasn't just the weather. I entered the season feeling "off". I didn't know what felt wrong, just that I didn't feel right. I experimented with change, looking at houses for sale and job postings, but none of these were right either. Gradually, summer passed and my feelings evolved. I now feel back to myself, back to the person I am and am becoming. No single event or thought catalyzed the shift from unease to ease but many contributed. At the end of this summer, I am grateful for:

• Spending a rainy June day in a natural rock spa in the Gatineau
• Waiting in line for the folk fest to open its gates, and hearing music stream into the air. Realizing that the music was Ben Harper playing an old Neil Young song as a sound check and that I was one of the few people standing on top of the hill, looking down at the stage, almost like a private concert. As the music ended, the Canadian Forces Air Demonstration team flew in formation over the hill three times.
  
• Hearing Ben Harper play that night on a candlelit hill. He was humble, yet radiant.
  
• Lots of new music on my playlist..."Time to Smile" Xavier Rudd, "Echoes" Dar Williams and more...
• Reconnecting with an old friend from university
• Camping during a mountain biking trip and sharing the tent with an Australian shepherd puppy, who thought I was a toy kong wrapped up in my sleeping bag
• Being bitten by a deer tick in Ontario and NOT getting Lyme disease (Yes, I did find the tick and had it tested)
• Yoga class, and especially Yin class on Fridays
• Meeting a friendly local in the Kalamalka Provincial Park parking lot who showed me the single track mountain bike trail.
• Acting impetuously on the way back from the park, and trying Stand Up Paddleboarding for an hour while still dressed in my cycling shorts and jersey. Managing to stay dry until I adjusted my stance on the board to enable a tighter turning radius. Falling into the lake and washing off the grime from the mountain bike ride.
• Chilean sunsets ( like the two at the top of the page)
  
• The host at our hotel in El Colorado, Chile who called me "little Jeannie" after the Elton John song
  
• Seeing three condors in Chile. The first time I saw one, I actually exclaimed " is that a bird or a plane?" , unintentionally mimicking the classic Superman line. The third time, I saw a condor was just as we were leaving the mountain. I stood with a friend and, arms waving like traffic controllers, we signaled for the bird to come nearer. It did and we could see individual wing feathers, splayed like fingers.

I am grateful, indeed, for all of summer's blessings.
Namaste,
Ginny

For no apparent reason

Yesterday at the rock climbing gym, I climbed two routes that were challenging me. One is graded a 5.7, which should be easy for me. I have tried it many times and kept cheating (reaching for a hold off route) at one spot. I have been climbing with skilled woman climber who declared,"Ginny is struggling on this route for no apparent reason". I laughed off the comment saying, "it is because I don't like the colour of the route marking tape". The truth is we all struggle at one time or another for no apparent reason.

I still don't know why I struggled, but yesterday night, I ended the battle. I climbed the route start to finish without hesitation. I shouted " yeah" at the end and that was that. Why I struggled in the past will remain a mystery. The key thing is that yesterday I climbed the route.

Today, I had lunch with a friend. Most of her conversation was about wanting to know why something happened. Knowing "why" won't change what happened, nor would it change her actions. Though she didn't want to admit it, she wanted to know why because she wants to absolve herself from any responsibility for what happened. What happened to her, happened for no apparent reason. Looking back won't help; looking forward won't help.

Even when the reason is apparent, I wonder. I wonder how much is perception. I wonder what caused the apparent reason. I wonder what could be done to change this in the future. I wonder what I could have done in the past. Wondering, like worrying, is no help. We may know; we may not know, and that's okay. We're taught to learn from our mistakes - the hitch is that the circumstances may not be identical and the fix may now become the mistake. Wonder can be a wonderful thing, but only when it is rooted in the present like wondering at the beauty of a sunset or wondering at the dexterity of a two year old's ability to pluck a petal from a flower.

Summertime

It finally feels like summer in this northern city in which I live. I am slightly sunburned and hot. As I walked the dog, I noticed a scent which reminded of the ocean. I thought, "how could that be? I am thousands of miles from the sea" and then I realized that I was a passing a garden of petunias. Their gentle peculiar scent was what I associated with the ocean. The beach that I grew up on had planters lining the boardwalk and so, it was not the Atlantic that I smelled but flowers.

How nice to smell the flowers without even stopping. Drinking in their fragrance is restorative as is the feeling of laziness that the heat brings on. I feel so lucky, so fortunate for the time to spend in the summer sun and cloud. I am lucky, yes, but I have also chosen a path which allows me such luxuries.

I feel fortunate also that I have woken up in time to realize how much I have. This spring I was feeling restless, unable to appreciate the wealth of my life. Thanks to some good friends and breaking open some old beliefs, I am closer to being who I am than I have been in the past. There is a song by Leonard Cohen that goes:

"Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in"

That sense of being less than perfect, of being vulnerable, is what opens us to the light and, also, how our light gets out. I look at the record of my journey from fear into fun and am amazed by the transformation. I still get scared. I still get stuck. But, I continue to learn to leap when my heart tells me and to just be still when my heart says so. The biggest challenge is clearing away the morass of daily life to hear my heart. Music (and I've had plenty in this summer of concerts and folk fests) ...nature (whose beauty I witnessed in six National Parks this summer)... activity (yoga in my favorite studio, mountain biking in new places, and trying a new water sport - Stand Up Paddeboarding - on a whim) all help me to hear, to be. I am grateful.

Fear of falling + Fear of not falling = Stuck

When I first started writing about my journey from fear into fun, I riffed on two themes, fear of falling and fear of not falling. At the time, I genuinely believed that I was stopped by both fears. Fear of falling was fear of failure and fear of not falling was fear of success. What I believe now is this: I wasn't afraid at all... I was just plain stuck.

As a child, I used to climb trees regularly. Sometimes, I would climb up, up, up among the crab apple blossoms until no one could spot me. Other times, I would stop lower down and linger among the scented flowers. I didn't give much thought about falling or not falling, until one day when I was climbing with my brother. I would have been 10 or 11. My brother was two years younger and famous (at least in our family) for his risk taking. He learned to swim early and well and soon gave up swim racing for surfing, and when that became tame, joined the adolescent boys jumping off the 1240' drawbridge into the river. He was the brave one. I was the tame, conservative older sister. I was sceptical then, one day that summer, when we climbed the crab apple tree and my brother got stuck. He told me so and I didn't believe him. I climbed down and went inside the house.

Shortly after, emergency vehicles raced into our driveway. The rescue personnel told us that neighbors had heard a child yelling for help and thought that someone was drowning in the river. I don't recall whether I revealed that I left my brother stuck in the tree but soon enough, the firemen discovered him sitting midway up the tree. The next day, the local newspaper ran an article with the headline "What goes up, must come down" and described the incident. I was mortified, and yet now, forty some years later, I realize the truth of that headline. What goes up, must come down. You either fall or you don't fall. I am not a believer in black and white dichotomies. I much prefer a continuum. However, if I am just plain stuck because I haven't moved to one outcome or another, it is that much more complicated when there are many choices. Sometimes simplicity helps. What I also realize is that I can chose to be stuck and I can just as easily ( okay...sometimes it hurts a bit like a band-aid coming off) choose to be unstuck. I can also choose to re frame my thoughts about that intermediate period when there is no action, and consider that I take action or no action when the time is right.

Rainbows

Driving home from Lake Louise on a late April Sunday evening, cars were pulled off onto the road’s shoulder. People were standing by the side of the road, as other cars sped by at 130 km, just looking up in the sky at a rainbow that spanned the horizon. It was reasssuring to know that there are others who take time to look at nature despite the rush of our times.

I went to yoga the next day, and during class, I saw fragments of light refracting like a rainbow. Blue, pink, purple were all there, shooting up toward the ceiling. I felt something loosen inside of me and felt safer than I have in a long time. Later, lying in savasana, I answered a question that had been with me for several years. I’ve wanted to move and thought that I wanted to move to the mountains, but lying in savasana that day, I realized that I want to live in a home with soul. The mountains have soul but many of the housing developments in mountain towns do not. My current house has soul but my neighborhood does not.

That same afternoon, I was walking my dog in my neighborhood and found chalk notices printed boldly on several curbs. “Concerned? Come to a community meeting Thursday at 8:00 p.m.” I was confused. The only time I had felt a community within my neighborhood was during the previous year as we coalesced to fight against a high voltage transmission line. The power company was installing the line elsewhere so what was there to be concerned about? Yes, the nearby highway noise and construction dust was a problem but that was well publicized and discussed. What was I to be concerned about now?

My answer came when I ran to the corner store to get some milk. A THC Hemp store had opened. I could understand why the neighbors were concerned. My question to myself then became: “If I know that I can make a home with soul wherever I live, why does my neighborhood matter?”

Good question, probably one whose answer is dependent on life circumstances. Is it easier to make a home where there are kindred souls, where there is inherent beauty, where art is appreicated? Yes. Is it possible to make a home on a battlefield? Probably not. And what about all the places in the middle? We do carry our homes within us and our life circumstances will influence how hard or easy it is for that soulful place to emerge. Rainbows can be seen from everywhere. Right now, my thinking is: why make it more difficult than it needs be? If my circumstances allow, I will choose a place that facilitates soul rather than impedes it

Practicing what I know

Today is the first in a long time (December 13, to be exact) for which I had no plans. I have been looking forward to it for nearly two weeks. I enjoyed Christmas and all the activity it brings. I enjoyed the start of January and the New Year. I have been doing things that make me happy. But that's just it... I have been doing things. Too many things and I am tired.

I know that to stay balanced I need time to myself. I also know that I need physical activity, wind in my face, and intellectual challenge. I came close to toppling over this week both figuratively and literally. I felt irritable, on edge.

Today I am taking time for myself. I want to write, so I am writing here. I wanted to cook, so I baked cranberry and white chocolate oatmeal muffins. I walked the dog without a grudge. I enjoyed the frosting of snow on the evergreens as I did so. I still feel edgy, but I have started to come back to myself. All those times that I have written about yoga and climbing and skiing and the need to balance precipitously have been practice for me.

Practicing what I know entails hard choices. I am grateful that I enjoy so much that there is not enough time to do all that I want. Day after day, small things make me happy. The smell of paperwhite narcissi, drooping tulips in a vase, snow sculpted by wind, the voices of friends and family. Big things (skiing in the mountains, travelling, fine meals) make me happy too but I am learning that I need to really appreciate the small things. My habit is to list what I am grateful for at the end of the day and then go " there, that's done, now I can sleep". I need to pause for longer and savour the peace.