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.