Cross-Counrty

Here are a few pictures from Saturday's sunny cross-country ski. Cameron posing with my snow pants on (he only planned on being at the beach in Tofino this winter, not anywhere that had snow), and a couple of pics of the almost-full moon rising at the end of our afternoon.

It was wonderful to get out, but I felt a sore throat coming on which turned into a full-fledged cold this week. Another one to end off the month of February. Seems like it's been one cold or fever a month lately, coupled with a back that is still not feeling 100 %. Is it just me, or is illness becoming more and more frequent?

Cameron split all my wood, both the residual pile of fir that I had left, and all the new pine we collected with Ken and Shirley. That's a big help. Living out here I have started to realize jut how much of my time is dedicated to keeping myself warm and fed, and having a sidekick who doesn't mind helping with these things REALLY makes a big dent in my free hours. I've been trying hard to leave work at work, with minimal success at times, although every day hands me fresh practice.

I've been reading an author from Oregon who retired from teaching after ten years to pursue a writing life. Lots of his story hits upon the notes of my own life, of the struggle of trying to work within the confines of a system that is incredibly slow to change and toss out the notion of standardized expectations (for teachers and students) and evaluation.

With my extra time each evening I have also been doing a lot of thinking and considering. Who knows what the future of the school will be for next year, and who knows where life will lead me. I have been thinking about doing a master's in creative writing instead of in outdoor ed. I have always wanted to write, and for many reasons have not given myself a fair chance at it. Partly social, partly societal, looking into the social mirror rather than inside myself towards what I really want in life, all the expectation to make a steady paycheque.

"You've got plenty of time off over the summer to write," my father says. This advice coming from a man who has never taught or written for a single day in his entire life. It takes more than a month off each summer, which is what it becomes once I take a couple weeks to decompress after the chaos that is the school year, and then subtract the two weeks before school starts that I dedicate to planning and setting up my room, to write the way I want to. But at this point I will take it. And maybe one day I will have the guts to tell the chorus of expectations in my head to sock it. Maybe one day.

A Smorgasbord Update

The third annual Winterfest happened at Little Gun Lake over the Family Day long weekend. It was a beautifully sunny Saturday out at the lake, and temperatures, although very warm in the week leading up to the event, cooled off enough in the nights before to leave the ice of the skating and curling rinks in good shape. My neck was still quite sore, so I refrained from skating, but did walk around the lake to collect numbers for a poker run, in addition to touring slowly around the crowd to say hello to all the people that I now know. By the time the sun went down it felt as though I had spoken to basically everyone, even some friends of my youngest sister, and a group of people I met out at Marshall Lake at the start of last summer.

Snow angel painted by one of the many children at Winterfest. Spray bottles with water and food colouring: thanks to Shirley for the great idea!

At the peak of the event there were a solid 250 people there—very impressive for a town of our small size, as there is probably about 130 local full-time, year-round residents in the entire Bridge River Valley. Community spirit was alive and well amongst the crowd, and it was nice to see all the Gun Lakers, Bralorne residents, people from Marshall Lake and Gold Bridge folk out at the same event together. Although we are small in numbers, the geography that separates the towns can lend itself to some dissociation between people and their motivation to attend events that are just a short drive from their yard. Events can be labeled by locals as “up the hill” or “down the hill”, and not welcoming to them if they live in an area that is far from the event itself. Winterfest sure brought people out though, and it was wonderful to see.

That night some teacher friends and I made a trip “up the hill” to the local Bralorne Pub for some dancing, and when I arrived home I took a long bath. I had the urge to curl my spine into a tight little ball, which I did, and things cracked and popped into place. Perhaps this acupuncture thing really works! The next morning I still felt aligned, although that was two weeks ago and the muscles in my neck and upper back still feel cramped and tense. I have been doing lots of yoga, and teaching it to the students as well. There was a time in my life when I practiced yoga religiously, and in the last year I have fallen away from this practice. Nothing like an injury to remind me of the importance of stretching and taking some time each day to practice mindful breathing.

I have been taking a bit of a break from writing and painting lately. There is unfortunately only so much time in a day, and recently I have picked the guitar back up and have been doing some reading. I’ve written and have been practicing a couple of songs, and have been taking a lesson every couple of weeks with a musician who moved to Bralorne at the start of the winter. 

A large handful of new residents have moved in lately, bringing with them some incredibly creative energy and ideas. There is also a Bridge River Valley Arts Festival in the works set to take place over the August long weekend, and the students and I have been attending bake sales at the library where the guitar guy and another new local musician set up their amps and speakers and plugged-in gear and jam out for the afternoon as people filter into the post office-Library to pick up mail and peruse all the goodies. Local residents have been displaying their own paintings, art made from dyed wool, and woven figurines at these bake sales. There is so much artistic talent up here, I suppose partly because we all have the time and the inspiration, and it’s nice to be surprised by just how talented the local people are.

Last weekend I spent some time collecting more firewood. Even though the weather has been warm I am still burning quite a bit each day to keep the house warm. It seems like I burned a lot more than last year, but I am also spending more time here than I did last year. I had some help from Ken and Shirley who cut down a couple of dead trees on their property. We then loaded their truck up with rounds and brought it to my house before burning off all the branches in a warm afternoon bonfire. Cameron also came back for a visit before he heads to Saskatchewan for seeding season, so it made for light work.

I love big fires!

This week at school we hosted another successful Tea Party. We have now had one per month since the start of the school year, and the feedback from residents and from students and parents has been wonderful. It’s a time where students can share their learning or just a casual conversation with people who they might not otherwise get the chance to interact with on their own turf. A lovely young woman who has recently moved to Bralorne came in to help students make apple pie from scratch with the batch of apples sent to us as part of the B.C. School Fruit and Veggie Program. We get a delivery of fresh fruit or vegetable, the smallest size which is still tons for us, monthly, so we try to make something with the food to serve to guests at our tea parties. In January students made delicious rice pudding to go with the kiwis we received.

Here’s a salmon mural we made before the January tea party using our print-making skills with some fish we made out of foam paper.

Last Friday I had a professional development day that I chose to spend with a retiring tutor in Lillooet who is going through and culling some of her resources. What a wealth of information she is! We spent hours going through things as I jotted down notes and tips from a seasoned professional as we excitedly flitted from paper to paper. She also took me on a tour of her amazing, multi-level garden that stretches for about 100 metres out across the back yard of her house. She has built up the garden beds herself with river rocks and bags of cement over the years—forty years of work in progress, and she said that she cans anywhere from 500-700 cans of food from her garden each year, which lasts her though the winter months. She also has a “worm bed” in the front corner, which is literally a bed frame filled with a mound of composting dirt and worms. Such an inspiration for someone like me who hopes to have my own thriving, massive, feed-yourself-through-the-winter garden one day.

We also spent some time playing guitar and she gave me some great songs to learn which I have been working on. People seem to come into my life just when I am in need of them, if I am open and willing to make time to meet with them. One of the beautiful things about the living of life, surely.

Our own worm farm at the school is doing wonderfully. The students and I set it up back in November, and the worms are now reproducing at an incredible rate. It smells like dirt when you lift the lid to feed them food scraps, even looks like dirt in some spots, and little tiny dots of eggs and translucent, wriggling baby worms, as short as a pinky fingernail, are everywhere.

We are also participating in the “Salmonids in the Classroom” program put on by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and our salmon have hatched from eggs to the next stage of life, alevin. Students are responsible for checking the tank every few days and to suck out the dead fish with a turkey baster. We also add 3 capfuls of chemical once per week to keep the water pH balanced.

At the moment the fish are floating in a pocket of flicking tails along the gravel bottom of the tank, but when the orange yolk of the leftover egg sac is used up, they will swim to the surface of the water, breathe a gulp of air from the surface which will inflate their swimming bladder, and will be floating in the middle of the tank and ready for a daily feeding of salmon food.

The DFO guys will come back to do a salmon dissection with us, a ghost net presentation, and hope to bring an elder from this territory to talk to us about local history and to tell us stories about the salmon that once swam all the way up river past Gold Bridge before the dam was built back in the 50s.

Anyway, it's already Saturday afternoon, and I'm off to the school for a couple of hours to organize and flip through resources before heading out for a light cross-country ski in the sunshine. My back is feeling better, although still not 100 %, so trying to take it easy. Have not been out back-country skiing in ages. At least Cameron has now split all my wood, which has really helped because that was a constant chore that didn't let me rest much.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend.

Lessons in Acupuncture

My neck has been sore for weeks, and that makes me willing to try anything. The nearest chiropractor is in Pemberton, a 3.5 hour drive one way, so the health centre in Lillooet will have to suffice for some health care help with my aching body. Certainly one of the drawbacks to living in a community of this size is the lack of access to nearby medical care, what we tend to take for granted living in an urban metropolis.

I made the call to see if I could get an appointment for a massage.

“Unfortunately we do not have any spots left for massage, but we do have a couple of openings for acupuncture,” the receptionist was soft-spoken, and I could tell she was smiling on the other end.

“Well, I have never tried acupuncture,” I told her, my thoughts quickly imagining needles being stuck into my neck and back. A quick wince broke my stillness.

“That’s okay, just tell the therapist you…”

“I’m afraid of needles,” I interrupt her mid-sentence.

“Oh don’t worry. Many people swear by it, and she also does cupping,” she said, as if that was supposed to reassure me.

“Cupping?” I had never heard of this.

“She places cups on your back which have a mild suction to them. It’s supposed to help bring blood to the injured area to help with healing,” she said, still smiling on the other end.

“Well, okay. I guess I’ll have to try it. I’ve been hurt for weeks. I guess I’ll take the 3 o’clock appointment on Friday.”

I penciled it in my day timer and tried to put the thought of needles out of my mind for the three days before the appointment.

I get there early after driving in from Gold Bridge in the morning, palms slightly clammy and eyes darting all around the lobby at the vials of different aromatherapy scents and skincare products. I recognize the receptionist from my days teaching in Lillooet and distract myself by talking to her, asking how her year is going, how her husband is, how things at the school are.

As we talk the therapist walks in, and I'm so nervous that I forget to even tell her that I'm afraid of needles.

We walk into her room at the end of the hallway and I point to the places in my neck and back where it hurts, look at the charts of pressure points over the body that are lining her walls.

Before long I am shirtless on the table, my face watching the carpeted floor from the opening for my face in the massage table. She comes in and rubs my back with alcohol pads and tells me that she is going to start. I ask what acupuncture is supposed to do for me, and she tells me that the needle goes into the belly of the muscle and is supposed to stop the muscles from firing. Perfect, I think to myself as I hear her opening plastic packaging above me, just what I need; my neck muscles have felt like they are squeezed up into little balls for weeks.

“What does it feel like? Does it hurt?” I ask, speaking louder than I need to, watching the floor, trying to breathe the blood back into my ghost-white hands.

“You might be able to feel it pierce the skin. It doesn’t hurt,” she answers.

“Like a pinch?” I ask. The noise behind me has stopped and she is now squeezing one of my neck muscles lightly between her thumb and fingers.

Needle in. I feel just a tiny poke at the surface of my skin, really nothing like I am bracing myself for. I breathe out slowly as she slides the needle in further.

I’m not sure when I start to loose the feeling in my fingers, but soon everything is in and my back is covered in cups that are drawing the blood to the surface of my skin with some aggressive suction.

So far it has been an intense procedure, but being the type of person that I am I think it’s almost forcing me to relax, to breathe deeply, to focus only on my breathing to keep myself calm. I have a moment where I imagine myself standing up like a crazy woman and demanding that everything be taken out and ripped off, like one of those crazed hospital patients you see on TV trying to rip out their own IV lines.

She then heats up the needles with some special stuff that I forget the name of, and I have to withstand the heat as long as I can before telling her to stop. One at a time she makes her way through the needles, and I wait until the sting of hot hits each place before I ask her to move on.

I then decide that want to move my arms, which have lost all feeling in them. They are up above my head and I can’t seem to lift them, so she moves them for me. The feeling starts to come back to my fingers as she tapes tiny seeds to my ears with pieces of tan-coloured bandaging tape. I’m supposed to leave them on for five days, to press on them whenever I remember.

Soon the needles are removed, one by one, and the cups are pulled from my skin. I feel warm, and when I get up from the table I am incredibly relaxed. All I want to do is go to sleep.

“Make sure to stay warm,” she tells me as I drift through the hallway towards the door, “your meridians are open, so you don’t want to catch a chill out there.”

I wrap my scarf tighter around my neck, pull the hood of my jacket over my head, walk out into the cool sunshine of an early Lillooet evening.

When I get to my car I phone a friend to ask if I can take a nap in her spare room for a couple of hours. She says “of course!” and I sleep for a while, while the daylight turns dark outside the curtained window of her spare room, waking to the sound of her playing guitar, soft singing lingering in the corridors of her basement, finding me warm and groggy with sleep and my open meridians.

I get groceries, weaving down the isles in a state of mild hypnosis, coming back to her place for dinner and to go through some tutoring supplies she is culling, as she is close to retirement.

After a great meal and some life-inspiring talk I start out on the long dark drive home. I think of the cold house awaiting me after my long drive. I cry a little along the way, and that feels pretty good, so I go with it, reaching up to press the seeds along my little ears. Me and my open meridians. I figure crying is part of the process, part of the experience, part of the opening, and it's been a while.

“Think of the ears like an upside down fetus representing your body,” the therapist had said. “The seeds are in places that resonate with where your body needs the healing.”

I feel a little calmer after pressing along the seeds that are taped along the hard cartilage ridge of my ear. Representing the spine, she had said.

Finally I walk into the cold house, unload groceries, pack them away into the fridge, into cupboards while a bath runs and the fire tastes the dry kindling and eats the balls of newspaper I have laid down for it. It was a big shopping day, lots to restock, lots to put away.

I have a bath and have a wonderful sleep after snuggling up with an electric heating pad. Perfect remedies for staving off the cold house blues.

The next evening, after being out with some friends, I come home and have another bath. Curling up into a little ball, which feels great, so I go with that too. Things crack, and the next morning I feel better than I have in weeks. My spine feels realigned, although the muscles ache from holding on for so long, and my back is spotted with deep purple rings from the cupping.

This was last Friday and I still feel better, although the tight muscles are still clenched, still balling up. I’m getting back into a yoga routine, which I had fallen away from. The balance. More balance needed, more balance found.

All I can say is that perhaps there is something to this acupuncture thing, but I do tend to believe in some pretty alternative healing methods. In talking to people after the treatment it seems that there are many who just love it. I’m not sure if I'm in the camp of the advocates of it, but I’m at least glad I tried it, and I do feel better. And it’s good to try something scary every so often, just to show yourself how brave you can be, and as a reminder of how our minds can paint a false picture of things before we have even given them a try.

SLLP Promo Video

Here is the promotional video for the Sustainable Living Leadership Program (SLLP) which takes place for twenty five days each summer down the length of the Fraser River. I was lucky enough to praticipate last August, and am still hoping to be a member of a relay team that will swim down the Fraser in a couple of years to raise awareness about the program and the health of the Fraser watershed.

The video was created by Jeremy Williams, an amazing filmmaker, who was with us for half of our time on the river, and who had participated in other SLLP trips in the past. My intereview was not used, but I am flipping off the boat and can be seen intermingled in the group from time to time. If you know of any young leaders living in BC, you've GOT to tell them to apply for this year's trip!

Enjoy!

Anderson Lake Paddle

Last weekend I went to visit a teacher colleague and friend who lives in Shalath, in a quaint cabin right on Anderson Lake. I was originally going to go skiing here in the mountains around home, but my neck had been sore for a week and I thought it better to take it easy, as well as wanted to seize the opportunity for some collaboration to connect our intermediate students online.

The first night we had a fire down on the beach out front of his place, watching the occasional train snake its lights like a stream of lanterns wandering over the land on the opposite shore. I am always struck by the foreignness, yet comfort I find in the mechanized sound of a train, of the squeal of metal across the tracks, of the shifting and groaning of ricketing carts clicking along through the perfect blackness. I could listen for hours. 

A scout truck drives the tracks first to make sure they are clear of debris, flashing orange, siren lights hitting the rocky banks, bouncing off the glassy dark water. And then the train, small white lights blinking from between trees off at the far end of the lake, noiseless at first, and then finally, after about an hour, passing us. How hypnotizing and mysterious the sound. Almost relaxing to me, like I could fall asleep listening to it just as I could the rush of a mountain stream. Pair that with the alluring qualities of an outdoor fire made with dry driftwood along the lakeshore and it makes for a pretty amazing (and cost-efficient) way to spend a Saturday night.

The next morning we were up packing a lunch to take on a canoe ride down the lake. A friend stopped by who lives with his wife up in what sounds to be a remarkable dwelling off the High Line Road, connecting Shalath and Seton to Pemberton through D’arcy. The more time I spend exploring this area of the world, the more people I come into contact with who live an alternative lifestyle somewhat like the one I would one day imagine for myself: self-sufficient, huge garden with the ability to save food year-round, off the grid, dwelling self-made of local materials. 

The more I think of the possibilities, the clearer my direction is becoming, and the more people I am meeting who are already living like this or who hope to soon. For now I am working to save and save and save, but with land prices as high as they are, this save and save and save is going to take me a while. But it’s nice to become clear about just what it is that I am working towards. At least I will not be paying city prices for a piece of land, but still, I am starting from scratch as a single income person living on a teacher’s salary. 

Luckily my tastes are simple, and staying up to date on fashion trends or vacationing in lavish accommodation does not even make it onto my list of priorities. I’d rather spend time making my own bread than shopping, would rather sleep in a tent or a hostel than a private hotel room, and this gives me hope that one day I really will have enough for a substantial down payment. But hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere. And there are people living in this way all over the place here. It is truly possible, and that realization makes me even more dedicated to one day making it a reality regardless of how it is viewed by others. (I find paying $800,000 for a tiny snippet of land in the city much more crazy, but hey, "luckily we are not all the same or the world would be a dull place", as Barry always says).

Anyway, this wonderful man stopped by and the three of us had a marvelously enlightening conversation about the fragmented parts of reality and how we need to work to put them back into a whole, about how science has tried to take things apart, to look at reality in pieces, to look closer and closer and closer at things until we start to forget that all these small things are a part of a larger, working whole. That everything is a part of everything else and that nothing exists in isolation. Just my type of banter. We sat there sipping our tea and coffee, chatting as we watched bald eagles dip and dive as they caught small fish from the lake and then fought over the catches. Juveniles with their mottled feathers sharing trees with their white-headed parents, while a flock of white and black ducks swam out in the middle of the lake.

What an amazing place. And it was nice to get a little break from winter since I am less able to participate in all the winter sports here due to my sore neck. But canoeing, a light paddle down the lake, should be fine.

So we head out, lunch packed, tea pot for making tea on the beach fire we would later start, wind sending small ripples over the surface of the lake, eagles high in the trees all along the shoreline.

We stopped at a beach along the way and I walked up to a large Douglass Fir to sit and think with it a little before continuing our paddle on to our destination.

We are now walking to a waterfall, and cougar tracks greet us from the snow in the trail we follow into the forest. Old ones, as the edges are melted out. There was much beaver activity on the shore where we landed; gnawed-down trees, a trough pushed into the sand and rock of the beach where the trees were dragged into the water. How many people are inside today, how many of our students are online, playing video games, instead of having an experience like this that is FREE if one just has a canoe and paddle, or alternatively has access to two-legged propulsion. How calming for the spirit to be outside, to be asking questions of prints in the snow, to be witnessing the constant evolution of life at play and feeling a part of it.

We too were on the beach, and we too will leave our footprints in the snow and sand, evidence of our time there.

We walked to the old cabin where this man whom I mentioned earlier lived when he first moved to the area from Germany, I think over fifty years ago. We walked to a waterfall where a prospector once spent many months searching for gold and possibly finding it.

The waterfall.

The cabin.

Once back at the lakeshore we built a fire atop a couple of logs to keep it away from the damp ground. We set our tea to boil, ate homemade bread and cheese and chocolate. And we felt more at home in this place, the only two people around, sitting on a rocky beach with the sky overhead reflected on the canvas of lake stretched out before us. 

I also went back to the cabin on my own to take some pictures and to just be there in the quiet of it. At one point I heard some noise, which ended up being just the drips of snow leaking through the hole in the roof, but I like a little jolt out of life now and again.

To me such a day is the living of life, and this is why I choose to live here. I choose to stay here more and more instead of fighting the highway down to the city. It’s days like this that remind me of how I hope to spend much of my time in this life: as a participant in simple actions—in the paddling of a canoe, in the making of a fire, in the walking through the woods—with only the sounds of an upcoming waterfall, a steady river running beside, and my breath leaving and returning to my lungs again and again.

Icicles

Have never lived somewhere that had icicles before. Here's a little taste of my morning photographing them.

Nature Kindergarten

For some time I have had a keen interest in implementing environmental, place-based education practices in my teaching. Living where I do it is easy to get students outside engaging with the world around them in a hands-on way, almost daily, and this is a thread of thought I hope to weave into rope during my master’s program.

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a webinar on a nature kindergarten program which started this year in the Sooke School District on Vancouver Island. Nature Kindergarten is a program that is funded as one of the Growing Innovation Projects happening throughout B.C. in rural school districts. For more information, check out the Nature K website and blog by clicking here.

What happens is that students show up each morning and then head out to spend two-and-a-half hours outside, rain or shine, engaging in play in one of two natural settings. They arrive ready to be outside, pick up their “to-go” packs which hold a granola bar, a small first aid kit, a detective notebook and magnifying glass, and off they go.

There is one teacher and one early childhood educator (ECE) that facilitate the learning in the group of twenty children. Play usually becomes tied to what the students are learning during their afternoons in the classroom, and teachers also work at observing student interest during their outdoor play and try to bring in materials and topics that relate to the interest students seem to have while out in the field. An example in the webinar was a boy who found a worm, and who was then directed to books on worms in the school library following his interest.

The anecdotal successes of the program included observations of how independent students had become, how they were challenging each other to climb higher on a stump, to touch a slug, etc., of how they were becoming caretakers of the environment and of each other, and of how they were able to play with incredible imagination without any manipulatives or toys, just by using the natural objects and structures around them. I see this too in the play of students here--the imagination, the exploration, the learning that takes place simply by being outside!

The teacher and ECE have also had parents saying that their children have been asking them to go outside more often, and there have been no instances of children not wanting to go outside because of the weather.

Nature school is an idea that has been around in Europe for decades, starting in Scandinavian countries in the 50s. There are also “forest schools” in the UK modeled on the same concept—that of getting kids spending time engaging in the outdoors—and as an educator who believes that a connection with the natural environment is an imperative step towards restoring a sense of balance and environmental stewardship in our society, this whole project is both exciting and deeply inspiring.

I’m spending a lot of time thinking about it, as a similar structure to the day would work really well for the students here in Gold Bridge. I’ll be sure to let you know where my thoughts take me!

To Good Health

So much to catch you folks up on. Hoping to write a few short posts this week with pictures of what I have been up to in wintery January, just to get us all back in the routine of the blog again.

Had a wonderful visit with Cameron. He stayed with me here for a week-and-a-half, soaking up all the outdoor winter activities with the same amped-up sense of adventure I approach the world with. We arrived here on a Saturday, and on Sunday we were out skating on the clear ice of big Gun Lake, which had just frozen earlier in the week. At some points near the edge of the water you could see all the way to the bottom of the lake! It was amazing, but not for the faint of heart.

The lake creaked and groaned under our strides, and an arrow of swans that had called the lake home for the past couple of months took off over our heads in their quest south.

The sun was out and the clear black ice was dappled with amazing frost flowers, a rare occurrence that happens when the ice temperature is at least ten to fifteen degrees warmer than the outside air temperature. When the cold, humid air saturated with water vapour hits the warmer air just above the ice, it condenses as hoar-frost crystals by the process of deposition, which is when a substance moves right from the gas phase to the solid phase, without becoming a liquid first.

Good fodder for our snow science unit anyways, and speaking of snow and science/mathematics, check out this guy: Simon Beck. He was once a marathon runner who can no longer run long distance, so instead he heads out on snowshoes for six hours a day to make the most brilliant, large-scale geometric designs, all on snowshoes! We have become inspired, and are doing our own snowshoe art for the upcoming Winterfest at Little Gun Lake on Feb. 9.

But I digress. I also took Cameron on many wanders around town with Sanford, to Wednesday night hockey, on a cross-country ski outing by moonlight on the set track around Little Gun Lake. I even took him ski-touring up Sunshine, and needless to say he is absolutely in love with the place. He made it safely back to Tofino earlier this week to continue with his winter surfing, but plans on visiting again in early March once his house-sitting stint is over on his way back for the farming season in Saskatchewan.

Since turning 30 I feel like I have spent more time in ill health than at any point in the past three decades. In my last post I was talking about how I am getting to know myself, but this is a never-ending, lifelong pursuit, and new lessons are presenting themselves all the time. At the moment I am learning how valuable my health is, and in paying attention to the flus and colds and sore joints I feel like I am learning to slow down a little. Slowly, slowly learning this, as I have revved through life on overdrive. Those of you who know my parents can probably understand where parts of this stem from. I tend to pursue life on high octane all the time, the midnight oil burning, multiple projects on the go, playing strenuous sports outside. The knuckle of my right index finger that I smashed chopping wood is still swollen and red, and I think I’m just going to have to get used to it being a little misshapen and bulbous. I can bend it easily, no pain, and even pressing on it feels fine, so if I must submit to a little deformity as a constant reminder to take my time, then I'll take it! There’s nothing I can do about it, so I better just be more careful from now on.

I also hurt my neck, re-aggrivating an old snowboarding injury while playing hockey last week. The massage therapist was up doing treatments here in Gold Bridge over the weekend, and thankfully I had an appointment, but it is still a little sore so I am taking things easy. And this week I was feeling like a sinus infection was coming on: hurt to chew, felt like my left eyeball was going to pop out of my skull, painful to the touch all over my cheek. Looked up some natural remedies for it, which I followed with a type-A dedication, and feeling much improved today. Trying to take it easy guilt-free, which feels wonderful when it works. 

In light of my new-found mortality this week I’ve been taking more rest time to myself after work, not answering emails until days later, letting the phone ring until the machine picks it up, not forcing myself to create when I feel so tired. I think my body is trying to tell me that it is feeling generally run down, my mind ablaze with thoughts at all hours of the day, working at a busy job and then trying to work on after school projects all the time in addition to all the planning and communicating related to said job. I am trying to learn the lesson all this injury and illness is bringing me, learning to let go of the high expectations of myself that I have been carrying around from my upbringing in a society that seems to think that productivity is only measurable by actually producing finished things. I think I need to start being more accepting of doing “nothing” once in a while, of letting projects sit half-finished, of spending more time listening to music, watching movies and reading for their own sake, rather than focusing on producing creative projects all the time. After all, I already have a more than full-time job, so time to give myself a break and a solid rest, to invite a little more balance into my life rather than always pushing myself at everything I do. Had a great chat with Cameron about pressure, and how I like to seek out pressure, taking on more and more responsibility until I am highly pressurized and justifying the stress to myself by saying "I work best under pressure". But it is certainly what I am used to, and breaking the habit of seeking it out is going to take some hard work at letting go. I'm sure many of you out there can relate, and with the advent of emails and the internet we are all more bombarded with information and external pressures than ever before. And we are more anxious and charged-up and stressed out. More full of external expectations too, and I want to become more clear about my own expectations of myself, rather than taking on the expectations others might have of me. I want to welcome a little more balance into my own life, and that is the lesson I am trying to learn now.

Anyway, more to report of course, but I’ll save it for later in the weekend. Thanks for sticking with me in spite of the long hiatuses in my posting recently. I really do enjoy writing here and feel refreshed and ready to get back into the routine of it. It's a quiet activity that calms my own mind, so it's a good activity to engage in on the couch :) Have still been working on the book project, slowly, slowly, but that's okay. Learning to let go of expectations and to let the words come, a constant battle, always.