when your eyes are all painted Sinatra blue...

This morning I woke up and realized that I have the house to myself this week. With Bethany and Joel gone to San Francisco, it will be very quiet here the next few days. Not only that, I sent my computer in to be fixed this week so I don't have my usual companion around either. I was feeling a bit unsettled about it all, but when I woke up this morning, I started to think about what I would all do and I came up with...pretty much anything I want to. I think today I would like to spend the whole day at home: doing laundry, frying bacon, baking cookies for my lunches this week, listening to music, reading a book or two, drinking tea. I think it will be a good day.

On a totally unrelated note...or maybe not. I have been thinking about seeing all of Canada lately. I absolutely love that I am a Canadian and, in particular, a western Canadian, but there is so much more of this country I haven't seen or experienced. I feel like if I were born as any other nationality, I would have Canada as the number one country I'd like to visit. I have a vision for this Canadian experience. I have recently fallen in love with Via Rail and I think I'd like to fly out to Victoria and then take the train all the way to Halifax. I am going to pack my camera and laptop of course, but other than that I only want a backpack with a few changes of clothes and a bag full of books. I want to watch the country move past my window like a stream of consciousness narrative. I want to listen to music and make playlists for each province and write about them. Write about the people I meet, the things I see and the way in which I experience them. I want to take photos of these things so that I can express what my words lack.
I can think of a few people who I would love to make this trip with, but I also think I might experience it just as well on my own (of course calling to check in regularly , Mom). I usually am not a big fan of traveling alone. I get lost inside my own head pretty easily and I fear if I were to experience too long of a time by myself I would re-emerge into society a very strange person. I also think that, as it says in "Into the Wild"...Happiness is only real when it is shared. An experience of beauty on your own is nice, but when you can share it with someone else, it takes on a life of its own. However, I think on parts of this trip it would be important for me to just be on my own and listen to myself. Anais Nin says "We don't see things as they are, we see them as WE are". I have discovered that most of my travels consist of 25% discovering this amazing world I live in and 75% discovering who I am and my place within this amazing world. I think its time to embrace that and recognize it and document it with that kind of awareness, perhaps for no other purpose than my own understanding.

one more kiss tonight from some tall stable girl, she's like grace from the earth...

I am snowed in again. Day two of waking up at 6:20am to see the snow flying and realize that work is an impossibility. Yesterday the time off was nice. I lounged on the couch, watched movies and wrote letters. Today I'm feeling more agitated. Not necessarily because I have today off work, but because I can see there will be a few more days of this ahead. Guess I picked a bad time to start landscaping.

To keep my mind off things and make sure I enjoy this freedom (which I will no doubt make up for when it warms up) I spent the morning taking a walk, frying bacon, sipping tea and reading my old blog posts. When I got back from Bangladesh, my sister made a binder for me full of all my blog posts and emails to her during my months there. It was one of the most brilliant things I have ever received. I love reading through it and thinking about everything I was going through back then.
So, today I started back a few months and began reading my own thoughts and adventures. Its a strange things to read through your past through your own eyes. It exposes certain themes that you never even realized were themes in your life and shows how they are evolving and moving and changing you.

I was pretty resistant to blogs pre-Bangladesh, but I've come to love mine an awful lot. Not because I want everyone in my life to know whats going on in my head, but mostly so that I have it for myself. To chronicle the things I love, the places I've seen, the thoughts I've experienced, the person I was and am and who I'm becoming.

Every new post, the quote from Jennifer Hecht on my blog profile becomes more and more true: "I think I’m always writing in part to speak widely, to society or to history, and in part to speak privately: I’m just writing to myself, reminding myself of things."

turn a mountain of lies, turn a card for my life....

I would like to dedicate this blog posting to Spolumbo's fine foods and deli sausages.


This story starts somewhere around 11 months ago when I first started working landscape maintenance in Edmonton's many overgrown subdivisions. Some subdivisions are well established and have little shopping centres full of Sobeys/Safeway/Save-On, DQ, McDonald's, Taco del Mar, Tim Hortons, etc. However, some of the newer ones don't have much more than a gas station. It was in the subdivision of Parkland that my idea of convenience store hot dogs was transformed. Last summer, all Parkland had in it, as far as shopping, was a Husky gas station. But let me tell you, it was a deluxe Husky. It was about 9am one fateful morning that I strolled into that store looking for a bathroom, and found instead a rolling grill full of hot dogs. Being the meat lover that I am, I decided that maybe 9am is a good time for a hot dog and made myself up a bun. And you should have seen the available condiments...banana peppers, saurkraut, fresh cut onions, etc. (and this was before 7-11 started beefing up their condiment stashes). Well, I bit into this hotdog and it revolutionized my life. I felt it was my duty to share this with my crew so we came into the habit of having a 9am Parkland Husky hot dog break. Obviously word had gotten out about these pieces of heaven because if you got there much later than 12, all the hot dogs would be gone.

One day on our break, I was standing in line for a hot dog with this older man (yes, there was a lie up for these hot dogs) and since I had noticed him there before I made some sort of comment about how everyone seems to come for the hot dogs. At this point I put down eveything he was doing, stared me in the face and in the most intense, seriousness said "These, are Spolumbo's." He then went on to tell me that he came everyday from the northeast end of the city where he works (at least a 45 minute drive) to this Husky to have his Spolumbo's sausage.

Well, ever since, karen and I have been spreading the Spolumbo's gospel. We tell everyone we know that going to the Parkland Husky to have a hot dog will change their lives in ways they could never imagine. So you can imagine our excitement when we returned to Parkland this week to do some work with our new crew. We ran into the Husky in great expectation, only to find the clerk filling the rolling grill with frozen "Fletcher's" hot dogs and the only condiments to be seen were ketchup and mustard. You can imagine our disappointment. It was a small tragedy. When we called the clerk to task about it, she said they quit because the construction workers would load up their hot dogs with all the condiments and leave none for anyone else and make a giant mess on the counter.

Of all the soul-killing moments I experience working in subdivisions, I feel this moment is in the top 3.

Goodbye Spolumbo's sausage. You will be missed.

and a bike wheel spinning on a pawn shop wall...

There are moments when I am overwhelmed with the feeling that I am wholly and utterly normal. And not necessarily in the "thank goodness I'm normal!" way and not quite in the "there is nothing special about me, I'm so normal" way either. Somewhere sort of in the middle, in a way that just makes me feel really human. I've been landscaping for the past few days which always has a way of reminding me that there are very different people existing in the world. I have a tendency to live in a "bri-centric" world most of the time, and landscaping always seems to shake that to its core and make me realize that I'm not so unique as I thought...in a very humbling way. Today as I was trying to work together/direct 9 crew members in ridiculous weather conditions to get done relatively futile work, I was struck - one again - with the thought that I am not the only one on my crew who would like to be considered as unique and interesting and important, and, in fact, it is a pretty 'normal' universal desire. It makes me think of a Hafiz poem and a fantastic CS Lewis quote...

With That Moon Language -Hafiz

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud,
otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still, though,
think about this,
this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to hear?

------


"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit." -CS Lewis, from The Weight of Glory

you say that the indigo shines deep inside my eyes...

I have been thinking lots about "home" since I got home, but I'm not ready to write something about that now, so that will have to be saved for a different day.

Anyway, I had a surprise extra day at my sister's house today and wound up spending most of my day with my 5 year old nephew. This morning, there was a whirlwind of activity: my niece to the school bus, my sister taking my other sister and son to the airport and so suddenly at 9 am, just Jerett and myself were left in the house. We decided to go take photos around town, go for steamers at the local coffeehouse, drive to some fields just out of town to photograph the mountains, 'catch some gophers' (which mostly just made us look like idiots running in a field), have a snack picnic in the playground and playing www.funbrain.com (which I actually really got into and plan to play later again once I'm home..i recommend "pickle pop" in the playground section) for the rest of the morning after he fell backwards off a swing.

Spending a good portion of my day with my favourite five year old boy was a really fantastic way to start my week. Most of the things that came out of his mouth today made me stop and say to myself "you have to remember this". I hope I will.

I have had a lot of moments this weekend where my soul feels like its so much bigger than my body. That it gets stretched beyond its capacity and right before I feel like I'm going to crack, it breaks open and suddenly I am not just me, but a part of something bigger. Not only that, not just a piece of something bigger, but so intertwined, so enmeshed in it that feel as though I am simply part of the infinite. (I don't know why I chose to use the term "the infinite", it just came to me, so please don't ask me to explain) It has been a beautiful few days though.

when every happy plot, ends with a marriage knot...

I have been rightly chastised by beth to write a new blog post, so I am.

I've been thinking lately about rich and poor. Not in a giant mansion versus homeless beggar, kind of way necessarily, but in a bit of a more personal way. I've decided to do landscaping again this summer, and though at first I had a bit of anxiety about joining up with a company I'm not sure I 100% want to be associated with, I am really looking forward to it. The other day, at work a guy sat down at the bar for a drink and started whining to me about his job (bartending somewhere else) and ended saying "well, its way better than working manual labour for that kind of money" and the very first thing I thought was "Not its not!", so I felt very validated in my choice of summer work. That being said, working landscaping has been the most financially friendly thing I've done. The hours and the wage work out to be pretty nice on my bank account, which is a good thing since I've been pretty lousy to my bank account lately!
The thing is, I have this feeling that I think I'd be really good at being rich. Not in a "I want lots of wealth" kind of way, but I think that if I came into a windfall of money, I would handle it well. Of course it would change the way I think about things, but it would be mostly in good ways. In generous ways. In respectful, thoughtful ways. It wasn't until this week though that I started thinking about why that is. And what I came up with, is that I am also really good at being poor. Though I am under no impression that I am in any way "poor", but I almost enjoy the way my years of being a student and my summers of volunteering and now my flitting from job to job in search of something I really love has taught me to live from paycheque to paycheque frugally without restricting my lifestyle too much. In other words, I have learned how to watch my money without being cheap about it. And though I understand the importance of saving up money for whatever the future may hold, I also know that this is the time in my life where I only have to worry about me in a lot of ways. If I have food and a place to live and an outdoors to appreciate and friends to share it with, I really don't have to worry about much more. I have not only learned how to deal with my kind of "poor" well, but I have fallen in love with it. Living this way has taught me things I'm not sure I would have been able to understand any other way.
..Rather than going to the movies or some other costly activity, I choose to walk around the city and in the river valley. And during these walks that I have found that I am ridiculously passionate about the nature that surrounds me and the people I share this city with. Which in turn leads to an involvement in issues of environmental consciousness and social justice.
..Rather than driving to the grocery store for bread/cake/granola, I often chose to make it myself from ingredients I have in my house. While I sit kneading bread and peeling apples and mixing rolled oats, I learn the importance of time and supporting of local agriculture.
..I watch the birds outside my window and listen to music and dance alone in the kitchen while I wait for the cake to rise in the oven and I learn what it is to understand myself. The crucial importance of listening to me and discovering more about who I am.

No, I would not trade my lifestyle for anyone else's in the world right now.

Soon regular schedules of landscaping and long hours of fantastic "manual labour" will fill my days with busyness and excitement, so I will savour these moments of lingering winter stillness while I can.

what honest words she can't afford to say...

I am learning that things that move slowly are usually the most important and, as Mary Oliver puts it, "most things that are important, have you noticed, lack a certain neatness" - like the way winter moves into spring...but i want to say something more on the idea of slowness today.
I was always raised with this ideal of efficiency and the idea that it is important to get things done to the very best of your abilities, in the smallest amount of time necessary to do so. And though I still think that this is a pretty good thing in many situations, I have been really enjoying questioning that in small ways: Standing at the window watching the birds make tracks in the snow while the kettle boils rather than folding my laundry while I wait. Walking past my car to take city transit. Dancing to a Billie Holiday by myself in the kitchen while my supper cooks. Walking to the mailbox at the end of the street, picking up and examining interesting pebbles and rocks along the way.
I am in a strange place in life right now where I find myself floating between periods of excessive freedom with my time followed by short moments of rushing, busy work. And on the horizon, I can see a regular schedule and considerable busy-ness approaching with spring and landscaping nudging ever closer and so I feel as though I must make the most of the time I have left in this unusual lifestyle. And I've found that my soul finds its time best spent sipping tea in front of windows, bumping into strangers on the bus, swimming in jazz when dusk is just turning to night, sharing a pint of Guinness in cozy dark pubs in the early afternoon, baking cakes from scratch, letting the dough squeeze through my fingers and devour my hands and reading poetry aloud while laying in the middle of the kitchen floor.

I intend not to "step so quickly over this sacred place on God's body that is right beneath your own foot, as I dance with precious life today" (Hafiz).