Wednesday, July 21, 2010

essay on whoa, man


I'm taking disciplinary action against myself.

I've realized in the past couple of years that as much as I love spontaneity in my life, I can't enjoy it unless my days are otherwise regimented. Seeing as I am sparsely employed these days, slothfulness is my natural go-to mode of being during the stretches of nothingness that seem to never end, and apparently sitting on the couch indulging my new addiction to Privileged is not the way to create a regimen. I'm becoming more and more useless with every day I mentally tick off my mental calendar. However, as I was recently chastised for not keeping up with my blog since returning home in June, and because I openly admit to having an over-active superego and therefore choreograph my life in such a way that will paint pretty pictures of me in other people's minds, I feel compelled to throw myself back into the writing ring and call it productivity. I will attempt to prove myself as the 21st century female reincarnation of Alexander Pope- I will write out of discipline and a sense of duty to my so-called art.

(This is the part where you nod your head encouragingly at the computer screen as though you believe me capable of such simultaneous change and consistency.)

Now, on to the task at hand.


On Sunday I attended a lovely little reunion with some fellow travellers from SSHL. It's amazing to me how bonds forged in a peculiar context can survive being transplanted into everyday life; what a welcome gift it was to again feel the ease of being with these women whom I came to think of as my little band of wandering sisters and adoptive mothers. What a surprise to realize that we did not need the excitement and constant activity of an overseas adventure going on around us in order to make us a community. What a work of the Spirit: awakening the heart from its ancient sleep (thank you, Hildie of Bingen).

Being awakened to the fact that there were other people on that trip with me made it easier for me to stop procrastinating introspection. On Monday, I took Angelo for a walk in Edworthy Park, where we used to go all the time in the first few years that we lived here. It was cold and overcast, just the way I like it. On days like that, the warm green of the leaves makes the most beautiful contrast with the grey and forbidding sky; everything from a building to a leaf looks delicate and fixed in place, which makes the wind a near-visible apparition. Days like that turn my city into something I can love, an opponent with whom I have been reconciled. Musalaha is always something to embrace, even in such pedestrian circumstances.

And this particular embrace led me down a path flooded with memories. I think about the past constantly, but I invariably become fixated on certain elements and thus ignore the bulk of my memory's contents. But on Monday afternoon I was taken right back to the beginning of my life in Calgary, when I would walk through the aspens on a narrow, windy trail that I wished no one had ever taken before. I would try to get lost. I would let my confused expectations play around with my imagination to see what kind of world they would create. I would sit on a bench overlooking the river and the railway and the stalagmites of downtown and fancy myself to be a daintily-clad Jane Austen heroine standing on the edge of a windy promontory. I would stare at the city until I found something I liked about it, then emotionally flagellate myself for betraying my allegiance to my home town. Often when I recall those transitional teenage years, I get lost in a fog that makes it seem as though I never really felt or saw or understood anything in those days. But I looked through my own innocent eyes again during that pensive walk, and I knew myself again with clarity.


Here's hoping that the clarity continues; after all, I wouldn't want y'all to resort to books for daily reading material.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

mastering the art of french loneliness

I spent the entire day entirely alone. I didn't want to, which made it less enjoyable than it would have been had I planned it based on one of my not uncommon introvert time cravings. However, I think I made the best of it. I did laundry, vacuumed, cut fresh herbs from the garden to put in my lunchtime soup, read Herzl in the sun, played some Bach and Brahms and Rimsky-Korsakov, and watched Julie & Julia (on an actual tv, I should add, not on my laptop- extra points!).

These days, I'm proud of myself when I do anything that isn't lamely habitual. I'm in the process of preparing for a new direction, but I have no idea how long I will be kept in this holding area, this prep school of the soul and bank account. I'm not very adept at waiting, and absolutely inept at waiting patiently, so it's a miracle when I can do more than lull myself into a state of near-unconsciousness on a day like today that is all about patience.

Maybe this miracle is due to the fantastic few hours I spent with a semi-estranged friend on Thursday. I think that time really helped me come face to face with all the issues I've been suppressing since coming back. I talk about the Middle East and my new direction every chance I get, I'm well aware of that. But rarely do I get to talk right down to the core of the trip, to those ideas and inklings and experiences and observations that burrowed under my skin like happy, soulful parasites. Smoking white grape shisha and making hummus and re-opening an old connection made my hidden heart feel real again, and I was grateful for that today as I acknowledged the new stage of separation that I am beginning. It is the stage during which the experience begins to feel like a dream in the way its big images fade away and all that is left is the emotional residue of its many small moments. Memories now become memories of memories, cousins of memories, but their fragmentation allows them access to the numerous tiny recesses of my mind that manage to touch every thought eventually. Then the memories are like cousins not in the Western sense of the word (don't marry these unless you're royalty, but cultivate awkward, ill-defined friendships with them instead), but in its Middle Eastern sense (these can be found anywhere, in anyone you grow to love in any way).

And so that is how I explain why I cried today while watching what critics called "the feel-good movie of the year". Everything, absolutely everything, comes back to my desperate yearning for that something I cannot possibly name in that place that bears so many names.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

I would fire me if I were you

Over a month ago, as I sat on a rock that formed the foundation of a tiny Franciscan church and looked out over the waters of the Galilee, I shed some heavy tears at the realization that life back in Canada would most likely choke the life out of me. I wanted to think the best of my home country and my community, but I had an inkling that the extreme presence of mind, compassion, and determination that I was experiencing in the Holy Land would come under fire once I re-entered the Land of the Meaningless.
It turns out I was right.

The difficulty I face now is in living in a world that is full-blown obsessed with the inconsequential. It's not that I'm now so much wiser and holier than this kind of world and can no longer understand why other people participate in it; it's that I still find myself caught up in it, still find myself waging petty battles within it, and still can't escape it no matter how hard I try. I thought that imagining where I was and who I was in those places would ease the pain of these ridiculous workplace arguments and pointless relational struggles. I thought that organizing my mental notes on age-old world conflicts would realign my priorities. I thought that reading Potok and Herzl would restore my peace of mind and eradicate my social anxiety.
It turns out I was wrong.

I'm sick of worrying, and yet I worry.
I'm sick of arguing, and yet I argue.
I am frustrated with frustration,
confused by confusion,
and finally- disarmingly-
disheartened by hope.

The hope remains, but it has found some new opponents. The dreams have yet to die, but pettiness threatens to consume them; it scratches at the door to be let in.

But now I see raindrops on my screened window and hear the wind howl in the strategically planted trees of my neighbourhood. I feel the wilderness within my heart and the borders within my brain. I know the ease with which I could step into the current of the inconsequential and be swept along by the momentum of self-satisfied dissatisfaction. We are called to be in the world but not of it; we cannot give ourselves over to a thing which would consume us. But I cannot give myself over fully to a hope that would take away my 'livelihood', nor can I surrender myself to a lifestyle that would make a mockery of my dreams. Needless to say, I've become a shit employee.

Oh, the tension: theoretically satisfying, but practically flummoxing, and no Magic Bag in the world will loosen it.