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.