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Old habits and new challenges (Main Street column January 2013)

30/12/2012

For this New Year, I wish you good health and happiness in all ways … and just the right balance between the easy groove of old habits and the invigorating excitement of new experiments!

There is nothing like a four-day power outage to catapult us right out of our habitual way of life into a scramble of creative responses and improvised solutions! Of course not everybody in the Laurentians was equally affected by this pre-Christmas gift of tons of snow and trees on power lines. I met a colleague in the supermarket who has municipal water and a gas stove, and who told me that it wasn’t a big deal for her family. The situation was definitely more precarious for me: I was functioning without running water, cooking on a basic little wood stove in the basement, and relying on candle light and a pocket lamp once it got dark.

It was certainly a very interesting experience, the longest I have had to face since I moved to the Laurentians seven and a half years ago. I enjoyed the sense of adventure, and I had some brilliant and some not so bright ideas about how to deal with the various challenges along the way. I also realized just how much time and energy are spent on the essentials of life when we have to make do without the creature comforts that we usually take for granted.

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Loving it All (Main Street column December 2012)

10/12/2012

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Loving it All: aspiration, inspiration, and also a state of mind.

I made my ‘debut’ as a writer for Main Street (an English language newspaper in the Laurentians) over four years ago with an article on positive thinking, and I continued with variations on this theme for a few months. I didn’t have a title for my column then, and for various reasons I stopped writing it, only to start again in January 2012. Fast forward to the Main Street writers’ conference in October this year, when Sue Macdonald, the new editor, asks me to come up with a title for the revived column. I was lost for words, and I said I’d think about it.

Well, I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching since then. Since I haven’t had a theme to conform to so far, I’ve been free to write about whatever came to me in the moment. I really enjoyed that liberty, and there is a little red rebel in me that definitely doesn’t want to confine herself in any way. On the other hand, having a heading can be inspiring, too, I told myself. In fact, I realized, the name of the column could even express an aspiration that motivates me to explore that theme from all sorts of angles. Now that sounded interesting, now we’re talking!

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November blues and reds

10/11/2012

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My retired neighbors are November birds: they leave for Florida in late October and come back in December for the snow. Most people, if given the choice, would probably take this month off the calendar altogether, or, like my neighbors, spend it somewhere warmer and more pleasant. As for myself, I have to admit to strange tastes: I quite like the barren, brown beauty of a forest that has shed its leaves, much as I enjoy the spring and summer shades of green, the fall exuberance of yellows, oranges and reds, and the pristine whiteness of winter. And since I find myself in the midst of menopausal hot flushes, I positively cherish the continuing drop in temperature!

But let’s face it: even if there are some things we can appreciate about the month of November, it tends to be a challenging part of the year. The days keep getting shorter and darker, and the ever damper and colder weather takes its toll on our energy and wellbeing. Our bodies become tired and sluggish, and we are more susceptible to falling ill. Aches and pains that had improved during the summer may start reasserting themselves. At the emotional and mental level, too, whether we’re dealing with a mild case of November blues or with a more severe one of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), we’re all affected in some way by these conditions.

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Fall walk

14/10/2012

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Fall is such a short-lived experience of exuberant, utter beauty that I decided to capture some of it this year and publish it as a blog. So here is a visual impression of a walk in the Laurentian mountains. Day after day, the landscape changes its look. Day after day, the trees change their colors and shape. Day after day, the carpet of leaves on which I walk transforms. A true experience in what buddhists traditionally refer to as the impermanence of life.

Below is a slide show of some of the vistas. Enjoy!

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Seasons and cycles (Main Street column October 2012)

3/10/2012

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Fall is at its most colorful stage right now in the Laurentians. A few days ago, I asked the friend I was with how she felt about fall as we were walking on paths sprinkled with fallen leaf touches of yellow and red. She is a real summer girl, and I could guess her answer: the colors were still ok, she said, but she definitely couldn’t stand the grey, barren, rainy-cold part of it. Who does, for that matter? When the magnificent, sparkly finale of nature’s yearly life cycle is over, all that is left, it seems, is a slow descent into the underworld of decay and death. Winter will mercifully cover it all over with its pristine whiteness, but make no mistake, it’ll freeze everything into place for a good while.

It’s interesting to look at the seasons as a way of learning about our own life cycles. Every year, we experience Nature as it goes through its own characteristic life cycle. Starting with the buds bursting into new life in spring, it moves into full, vibrant expansion in the summer, to then slowly decline in the fall and lie barren during the winter. For sure, spring and summer are more inspiring to us, as they display the growth and expansion part of the cycle. Fall and winter, by contrast, represent the decline and death part of it, and this seems less easy to accept somehow. But a cycle, by its very nature, contains both halves: without the second half of ‘fall and winter’ we would never arrive back at spring. Of course we can dream about eternal spring as a paradisiacal kind of steady state, or about continuous growth and expansion as an ever increasing line going up and up and up. But we’re then not dealing with cycles, we’re talking about straight lines.

There is a lot of investment in our culture in making us believe that everything could develop along a straight line of expansion, whether it’s our own personal growth or that of the economy. This is appealing, of course, because everything seems to get better all the time. There would only be gain, and we wouldn’t have to face any loss. Is that true, though? Is that really how things are? What if cycles are better models for understanding how life unfolds?

I won’t go into the economy or politics, as that’s really not my field of expertise. I do know a fair bit about the dynamics of our inner life, though, and my experience is that people have a really hard time when it comes to accepting loss. Loss is inevitable as a cycle goes into its ‘fall and winter’ part and thus towards its own end. Friendships, relationships, or partnerships may move past their prime and eventually fall away, and jobs may be lost as part of a greater economic cycle that starts declining. There’s no denying that loss can be very painful, but it can be comforting to realize that as one of our cycles comes to an end, others may be in full expansion, and yet others are ready to start off. When we accept that our life has its own seasons and cycles, we’ll be able to follow it more graciously into its falls and winters, just as we will naturally enjoy and celebrate its springs and summers.

So this fall, as the leaves whirl in their last flamboyant dance, we could look whether there are cycles in our own lives that are moving into fall, as it were. We can check with ourselves whether we’re willing to go along with that movement or whether we’re resisting it. For sure, peace lies in letting Life lead us in its own unfathomable dance.

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Forward>>

Old habits and new challenges (Main Street column January 2013)

Loving it All (Main Street column December 2012)

November blues and reds

Fall walk

Seasons and cycles (Main Street column October 2012)

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Old habits and new challenges (Main Street column January 2013)

Loving it All (Main Street column December 2012)

November blues and reds

Fall walk

Seasons and cycles (Main Street column October 2012)

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