The Turning of the Year

This post has been some time in coming. Late fall melted into advent, into Christmas, into the new year and January is waning like the moon. My Christmas cards printed in October are, as yet, unsent awaiting a lull in the relentless business of working full time, meeting obligations and weathering numerous colds and flu. I have had two months to read a book for my book club, a pleasurable experience I will have to achieve in 48 hours if I am to be ready to share. We are reading Rudy Wiebe's Sweeter Than All the World. Reading is and has always been for me sweeter than all the world for each book contains its own world where I can visit, linger, leave at my will. In the end this book moved way too slowly for me and repeated a lot of his memoir Of This Earth, but without the charm. My whole book club of the four of us agreed on this.

Almost two months have passed since I started this blog.Our next book club book  I just finished reading. It is Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland which, of course, deals with Renoir's painting by the same name. This was slower to pull me in than The Girl with the Pearl Earring, but eventually the fictionalized truth of the painting's composition and subjects created a hypnotic sense of time-traveling backward.I found myself cutting a pattern for a blue dress with Aline, balancing between loss and a new shoot of hope and love with Alphonsine, taking risks with Ellen, mixing paints with impressionistic abandon and control, all of it with sails, boats and skiffs in the background like an armada to the brevity of summer. Each second in the sunlight stretched like a butterfly still fluttering, but pinned. A thing past and present and living fixed in the paint.

In a few days we will have the spring equinox. In the midst of a late brush with wintry weather on the March break Mathew and I went to see the Toronto Home and Garden Show at the Enercare Exhibition Grounds. We walked some 20 kilometres in total that day!

  It was as cold as these pictures look! 

Matthew got cozy with Glenn Gould. 

 Inside it was a haven to the wind weary pair of us!

 The floral show was in celebration of Canada's 150th anniversary this year. We really enjoyed some of the displays.

 This last picture was missing half of an important province! It sort of takes away from the patriotic pride to have left out the most easterly province. Otherwise, I am left to conclude it was another example of a central Canada idea of what area is not important to the country!

 There were competitions in so many different categories of floral arranging. It was all mind-boggling to me how many different elements there are to it. Below are a few highlights I was taken with on both the large and small scales.

We met up with a familiar face at the home show. 

 Two more pictures : one of each of us. 

We met up with our friends Andy and Kris and spent a happy evening with them at their lovely home. 

 At the Art Gallery of Ontario I have never seen so much by way of Indigenous Art. I found it ironic that as I am fighting as a Mi'kmaq to retain recognition as a status Qalipu member due to politically imposed injustices, that artistic statements about the importance of reclaiming one's culture and writing wrongs were being given voice at both the AGO and even the Toronto Home Show. It is one step forward and one or two steps backward.

This is from the Home and Garden Show. Residential schools were devastating, but they were not the only means used to try to extinguish a culture as my family can attest to. There are so many more people of indigenous background who have suffered and who are suffering still.

I do not want to leave this post on such a negative, sad note. The battle for justice, fairness and healing goes on. I like to believe that with love and a true, universal  desire to right the wrongs of the past that we may be able to cease the need to battle and be embraced for who we are and who we wish to become.

Beginnings, endings and in between

The biggest beginning I am part of is in welcoming my grandson Remi to our lives. Though he is still just two weeks old he has already worked his way into our hearts. When I see him or hold him the feeling of love, pride and protection I have is indescribable. I have felt it twice before in this intensity with the birth of each of my daughters. My mother said upon holding her first grandchild, my daughter Samantha, that it was the same as holding your own baby. My grandbaby is a child of my heart and in his veins through my daughter flows the blood of all my ancestors, my husband's ancestors and Remi's father's ancestors. I am grateful to be so blessed with the beginning of my life as a grandmother. I look forward to the wonder of being part of his infancy and childhood and to seeing the person he will become and celebrating his successes and his wonder. He is, like all babies, a beautiful mystery to be revealed little by little. So I must thank my daughter, Samantha, and my son-in-law, Mikhail, for bringing him into this world.

Where will these feet bring him in life? 

In his mother's arms so loved.

   This, too, is the beginning of my summer holidays. I am so tired and so grateful to be on a break. There are many students I have said good-bye to-some for the summer-some maybe forever. Beginnings and endings.

As I grow older and I know more and much less. I see that there is much more of the in between in life. Beginnings and endings are not as clear cut as they once seemed. Love can be never-ending. That is when it lifts us, and holds us, maddens us, incites us, strengthens us, excites us, inspires us and ever grows and changes with the core holding us firmly anchored one to the other beyond distance earthly, in time or dimension. Love can almost end when givers grow unkind with a pain like losing limbs. At the time you do not know if you will withstand it, but you do. It leaves a scar like a knot that was once a branch of a tree. There is strength in a knothole and a beauty in its poignant ghost of a limb. At 53 I am still discovering who I am, still learning and ,hopefully, still seeing, listening, tasting, touching and feeling with the same wonder of a child. When I get overwhelmed by the suffering, the violence, the poverty, the intolerance, the injustice in the world I look for the beauty wherever it is. That takes renewed practice each day. That takes a lot of effort and determination some days. I will be old the day I stop looking and seeing and learning.   I never want to get old in the heart and mind.

Family: we're in this together whatever comes our way.

Hamlet says of his uncle Claudius, who is also his step-father: "a little more than kin, but less than kind". Family is always kin and there is always love, no matter its manifestation exuberant or shadowed, but the kind part is dependent on so many things.
Lets start with the good, the immutable.

• Love. It's not all happy ever after, not for parents and children, nor for spouses, nor aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews nor cousins, whether full or removed once, twice or wished-for removed. In-law love may take root, or not, but at the very least it seasons the other loves in our lives. Love is pervasive. Its roots go deep into our souls. The droughts, fires, freezing, earthquakes, floods of life may alter them, but they persist on deeply, seeking sustenance, nourishing us with green plenitude or spindly sourness, but nourish it does just the same. It cannot be beaten by any force. Not even death, the ultimate divider, can hold it off bleed us as death will. Love is forever. 
  

• We are never alone. We may have family members whose pain and suffering isolate them from others or we may do this ourselves in an attempt to scar over the pain of loss, grief, guilt, shame, disappointment or deep-worry; we can never isolate ourselves from the roots of love, both earthly and divine. Our family runs in our veins, warm sap passed on generation to generation by our ancestors whose unseen presence and unheard prayers whisper comfort, strength, tears and hope to us, unobserved, but powerful. No dam lasts forever because water, like love, will erode any barrier over time. So it is with the love of family. 

• We have a shared history. There is joy and comfort in knowing the stories, the jokes, the trials, the triumphs, the challenges, the losses, the people without having to explain everything. When you are away and come back you just pick up where you left off with them. In the meantime every phone call, every card, every letter, every picture means more. 

• We have each some of our loved ones in us. We share the memories. Where one person forgets, another remembers, so as much as possible is preserved and so we collectively make a mosaic picture as a family. We get know those who have gone before us who we have never met. We get to hold onto more of those we have lost. We get to see them in a glance, a laugh, a tip of the head, a saunter in a walk, a nervous tick, a singing voice, a speaking voice, a way of moving and many little things we never notice until they resurface ephemerally in a family member like soap bubbles on the wind. 

• We belong. We may be the life of the party, the funny one, the musical one, the storyteller, the great baker, the misfit, the black sheep, the embarrassing one, the peace-maker, the hard-worker, the quiet one, the chatter box, the hunter, the sewer, the keeper of the pictures, the keeper of knowledge, the confidante, the walker of hills, the gardener, the hewer of wood, the builder, the traveler, the teacher, the elder, the youthful, the wise one, the giving one, the needy one,  the joyful, the depressed, the hurting, the innocent, the faithful, the lost or the found but we all belong . We have membership by birth and it cannot be revoked, though we can choose to never revisit it in person it lives in our dreams. 

  
  

  We are dancers, and dreamers, tad pole explorers and hand holders
  

  
  

  There is, too,  the not so good. It comes as a package deal. You don't get to pick and choose what parts you want and what part you want to eschew. 

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Our genes are ours at the moment of conception. Learning problems, clumsiness, mental illness, a time bomb of cancer, of Alzheimers, of Parkinson's disease, of M. S., of heart disease, of diabetes  and many more, a propensity to obesity, to addictions, a mutated gene, a congenital defect any of these may be destined to be ours in the lottery of family genes along with all the desirable ones. There's no betting on it, no bargaining, no cheating, no trading. 

  
  

  
  

•  We parent the way we were parented for the most part. We may be lucky to have been passed a chain of careful nurturing and kind instruction from parent to child to parent to child. Many of us are passed a chain of abuse, poverty, neglect, uncertainty, doubt like wind and storm that may twist our limbs, snap them off or even destroy us. Many of us are passed some of each. The love showing like sunshine, mildness and warmth  and mental illness, addictions, hopelessness, abuse so many storm clouds bringing hurricane winds, ice pellets, driving snow like teeth, rain torrents like vertical drowning. Whether you grow straight, you grow crooked, or you are stunted depends on family. 

We may carry burdens together, hold hands, struggle to catch up, tame bears, or carry someone on our backs, but together we thrive.

• Familiarity may breed jealousy where the clear glass of our child hearts has been smudged, cracked, chipped or even broken. Where positive attention has been lacking, where potential has been neglected, where confidence has been eroded, where self-doubt has taken root in the arid, stony soil of neglect and violence, there jealousy and resentment and a sourness of view may thrive where there should be joy in the accomplishments of our blood loves, our loved ones. 

There is, however, always love. The universal truth is love and hope and belief and education are the gates that can lead us there to an unshadowed love. 

“You did not invent these family habits. Your family is like mine, for thousands and thousands of years our families have embraced a dysfunctional lifestyle, passing these habits as gospel on to subsequent generations. This was not done out of malice, spite, or hate, but what they knew best. As ineffective as these habits are, you never stopped to consider another way of loving.” 
― David W. Earle

One in five people in Canada suffers from mental illness. Explore this further if you wish. That means so many families are affected by this. I have always lived with this in my family. It has made me who I am and I would not trade away any of the challenges I have known, because I would not be so strong as I am, nor so able to appreciate life so much, nor so able to see how much light there is amid the darkness, to feel empathy so deeply, nor hope so strongly. That seems to me I got the best amidst some sad, painful experiences because love will find a way through as it did in my family. I have to agree with Rumi: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”  

So we see that the good and the not so good about families is part of the same whole. We're in it together. Together we can triumph, grow stronger and every generation better our children's lives more, nurture more, celebrate all of life more. We must tell our family stories, the dark  as well as the light, so that we learn to lift our children above the past to new heights, without ever forgetting it or letting them forget. To forget is to weaken the appreciation of the gifts we have, to forget the love and the sacrifices of those who have gone before and to forget to be thankful and humble and aware and realize that we stand in the love of our families and on the shoulders of those who have gone before be they bent or strong. If we forget to remember how empty the gifts we have and will pass on. 

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.-Frederick Buechner