Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Post #3323: Endings
Are any of us good at endings? Goodbyes? Departures from the gate?
I am currently in the throes of both a long goodbye (work/retirement), and the grief of an abrupt one (,y friends Jennefer and David two friends in an accident last Thursday) and I can say that I am good at neither kind of ending. The long one has had me in liminal space for weeks, and I am not a fan of liminal space. On the other hand, the sudden loss of my close friends has had me walking around these last few days like my brain and body are disconnected from one another. Both situations have me in tears several times a day.
As much as these losses seem separate from one another on the outside, they are intertwined, as so much of life is. One of the things I looked forward to in retirement was spending time with these friends, and in particular collaborating on some art projects with my friend David, who was just beginning to make paper and wanted to do some book-making projects together. He had purchased all sorts of equipment and told me that I was free to use any of it – and I anticipated that when they returned from the holiday on which they died (in a snorkeling accident, the details of which are unclear) I would get a tour of his finally-set up studio.
Instead, I will spend the first month of my retirement planning their memorial service on Gabriola which will take place in the middle of November. I will kneel at my altar every day until then (and for some days after) and make an offering and a dedication to the liberation of my two friends. I will chant the Dai Hi Shin Dharani. I will work, bit by bit, to reel my soul back into my body so my energetic presence stabilizes again.
As much as we love people, and some of them never leave our hearts, I know we do get beyond this point of crisis to the spot where we can remember and cherish without feeling sad and angry. And as much as work has provided a framework for the rest of my life, I will find ways to replace the structure and the daily interactions with something else that is more rooted in my community.
Last weekend, Brian and I drove across Vancouver Island to Botanical Beach – an excursion on an old logging road that has been paved in the last few years and made the trip much easier than it once was. We wanted to get away from home and and avoid having conversations with anyone that day, we wanted some time alone to feel our grief together.
Just over 23 years ago, I broke my ankle hiking the Juan De Fuca Marine trail about 10 km away from Botanical Beach, which was to be the final night of camping on the trail. Instead of completing, I was carried off by paramedics (and my friend Aaron) at the Parkinson Creek trailhead and spent the next several weeks healing from the accident and surgery that followed it. Since that time, I have been back to the beach below the Parkinson trailhead junction once, but until last weekend I had never made it out to Botanical Beach even though it really is only a couple hours of driving from where we live now that the road is paved.
In any case, that accident in my life was an abrupt ending to what had been a beautiful trail experience with one of my closest friends. Afterwards I grieved not only the end of the trip, but the whole body which changed following the accident — I will forever have swelling around the titanium plates keeping my ankle intact whenever I hike. As I get older, I can also see how that accident may further impact my mobility as I continue on — though I have learned to work with the break by taking extra care, using hiking poles at all times, and paying attention to what my body needs rather than simply pressing on. I will never forget the accident, nor the injury which has impacts to this day, but I have absorbed them both into my daily reality and they have made me wiser than I would be otherwise.
One of the choices we have to make with loss is whether it is going to shrink our world, or get integrated so we can move forward with new insight into our lives. My immediate reaction to the death of Jennefer and David is to want to close my heart to the world. No new friendships. Too painful. No more of this. Likewise, retirement could become a refuge into which I disappear as it is for some people who retire to pottering around house and garden.
But of course, that’s not me. And simultaneous to the end of my career in the federal government, I am stepping into my life’s work — for that is how I’ve come to see community-based chaplaincy and where it fits for me. I am 53, and grieving my career identity and my dear friends, but the spiritual formation process I am in encourages me forward. Not in spite, but because of.
This returns me to the question of whether anyone is good at endings. Do we have to be? Do we have to find the right words? Make peace with what has happened? Discover the deep meaning? Are we allowed to take the next step without having “come to terms with” the loss in our lives? Or can we simply show up to the altar, in our community, and to our work with the faith that each step will move us further away from the pain and retraction of loss.
I don’t know yet how to carry the grief for Jennefer and David’s passing. I don’t know what retirement will feel like when the shock has passed and the days no longer have the familiar shape of a working life. I know only that I am standing at the threshold of both, and cannot see very far ahead.
But if I’ve learned anything from Zen practice, being present in what is right now allows the heart to stay open even when every instinct tells us to close it. And “what is” right now is more than the loss, more than the grief. It is also the unfolding of community all around me – the great glittering jewels of my Gabriola people, my Zen sangha, and my oldest friends in Victoria who I will spend time with next weekend in celebration of my retirement. I am blessed to have the kind of friendships that I grieve when they are gone. I am wiser for the experience of these endings as I step forward into the unknown.
But until this time passes, until the fresh grief has dulled so that it becomes harder to recall among the good memories of my life — I will keep making offerings and chanting. I will help my community say goodbye to two people we loved so much. I will finish work and continue my new studies. And I will continue to make things with my hands, hike all the trails, arrange shows at Birdsong, and play all the fiddle tunes I know.
Post #3322: Five weeks (and how I ended up in seminary)
I am five, very busy, weeks away from retirement. My last day of work is October 20th and my first day of grad school is tomorrow. In between now and the 20th I have an in-person school intensive, several board meetings, a visit with family, a camping weekend, and a meditation retreat marking the beginning of fall practice period.
It’s a lot, but once work is removed from the equation it will feel like a massive relief–allowing me to focus on just the stuff that matters to *me* for the first time in my adult life. Other than a 4-week period on EI, and a couple of school semesters, I have never not worked since I was fifteen. I can feel the burden slipping off my shoulders already, even though I still have just over a month to get through.
Last week I spent three days on the Vancouver School of Theology/UBC campus where I am starting a Masters degree in Public and Pastoral Leadership with a specialization in Spiritual Care. My eventual goal, should I be able to get through both course and practical work, is to become certified as a chaplain, or spiritual care provider, and perform this role within my rural community. Besides seeking a certification from the Canadian Association of Spiritual Care, I will also be looking for recognition in my Zen Buddhist order so that I am formally recognized in a religious tradition.
I have been thinking about Buddhist and interfaith chaplaincy for a number of years, and had planned to attend Upaya in New Mexico after retirement. Joan Halifax leads an accredited Buddhist Chaplaincy program there that incorporates a number of elements that particularly interest me, and it comes highly recommended by people I know who have attended. But alas! I have become a total refusenik when it comes to the United States. Not only will I not enter the country, I try very hard not to spend any money in its economy.
And so, when it comes to Buddhist-specific chaplaincy education, my options are limited. I am aware of only one such program in Canada, at Emmanuel in Toronto, while international online options are either very limited, don’t provide the accreditation I need, or are prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, the Vancouver School of Theology, while founded on Christian affiliations and principles, has made increasing room in recent years for Indigenous and interfaith studies – and back in March they accepted me into graduate studies starting this week.
So far I am enrolled in only one semester-long class (History of Christianity in Ancient Greece and Rome) which is online, and two in-person intensives (Intro to Buddhism, Intro to Judaism). I am marginally terrified of the History class as it promises to be a lot of work, but glad for the intensives which mean being in-person with others in my program. One thing that was apparent to me in the orientation last week is that I miss being in a classroom with other students, and will definitely make sure I am doing at least some of my work on campus for this degree.
The other component to this education is a practical piece of three units of internship in hospital chaplaincy. This will require in-person attendance and at the moment the only advertised options are in Vancouver, but I am hopeful after hearing a rumour that there may be a program in development on Vancouver Island. In any case, I won’t start the practical education component until next fall at the earliest so there is time to figure it out.
All-in, I expect to spend four or five years walking this educational path as I won’t be attending full-time and I have find ways to make the practical education piece work for myself and my family. Additionally, I am building in more time in my own spiritual community as part of deeper education in my tradition of Zen Buddhism.
So I am standing at the edge of a fairly remarkable transition: leaving the job that has defined my adult life, beginning graduate school, and committing myself more deeply to a spiritual practice that has been part of my life for many years. There is a lot of uncertainty in it, but also a surprising sense of spaciousness.
I don’t need to know exactly where this path leads. Five years is a long time, and I expect both the work and I will change along the way. For now, it is enough to take the next step: into the classroom, into practice, into community, and eventually, I hope, into a form of service that feels like a natural expression of the life I have been trying to build through my years of hosting, music, art, and general being-ness in the world.
The most important thing is simply to begin, I suppose, and see where I end up – which is all we can ever do.
Post #3321: Summer retirement practice
Last night, the coyotes running down the road woke me up – barking and howling like the wild things they are. It’s okay to be woken up in the middle of the night when on vacation, I just sleep in more in the morning to make up the difference, and an afternoon nap is often also on the agenda in the hot summer days.
Brian and I left music camp in Sorrento on Sunday, driving directly south to our cabin via Yankee Flats, Glenemma, Fintry and a bunch of other unincorporated settlements along the way. We are now in Bankier, a train stop settlement on the old Kettle Valley Railway – where we will stay for the next few days before returning home. It’s pretty hot here, but the cabin stays cool and I have my heart set on an after-dinner swim tonight. We have unearthed the kayaks from our under-cabin storage box and an early-morning paddle is on my agenda for the morning. One thing about being in the mountains (the foothills of the Cascades really) is that the mornings are cool enough for activity, even when the rest of the day swelters.
We have owned this place with friends for about 12 years now, but since moving to Gabriola a decade ago we don’t get out here more than once or twice a year. I’m hoping that when I retire this fall (last day of work = October 20th) I will make better use of it. I have a mind to come up during the week sometimes when Brian is in the city – I can drop him off at work on my way to the interior and then pick him up again to return to the island by the weekend. We will see.
For sure we are coming up here again in the days after I retire, I have put it on the shared calendar that we will be here from Thursday to Sunday in anticipation of needing something to do in the immediate aftermath of my work identity being returned to my employer. I haven’t quite wrapped my head around that moment yet, and I don’t expect to until sometime after. All I know is that having a plan to keep busy those first few days is essential.
I did enroll in two courses for the fall start of my Theology program yesterday, and I expect that will help the transition as well. I’ll have about six weeks of overlap between the end of work and start of school, so that will be a bit hectic, but I will have something to transition into at least. People generally say you shouldn’t plan anything too big in the immediate aftermath of retirement, but I’m not planning to stop doing life just yet and I want to take advantage of the extra year and a half the early retirement initiative has bought me to get on with the rest of it.
Before I left work for my holiday, I told my team that they could practice me being retired since that’s what I am doing. Yesterday I took two walks, today I had a long nap after going to town on an errand, tomorrow I will kayak. Maybe that’s what it’s like to be retired – just deciding day by day what I want or need to do and doing it, without the external structure imposed onto my days. It doesn’t mean that I won’t do anything difficult, or that there won’t be chores in my life – but that I will suddenly have 40 hours per week with which to do other things, and I can schedule my life according to my actual biorhythms – working out in the morning before I eat breakfast, for example. Going for a walk after lunch. Sleeping as many hours as I need instead of forcing myself out of bed at 5 am no matter whether I’ve spent half the night awake. Just the amount of extra movement I will naturally get when I’m not at a desk all day long makes me giddy to think about.
I have a few more days of retirement practice before I go back to work and try to finish off some last projects. I have realized that as much as I feel the responsibility to get it all done – I won’t, and it doesn’t matter all that much anyway. I just need to put in three more months before I find out what it’s like to be on the other side of work, opening the door to whatever comes next.
Post 3320: Thyroid matters!
It appears that 2026 is going to be all about health-related stuff if the first six months are anything to go on. That being said, I’ve just come back from seeing my surgeon in a follow-up from having half my thyroid removed on June 8th, and it appears that all is well there despite the fact there was some (low risk) cancer in the pathology report. So perhaps I’m in the clear for a bit?
I first wrote about my thyroid here back in 2012 when I was cleared of thyroid cancer following a series of needle-aspiration biopsies which were triggered by my doctor at the time observing the growth of a goiter on the left side of my neck. I was sent to a surgeon who was so gung-ho to operate that he told me I should have my whole thyroid removed if there was “even a 10% chance” of cancer. He was so eager to find that cancer that he sent me for multiple ultrasounds and 3 biopsies, the final one refused by the biopsy doctor because he thought I was being overtested for something of minimal risk.
Because the thyroid is an important gland, I was in no hurry to have it removed, even if I did have an unsightly bulge at one side of my throat. I did a bunch of reading at that time and discovered that the majority of thyroid cancers are very low-risk and develop very slowly over the course of a lifetime, never becoming deadly. I had decided for myself that even if cancer was discovered, I would take a monitoring and assessment approach rather than moving right to surgery and chemically invasive procedures.Despite my surgeon’s eagerness, I could find no reason to radically alter my body’s bio-chemical mechanism for what seemed to be mostly cosmetic reasons.
I moved to Gabriola and cut ties with that surgeon, opting for an annual ultrasound to monitor the growth of nodules and swelling. About three years ago and I noticed that my goiter was getting larger, and I was getting a strained voice when I sang and also could feel the pressure of my thyroid when I swallowed, at the same time I got some funky TSH levels that indicated hyperthyroidism (though I had no symptoms of any kind). This lead to a (what I think is now incorrect) diagnosis of Graves disease and some extra scanning of my now-much-larger thyroid. There was no indication of any cancerous growth, but the new surgeon I was referred to told me that removal of the left hemisphere of my thyroid could make things more comfortable and prevent problems later on as continued growth was likely. At this point, I was in agreement with having half my thyroid removed and put on a long wait list (because no cancer was suspected, the surgery was treated as elective).
Two years later and I got a call quite out of the blue that there was surgery space in 10 days time and could I fit it into my schedule? Given the fact I really wanted this done, I *did* fit it into my schedule, and on June 8th I underwent surgery, staying overnight in Nanaimo General Hospital with discharge by noon the next day.
Despite the fact that the wait is long and our facilities are crowded – I had the most excellent care. And I mean, phenomenal. My surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the recovery room nurses and my morning nurse were all incredible – compassionate, caring, professional, personable – the works. I cannot say enough good things about the experience once I finally got a date booked.
The immediate recovery period was a bit rougher than I expected, but that’s just because I assumed I would come home and feel totally normal within 48 hours! That was not the case of course, and I took a week and a half off work during which time I puttered in my studio and sewed a bunch of summer clothes for myself. Last week I went to Ottawa to see a concert and had some more days off work, just wandering about. I’m now three weeks out of surgery now and finally feeling pretty normal except some soreness around my neck wound which is still healing.
Yesterday I went back to my surgeon for the follow-up visit and he told me that one of my thyroid nodules did, in fact, have cancer but it was exactly as I had learned all those year ago…. low-risk, slow growing, and requiring no follow-up of any kind. Removal of my left thyroid hemisphere removed all the cancer, and there is no need for any more treatment. He also affirmed the fact that I could have done nothing about it at all, and that if they knew there was cancer going in, they would have followed exactly the same course of action. The only thing knowing about the cancer would have done was bump me up in the priority queue for the surgery – but honestly, I would hate to take a spot from someone who was really *in need* when I was just experiencing discomfort.
As for the Graves – I have never been convinced by this diagnosis and believe the test results were strongly influenced by a combination of my thyroid swelling and perimenopausal fluctuations in the body. Since the initial diagnostic period I have experienced no symptoms of it, and my TSH levels returned to normal shortly after testing. My surgeon agreed that a false positive here was a definite possibility, especially because my left thyroid was so swollen by the time it came out. Fingers crossed this is the case and we won’t hear anymore about that!
So now it’s just life back to normal for the most part. I will test later this summer to see what my TSH levels are doing and whether the right side of my thyroid picks up the slack on its own or needs pharmaceutical help, and more ultrasounds will be done in the next couple of years. These tests are already a standard part of my medical care and have been for years.
I have been walking a ton in the last week, but won’t return to weightlifting until mid-July since on Saturday we are off to music camp and then our cabin in the interior after that. My energy level is pretty good all things considered, and I’m looking forward to some times playing tunes by Shuswap Lake. So glad I could get the surgery and follow-up out of the way before the true start-up of summer.
Post 3319: Gifts
I’ve been having a strange time of it lately. I am out of the post-illness slump of March – back in the gym 4 days a week, walking in the mornings, eating properly and all that – and yet, I find myself strangely uncoordinated, at odds with the world, and mildly depressed most days. I expect it’s hormonal, that I’ve entered another phase of this journey through perimenopause, and that I should adjust my HRT in some way – but I’m holding off a bit to see if its just a bit of depression that will lift on its own.
In the meantime, I have cancelled some activities in order to ensure I’m not prolonging this state by draining my energy, and I will continue to uncrowd my life over the next little while to just give myself some space to rest and work on the garden and in my studio. That’s really the only place I want to be right now, in the lead-up to a bit of summer journey-ing and parties and so on.
On Thursday I went for a walk to clear my head after work, and as I walked, I let my feet choose the direction without thinking about it too much. Up I went into the neighbourhood above ours, across, and then back into the forest on my way towards home again. It was a beautiful day, and I ran into no one as I walked (two cyclists who passed me at one point, and that was it for people – in 5 km – this is one of the things I love about living rural).
As I came down through a drainage area, I stumbled across what might be the largest trove of oyster mushrooms I have ever seen in one place growing on some logs which had fallen across the trail at some past point. Trail fairies had cut the logs on the trail to keep it clear, but the remaining dead wood was left on either side – creating a perfect fruiting environment.
It was truly a moment that felt like a gift, my funk had already been lifting as I walked, but the discovery of the mushrooms felt like the delivery of a message – the surprising capacity of the natural world to deliver wonderous moments, even in places one has been a hundred times before.
I had no way to collect the mushrooms in the moment, and so I took one along as I continued my walk, noting that the mushrooms had colonized many logs in this one small area and that there were so many that foraging some would not be a problem.
So, yesterday morning I did just that – rode back on my bike to the spot which was not far from my house, and collected about 5 and a half pounds of oyster mushrooms – which was only a third of what was there.
Afterwards I cycled home, picked some walking onions from the spring garden, and made the most beautiful lunch omelette for my partner and I before soaking and processing the rest of the mushrooms for the freezer.
Though I walk in the forest often, I do not do much in the way of mushroom hunting or foraging. In the fall, so many spots get picked out, and I don’t have nearly enough time in my life to get into the woods the way true foraging requires. This discovery though was so evident, right on the trail, it was surprising that no one had harvested before me – perhaps because no one thinks about mushrooms in the spring? Or because no one who passed them recognized them for what they were.
In any case, it felt as though the forest was offering something to me on day when I needed a little left, and I thanked the Gods of the forest as I harvested and ate these beautiful gifts.
