Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Here, there and everywhere.
Managed to drive Campbell River to Nanaimo last night in under two hours to be the last car on the 7 pm ferry back to Vancouver. With an almost-empty tank. Let me tell you, life doesn’t get more edgy than that 😉
The real point is, I made it home safe and sound from my Victoria & Campbell River speaking gigs and fortunately today’s talkathon is right around the corner from my work. Next week it’s Courtenay and Vancouver, the week after that I’m back in Victoria for two days of meetings and then speaking again in Vancouver the week following. Bargaining team members are like union rock starts, donchaknowit – well, except we don’t have groupies, the members are often upset with us, and we don’t get paid the big bucks (or anything really)… Okay, fine, we are nothing like rockstars except on the road a lot.
Whatever. Believe it or not, one of my favourite parts about being a union rep has always been traveling around the province and meeting union members in the communities where they live and work. We’re a pretty diverse and interesting workforce and have people in pretty much every small town between the 49th parallel and the DEW line. Despite having to rush about a bit, I do enjoy the part that gets me out of Vancouver.
All that driving time though, that’s a lot of thinking space, and now I’ve got some new project ideas that involve recording interviews and doing online photoslideshows – multimedia blogging really. I’ve already story-boarded one of them in my head. That’s just because I don’t have enough to do already – you know – and I’m also incredibly compulsive when it comes to wanting to do stories in different ways. Unfortunately, this will mean the purchase of a minidisk in my future because audio recording quality into the ibook is just not that good.
It’s an experiment, really, to see if I can take music and photos and interviews and build stories – but also I’ve got a lot of smart, interesting and funny people in my life who I would like to record and share with the world (yes, that means you friends). I suspect for the initial piece I am going to explore exactly where this compulsion to share our stories comes from in the first place. Anyhow, just be a good sport when I pester you to talk to me okay?
I should get back to work. I’m here after all.
Simply an update.
So, it’s Monday. Again. A Monday in November. Not exactly inspiring anything insightful as the rain drips down the panes of my 15th floor cube. Glass paneled buildings in Vancouver do little more than let in the gloom on days like this, though I suppose in a sunnier climate they would be unbearable to work in. Really, I’m still clearing the sleep from my brain after a weekend where I didn’t get quite enough of it. As if I was some kind of socializing machine or something. Sheesh. At least I spent yesterday alone at the house and gave myself some much needed puttering time.
Darren managed to get through yesterday to let me know he’s okay and will be transferred to a final facility after the US Thanksgiving weekend. He’s hanging in there, but travel within the penal system is pretty challenging physically and emotionally. On a travel day he is basically shackled for up to twelve hours while awaiting and being transported which is pretty overwhelming for anyone. Unfortunately, upheaval of any kind in his routine also triggers a lot in me – loss of control issues mainly – and the call was a bit more difficult than usual. On the plus side, he wasn’t aware that his release date had been moved 10 days earlier (to August 14th), so it was nice to have some good news to share. Once he’s settled again it will be a lot easier for both of us – this was the first communication that we’ve had in almost a month besides letters. Since he’s staying in Florida it’s pretty much a given that I won’t be seeing him in person again until he is released.
I spent over an hour playing music after I got off the phone, something I haven’t done on my own in ages. A jam with a friend on Saturday served up a a reminder that if I don’t play, I get really out of shape and I *hate* that feeling. So I’m going to attempt to get at it a bit more – he wants to jam a few times and see where it goes, and this type of thing is what I need to inspire me a bit. I’d like to start writing again as well as learning the tunes of others. Music is something I go around and around on – never quite letting it go, but often not keeping it up either. I wonder how connected that is to the fact that it forces my cogitating mind to switch off…. or perhaps it’s just laziness. I think I might take the advice a couple people have given me and start taking my fiddle with me when I am traveling on business. I usually have lots of empty evenings to fill up in Ottawa and it is a better release than almost anything else.
Besides all of that, this morning has been so far busy and I’m filling in my calendar for the next few weeks. Between now and mid-December I’ve got six speaking engagements (on collective bargaining), am out of town twice, and have a shwack of work to deliver before the holidays. It’s all pretty straightforward though, and I’m not going anywhere far which lessens my stressload considerably.
I’m feeling pretty good at the moment despite it being a Monday in November, I’ve got one of my last French classes tonight and a date with Brian afterwards…. So, you know, those are both pretty good things 😉
Raise the Minimum Wage!
Honestly – highest cost of living, a booming economy and we can’t see a living wage for workers? This video is part of the BC Fed’s ongoing campaign to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour.
Forgiving me.
I woke up out of an angry dream last night to a couple hours of insomnia which gave me ample thinking time in the middle of the night that I probably didn’t need. I’ve been struggling lately with the concept of “sucking it up” and making things right with a friend of mine – particularly because I don’t feel it’s my responsibility to extend the effort at this point. The worst part is that it’s over something relatively insignificant – half misunderstanding and half misinterpretation. Not resolving it is more stressful than just making the phone call. I know.
This past year has been one in which I have meditated an awful lot on forgiveness, having experienced both sides of anger and hurt as a result of my continuing support for Darren, Chelsea and others in the Operation Backfire case. Through that process I have seen the difference between those who have found forgiveness and those who have not. And I worry all the more for those who haven’t, their anger projected outside of them seems untenable to live with on top of the facts of prison, betrayal, and state violence. As much as I wanted to believe otherwise two years ago, this situation was unchangeable from the very beginning and no amount of hating the self-righteous or the “snitches” makes any of it easier to bear. The opposite in fact. This outrage steals daydreams and turns them into revenge fantasies, gives an excuse to build fences between oneself and the world. Fuckers. Got to keep them out.
Early in 2007, I was sexually assaulted by someone who had been a friend to me for a long time – the fact that a friend had done it being more of an affront than the act itself. I never wrote about it here because it took me awhile to figure out and decide how to move with it – I didn’t even tell anyone at first because I didn’t want anyone making a big deal out of it before I had a chance to find that answer for myself. About three months after it happened, I started to write about it privately, and somewhere in there I realized that the only choice I had was to forgive the act and then walk away. To call the person to community accountability would mean that I would forever have my hurt and his bound up together in public space for others to look at, but to nurture my anger privately would result only in lessening myself and do nothing to counter the act.
In July I wrote him a letter outlining my perception of what he had done, how it had made me feel, and finished with my resolution to forgive him rather than holding onto it. I was clear my forgiveness did not restore our friendship, but that I had made a decision about clearing and was done thinking about it. And while some might question the sincerity of this, I can honestly say that when I sent the email I felt free of even my own self-doubt and am as sure now about that course of action as I was in the moment.
Does it make it all better? Well, no. Of course not. Simply forgiving doesn’t change the circumstance of violence, entrapment, loss or injury. These things are still present in both of the scenarios I describe above. Forgiveness is a symbolic and psychological act more than a physical one after all. But it does indicate a willingness to set one’s focus up and ahead rather than down and behind. That is – looking forward and for good instead of convinced that the past is the present and a dark one at that!
Like anything – generosity, gratitude, selflessness – learning to forgive requires regular practice – we don’t exactly live in a society that vaunts these values (being forgiving somehow being equated with being a pushover). But although it may be slightly easier each time, I still find it a struggle to let go in the moments when I am most acutely hurt. This seems to have nothing to do with the severity of the event itself but some other combined set of circumstances that I haven’t quite unravelled yet. Which oddly makes it easier to forgive a man who violated me physically than one who has simply wounded my self-perception. A chip at the ego, and I can’t bring myself to pick up the phone and clear the air between us.
Of course now that I’ve written it here, you know I have to.
Sound cycles.
The arrival of almost-winter has me reaching into my archive of classical music – simultaneously adding to it with new renditions of old standards, and new classical works altogether. This is a cycle I recognize, the November onset of reflective and beautiful music written back onto my playlist.
I was raised in a house where nothing except classical music was played until I was about eleven years old. My mother, a music teacher, played classical piano and had my brother and I trained in the pseudo-classical Suzuki method for violin – never mind the extensive record collection and the fact the only radio station we ever heard was CBC. Instead of rock stars we had the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Yehudi Menuhin to venerate, and a high point of our childhood was meeting old-man Suzuki himself at a conference in Bellingham.
That would be some geeky childhood, let me tell you 😉 – and like all individuating beings, I started listening to pop/rock and then punk rock music exclusively when I was about twelve years old – having discovered the University of Victoria radio station (CFUV) and the power of my own spending money for records. At the age of 15 I ditched my violin as one more thing I would never be good enough at and spent the rest of my teenage years in some form of trouble or another. To say I had some issues at that time would be an understatement – but I never went as far as pawning my instrument no matter how bad it got. Lucky me, I still have the same instrument I received at twelve – my “adult” violin after years of playing cheap chinese-factory children’s sizes. (A little trivia – I do not play a fullsize violin, but a 7/8ths size which was common at one time among smaller adults in Europe and suits my short fingers perfectly even now.)
My violin lay untouched for a few years, when I picked it up again to make money for college in my early twenties. Having quit a job mid-summer at a fishing lodge (under terrible conditions), I came back to Victoria with a pretty severe disdain for working and decided instead that I would try my hand at playing on the street for money. Thinking about it now, it seems like an entirely preposterous decision since I had barely picked it up since the age of fifteen, but I suppose that has something to do with being twenty-one and a bit reckless. For about two months I was there every day with my fiddle playing improvised classical music on the summertime streets and making surprisingly good money. Typically I would play about 3-4 hours, taking about $200 into my case which not only provided for living expenses but also allowed me to save a year’s worth of college tuition. It was a joy, this improvisation without form or rule, and probably the first time I realized a connection between my inner being and that strange wood box – how I could make a single thing out of it, appreciated by others.
Although I continued to play a little bit through the time I went to school, it wasn’t until 1997 when the Flying Folk Army had its first jam in a studio on Granville Island that I really discovered an excitement in collaboration and later the comfortable creative trust that could develop between people. Not classical, but based in folk traditions timeless in their own right…. But I’m not going to go on about that now as this post has already gotten a bit long.
To bring this back around, the point with which I started – classical music was something I ditched out of rebellion some years ago, and never pursued as a violin player afterwards…. and yet I have been increasingly drawn back to it in the last few years. And as much as I have fallen in love with the more esoteric “new” classical, I can’t help but find an incredible comfort in the pieces I was raised listening to – Bach, Vivaldi, Boccherini, Elgar. A fascination to play the newer artists (Kennedy, St. John) to see what they do with what could become stale. It’s still remarkable to me how distinct the interpretations can be and how ways of playing a piece seem to come in and out of fashion. (Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins and Strings in D minor is as close as it comes to “perfect” music, the piece by which I consider any professional violinist.)
Equally stunning to me is how I habitually to turn to these same pieces year after year as winter sets in, and how this music continues to shape the person I am as it has since my childhood. A certain melancholy I suppose, a particularly tempered joy – this music fits back inside me like it always belonged there.
(This post was inspired by this one – Thanks to Diana for the mother’s lament)
Red Cedar 