Red Cedar

I am awkward in front of the camera, but still I feel the need to start showing off the clothing I make more often (wearing it, not just hanging in front of the wardrobe). Mustard yellow tunic with bright pink butterflies – a fabric I would never normally wear (I was using it as a muslin to see if I loved the pattern – which I didn’t) – but paired with a cardigan and leggings I think it works quite well. So there, a goofy picture of me wearing a new tunic.

Have you ever noticed how much less you see when you put in your iPod headphones and walk down the street? And yes, I mean “see” because I am convinced that I do not witness/observe/appreciate nearly the same amount of visual stimuli with my earbuds in.

I’ve been walking to work again recently – six kilometres door to door – through Hastings-Sunrise, Grandview-Woodland, Strathcona, the Downtown Eastside and right into the heart of downtown. It feels like descending through rock strata as I pass from one distinct neighbourhood to the next, passing colourful houses, community gardens, groups of Chinese women doing Qi gong exercises along the way.

For whatever reason, this last month I’ve been putting on the iPod more often than not – which wasn’t the case last year when I walked. It’s like I forgot over the winter that I don’t “get bored” with the sounds around me, and somehow I need the extra stimulus of music. So for the last few weeks – that’s how I’ve been taking my steps and I have to admit it’s been kindof awesome. Driving music definitely quickens my pace, and if I play the rights kinds of things – a little joy even leaps up in my heart from time to time, giving me connections to my self and my own thoughts as I get my morning exercise.

But because music played through headphones turns one inwards – internalizes the experience of being in the world by blocking out non-controlled sound – so too does our range of visual perception narrow. I hadn’t really been aware of the degree this was happening until this morning.

When I stepped outside my door, the birds were making a racket and for the first time in a couple of weeks I decided to pocket my iPod instead of tuning into it. Within a few blocks I noticed that rather than focusing down and directly ahead, is that without the headphones I am much more likely to put my chin up and open my field of awareness outside of myself. While I have always known this to be true when interacting with other people on the street, that headphones limit those interactions, I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so aware of how blocking external/environmental sounds (replacing them with others) creates nothing short of a  sensory deficit. A distraction, I suppose, from the real drama unfolding continually around us (and especially in the city!)

And yet, once I get downtown, every other person is plugged in to a machine – turned towards their individual and interior space, each grooving to their own private soundtrack designed to reinforce or change their mood of the morning. Which is how so many of us navigate through the city – on foot, in a car, even by bicycle – tuned into ourselves and away from everyone and everything else. And despite the fact we (almost) all engage in what can only be termed a form of narcissism (“I only need to listen to my interior self, fuck the exterior around me”) we are annoyed when others do so.

I’m not sure how I got into this headphone habit, except that it gives me an artificial stimulus I talked myself into thinking I needed. Good thing the birds reminded me this morning that there is much more to hear and see when I don’t plug myself into a machine upon encountering the world outside.

I have changed my work schedule starting this week in order to fit meditation and walking 6 km to work into my life before I hit the desk – just in time for the glorious change in weather. But instead of sharing one of the beautiful little flowers poking its head up from the dirt, or a bird flitting in the neighbourhood shrubbery – I am sharing this little piece of truth  captured on the side of a city works trailer.

This graffiti makes me think of lots of people I have known and things I have done — which I realize now weren’t weren’t in the service of ending capitalism but of ending my own sense of suffering.  I think to be honest the graffiti would actually read “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of suffering.” This explains a lot of apocalyptic thinking (and action) on the left and right – call it whatever you want (capitalism/oppression/suffering/guilt) we are all looking for a way out. For some of us the suffering is so extreme that we can only imagine it ending if everything ends with it (and if you are a Christian – you might not be so sure about that because hell is always a potential afterwards).

This is jihad, and revolutionary class war, and the rapture all rolled into one – it’s like scratching an itch so hard that it ruptures and creates a permanent wound. It’s the impotence of protest activism and the frustration of spiritual poverty. It’s an inability to envision transformation.

But if you could pull the plug, would you? I suppose that depends how great the suffering is – for those mad from it might do terrible things. Most of us, however, just imagine. We march and pray and spraypaint and hope that transformation comes in our lifetimes. Even if we have a hard time believing it will.