Coffee Hour #3 Sometimes we have snow days.

Jan 25, 2019

I admit yesterday was a little disappointing.  I fully planned on sitting down and writing after breakfast until I looked out the window and saw what the snow and rain of the previous day left behind.  Everything place shovelled was covered in a thick slick layer of ice.  So much for a morning writing session. 

I did manage to jot down 3 sentences.  (Ironically, I chose to write about hope.)

Honestly, I wasn't surprised that overnight our driveway and sidewalk had become polished to an icy mirror shine.  I half expected it and had already been stroking off things on my mental list of things I hoped to do that day.  

In the sunlight, the cold kaleidoscope of greys, blues and golds would have made a good picture, but the realization that my weekly volunteer job of a couple hours just became all day affair because there was no way I was getting our truck down our steep driveway without a few bags of salt put me in anything but an artistic mood.  On top of that, I needed to head to town to get said salt.  (I only had half a bag on hand.  We don't use it often.)  There was no way I could get the truck out of the garage and down the hill without it becoming a giant toboggan.  

This is when I am thankful my parents live down the road.  Instead of being angry about my day being reduced to the simple task of escaping my driveway, it turned into some time well spent with my dad.   By noonish our driveway was no longer a slide after a good coating of salt.  My dad and I ended up doing my deliveries together and got in some good conversation. 

Taking lemons and making them into lemonade seems to happen often in our family.  Thing is, life doesn't always go our way.  There are so many things we don't have control over.  And, when you live in Canada, you're plans are going to get sidelined now and then by winter weather.  C'est la vie.  Grin and bear it.

Three snow days this week means it hasn't been a very productive week for me period.  Instead it's been a week filled with good moments spent with my kids, one of the good things about snow days. Nothing fancy, fun can be simple and free.  Who doesn't love a good movie marathon?  (I am no master of sitting still, usually I am working on a sewing project while watching and discussing what I love about the choreography and characters.  We've watched the Pirates of the Caribbean series through once again.  Think warm tropical thoughts.  Why not an adventure on the high seas?  Who doesn't love Jack Sparrow's spontaneity and charisma?  Does he plan things or is he just that lucky?  Lol!)

Productivity is such a focus these days.  I fall into that trap so often.  One of the first questions asked when we meet someone new is "So what do you do?" Being home, much of what I do is invisible to the outside world and when that dreaded question comes up in conversation, I feel like my answer isn't all that exciting.  The fact that I cleaned my house or made my own jeans feels trivial in comparison to someone mentioning they teach, they heal, they solve the mysteries of the universe. 

To my children though, I am important.  Being a stay at home mom is no easy gig.  I end up wearing many hats.  Sometimes, it means getting a little creative to make things work.  For me, staying home wasn't as much choice as necessity.  My son had a rough start to life and needed extra care.  It's what our family needed to do to make things work.  

What we do and can do can shift so quickly.  I am sure I wasn't alone in just trying to escape my driveway yesterday.  Circumstances change.  Health changes.  Babies arrive.  Kids become teens.  We grow older.  What we do can't be the only thing that defines.  Who we are matters.  How you respond to life makes all the difference.  Dreams of youth don't always pan out.  Sometimes you have to trudge forward and forge new dreams.  Leave the driveway late to start your day at noon.  Work away at writing a novel. Spend your day with your children because the snow is blowing and wind howling outside.

If life is only about what you accomplish or making dollars, it might never be satisfy.  The storm of striving for more is a dangerous thing.   At some point it becomes an act of chasing after the wind as Solomon would say in Ecclesiastes.  You'll never catch it.  Grasp at the air and open your hand to view an empty palm.   Rail against the wind, try to run through it, two steps forward and one backwards.  

As in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, like Captain Barbosa, what good is it to consume but not enjoy the taste.  To take a different meaning, sometimes it's good to slow down and just be in the moment.  I have a habit of making myself so busy because of I long to recapture what I’ve lost because of the way life fell, I have to keep refocusing on what has gone right.    Hopefully my career will come, my own niche business will work out, novels will get finished and edited.  Sometimes striving has to be set aside for a breather.  Children grow too fast.  Relationships take time and nurturing.

It’s better to savour the little things you do have, then mourn the larger things you don’t.  Take time to do the things you love with the people you love.  I’m a work in progress just like this writing project.   Time to leave this page for another day.  I apologize, this entry is billowing out at the seams with tangents and full of loose threads.  

Sometimes we need a good snow day to really see what’s important.  

Coffee Hour #2 Have a little faith

Jan 23, 2019

The following is only a pin prick into a bulletin of my thought process.  It's a topic needing more than an hour of mulling over, but this is my caffeine induced journal entry for today.  This is my crumb of thought and my intent is not to upset, but encourage contemplation.  

Parenting teenagers means I often have interesting discussions.  Atheism came up the other day.  A heavy topic to write about while slurping coffee this morning and a view point I admit I struggle to wrap my head around myself.  I live by faith.  With what I have gone through in life, the existence of God for me is an absolute.  For others near and dear to my heart, it is not.

One of my kids' friends told them that they don't believe in God and thus do not have faith in anything.  I told my children even atheists must have faith in something.  It takes faith to believe God does not exist just as we have faith that God does.

At some point our knowledge ends and we must have faith in the interpretations we make of our world, just accept things are the way they are without burning out our finite minds spinning through circular logic in search of an irrefutable landing pad, the quest for concrete basis for everything.  I'm speaking of the basic construction of nature, our perception of existance.  It's not really basic either, it's fabulously and wonderfully complex.  

Ever study fractals?  Random insert here, but pretty cool!  Repeating pattern made up of repeating pattern upon repeating pattern, intricately beautiful.  Look them up!

We grains of sand struggle to fathom the entire desert when we see but one small part of its ever shifting existence as the wind carries us where it may.  It's impossible to see the whole glorious picture as a finite being.  Just imagining is like falling down a rabbit's hole as you try to wrap your mind around it.

Faith as the dictionary puts it is having confidence or trust in something, a person, a belief, in God. Strangely, it also lists obligation to something.  Am I obliged to believe in something?  I guess.  I have to believe that the chair I am sitting on will support me and that the ground will not suddenly sink beneath me in.  I must in order to move in the physical realm -equal and opposing forces.  I must push off in the opposing direction to move in the direction I desire, go backwards to move forwards.

Faith is believing in things unseen, things you can't fully explain.  No one knows everything, not even the most educated and intelligent among us.  The expression, 'the more you know, the more you realize you don't know', comes to mind.  The more educated we become, the more years of study, the more specialized the focus becomes, the more we realize there is to learn.

So at some point taking a leap of faith is required where our knowledge leaves off explanations.  Faith that gravity will continue to keep them grounded.  Faith that the sun will rise again the next morning.  Sounds silly, but can you explain every action of the universe, or further the interaction of universes plural and their gravitational effects on each other, the fabric of time?    

(Time is a favourite topic in our household for many reasons, from the constant battle to keep up with the clock to the paradoxes of time travel.  Love, love, love scifi stories.  As I write this, I am wearing corduroys with the Millennium Falcon embroidered on my back pockets.  And yes, I admit I make my own pants.  Sorry for the tangent.)  

Faith in the knowledge they have been presented with by their predecessors is correct, from the macroscopic to the microscopic.  Faith in the premises they ground their logic on.  The chemist can explain molecular interactions to a certain level, the physicist can explain or theorize the interplay of those molecules and the forces holding them together to a certain scale, increasingly minute.  I love science, but at some point science requires faith.  At some point the explanation stops and we accept what we are told, whether it be at a high school level of study or a Phd.  

Proving or disproving God lies in perception of data and which interpretation is more desirable.   Theories formed from observation or mathematical extrapolation. Either an ordered universe comes from God, a controlled big bang, or an ordered universe spins from a disordered kaboom.  

Random luck results in the building blocks of life meeting and mixing leading to genetic perpetuation of favourable traits along an evolutionary tree.  If aliens seeded life here on earth, who created the aliens....chicken or the egg, repeat.....hmmm.  Sorry, I admit I am a little bias on this one.  I believe in an infinite designer of universes.  Not meaning to ruffle feathers here, my point is none of us were present at the point of the world's creation, let alone the cosmos.  No matter how you believe it happened, it is an act of faith to believe in an explanation.

So the atheist is required to have faith in the idea that God does not exist.  Hopefully my kids walked away from our family debate with an understanding of how they might explain their own viewpoint and turn it into an open discussion with their friends.  They have a great bunch of friends who are thinkers and I love it!  

We come together from different walks of life, different beliefs and trying to clout one another over the head into submission of following the same beliefs is not showing love in the least.  We can love each other and strive to understand one another without demanding conformity under the threat of rejection.  Humanity is a tapestry of beliefs and cultures entwined and beautiful in its own right.  It's a shame when threads become tangled into terrible knots to the point of hatred.  In conflict, we end up seeing only our differences instead of how fundamentally we are the same.  

My point in all this is not to persuade or dissuade you of your beliefs, rather to get you dear reader to think, have faith!

I believe I have had enough coffee today.  This entry has taken a second cup after lunch to finish.  I'll be writing about a lighter topic tomorrow.  Phew!

Coffee Hour#1 -Cause Caffeine could create confidence.

Coffee Hour #1  
Jan 22, 2019

Well, if I am honest, for the last few months I have been struggling with writer's block.  Well, maybe that's not entirely truthful.  It's more of a confidence thing.  I have had many failures in life and quite a few things feel like they fell apart in my hands and many seemingly simple aspects of life end up becoming complex.

When working on long term projects, like novels, it's easy to get stuck in the doldrums and sit forever without a fresh breath of creativity to fill your sails and send you on or maybe it's more that life gets so busy it drains any creative drive before you sit down at the keyboard.  I think for me, it's been the latter.  The stories are screaming to get out, but I wall them up in the name of duty, responsibility.

Maybe it's more the fear that I could write for ages and not a soul would ever remotely be interested in reading my stories.  It's a silly fear because I have nothing to loose.  Write or don't write, the cost is the same.  I am not nor have I ever been the queen of popularity.

So once again, I am starting small.  Whatever I can write while drinking my morning java, I am going to post.  Time to take this blog in a different direction and maybe I'll get over my fear of getting back on the horse, forge new patterns of behaviour, open up one of my manuscripts and dream again.

I am not one for New Years Resolutions and this is not one.  I'm simply attempting believe in writing again.  I've given myself to many reasons not to.  As with sports, sometimes it is better just to do and not think in the moment.  As I tell my kids, don't attach any emotions to the action.  Don't dread it.  Don't consider things hard.  Just get moving.  Just get to it.

What do I have to loose anyways?  The drive to write stories wells up until the point of desperation, until the dam is going to burst and I am so frenzied trying to get everything else done in life that I feel  washed away before I've started, until I can't sit still.  Thoughts flow like the water in a torrential river named time.  A deluge of ideas wash through my fingers as grasp for paper cups to catch them in.

Why don't I let myself write?  Self perception, mainly.  I am my own worst enemy.  Considering my humble post in life as a stay at home mom, I battle the ideology that I should cook and clean for my family, making our home safe harbour in the stormy outside world and yet, the hurricane is blowing within me.   Growing up on an extended family farm and rising to work with the sun and playing only after it has set has left its stamp on me.  Don't be a grasshopper, be an ant!  Idleness is folly.  Reading and writing will remain leisure activities as they don't feed or house you.  I should be doing things that have a guaranteed return for my family.  Necessities of physicality are a beast of a task master.  If you're not moving forward, you're falling behind.  Are they not drivers of most actions if you really break it down?

I see what needs doing all around me.

So I hesitate.  I put off writing while I finish chores only to find that the kids are home and it's time to start supper and all the while the storm silently rages on for me.  My husband comes home and the house is alive with activity.  I batten down the hatches and keep the gale at bay.  Candle lit in the window in hopes of time for my own creative outlet returning.

I love my family.  I love my husband.  I know these moments with children in the home pass all too quickly.  Spending time with them is time well spent.  I am a cancer survivor (right smack in the middle of my university years-a key hinging point in my life.)  Life and health are treasures not to be taken advantage of.  My boy's life almost ended at 2 days old and he lives with some extra challenges.  Another twist in the road I am on.  Everything in balance and my problem is I give my time away easily.  
(And I am just not good at saying "no" when I am asked to help.  I'll admit I enjoy being able to help others.  There are have been many times I needed help.)

I am a mom.  I am, or, I was a scholar and an artist.

This battle, this duality of titles leaves me scrambling.  So I pick up a pen and save a sentence for later and maybe later happens much later than I would like.  I lived through a few things and I know control over life is an illusion, but it does help focus and make decisions.  Rage against the storm and even best laid plans come to ruin.

Perhaps it's the beauty unpredictability of life, the depth of feeling that develop character and make for better stories and deeper understanding.   What are stories but a tale of characters confronted with problems?  Ideas are birthed from problems and failures.
Shapeless and soft clay molded into a vessel that holds a wealth of water.  Standing water grows stagnant.  A vessel needs to be poured out and refilled to stay healthy.  I need to let the stories out.  For the sake of the act,  for the need to open my hand and let the torn bits of paper take flight,  grow hard like clay baked in a kiln and not fear negative responses.  

Maybe no one will ever read this, but it's been set free.  A form of communication or is it if it rests in silence?   A tree falls in a forest and no one is present to hear the sound......  Nevertheless, my coffee mug is empty and writing a blog is much cheaper than therapy sessions.   I am a survivor and the wilderness is vast so I'll keep on climbing over boulders.  Maybe my words can be a bridge for someone else.