Playin’ The Edge

 I finished reading Karen Connelly’s book Burmese Lessons, about her time in Burma in the mid-90s.  She’s a writer from here in Canada, a country that offers us the luxury of national politics as bland as tapioca pudding.  She goes from here to a country run by generals that is being abandoned by millions of people fleeing as refugees.  Her observations are sometimes really hard to read, a sad reminder of the kind of things people can do to one another.  She also has a keen eye for the basics of what it is to be human in the experiences she’s had.  Here are a couple excerpts:

I used to find the word homemaking vaguely embarassing.  As an occupation, it was an uninspiring potential fate.  But being among Burmese refugees and exiles in Thailand has taught me that it’s no small act to make a home.  Making a home safe enough for a child is the ordinary miracle.  How many refugees on this earth can only dream of it?  The tendency- perhaps from television images, the news clips - is to envision the displaced as herds, flocks, haunted masses carrying children and possessions on their backs, walking away, arriving at makeshift camps only to leave again.  And they are that.  But they are also individual men and women and children with the old human longing: to be held safely in their world.  Each one of them as a name.

People usually try to feed me, so that I now show up to the offices or safe houses with bags of curry or grilled chicken or mangoes, adding to the communcal meal or extended snacks that i know will be offered.  This food giving and food taking is so familiar that I sometimes forget its meaning.  We are taking care.  To take care is the great human act.  It is part of the answer to the brutality that may not touch people here directly but affects them deeply.  On the physical and metaphorical border these people inhabit, it is a daily challenge to take care of themselves, let alone others, but that is what they all do…..each one has done more than survive.  They have remained or they have become tender, alive to their own suffereing and the suffering of their people.  While I try to control my personal longings and berate myself for being too soft, they remind me that my yearnings are as basic as cooked rice.

I know a book about a marriage and family breaking up shouldn’t be on one’s holiday reading list but Happens Every Day  isn’t maudlin and self-pitying at all.  Here’s a bit I liked about finding happiness and good pancakes:

You start to look at the tiniest things to make you feel better, alive.  Anything to give you a moment of happiness.  My friend Eve told me to look at the fallen leaf on the road and try to see even the smallest glimpse of beautiy….One Sunday morning the four of us were at brunch.  It was painful.  We were faking being a family…The place where we were having brunch was actually the town bar, but on Sundays a renegade brunch cook took over the kitchen that usually slung out frozen bar food.  He produced world-class eggs and pancakes.  His specialty was savory pancakes.  I ordered pancakes with asparagus, Gruyere, and ham.  They were served with maple syrup and two eggs on top.  It was a leap of culninary faith to order them…..I did what the waiter told me to and poured the syrup over the dish.  It was sublime.  Somthing about the sweet and savory and the sharp cheese and the runny yolks.  I called out, “Sweet lord these are incredible!”  And I started to laugh.  It was as if I was eating dulce de leche ice cream for the first time.  A bomb of involuntary happiness went off in my mouth.  Josiah didn’t seem to appreciate my enthusiasm, and the boys continued to throw hash browns on the floor and dump the salt on the table, but at that very moment my life was being saved.

I just finished reading The Gargoyle and loved it.  It has stories within a story - good stories too.  And it has a supernatural bend but never takes that part too seriously.  The main character is a cynical old cuss right ’til the end, and I respect that in a main character.   The plot, in broad brush strokes, is about him spending time in a burn ward after a car accident and this chick, Marianne, shows up and starts telling him stories about their “history” together.  

So he’s trying to figure out which particular mental illness she has but is also starting to develop a connection and feelings for her.  On Christmas Day, right before he’s set to get out of the hospital, she brings in a huge feast for everyone to enjoy and he says this about love:

I once knew a woman who liked to imagine Love in the guise of a sturdy dog, one that would always chase down the stick after it was thrown and return with his ears flopping around happily.  Completely loyal, completely unconditional.  And I laughed at her, because even I knew that love is not like that.  Love is a delicate thing that needs to be cosseted and protected.  Love is not robust and love is not unyielding.  Love can crumble under a few harsh words, or be tossed away with a handful of careless actions.  Love isn’t a steadfast dog at all; love is more like a pygmy mouse lemur.

Yes, that’s exactly what love is: a tiny, jittery primate with eyes that are permanently peeled open in fear.  For those of you who cannot quite picture a pygmy mouse lemur, imagine a miniature Don Knotts or Steve Buscemi wearing a fur coat.  Imagine the cutest animal that you can, after it has been squeezed so hard that all its stuffing has been pushed up into an oversized head and its eyes are now popping out in overflow.  The lemur looks so vulnerable that one cannot help but worry that a predator might swoop in at any instant to snatch it away.

Marianne Engel’s love for me seemed built on so flimsy a premise that I assumed it would come apart the moment we stepped through the hospital doors…..but this Christmas Day had shown me that Marianne Engle’s love was not feeble.  It was strapping.  it was muscular, it was massive.  I thought it could fill only my room in the burn ward, but it filled the entire hospital.  More important, her love was not reserved only for me; it was shared generously with strangers….

I used to live above the Trident Bookstore when it was on Argyle street and often when I came home from work I’d feel a Book Urge and I’d go in and browse.  They sell used and off-price new books so it’s like book shopping and bargain hunting all in one, two of my favourite shopping pursuits. 

There must be a reviewer or book blurb writer in town who sells all theiur manuscripts to Trident.  Either they’re padding a measley income, or trying not to get overrun by books with plain paper covers.  I picked up an ‘uncorrected proof for limited distribution’ of Heart Steps: Prayers and Declarations for a Creative Life by Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way fame and it’s been a fave. 

It’s one of those books that I dip into when I need it.  It offers short bits, some God-oriented, some not.  Some on specific issues, some general.   I’ve folded over page corners of ones that grab me because when I’m feeling like crap, it’s those same ones that speak to me every time.  

It’s not about trying to go from wallowing in my pathetic-ness to skipping down the street full of pollyanna-ish platitudes.  Even if I thought that was a good idea, good luck.  My goal is more about allowing the bits in the book to remind me that there *might* be meaning in what’s happening in my life.  That I *might* have what it takes to survive whatever’s going on.   That I *might* be able to trust that things will work out. 

And then if I can find that scrap of hope then maybe I’ll stop doing dumb self-sabotaging things that make life worse, and maybe even make things a little better.  Even if the tiny shift is just in my head, in my outlook, in my perspective -  that’s the best place to start.

Here’s the one I liked this a.m.:

The Universe Funds Me With Strength

In times of adversity, I remember I am strong enough to meet the challenges of my life.  I am equal to every situation, a match for every difficulty.  Sourced in the power of the Universe, I allow that power to work through me.  I meet calamity with strength.  I have stamina.  Rather than draw on limited resources, I draw on the infinite power within me that moves through me to accomplish its good.  I am fueled by all the love, all the strength there is.  Loving strength melts mountains.  I am ever partnered and supplied by universal flow.  Knowing this, I do not doubt my strength.  I am strong and secure.

I read an article on Bif Naked’s fight with breast cancer and her new album.  How do people who are going through chemo do things like record an album?  I’m sure I’d be lying in bed watching soaps all day feeling entitled.  But maybe not. 

I love her ‘tude about the whole thing.  There must be so much pressure to fit your illness into a little box so people can cope with it, most of us are just so uncomfortable with it.  Like it’s catchy or something.

I like how she says that everyone expects you to have an epiphany when you have cancer, but you are who you are, cancer or not.

She mentions on her blog that one advantage of losing your hair is the money you save on brazilians.  She also says it’s a good thing her husband is an ass man

CBC Radio 2 has stopped playing classical music 24/7 because they realized their audience is going to start kicking off soon and playing classical for 5 people is simply not a good use of taxpayer dollars.  So now they play good stuff and I sometimes listen to it on the way to work. 

They’re always careful to tell you the performer, name of the song *and* the album it comes from - often before and after they play it.  They’re poster children for polite Canadians.  It’s also ad-free and there are no annoying you’ll-never-guess-what-I-imbibed-with-my-coffee Kenny, Tina and Ron-type morning show people….ewww…..

I don’t mean to hack on classical, but for me it’s just not the kind of music I want to listen to in the car.  It’s either subtle violins I can’t appreciate over the roar of my 6 cylinder or it’s in-my-face Gustav Holst designed to send me  into a telephone pole.  Thanks, I’ll save that genre for home.

Anyhoo, they played Sarah Harmer’s “Basement Apartment” this morning.  Yes, this is another fan-girl post, obviously I’m in a mood.  I love that song, and I’ve played it in yoga class too.  I thought, if I could write lyrics like that I would be a more happy and fulfilled person - I know, hard to imagine that’s possible.  But until then, I’m so glad we have Sarah:

Basement Apartment

You live out where the street ends
In a basement apartment with one of your friends
And the tap drips all night
Water torture in the sink
The furnace is burning
But it’s still cold i think

I can smell the bleach
That they use in the hall
But it can’t clean the dirt off of me
It’s seeping under the door
In across the floor
It’s starting to hurt

Everytime I breathe
Everytime I try to leave
Everytime I breathe

Now the toaster sticks
And the empties are piled
I haven’t been up the stairs in awhile now
I gotta wash the sheets on my bed
Gotta watch the things that go unsaid
God I wish we’d leave it at this

And every evening you open the door
You come down
There’s nothing like watching tv
all night underground
And no one is watching me slide
Below street level
Barely alive

Now we live out where the street ends
In a basement apartment just like our friends
We always said that we were different
But you know now that we weren’t
‘Cause there’s holes in all the bottles
And my lungs hurt

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

On the weekend I saw Some Kind of Monster, the documentary Metallica did about making their last album and I’d highly recommend it.  I know what you’re saying, “Um, do I look like a raving metal head?”  No you don’t and I’m not one either but stay with me before going back to listening to your Zamfir pan flute music.

 I got the impression that they brought in the cameras to grab some footage that could be jammed onto a concert DVD or something.  But instead the cameras caught the band coming into the studio after losing their bass player, spending a bunch of years apart with serious creative differences and no material.

Their management hired a $40k/month therapist who specializes in helping performers. Where the creative process had been driven by two of the band members in the past, he helped them figure out how to make it more cooperative, so they’d have a “now we’re all working on lyrics” time together.  And what a process it was, it looked pretty painful at times and the album still took 2 years to create.  With the challenges they had, it probably wouldn’t have been made at all without the intervention.

These guys worked hard on not just doing the “stock” thing but keeping it interesting and different and it meant being excruciatingly honest and going to the edge with each other.  Their challenge seemed to be about channelling the anger and emotion into the music and not at each other.  They even invited in the guy who was thrown out of the band in the early days who talks with heartwrenching emotion about his regrets for screwing up - it’s brutal to watch.  By the end the band has bonded in a way you can’t imagine at the beginning.  Once they finished the album they became a unified front dealing with all the external stuff that comes into play post-album release.

If you have any interest in music, it’s a great insight into the creative process.  They’d listen to the playbacks, find the nuggets in a song and nurture them into interesting hooks.  And the process seemed to be succesful, they ended up with 30 songs to choose from for the album.

The part that really got me was midway through, James, the lead singer goes into rehab and pretty much comes out a different person.  He goes from being sullen and disconnected to talking through some pretty heavy shit, which must have taken serious guts with the cameras rolling. 

You see him dealing with his “new life” trying to do things sober for the first time.  Pretty challenging for someone whose stage persona was all about consuming beer.  But at the end of the film there’s a bit from a concert where he’s really connecting with the audience and you can see that it’s more effective than the beer bit probably ever was.

So before going back to your Zamfir records, check it out.

I got Zero 7’s latest, Simple Things and it is so awesome for yoga.  It’s good lush chill-out background music with enough beat that’s never too in your face.  It’s smooth without being schmaltzy.  I used almost all the album, there’s a mix of vocals so you don’t feel like it’s all the same stuff.  Here’s how I remixed it for my 85 minute yoga class:

1. Destiny - sexy vocals and a nice groove for 5+ minute warm up
2. Give it away - a good smooth beat for starting sun salutations and standing poses
3. Out of town
4. Simple Things
5. Red Dust
6. Likufanele
7. Polaris
8. In The Waiting Line - here’s where it starts to slow down for some nice easy stretching
9. This World
10. Spinning

And I finished it with 10 minutes of crystal bowl sounds I got from itunes for Savasana.

Today’s quote is from Nora Ephron’s, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being A Woman.

Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.

It’s a good book, I recommend it