Fear and Bears

I went to the Rockies over a year ago with my husband. We had a great time, hiking, hanging out and generally enjoying being in the magnificent Rocky Mountains. They are definitely one of the most beautiful and haunting places in our wide world.

I used to go there often when I was a young woman, and the mountains gave me a feeling of peace and confidence I've remembered often throughout my less peaceful life. So I was surprised to hear the many warnings about bear spray: how there were so many bears, how aggressive they've become, and how everyone should be on high alert and carry bear spray.

There are excellent arguments for and against carrying bear spray. 

Arguments For: bears have changed over the decades. Apparently they have gotten much less afraid of humans and perhaps they've become more aggressive, and perhaps the populations have grown. And, why not? It's easy to hook on to your belt and easy to deploy if you need to.

Arguments Against: for decades people have been living, hiking and exploring in the Rocky Mountains and we've always learned that making noise or travelling in groups and following simple rules will avoid nasty incidents with bears. Also, most people obey traffic laws but every so often some poor law-abiding soul gets hits by a car.

I did a very unscientific and completely informal poll on a Facebook group I belong to with over 25,000 members. It's a trail running group, all women. I asked them whether they carried bear spray in bear country, and who had ever had an encounter with a bear. Some of the women had indeed had encounters. No serious ones. Some of the women carry guns. Most of the responses were along the lines that most bears are afraid of humans, and that life itself can be risky.

Life can indeed be risky. Just last week I heard that a bunch of people were forced from their homes by an adjoining state bombing their country. My heart is pretty broken. A maternity hospital was bombed and we know of at least one mother and baby who were killed. How does that make any sense at all? As a midwife, we said brightly to each other "Meconium happens", until a baby actually died and then we realized, yes, the shit actually can and does hit the fan way more often than we would want it to.

But all of this is just begging the question: when is it smart to be afraid and when is it dumb to carry bear spray? Fear is necessary for life: we avoid dangerous things by working through from fear to avoidance to survival. But we can also get too cautious in life, and our fear can prevent us from living our lives properly. 

Balance is the key, but where do we learn how to balance this tightrope, this knife's edge we call life? And how do we teach our children that balance? When part of us only wants to create a soft cushion around the child so they'll feel no pain? Of course we fight against that urge in ourselves, because at the same time we know that humans need to experience richness in their lives, and part of that richness is darkness too. We've all heard the trope about darkness and light. But it's true. As Alan Watts says, if you want the Yang, you gotta take the Yin: more Yin, more Yang. 

Give me those Rocky Mountains, hold the bear spray. No, wait, YOU carry it, I'll skip blindly ahead. 

Now play this song, close your eyes, and remember everything is fine.

  

Shields, magic, bubbles, screens

 

One of the key qualities that a doula or a midwife seeks to make use of during her journey with a woman as she births is the ability to create shields, bubbles and screens. This quality is akin to magic, and it is hard to access and even harder to use skilfully. 

1. Shields can help prevent a birth attendant from bringing her own baggage to the birth room. To do this, we must place the birthing mother at the very center of the experience, so much so that our own desires, opinions, concerns, and emotional reactions do not really matter. At the same time, we must be constantly aware of the health and well-being of the mother and child, but not in an emotionally infused way. Rather, we have to notice what is happening, much like a Buddhist will notice emotions as they drift past during meditation.

2. Bubbles are wonderfully useful and I made so many of them when I was working as a doula in the hospital setting! A bubble is a protective sphere around the birthing woman. It can include her partner, you as the birth attendant, her midwife, her mother or whomever, but its main purpose is to maintain an emotional or spiritual "space" within which the birthing mother can find her way. Often the woman giving birth has other people's ideas and opinions floating around in her head, which can detract from the intensity of what she needs to do. The bubble will often give her the chance to be fully aware of what her body is doing, so that she can stop thinking through the event.

I will create a bubble by visualizing, but also with physical closeness to the woman (eye to eye contact, light massage), and also with carefully chosen words and a physical distancing (turning my back) from the people outside the bubble. Sometimes it will be necessary for the woman to move to a different room in order to fully accept and embrace the bubble.

3. Screens are effective when there is a danger of you, the birth attendant, becoming emotionally engaged with another person in the birth room. You must erect a mental screen so that your exchange with the other person doesn't infect the atmosphere in the room. For example, if the birth is taking place in a hospital and the nurse is feeling lonely and wants to chat about the patient in the next room, I always like to erect a friendly screen so that the nurse doesn't feel rejected but she knows that conversation isn't appropriate. On the other hand, if a member of the staff is being abusive to the birthing woman I will erect a very strong, impenetrable screen that shields the birthing mother and her family from the anger or ugliness that is taking place. This can be very difficult.

These methods can be used outside of the birth room as well, in stressful situations in all walks of life. Just get your magic on, and you can create a peaceful dwelling for yourself and those around you.

Decluttering and Re-Imagining

I have been de-cluttering my spirit over the past few months. I had descended into some bad habits over the years. If it only takes 30 days to initiate and maintain a habit, imagine how difficult it is to shed twenty years worth of bad habits!

But I realized that the best way wasn't in fact to navel-gaze for the rest of my life and try to figure out what I should keep and what I should throw out. The best way, for me, was to grab the toilet brush between my teeth, and to turn my back on habits that didn't make me happy, and to march into the sunset, toilet brush firmly held to remind me.

De-cluttering can mean anything at all! For me, it means moving towards play and saying "YES". It's so important to play. Ooooh, we are taught to feel so guilty all the time. I'm trying to break down my deep feelings of "having to be busy". If I'm not busy, what the hell am I taking up space for? What a silly idea. Plants aren't busy. But I'm not a plant. hmmm. 

I'd like to do these things: 

• freedive in beautiful water
• climb Mount Kilimanjaro
• work as a midwife again
• go into space and see the blue jewel of earth
• kiss my grandchildren as often as possible
• run long, long distances
• organize all my books into subject
• learn more about birds
• go dancing
• visit all my friends all around the world
• learn about the constellations
• spend months in the desert

What do YOU want to do?

The Magic of Meditation

I always tell myself I'm going to start meditating, then I do, but I only keep it up for about a month or so before other things become more attractive. Like running or sleeping. I've read a lot about meditation, and I know that physiologically it makes a difference to how our bodies process stress hormones, how our blood moves, and how our bodies function in general.

But since I'm not a meditator, how can I access the kinds of things I want from meditating, without meditating? What do I want to feel? How do I want to change my body and my mind? What's my goal?

My goal is inner peace. My goal is world peace. My goal is a healthier body. My goal is a better temperament. My goal is a better birth experience for women. My goal is to be a better person. My goal is to be the best ......

Hold it right there! "working on yourself", having a "goal" in terms of self-discovery or self-care, or healing from trauma or whatever... these are not useful. Why are we starting at a place where we are intrinsically broken? Why don't we start from that place where we are whole? If you can sit with yourself for one minute and be grateful for ... grateful for just being. For the little things that may give you pleasure in the here and now, then that is good. And that's all it is.

Life is made up of tiny drops in the ocean. Do something, it will have effects. Don't do another thing, that will have effects too. I try to experience that physiological state that I imagine meditating achieves when I lie in bed. I move my consciousness through my body and check where little glitches might be, and then I fall asleep. It's when I'm running that I can free my mind. When I run my goals disappear. I run to get lost. I run to lose mySelf. I run to run.

Health Hacks for the Over 60s

Here are some simple life hacks:

1. be kind to yourself 💖
2. eat when you're hungry 😛
3. do something creative every day 💃 🎶
4. don't get bitter 😞
5. keep your feet happy 👣
6. drink lots of water 💧
7. get at least 30 minutes of exercise a day! 🏃
8. be alone at times but be with people too 👭
9. call your kids 👪
10. do fun things 😀

Well, those aren't really health hacks as we know  and read about them on the internet. "This amazing fruit will keep your skin clear for 90 days!" and all that. But they are basic rules that we forget about over time, and so simple to remember!

Yesterday I had a little meltdown and here's why: Okay, first of all, it's been a hell of a week. Just saying. World news was compounded over here by a humungous flood-style rain, then ice, then freezing rain, then snow. So it was hard to get around. 

I run a cafe with my son, who's obviously half my age. Business has been picking up, in spite of the provincial government's effort to kill small businesses. So I've been busy, and it's the two year mark of a pandemic that none of us planned for. I've noticed that every so often everyone I know, at different times of course, has a small Covid breakdown where the big existential questions come to the fore.

It's been a weird two years though, that's for sure. Our family got together in November, and in the week that we were all together - all five kids and four of their "others" - three of the daughter-in-laws lost someone close to them, and not an ancient old great-aunt either. I've had a series of friends with pretty shitty health problems, one got hit by a car...who gets hit by a car??? And three members of my family had serious ruptures with very close friends. 

So there ya go, and I don't think we are special. It's been a hell of a ride. So anyway, yesterday, I drove home in the snowy ice and backed my car into a snowbank in our driveway from which I could not extricate myself because the snow was on top of three inches of ice.  I never get stuck! I've been driving since I was 18 and I'm a damn good driver! My son helped me get out and I was PISSED. And scared.

Scared? Later in the evening, I was definitely hangry but I just melted down. Because the incident with the car scared me into thinking that I was turning into a weak old lady with none of the strength and sass that I've always had. Driving badly, getting weaker, losing my hearing, maybe even losing my marbles.

It's like being a teenager: you don't know what's happening and you're worried it's going to be fatal. And it is going to be fatal, of course. So I start thinking about how much I can fit into the next thirty years, if I live to 95, and how I would have done things differently, and I go down a rabbit hole of doubt and despair. I look at myself in the mirror, and I'm not young any more! And I wonder how that happened, and why. My dog's snout is all white as she, too, ages. 

Follow my rules: be kind to yourself 💖, eat when you're hungry 😛, do something creative every day 💃 🎶, don't get bitter 😞, keep your feet happy 👣, drink lots of water 💧, get at least 30 minutes of exercise a day! 🏃, be alone at times but be with people too 👭, call your kids 👪, do fun things 😀.

Running Memories

I'm so fortunate to be able to run. Here are some running memories.

 

Lying Fallow

I've had times in my life where I've been lying fallow, waiting for the next cycle to begin. I think I'm just coming out of one of those times. I may have seemed busy, either to myself or to others, but the busyness was a superficial activity like the microbial activity on the surface of the earth. 

In a way, I think I was lying quietly, waiting to capture something that can't be captured. That elusive prey was a feeling of belonging, of being recognized and acknowledged. I lay so quietly, wanting that thing, that I started to forget who I was. So I started to be someone else, who I really wasn't.I started saying yes when I meant no, and no when I meant yes.

Living through the pandemic has thrown many of us into looking more carefully at our lives and our choices. I've been noticing weird parallels and similarities between my life and choices and other people's - people who I would never have admitted a similarity to had it not been for this dramatic event we are all living through.

I went to the desert a few weeks ago. I love it there. I would move there tomorrow if ... 

I love the clean-ness of the air there, not clean in the environmental, physical sense (although it does seem quite fresh), but clean almost in a spiritual sense. The wind blows, the sand moves, the bunnies jump around, the desert truly and clearly doesn't give any indication that it cares about you or notices you, in the sense that you can't anthropomorphize it like a shady tree or a sweet babbling brook.

So the desert gave me a chance to strip myself (figuratively, folks) naked and ask myself: who am I? 

The pandemic has given everyone this opportunity: a chance to be alone, to ponder, to daydream, to change our "normal". Have we done so? No, we have not. 

But one thing the desert always shows us is that there's always another morning, when the wind is blowing and the sand moves lightly. It's not too late to wake up and make a move. It's not too late to recover the land that has been lying fallow. It's scary, though. To be honest with yourself. To say what you believe. To engage in a discourse with others, instead of either deleting people (guilty) or falsely agreeing with them (guilty).

Well, my answers to that age-old question (who I am) were not super clear. The desert doesn't actually give you the answers, it just gives you the peace and quiet so you can try to figure them out. 

• I'm a woman 👩
• I'm a wife 👰
• I'm a mother 💞
• I'm a runner 🏃
• And a Grandmother!!!! 💓

And then there are all the microscopic things that we add on, like extra toppings on the pizza: midwife, writer, cafe owner, saxophone and clarinet player, traveler. I'm good at Trivial Pursuits. I don't like green peppers. I was shocked by the Liberal's reaction to the demonstrations in Ottawa. I don't mind breaking rules if I think they're unjust. I have three Pfizer vaccines in my body. 

Maybe fallow is the time we can separate fact from fiction: separate those things we do "just" to impress others from the things that we do instinctively. Or even the things that we do to impress ourselves, even those things can be recognized by the harsh light of the desert. 

Now is a time in our world when we are moving further and further away from each other. We are drawing thicker and thicker lines between ourselves and amongst ourselves, with little chance of repair. It's time to take some breaths and lie down. Feel the earth under you. Remember what's real. Remember what's true.