Skeletons

Gotta keep working even when you
are gone. Found here

Really enjoying Cris Derkson this morning, the mood feels appropriate for what I wanted to write about today.  I am an analyst both by nature and training.  I think about things and find the fault with them, break them down into their parts and look at ways to make them better.  But it can be a fine line, you can't destroy everything all the time, people don't always want to know the faults you identify and it can be hard some days not to fall into the mindset of breaking the thing to see if you can build it better.  I see analysis as a dance in the shadows trying to find a healthy balance.

I think I learned a lot of my analytical skills from my mother.  I learned from her distance, as the Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote, that the child with a distant mother, will create a world of logic to protect themselves and make sense of things.  I also learned from going to church with her where we would sit in the loft so we could comment on who was going bald, who was not sitting quite close enough to their partner, and who was not keeping up.  It was a spiteful sort of game.  I learned to be very good at it even while feeling bad about the juxtaposition of church and judging others.  But there are moments when analysis can bring personal gifts, both the self analysis that can lead to good life changes, and also those precious insights into where we came from.

My father was a good man in retrospect or at least average.  He always took me for my visitation times.  It was not his fault that I was so poisoned against him, convinced that he was evil.  It wasn't his fault that I spend the hours after a visit in the bath repeatedly washing my skin to get the evil off.  It must have been hard for him to have this child so full of fear, but he always took me with him.  Because of the fear I don't remember very much about him, but one night as I was thinking about him it struck me that he must have really loved water.  He lived on a houseboat or by a lake or pond his whole life and our summer activities were always on or near the water.  Recently when Sophie brought up her affinity with water I could share this insight with her and linked her to the past, to a man I never really knew, but who I could find in the margins of other memories.

I really appreciate that the indigenous worldview has a space for the ancestors.  I missed this relationship in a colonized worldview.  I missed knowing these parts of me and recognizing the people who contributed to them.  I just finished the second book in Dean Koonz's Frankenstein series and it strikes me how we are Frankenstein, brought together from the pieces of our ancestors and animated by blood memory, maybe combining to be something new and other, but never free from those elements we have inherited. What treasures are waiting for you to find to the margins?

Happiness Part Two

I finally finished Looking at Mindfulness" by Christophe Andre .  I am very aware of the irony of really wanting to finish a book on mindfulness so I can get on with reading other things.  However reading this book and some related conversations with Sophie have made me realize that I don't have a healthy philosophy of happiness to teach the children.  It wasn't even something I thought I would need to teach them, but as one is a girl who has a lot of worries who easily finds sads easily she might need a framework to access her happies.
My received framework for happiness was that it was something perfect people had.  They had good money and good lives and they were therefore happy (I wrote about this here).  We were poor and cursed (by gods or previous bad decisions) to be unhappy.  How you felt was not something you controlled, except in perhaps getting more money and maybe becoming one the perfect people.

Artwork by Ellen Uytewaal

But in being more open with people and learning as I age, I know this version of the world is untrue.  Outside looks tell us nothing about the inside state of a person.  That it is in sharing our own cracks and hearing about those of others that we can become stronger.  I am not alone on this journey.  We are each carrying burdens and I have no particular right to be happy at any point in time.  I can work to capture those moments of happy that are in my life, in the ordinary spaces, but I will only make myself fail if I waiting for the perfect moment with "enough" before I count myself happy.

My children love youtube and sometimes I overhear them watching a "draw my life" video.  These are usually crude drawings done while a person tells their life story.  I couldn't understand the attraction to these videos, but more and more I think these are that same as the sharing we doing in circle.  These videos are raw, but they are real.  Many of these people come from hard backgrounds and many are learning disabled.  I wonder if that is the real attraction for my children to see people like them being able to find their space in the world and be happy with what they do even when they did not do well or like school.

So I have found myself the last few nights and in circle this weekend, talking about what I learnt from this book by Andre, to pay attention to the small things, not to expect everything to be perfect and to acknowledge your sadness while remembering paint in all the other colors of your day as well.  I realize that this is a lesson I will need to repeat many times for my children and act out in my life as well.  I never thought of happiness as being something you could work at, it was always binary for me, but even 5% is better than nothing and there is always something in my life that is good. It is not about becoming a Pollyanna and pretending that things are perfect when they aren't, but about walking a balanced red road.

Making things - leather and beads

Took a couple of days of work last week and worked on the house and my own projects.  One of these was the completion of this blue/grey top and the other a leather necklace.  I really liked how the pearl matched with the feeling of the leather.  I just added the pendant part to another necklace and I like how they played off of each other.  It is so good to make something real.  I am continuing to work on the wolf for Runa's moccasins.  She has also asked to have the four seasons represented so I am considerning of different ways to do this.  I am thinking about two directions on each vamp.  Has anyone tried something like that?  It is interesting how clear an idea she has of what she wants, it is just trying to translate that vision that is sometimes imperfect.  But that is life right?

Bits and pieces

A follow up on a show I mentioned last month  "The Guilt Free Zone" which is in a fight with the government to get the tax credits it expected.


We used to read Cracked a lot and we really enjoy the work of David Wong.  On page two of this article he does a great discussion about the lingering responsibilities of having benefited from racism.


Joel shared this article about a young indigenous man competing for a Rhodes Scholarship that was quite interesting.


How about indigenous Dungeons and Dragons?  Read the article here.


Or maybe some indigenous teaching resources? 


Or if you are thinking about Winter Solstice presents how about visiting Tammy Beauvais or Strong Nations?  I am off for a couple of days getting everything in place for Solstice and the winter pilgrimage to Ikea. 

Happiness

I continue to work through  Looking at Mindfulness" by Christophe Andre  which I have written about a number of times here.  I am reading a chapter about happiness and the fear we feel when we are happy as we begin to worry about losing that happiness.  I think that this paragraph by Andre contains a lot of wisdom and is a reminder to turn our eyes towards more mature ideas of happiness.

Autobiographical lace made by Adelaide Hall,
a patient in a mental asylum in Washington around 1916

"Why should happiness always be a matter of being carefree or unaware?  Why should it not also be found where it's needed, on the tragic side of life?  In mindfulness we train ourselves to notice everything, pains and pleasures alike, and to bear and make space for complicated, subtle, disconcerting experiences.  This is what real life is like - not the life we might dream of, but the one we inhabit, the one we cannot escape and which teaches us that our dreams are only dreams."

I grew up with a very dramatic person and life was to be great passions and deep despair.  The two could not intertwine nor find a middle ground.  I have worked hard to change my ideas of sadness away from this extreme, but I realize now that I have not done the same work on my ideas of happiness.  I don't have to wait for everything to be perfect before I am happy.  I can have it now.

Remembrance

It is a funny week with a break for Remembrance Day in the middle.  Lots of folks to remember in the family.  Norman Dale my grandfather was in the forestry corps in WW2 where he met my grandmother who came to Canada as a war bride

James Brady and Anthony Brady via Glenbow

James Brady, my great uncle was initially not allowed into the army as a communist.  Eventually after fighting this ruling he was allowed to serve in 1943.  His younger brother, my grandfather also joined.  Joel's grandfather was a veterinarian in WW2 with responsibilities for food safety for soldiers.

Then if we go back, and depending on the war there are lots who served in India, in the Jacobean rebellion, with Louie Riel, and in the Indian wars on both sides of the border.  My step-father was also a veteran who was very damaged by his time serving.  Both men and women who put themselves in danger to do what they thought was right.  Many thanks to our ancestors.

Unreasonable men and making stuff

This weekend we focused on making stuff.  Runa designed this creeper and I helped to sew it.  Sorry about the dark picture.  It is great to see her designing things and working to have them come to fruition.  She also made a refrigerator for her barbies and food out of sparkle paper.  It seemed like a likely diet for Barbie.  On Sunday she worked on crocheting bracelets for everyone.

In addition to the creeper I created a solstice count down calendar.  Each week is a different relation.  Week 1 is rocks and water, Week 2 is plants and Week 3 is animals.  For each day I am collecting a little item that can be placed in to show the progress towards the solstice day.  I have been meaning to make this for some time so I am very happy to have it finished.  I was very pleased about how the yarn made such nice looking grass.

We also had a nice walk to the park with a picnic after Sophie had a panic.  I was great to be out and crunch through the leaves.  I collected sticks as I want to find a better way to display the ancestors for celebrations.  I quite liked this idea using the sticks to create a boarder.

Link



“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman