Seeing the sights in my own backyard

"To see the world in a grain of sand
and a heaven in a wildflower,
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."
-William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

I am travelling right now. Not travelling in the conventional sense but travelling in the psychological sense. I have gotten lost for hours on a given afternoon out here at my parents' place exploring their little three acres of pasture and lush poplar forest. My wonderment and amazement has been the same wonderment and amazement I have experienced in "exotic"destinations. I am seeing this bounty of northern Alberta for the first time! The diversity of beautiful wild flowers, the fantastical mushroom "forests" that pop up through the earth in the forest, the discovery of the perfect robin's nest, barn swallows, the face off between me and the deer who eat the tender new growth of the 80$ apple tree I bought my parents a month ago.... all of these things bring me such joy, challenge and wonder. I have been coming to visit my parents here in Cherry Grove for more than a decade and it is as if I am seeing it for the first time and falling in love with it. I think I've just always spent my holidays here watching "What not to wear" marathons on TLC. I am, as a general rule, a very perceptive person. However, this has really shown me how much of my world I have been missing. But it's never too late to steep a pot of tea from the leaves of the northern bluebell growing in the backyard and wander through the forest in a race to eat the wild strawberries before the bears get them.

In the Ralph Waldo Emmerson's essay, "Nature", from 1849, he postulates that the amazement and wonder we can feel in nature does not come from nature itself but that we percieve nature through the lens of our state of heart and mind. He says:

 "it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both....For nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colours of the spirit."

Nature, then, and how we experience it in a given moment, could be used as an indicator of well-being. I guess, these days, I am doing good.

Acting like a "traveller" in settings that I have usually seen as banal, mundane, "been-there-done-that", has triggered a real genuine love for my home and opened up an entire undiscovered world.

These big beautiful yellow butterflies are EVERYWHERE out here! They are breathtaking creatures!

Hazelnuts?!

My forest of giant toadstools

Wild roses and northern bluebells

Wild peas! I found a harvest of these (but are poisonous of course...seems like such a waste)

My neighbour's horse, Regal, grazing at my parents' house

Crossing the mountain of anger to get to the meadow of forgiveness

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” -Ghandi

Forgiveness. Forgiveness has been the theme of the day for me today. I know in my heart that I must let go of the blame, or as Buddhist/psychologist scholar Tara Brach says “put down the story of blame”, in order to have an open and free heart. I know in my heart that this is what I need to do to move on in peace. My head, however, has been telling me a different story over the course of the last two months since the devastating and traumatic end of my relationship.

After I returned home from Bangladesh and I allowed myself to begin to feel the pain and hurt, the anger, bitterness and hate also arose. So much so that I was lashing out at my generous parents, who just wanted to help me get through this, and I would weep out of fear that I would always feel angry. I thought of all those who live in a state of constant anger and I thought how horrible that must be. How did this anger and bitterness manifest in my thoughts? I was thinking things like “I hope he ends up alone forever” and “I just want to put a curse on him”, or something stupid like that. However, I recall writing about these feelings of anger in my journal and I wrote that letting go of this anger and forgiving him, forgiving myself and feeling forgiven for the part I played in the downfall could only happen if I made the choice to engage in forgiveness; to make forgiveness my intent. Interestingly enough, I actually had a very difficult time deciding to start making my intention to let go of the anger and begin the process of forgiveness. Because I generally try to be dedicated to being an “adult” and try to stay away from making childish decisions based on my emotions, I finally rationalized that I must make the choice to forgive because the alternative is childish and poisonous. And as someone who desperately just wants to move forward from this, grow from this and, for christ’s sake, learnt SOMETHING from this, I understood that harbouring this negativity would definitely not be conducive to moving forward as a more compassionate, open, loving and engaged human being.

What has helped me immensely on this journey of forgiveness is the compassion that has been born out of the experience of pain. This compassion began emerging shortly after my return home to Alberta and my mom came home one evening to report that a beaver had been hit by a car and was still alive with his little paw and head grasping at the air as if he was saying “oh god please god somebody help me I’m in so much pain, I am suffering!!!”. I started crying. Then it further emerged as I took on my new job at a local greenhouse and, at first, I viewed the 4 other staff members as pre-menopausal, post-menopausal, middle aged, irritating-as-all-hell and as a homeschooled religious fundamentalist teenager. After lunch time conversations with them, I began to view two of the women as amazing breast cancer survivors, one of the women as simply sadly insecure, and a lovely teenager who is intelligent, confident and craving conversation regarding local, global and moral issues. After understanding their individual contexts , how I approached them changed dramatically. So how has this helped me in beginning the letting- go- and -forgiveness process? When I take the time to understand the context of another person, a fellow human being, perhaps an ex-partner who has hurt me, the empathy and sympathy and compassion emerges in ways unimaginable.

This morning the forgiveness began. During my meditation I was drawn to the idea of highlighting specific memories in which either he or I was hurtful, and for each one asked for forgiveness from him, asked to forgive myself, and gave him my forgiveness. I chose to undertake the process in this manner because it seems to me that as I’ve watched myself in moments of dwelling on things that he should have done different or I should have done different or should have responded differently, they always are rooted back in specific memories or instances of hurt. I felt the need to individually acknowledge my role and his role in each situation, to forgive myself. And for each situation, I acknowledged that we both did the best we could with the tools we had considering our individual contexts; all the baggage that comes from childhood and adulthood. Although me and him will never directly make amends as I’ve committed to starting a new chapter of life, I acknowledge that this process is for my heart only.

I know I will likely have to repeat this process a number of times over the next months and maybe even years. I suspect I won’t wake up one day and feel like I’ve let it all go and I am all good now. Khaled Hosseini, in his beautiful book “The Kite Runner “, described it poetically and wrote:
“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away in the middle of the night”.

Reality Bytes

This morning’s meditation session led me down the path of pondering the idea of being dedicated to reality. Dedication to reality is a concept put into my little impressionable head last night before bed as I was perusing M. Scott Peck’s famous book “The Road Less Traveled”, which I have read and re-read a number of times over the past few years. This 1970s tome postulates that growth and learning from all of life’s ups and downs can only occur if we are disciplined. The four dimensions of discipline, Peck says, are  (1) delayed gratification (going through the crap before the good stuff),  (2) acceptance of responsibility (rather than being the victim all the time), (3) dedication to reality and (4) balancing (balancing discipline with flexibility).

My mind began to wander during the meditation to some very precise memories of some of the “encounters” I had with my former-partner. Without going into too much detail, all I will say is that if I acted the way he sometimes did towards me during some of the challenging moments I too would not like myself very much. This is not to say that I do not acknowledge some of my responses to him as childish and, in retrospect, could have been done better.  And in the midst of remembering these moments between us, I had to laugh because I had been so blinded by the desire for this relationship to work that I hadn’t acknowledged how awfully horrible we could treat each other sometimes. Then, there was a sense of peace.

I had to ask myself then, why would I have tried to hide these painful truths about our relationship from myself and from others? Embarrassment that he or me or both of us had behaved so badly to each other who we claimed to love so deeply? Fear that it might actually be true that he and I could not work even though we believed each other to be “soulmates”? Fear that Elizabeth Gilbert was right in her heartbreak manifesto “Eat Pray Love” that it is actually too painful to be with your soulmate as they are a mirror off of which all your deepest, darkest flaws are reflected back onto you in a dazzling display of neediness, desperation, childishness, possessiveness, etc?  The painful truth is that, without some psychotherapy undertaken by both of us (but mostly by him, of course), we as a couple would have been more miserable than not. But this truth is painful and there is a massive aversion to showing pain or feeling pain in our society. We want everyone to believe at all times that “I’m good”. So when we aren’t actually “good” we shove it all deep down and we lie to those who care most for us and we lie to ourselves. These lies we tell ourselves about our various situations lead only to suffering.

In yoga there is also a focus on being dedicated to reality. As a general rule, human beings perceive the world through a thick fog of incorrect perceptions (called avidya) and these incorrect perceptions manifest in daily life in four ways: ego (asmita), desire (ragas), rejection of negative or unknown things (dvesa) and, lastly, the mother of all manifestations of incorrect perceptions, fear (abhinivesa). It is said that it is not so much the presence of the thick fog of incorrect perception that we notice but it is when the fog suddenly clears, you perceive something for what it really is without judgment or attachment and you peace washes over you. Perhaps this is also what is often termed an “aha” moment. Yogic principles teach that all things are real all the time, even our incorrect perceptions are real. However, yogic principles also stress the importance of being open to dynamic and fluid realities, like perceptions; how we saw something today does not mean we have to see it that way tomorrow or even in ten minutes… we are not bound to our maps of reality in any given moment.

For me today, this acknowledgement of reality helped me feel accepting, peaceful and to feel a few moments of freedom. But if I’ve learnt anything from yoga, meditation, love and, well, life in general, it is that at any moment when the ocean is calm and clear and safe and the sky is blue, there is always the possibility for inclement weather... this is our human-ness. This is why it is so important to relish in the moments of stillness.

"Dreaming with a broken heart"

I have been shown the impermanence of all things; dreams, desires, goals, people, relationships, ideas. The grief and mourning that comes with the inevitable dynamism of life, love and loss has led me back to my home, a hamlet in Northern Alberta. In brief, for those of you who read my travel blog post in early April, not but two days after that post where I announced so happily that I was awaiting the arrival of my love who would be sharing the experience in Bangladesh with me, he unexpectedly ended the relationship. This, I would come to realize a few weeks later, has been the biggest devastation of my 29 years-long life. Not because I've been desperate for a partner for so long, but because I felt the loss of the long-awaited contentedness and the subtle and powerful confidence that comes with being in love with the person who has committed their life to you, who has promised to care about your life in all its minutiae. I felt the loss of the life we had planned together. I felt the loss of my expanding network of kin that I've desired for so long as a person who comes from a small family. Ultimately I lost all feeling of connectedness for a brief period. For those of you who have felt this place of disconnectedness from EVERYTHING, understand that real grief and mourning surely follows. They will creep up on you in the quiet moments when you least expect it for weeks and months following this disconnectedness and if you don't have tools to work with them in a productive way, it becomes harder and harder to breath.

The few days of phone conversations that ensued during the final moments of the relationship, me in Dhaka and him in Scandinavia, were days where the ground dropped out from underneath me, time no longer existed, all things surrounding me faded into nothingness and it was just me, alone. All things I believed and felt to be secure, safe, grounded were gone in an instant and I was, what felt like, a million miles away and 100 year time-difference away from my dear wise and insightful friends, my family who has been my family my whole life, my dog, my fuzzy housecoat, my comfortable bed, the sunshine, the woods..you name it. I took to my Bangladeshi bed, pulled my mosquito net around me and allowed myself to feel nothing but a numbness. I had no support I could turn to there, no place to "get away" from it all and go for a nice walk, no place to go for a drink (muslim country), a time difference that found me up all night waiting to be able to talk to people at home and waiting all day for people at home to wake up so I could contact them. I barely ate, was barely able to muster up the strength to drink enough water (I owe my health for that week to the woman I had moved in with and had known for but a day when this all happened; a stranger shared her food with me, forced me to eat french fries and apple pie everyday for a week straight and asked me how I was doing multiple times per day..oh yes and I also owe my sanity to sleeping pills and the bottle of scotch that I had bought for a gift for him upon his arrival which I drank with my apple pie).

With no regrets and with an acknowlegement of my incapacity to continue on with the work I was to do there as I wasted away in my bedroom prison in Dhaka, I asked my employer in Ottawa to get me home as soon as possible and I ended my contract there and made my way back to my parents' place in Alberta. Some would say that I shouldn't have let a man have this much power over me.... I'll know for next time. Even the great pre-feminist feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of "Vindication for the Rights of Women", the mother of the author Mary Shelly, tried jumping off a bridge after a man she loved and followed around Europe for a number of years ended the relationship. Love, or rather the end of love, makes even the toughest, revolutionary, courageous and stongest women mournful for a time.

Here I am, living in my parents' basement (which I'm finding is not necessarily uncommon for people of my age group and educational level...weird). Upon my return to Alberta, after a week and a half of numbness in Bangladesh watching all the seasons of House MD repeatedly, I wept. And I wept some more and I wept some more. I wept myself to sleep for a few nights (way healthier than sleeping pills). I sat with the anger, the frustration, the grief, the sadness, the doubt. I just let them be and I have slowly breathed into all of the negative and have let go of so much and the heaviness has largely lifted. As theologian Matthew Fox says "we pick up our pain as we would a bundle of sticks for a fireplace; we necessarily embrace these sticks as we move across the room to the fireplace; then we thrust them into the fire, getting rid of them, letting go of them; finally we are warmed and delighted by their sacrificial gift to us in the form of fire and heat and warmth and energy".

 My pain's sacrificial gift to me is a hotdog roast. Thank you very much, pain, my old friend.

I spent the first month reconnecting with family, friends and working in a local greenhouse tending to ornamental flowers (not as glamorous as it sounds). I now know how to identify a number of ornamental flower/greenhouse blights as well as a number of species of hybrid flowers. And now, before I return to Edmonton to take up some work at the University as a research assistant, I have the next month free to fully engage in my recovery, thanks to the generosity and caring of my parents' who allow me to live free in return for decadent suppers and desserts which I LOVE doing so the "rent" is cheap. I took up meditating in the last month or so. This, combined with yoga and fairly intense exercise and playing lots of music and also a fourth reading of "Eat Pray Love", were the catalysts initially for bringing up the really deep deep guttaral emotional pain that could barely be breathed out of me when I left Bangladesh. Hope has slowly returned to me. I can genuinely smile and laugh again. But vulnerability, fear and grief creep in for brief moments every day if I lose perspective for just a moment. There is much healing to be had still but I'm on the right road.

 Me and Cubby. She's definitely proving more and more to be my little "Earth Sister".

 My first cupcake making experience: Lemon cupcakes with a blackberry buttercream icing.

My parents' house is on a 3 acre lot outside of town which is quite forested and there are beautiful trails to walk on in the area and wonderful, retired neighbours with beautiful gardens who have time to drink wine and eat cheese out in the sun any given afternoon of the week. I've taken to drinking in the forest, the wildflowers, the birds, trying to identify them all. The delight that this creates in me is the very same delight that being in love created in me. Although this delight with nature is fleeting right now, it helps remind me that the delight I had while being in love with him is still there. It didn't simply come from him but it has always existed. This brings me much hope. Today, as I sat outside reading, I relished in watching a couple of hairy woodpeckers chasing eachother through the woods, my mama hummingbird who is constantly at the feeder, back and forth, back and forth to her nest, a spider dangling from a single thread, butterflies flitting gracefully about and the auburn coloured squirrel who started a staring contest with me. This connectedness, this reminder of life, all life, are so marvellous, so awe-some and so utterly comforting. The fear of being alone for the rest of my life dissipates in light of these moments of connectedness.

Me and mom planted an apple tree. My first tree.