Where have all the cowboys/rig pigs gone???

First of all, I’d like to follow up on the last blog post regarding some of the more “controversial” things that were written. I acknowledge that men also face similar issues in obtaining a secure financial position, particularly while we are in the midst of a market failure. I also want to say that I sympathise with this extreme pressure on men to ensure the health and needs of the family, both here and in more extreme patriarchal societies. Having been working on issues of gender the last few years, although in a South Asian context, I realise that similar gender structures still continue to exist here. In particular, the dependence of women on men’s income does still remain, albeit in a less oppressive way. In Pakistan, women are almost universally dependent on men’s income to support the household. In cases of extreme poverty, women certainly obtain informal employment as cleaning and cooking staff in rich people’s homes or in labour intensive work like brick breaking. In so doing, they bring shame upon the family and expose themselves to harassment, physical and sexual assaults.  This is perhaps a key reason for things like the tragic numbers of farmer suicides around the world who have become slaves to big agribusiness and are absolutely unable to provide necessities for their families (a terrible and problematic paradox). I suppose the one difference between the northern and southern context is that here, women actually have some agency to get out and help bring the bacon home if need be largely without fear of being raped on the way to work or from bringing dishonour upon the family. Finally, I am also acutely aware of the career benefits later in life (minus maternity leave) that come along with being a single woman with  no other obligations except herself; work hard and play hard.

Okay now that that is said, let me clear up my intentions with dating, why I have returned to the awfulness that is dating (specifically awful, in my opinion, is online dating), and tell you of my initial experience here in Vancouver with the online dating scene: it’s not pretty.

While the last post was mainly focused on trying to hunt out a partner to set myself up with a double income so I can feel more secure in taking risks like doing a phd, this is not the only, nor the most important, reason.

The discussion with my supervisor described in the previous post was described to me last night over beers by my Brazilian friend, Dais, as perhaps being the final drop in the bucket that caused it to overflow. I have been so excited and happy to be here doing what I am doing, having a little honeymoon period and all of a sudden, WHAMMO!!! One small word making me question what the hell I am doing here?? Why did I leave my friends, my family, my university??? I went home on the bus after this metaphorical drop hit the bucket, trying not to bust out in tears and be the creepy crier on the bus. I wasn’t able to quite articulate why I felt so emotional until I went home, drew a bath and put on a Tara Brach podcast dharma talk about vulnerability. In it she both acknowledges the evolutionary functionality of vulnerability but criticises our aversion to feeling vulnerable or allowing anyone else to know we feel vulnerable. As I soaked in both my feelings of utter vulnerability and my baby-soft chamomile bubble bath, I wept uncontrollably (felt AMAZEballz). Emerging from this bath of vulnerability (which I fully made the choice to sit in) was the realisation that I actually am really uncomfortable with the idea of spending the rest of my days without a man-friend.  However, I must deconstruct this last statement so it doesn’t come across as desperation, inability to be alone or as “loneliness”. Loneliness, surprisingly, is not something I have experienced in a very long time.

Imagine a world where people didn’t latch on to just one other person and then spend all evenings and weekends and holidays together as a pair, to the exclusion of everyone else. Would we then feel such pressure and desperation to also find ourselves a match so that we don’t end up becoming the one that is excluded? I suspect not! I feel that one key reason I feel so much pressure to ensure I find a life-partner (even the term kind of bugs me out) is because that is what everyone else is doing and if I don’t join the band wagon there will be no one left to spend time with because they’ll all be spending time with in their own exclusive pairing. Or pairs will spend time with other pairs and then complain about how hard it is to find other couple friends. In my life, I have been fortunate to be the single friend to a number of couples who have taken me in as one of them, even so far as to jokingly refer to me as “2^nd wife” or their “adopted adult child”. However, they still have their own intimate and real life together after I leave, that does not involve us committing to each other financial support or support in moving cities on the advent of a new career, etc. Furthermore, the permanent-ness of their own relationships is not necessarily guaranteed either, as I am coming to discover.

There’s an old saying: “white people problems”. This actually is a real “white people problem”. If we continued to surround ourselves, live with, and be intricately connected to our parents, siblings, and extended families througout our lives, would these feelings of exclusion and disconnectedness exist here?  Instead we “move away”, buy our own place to live, buy our own furniture and TVs and kitchen stuff, and are mocked by MaClean’s magazine when we end up back living in mom and dad’s basements at 30 years old and termed as the "failure to launch" generation. This is in stark contrast to other places in the world and the benefits of having one’s identity completely wrapped up in a collective identity with a larger family network, providing financial and social security.

So, with my intentions for dating being made clearer and less sociopathic, I rejoin the world of online dating.

This is not my first foray into the throngs of the online dating world. I have tried it a couple of times before for short periods with a negative attitude and, consequently, negative outcomes: me feeling doubtful about the quality of the male species and like I am a total loser at the same time. I have been saying for the last year and a half that I will never do online dating again. I use reasons such as “It is just too goofy for me”, “I am waaaaay too good/cool/attractive for that”, “Oh it’s fine for others but not for me”, “I have never had a problem meeting people in the ‘real’ world”, etc. I always articulated these negative attitudes and how they impacted my ability to open up to the possibility of someone I met online as, “I view them as lame-o for using online dating and then remember that I am also online dating and therefore I am viewing myself as totally lame-o”. Real nice, right? Not only have I been inadvertently judging myself, but I have been judging these innocents who are putting themselves out there and genuinely seeking a partner (or a mommy for their 2 children, as in the case with a lot of the dudes in Alberta).

Here is why my attitude was changed a couple of weeks ago: In a conversation with one of my dearest and wisest friends, a mentor and an inspiration, we broke down my negative attitudes into manageable pieces. First, we are concerned with how the rest of the world views us. Secondly, we attach meaning to finding a partner in the “natural” way; that if we meet someone “naturally” it means we are desirable and if we don’t then conversely we are not desirable. Thirdly, when we go on a date with someone we meet online, we wonder about what the rest of the world thinks of us when we are out with that person, that person we met online. For example, I for years have said that I won’t date anyone under 5’9 because I don’t want others to look at us and think we are a munchkin couple. The implications of self-consciousness are an inability to be in the present moment and focus. My friend shared with me how she herself was going to attitudinally approach her own online dating experience once she starts. She said that she was going to approach each and every man she goes on a date with as an opportunity to practice mindful presence and connectedness. WOWEEEEE! Rather than view each of them as potential partner-meat, she will try to view them just as they were without self-consciousness getting in the way. We could ALL use more practice in mindful presence while in conversation with another. Have you ever been in the presence of someone who is actively engaging with you; when they’re with you they are WITH you and not checking emails/the time/texts on their phone or having their eyes darting around the room as you talk?  It is pure love, even if just for a few hours, and it is a sacred space. This was the “aha” moment.

I proceeded to reactivate my e-harmony account and was happy to have found a really cheap deal. I edited some of my photos, my location, and my occupation, proudly typing in “PhD Student”, proud of possessing this kind of cultural capital. This might have been my first mistake but I digress. I set my preferences: matches only within 20 miles, no religious types, between the ages of 26 and 38, etc. E-harmony retorts back telling me in not so many words that I am actually being too picky and tells me I should “broaden my settings”. “No way”, I think, “I am not quite there yet”. I paid the tab and then sat back in hopeful waiting. In Edmonton, during my previous e-harmony experiences, I would have 10-plus messages in the first few hours from men wanting to meet. Either I got uglier or older looking or whatever but I waited and waited and waited some more and heard nothing for two to three days. What was I doing wrong???? (It is always my fault and something I did wrong, by the way…. vestigial beliefs from previous relationship). I remembered the fact that the demographics in Edmonton are slightly more in favour of women than perhaps Vancouver is. Perhaps less young men in Vancouver are looking for step-moms for their oil-rig-two-weeks-off conceived children or maybe more young men are confirmed ski/climbing/sailing bachelors. Who knows!!??? Disconcerting and a little bit hard on my ego.

I confided in one of my new Vancouver friends about this strange revulsion men seem to be experiencing as a result of my e-harmony profile. She says “oh no one in Vancouver uses e-harmony, you have to download the tinder app, that is where all the hot guys are”. I went home, downloaded the app, had three dates in two hours: confidence superficially lifted! But this is fodder for the next post.

Next stop: the new “Hot or Not” and my newly discovered distaste of small mouths and large foreheads.

The Quest for the Holy Grail: the Double-Income

I have just begun yet another journey: the journey of dating. This one MOST likely won’t result in weird eye, nose, or throat infections or some sort of gastrointestinal cholera-like “issue” or sleeping with cockroaches… or maybe it might! Though it may appear self-indulgent, I want to share this quest for a partner, fundamentally a quest for connectedness, with the blogosphere for three reasons: 1) it is better than talking it out with a UBC psychology graduate student (all I would be able to afford) or bothering my most precious friend resources too much; 2) Because when I am experiencing fear, vulnerability and insecurity, I find solace in hearing other people’s experiences and to find that we are all going through the same shit; and 3) fun to practice non-academic writing (okay so it is MOSTLY self-indulgent but I’d argue that cat pictures are more self-indulgent).  

What is this drive for connectedness that drives us into the arms of another, or multiple others? I have caught glimpses of this connectedness, feeling true freedom, while in moments of meditation or while in the throes of debilitating “love”. I recall a moment of freedom from a little over a year ago, meditating outside at my parents little northern Alberta acreage. I experienced a fleeting second of knowing that I am made up of the same “stuff” as the rest of the universe, the rest of the earth, the other animals (my earth brothers and sisters, as I refer to them while at the same time being shit-my-pants scared of wild animals), the trees that were around me, the wind, etc. I remember thinking, “if I am all of this and this is all of me, how can I ever actually feel like I am alone???”. We are soooo not separate from the universe but rather embedded in an infinite network of energy and intertwining cosmic fascia. Like I said, it was a fleeting moment of feeling fully connected. At the time, I was voluntarily not employed and being cared for and looked after by my mummy and daddy in the forest in northern Alberta where peace and quiet (and Mormons) abounded. To say that maintaining this sense of connectedness was challenging upon re-engagement in society a couple months later is both a euphemism AND a paradox.

For those of you who know me well (and perhaps those of you who do not because, evidently, I am “cool” with telling anybody anything), one of my intentions for the last year and a half has been freedom. Freedom from thinking that my life “should” be different, that I “should” be different, that I “should” be “further along” on the life road map laid out by our culture (think Hasbro’s board game, Game of Life where we were either pink or blue little stick men driving what appeared to be Sebring convertibles). These “shoulds”, according to Buddhist philosophy, are the source of all desire and therefore the source of all suffering. By coming into mindful presence and a peaceful acceptance of the universe unfolding imperfectly perfect we can detach from the concocted story of how things “should” be; each of our lives is exactly how it is, perfect in its imperfectness. No “shoulds”. However these “shoulds” are the product of our culture's value system and are imprinted and profoundly embedded profoundly in our psyches. They are no joke. 

In particular, over the last year and a half, I have been seeking freedom from the paralysing belief that when I find a partner, THEN I can do all the things I want to do. I experienced a traumatically disappointing breakup in the spring of 2012, the kind that causes you to actually leave your body as a self-preservation mechanism with the resulting emptiness being first filled with fear, doubt and bitterness before light and wisdom re-emerge to displace these poisons. One of many pieces of innate wisdom that emerged was that this belief in a partner being a priori to me achieving my goals was a belief I had held for my entire life. This belief manifested in my behaviour as I sat and waited for someone to choose me all the while acting incredibly desperate as I just wanted to get my life “started”. This insight has indeed made the last year and a half the most positive, productive, exciting, and confidence-building chapter of my life thus far.

An event occurred last week triggered my old friends, insecurity and vulnerability and perhaps desperation. I moved to Vancouver a few months ago to begin a phd program. I rent a nice comfortable one-bedroom apartment, I cook nice meals for myself, have some savings for a holiday next year, some savings for retirement, do some yoga, swim lanes at the community centre, sit in nice coffee shops and work, plan my garden for next year, etc. You know, a nice single 31 year old existence as budgeted for in accordance with the increasing income that comes with more and more training. I have yet to be awarded a grant for my studies so I work full-time in 3 separate wonderfully invigorating and challenging academicky part-time jobs. In a meeting with my supervisor last week she first asked if “isn’t just working 2 of the 3 jobs enough of an income for you (2000$/ month)?”. I responded confidently with resounding  “no”. She then tells me that “theoretically you shouldn’t be working so much”. I respond by telling her “I don’t know how to respond to that comment. It is what it is”. This event  may seem like “so what’s the big deal, Adrienne???”. It shook me. It did not sit well with me for two reasons. First, it forced me to remember how vulnerable and insecure my position here actually is right now and then of course I proceeded to dwell on the accompanying worry. Of course, as I often do in times of worry, I totally neglected to remember how insecure and vulnerable my position has been for the last 7 years and how it has ALWAYS worked out. I began to panic, to feel homesick for the security of Alberta and my friends and my family, and even my university there; homesick for connectedness and grounding. Secondly, as I asked around to other graduate students I work with about their experiences with working and supervisor expectations, the majority of them had not had to worry about earning less income while in school. This majority had partners. These women have or had partners in their life during graduate school. These women had a double income household to buffer the insecurity. They then almost all solidified their security by having a baby while writing their dissertations. Babies equal relationship cement (debateable?).  I am simply trying to make a life for myself that does not assume I will ever have a double income. I am very honest about this, but one of the reasons I am doing a phd is not only because I have tended to be good at academia and I find it incredibly stimulating as a potential career, but also because it could one day allow me to earn an income as a single woman that might facilitate me in buying a piece of land in rural Alberta where I can grow a food forest.

All of this has triggered this strange desire to find a partner, as if that will make me feel more secure financially. Ha. Crazy right? Nope. While I am no victim-blamer, I am fairly certain I, along with a number of beautiful, intelligent, still- single friends of mine, am wrestling against a long history and deep-seated ethos of women as the helpless dependent. This historical ethos is perhaps not so historical and, I would argue, still influences the mechanics and structures of our present institutions. This event that has retriggered my fear, doubts, insecurities, and vulnerabilities is the first time in my life that I have ever felt like I may not be able to succeed at what I am doing not because I am a woman, but because I am a single-woman.

Next stop, travelling to the beginning of my online dating/prowling in Vancouver: The crap, the crappier, and the crappiest.

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.