Balancing In The Sea of Creativity

I find I am unable to focus on multiple projects at once.  Multi-tasking between creative platforms seems beyond me, and so while I’m immersed in the world of acting, my writing becomes the forgotten child crying for attention.

It feels like I’ve been in rehearsal for forever, there are so many characters living inside me, like multiple personalities, that it’s beginning to feel a bit over crowded.  It’s a high-class problem, but my writing child is crying louder and louder and it’s getting harder and harder to put her back to bed.  I’ve got one more play, one more character to bring to life before I can slip out the backstage doors of the theatre and bring my writing child out to play again.

Finding balance is always a challenge for me.  Living a creative life can be exhausting instead of fulfilling.  As an actress I never know when the next gig is going to come, each job feels like it might be the last, each opportunity too good to pass up.

I’ve gone from Queen Margaret in Henry VI and Mistress Page in Merry Wives of Windsor, to Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire, to Annie in Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests.  Great characters, all of them!  And now I’ve been given the opportunity to bring a character to life for the very first time in a two-hander written by a wonderfully gifted playwright friend of mine for the upcoming Vancouver Fringe Festival.  Grace, in the world premiere of Slumming, written by Barbara Ellison.

I’ve gone full out since early spring doing what I absolutely love, and jumping with both feet off the highest cliff into my deepest fears and my biggest, thickest blocks.  And I really feel in need of a deep rest.  This month of rehearsals and production meetings, heading towards our opening night September 6^th, I’m working to find balance.  Giving myself permission to sit quietly and read out-side, surrounded by my over-run garden and allow my physiological, spiritual and creative batteries to recharge.  Finding balance.  Creativity needs some alone, quiet time.  Simmering time.  Meditation.  Balance.

Dreaming of Forgiveness

I’m in Starbucks ordering a chai tea latte, I think it’s the one on Ambleside down the street from Gyra’s office, my therapist during those dark days full of hurricanes and touch down tornadoes.  Or maybe it’s the one in Caulfield village, in the same plaza as the Safeway where I used to run into her, where we would stop and smile and talk in the cereal aisle, me on my way to the vegetable section, she on her way to pick up bread, or perhaps something from the cold meat section.  She’s a carnivore, I know that.  No vegetarian could wield a flesh cutting knife with as much precision as she.

But I’m allowing myself to become sidetracked.  My Judge quickly backing up my Victim.  It’s good to give them a voice now and again, to let them speak, to hear them out.  To acknowledge them before gently guiding them back to their seats.  It’s my Avenger’s turn to manage the show.

So, back to my dream.  Did I mention I’m dreaming?  It actually begins in that trance world between awake and sleeping, the best birthplace of Active Imagination.  I’m lying on my back in the wee hours of the morning, warmly comfortable nestled under my blue and yellow quilt and I’m barely aware of the early morning dawn birds just beginning their Spring concert.  I’m floating in that magical realm of almost, but not quite awake, slowly replaying the film of my last dream, which must have included elements of my used to be marriage because suddenly and seamlessly I’m in Starbucks ordering my soy, no-water chai tea latte and in walks S., otherwise known as The Other Woman, or during those dark tsunami days (and some days since) as Witch Woman.  So named because even then, even so wounded and full of unrecognized anger I could not bring myself to give her the name that rhymes.

I’ve been here before, in this netherworld of Active Imagination.  In this particular scene.  Always in Starbucks.  Always ordering or waiting for my chai tea latte.  Sometimes with a friend, but most times alone.  And always, always, always unprepared to run into her.  Mirroring my awake fear.

What will I say to her when first I see her again.  After.  After she deceived and lied and manipulated and connived and betrayed.  So many Ands.  After she lived for two years having an affair with my husband while making nice Safeway small talk with his wife.  So many Afters.  What will I say to her?  It’s been six years since I woke up to see the Red Bird of Betrayal flying over my life.  Six years since my marriage blew up and six years since I’ve seen Her.  We live not far from each other, yet since I gave her my husband, I have yet to run into her again.

In all my other reverie world Starbuck encounters, my words don’t come as I want them to.  In that, I mean my shadow self always steps forward and disempowers me by blaming and shaming.  My Wounded Child and Victim join hands crying out and pointing fingers,  “You are a Black Hole sucking energy from everything around you, spewing out toxic free radicals in your evil witchy wake!”

Once again I’m at Starbucks, this time I’m waiting as the barista makes my drink, when I turn around and there She is.  I’m the director in this Active world of Imagination, so she stands silently.   Caught.  There is no more avoiding me.  I have my BlackBerry in one hand, to appear important, supported and needed.  I hold the silent support of all my contacts in my hand, my big, huge team is fanned out invisibly behind me.  My other hand is warmed by my soy, no-water chai tea latte, a symbol of my own self-love, care and nourishment.  I’m standing in Starbucks, where I often sit to journal or to write.  We are on my turf here.

  I turn to her and say, without attachment, as if observing my thoughts as in meditation, “What you did     was wrong.  The pain you caused was overwhelming, not just for me, not just for my four children, but it rippled out further than you can imagine.  You acted without any care or compassion.  You lied, deceived and betrayed.”  I look at her and shake my head, turning to leave, “It was inexcusable and so very, very wrong.”

“Can’t you let it go already?” She demands, “You should learn to forgive and forget.”

This time my answering words come without force, without conscious thought, through a channel of Grace of understanding.  I am looking at her with sadness and compassion, finally seeing that she is buried so far underground that she can’t see the light of Truth that surrounds her.  “You have no idea whether I’ve forgiven or not.  Forgiveness has nothing at all to do with you; it’s something I do completely for myself.  The truth of what you’ve done can live side by side with Forgiveness.  One does not negate the other.”

Then I’m climbing a sturdy, narrow, wooden ladder and with a hammer I have broken through the ceiling so that the ladder can now rise higher and higher through the jagged opening into the sunlight above.  “I’ve broken through!” I exclaim with a smile just before I wake up.

I chuckle as I think again of the ladder leading to my “break through.”  I’ve been searching and working on Forgiveness for years and finally ‘get’ it.  I don’t need to forget the Truth of my wounds in order to Forgive.  I don’t even need to release the pain of those wounds, I need only to detach.  To release means simply to ease out the hook of attachment and let my emotions swim and swill in the swamp with the rest of life’s injuries.  If needed for my work as a writer or actor, I can cast a hook into that swamp and reel it back up.  But this time I’m in conscious control of the fishing rod and can choose which worm to catch and when and where to release it.       

I’m not finished with my forgiveness work and it will remain a daily practice, but now I have a strong foundation to support me.

Building a House of Brick ~ Respecting My Boundaries

I’m sitting in my morning meditation, my wee pup, Bailey curled up on her cushion beside me.  It’s a peaceful morning and although the sun isn’t shining, it’s not raining either and the neighbour’s gardener hasn’t brought out his industrial strength leaf blower yet.  Nothing but my monkey brain to wrestle with this morning.  I smile as I realize I’m mind-writing this blog as I meditate.  My best writing quite often comes when I’m not writing.

Just as soon as I become aware of how peaceful it is a loud rumble fills the room.  A semi-truck has driven through my living room right into my stillness room, the engine booming and reverberating until I can feel my blood thrumming with the noise.  Free radicals of noise pollution.  I hear Bailey perk up beside me.

I bring my awareness back to my breath, breathing in one of my favourite Blessings from St. Theresa of Avila.

May I be at peace

May my heart remain open

May I be aware of my true nature

May I be healed

May I be a source of healing to others

May I dwell in the breath of God.

Twice more I breath in the blessing.  My attention is pulled to the engine outside my house as it belches and coughs and seems to become even louder.  A tiny tentacle of realization slithers and sinks down into my depths, bringing with it frustration, annoyance and more than a little bit of apprehension.  I will my peace to come and my heart to remain open.  Instead, I lean forward and tilt open the lid of my zen meditation clock to see how many more minutes I ‘have’ to practice breathing in peace.  Four minutes to go…..stop or continue sitting….stop or continue….I lean forward again, press the off button and shut the lid.

Trampled boundaries.  Again.  I hate confrontation.  Which is the same thing as saying I hate standing up for myself.  Wow.  I’m sitting at my desk, typing these words as the realization of that filters through my being.  I don’t like standing up for myself.  No wonder my boundaries are being breached, even I don’t respect them!

I spend the day listening to the thrum of the generator, tempering my annoyance by turning my music up louder.  I say to myself, “This is good having a TV pilot filming here, maybe one day I will be cast in it.”  “You said you support the Arts here in Vancouver, well, here is a chance to show it!”  “It’s not that loud, you’re just being sensitive.  They have to park the generator somewhere!”

I argue back, “But you were very firm when they polled the neighbours that you were concerned about the noise of the generator.  You told the young PA that you had trouble sleeping and worked from home.”

I amaze myself at how easy I call on my shadow Victim archetype and slip automatically into “Woe is me, how can the big bad bully do this to me?”

These words are the sunshine that clears the fog away.  I had no idea I called in a low-lying fog to surround me whenever I felt my boundaries being assaulted.  A thick haze that obscures even the strongest wall.  Here I thought I was building a house of bricks to protect me from the big bad wolf, and instead I see that my house is built of straw.

Night falls and still the generator rumbles, straw flying everywhere as the walls of my house disappear.  The wolf howls even louder through my bedroom window, as the filming continues into the early hours of the morning.  And still I keep silent, plugging my ears with small bits of squishy dense foam, which does nothing to block the booming base of my attacker.  It appears I’m willing to even compromise my health by sacrificing my much-needed restorative sleep, all to ‘keep the peace’ and not stand up for myself.  How much easier it is to see with the light on.

The weekend comes and the beast sleeps outside my door.  I walk with Bailey around the block, stepping over the thick, long, black wires that snake their way down the street from the film set to the hulking white truck parked opposite my driveway.  It turns out I’m not as excited about film sets and the accompanying entourage when I’m not actually a part of it; when it disrupts my ‘civilian’ life.

Sunday evening arrives, and with it the trepidation of the next morning’s waking of the fire-breathing dragon.  How this generator cur grows in my imagination and what power I give to it!

I’m having dinner with Lynn and my Victim is regaling her with all my illustrious “poor me” generator stories, pulling the blanket tighter and tighter around me as I speak.  She puts her fork down firmly and says, “No.  This is not right.  You told them not to park the generator truck where you could hear it and they did.  Someone dropped the ball and it’s not your fault they did.  Phone the production office and tell them to move it.”

My heart actually picks up speed as I hear the truth in these words, as my Victim steps out of the shadow and peers around into the light, knowing that I have to start mixing some concrete to lay the bricks to build a proper boundary.  One that doesn’t imprison me, but rather, frees me from the wounds suffered from weak boundaries.

Monday morning and I am awakened by the roar of the generator turning on.  I slip my feet into my red slippers, wrap myself in my fuzzy green bathrobe and head downstairs with Bailey.  Plugging the kettle in for tea, I look out the window at the pouring rain outside and the poor, orange-vested film crew carrying this and that from the grip truck.  They aren’t the enemy.  Neither is the grumbling, rumbling truck they’re walking past.

I pick up the phone and dial the film production office and ask to speak to Gordon S., the Locations Manager.  As I do so, I’m surprised at how easy it is.  I’ve stepped into my Femme Fatale Business Woman, donned my Ralph Lauren custom designed suit, twisted my hair into a perfect French roll, and am tapping my manicured fingernails against the table as I wait.  By the time Gordon S. is speaking to me, my spine is erect and my tone is firm as I explain the problem and my expectations for a solution.  As he backtracks and apologizes, dodging and weaving, I continue to stand firmly, yet kindly, in the conviction of my boundaries.  I hang up the phone, having received both his promise that the generator will be moved, as well as his personal cell phone number and that of his on-set assistant.  I’ve left him with my assurance that I will be following up.

The tea is seeping and I’m once more paddling about in my housecoat and slippers, but my spine still carries the vestiges of my Femme Fatale.  I’ve laid my first row of bricks and mortar against the huffing and puffing wolf.

Two hours later and a much smaller, quieter, off-truck generator is moved into place further down the street.  The rain has stopped for now and the bright sunshine of illumination warms the knots in my shoulders.  My story has changed and I have stepped out of the shadow and am animating the positive traits of the Victim.  She is the Guardian of my self-esteem, guarding and protecting the growth and awareness I am making.  My Victim is now a reminder of my own strength, of the power of my personal boundaries.

I will build no more houses of straw!

Seeking my Lover…

*I started this the middle of December!…..rather than begin again, I decided to simply jump back in and carry on. :-)*

Caroline Myss Lover Archetype card. Light Attributes: Great passion and devotion. Unbridled appreciated of someone or something. Shadow Attributes: Obsessive passion that harms others. Self-destructive devotion.

This month I am tasked with animating my Lover archetype, in companion with my Seeker and Pioneer.  In October I made a Sacred Contract with myself to spend the next year working to pick open a fate lock in my life.  One that is keeping me locked in a lingering pattern of pain and suffering and away from a path of Destiny.

Working with my archetypal energies and with the support and guidance of my Soul Sisters, four much cherished women working on their own fate/destiny journey, I am using the method and manner I’ve spent many months learning from Caroline Myss at the CMED Institute.  I’m passionate about the process and the deep inner work.

“Take your Lover out for a walk, to places you’ve never been.” Jim advises me via phone from Los Angeles.  I like the suggestion, but as I look out my window and see the ever-present rain coming down, I pull my blue, fuzzy blanket closer around me.  I can feel the cold dampness seeping through the window right into my bones.  Jim has never been to the rainforest we call Vancouver.   It’s close to Christmas and my kids are home from school bringing with them their exuberant energy as well as bags of laundry, dirty dishes left by the sink and expectations of a stocked fridge and pantry.  I’m wondering where my Lover archetype will find the time to take solitary walks.  I’m wondering if my Lover archetype likes walking in the driving, freezing rain, because I’m not too sure I do.

Two days later I’m walking down streets I’ve only ever before driven.  I’m seeking new and different, simple pleasures through the eyes of my Lover archetype.  The wind picks up and I wrap my scarf tighter around my neck.  At least it isn’t raining.  Bailey, my little Yorkie mixed mutt is pulling me ahead with her long red leash, criss-crossing the narrow road from one tantalizing smell to another.  She ‘sees’ through her nose.  I’ve brought my camera with me, thinking it will force me to slow down and walk more mindfully.

I stop to take a picture of a wooden gate with a wrought iron curlicued design set into it, through which I can see the ocean and the tip of Point Grey beyond that.  Almost directly across the street is another gate, this one an older white picket framed between two dense bushes, the fence on either side missing several pickets and falling into disrepair.  I love them both equally, each one an invitation to a secret garden and my imagination is set free to make-believe entire new worlds beyond.

I’m standing in front of the falling-down white, picket fence, my mind full of English countryside and orphans and faeries and my fingers fumbling to pull my gloves back on, when I almost drop my camera.  Bailey is pulling at the leash and nearly tugs it out of my hands along with my camera; something she’s been doing the entire walk and my frustration is growing.  How can I walk slowly and mindfully, taking the time to notice new, simple pleasures if she keeps tugging me to go faster!  Plus my hands are getting colder and colder every time I take my gloves off to take a picture.  And my hair keep blowing across my face and sticking to the lip-gloss I put on to keep my lips from drying out in the wind.

A car honks.  I call Bailey back to my side of the road and smile at the woman in the blue Volvo station wagon as she drives slowly past.  She smiles back at me and waves her fingers off the steering wheel as she passes.  Something inside me softens and releases as we share a smiling connection.  Patience.

The wind picks up some leaves and brushes a new, enticing scent along Bailey’s nose.  Her Yoda ears perk up and she’s once again trotting off, following the leaf down the road.  I smile again, tuck my camera into my pocket and let my wise, furry four-legged joy lead the way.  I allow the Grace of surrender to soften my mind’s tight control over how I think this walk ‘should’ go and instead embrace, with gratitude, what IS happening.  Now I’m actually seeing instead of looking.

Two weeks later I’m lying on the floor by the fire at my sister, Shari’s, house, warming my back after spending the day cross-country skiing with my brother and his family.  I’m alone with my book in the living room, but I’m surrounded by love.  I listen to the gathering in the kitchen as Shari and my sister-in-law, Amy, chop the vegetables that will go into the vegan spaghetti sauce.  My mom, brother and a couple of the older cousins sip wine and visit, sharing about their day.  A roar of laughter tumbles up the stairs.  My five-year old nephew, Fyn, has just scored in a rousing game of knee-hockey with his older cousins.

The Lover Archetype is all around me and I think back to my moments of frustration, wondering how I could possibly find the time to animate the Lover within me during such a busy month.  I chuckle to myself as Bailey trots over and drops her new squeaky toy onto my head.

It’s not about finding the time to animate the Lover Archetype; it’s about recognizing, with gratitude, the many wonderful, simple pleasures that already surround me every day.  I don’t have to seek the Lover within, I simply have to allow her to see.  Surrendering to the joy in the moment, instead of looking beyond to what hasn’t happened yet.  Surrendering to Now….with Gratitude.

My own little Yoda, Bailey

 I could not lie anymore so I started to call my dog “God.”

First he looked

confused,

then he started smiling, then he even
danced.

I kept at it:  now he doesn’t even
bite.

I am wondering if this
might work on
people?

Tukaram

There Once Was a Potter Named Dan

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air.  They are where they should be.  Now put the foundations under them.  ~ Henry David Thoreau

There are days when I’m drenched in sadness.  When melancholy seems to seep into my being even before I’m fully awake.   Grief can be like that, even seven years on.

I’ve had a restless night of very little sleep and when I roll over and finally open my eyes to the morning it is with the foggy brained headache of fatigue that I’m all too familiar with.  I close my eyes and mull over the remnants of my last dream, a variation of one that keeps recurring over and over again.  I wonder what it means, what my Self is trying to wake me up to.

I’m searching in the dream for the fingers of depression I feel stroking my skin, but find no answer.  I reach over and unplug my BlackBerry and automatically do a cursory check of my email and suddenly I’m flooded with memory.  An email from my brother with one word in the subject line, “Dad”, and I don’t even have to read it to understand why I’m filled with a sense of loss.  My mind has finally caught up with what my body has already remembered.

My brother’s email reads, “Hey guys, I remember it like it was yesterday.   I always will.  Raise a glass with me.”

My dad was one of those dad’s who could fix anything.  He was a jack-of-all trades, reinventing himself many times over, from working in radio and television, to drumming in a jazz band, to becoming a chicken farmer, but underlying every incarnation lived the heart and soul of an artist.  When he became a ceramic artist, creating a collection of handcrafted dinnerware, he finally came closer to marrying his passion to live a creative life with the everyday need to earn a living.

As I’m writing this I’m drinking tea from a mug thrown and glazed by my father.  I wrap my hands around the grooves that circle the outside and I imagine his hands as they crafted this mug and try hard to feel a connection; to feel my father.  I do this every time I sip tea from this mug and every time I am disappointed when it feels just like every other mug in my cupboard.  My father is not in the mug he made, my father is in me.

My dad visits me in my dreams sometimes.  Not often.  Not nearly enough and never, ever by my willful wishing.  When I lost my father I lost a vital link to the stories of my childhood.

Shortly after the birth of my second daughter my father and I are driving to visit my older sister who had recently moved to Saskatchewan.  My two young daughters are finally asleep in their car seats when my dad says to me, “I sometimes thought when you kids were young and life was stressful, how cool it would be to be able to meet your babies at birth, to look them in the eye and hold them and love them and then say to God – I love this baby.  This one is a perfect keeper, but I’m not quite ready.  And then put the baby up high on the shelf until you’re ready.”

I turn to him and am filled with an instant knowing connection.  He has just put into words exactly what I sometimes feel when I’m overwhelmed with the responsibility of mothering two young souls when I’m just nicely out of my teens.  And I’m suddenly struck at how young my dad was when he first became a father…and again and again times five.  With a big shift my perspective has permanently changed.

As we continue to drive the ever-long, never turning prairie highway, we continue what would become regular conversations that explored our shared history.  Together, throughout the years, at every visit we work and play to excavate our separate, yet conjoined truths behind almost every incident that might have seeded psychic wounds or joys.  This is the greatest gift my father gives me and the greatest loss I feel in his physical absence.

It is this loss I’m feeling most acutely in the early summer, the Gemini months of my dad’s birthday in May and my own in June.  My four children and I are celebrating my birthday in the first days of a rainy July, after my second daughter returns for a month long visit from Memorial University in Newfoundland.  Patrick and I are meeting his twin brother Braden, and my two daughters Meghan and Kate in Meghan’s apartment before heading out for dinner.

I open the apartment door and before I take two steps inside I’m greeting with three voices stopping me in my tracks, “Close your eyes and stay there!”

I stop and close my eyes as Patrick brushes past me to join his brother and sisters in their whispered planning.  They are becoming famous for their surprises and while I stand there with my hands now covering my eyes “in case I peek something inadvertently,” I’m silently thinking that nothing can top the gift of love that I’m feeling right this very minute.

But I’m wrong.  At Braden’s okay I open my eyes and step fully into Meghan’s apartment.  All four kids are looking at me with anxious and expectant expressions on their faces.  As I walk into the room and fully see the gift my children have given me I am flooded with emotion so strong it almost drains me of the energy needed to even stand.  Love and gratitude pour with a gentle strength into the hole of loss I’ve been feeling of late.  Tears are the only words that flow until finally I’m able to voice one word again and again.  “Wow.”

“You win,” Kate says to Meghan.

“I told her you would cry,” Meghan explains.

I can’t take my eyes off of their gift.  My children have given me the gift of my father’s legacy.  Propped before me are two large pictures.  One is an unframed liquid graphite finger painting done in grids by my son Patrick.  My dad is smiling as he guides the small hands of his two young grandsons as they work together to throw a pot on his wheel.  I can see and feel the love in my father’s smile and eyes.

A Potter's Legacy. Artist: Patrick O'Neill

The second large frame holds the gifts from my other three children.  Meghan has photo-shopped a picture of her grandfather working at his wheel and turned it into a Warhol like work of art.  Kate has produced an incredible sketched likeness using the same photo and the two of them side by side are striking.  Braden, my creative writing child, has hand-written his poem on linen and as I read the words I feel something within me begin to loosen, like a long ago rusted gear suddenly oiled and cleaned.

My Father's Legacy

A deep understanding fills me with warmth as I recognize my children for the teachers that they are. I hear my father speaking through my son’s words.  I don’t need to seek my father by wishing for a dream visit or by wrapping my hands around the mug he made.  My father lives in my children – in all of his grandchildren.

          Memory of Daniel Taylor Artist Hero Love Smile
                                    ~ Braden Daniel O'Neill

So, tell me now (I beg! I plead!)
              What is it you remember?
For your mind has moments in its caverns,
              With things distilled like coloured patterns.
These things have wandered, seeped, and spread
              Into the fingers of your soul,
                    Throughout the web within your head.

And here, this man, he sits all day,
              He prods and pulls and folds his clay.
He folds his arms, sits back at night,
              Content and happy.  Proud.  All right.
This man (his body) has passed since his arrival,
              Reduced this world by one less laugh and smile.
And he's reduced me too, by what he gave,
              Has swelled my shell (my soul), unending waves,
                                 Unending waves........
                                                                                      unending waves...
He's reduced me to a smile,
              Which conquers canyons every year.
He's reduced me to a courage,
              Which held my passions, quelled my fears.
He's reduced me to a love,
              Which turns to strength when things are hardest.
So he's reduced me to an artist.
                    And I've reduced him to a hero.

With his hands in yours, your eyes in mine,
              It's turned into something surpentine.
Unfolding lives from molded clay,
              That wheel he spun still spins today.
He holds our hearts and sits in minds,
              He folds our waves in patterned caverns.
                 He's made his glaze to shine through time.

Every mortal loss is an immortal gain.
The ruins of time build mansions in eternity. ~ William Blake

A City Defined by Thugs ~ Finding the Bully Within Me

I’m sitting at home manning facebook and twitter on my laptop while the breaking news on TV flashes images of burning cars and a raging riotous mob in the downtown streets of my beautiful city of Vancouver.  Echoes of 1994 all over again, only worse.  I am disgusted, disheartened and more than slightly worried.

My two sons are “over the bridge” having gone downtown to watch game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals on the big screen in front of the CBC building on Hamilton Street.  The last I heard from them was at the end of the first period; a quick phone call telling me they were heading to watch the game at their sister’s place a couple of blocks away.  Today is their 22^nd birthday, a day meant for celebration, not for roving riots of punk thugs and their accompanying complicit silent observers.

I send a carefully worded mother text asking where they are and telling them to be aware and to be careful.  Fifteen minutes later I’m rewarded with a reply, they’re safe in a bar in Yaletown.  Inside and safe from the mob.  For now.  My mother worry won’t settle down until they’re safely back home on this side of the Lion’s Gate Bridge, however.

There is a flurry of facebook updates among my friends as well as in my twitter stream -social media once again leading the pack on the frontline of breaking news.  It’s also the platform to share our absolute and complete disgust at what’s happening within our city.  I am drawn into the discussion when fear and speculation turn into generalities and judgments.  The need to understand the apparent inexplicable is an over-riding human characteristic.

My friend Kristina posts an update, “What happened, what’s going on, that a generation of young men are looting and creating violence? That is all who I see all over downtown tonight. Is this how far we have come? Are these the leaders of tomorrow?”

Within minutes I reply back to her, “We must remember that there are scores more of other young men who did not partake in the disgusting display of narcissistic destruction – who are just as dismayed as their elders…..I applaud each and every one of them. They are the leaders of tomorrow.”  I am thinking of my two sons and the thousands more like them who would never deign to act with such selfish disregard for human life and property.

With the bridges now closed by the police, my two boys walk well clear of the thinning downtown drunken mob to the Waterfront station and catch the seabus to the North Shore.  Within an hour they are walking in the front door, quiet and subdued, having witnessed first-hand the dark shadow of the bully archetype.

I spend a restless night with interrupted sleep and awake in the morning neither rested nor restful.  This morning, more than any other, I head to my yoga class without a clear intention but with a very strong need.  A need to find calm through the physical practice of mindful hatha poses.

I think of my sleeping sons as I settle myself onto my yoga mat and as we begin our morning meditation my intention streams through with strong clarity.  Compassion.  I dedicate this morning’s yoga practice to forgiveness and compassion towards those who have destroyed so much and hurt so many.  As my yoga teacher, Chris, says, “It matters where we put our energy.”  And I choose to put my energy into cultivating compassion and kindness.  I choose to find joy in this world.  To shine a light into the darkness that overtook our city last night.

  I’m driving home, replenished and relaxed and am listening to the CBC radio as they discuss the whys and wherefores of what will forever be known as the 2011 Vancouver Riot.  I smile as the announcer speaks of the hundreds of volunteers who brought brooms and garbage bags in the early morning and joined the city sanitation department in cleaning up and reclaiming our city.

Caroline Myss says in describing the Bully/Thug Archetype that “symbolically, our phsycial bodies can “bully” our spirits…” and that “underneath a bully is a coward trying to keep others from discovering his true identity.” (Which is more than slightly ironic given the mass amount of cell phone documenting going on last night.)

The Shadow attribute of the Bully was shown only too vividly, in all it’s dark thunderous colours last night in the smashing and burning of cars, in the broken storefronts, in the looting and violence.  It was shown in a more subtle and perhaps nefarious manner in the “mob mentality” of the onlookers who watched silently and sometimes cheering as the active thugs smashed, crashed and burned.  To stand by, cell phone outstretched and do nothing is to act in accord with the Bully.  Silence and inaction in the face of wrong doing puts you in the same camp as those doing the wrong.  You are complicit in the crime.

I’m contemplating thugs and bullies as I’m driving along the Upper Levels highway, feeling complacent in my existential distance from them.  A light blue van speeds by on my left and comes to hug the bumper of the car in front of her.  Tailgating so closely that it would be impossible to stop in the event of a sudden braking.  “What a bully,” I think to myself.

Suddenly I’m aware of every time the Bully archetype has manifested its shadow side in my behaviour.  The times I have acted with impatience while driving.  The times when my defensive city driving has boarded on intimidation driving.  At once my heart fills with gratitude towards last night’s bullies and thugs for holding the mirror up to myself.  Who am I to judge?

My friend Lynn writes on my facebook wall, “how unbelievably sad this morning!! As my lovely daughter said “what’s sad is that people are abusing our freedom”…..this was the evening after we spent dinner with William who is now on his way back to the Sudan to make a difference and to empower people. Many of those people have never experienced freedom…..sigh….my heart is truly heavy!”

I want to say to Lynn to find the gift that last night’s thugs left us.  The chance to look at the Bully within each of us; to become conscious of even the most subtle wisp of shadow smoke that filters through our lives.

I want to say to Lynn to cultivate buoyant joy and to be a harbinger of happiness to those around her.  It is with joy and lightness of being that the dark shadow that roared through Vancouver and into our souls will be swept away.  Fill your heart with light and let that shine through, for we are surely seeing the Light attribute of the Bully archetype glowing with every sweep of every broom held in this morning’s clean-up.  Our spirit is stronger than we think.

Caroline Myss says “the archetype of the Bully manifests the core truth that the spirit is always stronger than the body.”   That is the core truth.  The spirit is stronger than the physical manifestation of the shadow.

As Chris Clancy said in ending our yoga class this morning, “We must be brave enough to allow our light to shine.”  And remember, it matters where we put our energy.

And hold on to the truth that these thugs that infiltrated our streets, our hearts and our spirits will be caught and punished.  Apparently these Bullies were also without brains as they committed crimes in front of hundreds of facebooking, tweeting and you-tubing cell phone filmmakers.  Their faces and actions caught and uploaded for all the world and the Vancouver Police Department to see.

To Thine Own Self Be True

**I wrote this in 2006, shortly after the illusions of my life were suddenly and painfully illuminated.  Then, as now, I strive to live in the truth.

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Veracity is adherence to the truth.

Veracity is the heart of morality  ~ Thomas H. Huxley

Love the Truth

What does it mean to live in the truth?  Is it true that to be dishonest is to be amoral?   Can you keep a secret, or tell a little white lie, and still honour the truth?   I find myself growing wings and embarking on a journey to discover what living in the truth means.  It has become my quest, my search for the Holy Grail, the only way I know to learn and grow from the tsunami that has hit my life.

Nine months ago, as my twenty-four year marriage was exploding and my world was dissolving and evolving without me, my soon-to-be ex-husband asked me a question, “What do you want in life?”

I sat with that question for a while and the answer came to me – I want to live a life of truth.  After living for so long with my head planted firmly and deeply in the sand, with my eyes and ears cloaked in so many years of lies and denials, I needed to be immersed in the truth.  I needed to know what that looked like, what that felt like.  I needed the truth to guide me on my voyage of discovery.  I needed to know what living in the truth meant.

Galileo said “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”  In this ‘age of enlightenment’, my spiritual quest for the truth is not unique. A search on Google for “inner truth” spits out 5,500,000 possible matches; over 2000 titles on enlightenment are available from Amazon. As the baby-boomers hit middle-age and beyond and are confronted with the undeniable truth of their impending mortality, more and more people are becoming seekers, looking to uncover their own meaning of life.

I set out to discover my own truths.  Eihei Dogen, one of Zen Buddhism’s most prominent figures, wrote, “If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”   I believe in a Higher Power, that everything happens for a reason, and that wherever you are, is where you are meant to be.  These were the truths I carried with me on my journey.  When I was falling into the abyss of grief and fear, they were my lifeline which kept me from drowning.  I studied dozens of books taking notes and highlighting as I went, journaling about what I read and learned, discovering insights about my life as I wrote.  I began seeing a psychologist to help unravel my ‘self’ from that of my ex-husband and to slowly peel back the layers of protection that covered the truth.  I began to unwind and separate the threads of my truth from his truth.

I spent time cleaning the clutter from my closets and cupboards, filling boxes for a garage sale and giving away bags of clothes and shoes and in so doing I began to clear my mind as well.  I learned how to practice meditation and incorporated that into my daily life.  I began to sit in stillness, to immerse myself into whatever thought, feeling and emotion that flowed through me. I began to find the truth hidden within.  My discovery of myself and my truth became my vocation.  Peeling back the layers of the onion to reveal my authentic Self has been the most wrenching yet rewarding task I have ever done.

I needed to learn the truths about myself which I had long been denying – to acknowledge and take ownership and responsibility over my own actions and choices during my life and my marriage.  I needed to own and accept all my ‘selves’, the dark as well as the light.  Marianne Williamson, spiritual activist and internationally acclaimed author and lecturer, teaches us that “Emotional wholeness is the acknowledgment and integration of all our qualities.”

  In order to live in the truth, we need to live in all our truths, not just those that serve to present us in what we deem to be a positive light.  Williamson goes on to say that “We seem to have great resistance to looking at our lives, and our world, with emotional honesty”, yet to do anything less is to deny ourselves the opportunity to live a whole and complete life.

We also need to learn to separate our own truths from those of others, to take ownership over our own emotions and not to take ownership over the emotions and choices of another.  To take false ownership not only denies the truth within you, but also denies the right of responsibility from its true owner.  This was clearly demonstrated to me in the relationship with my good friend, Carla.

When I first learned about my husband’s affair, I was hurt, angry, devastated and humiliated.  My immediate reaction was to keep private the details of our separation as I learned to process and recover.  Carla was the one person to whom I entrusted my thoughts and emotions, and I asked her to keep my confidence.  I felt then, as I do now, that my separation and divorce and the reasons behind them, are my story to tell – when, if and to whom.

Several times during the ensuing months, Carla would accuse me of not living in the truth because I was not revealing the affair to the world at large.  Each time she confronted me with this, I would step back and question myself – by choosing to keep this part of my life private and asking Carla to keep this secret, did this mean I was not living in and acknowledging the truth?

Martha Beck, a Harvard-trained sociologist and an innovator in life coaching, compares secrets to stars in her New York Times best seller, Finding Your Own North Star.  She says “They’re hot, volatile concentrations of energy, and they have two ways of dying.  Over time, small stars simply burn out and cool off, becoming what astronomers call white dwarfs.  Massive stars collapse in on themselves, growing so dense that they create an immense gravitational vortex from which even light can’t escape.  They become black holes.”  I wondered whether my secret was a black hole and whether I was in danger of being sucked into its whirling vortex.

I meditated, studied, journaled and talked with my therapist about this.  I came to trust and believe my own instinct to find a way to define ‘black hole secrets’.  If keeping the secret causes emotional or physical pain to anyone then it’s a safe bet you’re in danger of being pulled apart by the black hole.  However, if the only discomfort felt is the need to gossip, then the only person served well by breaking the confidence is the person who is doing the telling. You can live in and honour the truth and still keep a secret.

The more I learned about myself, the more I began to trust the truth of my instincts and to listen to my ‘gut’.  As I learned to accept and take ownership over my choices, my feelings and my truths, I felt my reality shift.  A miracle happened in my life;  I began to lose the pain, fear and grief surrounding my separation and impending divorce.  A miracle is really just a shift in the lens through which you perceive life.  I realized my husband’s affair was not about me, it was about him and his choices and denials and his own hidden truths.

I let go of the life I had thought I was living and the future I had envisioned.  I let go of the person I was and surrendered to be the person I was always meant to be.  I learned from my past and stopped living in it.  I stopped projecting and expecting the future and instead, I work at living in the moment, taking comfort in the knowledge that what is meant to be – will be.  The I Ching states that “A light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized.”  This can only happen when we have the courage to face our self-deception, denials and illusions – to face things exactly as they are.

"The Seekscape" painted by my son Patrick O'Neill

I am still learning and discovering what it means to live a life of truth.  I will forever be on this voyage.  What I know for sure is that the truth is the only path to a whole and complete life.  I have learned from Mahatma Gandhi’s principal of non-violence which declares that “moral force emanates from righteous action”.  I believe, as Marianne Williamson states in A Gift of Change, that “while such force might not have observable effects, it indeed has effects on an invisible plane.  By simply standing in Truth – not only in words but through our behavior as well – we help create a wave of power that will heal the world.”

When I embarked on my pilgrimage I hoped to find healing, solace and peace.  I wanted to show my children what was possible in a time of crisis, to grow as a person.  I needed to learn from the earthquake which had destroyed my world.  I had no idea that I would find something much more powerful.  I would find my Self.

Gremlins of Fear

I’ve been contemplating fear lately.  Rolling it around inside me, reading about it, turning it this way and that like a prism.  Trying to come through the backdoor of my perceptions – my preconceptions.  Trying to sneak up on my already made up mind in order to nudge a shift, or learn anew.  It’s not easy; this ego mind of mine is so very good at dodging and blocking and building walls.

I’ve been stepping into my fear consciously and consistently for almost ten years now.  Pushing against and into my set in cement boundaries to grow and learn and evolve.  To become someone more, or other, or further, than simply being a wife and a mother.  To simply Be.

I sit at my simple, old, wooden desk and look out the window at the incessant rain drumming down.  At the dance of water that drips from the blue incandescent Christmas lights still clipped to the leaf clogged eaves troughs.  At the many hues of green that gives promise that Spring is here despite the grey skies, chilly air and wet, soggy ground.

Inside and outside Inspirations

I pull my gaze inside the room and see the words of inspiration that lay propped just in front of me, leaning against the window.  They have become cliché’s but remain as true and motivating as the day they were written.

It is never too late to be what you might have been. ~ George Elliot

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.  Live the life you’ve imagined. ~ Thoreau

Do the thing you think you cannot do. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Stand in the space and know you are there. ~ anonymous

I began taking tiny small steps into my fear when I ventured back into the world of acting with my first class nine years ago, impersonating the confidence I didn’t feel in the slightest.  Ten years and many steps later I am doing what I once only dreamed of doing.  I’ve learned that a dream realized doesn’t mean the end of the rainbow, the dream just grows and changes, always needing more and more steps into the fear.

My BlackBerry chirps on the desk beside my laptop, singing to me that I have a new text message.  I take a sip of my hint of chocolate tea and read what my friend has written,  “Just beginning step #4: Make a Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory of Ourselves.  Must write down all hurts and resentments in my life honestly.”

I glance to the bookcase on my right and my eyes find the picture of the two of us together.  I hear the conversation she and I had on the phone yesterday when she spoke of the path she was taking and the fear through which she was bravely swimming.  Although not an alcoholic, she is working through the twelve-steps with the help, support and guidance of a trusted friend and counselor.  At a time in her life when she often told me “it is too late,” and she is “too old”, my friend is finding amazing change and awareness and a growing consciousness with each courageous step.  The strong chains of fear that keep her bound to the past are growing brittle and falling away with each new awakening.

An image pops into my mind and I smile.  Another friend who is shining the light into her own dark alleyway of fear on her blog, Bespoken.   Although Marlene and I met only briefly over a year ago at the Deepak Chopra Foundation’s Sages and Scientists Symposium, I still remember our connection and conversations.  Every once in a while a person appears who I am sure has been with me on many life journeys, a familiarity and kinship is felt at once.  We don’t email or talk on the phone, but her presence is there nonetheless,

Just as I began a more formal research and examination of fear, I read a couple posts by Marlene ~ There’s Nothing to Fear Except Yourself and Resistance is Futile.  Synchronicity.  She writes about fear and relationships and ends with words that I will read many times over.

Nothing can fill the emptiness because the fear of being hurt or exposed or out of control becomes the dam that keeps you from experiencing love. And love is what we came here for. That’s our true purpose. Not money, not ambition, not fame, not passion, not success, not status, not video games, not gossip. Only love. Everything else is a distraction.  

I am once again suspended upside down against the wall in my yoga class.  My elbows form a triangle with the crown of my head suspended just above the floor, my fingers laced together and my pinky fingers stretched straight along the floor.  My forearms hold most of the weight of my body and with each breath I bring space and strength to the cavity of my armpits to help keep my shoulders from collapsing and keeping my heart centre open.  I slowly slide my feet tall up along the wall until my legs are straight.  I practice one-nostril breathing in order to bring relaxation in to my assisted headstand and to breath fear out.

“Move your arms closer to the wall, Terri.” Chris speaks across the room to me.  I slowly shift my arms back and then lower my head to the floor, allowing some of my weight to now flow down through my neck and the crown of my head into the floor.  Chris walks over to me and helps to move the straps from around my feet until the only thing assisting me is the wall against with I’m gently resting.  I keep my pelvic floor and core zipped tight and my awareness on my breath.  Release, release, release, I silently chant on my out breath.

“Okay,” says Chris, “lower yourself to the floor.”

A spike of fear.  Irrational images and thoughts of broken necks flash through my mind.  I take a breath in and with my exhale I slowly lower one leg…..and it stops, suspended halfway to the floor.  “Oh-oh,” my ego mind says.  Out loud I say, “I can’t reach the floor!”

“Just lower the other leg,” encourages the red-haired woman to my left.

I resist, not saying anything.

“Lower your other leg and you’ll automatically find the floor.”  Chris echoes, standing close enough to catch me if I crumble.

Fear rises in me like a red-scaled dragon.  I haven’t been in a headstand in so many years that I can’t find a memory to re-member.  Perhaps the fear grown from a head and back injury two years ago has walled me in so tight I can’t feel the childhood joy and body awareness in this inverted pose.  I can feel the sharp barbs on the wire as the fear wraps around me and threatens to pull even tighter.

I hear and feel the encouragement and support from Chris and Eve and allow my trust in them and in myself to move my second leg.  I feel the energy from the earth flow up through the crown of my head, along my spine and extend back down through my toes as my legs gently and softly lower to my mat.  As I lean back into child’s pose a warm wash of empowerment flows through my body.  I push up to a kneeling position, grinning in pure joy at the delight of fear conquered.

I’m finding new ways to melt away the contraints of fear, to breath away the suffocating confinement that stops me from learning and growing.  I close my eyes and sit in Namaste gratitude and listen for the stillness within.

Who am I?

I am a mother.  I am a writer.  I am an actor.  I am a seeker.  I am creative….female….

I listen to the wisdom of my body and go deeper, beyond the level of names and labels and physical form.  I breath in the stillness of the Source.  The wisdom of the Realm of Possibilty.

Who am I?

I am light.  I am darkness.  I am you.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.  We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?  Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.  There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.  We are all meant to shine, as children do.  We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.  It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone.  And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence liberates others. ~~ Marianne Williamson

Smoking Insanity

My rehearsal finished shortly after 3pm and I’m in my car and heading home through downtown Vancouver by 3:45pm.  The voice on the radio announces that Howe Street is closed near the Art Gallery, reminding me again that today is the annual 4/20 Marijuana Freedom Rally.  Although the event doesn’t officially start until 4:20pm there is already a visible haze hanging over the air of the thousands of people peacefully puffing and protesting.  I read later in the Vancouver Province that “about 15,000 people are expected to show up at the Art Gallery on Howe Street between Georgia and Robson to listen to speeches, music and to smoke pot.”

  I turn right onto Hornby from Smithe and slowly head towards Georgia.  As I drive past the Art Gallery I close my window and vents to keep out the acrid odour of the Vancouver pot cloud; the monster of insanity lurks in the smoke.

Two years ago today my then nineteen-year old son took part in his first and last Marijuana Freedom Rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa Ontario.   After spending a gap year playing soccer for a club in the Netherlands, he was nearing the end of his first year studying humanities at Carleton University.  Unknown to both of us he was also tip toeing along the razor sharp edge of insanity.

Two years ago today I was in Los Angeles with my oldest daughter, completely oblivious of the dark dance my son was smoking.  April, 2008 and it’s almost two years post marriage blow-up.  I’m deep in the throes of an incredibly complex and difficult separation agreement negotiation and there’s with no end in sight.  All of my children are suffering the effects.  I feel like I’m practicing triage in the middle of a jungle teeming with poisonous snakes, insects and insidious crazy-making diseases.  I’m running from one child to the next holding their heads above the raging torrent of water and teaching them to swim at the same time, while madly kicking my arms and legs to keep from drowning myself.  It’s a time of painful transition for all of us.

My weed-smoking son is one of two.  His identical twin brother played for the same soccer team in Holland and 2008 is the first year of their lives they have lived apart from one another.  This is a year of individuation and separation.  For the first time friends will know them as just one, not part of a pair.  For the first time they are without the support of the other.

Back in Los Angeles, I’m walking and shopping along Third Avenue Promenade in Santa Monica with my daughter when my phone rings.  I take it out of my purse and smile when I look at the caller ID picture of my Carleton son.  He’s scheduled to fly back to Vancouver after his last exam in a week and I’m looking forward to having him back home.  He’s been battling demons for the last year or so and I’m afraid they’re beginning to get stronger.  Long distance mothering is difficult and it will be good to be able to guide without a blindfold.

“Hey Sweetie,” I smile into the phone, “what’s up?”

As he answers I feel my heart lurch.  “I’ve changed my flight.  I’ve decided to stay here for a couple of weeks and then go visit Christophe in Montreal before coming home.”

“Okay,” I answer back, “let me know what day you’re coming home.”  We chat for a few minutes longer before disconnecting.  Something feels off.  Everything inside me is screaming that something is wrong but I can’t put a finger on it.  I push down my voice of intuition and smother it with self-denial thoughts of “this is just a process of letting go.”

Before the month would be over, my son would be admitted into the locked psychiatric ward of the Ottawa hospital with a diagnosis of acute weed-induced psychosis.  I had no idea such a thing existed, nor did any of my children.  All four went through the D.A.R.E. program where they (and I) learned that marijuana was to be feared as a “gateway” to hard drugs.  No one and no pamphlet listed insanity as a side effect.

I had fallen down the rabbit hole into the world of mental illness.  And that’s just what it felt like, like I was chasing the white rabbit with no idea of where to go, what the rules were or even how to speak the language.  I learned very quickly that there is a massive difference between how we view and treat those with a physical illness and those with an illness manifested in the mind.  There is no equality and little respect.  This is something that must change.

Patrick shortly after his release from the hospital

It would be about a year and a half before Patrick fully recovered from the siren’s call of psychosis.  Today he is not the “old” Patrick, but someone who has walked through his own dark night of the soul and emerged with a new awakening.  His life has taken a new direction, one filled with creativity and spirituality, but one that is still very much the life of a 21 year old.

Patrick’s journey back to wellness is inspiring and illuminating.   I struggled with this blog post, not because I feared the content, but because the content is so much bigger than is written here.  I discovered that what I was writing was, in fact, the beginning of the book that Patrick and I talk about writing.   One that shares our experience – his on the inside of insanity looking out and mine on the outside looking in.  A book about the hidden danger of smoking pot but also about what is possible in a time of crisis.  My son took my mantra and made it his own.

Marijuana leaf

For more information on weed-induced psychosis please visit the following links.  And please share them with others!

The Long and Short Term Effects of Marijuana Use

Recent Spike in Marijuana Induced Psychosis

The Downside of High – a CBC documentary by David Suzuki

Dream Visit from my Father

I wake gently in the morning, even those days that begin with the beep of my BlackBerry alarm.  I lay in the same position in which I awake, keep my eyes closed and I breath out slowly and evenly.  I let the last vestiges of the dream sink into me, running it through my head like a film.  What does it have to tell me?  What am I telling myself?

Last night’s dream leaves me feeling particularly good because my dad came to visit me.  Mornings after a visit from my dad are always better.  Like all my dreams I seem to drop into it in the second act and my friend Darlene is working on some kind of project with my Dad – which involves meeting up with him.

I’m not jealous but I’m wishful.  In the dream I’m telling her stories about him (I can’t remember which stories, just a feeling that I was sharing memories of him – like one would if you had never met the person – which was kind of weird since she was spending time with him) although at this point in the dream my Dad was also kind of Robert Redford…..it wasn’t clear if she was doing a project with Robert Redford or with Dad….they were kind of both the same person.  I smile at this.  I don’t usually think of my dad as Robert Redford, he’s more like the father in The Waltons.

I ask her what they do, and she gives me an old photo album.  Big with a worn, brown leather cover.  I slowly and carefully, almost reverently, turn the pages of this heavy book.  The pages where the photos would be is like a threadbare corduroy, a dark mustard brown colour, the fabric pulled tight, the corduroy in rows almost – like double furrows down the page, the fluff of the fabric worn almost completely away.  There are no photos, just the little corner pieces left to indicate where the photos were at some point.  My dad/Robert Redford has taken the photos out of the album so that Darlene may use it for the project.

I turn the pages wistfully and comment on how cool it would be to see the photos that were once here.  A couple more pages and there, lying loose, close to the inside binding and almost falling out of the book, are two photos.  I pick up one of them, a strip of four photos like those received from a mall photo booth.  They’re brown sepia toned pictures of my Dad at about ten or twelve years old.  I hold them gently as it’s obvious they’re very fragile.  Only two pictures remain and those two are in danger of disappearing – the emulsion has peeled away from two pictures at the top of the strip and pieces are loosened on the remaining two, like sunburned skin or the loosened paper label from a jar put through the dishwasher.

I hold it carefully and look into the eyes of my father as a child and smile.  “I wish you could have known him,” I tell Darlene.  Oblivious, in that dream-like way, that she is the one meeting with him in this dream.  And then, almost as soon as I say this, something in me softly realizes that I can see my father too, I simply have to ask.

And just like that I’m in the front seat of the car and we’re waiting for my Dad.  We’re picking him up, like teenagers heading out on a Friday night.  It’s dark and Darlene, my sister Shari and my son Patrick are sitting in the back seat.  I’m in the front passenger seat, which is oddly covered with a slight dusting of snow, which spreads a light one inch blanket across the entire front seat area – passenger seat, centre console and driver’s seat.

We’re parked in the driveway of our farmhouse on Harbell Road in Salmon Arm, just slightly ahead of the house, facing away from the road and toward the big barn at the end of the long driveway, so that I have to turn my head and look slightly over my left shoulder to see the back door of the house.  Up ahead to my right I know the machine shed is there beside the old outhouse, although I can’t see them through the dark night.

Looking and waiting for my dad to come out of the house I notice the shadowed shapes of the life-size reindeer, silently lined up as if to pull Santa’s sleigh, although it’s nowhere to be seen.  Big, blown-up birthday candles jut out of the top of each reindeer’s head – are they lit? I look at these stranded, frozen, flying reindeer with fond, melancholy recognition, thinking “Oh look, there are the Christmas reindeer of my childhood. If only you’d been there when….”  In my real childhood we had no such thing.  No lawn decorations of any kind.  But in this dream the memory is just as real as the snow I sweep from the seat of the car.

Then my father is jogging toward us, his arms full of packages meant to be used in whatever project he and Darlene are working on.  He runs through the dark, heading to the driver’s side before he remembers with a barely there “Oh, right, Darlene drives during these excursions” and he changes course and heads for the passenger door.  I’m smiling as he opens my door and greet him with a “Hey dad!”

He smiles back, hands me the packages and then wordlessly circles the car to get into the driver’s side, not surprised at all to see me sitting in the seat he thought he was to occupy.  I brush the snow away from the console and put the packages down.

We’re driving down the driveway, which is now paved and morphed into a narrow road.  “When did this happen?” I think,  “When did our farm driveway become a road and where does it lead?”  To our left I know is the house where Bubba Bland lives, down the paved road past the side lawn and the big tree with the tire swing.

In real life there is no such road.  In my real childhood the lawn spreads from the back porch to the summer house – a small, screened-in out building that we children used to sleep in during hot summer nights, the mosquitoes buzzing around our heads despite the wire mesh screens meant to keep them out.  Too many children opening the doors with unthinking abandon.

Walk along the grass away from the driveway with the house on your left and the summer house on your right and you’ll see the large maple tree with branches low enough to climb and big enough to settle into to read a book.  Hanging from the biggest branch is the big tire swing.  Lay a folded towel to protect your soft stomach from the hard ridges of the inside circle of the big tractor tire, dive through with your hands above your head and position yourself just so, finding the perfect balance point, and then push off, arms and legs dangling, long hair flying to just sweep across the top of the lawn and the hay field that the big maple borders.

Only in my dreams is Bubba Bland’s house where the alfalfa grows, his driveway paved over the grass of reality.  In fact, Bubba Bland’s brother now owns the farmhouse of my childhood.  The house where my dream father lives.

So we’re driving along the narrow, paved driveway road, Bubba’s house somewhere to our left, the machine shed and then the old chinchilla house to our right.  Then we’re driving between long rows of parked cars, under a large white tent.  It’s a car lot.  “Wow.  Progress.”  I think.  “Our farm has turned into a car lot?” I ask my father.  “Yep.”  He answers, both hands on the wheel, his attention focused on the road ahead of him.

Then we’re at our destination, the no-longer-a-barn at the end of the now long, paved driveway.  We park the car inside the large cavernous building and then we’re sitting at a desk or table with a large, over-weight man dressed badly in drag, a large “beauty” mark on his right cheek.  He’s removed his wig and his balding dark hair is messed.  Is he smoking, or is that the filmmaker in me adding details to complete the dream picture?  He looks like a mafia man wearing make-up.

My dad has the photo album on his knee.  My son Patrick sits beside me.  We’re here to talk to the mafia man in a satin spaghetti strap dress about a job for Patrick.  Go figure.

And there my dream ends.   My dad, me and my son in a scene from a 1930 gangster movie, minus the guns and danger and with the added colour of a man in drag.

I’m left with the lingering memory of my father who died suddenly on September 22, 2004.  At the time of his death I was just entering into the possibility that my husband was having an affair.  Double death.

I cherish these dream visits from my father.  An unexpected welcome to visit with him once again.  During my entire adult life my dad was one of my spiritual teachers and he continues to be so in death, the wall between worlds disappearing in dreams.

My dad working at his wheel.