Category Archives: Books

On Coincidence

I had the joy of spending Victoria Day outside with a few good friends at a spontaneous picnic. Simple pleasures: roast chicken, a few different kinds of fresh bread, warm strawberries, grapes, cool drinks, and total relaxation. All stresses were forgotten as we nibbled and laughed and played with my lovely goddaughter, who had more energy than the adults lazing about. Plus, I got a bit of sun, which, if you’ve seen my milky-pale skin, is a blessing. I no longer look like a creature of the night.

I happened to stop in at the secondhand bookstore around the corner and brought home quite the find: a copy of Connie Willis’ Lincoln’s Dreams. I’m a huge Connie Willis fan. I am not, however, a fan of charging $9.99 for a two hundred page book, and for some reason I never picked this one up when it was cheaper. (Actually, I know the reason: I’m not a Civil War fan.)

Well, apart from being immensely smug about scoring a Connie Willis book secondhand, I discovered that this book fits right in to my life at the moment. It’s not about the Civil War. (Well, sort of, but it’s a means to a different end.) It’s about dreams.

Now, I love how Connie Willis examines the whole what-is-real perception of reality, and time-travel, and life vs death. At this particular point in time, however, when part of my attempt to solve my sleep problems involves recording dreams, this particular book becomes even more fascinating. Especially since I’ve started noticing that every once in a while, I “dream true” – I’ll write something down in my notebook when I wake up, and a couple of days later something very much like it happens in the real world.

There’s no such thing as coincidence, I’m fond of telling my students, since everything’s connected by energy of various sorts. I’m also a Jungian, which means that I subscribe to that whole collective unconscious idea. I also think that our human concept of time is a construct to make our lives easier, sort of like democracy. So, why can’t someone start picking up the dreams of a man involved in the Civil War? What’s to stop me from having the odd dream about something that (in our childlike perception of “linear time”) hasn’t happened yet? Why does man stubbornly insist that memory only stretches backwards, because he has experienced it? We know the future exists, because today was yesterday’s future. By extension, we’re living in someone’s past.

Mankind places a lot of weight on what is verifiable by sensory proof, and yet is incredibly subjective about other concepts that require faith. Some are inviolate – of course it’s true, even though it cannot be proven – and others are flatly dismissed without even a second thought – that’s impossible. It’s absolutely fascinating to see how uneven we are, and how strongly we’ll defend certain ideas, yet obstinately push away others. Man’s a hypocrite. A loveable, frustrating, contradictory, inconsistent hypocrite.

Offhand

After an hour and a half break to take an Advil, make and eat dinner, and have a glass of wine, I’m back at the computer. Hey, don’t try to stop me. I’ve been restless and not-work-y for the past ten days; let me work while I’m happy to work!

Besides, it benefits two parties: the employer who needs this freelance work done, and me, because my work makes money so that I can buy more books. (This is serious. I’m currently in the throes of Egyptian and Norse mythology heaven, and I’ve got a list of titles I want as long as my arm.) Plus I’m multi-tasking: while one page loads, I’m searching out new links with the other.

Eventually I’ll stop, and I’ll watch Buffy or something. Speaking of, was anyone else left a bit off-balance by the Angel season finale? It was great, and tied up loose ends while preparing for a new season, but I guess I’m just too used to mass violence and cataclysm on Angel these days. There was surprisingly little cataclysmic action in this episode. It made for a nice break for the characters, of course – who, come to think of it, were left as equally off-balance.

The Ongoing Insomniac Saga

Nope. Still not sleepy.

Terribly thirsty, though.

I spent much of Friday moving things around – books, furniture, stuff like that – and by doubling up books on most of my shelves, I managed to not only find place for the stacks of books on the floor, but empty half a shelf. Just look at that, I thought to myself, all pleased. Now I have room for the books that will no doubtedly come my way throughout the next months. To celebrate, I stopped by the secondhand bookstore before heading out to the pub for various birthday celebrations, and wouldn’t you just know, in the philosophy/mythology section I found five books that I had to own. I mean honestly, a hand-bound copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Mythic Image? I teach this stuff, for heaven’s sake, how can I pass that up? And the book on creation myths around the world? And an original mass-market edition of Harner’s Way of the Shaman?

Needless to say, that half-shelf is no longer empty. But I’m still thrifty and virtuous – I paid less than thirty dollars for the lot of them. These days, the Campbell alone sells for about seventy-five dollars.

Already it brims with Post-It notes, ready for lecturing. (This is proof of my geekiness too, isn’t it, Skippy.)

Off and On

The past couple of days have been odd. I’ve been restless, moody, terribly social, terribly anti-social… I’m not quite sure what’s going on, but I’d like it to settle down. I slept a grand total of two and a half hours last night, then had a staff meeting this morning, managed to completely forget my god-daughter’s birthday family gathering this afternoon, arrived at said gathering with the hatchings of a migraine, left quietly two hours later, came home and hid under the covers for two hours of solid, blissful sleep. It got rid of the headache, but now I’m awake and my sleep schedule is even further off-kilter.

I’m now reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and I’m incredibly gratified to learn that if she wrote between fifty and two hundred fifty words per day, she considered herself successful (well, as successful as someone that self-critical can feel; perhaps ‘on-schedule’ would be a better term to use). If I pull off a minimum of two thousand per day, then, I’m doing just fine. Mind you, I entertain absolutely no notions that I’m any sort of a Virginia Woolf. None whatsoever. So no one needs to get nervous when I’m around water.

Family Visit, Virginia Woolf, Brief Miracles

We had glorious weather all weekend in Oakville until a wonderful thunderstorm during Sunday dinner (mmm, rack of lamb). I saw my grandmother from the west coast, old family friends, and all in all enjoyed a lovely trip. I wish we could have spent another day or so with my parents, but both my husband and I have to work today.

I managed to get a thousand words or so written on Saturday afternoon, too. I’d been dithering about a chapter in the Great Canadian Novel, unsure about how to handle the next step (or, rather, to choose what the next step should be from a pool of four different events). I plunged in and finished the chapter, and even started the next one.

And then, I crashed. Why, you ask? I picked up a secondhand hardcover copy of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. When I read work like this, I wonder why I even bother. (Yes, yes, I know: different styles, all kinds to make a world, different tastes in readership, blah blah blah. I’m sharing. Be quiet.) I despair of ever becoming capable of painting word and thought, of arranging language to convey a depth of emotion with only a few words.

I’ve read scraps of Virginia Woolf’s journals, and she too uses sparse language, and yet conveys something so much larger than what the words say. Is that what genius is? Everything I read of mine seems mawkish and heavy-handed (though not as heavy-handed as some of the published stuff I’ve read, thank all the gods), no longer as airy and bright as it seemed when I set it down. I’ve ordered a copy of Woolf’s journal so I can read the whole thing, not to further depress myself, but to try to understand how it is that she manages to succeed at what she does, even in her own private notes.

When I moved I found a humour coloumn that I’d clipped from the English department newsletter during my BA. It’s an “Ask Your Author Agony Column”.

Dear Author:
Lately I’ve been feeling that my life has no meaning. What should I do?
Signed, Pondering the Meaning

There are several witty samples of what various authors might have responded (“Get your archetypes straightened out,” recommends Robertson Davies), but here’s Virginia Woolf’s imagined response:


Life is just a series of brief miracles. Stay away from water
and for heaven’s sakes get a room of your own.
– Virginia Woolf.

Life’s just a series of brief miracles. This comment was meant to be fun, but it says something important. Juxtaposing the words “just”, “brief” and “miracle” creates a tension that Woolf’s work displays as well. How can something be “just” a miracle? Is it a miracle because it’s brief? Shouldn’t miracles, by definition, be life-changing? Or is it our observation of the miracle and how we choose to be changed by it that defines it as brief or enduring? If they’re brief, is it the knowledge that life is made up of miracles that keeps us going?

More people should see the miracles around them, however brief. And more people should remember that life is a series of miracles; we just have to find them.

On Misfiling And Missing The Point

I’m collecting information on the books that are coming out within the next few months within one of my fields of specialisation, and at Amazon I made a sickening discovery.

Out of all the decent books out there on witchcraft and the occult, I am horrified — no, that’s not quite right; shocked? dismayed? spitting mad? — that the top-selling book in that category is The Book of Shadows: The Unofficial Charmed Companion.

So help me Gods.

You know, in every interview I do, I’m asked my opinion on shows like Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My response? “Hey, I’m a huge Buffy fan. But Willow’s not Wiccan, and what she does isn’t real magic.” If they press me about Charmed, I usually say something about Wicca 90210 and heavily stress the 90210 part, because Charmed has even less Wicca in it than Buffy does.

These shows, and films like The Craft and Practical Magic, are double-edged blades. On one hand, they introduce a whole new crop of people to the idea that people who practice a discipline like magic aren’t, by definition, automatically evil, which is great. On the other hand, they’re an incredibly inaccurate portrayal of the path. Wicca’s about spirituality and responsibility, not spells, demons, and warlocks (don’t even get me started on that inaccuracy).

This is why I still do interviews with students, for newspapers and on radio, and why I continually write articles. I’m trying to raise the general level of awareness out there. And most of the time, people walk away with a better idea of what it’s all about. Sometimes, though, you just can’t get through to them, and they walk away determined to find “a real witch” who will teach them how to change their hair colour without the aid of L’Oreal.

It’s not easy. I’ve chosen to teach and educate on this path, though, and if this is how I’m being called to serve, then this is what I’ll keep on doing. However, if you ever feel inspired to do a bit of reading on Wicca, please, please ignore the sales ranks at Amazon. Read anything by Doreen Valiente, and Vivianne Crowley, and Gerald Gardner. Or read something like Essential Wicca by Paul Tuitlean and Estelle Daniels, or Scott Cunningham’s Wicca- A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. But for the sake of all that’s intelligent, stay away from books that purport to be about spirituality and use pop TV shows as source material.

My skin feels all crawly. I’m going to go make more tea.