Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

Feedback

Once a week or so I get e-mail from a reader. That is, a reader of the book-type thing I write, not just the on-line stuff that falls out of my brain during the day. They’re generally positive things, thanking me for putting my books out there and communicating information that has struck a chord with the reader, enabling them to think about something in a different way and make positive changes in their lives. While I’ve had feedback about all of them, the green witch book and the spellcraft book have garnered the most feedback. All of them touch me, reminding me that launching a book into the aether actually does create ripples that can change things. An author doesn’t generally get to see the changes made in people’s lives, so the feedback is doubly precious. It encourages me on a professional level, and on a spiritual level.

Today I got a wonderfully written letter from a reader (waves at T. E.) that could have described me, had my life not taken a significant turn five years ago. She’s got the education and in-house writing and editing experience, and is thinking about making the switch to the freelance writer’s life. (How many of you are laughing right now?) She is being very intelligent, asking someone who does it for a living what it’s like.

Something Tal and I trade back and forth when we’re frustrated is a comment about the life we’ve chosen. We have lots of them to draw from: feast or famine, less stressful environment for a more stressful schedule, and so forth. But in the end, we always cap it with, “But I’d rather be doing this than anything else.” Sure, I’d like a steady and reliable paycheque every two weeks. But I’m not willing to sign away the flexibility and freedom I have to obtain one. Yes, it’s incredibly stressful not being able to count on the arrival of a cheque at a certain time in order to budget properly. Going out and trying to drum up business is stressful too, especially for someone as shy as I am. I know freelancers who have a day job to make certain there’s money coming in (like Tal, for example) and I know freelancers who have so many clients knocking at their door that they have to turn them away (like Amanda). A lot of it depends on your area of specialization. And I certainly couldn’t be doing this on my own; having a significant other who brings money into the house is of immense value. (Although there have been more years than not where we’ve both been freelancing, which is also stressful, and not really ideal.) Having a significant other who is now working at a job with Benefits! is also a huge relief. On the other hand, having to do business for other people to keep money coming in is frustrating when you’re trying to write/finish writing books to shop around; a lot of my work is work that can’t be/won’t be paid off for a couple of years yet. It’s hard to accept that one is doing work that will be (probably) recompensed at an undetermined point in the future. Not that I’d know; I haven’t worked for myself (i.e. writing my own unassigned stuff) in, well, I can’t remember how long.

So yes, it’s hard. But it’s also preferable to the kind of stress I experience working full-time somewhere else. I like the variety of things I work on. I enjoy being in control of my environment. I like having a cat on my lap as I work. I like being able to ignore the telephone or screen my calls. I like being able to break when I need to without people watching my empty desk chair and timing me. I like dealing with people almost exclusively via e-mail. There’s the self-motivation problem, but I do have a pattern that I am now aware of thanks to chronicling my exploits here in the Owlyblog, and the motivation thing actually isn’t as much of a problem as I think it is when I’m in the middle of it.

Full moon Wednesday night, summer solstice this afternoon, Mercury direct again. If this were a fairy tale, all my cheques would arrive in my mailbox at once today. As it is, I’ve had messages this morning from two of my clients telling me my invoices have been processed, and in sixish weeks I’ll have payment. (Ironically, neither of these clients are the local one who processes in two weeks, she says, tearing at her hair.)

Today: another evaluation. I’m going to see if I can get it done in one day. I’ve managed to whittle the turnaround time to about six to eight hours, but I never have consecutive hours to devote to something so it gets broken down into a day and a half. Nothing like justifying a flat fee to force your learning curve.

Difficult Times

Not long after I finished Maggie’s farewell post yesterday, Liam woke up from his nap and stumbled into my office, slightly wild-eyed.

“I can’t find Maggie-cat,” he said.

My heart, which had already gone through the metaphorical wringer while writing the post, broke again.

“No, honey,” I said. “That’s because she’s dead. She’s gone.”

“I’ll look for her later,” he said after a moment, his face brightening.

The halves of my heart each broke again. The lump I’d been coaxing away reappeared in my throat, and I almost reached for the dangerously low supply of Kleenex.

“Maggie’s not coming back,” I said. “She died. People don’t come back the way we want them to when they die.”

He backed up until he hit the wall behind him, staring at me. Then he brought his hands up in front of him, sort of cupping them.

“We can get a new Maggie-cat?” he said hopefully.

“No, love,” I said, sitting on the floor in front of him. “Gryff is our new cat. Maybe someday we’ll get another cat again, but not for a long time. And it wouldn’t be the real Maggie-cat, even if it looked like her.”

“I want my Maggie,” he said piteously, much softer than he’d spoken before.

“I know,” I said. “I do, too. But she’s gone now.”

He bent forward and leaned his head against my shoulder. We stayed like that for a few minutes.

“Hey, guy,” I said. “You know what? In your toy box at Grandma and Papa’s house you have a stuffed Maggie-cat. When we go over this afternoon, why don’t you ask if you can bring her home? That way you’ll remember Maggie every time you look at it, and you can hug it and give it pats and tell it how much you love her.”

“Okay,” he said, brightening up. And when we got there the little stuffed black and white cat was sitting on his bed. He caught it up and asked me if we could bring it home, and I told him to ask his grandmother. She told him it would be all right if I said yes, so he carried it with him to the dinner table, brought it home, and slept with it. It’s gone to the caregiver’s with him today instead of Bun-Bun.

I wish I had a stuffed Maggie-cat to fill what Phnee referred to as the Maggie-shaped hole in my heart. But both Cricket and Nixie curled up with me when I watched the Carlo Rota Othello last night (which was an excellent adaptation with very good performances), something they rarely did because Maggie was always there first. I’ve been preparing to say goodbye to her for over three years now, and I’m handling her loss much better than I expected to. There are moments, though, where I expect to see her, or I think about something she used to do, and I remember how much I love her, and I have to stop what I’m doing. She was so much a part of my life.

Thank you to everyone who called or e-mailed or left comments to the farewell post. Your thoughts and condolences are deeply appreciated. I know so many of you loved her, too.

Goodbye, Maggie-Cat

Last night, at around eleven-twenty, Maggie passed away.

I had gone to bed and was asleep by nine-thirty. HRH woke me up around eleven-forty to say, “You need to get up. Something’s happened, love. Maggie’s dead.”

She was just outside the door to my office, lying on her side with her eyes open, staring at nothing. She was still warm. There was a bit of blood and clear fluid on the floor under her head. She’d been rattling when she breathed for the past couple of days, and she’s been coughing for months. She just finally wore out. HRH had found her when he came upstairs after playing on the computer.

I sat there and stroked her for about half an hour, thinking about the seventeen years we’d spent together. She’s been with me through all my boyfriends, eight different apartments, five other cats in the family, a baby who became a toddler and an enthusiastic preschooler who was so proud of being able to pick her up. She was the first to meet us when we brought Liam home, peeking into the carry seat. She’s been with me for everything important: my university graduations, my wedding, our celebrations, writing my books, and a part of most of Liam’s milestones too.

Maggie’s favourite spot to sleep was in the curve of my stomach when I lay on my side. She was the only cat who would stay in the room when I played my cello. When I first began playing, she would jump onto the chair behind me and stand on her hind legs, resting one paw on my shoulder and touching the scroll with the other. When she was a kitten, her favourite pieces of music were Schubert’s Trout quintet and the Death and the Maiden quartet. (I’m not kidding. She used to jump up onto the bookcase that housed my CD player and sit in front of the speakers when I put the CD on.) When she was little she used to suck on one of my knuckles and knead my hand, because she and her littermates lost their mother at only two weeks old; it took her ages to grow out of the habit. She was also the only cat who would do ritual with me, walking through the circle and sitting nearby to keep me company while I worked, leaving once the circle was down. Mags was usually the most social of our cats, coming out to casually insinuate herself into a group of friends until someone realised that there was a cat on their lap. t! coined the term “Breyfogling” to describe a particular sideways prance she’d do as a young cat, her back arched and her head tossed back so that she was all angles yet flowing, because if she’d been wearing a cape while she did it she’d look just like a Norm Breyfogle panel. The tip of her left ear was bent back, from an unidentifiable accident when she was a kitten.

Maggie was just always around me. She’d be on a cushion on the floor of the office if I was working. She’d be next to me on the bed if I was lying down. If I sat on the couch to read, she’d be in my lap. I used to have to push her off my office chair if I’d left it to get a drink or a reference book, because she’d steal it whenever she got a chance. She had dozens of nicknames: Mags, Maglet, Princess Maggie Puss-Meow, Mugwort, and the name almost everyone knew her by, Maggie. Her full name was Margaret. She loved bagels and would claw through a plastic bag to get them. She was even more insane about old-fashioned doughnuts dipped in granulated sugar. She would literally climb your arm to get to one if you held it above your head to keep it out of her reach. She also loved french fries (specifically McDonalds’ fries, not that we had them often and stopped eating them years ago); she would hook one out of the box and catch it in her mouth, then give a sharp shake of her head to, well, break its neck before she ate it. She enjoyed the occasional slice of olive from a vegetarian pizza. She also liked drinking mint tea.

Telling Liam this morning was almost as hard as making myself stop stroking her last night, as wrapping her in a deep brown towel before laying her gently in a cat carrier. I took his hands and said, “I have something important to tell you. Maggie is dead. She died last night while we were asleep.” “She’s gone?” he said, and his face began to crumple up. “But I want to see her again!” Then came the question of why, and I had to explain that when cats get very very old, they slow down and get tired, and eventually they just lay their heads down and die; it’s part of life. We assured him that he would see her again in the Summerlands, and that Gully was taking good care of her for us right now.

Some past Maggie-themed posts:

Maggie gets her own back at the annoying machines that steal her laps
Maggie turns sixteen

And there are others that were lost in the Great MySQL Crash, notably the “Here at the Maggie Institute for Lentil Research” post that recounted the day t! came over for lunch and Maggie sat on his lap, carefully hooking her paw over the edge of his bowl of soup and delicately coaxing a lentil out of it.

She was my baby, the first cat I ever got on my own. Seventeen years is a long, long run, and she had a wonderful life. I will miss her, but I’ve known she would eventually fade away. She’d been fading for months, feeling slower and slower when I placed a hand on her, feeling lighter and lighter as if she was losing energy. I always hoped she’d die in her sleep, and I’m sorry I wasn’t there at the very end for her. But she knew I loved her deeply. And somewhere in the Summerland there’s a big orange cat butting his head against hers, and another black and white cat who is perhaps less annoying in the afterlife than he was in this life licking the top of her head like he used to do.

Because she died at home, I don’t have a memento of her in the way of the fur a vet shaved from the area for the injection, the way we do for Gully and Roman. It feels odd not to have something of hers left, although I know that somewhere we must still have the black collar she used to wear. She never had a favourite toy or blanket. Once upon a time I thought I’d want her cremated and her ashes back, but I know I don’t need that now. I don’t really need a memento, because she’s always with me.

Thank you for everything, Maggie. I love you so very, very much. I hope I gave you as much joy and comfort during our time together as you gave to me.

A Sudden Abundance Of Live Music, And Thoughts Deriving From It

I’m tired, but there are things worthy of noting.

Invisible completely and totally rocked the house on Friday night, with a double set and a terrific cohesive sound. Every one of them keeps getting better and better. There was much dancing, and I don’t normally dance. There was much singing as well, and I hope I didn’t drive Jan too crazy with it. It was terrific to see people I haven’t seen in forever, too. Also, I had a very good margarita. “You really seemed to be enjoying yourself,” HRH said on the way home. “I think it’s important to obviously demonstrate to a performer that you appreciate what they’re doing,” I said. “There’s nothing worse than being on stage and seeing a sea of dead expressions in front of you, applause or not.” Sure, I could have sat there unmoving and enjoyed myself just as much, but the music was good and it moved and what the guys were doing on stage for us moved me.

Did I miss being on stage? Yes. But not enough to throw myself back into band. I miss the times when it was going well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go well most of the time. I miss it when we’re actually making music, not talking about unrelated things or wasting time. I certainly don’t miss the amount of energy that went into it. Or rather, I prefer to have that energy to put into other things, like living my day to day life (thank you so very much, FMS). I’d like to get back into band someday. Someday is not soon, however. We’ll all be different people somewhere down the line and that will make a positive difference as well. I’d like to explore other kinds of music in a small ensemble too, at some point, with different people.

The evening before I enjoyed Marc’s vocal recital, presented by all his teacher’s students. (Live music two nights in a row! I don’t think I’m greedy, just starved for culture.) There were about half a dozen of them and they all sang three songs, ranging from Broadway to pop to chamber songs and opera arias. It was great, and I saw a handful of the people who I would see again the next night, but in an even more relaxed atmosphere. We kibbutzed outside for an hour after the show was over, and that was just as wonderful as the recital itself, in a different way. I took a moment to look around both on Thursday and Friday night, and saw people with whom I’d stayed in touch for fifteen to twenty years as well as those I’d met within the last ten or so. I really miss my friends, and it was felt really, really good to be with them.

There’s this quirk that I have: My eyes tear up suddenly when I’m really enjoying something musical. It doesn’t mean I’m particularly sad or happy or overcome by what the music is communicating. It actually has more to do with appreciating the fact that the performer is offering something, similar to what I outlined above. Marc was the first one up at the recital, a position that carries a lot of responsibility, and he sang “On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady. About a third of the way through the first verse I had that tearing-up response, and I thought about what was happening. I was experiencing a surge of emotion, not as a response to the music but a response to what Marc was doing: he was reaching out to his listeners and offering them something, and I was moved by it. It seems to be an empathic response. It’s not in response to the words, or the music itself. It’s in response to the performer. It does have an emotional connection, of course, but it’s not primarily an emotional reaction.

This happens when I imagine performing myself. It doesn’t happen while I’m actually performing (or it does, but extremely rarely); rather, it happens when I visualise performing certain pieces of music. I have a very strong ability to visualise, and I invest a lot of emotion into it. It’s one of the ways I practise when I can’t be at my instrument. I’m also very good at imagining several different lines of music simultaneously, including my own line. (I think this is one of the reasons why I love working in an orchestral setting so much, and also one of the reasons why I get frustrated very easily in small ensembles without a coach; it’s hard for real performers to live up to what’s happening in my head.) In these cases, my response seems to be connected to the visualisation of the joint act of the performers in the ensemble reaching out to the audience. And this too may be one of the reasons I was dissatisfied with band: I very rarely felt that reaching out-ness happening, or a sense of the audience being moved by what we were offering. There was a lot of struggle that never felt like it resolved or settled into an actual delivery of something.

I’ve thought about this response a lot, and I still can’t quite put it into the right words. There’s something about the simultaneous identification with the performer as well as being an audience too, but I can’t pin it down yet. There’s also something about receiving and returning energy, which I know I’ve talked about before in lectures and discussion and very likely at some point in this journal as well.

I don’t have the opportunity to experience live music as an audience member very much, so this past week has been extremely precious to me. I’m very proud of everyone who performed, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I hope they all know that. And I hope that somehow I managed to communicate that I appreciated what they offered.

Parallels

Michelle West writes an excellent parallel between writing books and mothering here.

A belated Mother’s Day to all the moms out there. My day began very early, waking up with a jump at the crash made by a small boy dropping a play tea set on the floor next to the bed ( “Oh hi, Mama, I making you tea!”), moved through brunch with the Preston-LeBlanc clan (complete with smoked salmon, mimosas, a heaping bowl of fresh strawberries, and waffles), and ended with an afternoon with HRH’s parents and excellent steak.

Appeal

If anyone out there has a spare moment and the energy, can you think good thoughts about my mother in law? She’s had another blood pressure spike and was taken to the hospital this morning. This hasn’t happened in about fourish years, and the time before that was just before HRH and I got married, but every time is deeply scary because we don’t know what her heart will do next when it does occur. Thanks in advance, everyone.

ETA May 6: Thank you, everyone. After a fretful day with no news, we spoke with HRH’s father last evening who was in good spirits and said that after one final test she would be released and allowed to go home. This episode was one of three others, not two as HRH reminded me, because in one she didn’t go to the hospital and ironically that was the worst one. This was nowhere near as bad as that one. Thank you, thank you everyone, for your help and good thoughts both for her and the rest of us.

Such A Monday

This morning, I drove home from dropping the boy off in white-out conditions. It’s cruel, after a lovely warm and sunny weekend. Wasn’t this supposed to be rain? The first few flakes began falling and the boy said, “Why the snow?” “I don’t know,” I replied. “I think we should tell it to go away.” From the back seat there came a very clear and deliberate, “SNOW, GO AWAY!”

Thank goodness for a lovely recording of The Lark Ascending on CBC that played on my way home. I always think of Pasley when I hear it. Otherwise I’m so irritated by the CBC these days. They’re disbanding the CBC Radio Orchestra — the last surviving radio orchestra in North America — and they’re changing the Radio 2 format yet again so that it’s no longer going to be a mainly classical station. Over the past few years they’ve slowly revamped it to feature more jazz and folk and so forth, with which I’ve not been thrilled but have tolerated (although the radio gets turned off at 6 on the dot because I cannot stand what the evening programming has become). Now, however, they’re formally announcing that they’re going to go more mainstream, and cancelling the existing shows. This was done to net a larger audience, but it’s backfiring already: the backlash has been dreadful, and they’re going to lose droves of current listeners (like me, hello, who’s been a faithful listener for decades). If they did market research, they certainly didn’t think of asking their current audience what they thought of the idea. I’ve been meaning to write about this since they announced it and I just haven’t been able to bring myself to put my resentment about this dilution of content and commitment to culture into words. This isn’t what I wanted to say, either, but I have to say something at some point.

I am stiff and achy and want to be in the better mood I was in this past weekend.