Category Archives: Spirituality

Thoughts on 24, Season One

Every time I break my own rule of Never-Compose-A-Blog-Entry-Online, my computer crashes. Thus, you are deprived of a deep, intelligent examination of the television phenomenon 24, which my husband and I began watching this weekend. The highlights were basically as follows:

– Who says the first episode absolutely must be immediately followed by the second? It was a forty-five minute meet-the-characters, these-are-the-environments bite with no cliffhanger.

– We watched six straight hours of 24 on Saturday night, until we hit the end of the two DVDs we had borrowed. Needless to say, as of Monday night, we had the rest of the set in our possession. Damn, this is addictive.

– We’re starting to see how the first eight episodes are nice and tight, operating on the potential reality of ratings not meriting the second half of the season. By episode eight, it is completely possible that all ends can be tied up in two more episodes. Then, things change and become even more complex, presumably because ratings secured the last twelve episodes.

– The only thing better than seeing huge billboards with Keifer Sutherland on them along highways last season is actually sitting in the comfort of my own living room and watching Keifer Sutherland do cool stuff, and being able to select the next episode from the DVD menu to watch him some more.

More good job news: I have been contacted by a woman who took a handful of my courses last fall, who has booked me to do a private seminar for seven women at her home in early April. I’m thrilled that she asked me, and I’m really looking forward to doing it. The only problem? She asked me how much I would charge for such an evening, and I had to admit that I had no idea, and that I’d get back to her. I shouldn’t have been so proud about being able to quote my rate for writing services last weekend; evidently that gets filed under ‘Hubris’, and the universe feels obliged to present me with a situation such as this one to return me to my properly humble state. Normally I’d charge $25 per head for this particular seminar if I taught it in association with the business I usually teach through, but it doesn’t seem fair to apply the same rate, somehow. I want to charge less, but still not sell myself short. (Look, Mum, I can be taught!) I can’t apply the obvious solution — namely, using my writing services hourly rate — because that pretty much equals the average of the per-head fee of my regular seminars, which would mean that I’d be teaching seven people for the price of one.

Grr. My time is money. This was my mantra for a while in January while I worked out that hourly rate, and it looks like I’m going to have to chant it again for a while until I figure this out. Anyone have any ideas? What do companies pay outside specialists to come in and present seminars for their staff – say a three-hour seminar? There’s a huge range of potential fees according to a variety of factors, I know, but anything would help at this point.

Imbolc Interview

We must be coming up to a major Neo-Pagan festival – I’m on the radio again.

Yep. Going in to the CBC tomorrow to tape an interview about Imbolc, or Candlemas, or Chandeleur, or Brighnassadh, or Feast of Saint Brighid, or whatever you want to call it.

Now, it’s been a year since I’ve done an interview about my spiritual practices. You can actually dig back through the archives and read my rant about the disrespect shown to me by the last jerk who interviewed me. I did plenty of pre-interview work with the producer this time, and at one point I must have hesitated a bit too long, because she asked about my comfort level using certain words. I admitted to her that my last interview experience regarding the general topic had taught me a severe lesson and made me a bit interview-shy, and she’s assured me that nothing of the sort will happen this time. She was quite horrified at the level of immaturity displayed by the man who put me through that mockery of an interview last February and offered her sympathy, although she didn’t sound surprised. Sensational journalism attracts listeners, after all, the same way sensational journalism sells newspapers. In general, though, I have a very good feeling about this interview tomorrow morning. Mind you, forty-five minutes of the producer doing pre-interview research did a lot to put my mind at ease, and I’ve never had a bad interview with the CBC, in all the years I’ve interviewed with them. I’m always treated courteously and with respect. Mind you, I thought the same about CJAD up until last year too.

No, this will be fine. Besides, this time I know to terminate the interview if it goes in a bad direction. We’re taping, after all.

Barring major disasters, it looks like it will air Sunday morning on CBC Radio 1, which in Montreal is 88.5 FM.

Good Days

I had a fantastic day yesterday. That’s about it. Four hours of playing in the store, dinner with Ceri, a smash-bang-wow workshop, a request for a private workshop for a group on the South Shore, then drinks with friends.

On the way to the pub we stopped in at Renaud Bray and I picked up those inks, because I was paid for my full-time work last week and for last night’s workshop (private instruction is so much more lucrative than retail!) and I thought that I deserved a little treat for surviving the past two lean weeks. I now have those darling little oval pots of cuivre, marron, and spring green. Yay! We got home last night and the first thing I did was get out my dip pen, sit on the floor and make lines all over a sheet of blank parchment paper to see what it looked like. I’ll be paying Hydro off in full later today with a chunk of my earnings, but before that, the inks were a lovely little gift to myself. (Note to self: ink (both black and colour) for the printer would probably help too.)

Over dinner last night Ceri gave me her latest pages of creative effort, and for the first time since we began doing this exchange of writing in July, I had nothing to give her. I felt guilty when I left the flat yesterday morning, but then I told myself that I really didn’t have to feel that way since I had given her seventy-eight (!) pages of the Great Canadian Novel over the past three months. I did try to write earlier this week, honestly I did; but I opened the laptop, made a couple of corrections as I re-read the eleven pages of the latest section, and then stared at the screen for about twenty minutes. I’m stuck. Normally when I’m stuck, I jump to the next scene and then go back and fill in the necessary space with an event of some sort, but the next scene I had planned was Christmas shopping, and the characters were still only in mid-November with no way to get to early December. So when I shared that frustration with Ceri yesterday, she said, without missing a beat, “Make it snow,” which was absolutely brilliant and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it. Another of Ceri’s super-powers, by the way, is being a Muse for people. She gives them great ideas. She occasionally laments that alas, she doesn’t inspire herself in the same fashion, so I can only hope that our writing arrangement covers at least the deadline sort of inspiration that writers need. I did give her a nifty idea for her husband’s Hallowe’en costume, but I doubt it even comes close to repaying the Muse-debt that society has incurred to her.

I’m terribly looking forward to driving up to see my parents next weekend; I haven’t seen them since July, and we haven’t made the drive to Oakville in this new car yet. After its spectacular performance through New York and Pennsylvania, this five-hour spin should be a dream! Seven days to go!

Shock

I’m not sure where to begin.

I’m back at work this week — yes, retail; covering for another full-timer who’s on a well-deserved vacation. It was fun for about half a day. Then I started to get tired. I have thirty more hours of this, mostly with new part-timers I don’t know and have never worked with.

After work was my regular class that I teach on Monday nights. I was tired, but onwards I went. I wish things could have ended on a better note; I was trying to make them understand the individual steps in writing a research paper, and one student was seemingly being stubborn on purpose until we discovered that the term “research paper” meant something completely different to her than it meant to the twelve other students and the two professors. Misunderstanding cleared up. Frustrating at the time, though.

The I came home to two messages on my answering machine, one from my orchestra contact asking me to return his call, the other from a member of the LLO board asking me if I would help out backstage since I didn’t get the part. (Nice of you to ask; snowball’s chance in hell.)

I called my orchestra contact back, and sat down, stunned, as he told me that our conductor had been in a rather bad road accident on Friday, had severe head trauma, was in the Montreal General Hospital where unsuccessful surgery had taken place to staunch internal cranial bleeding, and was being kept alive by machines. So our weekly rehearsal has been cancelled.

This is the man who founded the orchestra thirty-odd years ago. Every member of the orchestra has been called and advised of the situation. Of course the rehearsal’s been cancelled!

The situation is even bleaker than it first appears. The family expects to make a decision within the next couple of days as to whether or not those life-support machines should be kept functional. Andres has just retired from teaching high school music to be there for his wife, who is battling terminal cancer. After a promising spring she has taken a turn for the worse, and now she has just been transferred to the Montreal General to be with her husband. Family is being summoned from his native country of Latvia and other places of residence. Evidently, things don’t look good all around.

I don’t know Andres other than as my conductor for a single year of orchestra. He has a sense of humour, a true love for music, the ability to communicate his ideas and visions, to corral forty adults of various levels of competence and with them create a thing of beauty. He taught years and years of string students at Lindsay Place High School. When I saw him last on Wednesday, he was in a wonderful mood.

The strangeness of knowing that he’s now lying somewhere hooked up to monitors and IV drips and pumps and tubes is unreal. It’s so difficult to maintain two opposing realities in the mind: that you expect upon extrapolating from the last time you encountered someone, and the reality that someone has told you which completely contradicts it. I suppose the necessity for closure is directly proportional to how well you know the individual in question. I’ve only known Andres for a year, despite the joy he’s brought me and the work I’ve done for him to meet the standards he’s set. My stunned feelings must pale next to those of the orchestra members how have worked with him longer than I, and to those of his already stressed family. I’m angry at the senseless tragedy; all I can do is pray, and I’ve been doing it since I heard the news. If he’s meant to live, let it be with peace and no pain, with health and positivity. May his doctors’ minds be clear, their hands steady, their acts inspired. If he is meant to die, then let him pass gently, with no further trauma, and may his family be spared further agony. He is an admirable man. Why did this have to happen?

This reminds me that if I walk away from someone in anger, or even indifference, there may not be another opportunity to erase that final image I’ll hold in my mind of them ever afterwards. Like my cats and our dog, he might not be there next time our orchestra gathers. My contact assures me that we’ll likely go on, although Andres was our heart. Perhaps we will; he wouldn’t want the orchestra to dissolve. Music is eternal, although people who create it are not. It will be strange, and it will be different; but for me, it will be a way to balance the senseless and tragic loss of life, if it is indeed confirmed that there must be loss of life. For every destruction, there must be creation, after all.

Loss

I heard today that my parents lost the last pet I’d grown up with. That makes all three within one year.

You have to wonder about the skewed idea of justice that the world has. Last year, it was our female cat Bo’sun, of lung cancer. Last month it was our dog Megan, also of cancer. Yesterday, they put down our cat Grey, of Cushing’s disease. These were animals who were deeply loved, and well-cared for in every sense of the word, who still developed fatal diseases. And everywhere, there are strays and feral dogs and cats, scraping out a living on the streets and in the wild, living to an astonishingly old age.

My parents aren’t completely alone; they brought their new Maine Coon kitten home last week, of course. When I go down at Thanksgiving, though, there won�t be a dog bouncing at the front door when I come in, or a familiar thin hyper-purring cat climbing into my lap when I sit at the kitchen table.

Why do things move so fast? Do you ever get the sense that the world is moving inexorably on, and you’re just standing there, bewildered, not knowing how to keep up? That things are changing, and you don’t know how to make them stop, even just for a little while?

I’m upset about Grey, of course; I’m upset for my parents, too. More than anything else, though, I feel like there’s been a link disrupted to my life as a teenager, when I still lived with my parents. I’ve lived on my own for ten and a half years, but only now do I really feel like I can’t go back in quite the same way. Our family pets have always played huge roles in our lives, and this particular set of three was around for about twelve years. Every time I went to visit my parents, there they were, waiting for me along with my mum and dad. And now, it’s just not going to be the same. At all.

Life goes on, of course, the way it does when anyone you love dies. You adjust. Sometimes, though, when I get really upset about the death of a pet, I wonder why we do it to ourselves; why we bring these little fuzzy things into our homes for a decade and integrate them into our hearts and lives to such an extent if we know they’re only going to go away some day, leaving us lonely and in pain. Of course, you can say the same thing about friends, or lovers, and some people do. They don’t let anyone close, brood over the past betrayals, and end up bitter, lonely individuals. I think, though, that we seek animal companionship for the same reason we reach out over and over to men and women: for love, for warmth, for interaction with another intelligence. To provide care and support; to receive those same things in return, to a varied degree. There have been times I have cried, and my cats have actively sought to comfort me; times I have been very ill, and they have stayed with me. When I am happy, they share that with me as well.

So we do it repeatedly; we open our hearts to these creatures who cannot share our seven to nine decades of life, because even those ten or fifteen precious years count for something. The pain is worth it.

At least, so it seems while you still have the comfort of their warmth and love, and that pain is still only a vague future. When tomorrow becomes today, and you cry, and protest the injustice, the story reads quite differently. And, as always, I wish I could rewrite the ending, so that everyone could live happily ever after.

The Dance Of One Who Does Not Care

Good gods.

We have a Friday the thirteenth this week.

This will be the first Friday the thirteenth I have not been called at work by CJAD to be interviewed on the radio. (I used to really disappoint radio hosts, since my whole approach was, “You know we’re just normal people who revere nature and believe in a deity concept that embodies male and female energy, right?”) I will not be speaking on the origins of the superstition, or superstition in general. or what it means to a witch, or the Pagan community in general

This is the dance of someone who doesn’t care.

La la la!

Retreat Recap

I�m back! Why do camping trips always seem like something you need a vacation to recuperate from?

We were one hundred and seventy eight Pagans, in a group campsite that had a couple of Boy Scout troops at the end. We all had coven banners up with animals on them by our campsites; by the end of their stay, they had marked �Lewisberry Coven� under their troop number on their site signs. It was so darned cute. Apparently we weren’t all that bad: when at the end of our main ritual we gave a wolf howl, they howled back (as Scouts are taught to do!). At the end of the weekend, though, their sites had been taken by a Baptist group. When one of the Pennsylvania people had to fetch something as we were packing up, she moaned, �Please don�t make me go past the Baptists � they�re singing, and playing the flute�. The contrast was hilarious.

Something I discovered: my stomach doesn�t like American food. I think it has something to do with the water. One of my fellow Canadian campers also pointed out that the US has different food regulations, so even if it�s the same brand of something I consume with no difficulty in Canada, the US equivalent might have different ingredients.

Their roads are so good! Smooth, well-marked (except for the construction, and the very sudden exits off a 65 mph highway onto a hairpin 35 mph exit ramp), and the two directions are separated for the most part, so you aren�t staring into the headlights of oncoming highway traffic. We drove the I-81 and the I-83 down through New York and Pennsylvania; I don�t know if other interstates are comparable or not. Driving home, in fact, I was inspired by the helpful and repetitive signs to create a little bit of Highway Haiku:

Watch For Falling Rocks
Buckle up for Safety Please
Bridge May Be Icy

Our border crossings both ways were nice and smooth too. If you cross into the US, make sure to smile and wave at the eight visible and likely many more hidden cameras that record you and your vehicle from every imaginable angle. (From my husband as the border guard steps out of his shelter: �God! When did they start arming the border guards? That gun is the length of his thigh!�)

My husband and I had the honour to stand as temple summoners/wedding guards/quarter officers at a marriage (no, we had no idea � we would have brought nicer clothes if we�d had any inkling!). This was an on-site request from the High Priestess and Clan Mother, who had never seen us in ritual before and could have been inviting disaster; as it was, we rose to her trust and the occasion. We ended up being honoured quite unexpectedly for it later on in the day, thereby yet again proving the �what you do returns to you� concept quite nicely to our minds. So, to Tracy and Ken, congratulations! It was an honour to stand at your backs.

We were welcomed at every turn. It was a group of balanced, strong (in more than one sense of the word), happy, secure, and relaxed people, all which was a nice change from the Pagan community in Montreal. No one was snippy, no one was criticising; the internal politics were straightforward and dealt with on a level that I wish all groups could operate on, Pagan or otherwise. It never degenerated into a happy-clappy hugfest; sure, things got teary at times, but they were tears from being moved at the knowledge that these people would stand behind you no matter what, whether you�d been a member of the Tradition for ten years or ten days. This unity is unique in a Tradition: generally groups hive off and sever contact from a mother group. My Tradition reunites yearly, re-affirming strength, maintaining continuity, and creating a sense of family. I am honoured to have been chosen to be part of it, and to have grown as much as I have within its context. My spiritual path, although I don�t talk about it much, is of great importance to me as I move through the challenges life presents: it is strength; it is celebration; it is balance; and it is joy. And now, it has been proven to me that it is family, as well.