Wild and Precious

Too bad I'm not drinking these days...

So Tuesday happened...

And then Leonard Cohen died today, just to ice our cake of despair nicely for us.

If my Facebook and Twitter feeds are accurate (and when is social media EVER NOT totally unbiased and accurate, she said with heavy sarcasm), the world is teetering on the brink of destruction, and apocalypse is nigh.

It may very well be true, though. I was reading a book when the U.S. election hit (Emily St. John Mandel's excellent Station Eleven), which is set in a not-so-distant future where a virulent flu has wiped out 99% of the world's population and survivors live in a word without electricity, internet, gas. It paired all-too-well with actual events, to the point where I looked down at the cat, rolling plumply on my bed, and promised mournfully, "I will never eat you, Molly." (I might have to though. People have been forced to do so much worse; unimaginable actions. You don't know the half of what you are capable of, good or bad. You have no idea what's coming down the pipe.)

Enough. Mourn, if you want to. I cannot take my emotional temperature from the same ten or twenty people I always turn to for wisdom on Facebook without feeling frustrated.

What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?

What am I going to do with mine?

Am I going to rail at the shittiness of the world on Facebook or am I going to DO something about it?   I am sickened by how much time I have wasted staring at that damn feed, watching the same people say the same things, agreeing with each other, "liking" each other's comments; an endless snake eating its own tail.

I am going to try and spend less time online and more time actually connecting with my friends and family in a way that is meaningful to me.

I am going to keep teaching preschoolers and underfunded and at-risk kids how to make music, how to channel all that crazy energy and those wild impulses into something beautiful. I will keep being simultaneously exhausted and renewed by their daffy, impulsive, annoying, beautiful selves.

I am going to try harder to be part of change. To support people who feel threatened and marginalized. I will not apologize for being lucky,  but I will try to acknowledge my privilege.

(I will also stop using the word privilege. Or the word creative, when used as a noun: I'm a creative. What the actual fuck does that even mean? Hell, if we're making early resolutions, I will stop making the thumbs-up sign, which looks dopey as hell but I can't seem to break the habit. And saying "like", as in "I'm like...")

A wise person said to me yesterday that social media allows everyone to feel as if they need to editorialize everything, all the time. I will say this: that if I, or anyone else, watches this shit go down and thinks that writing about it is enough, then we are part of the problem.

Enough. I will post this (and yeah, link to it from my social media platforms) and then I will get off the damn internet and enjoy my two days off. Because I don't know how much time I have left, but I won't live as though I have a sword hanging over my head. We all have that, all the time. Nothing changed except maybe it got a little sharper this week.

That's what I'm going to do.

What will you do?

4:30 am

4:30 am, and I wake from the clutches of a bad dream that is slow to let go. I seldom have nightmares, and they aren't often really bad ones, but they do tend to leave an unsettling feeling in me long after I wake up. 
Thank goodness for Christmas lights, strung around my blinds, and for cats; the fluffy cat curled in her special shallow cardboard box, which I have moved into the bedroom so she doesn't have to sleep alone, and the baby cat (now a robust 2 year-old) curled tightly against my legs. It may have been their shifting that woke me. Their owners, my roomies, are away on a month-long vacation, and we are all getting used to the big empty house. The first night they were gone, the hi-tech smoke alarm shrilled in the middle of the night, its calm disembodied robot-lady voice stating Emergency. There is smoke upstairs. Emergency. Beep, Beep, Beeeep. I leapt out of bed, heart knocking against my ribs, and dashed upstairs, examining every room, sniffing the air... Nothing. A total false alarm, but I lay awake twitchily for hours afterwards. 
Tonight it is my own brain that keeps me awake in the small hours of the morning; unusual for me not to sleep through the night, and unusual for me to have bad dreams. As with most dreams this one was mishmash of events and emotions: a concert, applause, a hug from a friend and then... an old hotel, like in the Wild West. A shooting, bodies lying bloody in their beds, mostly unseen, just a glimpse of the horrors within. 
I know where this comes from, of course.
 I am not, in my waking hours, someone who spends a lot of time agonizing over the news. I can hear about terrible events and still go about my day; I find I am unable to immerse myself emotionally in bad things that are not part of my world. It's not that I don't care, but it's removed from my everyday experience. I refuse to buy into the doomsday, we're-all-going-to-hell pessimism- not that it's not necessarily true, but... We have one life. I refuse to spend it in constant dread. 
This string of senseless, brutal shootings, though. How can it not seep into my consciousness, even as I have my cozy days at home with Christmas music and cats, and the deep everyday happinesses that are part of my lucky and fortunate life. 
There it is, made bogeyman in my brain: the horror of the random gunman spraying bullets, mixed with some el-cheapo wine drunk too late at night (more of gravy than of grave, as Scrooge would say), and some late-night reading about the musical "Hamilton" (Hamilton was killed in a duel) and...voila. I can't sleep. I listen to the cat turning in her box, and try to toss and turn as considerately as I can, so as not to disturb the other cat, the one against my legs. I think about the other thing that came out of my dream, along with the unshakeable dread-feeling. 
There it was, like a gift in the midst of the nightmare: 2 lines of song, with ethereal bluegrass-y harmonies and everything. When I realize I won't sleep for a while, I jot the lines into my phone so I won't forget them. 
When it's after 6, and I'm still not sleeping, I take the unusual (for me) step of deciding to get up. For once I am up before the garbageman, and the sun. I do half an hour of yoga. I shower. I decide to treat myself (at 9, when they open) to a cheap breakfast at a local cafe. 
I lie on the couch feeling exhaustion lurking behind my tired eyelids and type this, thinking If I'm lucky, I'll turn those lines into a song. That something pretty could come out of horror... well, that's just about the best we can do with what we're given, isn't it? 

Death and Blue Skies

Death and blue skies.

I can't get that phrase out of my head these days. Death and blue skies, because both have been such a feature of my summer.

I've been intensely happy these past 6 weeks, doing a job I love in a beautiful place. I fell in love with Saskatoon, and it's going on my list of Places I Would Like To Work In Again. But it's been an unsettling summer too. My home province is burning up. Vancouverites pray for rain. And death has left its mark on people I love dearly.

A few days ago, my second homes, Wells and Barkerville, lost an extraordinary man far too soon. Although I liked and admired him (and shared a drink or two with him at the Wells Pub), we weren't close, and I am more saddened because of the untimeliness of his loss,  and devastated on behalf of the community and the people who were close to him. One of those people wrote a beautiful tribute to Tim here.

When people in Barkerville die, my friend Danette will often post a moving tribute to them, and end with the phrase "forever part of the story of us." It's a beautiful expression, and it's resonated with me over the summer for a number of reasons. For one thing, of course we want so much to believe that when someone we love leaves us, some part of them will live on in our love and memories. For the ones who are left behind, stories and memories and love are our ways of immortalizing and honouring the ones who are gone. Every memory is a building block, and so I take the time to remember Pat's love of music, or Corinne's long braid and twinkling eyes, Pinchy's solo stick-wrestling games, or Tim's truculent posture, booming voice, and love of theatre and whiskey. Friends and family all over will do likewise, and I think one of the very best things about social media is that it gives us a place to share these stories with each other, however scattered we are.

But the story of us has another meaning to me.

Every time we get on a plane, step out in front of traffic, hike in a forest full of bears- fuck that. Every time we wake up in the morning and start another day we are politely asking death to pass us by, again.
I am the heroine of my life story, just as you are the hero(-ine) of yours, and the friends, family, enemies and co-workers who surround us are players in that story too. And when someone dies, our stories change, and when someone dies unexpectedly young, or tragically, we are rocked. The story wasn't supposed to go that way. And if we can lose someone we love suddenly in a car accident, or a massive stroke, or an asthma attack, who's to say that we cannot be lost as well? At any moment.

A friend of mine wrote to say that she "couldn't stop crying" after someone's sudden death, and my first reaction was to think to myself but you weren't that close. But that's not the point. A piece of her story is missing now, in a way she never expected; the world has tilted and shifted. For a moment, the facade slipped away and death was frighteningly near. As it always is, and the walls we build around us to forget that fact can crumble so terrifyingly fast. Someone dies, or- as has happened to me this summer- a handful of deaths occur, and those of us who are not close enough to the dead to be actively grieving that person must still rebuild our concept of what life is. Not a stroll down a quiet street but a tightrope walk over a gaping chasm. And that's why we write those old, tired truths: Live each moment as if it's your last. Tell your friends that you love them, every day. Make it count. 

I have no words of wisdom, I wrote to someone who just lost her love, her best friend. Only hugs and rage and hope. 

We live. We step onto the tightrope every single day. We meet people who become part of the story of us. And we lose them; our protective walls are knocked down over and over again and if we're lucky we get through with the love and determination of the community we build around us. Because whoever you are, living each and every day knowing that death is coming for you? That's the bravest thing you can do.