Beautiful start to the day.

Breakfast was served on the patio. In the distance, the rugged hills climbed steadily towards the blue sky that soared above. All around us, green vines crept in organized rows into the distance.

We sat in the morning sun, soaking up the air, the sounds, the view.

And then, one more potential site for our wedding visited, we headed east towards home.

It was a divine escape, a delightful sojourn in wine country, a wonderful way to spend four days together.

and now, I’m late and must run.

See you tomorrow!

My morning reverie. From where I sit…

This is peaceful country.

Vineyards and orchards line both sides of the valley, straight ridges of vines and trees climbing up the hillsides. At the bottom, crystal clear waters of Lake Okanagan and Skaha Lake lay in placid serenity, their mirrored surface a reflection of the blue skies above.

Sighing, I slip over the edge of busy into calm. I am content.

Yesterday, C.C. and I visited four  more possibilities for our wedding.

The one comment from every site is the same. “April? Hmmm… well, the weather can be iffy. Do you have to get married then?”

There is no ‘have-to’ with our date. It’s one we set. Just because.

All the venues we’ve seen have beautiful possibilities, but… well some are just more beautiful than others.

We’ve set a grading scale — 1 – 5.

View.

Logistical requirements (i.e. some need tents and all food as well as washrooms trucked in)

Ease of access

Atmosphere

Cost

And of course… the wine.

We haven’t gone through all our notes yet but, it feels like no matter what location we choose, it will be magical and marvelous.

But, do we risk April or  move to a date later in May? When the vines have had a chance to ripen. When the weather has had a time to free itself from winter blues.

Regardless of what site we choose, we have had a magical time in the valley.

Our last stop yesterday was at La Stella, an old world vineyard that is perched at the edge of Skaha Lake just at the tip of Osoyoos, a small arts and crafts town at the southern edge of Okanagan Valley.

Mike Kosaka, the vineyard operations manager, walked us down to the wedding site, chatting all the way about the beauty of the location (it is undeniable) and the challenging logistics of holding a wedding as ‘small’ as ours on their site. Logistically and economically, weddings of 150 – 200 make sense here. We’re planning for sixty.

It didn’t matter. The site was gorgeous and while we probably won’t be getting married there, Mike spent a delightful hour with us talking about the area, wine-making and his journey to vineyard manager. As we sat on the deck of the Tasting Room, exploring La Stella wines, he talked about pruning the vines and other facts and tricks of viticulture and his wife’s deep roots in wine-making in her homeland, the seat of Burgundies and Beaujolais and all things winey. He shared stories of wine-makers through the ages and the art of barrel-making and barrel-keeping. He talked of cycles of growth and self-planting vines and wine-snobbery and wine-mystery.

And through it all, we were enchanted. His passion. His knowledge and his generosity created a tiny bubble of joy that kept spreading out to encompass us both as we listened and asked questions and shared some of our favourite winery stories too.

C.C. has caught the bug. The dream of owning his own vineyard, something he’d set aside many years ago, has reconnected to his psyche. I swear he’s already plotting out the where’s and how’s! The who’s and what’s!

As we drove back along the lake, the late afternoon sun glistening on its waters, the shadows deepening in the crags and canyons of this arid land, we felt replete, complete and connected. Not just to the lore of the valley but to the story of life lived on the edges of the water’s of possibility.

And on our way back, we stopped at Hillside Winery, one of the possible venues for our wedding. We enjoyed a delightful dinner beside the fire as outside the sun slipped below the mountain peaks and the air quickly lost the heat of day. Tiny fairy lights came on all around the patio outside and we were embraced in the wonder and awe of the valley and being together here, in this place, where dreams awaken.

It is October the 3rd and we are already three days into Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Which means, I’m still not going to tell you which Olympic medallist I shared the podium with on Thursday. That will have to wait until next week!

Three days into the month and I have not done anything to support the cause or to draw awareness to the importance of doing whatever we can to ensure breast cancer does not harm another woman, child, family in the world.

In honour of my beautiful friends UZ and LS, both of whom are survivors and all the other women who have fought, who continue to fight, who have won and who have lost the battle, I am sharing a post by Lisa Bonchek Adams. I have followed Lisa’s journey for some time and I am always in awe and humbled by her spirit and her capacity to write with such self-awareness and compassion as she continues to fight for her life every single day. In an update Lisa posted on September 26th, she wrote, “I have become an expert in uncertainty. I don’t know how I will feel from one day to the next. I don’t know if the chemotherapy that worked a few weeks ago will still work today. I don’t know how my body will tolerate what I’m doing. I don’t know how long this all will last.”

Her courage is humbling.

Her honesty is heart-breaking and her willingness to be present as she takes each step of her journey reminds me always to find the value in all things, and to turn up in my life every single day with a loving, grateful heart.

Her post from today is titled, Last One On The Line.

Please take a few minutes to read it and if you can, make a donation to support Breast Cancer Research whereever you are in the world. Thank you.

 Last One On The Line

by Lisa Bonchek Adams

It seems like you can’t rank anguish. You shouldn’t be able to “out-suffer” someone. How do you quantify misery?

And yet, somehow we do.

“My problems are nowhere near as bad as yours are.”
“I feel terrible complaining to you about it when you are going through so much yourself.”

I hear these types of comments all the time.
I make these types of comments all the time.

Placing ourselves in a hierarchy of pain and suffering serves to ground us; no matter how bad our situation is, there’s comfort in knowing there is always someone who has it worse….(read the rest of this post)

Breathe in.
Water colour & collage
©2014 Louise Gallagher

This week doesn’t seem to have enough time in it! Oh wait. It always has the same amount of time. It’s just the speed at which I’m trying to process and the amount of data and things to do I’m trying to get done is greater than the time allotted in which to process and produce! There’s no change in the speed of time’s passing, its quantity or its impact. It’s just me!

No matter what I feel about time and its many facets, it only has one speed. It only is what it is.

I had my blog all planned for this morning. I was going to write about a first, a never experienced by me event — sharing the podium yesterday with an Olympic athlete.

But now, that will have to wait until tomorrow because my computer has taken advantage of the time of day and is backing itself up and doing all sorts of internal tasks to take care of itself — which is slowing down everything I do.

Yup. there’s that time thing again. Even though the speed of time has not changed, I am feeling the pressure of how quickly it is being consumed. I have an early morning meeting today and have to be out of the house by 6:45. And then, an all day training session — and still a list as long as my arm to complete before C.C. and I head west for the Okanagan for four days of r’n r and wedding planning.

So… bet you want to know more about the Olympic moment of my day yesterday.

You’ll just have to pop back in tomorrow to read all about it!

But I will tell you, it was inspiring and humbling and fascinating too!

And as to time’s speed of movement — time’s got nothing on an Olympic speedster!

Yup. That’s the tease and the clue. There’s lots of speed involved in this athlete’s sport and now there’s lots of time for you to ponder who it might be!

For now, I’m off to spend a day savouring each  moment, no matter how fast, or slow I think time is passing. Because, no matter what I’m thinking, time’s pace is steady and its beat strong.

Have an amazingly awesome day and may you find time, no matter where you’re at or what you’re doing, to savour the moment and cherish each breath you take.

And may you always…. Breathe in Love. Exhale Gratitude.  And again…. Breathe in….

Art Journal Page
Speak often the words of your heart.

This is one of those fast and flurry-filled posts.

After spending some time in the studio last night, I joined C.C. to watch one of ‘our’ programs on TV. And then, I got caught in another. After the second, I slipped into the office to catch up on some emails and work I had to get done for both my upcoming art show, and the concert for Christmas at The Madison. (Yes, it is coming soon for the third year! Sunday, November 30th, 7pm. St. Stephen’s Anglican Church – watch this space for more information soon!)

And then, I got distracted. Lost track of time and didn’t realize how late it was until the midnight hour was upon me!

Needless to say, I slept in. On purpose.

Actually set my alarm for 6:30am and slept until it went off!

Now that’s unusual for me.

To actually heed an alarm and not wake up before its ring.

And out of all that, what I’m saying is…

I’m late.

Or am I?

I have a choice.

To allow my sense of being late to hurry me up and leave me feeling breathless and out of time, or, to breathe into my sense of being late and allow myself the grace of being present in the moment, where I’m, at without judging the time or tardiness of my awakening.

What I choose will determine the tempo and the essence of my day.

And my voice of reason whispers, “Choose wisely.”

I am choosing to accept the hour of my awakening as what it is, the hour of my awakening.

And now, I must rewind.

Earlier, thinking I was late and had limited time to begin my day, I chose to skip my meditation. It’s my all or nothing thinking. If I don’t have at least 20 minutes to meditate, what’s the point?

The point is, there’s nothing wrong with just 10 minutes, or even 5. What’s important is that I take the time to center myself, to ground my day in quiet. So, rather than spend half an hour to forty-five minutes here, I’ll make this short and give myself the gift of time for quiet reflection where I can set the intention for my day and live into its wide-eyed awakening with awe-inspired breathing.

So often, in my ‘all or nothing’ thinking, I convince myself that there is only one way to do something when, in fact, the choice is always mine and in that choice, there are many roads and many options.

My option this morning is to surrender judgment and  fall effortlessly into being present in my day knowing, how I live it is my choice. When I choose to honour myself, I give myself the gift of all the time I need to experience each moment as a wonderful, joyful awakening.

There is no time like the present and time isn’t going too fast, it’s simply moving. How I experience the speed of its passing is up to me.

Chicken Little

Standing in front of my easel, staring at a blank canvas, or one I’ve decided to keep painting into, can be daunting. In fact, it can be downright scary!

I come to the canvas with an idea, a thought, a visual expression I want to make manifest, and always, my critter mind gets going like crazy!  Forget it. Stop it. Don’t bother. Nope, too scary. Nope, you aren’t an artist.

To move through the critter’s nattering I must take action. Get into action. Get going. I must make the first mark of paint, and then the second, and third and keep putting paint onto the canvas without letting the critter’s voice take hold.

And, with each stroke of paint, with each breath I take, the fear subsides as I move into the sacred space of creating for the sake of creating.

Tamara joined me in the studio last night and at one point she commented how much she loves to create with no agenda.

The underpainting
A landscape I didn’t like

It is in that space, that limitless and liminal space of creating without an agenda that magic happens, wonder awakens, awe invades. In that space, there is no critter’s voice telling me to Stop it. Or yammering about my limitations. There is only me and the muse. Me and the process of being present in all my senses, without judgement.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the critic has a role to play in the creative process. The original painting that forms the underpainting for Chicken Little was not pleasing me. The photo I shared is phase one. I don’t have a photo of phase two because it was quite ugly. I’d added a whole bunch of dark green trees in the foreground and the mass of them was disappointing! I was undecided as to where to go with it, what to do when I came upon a technique of painting random designs onto a background, and then, blocking out what was not needed and leaving the ‘desired’ elements exposed.

Letting go of fear, I decided to try it. What did I have to lose? A painting I wasn’t too happy with anyway?

And that’s where the magic, and the fun, happened.

In painting over, in fearlessly letting myself be one with the canvas, I found a new and fun way to work, and a piece I really like.

Just like life. when I’m stuck in thinking there’s only one way to do it, one thing to do, I am limiting my focus to the known, to the visible.

When I let go and relax, breathe into each moment and allow myself the grace of experimentation, of simply being present, miracles happen!

Death knocked at 5am, September 17th. It was not unexpected. It had been hovering for weeks, waiting for the quiet time, just before the dawn to slip in and steal her last breath away.

It came for three others that morning at the hospice. My youngest daughter will laugh nervously when she tells me this. “I told Grammy it was okay to let go. Perhaps I whispered too loud,” she adds.

I do not know the ages of the other 3 who slipped across the threshold from life to death. I do not know if they were alone, or surrounded by family, or if they cried out in regret or clung to the final threads of a breath filling their body in the hopes of one more.

Jill was 94. Her son, (my daughters’ father) and his wife, their aunt and her husband along with my youngest daughter, were by her side the night before she passed away. She didn’t want a fuss. She didn’t want a lot of hoopla as she called it. She was uncomfortable with tears and any sign of emotion. “Stop your blubbering,” she would say at the first sign of waterworks flowing from the eyes of anyone present. And the blubberer would obey.

She was not eager to stay longer she told me one Saturday morning when I went to visit her at the hospice and asked if she was afraid of death’s impending arrival. She was still coherent then. Lucid, even though the cancer had already prevented her from eating for weeks. “Why should I be?” she answered in her practical way. “It’s time. I’ve lived long enough.”

Long enough. To know love. To know the loss of love, the fearful scrambling for more and to know the sometimes painful truth of thinking love is limited to only those we think of as deserving.

It is not love that is limited. It is our capacity to let it in, to see and know and feel its boundless joy. To see and know and feel its infinite wisdom.

I first met Jill, my daughters’ paternal grandmother, when her son and I began dating in 1979. Never one to gush or fuss, she told me on the day her son and I announced our engagement a year after our first meeting that marriage was a trap, an institution that served only to strangle a woman’s voice.

I laughed and reassured her marriage would not do that to me and she said, “We’ll see.”

She was filled with contradictions. A woman who was once a Vogue model, who earned significant monies in the stock market, who fiercely held onto her independence while also believing it was her responsibility to cook and clean and keep house for her husband, she could not understand how I could make her son vacuum . “That’s women’s work,” she told me one day when she discovered the errors of my way. I laughed and told her that it was necessary work that didn’t have a gender. She harrumphed in response and I never again let her know if her son was engaged in ‘women’s work’.

Sometimes, it was easier with Jill to just not let her know. I also think she just liked to test people to see if she could get a reaction.

When my daughters were born, it was Jill I counted on to be there, to support me, guide me and to love our little girls like no other. And she did.

The very first night I got home from the hospital with my eldest, it was Jill I trusted to be with her while her son and went to the theatre to see Evita. I knew she was in good hands. I knew she was with a loving heart.

She was always there. Supporting. Loving. Guiding. Caring.

For all her acerbic and sometimes gruff ways, she loved her granddaughters completely, always, passionately.

She was a constant role model for them, showing them what it meant to age with dignity, and pizzazz! She danced with them. Laughed with them. Cried with them. Took them to the beach, searched for pieces of blue glass (you have enough green, she told them), overturning rocks to watch crabs scurry away, sitting for hours watching the girls play along the water’s edge below the cliff of her beautiful home that she loved so much. She taught them the wonders of watching an eagle soar above, the beauty of sitting still and doing little other than to watch a feather float upon the water’s surface or a deer traipse through the forest. She taught them what it means to be human in every way.

In the final years of her life, family matters got in the way of Jill and I having much contact. There are so many things I never told her about how much I valued her presence in our lives. So many words of gratitude that went unexpressed.

In her passing, the words remain unspoken, yet, I know that in her passing, there is no need for words. In the space that was once filled with her life, there is only one thing that remains. That very same thing that carried her into this world and carried her out. The thing she struggled most to express. Love.

And it is Love I pick up today and wrap around her memory in a warm, soft blanket of gratitude. Thank you Jill. You touched my heart and my life. Safe journey.

I am revelling in the exploration of the course I’m taking online with Abbey of the Arts, The Way of the Monk. The Path of the Artist.

One of the elements I have been meditating on is ‘silence’.

What does it mean to me? What does it look like? How does it feel? Where am I in silence? What do I hold onto?

These are all questions I have been pondering as I delve into the liminal space where my inner monk and artist co-mingle, finding themselves at one with who I am when I let go of searching for the answer to “Who am I?”.

When I let go of constant searching, doing, getting, and still my being into this moment right now, I find myself deeply connected, on a spiritual level, with the essence of my being present, here. The pounding of my heart, the constant sense of ‘what next’ as I scramble to get done all that I tell myself I must do to be productive, contributive, participative in the world eases away and I am left breathing deeply into my being at one with the moment, right here.

This morning, I am off to coach at Choices Seminars for the next five days. I will not be posting — they are long days, short nights, fast sleeps. I also won’t have time to delve into the coursework. Because I know how busy I will be, I decided to create the space last night, to heed the invitation of the Visual Art Exploration of the course.

Before going into the seminar room, I need to ground myself in the essence of my creative core. It is a vital practice for me, a necessary preparation to ensure that I enter the sacred space of the training, open, present, loving and compassionate.

What a gift the Visual Art Exploration gave me!

The invitation was to create three collage using water colour and images based on questions that came to me during meditation. The invitation was to simply, let be. To let the questions arise, without thinking my way into, or out of, them. And, to write the questions on the back of the watercolour paper, and to create without knowing which question was on the back.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “Have patience with everything unresolved  in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…. Live the questions now.”

Sitting in silence, allowing what arises to arise, what appears to appear, is always a challenge for me. I want to direct. To control. To know the answers.

Creating from the silence, allowing the unresolved to have space, to allow the questions to be loved so that I can live what calls from within me to be expressed, is also very challenging.

I am learning to let be.

What a wonderful exploration.

Four questions arose for me, so I allowed myself the gift of all four. It felt appropriate. In the training room at Choices, there are four flags hung on the wall which honour the four directions, and colours, of Canada’s First Nations.

For me, the four questions arose from the wisdom of The Monk. The Artist. The Monk and The Artist and The Mystic.

The artist asked:  What does the silence look like?

The monk asked: How do I find myself in the silence?

The artist and monk asked, as they faced each other and mirrored one another: How do I touch my creative essence through the silence?

And the Mystic asked: Are you willing to create the space to find your balance dancing along the edge of darkness and light, holding onto the silence?

I have chosen to live within the questions, to simply love their presence, without seeking to resolve or answer them.

I struggle with this. I want to know. Are these the right questions? What do these questions mean? What is the answer? Is there a better question?

I am choosing instead to let go of struggling and simply move into being in their presence.

As you journey through your day, I invite you to be present. To let go of needing to know the answers to life’s questions, and to simply stay present in the shimmering space of acceptance of the dissonance and resonance of being here on this planet, just as you are in this moment, right now.

See you Monday.

Namaste.

Though I receive a daily prompt for blog ideas from The Daily Post every day, I have never written to it.

Today’s title and idea intrigued me: Greetings, Stranger.

It reminded me of an invitation from my meditation guide Dal Bryant who asks: You are walking through the desert and someone approaches. Who is it?

Today’s prompt is: You’re sitting at a café when a stranger approaches you. This person asks what your name is, and, for some reason, you reply. The stranger nods, “I’ve been looking for you.” What happens next?

I smiled at the stranger’s statement, “I’ve been looking for you.”

I think of myself as a seeker. I don’t often see myself as the one being sought.

What happens next?

Not after I meet the stranger, but after I realize that I am not just a seeker, I am also a giver, a sought after, a wanted, a desired, a beloved.

What if the stranger is actually a thought that has come to me because that one new thing, that one new idea that was hidden to me, has been seeking the right time to be revealed?

The thread of this thinking stems from last week’s reading in my The Way of the Monk. The Path of the Artist. course I am taking with the Abbey of the Arts.

Now I am revealing new things to you
Things hidden and unknown to you
Created just now, this very moment.
Of these things you have heard nothing before
so that you cannot say, Oh yes, I knew this.
— Isaiah 48, 6-7

I have contemplated these words throughout the first week of the course, setting them to memory, even in my discomfort of reading  and quoting from the Bible.

As a child, we had to read from the Bible every Friday night when my mother would have us kneel in our living room and pray the rosary, in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary that stood on the mantle beneath the crucifix.

As a child, I loved the sacred space of that prayer circle. I loved the feel of the tiny sparkly beads of my rosary in my tiny hands. I loved the smell of the incense burning in the brass holder on the mantle sending out a long tendril of pungent smoke that filled the room. I loved the quiet hush that came over us as we four children prayed with bowed head beside my mother reciting the Our Father at the beginning of each decade of Hail Mary’s.

And then, I grew distant from the practice, not just of praying the rosary, but of the Catholic faith.

I grew angry with God and turned away from anything even closely related to organized religion.

It was a rebellion of my youth that lasted long into my 30s and 40s and while I am not so rebellious today, I still shy away from organized religion, holding onto my belief it does not sit well with my soul.

That which I resist, persists. The disquiet of my soul stirs deeply in my roots as I hold back from examining what it is I truly am resisting, as opposed to what it is I believe to be true to cause me such disquiet within.

I am resisting letting go of my anger, my sadness, my disquiet from the long and distant past where I felt forced to honour a God who let bad things happen to me, to the world around me, to people all over the world.

As I child, I could not understand how God, that giant unseen hand in the sky above which my mother promised me would fall down and strike me if I wasn’t a good girl or worse yet, would send me to Hell, could allow people to die. How could He allow war and famine and starving children in Africa and atomic bomb threats that forced us to practice hiding under our desks?

Was He not all powerful? All seeing? All knowing?

My mother told me He was. If He knew it all, what was wrong with him that he could let these things happen?

I have been holding onto a vision of God that is not of His making, but of mine and in my resistance to letting go of what I decided was true decades ago, I have held myself in the border lands, that place where my resistance to stepping over the threshold of my fear keeps me from truly expressing the Divine mystery of my being human.

I am delighting in this exploration. I am learning. I am expanding my understanding. I am evolving.

I do not know what I will find, but then, these are new things being revealed to me, so I cannot say, Oh yes, I knew this.