“Do you know what time the next bus comes at?”

His voice cuts into my reverie. I am sitting on a bench outside the bus shelter, savouring the warm embrace of the sun. I have decided to not walk home today from the C-train. C.C. is playing golf and can’t pick me up and I have forgotten to bring my shoes to walk in. I know if I take the half hour walk home in the one’s I’m wearing, my feet will not thank me.

I tell him I don’t. Does anyone, I ask him with a smile? This is Calgary Transit.

He laughs back. Sits down on the bench a couple of seats away from me. “Well wouldn’t you know it would take forever,” he says with a sigh. “A perfect ending to a horrible day.”

I look at him. Smile. I don’t really feel like chatting. The sun is warm. The air still and I am enjoying these moments to relax in the sun.

And, I am curious. My natural state of being. I want to ask him what made his day so horrible. I want to understand.

“Well, at least the sun is shining and we’re not waiting here in the rain,” I say.

“Yeah. True. But I don’t get transit. Hardly ever take it,” he adds quickly.

In this sprawling city of 1.2 million people spread across an area of over 280 sq mi, there are a lot of jokes about transit and its unpredictability. Having a car is thought to be an essential.

“I dont’ usually go downtown,” he tells me, quick to jump into the conversation opener. “I work on the north hill.” I smile and he adds, “I wasn’t about to pay the ransom it takes to park my car downtown,” he adds.

Calgary has some of the priciest parking rates in all of North America. I know what he means.

“Do you get our court system?” he asks.

His change of direction startles me. “How do you mean?”

“Well. I had to go to court today. Oh nothing about me. I was the witness,” he adds quickly. “But the guy I had to testify against walked. They tell me I had to respond to the subpoena. That if I didn’t they’d put a warrant out for my arrest. So I take the day off. Get down there by 8am. Spend my day in a courtroom and then. The guy walks. I don’t get it.”

I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure what to say.

Fortunately, he’s not looking for a response. He just wants to be heard. “I mean, these two kids are racing down our back lane at 60 km and spraying gravel everywhere and there’s an old lady who lives across the lane from me and she’s in her garden and I’m putting out garbage and these two kids fly by and someone could have been hurt. So I do what I think I need to do and call the cops. But they’re useless. They don’t want to go talk to the kids which is what I told them they should do. But they say no, if you’re going to report it we have to issue a ticket and they do and I get told I have to turn up in court and then, they don’t even call me to testify. Whole deal is done before it even gets in front of the judge. I don’t get it.”

We chat some more. I bridle at his comment that all the cops are in the donut shop at the corner of 17th and 37th and tell him there are lots of good cops out there. He grudgingly admits its possible but insists not in this case.

We chat some more. The bus is taking a long, long time.

He starts to talk about his kids. How he would hope if his son was driving like a fool down the lane that someone would take matters in hand and let him know.

“He’s a good kid,” he tells me. “Living in China right now. The north. Don’t know why he wants to live there but he’s loving it. Teaches English. I worry about him. What if he catches a disease? What if he drinks the water and gets sick?”

I say something about how we have to trust our children to live their own lives.

He sits for a moment. Quiet.

“My youngest son will never be able to live his own life,” he says.

And he tells me of the brain tumor when his son was nine and life was a wide open field of possibility. “Longest nine hours of my life,” he says about the surgery that removed the tumor and how, when it was over the tumor was gone, and so was the son he knew.

And my heart breaks open and compassion swims all around us.

“That must have been heart-breaking,” I say.

And he nods his head up and down and says, “Yeah. It is.”

And the bus comes and we get on. He sits in t he seat behind me and tells me the rest of the story of his son who will never be able to live his own life.

He gets off two stops before mine. As he stands to exit the bus, I wish him well. I tell him his son is lucky to have such caring parents. There are many who don’t.

And he nods his head and stands to leave. “Thanks for listening,” he says. “My day didn’t feel such a waste.”

And he leaves and I understand the worry about his son in China.

And his concern that nobody is teaching the two kids driving too fast to slow down.

And I am in awe of our human condition and the capacity of compassion to swim into the space between us and connect us one to the other.

Namaste.

Sleeping in is so lovely. Except… when your computer freezes up and you know you’re late….

sleeping in can be the difference between posting and not posting.

So, instead of words, I’m sharing three new pages out of my art journal.

Having fun exploring.

Hope you are too.

Later, after I have climbed down from my high horse, he will tell me that he didn’t like the ride either. But, while I’m on it, while I am riding high and feeling mighty, I convince myself he’s lovin’ it.

And it only makes me madder.

It had begun with a silly comment, an incident of not too big circumstances.

I decided to take umbrage. To pick up the gritty remains and devour the bitter after taste of disagreement. To make it mine. To make it all about me.

In the moment, it was not all about me. In fact, the critter was convinced it wasn’t all about me. “You can’t keep doing what you’ve always done, Louise and expect a different outcome,” he hissed. “It’s time he decided to change and you have to stand your ground so he will.”

He’d already convinced me that I was weak. Stupid to let it go. A patsy if I simply ‘rolled over’ once again and just took it.

“Fine!” I yelled at the critter who was leaping around like a banshee in front of me. “I’ll do it your way!” And the victim slid in, shoulders slumped, head slowly shaking side to side. “Good idea. Your way never works anyway and if you keep giving in, they’ll just keep walkin over you again and again.”

Talking it out is my game. But, when I’m emotionally charged, when I have donned the cloak of self-righteousness, my talking it out is more like the inquisition. Fires burning, hellfire awaiting if you don’t answer correctly — and the correct way is with the words I want to hear, not yours, btw!

Talking it out wasn’t working so, to prove my point, I slipped into silence.

Not the beautiful, graceful, silence of solitude and contemplation. I didn’t heed John Chryssavgis words to use my silence as “the pause that holds together … all the words, both spoken and unspoken.”  I didn’t allow silence to be “the glue that connects our attitudes and our actions.”

I let it become my weapon. My burden. My guilt.

I don’t do angry silence well. (Does anyone?)

In fact, in playing the silence game I can make myself sick. Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually. Because, when emotionally charged, what I’m really hearing is not reason, but rather the critter’s call to ‘teach ’em a lesson’ and not be the first to get accountable for my own actions.

The critter isn’t interested in my emotional well-being or ensuring I am living up to my higher good or for being accountable — it’s not my fault anyway, remember?

The critter only wants to protect. To stave off change so it can maintain status quo.

The critter likes discord. In discord, the critter doesn’t need to yell, he simply needs to hold his ground and let my victim story have its way with me.

We all have a victim story. That story that we repeat in times of distress that tells of all the wrongs, all the sorrows, all the woes we’ve experienced — and how they were not, “all my fault”, but rather someone else’s.

The victim likes to lay blame, as long as it doesn’t land at our own doorstep.

The victim likes to be right, as long as it’s about how everyone else has hurt us, lied to us, abused us, brought us down, been mean, stupid, blind…

The victim cares only about survival, and, as long as it doesn’t have to give up its protective veneer of innocence and being unjustly treated, the victim will do anything to appear like it is strong and knows the way out of the darkness. Problem is, in the darkness, the victim can’t see because its back is turned to the light of truth — there is only one way to peace and that is through Love.

I fell into the critter’s discord and awoke to the victim’s convincing litany of reason’s why it wasn’t my job to step out of it.

It had nothing to do with what someone else had said or done.

It had everything to do with my decision to hold onto what was causing me distress and not give into reason calling me to let it go.

Fortunately, I learned a valuable lesson through discord.

I learned that I do not serve myself, or anyone else, well when I play down to my lesser self urging me to DIVE! Take cover. Man the parapets and get ready to battle.

Battle never has to happen if I choose to lay down my guns and open my arms up to peace.

I don’t have to forge into the wilds of despair if I choose instead to do the right thing and take the loving path to peace, harmony and joy.

Namaste.

Refreshed. Renewed. Calmness settles in like a welcome friend. Quiet contains all that I am, at peace, at One.

It was a week of wonder, awe, joy. A week to revel in the art of creating in the woods. Of walking amidst the wildflowers. Of deer in the grasses and owls in the trees. A week of finding myself connected in a community of artists, connected with the muse flowing all around.

There is a shift, a change, a movement away from, a settling into, a gathering of — the evolving awakening of my creative core, a widening of my essential creative, a deepening of my gratitude for the gift of creativity.

Over the next few days, I will be sharing from my art journal as well as art-making that happened, using each day here as a means to capture the  week, day by day.  I’ll also be sharing photos I took along the way with my trusty smart phone!

Day 1. Sunday, July 27th

Last minute grocery shopping. Loading the car. So much stuff! Getting out of the city. Driving west, then north. Winding road into the foothills. Summer sun, hot. Wind dry. Air filled with possibility.

Arrive at River Rock shortly after lunch. Carry in 6 tubs of art supplies. Set up table. Wander the woods. Meditate at the edge of the forest. Breathe into the space, the essence of being  away, of being here where I am not away.

Only a few of us here. Five staying at the Studio, the others driving in each day from the City, from the mountains.

Jonathan Talbot greets us. Chats. We organize our workspaces. We laugh. Share stories from the surface of our lives.

Tomorrow it will begin. For now, I begin to settle in.

The poem I wrote, From Where I Sit, is on my poetry blog, HERE.

I am writing this on Sunday to be posted on Monday, because starting this afternoon, I will be out of Internet service for the week.

I am off to an artist’s retreat/workshop at River Rock Studio — and I am excited.  (the link may not work — it is http://www.riverrockstudio.com )

Six days of communing with the muse. Six days to be present in the wonder and awe of creativity abounding all around. And six days to walk in the woods, savour the silence and breathe in nature.

How divine. How delicious. How wonderful.

And there’s no Internet.

So I’ll be offline for the week, though I will be writing, and painting and collaging and creating and immersing myself in the joy of being part of my creative essence expressing itself in every breath.

See you in a week.

Blessings on your journey. May you discover the essence of your being present and alive in every breath you take.

I smile at him as he walks up to the stoplight where I am standing.

He smiles back.

I cross.

He crosses behind me and follows me down the stairs to the C-train platform.

It is rush hour but summer days have dwindled the traffic to a mere trickle of what it normally is.

The train arrives immediately and he gets on behind me.

It is one of the newer trains. The long bank of seats along each window face inwards, towards each other.

He sits two seats beyond me on the same side. He is dressed in a grey shirt, navy pants and vest. I think he works for Transit and he confirms it later when he turns to chat. “Worked for them 16 years,” he says. “It’s kind of my retirement job.” Four days a week driving a shuttle bus. No stress, he adds. Just a chance to talk to people.

Like he’s talking to me as he rides to work.

“How do you like having the C-train?” he asks me as soon as the train begins to pull out of the station.

“I love it,” I tell him.

He looks surprised. “People don’t usually say they love transit,” he says.

“It makes my life so much easier, and less stressful. I don’t have to worry about traffic driving home.”

“We had a family home on the lands that were expropriated,” he tells me.

“Was that hard?” I ask. “Having it expropriated?”

“It sure was for my mother,” he says. “She lived in that home for 53 years. It was her history.” And then he laughs. “But me and my brother, we made sure she got everything she could from the city so that she’s real comfortable now.”

And he goes on to tell me about the ‘battle’ as he called it. How the City didn’t give them all the information. How some older people were taken advantage of. Asked to sign documents that put them on the deficit side of the equation, without any consideration to their circumstances.

“Me and my brother, we got everybody we could whose lands were affected, together to tell them about what we’d found. I printed off every document the City issues on expropriation and found three lawyers who dealt in it specifically.”

But some of the older people, they couldn’t believe the City wouldn’t act in good faith, he told me. ” They thought the City was their friend.”

And he went on to tell me about one woman, in her 80s, who took the $18k the City offered as a ‘signing bonus’, not realizing that she could have received $30,000 in displacement fees if she’d waited. “She called me in tears wanting to know if there was anything she could do. I had to tell her there wasn’t. She’d already signed the documents, taken the cheque and cashed it.”

He paused and nodded his head up and down. This is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. “Sometimes people trust just because they think they should. I felt real bad for that lady but there was nothing I could do for her by then. Me and my brother, we knew the City wouldn’t look out for our mom.  So we did.”

And I laugh inside and the Universe laughs with me — you want to learn about trust?  Here. Let me deliver up opportunities to listen up, to hear, to learn.

“I hear you,” I tell the man as I get ready to exit the train at my stop. “Thanks for sharing your story.”

“Maybe we’ll run into each other again next week?” he says.

“Perhaps the week after,” I tell him. “I’m on holidays next week.”

And we say good-bye and I get off the train and walk towards my office. The sun beats down. The air is fresh after the rain that fell during the night.  City noises ripple all around. I smell the fresh aroma of the flowers hanging from the baskets that line the street. It is a beautiful summer’s day and my heart is light.

What a wonderful day to be alive.

“You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn’t come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.”

Alan Watts

I have not been feeling the energy these past few weeks. I have not been allowing it to flow through me just as I have not been allowing myself to tap into its eternal flow.

I have not been trusting the eternal energy of the Universe to carry me out of the depths and through the waves of my grief.

Instead of being one with the ocean, I have been searching for the wave to carry me out of deep water, rather than trusting the wave to find me simply because I am part of the wave.

Last night, a  dear friend called and we had a long chat about life and living and playing small/large/indifferently. My friend moved away a few years ago and since his leaving we have stayed in touch, more and more sporadically. It isn’t that we don’t still care about each other and cherish our friendship. Five minutes on the phone with my friend and my entire being revels in the free-flowing thinking, radical way of seeing a conversation with him always generates.

In a conversation with my eldest daughter a few days ago, she shared what someone had told her about grieving the loss of a family pet. Often, they said, our pets are the ones we share our deepest thoughts with, our secret sorrows. They love unconditionally yet, when they die, we tell ourselves we should get over it, they’re just a pet. In our culture, there is no room to simply grieve the loss of a pet without the guilt of feeling like we’re giving too much attention to their loss.

I have been trying to get over Ellie’s passing. I have not been allowing myself the grace to move through it by giving myself room to breathe and grieve without judging my process.

It wasn’t until I spoke with my friend last night and we spoke of Ellie and all she represented in my life, that I saw where my tiredness of the past few weeks has come from.

It isn’t just that I miss her. It is that in her being, she carried my secret sorrows, my hidden fears, my silent grief. In her being, she carried me and though I fed her and walked her and pet her and brushed her and loved all over her, she was the one keeping me safe from falling into the abyss of despair so long ago.

And I think that in her passing, I have been afraid to look into that abyss for fear I might fall in. And in my fear of falling in, I have created what I fear the most — feeling sad.

I don’t like feeling sad. For most of my life I remember my mother being sad. No matter what I did, how much I laughed, how hard I smiled or tried to please, my mother was always sad. Feeling helpless to ‘make her happy’, I moved into anger, resentment, disdain. In my teenage years I feared I would become sad like her and plastered on a smile that nothing and no one could displace. I was Happy, dammit and nobody could hurt me. At least, not that I would allow them to see even if they did.

My smile was my shield and I stomped through life smiling indiscriminately.

In the last year of Ellie’s life, I could feel her energy waning, feel sadness emanating from her body. What I didn’t realize until I hung up the phone last night and let myself sink, without judgment, into the sadness of  losing her, is that it wasn’t her sadness I was feeling, it was mine. In my fear of losing her, I wasn’t living in the moment of having her in my life, I was thinking about what it would be like when she was gone. And I was sad – but I wasn’t going to admit it, dammit.

What I fear I create.

I have seldom allowed myself to feel sad. At least not for any length of time. My fear was, to allow sadness would mean I would be just like my mother and having judged my mother as lacking in moral/emotional fibre for always being sad, I could not, would not allow myself to feel a natural out-pouring of grief over the loss of someone very, very dear to me.

Emotions are natural responses to circumstances. They change. They flow. They evolve. My mother’s sadness was not of her making, it was an expression of deeply felt sorrow she never knew how to express because there was no safe place for her to express it. And so, she held onto it for fear letting it go would leave her stranded on an island of grief.

In my subconsciously pushing down feelings of sadness, I have been just like my mother,  isolated in sadness, and forgetting the antidote is not to isolate, but rather to connect.

My mother is a beautiful, heartfelt woman. She is kind. Caring and loving. There is much of her character I would like to emulate. Perhaps its time I let myself off the judgement wagon and allowed myself to simply be all that I am meant to be when I let go of fearing emotions that simply flow in response to the world around me.

They are not mine to keep, to hold onto, to possess.

Now is not forever. This too shall pass and I will always have that which I need the most — LOVE.

One of the core processes of the Choices week happens on Friday afternoon when the trainees stand in their small circles and explore the question, “What do I want more of in my life?” to come up with their Contract word.

A contract word is very different than an affirmation. It is not simply telling yourself over and over again about your brilliance. It is the way of being you need to remind yourself to live to have the more of what you want in life. It is the ‘how’ of creating what you want in the world — even when fear is rising and negative self-talk is triggering all sorts of self-defeating games.

Eight years ago when I went through Choices, I was pretty confident that I could ask myself tougher questions than anyone else in that circle. So, when it came to my turn to step into the light and explore the question, I was just a tad arrogant about my knowledge of the answer — and my Contract became, I am a passionate and fearless woman.

It was pretty evident the first time I coached that being passionate is not really a problem for me. I am passionate about living life awake and conscious. Thelma Box and I had a conversation about why I put the word ‘passionate’ into my contract statement, and I took it out. I was hiding behind it and using its presence in the statement to avoid being ‘fearless’.

Except… with several years of living awake and conscious, I realized last year that ‘fearless’ really wasn’t my issue. I am fearless and when I’m not, I’m fairly adept at identifying what it is I fear and allowing my courage to draw me out.

So I decided to change my contract, especially after an incident on the Coquahalla Highway where ‘Death’ reared its ugly face in front of me and I felt its seductive call pulling me from my path. I was on my way to The Haven for the Come Alive course and it was a wake-up call. I needed to face death and claim my right to be alive everyday.

So my contract became, I am an alive and radiant woman.

But here’s the thing. My contract word is not an affirmation of who I am in the world, it’s a statement of how I need to be to have the more of what I want in my life.

And I am not particularly trusting.

A couple of years ago I did a course with Christine Valters Paintner at Abbey of the Arts. It was a 40 day pilgrimage into the spiritual desert using art, poetry and contemplation as our guides. It was an amazing course and one of the things I realized through it was that I do not trust easily — in fact, to hide the fact I do not trust easily, I will often trust indiscriminately, give it away as if it doesn’t matter to me to hide my fear. And in my lack of discrimination, I have accepted the unacceptable in my life. I have trusted the untrustworthy and not trusted myself enough to listen to my intuition, to hear my heart’s voice calling me to awaken.

Last week, in the coaches circle on Wednesday morning, I was listening to the conversation around me when my heart spoke loud and clear.  “Louise, you have been beating around the bush for long enough. It’s time to claim what you fear. You are a trusting woman.”

Don’t you love it when your heart knows and your mind tells it to shut up?

‘Cause that’s what my mind did in that moment. It said, “Don’t be ridiculous, chicken heart. You don’t know what’s best for Louise. Only I do. Shut up!”

Fortunately, in the safe and courageous space that is the Choices training room, my heart is fearless.

“I hear you,” it lovingly responded to my mind and without skipping a beat, its words came out of my mouth. “I am a trusting woman.”

I thought I might throw up.

Even just writing that scares me.

Seriously — be a trusting woman, even when I’m scared to death of being hurt? Of losing it all? Of not being enough? Or simply not knowing what to do?

Trust?

Ouch.

Except. It’s true.

To have the more that I want in my life. To fearlessly live alive and awake, I must trust.

Trust in me. Trust in the world around me. Trust in the Universe. Trust that there is a purpose for my being here on earth. Trust that my presence here on earth makes a difference.

Trust that I am ok. Just the way I am.

It’s taken me many years to step into the circle of life where I am willing to acknowledge that the only thing I need to claim to be free and alive is the one thing I trust the least, myself.

I am a trusting woman.