Art Journal August 24, 2014
The caterpillar cannot fly free, until it learns to spin its own dreams

When my daughters were little I wrote them a story about an unhappy caterpillar who cried and cried all the time. One day, his tears fell on a leaf fairy sleeping on a leaf. Surprised by the sudden rain pouring on her head, she awoke and demanded to know why the caterpillar was crying.

“I hate being a caterpillar,” the unhappy fellow wailed. “I hate it. Hate it,” and he shook his tiny body ferociously and cried some more.

“If you weren’t a caterpillar what would you rather be?” asked the leaf fairy.

“What a stupid question,” said the caterpillar. “How can I be anything else? I’m stuck in this body.”

“Well, I’m a fairy and I’ve got magic and I can turn you into anything you want,” the leaf fairy told him. She wasn’t used to being questioned so she had a bit of attitude around her response.

The Caterpillar thought about this for a moment. Magic. Hmmm… Anything he wanted…. Well in that case. “A rose,” the caterpillar promptly replied and poof, she changed him into a beautiful red rose.

Alas, the rose was prickly and thorny. No one could get close to him. He wanted to be more… likeable. He cried again and asked to be turned into an iris.

The iris, however, was too blue. He was tired of being blue all the time and wanted something happier. Like being a bright, sunny faced daisy he pleaded with the leaf fairy.

The leaf fairy agreed to do it (but he was wearing her out) but even then the caterpillar was dissatisfied. The daisy had lots of arms to reach out and touch people with, but it was rooted to the ground.

Just then a brilliantly coloured butterfly flitted by. The caterpillar watched her in awe and then he knew what he really wanted to be. He wanted to be a beautiful butterfly with gossamer wings that shimmered in the sun, free to fly wherever he wanted.

He pleaded his case one more time with the leaf fairy. “Okay,” she said, “but you’re tiring me out. This is the last magic I can do for you today.”

The caterpillar closed his eyes and waited. The leaf fairy spoke the magic words, sprinkled leaf dust all over him and when he opened his eyes anticipating wings to fly free, the caterpillar wailed in dismay. He was a caterpillar once again.

“I told you I wanted to be a butterfly,” he cried. “I hate being a caterpillar.”

“You are a butterfly,” the leaf fairy told him. “Inside you there is a beautiful pair of wings waiting to be free. But first, you must learn to spin your own dreams.”

Sometimes, I have not believed I could fly. Sometimes, I have clung to my disbelief in the possibility of change as I held steadfast to my resistance to dream. Sometimes, I have embraced the lie that I am not powerful enough to make my dreams come true, and sometimes, I have grounded myself so deeply in my fear of flying, I haven’t even bothered to try to stretch my wings for fear I will fall.

Regardless of the reasons why I haven’t catapulted my dreams into reality, when my dreams don’t come true the way I want them to, I have a choice. To find value in what is, or…. to hold still, take a deep breath, and keep on spinning my dreams into reality.

When dreams don’t come true, it’s because the dreamer spun in a different direction, changed their course, or simply gave up spinning in any direction at all or perhaps it’s because they were spinning cotton, not silk.

Today, I commit to spinning my dreams in the direction of my goals. Today, I choose to affirm, my dreams are mine to spin in every colour of the rainbow.

Today, I commit to spreading my wings. I don’t know their full extent until I reach beyond the edges of my imagination, out into the universe where dreams come true because I’m willing to spin my own dreams.

Love this quote — so very powerful.

She put on lipstick.

Brushed her hair.

Applied a little blush.

“You look beautiful,” I told my mother when I arrived to visit her at the hospital yesterday.

Definitely much better than on Tuesday when my sister and I wondered if she’d ever be able to get out of bed again.

That is the thing about blessings and kindness (and good medical care). When the heart is open to receive, Love flows freely. And with its flow, in no time at all, healing begins.

She is getting out of bed. They’ve taken out the IV, and she is eating better than she has in a long while. Even though “the food is terrible,” she says. And she scrunches up her face into a look of disgust, waves her arthritic fingers in the air as if brushing away something foul.

Which given her estimation of the culinary efforts of the hospital kitchen, is probably what my mother is doing, brushing away an ill-smelling memory.

It is one of her habitual responses — to throw her hands into the air, brush away imaginary cobwebs of confusion and say,  “Let’s not talk about that.”  or “Let’s not bring that up again.”

And while my mother and I have many similar traits, this is the one that sits between us, irritating whatever fragile peace we’d managed to claim in our often turbulent relationship.

I want to ‘deal with things’, get them out in the open, deconstruct and dissect to discard. My mother would rather just leap to the discard.

In the past, I have judged her harshly for her desire to discard. How can something heal if you do not acknowledge its existence? I’d ask when she would ask me why I have to bring that up, again.

Because to learn from it, I need to see what it is, I would reply.

I don’t want to talk about it anymore. What’s done is done. Nothing can change it.

Yes but…

And I would insist on pushing into it, pulling it apart, pushing it through to the other side.

For my mother, that felt harsh, cruel, mean.

For me, it felt constructive. It wasn’t personal. I simply needed to understand in order to learn. Believing that I cannot heal or change what I do not acknowledge, I wanted to speak of what it was that was causing me so much distress.

Except, when looking to heal a relationship, or build a bridge between two differing points of view, talking over the other person’s point of view only creates more of what caused the rift in the first place — discord, differing points of view, decidedly different perspectives.

It isn’t that either point of view is wrong. it is simply that they are different.

Yesterday, as I sat and chatted with my mother and my youngest daughter who was visiting with her boyfriend, I marvelled at how different the view is when no matter my perspective, I step out of judgement to see the people around me through a compassionate and loving heart.

When I let go of having to prove I’m right, the world rights itself to that place where it is not our differences that connect us, it is the thing we share that can never be broken, our family circle united in Love.

She is doing better.

C.C. and I went to visit my mother last night. We were later than anticipated. We both had early evening meetings and by the time we met up, neither of us had had dinner (or lunch for that matter). So we stopped at one of our favourite French Bistro’s and shared a glass of wine, delicious food and stories of our day.

Seated at our window table, we watched people run through a sudden downpour, skipping over puddles and dodging umbrellas of passers-by. We watched a man stop his car in the middle of the street, get out and have a conversation with someone on the sidewalk as the drivers behind him veered around, waving arms and honking horns. A visibly homeless man pushed a shopping cart overloaded with personal possessions, stopping every once in a while to rummage through streetside garbage bins. Dog-owners, home from work, walked their soggy pooches along the street as those ill-prepared for the rain, gave up all pretense of trying to stay dry and simply kept walking as if it didn’t matter.

After dinner, we drove to the hospital to visit my mom and found her in much better spirits than when I’d seen her yesterday.

The pain is gone, she told us, her tiny body wrapped in a hospital blue blanket. They had moved her from the floor she was originally on to a ‘medical’ ward. Her bed is by the window, where she could look out at the grey, sodden world and be happy to be warm and dry inside.

Talkative, chatty, (she loves it when handsome men come to visit) she shared tidbits of her day. In her hands that fluttered while she spoke, and her voice that rose and fell with the lilting singsong of her French accent she has never quite lost, I caught glimmers of the woman she used to be before depression carved its way into her daily routine.

Chatty, curious, and very sweet, my mother was always filled with little conversations about people she’d met and things she’d seen throughout her day. She’d often wonder about this person or that, why they did, this or that, what happened to create this or how did that become. As loss and time dug away at her peace of mind, her world moved from outwardly focused to internally centric ruminations that devolved again and again around the things that have happened that hurt her. And, with the narrowing of her perspective, her capacity to see beyond the personal, narrowed too. Never adept at shaking off lifes arrows (she has a very gentle, sensitive heart), her capacity to handle life’s travails lessened as her worldview shrank.

It has been the sad reality of the narrowing of her world. From daily happenings that involved giving to others and sharing her talents, time and treasures with the world, her life has become a singular focus on the immediate world around her, a place where the past is the only place she can visit to be reminded of the meaning she once had in a life to which she gave her best and created meaning in her doing.

I see it whenever I visit the lodge where she lives. Once broad lives narrowing down to singular focus on days filled with card-playing, gossip, meals together and routine that seldom varies from the calendar posted on the wall announcing various  ‘space filler’ activities designed to keep minds and bodies active — with little opportunity for external connections to be made and maintained.

I hear it in the voices of the well-intentioned staff who give their all to ensure the residents are well-cared for and tended to, but who inevitably use the same voice they’d use to speak to children.

And I am reminded of what one woman told me at the homeless shelter where I used to work when I was explaining to her about a video we were shooting. “Just because I’m hard of hearing doesn’t mean I’m stupid, dear,” she said after I’d consciously chosen simple words to explain the project.

I have been condescending with my mother in the past. While not intentional, I have given her my 13 year-old attitude assuming that age has rendered her incapable of understanding the simplest of things. At 13 I thought she was incapable of understanding life. I thought she was fragile, naive, old-fashioned and not with the times. Funny thing is, back then, she knew more than I thought and was tougher than I gave her credit for.

No surprise, at 92, she’s still tougher than I think.

I am at the hospital where my mother has just been brought by ambulance. There is no bed yet in the Emergency area so my sister and I sit on chairs in the hallway where she is lies on a stretcher.

“I’ll get us tea” I tell my sister J. who is there with me. And I head off to find the coffee shop.

I order our teas and when I walk over to the condiments area there is a priest carefully placing a lid atop his tea.

I smile at him, take a breath and ask, “Are you just finishing visiting someone at the hospital?”

“Yes,” he replies.

“Do you visit people in hospital a lot?”

“Not as much as I used to. There is a hospital priest who is assigned here,” he tells me.

“Oh…” I hesitate and then quickly add. “My mother was just brought in by ambulance. She’s not on her deathbed but it would make her really happy and give her peace of mind if you were able to come and say hello.”

He doesn’t hesitate at all. “Of course. What room is she in?”

“She’s not in a room,” I tell him. “She’s on a stretcher in the hallway in Emergency.”

His smile is warm and caring. “Then lead the way. I’ll follow you.”

As we walk I tell him how my mother will be so very happy and grateful to see him. “As long as she doesn’t think you’re coming to give her last rites,” I add, nervously.

He laughs and tells me he will keep it light, happy.

By the time we find the corridor in the emergency area where my mother was placed, it is empty. They’ve already found her a cubicle.

Father Wilbert enters the small curtained room with me, takes my mother’s hand and asks if she would like him to say a prayer of well-being.

Her entire being beams. One hand grips the gold crucifix she wears around her neck and she whispers, “Yes. Please.”

And he anoints her and blesses her and prays over her and my sister and I stand on the opposite side of the bed, heads bowed as he says aloud the words of a prayer we have known since young children when my mother would make us kneel in front of the crucifix above the mantel in our living room and pray the rosary. “Our Father who are in Heaven, hallowed by Thy name…”

It is a moment of grace in a frightening situation.

Earlier in the day, the nurse at the lodge where my mother lives had gone to check up on her. “I think you should take your mother for a chest x-ray,” she told my sister when she phoned. “I hear a rattle.”

The rattle was pneumonia. And an infection in her chest cavity. The doctor’s office called an ambulance. My sister called me and we both met at Emergency.

When the Emerg Dr. came to see her, she took one look at my mother’s tiny body and said, “You are just a wee mite, aren’t you?”

And she is. Her bones protrude. Her skin is sunken in the cavities between the edges.

“She doesn’t eat much,” I told the doctor.

“I can see,” she replied and as she left, she smiled and said, “I think there comes an age when we get to be grouchy if we want.”

“My mother is never grouchy,” I told the doctor. “Just sad. Very, very sad.”

She was admitted last night. Tiny. Frail. She is receiving the best of care.

My eldest daughter and my middle sister arrive next week. They were already booked to come and celebrate mom’s 92nd birthday on the 30th.

“Should I change my flight?” they both asked when I spoke with them.

“Let’s wait to see what happens at the hospital,” I tell them.

The admitting doctor was optimistic. The antibiotics should kick in within 48 hours and she should feel the improvement within a few short days.

She should be home for her birthday.

We will all be together to celebrate.

And she will not be grouchy. It is not who she is. It is not who she has ever been.

She will be sad, and I believe, within that sadness, will be the joy of having her three daughters, two of her four granddaughters, as well as their husbands and boyfriends around her to celebrate her special day.

And in that joy she will be embraced by what she cherishes the most, family.

When my cell phone rings I gingerly press ANSWER. I don’t want to get paint on it.

“Hey! What are you up to?”  It is my girlfriend Tamz.

“I’m in the studio,” I reply. “Aren’t you at the Bruno Mars concert? What time does it start?

“Eight. And we have a single ticket free. Why don’t you come?”

I glance at the time. 7:30.

I glance at my paint covered hands. My painterly clothes.

“I’m in the studio.”

“And he’s at the Saddledome,” she replies.

I hem and haw. My brain goes into hyper-drive.

I am contentedly painting in the quiet of the studio. I have no intention of going out. I am enjoying myself.

Hmmm… Bruno Mars. Love his music. So talented.

Yes, but I’ve told myself I want to have more fun. To be more loose, not just in my painting but in my life.

Bruno Mars. Quiet in the studio.

I tell her I’ll be there by 8. Race upstairs pulling off my paint covered shirt as I go. C.C. is reading in the den. “Hi honey. Tamz has just invited me to the Bruno Mars concert. They’ve got one ticket. Are you okay if I go? Do you mind dropping me at the Saddledome entrance?” Good thing C.C. is knows me well — and is a good sport!. He nods his head, closes the book he’s reading and tells me I’d better get ready.

I am there by 7:55. Not bad given that it’s a 15 minute drive.

As I walk towards the Saddledome to meet Tamz and her friend on the main staircase, I spy a man I know from the shelter where I used to work. He is pan-handling at the edge of the concourse. He sees me, smiles and I walk up to say hello. He gives me a big hug. We chat (he’s finally moving out of the shelter he tells me) and I tell him I’m glad and I have to run. I’m going to the show. We share another hug before we part.

At the show, my seat is AMAZING. Row 20, dead centre of the stage and while I’m sitting by myself, the people around me are friendly. Once the show starts, it doesn’t matter who I’m with. I’m one with twenty-thousand people standing in unison and swaying and clapping and screaming in concert with Bruno Mars.

I leave at the second encore. I want to grab a taxis home and can’t phone Tamz to set a meeting place as planned because, my phone is dead. I want to get home to call her before she gets anxious waiting for me. As I grab the handle of the passenger door of the first cab in the line, two young women behind me scream, “OMG!!!”

I hesitate. Am I stealing their cab? Were they in line?

I turn to ask and one of the young women says, “OMG. OMG. You’re that woman!” Her hands are fluttering around her face. Her eyes are wide.

“That woman?” I ask hesitantly.

Breathlessly, she responds, “The one in the movie. I just saw it on TV. OMG!!!!” And she screams at a friend across the avenue, waving madly for her to come over to where we are standing.

Perhaps it’s the excitement of being in the concert. The thrill of listening to a great musician and getting caught up in the energy of the room. But I do kinda think her response is a bit over the top.

I smile. Tell her yes, I am that woman. We chat for a moment, she is studying criminology, and I get into the cab and give the driver my home address.

He plugs it into the GPS and a soft, melodic woman’s voice gives him directions.

“Could you take 11th Ave instead please?” I ask. “At this time of night it’s faster.”

He sighs, tells me, ‘she’  won’t like it and carries on. She tells him to turn left. The driver tells her he can’t. “My passenger wants to go another way.” When he drives beyond the left she’s dictated, he apologizes to her. Pats the dash. Tells her, ‘it’s okay honey.’ It happens many times along our route. Every time she says turn and he goes another direction, he gently reassures her that it’s okay.

“One day I’d love it if she came and sat beside me so we can have a real chat,” the driver tells me. “I love how she never argues.”

I laugh and tell him I understand.

And I do.

It’s life.

Funny. Messy. Quirky. Screaming fans and awe struck young women. Spontaneous outbursts and quiet interludes. Moments that take your breath away and moments that draw you to tears and ones that simply make you shake your head in wonder.

It’s ins and outs and ups and downs and ‘yes I will’ and ‘no, I won’t’. It’s changing your mind and deciding to join the throngs instead of staying at home in the quiet of your own space to hear your heart breathing as you measure each breath in the joy of being at One within the moment where you’re at.

And it’s going out and coming home to share the stories of the laughter and music with the one I love. It’s the moments that caught me off guard and the ones that made me shake my head and wonder, are we all crazy and knowing the answer to that question is yes and no.

We are all human. We are all connected. We are all travelling this path called life, doing the best we can, where ever we are.

I am blessed. No matter where I go, my heart is where it belongs in the safe embrace of the one I love.

“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.