traveller’s drift
I have been intending for some time now to step out again into the world of blogging. My first attempt was a great success, winter solstice some three years ago, maybe four. I could never (in my annual attempts) remember how I’d succeeded in publishing that first post, and so, it has remained a one-page postcard, there on the massive web of e-offerings. I can’t tell you how to find it, but, you should definitely check it out!
E-possibilities and the web generally have revolutionized my life, opening a little gateway between a perfectionist shut-in who has spent far too many years standing quietly in the hallways of elementary schools, and along the edges of playgrounds, and a world of people who enjoy a good game of intellectual combat, and/or heart-to-heart interaction, and/or deeply silly wordplay.
My first experience on a list was The Writers Union of Canada’s listserv, and, in the first week someone made a trashing comment about the poor, and someone else made some comment that trashed aboriginal people: I was so scared I lost my balance, and did what I learned to do in “real life”– talk fast, lie hard, survive the situation. After I’d returned to my self, centered again, hours or perhaps days later, I was so ashamed: I don’t recall now whether I quit the list, or just decided that i needed to suck it up, and put up with my own survival mechanisms, and try to do better in future. I was on & off that list for years, and around the time I started my first (one-post) blog, I was so irritated with the “self” — the persona– that i had developed on the list, I quit for a full year. When i returned, there was no more lying, and plenty more lip-pursing, and an endless feeling of fumbling about– you know how it goes, post something, then post a correction, then correct your correction, then apologize for posting so much…
Conquering self-consciousness, bit by painful bit. I still tend to have clumsy days, it’s true. What has changed has been, taking it all a whole lot less seriously– yup, that’s me! Here i go again! As one of my sons put it when he was learning to walk, looking down at his feet with scorn, “stupid feet!” Learning to walk your walk means accepting your own pace and gait, instead of holding it up against some idealized image, and rejecting yourself for not being someone else, a tidier or more brilliant or more exquisitely handsome version.
I suppose the real-world version of that has been, getting ready to perform. I’ve been doing readings and public talks since the eighties, and I used to wholly wear myself out, before every performance, trying to decide what to wear. After a decade or more of this exhausting behaviour, I finally had a great idea: How about if I just dress up as myself? This new standard of wear has been quite useful. Simplifies everything.
I made a few fast friends on the list, other poor writers, or people politically similar to myself. I took two of my sons to an island to meet a writer I only knew as a compassionate email companion, and, we had a mutually wonderful week, our first out of the city in some time. Another writer I never actually met pressed me to apply for a Woodcock Fund Grant, gently arguing with me when I dismissed myself as writer-enough to qualify. That reality check was immediately useful, and also began a long term relationship between myself and The Writers Trust of Canada.
Through an accident of the internet– a chain of letters protesting something that included a letter from me and my contact information– a woman that I don’t know in Scotland reunited me with a friend in Toronto, by forwarding the chain of letters to him. John Barlow and I met at the university of Windsor, which I attended from January 1980 to the fall of 1982. We became associated through a rabble group of undergrad poets and philosophers, we called ourselves The Ugly House Poets, and we argued a lot. John like myself had continued on a poetry pathway, and he invited me on to a yahoogroup, poets across Canada who ranted and played a great deal. I became consumed by this conversational style of e-community, and joined other groups, and started a few myself. After about a year of intensive play (heart-to-heart communications, intellectual combat, intensive wordplay) I brought my family out to a gathering at one of the poets’ homes. I sat chatting with complete strangers, found myself saying cheerfully how shy I am, and then looked around the room: I sure wasn’t feeling shy, and I didn’t seem to be acting shy, either. Change noted: time to consider updating my image of self.
My friend Flo Robertson and I met in the late 80s, when I had but one son and she had three grown children. We volunteered at our new housing co-op, and became deep friends making up rules for the membership committee, relentlessly joking around and getting a lot of work done, too. Flo eventually moved out of daycare work, did social work for a number of years, then “retired” to a career of making and selling craft at conferences and conventions. She also does public speaking, and a couple years back we were commiserating (eg talking shop) on the telephone. “It’s really hard,” she said, “to talk in front of a group, when you’re sure you’re going to get hit for talking.” We laughed, and laughed– what the body knows is one thing, and what the reasonable mind says is something else, and the challenge is to be kind to ourselves while continuing to do what is needed, what is right, and what is reasonable. There are a lot of different kinds of traveller’s drift, and this is one.
In my own view, in my own experience, the great gift of the e-world of humans connecting is the splashback effect in the everyday, embodied world. The privacy and the safety of the computer chair in my own home, and the possible, palpable gains that come along with me when I go again to walk out in the world.
Next time, I will carry on regaling you with the theme of e-human realms: facebook, msn, favoured blogs and websites. For now, I would like to thank Kateri, Renee, Richard, Gregory, and Marilyn, for your different forms of love sent to the world in general, and me specifically, through public and private expressions of your exuberant, intelligent, gifted, big-hearted beings.
I give thanks for a beautiful little book launch that happened on December 13th, at the Grunt Gallery in Vancouver: congratulations to Chris Bose, and thank you for driving safely through snowstorms and car wrecks alongside the road, to perform! Big thanks to Tania Willard, Aaron Paquette, and all the behind-the-scenes helpers who helped birth STONE THE CROW in bookform.
Thanks to those Aboriginal Writers Collective west coast members who came out to support the launch, and just generally for making the world of embodied humans a more obviously wonderful place.
At the beginning and at the end of things, stands the family out of which i unfurl: to my eight sisters and brothers, to my six children, to my two ex-husbands and my e-husband too, and to my mother, deepest thanks for being you, and being with me, too. To my father John, and my step-mother Greeta, safe journeys in the beyond, you carry my love with you.
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