Category — Life

The truth of the matter is, I want to blog. But my MacAir has been on life support for two months and I can’t stand finding my way around Michael’s PC where only a smattering of my files live on the desktop. Fingers crossed that the geniuses at the Apple store can sort things out this week and I’ll be up and at ‘er soon.

This week Madeleine and I baked a big batch of ooey gooey oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for our neighbours and grandma and grandpa, who are coming to visit at the end of this week. While the rain continued to pour outside, we decided to also whip up a batch of play dough. Turns out it’s easy as pie. Easier, actually.

Play dough (recipe from Tracy at Bowen Island Family Place)

Mix: 2 cups flour, 1/2 cup salt and 2 teaspoons cream of tartar

Mix: 1 1/2 cups boiling water, food colouring and 2 tablespoons oil

Mix liquid into dry ingredients. Microwave on high for 30 seconds, let cool for 1 minute and then knead. Repeat microwave and knead. Keep in a plastic bag when not in use.

Red and yellow make orange. Madeleine’s pick. Her favourite thing is making playdough snowmen. Good thing too. We’ll have nothing but snow in a few short months…

I have been on the wet coast for five days now and the unexpectedly cool weather has been doing my eight-month-pregnant body good. I expect when I return to Toronto’s July humidity I will balloon something fierce. In the meantime I am enjoying much quality time with family and friends, lots of time at various petting zoos, and altogether too many americanos and plates of dessert. What a good holiday should be.

This is my first visit home since our move to Toronto and it is different than I would have expected. Instead of packing in trips to my favourite Vancouver enclaves I am wanting for quality time with people wherever I can get it. DQ in suburbia. Visits to my grandma in the hospital. Teeter-tottering in Queen’s Park.

I am fitting in some final article writing, interviews and key meetings before I return home and baby number two arrives. I have this (well founded) feeling like my life is going to (temporarily) end when baby boy shows up a month from now. It is amazing the productivity that comes with that kind of a deadline. In the past month and a half I have checked off some major writing to-dos, like stacks of poetry submissions, article pitches, contest/mentorship apps, and some other quieter projects. I promise to post a bunch of recent articles soon.

Vancouver (/Bowen Island,) I love you — ALL OF YOU, MY BEST FRIENDS, MY FAMILY – more than ever.

The other night I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning with an idea: give up the internet for a year. While the thought came in the flicker of night, it has been gestating for more than a year. It began during the research and writing of “In with the Old,” an article for the New York-based journal The Curator, and set for republication this summer.

In it I wrote:

There’s no question that technology has overrun our lives. Over the past century, the world has welcomed technological ‘progress’ with arms wide open and we’re living with the clicking, dinging, anxiety-inducing deluge of it.

But a creative backlash is underway, helping human beings cope with the avalanche of data that passes in front of most of us every day through the use of computers and cell phones.

Slow food, the back-to-the-land movement, and groups like letter writing clubs are being formed by a new subculture: the 21st century luddite, wielding fountain pen and notebook, and some checking e-mail from the public library a mere hour per week.

Rebecca Dolen and Brandy Fedoruk [owners of a computer-free paper store in Vancouver, called Regional Assembly of Text] think this movement is more than a blip on the technological continuum.

“We started the letter writing club right off the bat because we wanted to have an ongoing community event. There have been a few hardcore regulars but 80% are new people each month. We started with five to ten people and now regularly have 20 to 30.”

There’s a universal sense that something must be done to rope the nodes in. But what? We can’t all pack our bags and head for the hills, or can we?

I’ve been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the role the internet plays in my day-to-day life and the impacts it is having in our society at large.

Last week I watched a CBC documentary called: “Are we digital dummies?” In it there is a scene where a priest is conducting a blessing service for smart phones. Here is a man dressed in holy vestments calling on the God of the universe to bless a Blackberry. I had a visceral — absolute bodily repulsion — to the scene unfolding before my eyes.

While the benefits of the internet are numerous: Skype and photo sharing, for example, it is mixed with an ever-dominating persistence for our attention, and it is this I find unsettling. The centrality of internet technology in our daily lives makes me squeamish and I feel I need to figure out why.

I have suspicions. I think the internet makes me lazy, as a thinker, a writer, and a friend. I think the internet allows me to emotionally disengage, enabling me to pass the time with ever-ready filler: mundane, contextless information via newsfeeds, Facebook and Google Reader.

The truth is, I am both bored and obsessed with the web.

It is my hope to complete higher education in the area of media studies, particularly looking at new media’s impact on our understanding of citizenship. During this season with young children I am able to do little to move towards this dream. Completing this year-long fast from the internet would allow me to conduct first-hand research while staying at home with my children. It will also hinder the amount and kind of work I am able to complete as a self-employed writer. Thus, I am seeking out a publication or two that would be interested in chronicling this journey. I am offering to submit a regular column by snail mail or couriered USB, as I will not be accessing email.

I anticipate this fast as an opportunity to enliven my real relationships and filter out the extra. I know it will be an enormous adjustment in my day-to-day life, but I also expect it will be a life-giving exercise. I know it will be a huge change for my family, in particular not seeing pictures and blog posts appearing online. Instead I hope to send a regular update (with lots of pictures) by mail, pick up the phone and have Michael organize Skype dates with grandparents and the kids. I will not allow our children to suffer the loss of grandma and grandpa face time on account of this fast.

Spiritually, I hope this fast will open my ears and my eyes to God’s voice and the world around me, and quiet the hum of my online life.

I welcome all of your thoughts (and thank those that already shared on facebook.) If I go ahead I plan to begin January 2012.

[process]

Tomorrow I leave for a charming, Atlantic coastal house on the shores of Prince Edward Island to work on my life’s dreams. It’’s an Angela Ritchie ACE (arts, culture and education) camp being hosted by a longtime creative hero of mine, Sabrina Ward Harrison (whose work I was first introduced to by my dear friend Avital.) I’’ve been reading Anne of Green Gables in preparation, and between that and reopening Sabrina’’s book Spilling Open, I am being confronted with an abandoned way of living — Anne’’s insatiable desire for all things romantic and Sabrina’’s altogether raw confession.

Yesterday I was talking with my friend Sara and trying to explain how I felt about this trip. With my tongue uncharacteristically tied in knots, I finally spilled the truth that I was feeling NERVOUS.

I am nervous to go to camp.

Like the nervousness I felt before going to a Calvinettes camp-out when I was eight. Except today it’’s an adult nervous. Like I’’m fooling myself into believing that I can see all of the potential potholes ahead.

I’’m not nervous the girls are going to tease me or the boys won’’t think I’’m pretty. I’’m not worried I’’ll forget to bring my bathing suit or that it will rain all week and we won’’t be able to sing or roast marshmallows around the campfire. I’’m worried that this trip, this camp, this first four-day sojourn without my one-year-old, this meeting of a creative hero, this writing assignment, won’’t be all I desperately hope it will be.

Something deep, DEEP, in me wants to fling myself into this week with the unhindered expectation of a five-year-old. I want to believe with my twenty-year-old-heart (the better, freer, lighter heart) that this will be IT. The marker. The moment. The chapter changer. A time so affecting that I’ll hold it up as my Everest climb. A culmination of so so so much. And something (SOMEONE) tells me it is. And I want to believe it.

Oh god, do I want to believe it.

But my adult self tells me to be careful. To not care too much. To not get too excited. To set my expectations just a little bit lower.

And my five-year-old/twenty-year-old self is telling my thirty-one-year-old head/heart to fuck-off. To ““do what you did at first”” (Revelation 2:5). To BELIEVE.

That my God (the God I am so unsure of, the God who ever clings to me, the God of my youth, the God of the universe) is love. And that he WANTS me to believe this with every single inch of my being. And to not hold back.

And somewhere behind my ribcage, behind my separating bones, screams YES.

The yes of my two-year-old, five-year-old, twenty-year-old, pre-period, pre-heart-smash, pre-confusing-years, pre-church-mess-ups, pre-career-detours, pre-falling-out, pre-self.

Yes.

Yes. It will be.

Yes. I believe it.

Yes. There is love ahead.

Yes. There is more.

Yes. The daring will be worthwhile.

yes. yes. yes.

good. good. good.

love. love. love.

amen. amen. amen.

echoes my thirty-one-year-old heart.

And tomorrow I leave on a jet plane. And all shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of things will be well.

Yes. Amen. Let it be.

Crayons at breakfast, Nita Lake Lodge Whistler

Beach, Bowen Island

I am one of seven children.

There are numerous blessings being part of such an enormous clan. Like never being bored. Always having a playmate. Epic Christmases. Camping under the stars lined in sleeping bags like sardines. Unforgettable van rides with resident seat buddies. Always having someone to call (the phone list never runs out.) Learning stuff from big brothers. Teaching stuff to little sisters. Performing full-blown musicals with dancers, singers, choreographer and back-up. Being portioned toast and jello squares by toss from the head of the table. Filling an entire pew at church (for some reason this gave me an enormous sense of pride as a kid, like this is our row.)

In the last week and a half I have had the opportunity to twice visit with five of my six siblings (save for my sister in Australia, we miss you Lynn!), plus parents, spouses, nephews and nieces. It is a rare occurrence these days (which I am still coming to terms with) and times together are filled with good conversation, much affection and heaps of hilarity.

Like when my sister Kristen, up visiting from Las Vegas with her husband PJ and their adorable little boy Ben, says: “This might not be a real memory, this might be one of my made-up memories, but let’s just check…” before beginning a story. We all burst into side-splitting laughter. This is coming from the sister who created imaginary holidays to foreign lands and told them to her teachers while her own mother was, helpfully, one of the teachers on staff. Things usually got sorted out pretty quick. It’s moments like these that make me ache to spend time as a whole family as often as possible.

My whole life I have been focused on the good of having 6 siblings and 4 parents. And there is SO MUCH GOOD. But there are also down sides. And they seem to be growing with time.

There are more regrets. More missed moments. More misunderstanding. And more people to keep up-to-date than seems humanly possible.

I am trying to make concerted efforts to share more with my family. To call them just because. To send out emails with exciting/important news. Share more pictures. Share more of myself. But it’s hard. Even though it’s my immediate family, with so many I can feel like I am spreading myself thin. My husband has one sister and two parents, his circle is small and I am sometimes jealous of the simplicity of his arrangement. But I would never change things in my family. Never in a million years. Because we love so much. Because we Groot clan are a beautiful mess. Because we go on trying to care for each other as best as we can. And in the end that is all that matters.

Dad, Grace, Mom, Chester, Mike, Heidi, Rueben, Jesse Fin, Sloane, David, James, Jocelyn, Judah, Kristen, PJ, Ben, Michael, Madeleine, Matthew, Lynn, Barney — I love you.

i am not the mother writer who pours out lines like quarts of milk. i loathe her, the everyday blogger/writer/mother/poet, though i know i shouldn’t.

my lines rarely come in a flourish. i am a one line wonder. sometimes, slowly these words make their way into form. often they remain alone on the pages of journals, on scraps of magazines/napkins/bulletins i place in piles with care.

i often wonder about poets’ process. i thought it might be nice to show you how a poem might begin.

like this:

a line that came to me while looking through the bedroom window lying in bed one morning.