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.

I have stubby thumbs. They’re quite comical, really. Apparently the actress Megan Fox has the same ones but she, unlike me, gets a thumb double.

Anyways, these fat suckers have kept me from being very crafty because I have little-to-no patience for handling finicky things. So it was a big step for me to sign up for a sewing class because I would have to feed the thread through the needle hole, and fill a bobbin, and handle all of those little itty bitty teensy weensy things. And though my thumbs hung me out to dry a couple of times, I had a really good time. I took the Sewing Essentials class at The Workroom on Queen Street which is basically a get-to-know-your-sewing-machine class.

We made a pillow case. Here’s how mine turned out. I’m pretty darn happy about it.

Next project: hemming curtains.

A Song of Jean

by SIBYL RUTH, 2008 winner of the Mslexia Poetry Competition

Let my tongue and keyboard both proclaim the power of Jean.

For in the meeting house, Jean gets to her feet often and ministers
with a voice that is a clanging gong.
She drives away false peace, awakens us.
Teach us not to fear becoming caught in the long diversions of Jean’s thoughts, lost in the ring road of her speech.

When appointed hour is done, may we engage Jean in conversation
and not run away from her in the lobby for some invented reason.

Let us acknowledge the aging of Jean
who doesn’t enjoy being eighty
but wishes to go on as she did at thirty.
Allow us all to accommodate Jean’s fury,
listening with tenderness to her shouts and rants
Jean’s demands for help. Her refusal of help that’s offered.
Those cries of No. No I can do it. I can manage.

May we make time to watch over Jean
for she mislays her spectacles, her watch, her keys, her purse.

Help us to worship the Spirit that shaped the hands of Jean,
hands that once tied knots, hammered tent pegs, peeled thousands of potatoes.
Jean’s hands now in their fleecy gloves, their knobbly, twisted, arthritic fingers,
hands that can no longer do buttons, whose buttons are done wrong.
frantic hands that keep on searching bags and rattling papers.

Jean has been diminished, yet we shall magnify Jean’s name.
Lead us to esteem properly the engine that is Jean’s body
the darkness of her teeth.
the hairs of her head, white and coarse as dune grass
her stertorous breath
her bent back
her slumped chest.
Also let us praise Jean’s black-handled stick that likes to slip from her grasp and hit the floor with a great clatter.

May we remember always the muchness of Jean’s mind
Her mind that carries those seas from which we crawled in the beginning
that holds those caverns which shall open to receive us at our end.

May glory and honour belong to Jean, and every day that remains to her be blessed.

___________

for all of us will grow old

a blessing for those we love whose hands now flow blue

for my grandmother who lies again in hospital bed with fractures

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.

when

you

love

somebody

THIS MUCH

words

don’t

do you

justice

______________

I am cherishing these last days as just the two of us, being mindful of how our world will change when another little one makes his way into our world. There are new days ahead.

Found objects, Prince Edward Island

The final piece, now hung in our office / art room. Paint, India ink (Sabrina’s lettering, my words,) and collage on craft paper. I originally thought I was making a piece to be cut into pages but decided in the end I liked it too much whole.

_______

Closer…

[Grab images and drag to a new window to look closer]

[poetry / freewrite]

I am here today to give myself

permission
to take all of the twine
the knots
the dirt-sand-rock-thorn lines
and bless them
smile with my mouth
my eyes

what I mean by that is

I want to live open
extend my arms
out
give way to the new things
lift eyes to grey skies
lover’s hand
and grasp with the strength of a giant

last wednesday

I sat with my one-year-old
reading the ugly duckling
the ripped pages
painting a pretty picture on the floor

and we danced
cheek-to-cheek
on whatever was playing on the radio
her warmth to my warmth

I am craving

more of this
the untethered moments
the knowing
that this is life at best
life at present
life given
life to be grabbed
life not foresaken

and I want the beautiful

when I was little I wore

dresses that matched my sister
and it made me proud
I wanted to look the same
next to her olive skin

the colours were

pink, white
sweatshirts with happy and sad faces
dresses in fuschia and aquamarine
there were yellows — warm

I remember how

we’d go to the playhouse
dad built in the backyard
the one with the real house windows
that opened and closed
we’d sit on the black spackled roof
and laugh at our brothers
dressed like batman and robin
jumping from roof to lawn
and be secretly jealous of their bravery

I wore my hair

long then
but I’d liked it short
the time I cut it in my friend’s bathroom
with paper scissors when no one was looking
and wore it the same way to my dad’s wedding –
a perfect tomboy in a pale blue dress

[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.