Under the Sword

When the samurai Kikushi was ordained a Bodhisattva (one devoted to lifelong service), his master told him, "You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair".

I was once told by my boss that I seemed to live my life at mach with my hair on fire, so I can relate to this quote.  I am finally reaching a point of equilibrium with respect to the speed at which I live, but I am still working hard to consecrate myself wholly to each day.  I believe that to be a worthy goal.

We have reluctantly left our beloved home in Kings Langley, UK, behind, and we are working at the cultural adjustment necessary to live comfortably and successfully in our new adopted home: Folsom, California. While the weather is great, we are all finding things that are completely normal to Americans to be a little strange to us. If we had parked our car in the UK the way most people park here, there would have been fisticuffs! But the parking lots here are massive, and are designed to accommodate the latest armored personnel carrier that the average suburbanite Californian drives.

And the driving! Good grief! At least they mostly do it at a decent pace here, unlike when we lived in Oregon. I used to call Oregon "the land of ridiculously low speed limits, and drivers who fail to achieve them".   But one does have to remember that over 50% of your fellow car pilots on the road here are paying more attention to their text messages than they are to you, something to keep  in mind once I have a bike back on the road.

The Hawk is being refurbished, in hopes that I can use it to explore some of the lovely local roads. I have a Vespa P200 that I intend to use to ferry Alex to school once the title is sorted out with its former owner.  I am not in as big a hurry as I was, due to the driving factors mentioned above. And the distances are far longer than what we were used to in the UK. The good news is, rather than having to navigate several large roundabouts, including the infamous "Magic Roundabout" in Hemel Hempstead, which was quite local to us  (see:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9zrOWt8Ee8 for a leisurely trip though when there was almost no traffic-it is usually ten times worse!), we have roads in town that are larger than all but the biggest motorways in England!

So far, other than the local gun shop, which is positively heaving with customers every time I go by, we haven't seen any gun action. The neighbor over the road from us did tell us he was broken into and all of his guns stolen, but thankfully they haven't come back. My friend who lives here does have a gun safe  in her house, but her boyfriend uses it to keep a bunch of 'spare' guns, in case he wants to go shootin' when he's in town.

That's my rather chatty post for today: this blog is all but moribund, thinking about starting a new one someday soon. Meanwhile I will keep working on my 'zen' while I enjoy the pool, the smooth roads, and the large garage!

Lost Boys

When I was pregnant I remember hoping that I wouldn’t have a girl. I was relieved and happy when my son was born. This wasn’t out of any misguided cultural notions that a boy would care for me in my old age, or that the burden of the sizable dowry that a daughter would have to married off with would be too much. It wasn’t even the perhaps slightly less idiotic fear of raising a girl in a misogynist, patriarchal society that would value her for her sex and beauty more than for her strength, athleticism, kindness or smarts.

No, I shuddered instead at what I went through when I was growing up, and I felt too feeble and weak to deal with the vagaries of shepherding a girl through minefields of schoolyard bullies, predatory men, drugs and alcohol, and adolescent hormonal freakouts. 

Now, in the face of what has become a regular news barrage filled with sad, hate-filled young men, twisted beyond recognition into models of rage and violence, I think back and wonder how I was so far off the target. Why I assumed those issues to be uniquely female problems I can only ascribe to my own sex and gender stew.

I feel sadness and regret at the waste and loss of life. At the victims, the list of whose names gets longer and longer as the bodies pile up. At the young men who are so emotionally stunted, so tragically tweaked, that the only ‘manly’ way they see to deal with the emotional wreckage of their lives is to take out as many people as they can when they kill themselves. I do believe that the staging of a public killing spree is as much “death by cop” as running at a line of armed police officers can be.

As I watched the video footage of the horrible, sadistic bombing of the crowd in Boston, I couldn’t help thinking that we were about to find yet another twisted teenage boy or young man at the end of the hunt. Turns out, there were two lost souls behind the rampage this time. But the unfolding tale appears to be the same as what we are beginning to recognize as the blueprint for such tragic circumstances to occur: one or more boys who clearly got the message that in a male, weakness is bad, and that the notoriety of killing as many people as you can before dying in a hail of bullets is better than asking for help.

I sincerely hope that we begin to talk about and address the outmoded and ridiculous codes of behavior we demand that men adhere to, and start to turn the tide of hurt that drives young people to commit similar acts of desperation. My hope is for America, for the world, but most of all for my son.

Motorcycle Blues, Part Two

Back in November of 2011 I posted a long whine about how I was trying to get my motorcycles licensed to ride here in the UK.  I ended that post with one import document having been received from the authorities, and the other one having been sent a day later, but not received. I expected anxious readers to be pestering me with questions about how it all turned out.

Alas, I have given up waiting to be prompted for the REST of the story (thanks Paul Harvey) and I’m just going to tell you. If you remember, or more importantly, if you don’t; I was planning to license the Honda Hawk first as, being more than ten years old, it didn’t require a single vehicle inspection to get licensed. The Suzuki GSX-R750 did need such an inspection, another bureaucratic hoop to jump through which I hoped to postpone.

Alas, the Hawk turned out to have two blown fork seals and a broken tail section from the move, problems which have yet to be remedied. So instead I decided to focus on getting the Gixxer on the road. This was all brought to a head when I got a job in May 2012 and needed the bike to ride to work, as they did not have car parking but would let me squeeze the moto into the car park. They are so civilized about that sort of thing here, and I love it.

After waiting on the document from Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue, I finally got a duplicate sent out to the DVLA licensing office. I then managed to find a lovely bloke to come and load the bike up to take it down for inspection, and of course he knew the bloke at the place who was doing the inspecting, and the whole thing went tickety-boo like that.  Next, I trotted down to the licensing place. From there I had to take the papers in to the moto shop up the road to get my plate made, and then I was shockingly on the road all completely legal (well, except for the tax disc not being mounted on the bike somewhere, but I did have it right there in my tank bag!).

Those first few days in traffic were absolutely hair-raising. If you’ve never driven or ridden in England, you have to realize that the roads here are approximately the width of one lane of a North American freeway. On this road, you have vehicles, including giant lorries (semis to you TransAtlantic-ers), going both ways, cars parked on the verges, bicycles and motorcycles lane-splitting up the middle. Both ways. There are, out here in Hicksville, very few stoplights, but a great many roundabouts, some of which have three lanes of travel or more, and multiple exits.

Anyway, I survived, and am now a happy veteran of more than six months of motorcycle commuting. Unlike the hardcore locals, I have put the Gixxer away for this season of ice and snow, darkness and incessant dampness, and look forward to riding again in the slightly warmer dampness in the spring.

 

Epilogue

That missing document? OK, well, months after I spoke to the fellow and got a new one sent out to the DVLA so I could license the Gixxer, we got a knock on the door of our house on Hempstead Road. It was the lady who had moved into the house we had been renting when we arrived here, up in Tom’s Lane. She had mail for us. You guessed it: the document from HMRC for the Gixxer was in there!   The guy had sent the one for the Hawk to our correct address, and sent the one for the Gixxer ON THE SAME DAY to the old address on Tom’s Lane!

God Save the Queen

I went to London to visit the Queen. Well; I went into The City to watch the Diamond Jubilee flotilla. I went largely because someone I know and used to work with in Vancouver was here to paddle in a dragon boat in the flotilla, otherwise I may have been tempted by the hideous weather to just stay home and watch it on telly like everyone else.

But a curious thing happened. I became intensely interested in the Queen and everything about her. I mean, I grew up singing "God save our gracious Queen, long live our noble Queen" in school in Canada. The night before the flotilla, we watched her son, Prince Charles, talk about her in a BBC television program that shared many minutes of private film footage from the Windsor family.  From the earliest days of her marriage to Prince Phillip, Elizabeth wore her destiny, not like a hair shirt, but more like a shining mantle.

 

As the culminating proof of her almost zealous commitment to her people, Sunday afternoon the 86-year-old monarch stood bravely in the face of wind and rain, for four miserable hours as she was paraded down the Thames on a barge to the delirious approval of almost a million of her subjects who gaily lined the banks of the river in the rain, waving and wearing flags in equal measure. She never once sat down in the on-board throne specially designed for her rest and comfort.To my amazement, I have concluded that she has been, and continues to be, gracious and noble. I'm not sure I even knew what that meant before this long holiday celebration weekend.

To those of you of a republican bent, you may still not know what it means. But something else occurred to me, perhaps as Hosni Mubarak received his jail sentence and civil war by any other name rages in Syria and Charles Taylor is finally brought to justice: the sovereign has another, less talked-about role in this otherwise very modern democracy.

What if the Queen (and the monarchy) plays a very real and critical role in legitimizing the government and deterring any coups? What I mean is, maybe having a Queen or similar benign despot actually helps to prevent the violent overthrow of the democratic system?  I mean, if you want to sneak in and start making things autocratic, you would have to either have the consent of the monarch, in which case the people would very quickly catch on and make Parliament DO something about the uppity monarch, or, in the case where it is the Parliamentarians wishing to usurp power, it would  become apparent when the first thing they wanted to do was to get rid of the monarch (or replace them with some hand-chosen variant not of the House of Windsor).

I realize this is a very cursory treatment of what could be a vast and in-depth political treatise, but it is late and I have been going quite hard for the last four days or so, not wanting to miss any of the excitement. A lot has been written and said about Her Majesty this week, here and elsewhere. Goodness knows I'm no Plato or Aristotle, but I feel that the wheels of politics and of society sometimes, or oftentimes, turn within each other and it doesn't hurt to think about what some of this stuff means.To me, tonight, it means that I have a new respect and admiration for Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II, that will not soon leave me. God Save the Queen.
God Save The Queen at St. Paul's

Spring Garden Chronicles

Quince flowers herald spring

 The five stages of spring gardening have stayed remarkably static for me, whether I was living in B.C., Oregon, or here in Hertfordshire.  This account being chiefly about spring, it omits the hopeful months of late fall and winter, when you stand in the garden with your beloved discussing how next year will be different, and envisaging all the wonderful things you can/should/will do  in the off-season and planning wonderful new heights for the garden. It goes something like this:

Aren't the bluebells lovely?

1. Joy.  Sometime between January and March, you see the snowdrops and crocuses rise defiantly up through the snow or the grass, depending on the year, and you can't help it: your heart fills with joy. As the weeks pass, more and more of the garden comes to life, and you thrill as the garden fills with flowers from bulbs: daffodils, tulips, bluebells, lily of the valley. Fruit trees bud out then blossom in riotous pinks and whites. Giddy with spring fever, you get out the garden table and chairs, prudently leaving on the rain covers. Maybe you even make a hopeful trip to the garden centre.

2. Concern.  As the sun comes out, and showers start, you wonder when the explosion happened. All the old stalks you left for the over-wintering critters now stand dead and ugly amongst the greenery. The trees you didn't get around to pruning early enough go from bare branches to a breathtaking array of green within hours. The lawn is looking shaggy and suddenly one day appears to be more dandelions than grass.

Forsythia in Bloom

3. Panic. You have been glancing with growing alarm at the garden as you dash from the car to the house in the pouring rain carrying sixteen grocery bags.The grass that was dormant now stands three feet tall and surely harbours everything from giant rats to tigers. The vines have overtaken all the trees. Weeds have choked out nearly all the flowers in the beds.Now, after several consecutive weeks of rain, panic sets in. At the first sign that the downpour is letting up, you dash outside and fire up the mower, which groans in dismay as you wade into the lawn, and dies.

4. Despair. As the weeks pass, you manically hack and cut and pull at every opportunity. It never seems to make any difference. One day you realize that the horrible brown-specked scraggly plants you have just industriously cleaned out of the beds were your gladiolas. Your shoulders slump and you drag yourself inside, dolefully clutching the few small stalks of rhubarb you have managed to salvage.

5. Apathy. As the weeks of summer wear on, your sense of community pride shrivels. You mow the lawn every 3 to 4 weeks.With what you won't admit to yourself is a sense of relief, you finally don the mantle of utter failure. You invite people over for garden parties or BBQs and just before they arrive you halfheartedly run the mower over the grass where you'll be sitting.  After a few Pimm's or margaritas, no-one notices anyway, right?

Wisteria temporarily under control

I am hoping to cling to my hapless urge to garden for another few weeks, maybe hang on until the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in June, in case anyone comes over or they have a street party in my neighbourhood. Then all bets are off. I even have a vacation abroad planned this summer; any residual guilt feelings that I harbour can be shrugged off with "What can I do? I was away."  So if you're planning to visit us this summer, do it now before it's too late and you have to hack your way through the holly to get in the front gate, and get tangled in the wisteria before you get to the door.

Julia’s Story

“It was a gentle curve! She just kept turning, and rode right off the road!” Sarah was near hysteria, trying to explain to Robert what she had seen. It was about 2 in the afternoon and Julia lay dead in the ditch. “I-I don’t know why; why did she do that?”

As the sun had crawled up into the blue sky over Vancouver that morning, Julia had eased the lavender motorcycle out of the cramped garage space behind her parents’ restaurant on 4^th Avenue. Soon, she would be cruising through the turns of the Sea to Sky highway, winding along past Howe Sound. The Hayabusa. Her symbol. All of her bikes were purple, but when she rode this one, she was almost a caricature: the tiny Asian woman, barely 5’3”, riding the most powerful and fastest production sportbike made.

The route they had chosen for today’s ride is legendary: the Duffy Lake loop rises out of Vancouver, climbing hundreds of feet above sea level as it takes multiple thousands of tourists to Whistler each year. Past that worldwide icon of recreational excess, the road drops into oblivion, going through the small ranching and Indian towns then abruptly turning east to head over to the leeward side of the mountains. It leads up into the blistering desert of the central interior, where tumbleweeds loll on the verges of the road, which crumbles away to steep drops on one side and sheer rock faces on the other. For motorcyclists, sport riders who worship the twisty ribbons linking curve on curve, for mile after mile, this road is black asphalt nirvana.

“Where are you going?” It was her mother, speaking to her in Chinese, from the door to the cafe’s kitchen.

“For a ride, with Robert”. Her mother got that look on her face. The one she always got when Julia went out on a bike. Kind of a pursed-lip, not-quite-frown, look.

Her wedding was in a few weeks. Robert was to be her husband. Robert, who had stood by her in the days and weeks following that harrowing ride last year; who had been a good friend to her and Bogdan when they were together. It would be a fitting end to this year of sadness, and a tribute to all of her friends. Julia thought about how her passion for riding, ignited such a short time ago, had grown to encompass her whole life, from the restaurant after she took over, to the women in motorcycling she had gathered around her. The community was awesome, and she swelled with pride when she thought of the success of Motorcycle Mondays and the Hot Chicks Ride. Everyone would have a blast at the wedding.

Not like the last gathering at the Flying Swan Coffeehouse. Lines of bikes down both sides of the street. Riders standing in somber groups. The slow procession to say goodbye.

Inevitably, her mind was again delicately pondering whether Bog would approve of her impending marriage or not, when the road suddenly demanded all of her attention back. A deer had bounded into her peripheral vision, and was poised to dart in front of the bike. She grabbed a handful of the front brake and squeezed with increasing force, slowing the big bike down to a crawl as she passed alongside the deer, which paused long enough to let her by. Letting out her breath, she eased the throttle back on, resuming her pace and spacing out with the others.

Robert rode ahead, and she saw him look in his mirror briefly when she slowed, waiting for her to catch back up to take his wing position. Behind them, the others were evenly spaced, with Sarah riding sweep at the back. Everyone rode at his or her own pace, with the result that the bikes broke apart in a long line, then grouped up together again at a turn or a town, slowing to regroup. The effect was like a long string of pearls, Julia thought, on an elastic rope that stretched out and then became taut, bringing the pearls back in proximity. The sight was captivating, and she never failed to enjoy the sight of the whole string of bikes stretched out in front of, or behind her.

Now the bikes had climbed out of the mountains that surrounded Whistler, and were headed up into the desert of the interior plateau. Julia caught her breath as they rounded a turn, and the brown blazing hills shimmered into view. She had seen it many times, and repeated all the way down the continent, from rides like US 20, winding across the arid country around Winthrop, Washington, to the creeping back roads of central Oregon and California. But it was nevertheless, and still, spectacular.

The bikes hummed along as they traversed some of the sleepy little ranch towns, where childhood games of cowboys and Indians were still occasionally played out in real life. Momentarily, her heart leapt as they passed the spot where she had last held her beloved Bogdan. Bogdan, her soulmate. Her riding partner, her muse. The most wonderful man and the best rider she knew. What had happened? What could have caused the bike to carry him out into space, off that corner, into oblivion? She remembered coming round the corner, bikes pulled up, running to the edge, looking into the abyss…

Too late her attention returned to the road in front of her, to the bike, to the process of a million small decisions a rider makes every second to keep human and machine in that delicate dance of equilibrium with the road. She could have made the curve, could have turned, leaned, cranked it over, but it was too late. Her lizard brain rose and took over. The bike went straight.

Later, the lines of bikes filled the lanes, snaking through the streets of Vancouver, like a dragon’s tail for the hearse, in eerie repetition of the procession that followed the hearse carrying Bogdan to the graveyard, almost exactly one year previously.

Motorcycle Blues

I find ranting can be a bit insufferable and tedious, so I planned never to do it in this blog. But it has been almost two years since my motorcycles arrived and I have yet to (legally) turn a wheel on either one of them on a public road. I am almost past despair and into hopeless apathy, but while I still can get a good head of steam up about this, I’m going to let fly. It may get a little insufferable and tedious.

For the most part, I deal with bureaucracy in a fairly sanguine manner, never really getting in a flap over anything. Twenty years as a lawyer has even taught me to enjoy it a little, like a frustrating game or puzzle that you have to figure out. But I am taxed. Taxed to the limit.

In Canada, public servants tend to be a largely neutral group who will reflect back any surliness in spades. They are often officious, but generally you can get whatever business you need transacted with persistence, preparedness and polite determination.

American bureaucrats are a different breed. They tend to be quite the picture of petty tyrants, and sometimes no amount of groveling gets you the information or piece of paper that you need.

British bureaucrats, in my limited experience so far, are extremely cheerful and earnestly striving for competence. But there is an ominous, almost imperceptible feeling of hopelessness that pervades any public endeavour, and it’s almost like the expectation is that it simply won’t work, no matter what we do.

I have two motorcycles. The motorcycles arrived in this country on February 19th, 2010, after which I set out to go ride them. First task was to get them registered, licensed and insured. I assembled the paperwork: insurance was required before I could get the registration. After about 30 lengthy phone calls to insurers, and innumerable websites visited,, it was determined that I could not insure either motorcycle because I was not licensed to ride them. Apparently the grace of being allowed to drive for twelve months after arrival on my Oregon driving license did not extend to the bikes and I had to go through the entire 3 or 4 level testing procedures in order to get the top level bike license that would allow me to ride the 700cc and 750cc bikes I own.

After several hundred pounds, a couple of Saturday classes and several trips to the DSA (practical test agency) and DVLA (theory test agency), I now possess a full, unlimited, ride anything I want anywhere I want, UK motorcycle license.

Bonus, so I call and get insurance on the Hawk. On to the next piece of paper: I need the customs forms. No problem, I go through the moving papers. No customs forms. What??! My limited knowledge here tells me that those bikes came in a sealed container, beyond a big fence, and someone had to show someone something official to get them released through the import centre and onto the truck that hauled them to me, no? They must have forgotten to give me the piece of paper.

Phone calls to the movers in Portland sent me to the consolidators in St. Louis, on to the guys in New York that shipped them, who in turn pointed me at the guys in Aylesbury who actually picked them up at the dock and brought them out to Tom’s Lane. OK, now we’re getting somewhere: talk to the nice lady out there and after three or four calls she tells me to talk directly to the logistics brokers who were in charge of clearing them though Customs. Meanwhile, I have been on the phone with Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue myself to determine what is required to get this elusive C&E 388 for each bike.

After a few calls with the logistics people, I get the nice lady to forward the documentation to HMRC, which she does, and then gives me the direct e-mail address of the HMRC representative who is seized of the task of issuing the two forms. This wonderful man issues the GSX-R paperwork that very afternoon, and-get this-it slides through the mail slot in the front door promptly at 8:30 a.m. the next morning! Clearly both Canada Post and the USPS have something to learn here from the Royal Mail.

The Hawk C&E388 didn’t get issued because he couldn’t find the date on the title. This is odd, since the both titles are virtually identical forms from the State of Oregon. So I scan and send over some additional documents, translate the stupid American-style date from the title for him (“062705” or something meaningless like that), and he says fine, it’ll go out today. I hover over the letter slot for the next several days in anticipation, and…nothing.

Email correspondence with the nice man at HMRC (who is so responsive, and still sounds like he cares, and actually *gasp* apologizes to me) indicates that the C&E388 was in fact sent out to me on November 11th, and he has no idea what’s happened. The otherwise-efficient Royal Mail has apparently had an epic fail and so he now has to send out a duplicate one to the DVLA office of my choice. Haysoos H. Chreestos.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

Who is the Patron Saint of Lost Causes, again?

What is it that possesses an otherwise rational woman to futz around for over half an hour trying to re-thread a cheap plastic zipper on a storage bag that only cost five quid to begin with?

Is it because my ham-fisted husband (bless him) yanked it from its moorings on the very first pull? Before I’d even gotten to enjoy having the extra sheets safely and conveniently stowed beneath the bed?

Or is it some darker, more deep-seated neurosis, some artifact of my parents’ Depression-era “waste-not, want-not” philosophy? No, this is a serious question; how do you make the call when something needs tossing? I need a clear decision-tree approach, cause I’ve thrown out tons of stuff and then, not more than a week later, gone:”Oh, man; if only I’d kept that! I could really use it right now!” as I padded off to the store to buy a new…whatever it was.

Once I had this rubber ring that I was sure went to something. I kept it in a little catch-all doolie that I had above the sink for random stuff that needed to go elsewhere but not right now. It sat there for months. Finally, moving from the upper apartment to the lower one in my house in order to rent the upper suite, I tossed it. As I was unpacking in the new digs I found my beautiful vintage glass cookie jar, the lid to which was missing the (irreplaceable) large rubber washer that fitted it snugly to the jar. *sigh*

It is long past time for me to let go of stuff that does not serve me well. What do you think, gentle readers? (I love imagining having readers; that delusion I won’t let go of soon) Toss it out, or put the zipper back on track? Any suggestions for how to do that?

Poetry Corner

While looking out the window, and pondering my position
On what the world has come to, and the human condition;

I sometimes think we’re predators and am sometimes sure we're prey,
It changes with my state of mind, depending on the day.

M. Storbo © 2009

Forgiveness

I guess I had always thought a lot about forgiveness, but I first became interested in its true nature in the shock that followed the Amish School massacre in 2006. In October of that year, an average American fellow (who, unbeknownst to everyone including apparently his wife and himself, had sprung a leak in his marble bag and had been losing them one by one for a while) decided to rape, torture and kill some schoolchildren. Arming himself to the teeth with firearms and other implements of his compulsion in a bag, he went and found the most innocent, trusting children he could find: the children of an Amish village school in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. When it was all over, he had killed five girls and himself. By the time the parasitic news media had begun to thoughtlessly thrust cameras and microphones into the faces of the grieving community and ask how they felt about it, the Amish had begun to forgive the killer.

What??! This revelation took my breath away. How? Why? Well, clearly they were trying to follow what they thought were Jesus’ teachings. I have no doubt that they are right and that is what Jesus taught.

But that is not what consumed me: what I wanted to know was the nuts and bolts of it. How does one go about forgiving such a heinous, awful thing? And how do normal folks, like me, go about the process of feeling forgiveness. What does it feel like? What did it really mean to forgive someone?

I puzzled and puzzled till my puzzler was sore (props to the Good Dr. Suess). I thought about talking to a local preacher of some denomination or other about what they thought it meant. I thought about forgiveness as I lay in bed at night. I thought about it while walking down the street.

I wasn’t carrying as horrible a burden as death or anything like that, but there were a few things that I would have liked to get past that had happened over the course of my several decades of life. I had this sense that, if I could somehow truly forgive the perpetrators of the hurtful acts, I would finally be free of the agony that the memories had shadowed me with all these years.

The answer came to me, finally, in a flash. I had started a therapy called EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It is a therapy developed in the ‘70’s and it especially helps people who are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, which was often called “battle fatigue” in the old days.

During a session in which the therapist leads you through a series of reframing exercises using rapid eye movement or other bilateral stimulation, it suddenly came to me. Like a lightning bolt, I had the thought that forgiveness was nothing more than deciding to put down the burden of caring about someone else’s bad act or acts. The awareness dawned in me and I felt a wave of relief.

This was something that I could do. I could feel the dregs of the past washing away as I contemplated a visual image in my mind of putting down the heavy bags I’d been carrying all these years. I symbolically laid the bags on the doorstep of the person or people who had done the horrible things and left them there. Their acts were theirs; the consequences of those actions are theirs to live with. I don’t hate them anymore; I don’t even give them another thought.

In the days and weeks and months that are accumulating since that one session, I continue to feel the benefits of forgiveness. I am happier, less stressed, more free than I can remember being since I was a child.

Whether you need to find the seeds of forgiveness in your faith, or whether you simply want to reap the benefits of forgiveness, I urge anyone who is carrying a burden due to a wrong by another to find a way to forgive. There is no downside and no regret, only increasing freedom from the poison left by the shadows of the hurtful or hateful actions of others.

Cider

I have something to say that will rock the basis of some of my valued friendships. I like fizzy cold cider. I like fizzy cold beer. Despite the fact that there is, in fact, no such thing as “pear cider”, I even like that.

This is heresy to a great many people. “You just haven’t tried the good stuff” might be the mildest approbation I face in making such a confession, with “You have no taste” or, “You are a complete and utter heathen, and irredeemable”, being more likely to be thrown my way.

However, I can’t even retreat and plead ignorance of the ‘good stuff’. The Castle Inn, in Lulworth Cove, was graced by the presence of my family, the dog, and my in-laws as guests during a recent foray into deepest Dorset. Now, leaving aside the great unresolved feud between Somerset, Dorset and Cornwall about the true origins of cream teas and ‘real’ cider, this fine establishment features no less than twelve of the southern regions’ finest ciders and perries on tap.

I tried the Orchard Pig “Light” Medium cider. I tried the Cider by Rosie. I tried Weston’s Country Perry. I confess to being scared shitless of the Snakecatcher Scrumpy. This is the description they had for it:

“Percentage: 7% | Units: 4 per Pint | Producer: New Forest Cider
Seriously strong, intense in flavour and character, being aged in spirit barrels. The ignorant might call it rough, but the knowledgeable connoisseur would consider it a robust English artisanal country beverage.”

Gack. Other than that, I tried every damn thing they had in there, and finally resorted, in desperation, to getting a ‘top’. This spritzing of a shot of ‘lemonade’ (7-Up or Sprite for you Yanks) on the top of your cider or ale is naturally frowned upon by pub cognoscenti as being an immature teenager drink. But at least I could pretend to the other patrons that I was drinking a pint of something decent (even if the publican himself knew better). In spite of a lot of what an old beer ad used to call “bitter beer face”, I couldn’t bear to cop out with a bottle of Bulmer’s pear ‘cider’ with a glass of ice.

So give me a nice, cold, sweet pint of fizzy Strongbow off the tap, or, if I find myself back in the Pacific NorthWet, pull me one of McMenamin’s ciders or give me a bottle of B.C. Grower’s or even an Okanagan, but leave me out of the tepid, bitter, flat local “artisanal”, “real” cider and perry tasting next time, thanks.

I can hear the rush to “unfriend” me on Facebook, as my “Friends” count drops: 303, 302, 301…

Sometimes you just go for a walk.

Sometimes you just go for a walk. That’s how life starts: you just go along from one thing to the next. Early on your growth is astonishing as you learn to walk and talk inside of the first three years, along with a host of other physical, mental, and emotional milestones. You’re so aware, so in the present.

As you age, you learn to string the ‘nows’ together so you have slightly longer term plans and ambitions. But things don’t always go the way you planned. Sometimes you backtrack; sometimes it’s a dead end and you have to go another way. Sometimes it feels like you’re not moving at all and sometimes you have to stop and take a rest.

Along the way, you start thinking “where am I going anyway?” You try to climb up high to get a better look around you. You might get a better sense of place when you do this. Or maybe you just keep your head down and keep plodding along, content that you’re where you should be and going the right direction. Some people think they’ve got a map, or a GPS or sat-nav that tells them the way. But these human devices can be notoriously unreliable. Many of us get so wrapped up in the mire of past patterns and the fog of the future that we lose all sense of direction: our awareness of now all but disappears.

It’s like you’re just walking in a hayfield, wandering this way and that, and it all seems like a maze: you can’t see where you’re going and only have a hazy picture of where you’ve been. Then, at the end of it, you get a helicopter ride back home and you look down and see this fantastic, otherworldly pattern to the whole path. The whole time you were walking, you were creating an amazing picture in the field. Everywhere you trod forms a piece of the puzzle.

When I look back, that’s how it feels: I occasionally have a glimpse of something shimmering through the haze, a sense that I am right where I should be, that the path is bewildering and the pattern intricate, but that it is actually being formed according to a universal intention.

Gratitude

I am thrilled to see the sun this morning. My family is all healthy today, and I have several meet-ups planned with various friends today to look forward to. I am filled with gratitude for this. I like to start and end each day thinking about the things that I am grateful for. It seems simplistic, and perhaps Pollyanna-ish, but I can say without hesitation that gratitude has changed my life, remade it even.

Giving thanks is not something we learn much about. Like many of us, I grew up always seeing the obstacles, fearing the worst and generally going about life as though I were fighting a rearguard action. I am not sure exactly when it began to sink in, but I had seen the little lessons from here and there, and about ten or fifteen years ago I decided to change the way I look at things and see only the plusses (and any minusses that I could change or do something about).

For me, gratitude is nothing more than the simple act of pausing in quiet reflection, fixing something that is wonderful in my life in my mind, and letting the feeling of gratitude well up inside me. If you have a spiritual tradition that includes some power greater than yourself, it is nice to send that gratitude in the general direction of this power. If not, just feel the power of gratitude in yourself and maybe share it with those you love. I think that love is sort of the inevitable result of gratitude, but that is a story for another day, along with a story about the differing traditions of Canadian and American Thanksgiving.

I sincerely wish for you that today you have something in your life for which you are grateful. Just a little thought or two on this American Thanksgiving.

Thanks.

Beaches

We spent the August Bank Holiday weekend on the beach down in Cornwall. The weather was fabulous and I got to thinking about how we are really at our happiest when we're near the sea. This picture was taken in Gorran Haven, near where we were staying.

It may be just that we are away from home, and that's always liberating. But I don't think so: other trips never seem to have the same cachet or memories that visits to the sea always leave with us.

I suppose not everyone is the same. For our family, though, a sojourn at the beach rejuvenates us, lifts our spirits, and leaves us calm and happy for days or even weeks after returning home.

Does it matter what beach? It doesn't seem so: here are some pictures of some of our other favourite beaches. I can't say we are happier at one or the other, although I guess it's pretty obvious that the Pacific is our "home" beach.


Gearhart was our favourite beach while we were in Oregon. Only 45 minutes from our home in Forest Grove, it was an easy and comfortable place to spend the day, whether it was winter or summer.

No trip to the beach was complete without a stop at Camp 18, the logging museum cum cafe cum gift shop that was 18 miles from the end of Highway 26.





But we also went to Sayulita Mexico in 2006 and loved walking along the beach there.







Our first trip to Hawaii in 2005 took us to Oahu, and we loved the beach right in front of our hotel. Alex ran down the hall in the lobby towards the beach, yelling "Why-kee-keeee!" on our second day there.







Our return to Hawaii in 2008 took us to Maui, with the same result: we all fell in love with the beach all over again.




We got married on the beach in Tofino BC in 2001, and in 2009, we returned to the same beach on a motorcycle trip for our anniversary.


Almost everyone will have a picture of themselves on some beach in their album of favourite places, or will tell a travel story involving a beach when asked about their favourite trip. Why? Is it just because beaches are among the most beautiful places on earth? Is it because the ocean calls out to our spirit? All I know is, there is definitely a beach in my future, and if I play my cards right, I will be able to see it from the windows of my house.

Religiosity

A friend asked me recently about the differences between the three countries. I’ve obviously spent a lot of time thinking about that, but on this particular day it was religion that occupied my thoughts. There seems to be a particular hue to the practice of religion in the three places.


We’re all reading from the same book: the Bible. But just like Islam and Judaism, the various sects of Christianity all have their own spin on it. The book itself is still the peculiar mixture of Old Testament books taken from the Torah, a collection of letters and anecdotes from Jesus’ time, all tied together with allegory and metaphors written by the members of a then-obscure cult some 400 years after Jesus Christ died.


I think Canada has inherited England’s mainstream sort of laid-back, benevolent and slightly irreverent moral ethos, while the Puritans’ rigid moral backbone still beats at the heart of US religion. You see both sides in England: just like in the States, yet another MP gets caught in some scandal admiring a dark-skinned young woman or having a dalliance with his gay lover. But, more like Canada, people tend to mostly laugh and shrug rather than get their panties all in a twist about it.


Unfortunately, it is the humourless brand of puritanical fervour that mostly obtains in the US. It makes for no fun. No fun is guaranteed to drive people away, even if they carry the guilt and shame with them when they go.


Of course, there are almost as many flavours of Christians as there are people in the U.S. Given the propensity for individuality, everyone wants to start their own religion. And a lot of them are fun, it’s just that the really zealous sorts are the ones that make the best headlines.


I personally really like Mahatma Gandhi’s take on the dominant paradigm of the English-speaking world. He said: “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

America Grows Up

America is a big, strapping country now, but it has not been so long ago that America was a drooling infant learning to stand and walk and talk.

As America grew to toddlerhood, it had its spells of brilliance, and the world oohed and aahhed over its grown-up Constitution and Bill of Rights. Like Mozart, America was a prodigy, producing in its infancy the Declaration of Independence; one of the best political documents ever written, and one that will stand with the Magna Carta in the annals of history.

But America also had its tantrums and fits pf pique and it nearly destroyed itself in an internal war.

When World War II came, America proudly marched into battle, eager to test its mettle against the enemy. Idealistic and brave, Americans threw themselves wholeheartedly into protecting the downtrodden from bloodthirsty enemies. It invented new technology, fought bravely and, with the rest of the world, looked into the face of evil and mourned the loss of innocence.

In the 50’s and 60’s, America grew into a brash, gregarious, fun-loving teenager, culminating in a nationwide love-in in the late 60’s.

In the years since, America seems to have lost its early idealism, sense of fun and even some of its bravery. Like many of us in our twenties, it seems sometimes to have lost its way. I think that some people are wondering about the waste, the greed, and the arrogance that seem to have informed some of America's foreign policy and even internal policies these last 20 years or so.

A mere 200 years is not enough time to mold a great civilization or really to draw any conclusions about its history, but I only hope that somewhere out there Americans are pondering their way of life and thinking about the legacy they leave in the world. Given what I know about Americans, I think that they are.

Following Somerset Maugham's advice that "The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit*, here are a couple of tidbits about Canada, the US and the UK.

One of the sillier quotes about Canada is that "Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen." Certainly no longer the case, post-Expo '87 and the more recent Olympics in Vancouver. As for the US, I always laugh when I hear the quote about how the US is the only country in history to have gone from barbarism to decadence without having passed through civilization in between.

But by far the pithiest expression I've heard of the great gulf that separates the two Children of a Common Mother, is:

The boundary between Canada and the United States is a typically human creation; it is physically invisible, geographically illogical, militarily indefensible, and emotionally inescapable.
Hugh Keenleyside, Canadian diplomat, 1929

As a Canadian who grew up in a mountainous backwater of British Columbia, the US was always like a big brother: you were never sure on any given day whether you hated or loved it more, you were fervently competitive while harbouring a secret belief that you would never best it because it was always so much bigger, and you bore the good-natured pummeling it inevitably handed you stoically.

To me as a Canadian, however, the UK was like an irritating great-aunt: overbearing and largely irrelevant, but you still had to be polite whenever she came to visit.

Now that I am in the position of living in, or having lived in, all three countries, I have slightly different views. Canada has grown mythologically in my memory since I left in '04. I have an even greater belief in the horrendous failure of the US to live up to its promise as a country, while simultaneously having the greatest regard and love for the American people individually. And the UK has so far surprised me greatly with its civilized way of life and overall sweet disposition of its people (excluding that one jackass in the BMW who raced past blaring his horn when I was trying to back out of my driveway one morning).

Intro

The Peace Arch straddles the border between the US and Canada south of Vancouver, BC, on the way to Seattle Washington. On it is inscribed a saying: “Children of a Common Mother”. I am a child of Canada, briefly immigrated to the US, now migrated across the sea to live in the womb of the mother country, England.

Some of these posts are slightly political, some are philosophical, and sometimes I make off the cuff comments about religion. I do not intend to disrespect anyone’s beliefs, culture or politics. These are my thoughts and opinions, and if you disagree or are offended, please feel free to respectfully correct me or post alternative views, but I don’t want any vitriol so save it for “Ann Coulter is Batshit Crazy” or whatever your chosen outlet for spewing invective is.

I may also occasionally just blather on about motorcycles, dogs, kids or home improvement, so pick and choose your area of interest and thanks for reading!