Just Breathe. Just Jump In.

These two short sentences make up my New Year's resolution. At first glance neither seems lofty, but that - at least for me - is deceiving. I am not a big believer in New Year's resolutions. Experience tells me that making a hard and fast goal, at least one backed up by a litany of shoulds, is bound to backfire. Don't get me wrong, I think goals are sometimes necessary, but it's when they become task-masterish that they often have the opposite effect of the original intention. If your goals don't help you make changes, what's the point?

When I look back at this past year, I am kind of amazed at the amount of things I've done. I'm taken aback. Many accomplishmments I forget to stop and feel good about, because well, I'm just living my life and putting one foot in from of the other, like anyone else. But in reality, there's been some nice accomplishments. But all to say, I've often thought that most of the progress I've made in areas I feel bedevilled by have come by approaching them sideways. By that I mean telling myself to, "Stop!!" thinking about something just makes me think about it more, likewise trying to not eat something I crave cold-turkey, or do more of something I feel I ought to be doing more of...just makes me want to rebel. But when I work at living my life from the side, sneaky-like by just doing other things that make me feel content, I end up feeling more receptive to change in the other areas. It can still be counter-intuitive, because my instinct is to rely on an inner hard-ass voice, which I might add, has never ever helped, nor I might add, led me any closer to where I wanted to go.

So for me - breathe. If it's the only sane thing I can think to do, just for one second, breathe. And when the time is right - but don't over think it! - just jump in. If I can do that even half the time the thought crosses my mind, I'll have done a whole lot. And that's plenty, my peeps!

Top, Gloucester, MA August 2010; bottom, Jacques-Henrie Lartigue, c. 1905.

Thanks to this blog for providing my with my keeper of a New Year's resolution. http://adore-vintage.blogspot.com/2011/06/daily-inspiration-just-breathe-just.html

Not So Deep, but Crisp and Even, Yeah

and cold as a MO-FO! I mean, Jesus Mary and Joseph did the temperature ever turn north, or, south, depending on your perspective.

Yesterday we had snow the better part of the day. A few stray flurries for about an hour or so, at which point the pace picked up and the flakes feel steadily and with great purpose. I decided to use this and the bum knee as an excuse to stay in and de-clutter my digs for a few hours. Between Christmas wrapping paper and paper-paper - magazines, newspapers, loose bills, stacked, three-whole-punched and sorted in binders - I have a knack for collecting paper. I went ahead an recycled some of the Christmas wrap, which made me feel mildly guilty because I feel I should store and use a second time. But who, I ask, has the room to store stuff for 11.5 months in order to use it but once more? Not I, I reason.

I also took some of my fabric stash and having cleared my white wooden bookshelf of old family photo albums (now on my hall closet shelves), placed it there. I have decided that I really could use a small basement storage space for things like paint tins and theses research and summer clothes-filled valises, but I don't have one and so I make do.

So it snowed and it snowed and because I like being out in this kind of weather - it makes me feel hardy, in touch with the elements and not at the mercy of winter, therefor subject to cabin fever - I decided to take a walk. I needed a new special sewing needle and decided to see how far I would get in making my way to the downtown Fabricville store, where this week they are half-off. By the time I made it as far as Westmount, the snow had picked up. I back-tracked a block to pick up an album I had admired a few days prior, still in a bin outside the shop but now covered by a think layer of snow. The sticker I had seen on it must have been the original price, because when I went to pay I learned the cost was, in fact, a dollar! A dollar for dream. Heading west again, I made it as far as Greene Avenue, where I eventually ducked in to the metro and finished the remainder of my walk courtesy of the subway. I spent too much time at the fabric store, and used great restraint only to exit the premises and see a full-blown blizzard had developed! The first of the season.  A 1970s-era whopper of a winter storm.  I trudged northwards to catch the bus on Sherbrooke at Parc, which for all the wind and blowing snow might just have been called Snowlandia. I imagine it was only around 4:30 pm by then, but it was cold and blowing and kind of exciting, too. Came home and made myself some warm milk with a dash of egg nog and Lordy, was it nice! Made me drowsy, too and so I fell asleep on the sofa, far too early, tree lights blinking close by.

One would expect to wake up to many feet of snow after such a storm, but no, there's actually very little. We have, for all intents and purposes, received scant snow this winter of 2010. I don't expect it will last, but the fact that we have made it this far already already shortens the winter substantially, which means a lot when you live in a place where the first tiny blooms are only expected to poke their heads up from the earth come April.

(I guess this was a "neither here, nor there" kind of post, not about this and not about that. A bit about paper and the cold, and yesterday's snowfall and my new-old record album. Should these posts have a focus? Is there a responsibility there? I'm not sure. I am thinking on it, though).

Christmas Eve Project (for Rapid Sense of Accomplishment!)

Cats needed a soft, but not too thick blanket to maximize the impact of their Occupy Radiator  protest. And I needed to start and finish a project, as of late I've been flummoxed by a couple of the ones I've began and...well, they're still pending.

So, win win!

Happy Christmas Eve, my peeps!

Christmas is such a weird time. Can I say that? I mean, I know there are lots of articles and programs out there on the stressors that are triggered this time of year; the family drama, the reverting to childhood of individuals who, otherwise, feel they have 'worked' through the best of their crap. But I don't see much about the longing that oftentimes, at least for me, accompanies Christmas.

I feel I should back up. I am a child of December. December 14th, to be exact. So as a little one, the whole of the month was filled with such anticipation. In school, the likelihood that on my birthday, I would be asked to turn back the small flap on the Advent calendar. The walking up towards my house, a house surrounded by stacks and stacks of snow, to see the Christmas tree had been put up while I was out. And it was a fake tree, too, that to me could not have been more beautiful. The small plastic reindeer were on the window ledge, the illuminated Santa faces hung in the two main windows of our flagstone house.

My childhood was not a perfect time by any means. There were arguments and strife and so many things left unsaid, at least verbally. But my Christmases, my Decembers, remain untouchable. Even the one when I was sick with the chicken pox. (OK, in retrospect, that was lousy). I can recall lying in bed in my room one Christmas Eve and looking out the small window that framed the moon and thinking 'the sooner I fall asleep, the sooner it will be morning..."That we ever feel such a sense of magic, of wonderment is enough for me. I don't need to feel it now. I don't and yet...I long for it. I think I do because I knew it was existed, and because like anything we feel, it is still somewhere inside us. Not necessarily practical, but there nonetheless.

When I was a kid, it was naturally about wanting to tear through my gifts. Hoping that big box left under the tree had my name on it. The enormous (now, not so much) wooden sled with tartan padding that leaned to the left of the tree, the game of Clue, my first watch - a round, plain-faced Timex of course, that I still own - and in later years, the Rumours album. But this year the real moments of joy have come from finding or making just the right gifts. Because more and more I see that for whatever reason, be it stress, loss, longing, illness, want of any kind, Christmas can be hard. Hard with a capital H. So it actually gives me genuine joy to think maybe whatever I've given someone, for just that moment, makes them feel genuinely special and cared for. Don't get me wrong. I still love receiving presents and soft things and the corner piece of the store-bought cake, better still one with being sugar rosettes on it. But the gifts I give and the moments of pure  happiness I like to think that accompanies their opening, is a game-changer. (Again, please don't think this means I don't like opening gifts addressed to me and me alone, because you'd be mistaken!)

Christmas, like aging, or watching a parent age, is not for sissies. It is, or ought to be, for adults only. It is profound, it is life-changing and it is bitter and sweet, but I'd have to say it is more of the former. When it's a kid you are dealing with, or when it's an aged parent, mostly, the change has got to happen with you, in you. And I don't know about you, but sometimes I can only change so much and so fast. So then I rest, if I'm lucky transform a little more, dig a bit deeper and then maybe, 'cause I'm human, I step back. I cut myself a break, perhaps wisely, perhaps not. I muddle and F*ck Up royally and then do more of the same and try not to regret, over-analyze, over-apologize, or over-anything. But being human, I sometimes do. And I hope that it all works out in the end. And sometimes I drink a glass of wine, or better still a gin & tonic with a slice of lime and a maraschino cherry and flip through the latest edition of Vanity Fair.

But the aforementioned sweet, perhaps not belaboured enough but still real, is...real. The peacefulness of a beloved pet sleeping on a radiator, the utter love with which they sometimes take you in, the way a piece of music (see link below) can reach through your breast bone and grab your heart in such a way you didn't think possible, at least not anymore. The smell of a Scotch Pine, the soft twinkling of lights on the boughs of the tree with - at last - snow falling softly behind it, visible through the windows. The quiet of your living room as the setting for all this, while you wear your Dad's beige wool cardigan that still smells like him. To miss that Dad in ways you can't ever put into words and to wonder what he'd think of those fine lines that now appear around your eyes when you smile. A slight man, but one with quiet conviction and the hands of a French-Alps farmer, of his father; wiry and strong and able to steer me from behind my neck either purposefully or lovingly. Or both, in retrospect. The imperfect, but dearly loved ballast of this family. All to say, I am so blessed Dad. So blessed.  Born on the 5th of January and passed on the 7th. I miss you beyond all measure. You'd have loved the cats (and they'd have loved you).

Merry, peaceful Christmas. Let's see what 2012 brings.

Love to all.


Magnum Mysterium; Nordic Chamber Choir.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn5ken3RJBo&feature=share