SAUNA CLEANSING FOR BODY AND SOUL

A lovely calm in the city this evening, quite a contrast from the post-police heaviness of last weekend. Dom and Tashi and I are just back in our green oasis (the garden is SO spectacular) from two nights in Grey County. It was a great visit, staying with friends, dancing contra dances with friends and strangers of all ages and descriptions, having a leisurely but intense sauna this morning followed by a delicious swooshing swim in a rain-swollen river. It's so liberating to catch the current and get swept along, riding the power but without fear, a benign mother nature carrying us along.

Up in the country I was sleeping out in the forest in a little cabin-like space, a tiny trailer in fact, with screen windows all round, so that the bird calls woke me early and then kept my morning daydreams company. Last night was clear and moonless until late, so the stars seemed to hang low and for sure there were more of them than usual. "Diamonds in the sky" rarely feels like a good metaphor, but last night they were brilliants, draped across the bosom of the sky, I feel like saying.

The sauna, like all purgings, leaves me feeling aired out and light. And that feeling is carrying me along like the river's current. I feel washed of small anxieties for the moment, delighted with the world, pleased with the recipes I have already worked on for the Burma book, looking forward to telling stories and giving the whole thing shape: it's a lovely freedom, a freed-up-ness.

Now how to keep riding this wave a appreciative engagement? How to surf the happiness?

I saw an aunt of mine up north, well over eighty and still lively and beautiful and very engaged. She came too to the contra dancing and kicked up her heels with us all. S(he also taught Dom to waltz, as the band (fiddle, flute, drums, Irish-style) swept us along. She talked earlier that afternoon about how she always felt, as the youngest in her family, that she was not as smart as the others, not good enough. I said to her (after arguing with her that her inability to count up her change and remember dates doesn't mean a lack of intelligence -she has plenty, and it's lively! - just an area that some people are better at than she is, so what?), " But now surely you don't worry about what other people think of you?" She said, "Well, now mostly not, but it sure made me afraid then, afraid of getting things wrong!"

The conversation made me think about all the crippling expectations we put on ourselves, the unrealistic voices we hear in our heads hectoring us over small mistakes, or filling us with doubts about our ability to achieve. What a waste of energy! And how destructive! I don't mean that we should all strut around with chests puffed out and feeling like we're masters of the universe. But I do mean that the judgementalism of early teachers or parents or siblings can corrode us, and burden us, if we let it.

Maybe we carry it around when we are young, but surely as adults our task is to look those hideous negative chains that hold us down square on, confront them, and then laugh at them. They are our own constructions. We need to see them as papier mache, without power, and we need to laugh at them.

Feeling as I do today, thrilled by Dom's great driving (he has his learners licence and was fabulous driving down from Grey County in the red Honda Fit, loving it and confident) and by the lightness of being that's infected me, I am impatient that any of us gets caught up long-term in negative thinking. It feels anti-life, and certainly anti-pleasure and a waste of good energy.

How to purge? is the question. The sauna, by heating us right to the marrow of our bones, feels as if it's driving out all kinds of toxic crap, leaving us slimed with sweat. When the river or lake or shower washes it off, we are freed. Now what is the sauna for the soul and the trapped-in-a-hamster-wheel brain? I don't know.

But surely days out, not so much the buffer days we allow ourselves (see my earlier post from early feb 2010), but more the completely out of our element days, where we change place and pattern and disconnect from the normal, surely those times are the way we can get freer. Short term freeings-up happen when we dance and dance, into a kind of high that transports us. Heavy physical work can do it too, for sure. (Drink and drugs are other avenues, but they mire us down and we pay sooner or later.) But when we get the chance, let's remember to get out of our stucknesses, however much effort it may take.

AND AS FOR FOOD: Now that the new potatoes are appearing, if you have some spare hands around to shell peas, use them in a simple herbed potato salad: Boil the spuds whole, drain and let them cool to firm up. Meantime get the peas shelled and pick some fresh herbs: parsley, mint, plenty of it, chives, and then basil if you have it... or tarragon if you like. Be generous with the quantity of herbs. Chop the herbs and stir them into an olive oil and vinegar (or lime or lemon juice if you prefer, or a blend) dressing with some salt. A dash of Dijon mustard is an option and/or a dash of good soy sauce. Heat a small amount of water in a pot, add the peas, and cook them briefly, until just tender. Put the peas and potatoes in a large wooden bowl (or whatever bowl you have), pour the dressing over, and toss gently. It's a great dish for a potluck (Lillian made a 10 pounds-of-potatoes salad just like it for Saturday night) or for a hungry crowd, especially in hot weather.

SWIMMING IN THE RIVER OF TIME

I feel I've been far away, but in fact I've just made a four day car trip to Ottawa, my home-town, with Dom and Tashi.  The drive is less than five hours, but was transporting.

It's mid-July, my birthday time, and I love to mark it somehow, so that later I can think, ah, yes, THAT year I was doing such-and-such... (So as I said to Dom, twenty-two years ago, I was pregnant with you and walking up the pass that is part of the circumambulation of Mount Kailas, in western Tibet, and here you are tall and grown and hopefully undamaged by those early in utero exertions!)  

This year we slept in a friend's cabin on a hill above the Gatineau River, on a chilly night (but we had sleeping bags and quilts and were comfy).  On my birthday morning I could get up early and walk down through the trees to the gleaming wide river, slip off my sweater and sarong, and step into the water.  I was bare, but warm with the remnants of sleep.  The river was warmer than the cold morning air, so it was soft and welcoming, slippery smooth on my skin.

I love swimming in the Gatineau.  It flows south into the Ottawa River at Ottawa, and its water carries some suspended clay in it, making it almost silky to the touch.  Any place that we spend our childhood has magical connections for us I think, and for me the Gatineau sure has those.  There's a before-thought kind of familiarity and welcome to all of it: the feel of the water as I first sink into it, the subtle cool scent of the air over the water, the slight ooze of the river bottom as I push off to start swimming out toward the far shore.  

I don't actually swim across the river, and have rarely done so.  It's very wide.  When I was a kid we would occasionally swim across, but only if accompanied by an adult in a rowboat, for safety, and always it seemed so far and such a marathon.  I think I'm in better shape, and also am a more confident (though not a more elegant!) swimmer, so the crossing looks less daunting to me now.  But I don't do it.  Instead I swim out then luxuriate and float and paddle and swim a little more and let myself just BE there.  Heaven.

Once back out, that birthday morning a few days ago, I wrapped myself in a towel, slipped the sweater on top, and walked over on the path to my cousin's dock.  Under it the water makes a lapping sound as little wavelets reach the rocks and shore.  I lay there in the sun, getting slowly warmed and feeling connected to and almost inside all the times I've been in that place, listening to that water.

But of course the water I heard before, all those other times, is somewhere else on the planet or in the air now, and the dock I lay on as a child has been replaced by a fresh dock with fresh planks.  As always there's that lesson about life, which can seem the same, and feels the same but not the same, feels continuous but also renewed and altered over time.

So as the river flows by, we step into it at the same spot, but into different water, and we too are different, not the same person who stepped in yesterday, or ten years ago, or fifty (fifty!!) years ago.  But inside I feel like the same person; I'm still me, aren't I?  

These are birthday thoughts, or thoughts for the new year, when we ponder life and time and change...

And so it felt entirely right that on that trip to Ottawa, apart from the pleasure of swimming, and of seeing old friends, and of having travelling time with Dom and Tashi, I also had a visit with my aunt.  She is eighty-seven now, lives in a present that is ephemeral to her, and with the past just a vague impression, so conversations are tangential and like those inside a dream state.  She now looks very like her father, my grandfather, as he did in his late eighties, especially the way her mouth shapes words as she speaks.  It's a precious glimpse of the past.  I found myself in tears almost, touched by that family connection, and, once again, by the intertwining in life of continuity and change.