LEARNING RESPECT, IN SCHOOL & OUT

It’s warm and kind in the sun, but sitting here in the shade, in my small back garden, the cool of autumn is tickling my skin and reminding me that Labour Day is around the corner. I’m not ready for this! Perhaps no-one is, including teachers and kids heading back to school. And here in Toronto, where we’ve had an unusually cool summer after a long harsh record-setting winter, we’re feeling a little robbed of warmth and renewal.

You can’t tell that though from looking at gardens and farmers’ markets. Somehow the tough winter helped many plants and crops thrive, in a kind of “if you weren’t killed by the cold, then you are stronger and more vigorous” kind of scenario. Thus the stone fruits are full of flavour, the arugula and sorrel in my garden are still luxuriant, and the cool weather has kept the lettuce lively too. The bees are humming, working hard, sucking at the chive flowers and the remains of the phlox and lilies, the flowering arugula gone wild, and the odd daisy.

Meantime next door the neighbours’ little kids are playing in water, splashing and squabbling and then laughing again…a last hurrah before the older child heads to kindergarten next Tuesday.

I think of school as a process of socialisation: we learn about the diversity of characters and interactions from spending time with people we did not choose, in a relatively orderly environment, and with distractions, such as learning, to help us stay on track and focussed. If school helps us maintain respect for ourselves and others, and learn to discern and work with the differences between us, then that’s a huge accomplishment. The marks and “benchmarks” are so much less important!

Up the street, speaking of school and turning points in the year, the campus of the University of Toronto has been mown and tidied and repaired and touched up, in preparation for the arrival of students. Awkward first year students and their worldly possessions are being unloaded in front of residences by their parents this weekend; the cooler at-ease-in-the-city upper year students will be around in a week’s time. So now is the last day to get to the University bookstore for supplies before the huge long line-ups start. The next time for easy access will be in four weeks.

And so the world turns in this safe-feeling Toronto of no war and predictable seasonal cycles.

But across the water people are suffering in fragmented and war-torn landscapes. Syria is a catastrophe, and parts of Iraq too, and in Ukraine Putin is flexing the muscles he first used to wrest Abkhazia and North Ossetia from Georgia. The era of the cold war, so static and buttoned down, and full of bluster, with two clear “sides” must feel desirable to some people in retrospect, just as many in the ex-Soviet Union after 1990 spoke fondly of the certainties of life under the Soviet dictatorship. But now we’re in a new era and have to feel our way and figure out how to stay open to the wider world.

It’s too easy to turn our backs on the pain of others. Their pain and suffering make us uncomfortable; perhaps we feel guilty for being so well off in our peaceful place while other suffer. But I do think it’s important to keep thinking about the individual human beings on the ground, anywhere and everywhere in the world. They deserve our attention, our respect, and our help.

Food is a thread that we can use to help understand others, in fact to help visualise ourselves in their place. Even as there are rocket launchers attacking, in Gaza or Syria, there are home cooks figuring out how to feed their families, and bakers heating their ovens to get the day’s bread baked.

And that visualising of the daily food preparation, and family meals of others, in turn helps us remember that we are all on this planet together. It helps us have respect for the people we share the planet with, just as, when we were in primary school, we were all in the classroom together, with our differences and our difficulties, embarked on trying to understand what was going on and to learn.

CHANGE & MEMORY

I started this post on Tuesday night, June3, right after I got back from a meeting of the Women's Culinary Network, our end-of-season annual potluck. This year was different, because it was also our last meeting.The organisation, begun 23 years ago by Nettie Cronish and three other women who knew that they wanted to provide a supportive networking environment for women working in food, is now winding up.

Women, and young men too, do still need support and mentoring as they try to find their way and hone a career in food. But now there is the internet, with FB and Twitter and just plain old email, all useful tools for staying in touch and cross-connecting. Women in the food world are less relatively disadvantaged than they were twenty plus years ago, so a successor organisation would not need to be "women's", it could just be The Toronto Culinary Network.

In the meantime, as we see what people need and want, it's a good moment to acknowledge the hard work and good creative intentions of the founders and early members. And we should take pride in the fact that the WCN has been brave enough to close down rather than trickling into sad reproaches about change. It's a real sign of health, this preparedness to move forward.

Most things in this world, human creations and mother nature too, have their cycles of birth and growth and change and eventual subsidence. We all know this, but I for one tend to forget it and to cling.

It's just hard to accept change sometimes, even when beautiful examples of it unfurl before our eyes in our parks and gardens and tree canopies these last weeks of spring. The harsh winter seems to have pushed the plant world into extreme responses, a sort of "flourish or die."  The tall chestnut trees, for example, that line the streets in my neighbourhood, are loaded with "candles" tall lightly fragrant blossoms, more loaded than I have ever seen them. My friends in Grey County have had record-breaking flushes of shiitake mushrooms, the asparagus in Ontario tastes sweeter this year, and so on... On the other hand, winter cold killed many plants (including an beautiful tall rose bush of mine.

Wins and losses, and always change.

I met a friend for coffee yesterday morning and we talked about Kurdistan. She had been there two years ago and passed on names of contacts to me before I went in April. We especially talked about women there, and the patterns of life in more traditional households, where women cook and clean and tend to their families. The daily patterns provide an anchor-point, a feeling of security for everyone. The code of hospitality is very strong, so that the guest, expected or not, is offered water and tea and then food, much more generously and graciously than would happen in most North American households. I was humbled by the warmth and generosity of the men and women I met and stayed with in Kurdistan. And I wonder, as the country changes, whether people will be able to hold onto their traditional values. I hope so, for their sakes.

So this is the question: How do traditional societies make the transition to the patterns of the modern world, without losing their core values? It's a troubling problem, one that exists not only in newly modernising cultures like Kurdistan, but also in families who have left their home country and moved to North America or Europe. The parents have difficulties and distress when they see their daughters and sons adopting new patterns of behaviour; change is threatening to them. On the other hand the children are stressed because they want to honour their parents but they also want to participate in a changing world with their peers; for them change is enticing and part of growth.

All this is not news. But as time races past, marked by mother nature's evolving patterns, it's sometimes valuable to stop and think about these issues. Other people's lives are a mystery to each of us. We can only guess at the struggles or pains that people are living with, or the sufferings they may have had earlier.

This first week of June is a week of major anniversaries: Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the start of the Six Day War in 1967; the D-Day Landings in 1944. As I think about these big turning-point events, I try to imagine what each was like for individual people who were there and participated. Somehow the passage of time can flatten the life out of events so that they become like stone statues on the our mental landscape. The reality is that they were complex, full of feeling and intensity, fear and pain and awe, and that individual human beings just like you and me were caught up in them.

Thus in this musing about accepting change I guess I am saying that when it comes to memories, it feels valuable to resist change, to hold onto memories and revisit them. If we can keep a vivid sense of our own history, and that of others, then the lessons and insights of the past can continue to live in us, even long afterward - or perhaps, especially long afterward, when we've had time to reflect on it all.

A LIFE OF DEPARTURES & CHANGE

I’m sitting in my Toronto-bound plane in HongKong airport, waiting for everyone else to get seated, as the sun comes out from the mist and cloud and the afternoon shadows sharpen and lengthen.

In the last few days of packing and anticipating departure from Chiang Mai, I’ve found myself in a familiar state: a little edgy, sharp-tongued, unsettled. You’d think that after all these years I would take departures for granted, but somehow that has not happened. I’ve written here before about how I hope I never lose my sense of wonder about travel, whether in a plane or otherwise. Part of that wonder is also what gives me edge and edginess: a departure is a loss, a severing from place and people. It’s something I can never get used to. On the other hand departure is also marks the start of new possibilities and the opening of new horizons. That’s why travel has such appeal to many people, including me.

But there’s a disconnect between the romantic notion of “travel to faraway lands” and the focus and attention to detail that are necessary to actually get where you’re going. When it comes right down to the actual days leading up to departure, the practical details of packing enough underwear and warm or cool or whatever clothing, and basic checklist questions such as do I have my passport and other essentials? have I locked the house? watered the plants? etc, then there’s not much romance. 

I think it’s in part that need to focus on practical details that makes me edgy.

But I think that it’s mostly because I have an old-fashioned feeling about travel. No matter that flights halfway around the world can happen with speed and ease. For me they are still huge and momentous departures. Perhaps I’m channeling the feelings of fear and anticipation that humans have felt for centuries as they embarked on perilous sailing-ship voyages, often never to return home, or made the fraught transition from hard-scrabble village and farm life in rural China or India or Africa to the terrors and possibilities of the cities….

Thus the idea of departure becomes one more moment in life where we can be either “glass half full” or “glass half empty” people. I am mostly a glass half full person, with a (sometimes irritating-to-others) inclination to see the positive. When the time for departure actually comes, though I may have been edgy ahead of time about the loss involved in saying farewell or the anxiety about what might come, I lose that little feeling of dread and can usually feel unequivocally pleased about the new horizons that lie in the journey and the destination. I’m not bragging about this. I think it’s just a matter of luck that I love the unknown and the unexpected, rather than fearing them.

LATER:

Now safely landed in the wintry chill of Toronto in late February, I look back on the thoughts I had in the plane and on my edginess before leaving, and they feel like the clothing I wore in the flight: familiar, now needing a wash and an airing, but destined to be worn again when the time comes to make another departure.

These habits of thought, which we may well be able to modify when we’re young, eventually become part of us, at least so it seems. I don’t expect ever to get matter-of-fact about departures or long flights or parting from loved ones.

And if travel is, as the truism goes, a metaphor for life, then it is one way of accustoming ourselves to the truth that all life is change. We can count on nothing remaining constant except the fact that everything changes and that we are all mortal and headed sooner or later to the biggest change of all. Every departure is a small death, just as falling asleep can be, a letting go, a loosening of the ties to the known and an embarking on unknown seas...

STRIDING FORWARD THROUGH THE CHANGING SCENE

These days, in damp and drizzle and wind and hail and chill, the streets of Toronto are paved with gold, and green-gold and white and pale pink and pink-red….the tiny yellow-green maple tree flowers, the cherry and plum and apple and flowering almond blossom petals, that are being washed and blown to the pavement by rain and wind. It’s a dazzling show for those like me who are walking people. The vivid colours are kind of hallucinatory as I rush along; today I was in a hurry to get out of the cold.

The other day I was hurrying along petalled streets to see a young friend whose first baby was born at the end of March. It was my first sight of her. Olivia is of course downy-soft and adorable, her little fists clenched under her chin as she sleeps, her gaze direct and alert when she’s awake. I took her mother some books, kid books, to get her library started. I imagine them later with perhaps crayon lines and marks in them, and fingerprints. Every child needs a store of books. I’m no good at buying clothes or other things; I never know what’s needed or wanted. And anyway, babies grow like weeds, so todays large garment is tomorrow’s giveaway. I’d rather give books.

And that got me thinking about permanence and impermanence. Those flowering trees, fragrant or not, give us a moment of heart-stopping beauty, and then it’s washed away. The tree remains, a reminder of a moment, and it promises us another next year. So too a book gives us intense moments of pleasure, or connection, and later on its presence on the shelf reminds us of those moments and perhaps invites us to open it again and reread it. Kids of course love the familiarity of the already well-known book. They will ask to have the same book read over and over, weekly or nightly. We lose some of that impulse when we become autonomous readers. We seek out the new.

And yet at the same time there are some books that I go back to and reread, as a kind of soothing technique, a remnant of kid-impulse I think. They are mostly books that I read as a kid or teenager: the Complete Sherlock Holmes, in two volumes, is one candidate for rereading, perhaps every three or four years. For my kids it’s the Philip Pullman books, and some of the Harry Potters.

Perhaps it’s age, and the perspective it can give as I gaze back in time, or put my head into an earlier year’s place and gaze forward, but I am more and more aware that one of the things that keeps me feeling alive and well is an ongoing effort to keep a sense of balance as things around me change. Those can be the seasonal changes, that remind us of fragility and loss, even as those first blossoms are emerging on the trees. Or they can be the announcement that a friend or the parent of a friend has only a limited time to live, or the demolition of a familiar building on a neighbourhood streetcorner, or the closing of a bookstore, or the purchase of a new piece of technology that is complicated and needs to be mastered.

All change can be disorienting, or anxiety-making, even just as we contemplate the possibility of change, let alone when it shocks us with its suddenness.

I love through-lines, stories that continue across generations or across continents and oceans. I like other people’s family stories, the history of long-term friendships, I like thinking about the long-term cross-linkages in my own family and in my life. That idea of some kind of continuity is precious. And for me perhaps it’s what helps me keep my balance in the day to day changing scene, helps me enjoy the dynamism of young people’s ideas and the liveliness of their open horizons.

And so as the tulips fade and the petals fall from the flowering fruit trees, rather than regretting their passage, I love the anticipation of the next phase of the year: rhubarb and sorrel and tarragon now my garden, tender asparagus now coming into the farmers’ markets, and then after that the generosities of summer. Yes! 

FAREWELL TIGER, & HELLO TO THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT

it's the last day of January, the first day of this year's immersethrough week in Chiang Mai and north of here, and also this is probably my last post in the year of the Tiger, since the Rabbit is due to come loppety-lop into our lives on February 3. I have nothing against rabbits, in fact precious Dom is a Rabbit, but since my birth year is a Tiger year, I am sorry to see the end of another one.

One more the cycles remind us that there are things to look forward to and enjoy, and that there is also a time for them to be over, for us to move on. I'm moving on by remembering that this Tiger year has given me health and happiness, deepening friendships, a small but growing understanding of culinary and other culture in Burma, and an optimism that even if tomorrow is harsher or more painful than today, I have the resilience to weather hard times. Yes, that optimism may be misplaced. But I don't care, just am happy to be feeling this way.

Today we shopped in Warorot Market, now celebrating its centenary, and then came back to make, under Fern's mother's direction, a wonderful meal: gaeng om (a simmered layered-with-flavor beef soup/stew); gai nung (chicken pieces rubbed with a spice paste and then steamed to make a wonderful broth and tender meat); laap pla northern style (catfish minced with cleavers, then fried with aromatics, then mixed with separately fried heaps of of crispy fried garlic and the fish skin, and topped with more aromatics); gaeng pakat (Chinese kale in a broth flavored with pork ribs etc); ep moo (pork cleaver-minced and then mixed with lemongrass and other flavors, then shaped into small flat patties, wrapped in banana leaf, and grilled); and lots of fresh vegetables; all made and eaten with a great vibe. That's my immersethrough report! Very local doings here in Chiang Mai.

I feel rather cut off here from the huge world events of the last week: the turmoil and awakening in the Arab world. To stay with food, for a moment, apart from all else they have in common, the places where change has happened or is seething at the surface are all flatbread places: Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon.

When I was in Tunisia (for an Oldways conference and also to do research for the Flatbreads book), the place felt heavy, authoritarian, much more than Morocco. Once when I was in a car driving north of Nefta, not far from the Algerian border, the taxi driver had some great music on the radio. It was sufi/qawali music, being broadcast from Algeria. He made me promise not to tell, for that radio station was banned in Tunisia. He could be arrested. It was a small thing, in a way, but a reminder that people's lives and thoughts were not their own. And Mubarak's Egypt of course is notoriously oppressive. But for years Tunisia has often been referred to approvingly, in the media and by politicians, as stable. Does "stable" just mean "successfullly repressive?" It seems to, when it comes to US allies in the Arab world and in other places too.

How disgraceful.

Here I find myself on a political path in this post...how did that happen?

And as I write out here on Fern's balcony (she has wi-fi and I don't) I can hear a call to prayer, in the dusk, a call with elegance and intensity both. It's a good reminder. When I think of the people demonstrating in the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, and those injured and killed, I want to think of them not as an abstract mass but as human beings with feelings and aspirations, wanting the freedom to listen to the music they choose, to believe as they wish, to be safe under a secure rule of law.

Maybe the year of the rabbit will bring them that. Let's hope so...

And may the year of the Rabbit be a generous and fruitful one for all of you.


AND AN AFTERWARD: There's an article in the NYTimes by Ross Douthat that engages in a brief way with the guessing games played by the US and other governments about whether or not to intervene, to support repressive regimes for fear of worse, etc. It's here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/opinion/31douthat.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

Basically everyone would like sure outcomes, but such things are not available...and often then, the US and others tend to stick with the devil they know rather than supporting uprisings, even when the devil they know is deeply authoritarian, undemocratic, corrupt, etc.

FULL MOON, FIRST FROST, & THOUGHTS OF CHANGE & ROUTINE

The moon is bright bright and full, making sharp shadows in the garden. And as often happens at full moon in October, it looks like this is the first night we'll have frost. So I was out there in those sharp shadows an hour ago, pulling up, with regret, the huge strong basil plants in the garden. I have two Med basils and two Thai basils. They've kept us aromatic and intensely flavoured all summer. If I don't pull them up, I thought this evening, they may freeze and then be wasted, blackened and gone. If I DO pull them up then they'll last a little in water in the house and I can use them mindfully and process the last leaves in olive oil for a pesto base that I'll store in a couple of glass jars.

This really feels like the end of the garden... even though there are a few last tomatoes clinging on, not getting any larger but slowly ever so slowly changing colour.

I've been thinking about change these days... well truth be told change is often on my mind, but in this case I mean social change and social and economic mobility, what it means and what's involved. I have been talking to everyone, perhaps tiresomely, about Doug Saunders' new book Arrival City. Here's the link to the site for the book. A friend who heard the author interviewed on the radio said, "Well it's a pretty easy theory to understand so I don't see any reason to read the book." But I found it riveting, details about what works and almost more importantly what doesn't work in some "arrival city" situations, are clearly explained. And the history of places where immigrants land, immigrants from the countryside, or from other countries, and how they help each other and navigate their way into better lives, over time, if given the chance, is fascinating, from Teheran and Istanbul to (failed) arrival cities in Paris and Germany, etc.

I have lent the book out, and it's probably in the library too by now, but it is really worth owning, so you can dip back into it at intervals.

Another recent book is Sheila Heti's "How Should A Person Be?" She has such a distinctive voice on the page, it's so artful while seeming effortless. I heard her read the prologue aloud at a book launch and it was fabulous read aloud. Maybe the best books are? Not sure, but it's a good test of writing, to hear whether it is happy and interesting being read aloud.

On another topic, the unexpected, I had a quick brush with "disaster" the other day. I was running in the sunshine last Saturday, the leaves bright and my spitrits too, doing a long loop to end up in Kensington Market. I saw some guys far ahead of me in the middle of the street working on the street, but didn't notice what was right in front of me as I stepped off the curb to run across a side street... It was a deep patch of fresh cement, and there I was one foot, the second foot in to the ankles and then out again onto "dry land". Yikes! The guys working said apologetically, "We watched you run toward us - sorry not to warn you!" I assured them I'd be fine. "No they said, Go right over there to the cement truck (huge and rumbling). "There's a water hose on the back. Get those guys to help you. And so with a lot of running water I cleaned off all the wet cement and then jogged on squelching a little!

If only all unexpected "bad surprises" could be resolved as easily! I ran on feeling lucky to be unscathed, and able to laugh, rather than wretched. Not sure why I'm telling this story except that as always when events take an odd turn, it was a reminder not to take any joyous moment for granted. And also I guess a reminder that change is one of the few constants in life. Thus if things are going well they can and will turn, and we need to accept that and be ready for it. SImilarly, and sometimes very hearteningly, if things are bad, depressing, rotten in some way, then they WILL change, evolve, get easier. Keeping a reasonable equilibrium in all this up and down and unexpectedness is one of the main challenges and, with luck, the main pleasures of life.

And to turn another topic corner, I find, now that I have been pushed to tweet and participate in that 140 character hamster wheel, that it is sometimes rewarding (when there's an interesting link posted) but more often it is just another place to check, another way of procrastinating.... If I have enough places to check (two email accounts plus Facebook plus Twitter) that means that by the time I have engaged with each of them it's time to recheck the first one again. Do you find yourself doing that? It becomes a reflex, like smoking another cigarette used to be.

Are we just destined to fritter away the privilege of free time and choice on often-meaningless repetitive behaviours? Or are these just highly evolved or hi-tech work-avoidance techniques?

The first check of email in the day, like the first cigarette, can be pleasurable and fruitful, but the subsequent ones?

Some days I avoid the computer altogether, or else I label the day or the morning a non-internet zone. It's amazing how much else I can get done, then. And it's a little scary to find how long it takes me to settle into more focussed thinking or writing or reading, like a kind of necessary withdrawal period.

hmmm

With colder weather arriving, and so less outside time, the risk of getting even more squirrely and online-hooked is real. Books are one great antidote, for sure. And that's one reason to be grateful that publishers are still, despite the warnings about the end of publishing, printing books, acquiring new titles, enticing us into deeper longer thinking and reflecting.

Some things don't change much, and one of those is my simple roast chicken. I've written about it before: I wash and dry the bird, then prick a lemon and put it inside, then drizzle on olive oil and scatter on salt. It goes in breast down for the first while, then I turn it, all at 425 or 450. Around it are sliced potatoes roasting, and also drizzled with olive oil and salt.

And this same old- same old is always a pleasure, succulent and satisfying and full of flavour. Next day's broth is also a treat to look forward to. Usually this roast chicken and potatoes combo is my Thursday night meal, after a heavy day for Tashi and before a heavy Friday for Dom. The guys cook other days, but Thursday it's my turn, a nice anchor in the week. I've come to enjoy this sense of routine, despite my dislike of predictability. Is this old age? Or is it just a realisation that some habits and routines are so pleasing that altering them would be a foolish waste of effort?

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.

DANCE OF BALANCE

The large crabapple tree that shelters the front of the house from the street is coming into radiant white bloom, and underneath it the lilies of the valley are slowly starting into flower. Spring springs!

Last night had a lovely pair of phone calls:

The first was from Fern, a good friend from Thailand who lives in Chiang Mai and who was the lynchpin of our immersethrough week in February.  We couldn't have done it without her; and the out-of-town cooking took place at her very beautiful farm near Fang.  Fern was calling because her nineteen-year-old daughter Melissa is flying to Toronto this week to stay with us for the summer and Fern wanted to touch base about some last-minute things.  

Melissa is going to find it chilly here until summer heat arrives, but then she prefers cool to hot, even though she was raised in Thailand.  We are so looking forward to having her here, watching her get comfortable in this very different place and culture. 

The second call was from Tina Ujlaki, a good friend,  who gave me news and then passed the phone on to Jim Oseland, the wonderfully quirky editor of Saveur and fun guy to travel with.  They were with our editor Ann Bramson at the Beard Awards last night. It was Ann's phone, in fact.  They were all three happy to give us the news that Beyond the Great Wall had won best International book.  Delightful!  (Yes, one of us should have gone, but suddenly the trip seemed expensive and too much to squeeze in; lovely Ann Bramson was stuck with having to accept for us and stand up and speak.  Thanks Ann!)   

Later we learned that Jennifer McLagan's FAT! had won book of the year (as well as best SIngle Subject book).  Publishers were very unimaginative about the book, reluctant to consider it, until finally M&S, here in Toronto, and Ten-Speed joined forces to publish it.  As a result, Jennifer, Liv Blumer (her agent and ours), and all those of us who always thought Fat was a great subject, are feeling victorious and vindicated.  We all get to share in the win, in a small way.  

So today is very different from yesterday for Jennifer...

And for all of us, life changes every day in big ways and small.  Tashi had his last exam yesterday and became a free man.  How lovely!    

This talk of change reminds me of a conversation I had via email with a close friend, Lillian, a wise-woman.  She came up with the phrase "the dance of balance"  which is a wonderful way of expressing the dynamic moving-target essence of life (and of relationships too, such a big subset of life).  We try for equilibrum, but everything is changing around us, in happy ways and harsh ways, but always changing.  So it's a dance, a dance of balance.

In this springing early May time of year it's easier to feel light on my feet, as I dance this dance (or perhaps I should think of it as a dance composed of many smaller dances?).  And if ever I am feeling heavy-footed, it's up to me to lighten myself, energise upward, take on and work around the gravity of gravity.  

How about you?

LIFE CHANGES THEN AND NOW

Here it is January 14, a big day on my calendar every year, for it's the date on which, forty years ago, my father died.  I was eighteen and in first year university; he was forty-eight, had been on the beaches in Normandy, in the Canadian forces in Holland at the end of the war, at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar after the war, studying physics, and then a fabulously present and intelligent, engaged father to me and my brother, and I think a loving reliable partner for my mother, though they couldn't have been more different in many ways.  

Nothing prepared me for his death, not could anything have done so.  That first big loss, and after all I was eighteen and not a small child, so I was lucky, took years to absorb, perhaps will never be quite absorbed.  But it also had a huge impact on how I look at the world.  I came to realise that life is short, can be cut off at any time, and that human relationships, our web of friends and family and acquaintances, are what keep us all afloat, remind us that we are part of a larger whole.

Some people look to religion for this connection.  For me religion has always been a version of words, sometimes loaded, yes, with meaning and metaphor and remembrance, but actually just a form of institutionalised control and restriction.  No there is no life after death, I believe.  And no, my father is not looking down on me from some heaven and pitying me or loving me or whatever.  Those can be nice images, consoling perhaps, but also they are creepy.

We have the now, and our relationships and our minds and imaginations and creative energies.  That is the heaven we have on earth.  Let's agree that we are not so separate from the animal kingdom.  The difference is in our awareness of and our ability to conceptualise and verbalise about both the future and the past, while also living in the present.  How rich is that?!  And another difference, I believe, is our capacity for kindness, our ability to will ourselves to behave better toward each other than pure animal instincts would dictate. 

So if life is fragile and to be savored, and thus individual people and relationships are also evanescent, potentially, and need to be appreciated, why am I planning to catch a plane tomorrow leaving friends and extended family and my nearest and dearest Dom and Tashi to go to the other side of the world?

Well life is also about stretching ourselves, keeping commitments while pushing ourselves to extend outward, to keep learning and appreciating what's out there.  And for now, that sends me to southeast Asia, first to Chiang Mai for our immersethrough course, which will be fun and challenging and a very new adventure, and then to Burma for I hope a good explore to the west and north of the country.    

Yes, I'm sure things can and will go wrong or off track.  But that's not always a bad thing.  And the serendipity that I rely on when travelling, which is really another way of saying that I enjoy the unexpected, is something to look forward to.

First there's the flight to HongKong, where I'll have a few hours to go into town and see Rocky, at Phoenix Travel, such a wonderful person and old friend, and hopefully Peter too.  Then it's back onto a plane for the legs to Bangkok and Chiang Mai.  I'm packed, with computer and camera, and books for the flight.  

And yes, part of me is weeping a little, for the loss and change of today long ago, and for the losses and changes to come, even as I look forward....