I am a number person. I count things, I see quantities as multiples (ie. this box is twice a big as that box). It just so happens that the year is finishing, and this is my 300th post to this blog. In 2007 I posted a paltry seven times. In 2008, it was 32 and in 2009, 85. Since then I have barely stopped jabbering but now, A Moment of Reflection:
This blog is one of my quiet joys, a place where I can record some thoughts and share them with people thoughtful enough to stop by my corner of the virtual neighbourhood. What a wonderful way to overcome the inherent isolation of living here in NB. And this little blog is so faithful and undemanding. It will sit neglected for weeks and still be waiting when a loud thought pops into my brain and is later forced out my fingers and into your neurons. Pretty wild when you really think about it, isn't it?
Believe it or not, I have rules about writing this blog. Such as:
1. Don't write in ridiculous over-thought prose.
One might consider asking oneself: did the word choice matter or was all choice merely an illusion? She digressed.
Ever since I read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," the importance of plain speaking, and the uncessary pretence of too many Latin-based words have hit me like a lightning bolt. Just say it simply, and mean it. I try not to write if I don't have anything worth saying.
2. Personal blogs are not for me.
Discussing ideas and experiences in public with acquaintences rather than intimates is a very valuable and underrated process. I wish we lived in a world with more engaging conversations. I do enjoy some personal blogs but the thought of putting my life out there is actually pretty nauseating.
3. Keep it positive where possible and avoid overgeneralizing everything.
There are enough stereotypes, shallow news stories and shoddy thinking without me adding to the heap! People will never change their lives and our society if they aren't given a better alternative. How's that for a stereotyped, generalized statement?
4. Less is more
5. Proofread. And then proofread again. Try to mean exactly what you say, and nothing more.
I hope 2011 will bring you growth, joy, laughter, rest, work, love, and peace. Thanks for reading.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
MIT, for free
Some of us are learning junkies. I would count myself firmly in that category - I get so bored and restless if my neurons are not getting their proper workout. So I've heard about the MIT open-source courses, but until today I had never actually checked them out.
Basically, you can choose from a HUGE list of courses, their syllabi, reading materials, and in some cases, assignments, exams and solutions. And in many courses you can download all the things you need onsite. For free. That's right, no student loan, so 8:30am deadline, no excuses. It's all there for the taking, topics from Music and Theatre Arts to Theoretical Physics, Urban Studies and Special Projects.
Wouldn't it be incredible for Carleton County and New Brunswick to have groups of people working together on these courses? To have our leaders and teachers and citizens educated MIT-style while enriching life here with their knowledge and capacities?
Oftentimes, I think there is no 'payoff' for getting formally educated around here. You certainly won't find an experimental laboratory to pay your salary, nor is a master's degree particularly lucrative for most self-employed people. As someone counting the months until my student loan is history, I can say that debt is a tremendous deterrant to getting an education. However, being self-educated is of tremendous value in allowing a person to understand the world in which they live, and being able to shape it in a responsible and inspiring way for future generations.
I look back on the history of Woodstock and Carleton County and I see the things that our citizens accomplished: F.P. Sharp and his (successful) experiments in adapting apples to the short Eastern growing season, Tappan Adney and the preservation of the birchbark canoe, the people who built the beautiful and enduring Victorian houses.
What kind of culture will we pass on? A culture of learning, now at our finger tips for free; an insistence that feeding one's curiosity is a worthwhile pursuit? A legacy of quality work and craftsmanship, of practical innovations ? I hope so, because I think we deserve to live in a place which asks for, and values, the contributions of people who live here.
It's tempting to play the victim and pretend we're second class citizens, when actually, the problems are ours and so are the solutions. So get busy learning. We need you to educate yourself, we need to enrich each other, whether with MIT courses or by any means available.
P.S. Watch this link to the wonderful Sir Ken Robinson's commentary on the pitfalls of our industrial education system. Thanks Gill!
Basically, you can choose from a HUGE list of courses, their syllabi, reading materials, and in some cases, assignments, exams and solutions. And in many courses you can download all the things you need onsite. For free. That's right, no student loan, so 8:30am deadline, no excuses. It's all there for the taking, topics from Music and Theatre Arts to Theoretical Physics, Urban Studies and Special Projects.
Wouldn't it be incredible for Carleton County and New Brunswick to have groups of people working together on these courses? To have our leaders and teachers and citizens educated MIT-style while enriching life here with their knowledge and capacities?
Oftentimes, I think there is no 'payoff' for getting formally educated around here. You certainly won't find an experimental laboratory to pay your salary, nor is a master's degree particularly lucrative for most self-employed people. As someone counting the months until my student loan is history, I can say that debt is a tremendous deterrant to getting an education. However, being self-educated is of tremendous value in allowing a person to understand the world in which they live, and being able to shape it in a responsible and inspiring way for future generations.
I look back on the history of Woodstock and Carleton County and I see the things that our citizens accomplished: F.P. Sharp and his (successful) experiments in adapting apples to the short Eastern growing season, Tappan Adney and the preservation of the birchbark canoe, the people who built the beautiful and enduring Victorian houses.
What kind of culture will we pass on? A culture of learning, now at our finger tips for free; an insistence that feeding one's curiosity is a worthwhile pursuit? A legacy of quality work and craftsmanship, of practical innovations ? I hope so, because I think we deserve to live in a place which asks for, and values, the contributions of people who live here.
It's tempting to play the victim and pretend we're second class citizens, when actually, the problems are ours and so are the solutions. So get busy learning. We need you to educate yourself, we need to enrich each other, whether with MIT courses or by any means available.
P.S. Watch this link to the wonderful Sir Ken Robinson's commentary on the pitfalls of our industrial education system. Thanks Gill!
Thursday, December 16, 2010
It's a Man's World
If you're interested in places outside of North America, you've probably read some of Stephanie Nolen's excellent journalism. Listen to this excellent podcast - Nolen is a journalist who discovers the truth in large part by talking to women.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Your Hurtin' Heart
Many of you know my sister Tracy, the musical chameleon. She sings jazz, she plays the keys, she studied opera, she teaches many wonderful students 'round these parts. But before all of that, she was - wait for it -a country singer!
That's right folks, twang and slang and all those other things your English teacher tried to talk you out of.
As kids, we grew up with Dad singing "Hey, Good Lookin'," and we knew all the words to "Coat of Many Colours" before we left elementary school. Now Tracy is preparing to release her first ever CD recording - a project she has been dreaming of for years now. We like to joke that Tracy's having her first "baby" - and it will probably involve a similar amount of love, sweat and tears!
Yours truly has been accorded the golden opportunity to sing back-up and I am pretty tickled to step away from the keys and do my backwoods holler.
Look for the Hurtin' Hearts coming to a town near you soon. Check out the website to pre-order the CD and support the Heartin' Heart cause. The CD will be a mix of country/alt-country, jazz and blues, and will feature many fine Maritime musicians and artists.
Pre-order yours, make a donation and help Tracy take her country blues coast to coast!
That's right folks, twang and slang and all those other things your English teacher tried to talk you out of.
As kids, we grew up with Dad singing "Hey, Good Lookin'," and we knew all the words to "Coat of Many Colours" before we left elementary school. Now Tracy is preparing to release her first ever CD recording - a project she has been dreaming of for years now. We like to joke that Tracy's having her first "baby" - and it will probably involve a similar amount of love, sweat and tears!
Yours truly has been accorded the golden opportunity to sing back-up and I am pretty tickled to step away from the keys and do my backwoods holler.
Look for the Hurtin' Hearts coming to a town near you soon. Check out the website to pre-order the CD and support the Heartin' Heart cause. The CD will be a mix of country/alt-country, jazz and blues, and will feature many fine Maritime musicians and artists.
Pre-order yours, make a donation and help Tracy take her country blues coast to coast!
Monday, December 06, 2010
And then there were men
I remember a lot of things from the evening news I watched with dad when I was a kid. I was born in '82 and some of the things I saw as a youngster must have had quite an impact, because I still remember seeing them on the screen. The piles of bodies during the Rwandan genocide, countless elections, the Rio earth summit, the Quebec referendum, the Westray coal mine disaster - the nightly news was (and is) my father's lullaby.
Today is the 21st anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, which means I would've been seven when it happened. It feels strange to me that I can't remember seeing it on news, but for some reason there's a hole in my brain where those horrendous images could've been.
Last night I was thinking about all of this - the horrible reality of what those women faced on that day, and the subsequent battles over gun control (yes, the long gun registry goes way back to Ecole Polytechnique). It seemed, and still seems, so unbelievable to me that a man could be so enraged by female engineers that he would gun them down in cold blood. How could a seven year old make sense of that?
Growing up I was lucky enough to have parents who were both capable of cooking, cleaning, caring for people, piling wood and doing all the other things life required. For a time, my mother was very sick with cancer, and when she was, dad did it all, with the help of Grandmother and Grammie. Grandmother being such a feminist, and Mom being a natural tomboy, the gender roles were pretty fuzzy at home, and without any brothers we learned to do whatever was necessary to keep the fire going, feed ourselves, do our homework, and present ourselves in public.
In my late teens I became an ardent feminist because I didn't think most women were equal to men, and I didn't think most men treated most women as equals. The exception to all of this, of course, remained my parents, and even when I became interested in the idea that "the personal is political" in university, I did not feel it was fair to tar all men with the label of "oppressors." My father did not 'oppress' my mother, he cared for her when she was sick.
I've always found the 'feminist' discussion prickly - you know, that moment at a party when someone drops the 'f-bomb.' Inevitably, some eyes roll, others suddenly have to visit the bathroom, one or two people start raving, and the other people watch silently, waiting for it to be over. I've seen it many many times, and it doesn't seem to change whether the people are 15 or 50 years old. The arguments are so counter-productive, all it does it make people take sides. Nobody is thinking or really listening.
Now that I'm a little older, I have married into a family that is the mirror image of mine - all sons and no daughters, but where the boys were taught to take care of themselves so they wouldn't be dependent on a woman for their well being. I see them out shoveling my driveway, lifting heavy things repeatedly without resentment, being sensitive about things and having hurt feelings just like people in my own family.
And I also see them struggling with the idea of what it means to be a man, to win people's respect with work and money, but to do it in a way that engages women as equal partners and makes a positive contribution. It is not any easier on them than it is for women.
And I wonder when people will realize that patriarchy is a problem for men too - that it marginalizes their feelings the way it marginalizes women's work, that it invites miltarism and violence as the solution to all the world's problems, that only a few 'alpha dogs' will get the payoff while a room full of good men secretly wonder what's 'wrong' with them.
I think we could do a much better job as men and women to envision what kinds of families, workplaces and communities we really want to have. Worldwide, many women are still treated like cattle and it is the moral responsibility of women and men in privileged countries to stand up for them, and help with projects they have already started to improve their own lives.
Here at home, where women are legally equal, the lines are a bit blurrier. We certainly have a problem with missing Aboriginal and poor women - they are still disposable in our society. If the Montreal massacre had been the Moosonee Massacre and the victims 14 aboriginal women in Northern Ontario, would we still be remembering 21 years later? I'm not convinced.
I think we have a tremendously anti-woman government at the moment. Which I find so wierd, if for the sole reason that Stephen Harper's wife Laureen seems so worldly, educated and intelligent. While Harper was doing economic analysis, she was riding a motorcycle across Africa. And yet, they have removed 'equality' from the mandate of the Council for the Status of Women, and eliminated Supreme Court challenges under equality provisions. Not pro-woman policies, not in the least.
And Canada has a dismal, dismal, dismal, record on women participating in the political process. Rwanda is recovering from a genocide and now has more than 50% female parliamentarians. Here in Canada and in NB it's consistently less than 20%. When is the last time you saw a women premier or leader of the opposition anywhere?
So, twenty one years later, the Montreal Massacre still raises a lot of questions, and holds a mirror up to our society. I think individual Canadians do have a lot of respect for each other as women and men. My own experiences of sexism have been limited, thankfully, although I can tell you lots of second-hand stories. But I don't think individual respect can trump a system where some women are disposable, some men are marginal, and decisions about power and resources are still made in the 'interest' of men who don't exhibit a lot of caring for the world.
Although dates like this one do make good men feel bad, those good men feel bad because they would never do to their spouses, sisters and mothers what the killer did all those years ago.
But it can happen in Canada, and it did. To remember the women is to dignify the memory of those who have passed. It reminds each one of us that peace starts at home and at work and will only come from our own committment and dedication. It will never be legislated, it will never be financed and that is precisely what makes it valuable.
Today is the 21st anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, which means I would've been seven when it happened. It feels strange to me that I can't remember seeing it on news, but for some reason there's a hole in my brain where those horrendous images could've been.
Last night I was thinking about all of this - the horrible reality of what those women faced on that day, and the subsequent battles over gun control (yes, the long gun registry goes way back to Ecole Polytechnique). It seemed, and still seems, so unbelievable to me that a man could be so enraged by female engineers that he would gun them down in cold blood. How could a seven year old make sense of that?
Growing up I was lucky enough to have parents who were both capable of cooking, cleaning, caring for people, piling wood and doing all the other things life required. For a time, my mother was very sick with cancer, and when she was, dad did it all, with the help of Grandmother and Grammie. Grandmother being such a feminist, and Mom being a natural tomboy, the gender roles were pretty fuzzy at home, and without any brothers we learned to do whatever was necessary to keep the fire going, feed ourselves, do our homework, and present ourselves in public.
In my late teens I became an ardent feminist because I didn't think most women were equal to men, and I didn't think most men treated most women as equals. The exception to all of this, of course, remained my parents, and even when I became interested in the idea that "the personal is political" in university, I did not feel it was fair to tar all men with the label of "oppressors." My father did not 'oppress' my mother, he cared for her when she was sick.
I've always found the 'feminist' discussion prickly - you know, that moment at a party when someone drops the 'f-bomb.' Inevitably, some eyes roll, others suddenly have to visit the bathroom, one or two people start raving, and the other people watch silently, waiting for it to be over. I've seen it many many times, and it doesn't seem to change whether the people are 15 or 50 years old. The arguments are so counter-productive, all it does it make people take sides. Nobody is thinking or really listening.
Now that I'm a little older, I have married into a family that is the mirror image of mine - all sons and no daughters, but where the boys were taught to take care of themselves so they wouldn't be dependent on a woman for their well being. I see them out shoveling my driveway, lifting heavy things repeatedly without resentment, being sensitive about things and having hurt feelings just like people in my own family.
And I also see them struggling with the idea of what it means to be a man, to win people's respect with work and money, but to do it in a way that engages women as equal partners and makes a positive contribution. It is not any easier on them than it is for women.
And I wonder when people will realize that patriarchy is a problem for men too - that it marginalizes their feelings the way it marginalizes women's work, that it invites miltarism and violence as the solution to all the world's problems, that only a few 'alpha dogs' will get the payoff while a room full of good men secretly wonder what's 'wrong' with them.
I think we could do a much better job as men and women to envision what kinds of families, workplaces and communities we really want to have. Worldwide, many women are still treated like cattle and it is the moral responsibility of women and men in privileged countries to stand up for them, and help with projects they have already started to improve their own lives.
Here at home, where women are legally equal, the lines are a bit blurrier. We certainly have a problem with missing Aboriginal and poor women - they are still disposable in our society. If the Montreal massacre had been the Moosonee Massacre and the victims 14 aboriginal women in Northern Ontario, would we still be remembering 21 years later? I'm not convinced.
I think we have a tremendously anti-woman government at the moment. Which I find so wierd, if for the sole reason that Stephen Harper's wife Laureen seems so worldly, educated and intelligent. While Harper was doing economic analysis, she was riding a motorcycle across Africa. And yet, they have removed 'equality' from the mandate of the Council for the Status of Women, and eliminated Supreme Court challenges under equality provisions. Not pro-woman policies, not in the least.
And Canada has a dismal, dismal, dismal, record on women participating in the political process. Rwanda is recovering from a genocide and now has more than 50% female parliamentarians. Here in Canada and in NB it's consistently less than 20%. When is the last time you saw a women premier or leader of the opposition anywhere?
So, twenty one years later, the Montreal Massacre still raises a lot of questions, and holds a mirror up to our society. I think individual Canadians do have a lot of respect for each other as women and men. My own experiences of sexism have been limited, thankfully, although I can tell you lots of second-hand stories. But I don't think individual respect can trump a system where some women are disposable, some men are marginal, and decisions about power and resources are still made in the 'interest' of men who don't exhibit a lot of caring for the world.
Although dates like this one do make good men feel bad, those good men feel bad because they would never do to their spouses, sisters and mothers what the killer did all those years ago.
But it can happen in Canada, and it did. To remember the women is to dignify the memory of those who have passed. It reminds each one of us that peace starts at home and at work and will only come from our own committment and dedication. It will never be legislated, it will never be financed and that is precisely what makes it valuable.
Friday, December 03, 2010
Every Seven Years
The number seven is surrounded by myths - I've heard that every seven years, we replace all the cells in our bodies, and become entirely new people. In the Bible, the seventh year was the "shabbat" or "ceasing" for the Jewish people, as God decreed:
The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying: 2Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sabbath for the Lord. 3For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in their yield; 4but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard.
In May, it will be seven years since I graduated from university. Since then, I bought a house, worked 5 jobs simultaneously, founded a concert series, a non-profit, an arts festival and assisted with more volunteer projects than I can count (or remember!!). I have loved them all, but I feel tired in my bones.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the wisdom of Earth's self-sustaining systems. When something gets out of whack, the Earth's feedback loops put it back into balance. Without human intervention, living things have everything they need, and are connected in a web that doesn't 'waste' anything. This is beautiful, and what could be a more fitting model for our own lives?
Hence, in May I will be on Sabbatical from volunteer projects - one year to rest, let myself recharge, not expect anything other than what grows without cultivation. I am not quitting, I'm invested in community for the long haul. However, I would like to arrive at the finish line knowing that I took the time I needed to do my best work.
The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying: 2Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sabbath for the Lord. 3For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in their yield; 4but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard.
In May, it will be seven years since I graduated from university. Since then, I bought a house, worked 5 jobs simultaneously, founded a concert series, a non-profit, an arts festival and assisted with more volunteer projects than I can count (or remember!!). I have loved them all, but I feel tired in my bones.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the wisdom of Earth's self-sustaining systems. When something gets out of whack, the Earth's feedback loops put it back into balance. Without human intervention, living things have everything they need, and are connected in a web that doesn't 'waste' anything. This is beautiful, and what could be a more fitting model for our own lives?
Hence, in May I will be on Sabbatical from volunteer projects - one year to rest, let myself recharge, not expect anything other than what grows without cultivation. I am not quitting, I'm invested in community for the long haul. However, I would like to arrive at the finish line knowing that I took the time I needed to do my best work.
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