Category Archives: Inspiration
Holding through winter
I like winter, it must be said, but it’s a little frosty in my house today. As I write, I lean over from my chair and snap this picture.
We’re having new windows installed, and it’s snowy winter here. The window leaning against the ladder will soon be hoisted up and installed in our bathroom. In the meantime . . .
There’s a chill in my house.
Not to mention an invading army of workers who moved in and commandeered the place as of 7:10 a.m.
It snowed the day in late October when we returned to Ottawa from sunny days of hiking in England, and it has not really let up since.
Winter arrived unusually early for us.
According to the article “Winter Leaves that Hang On” by Jim Finley on the Penn State College of Agriculture Sciences website:
Sometimes, early cold weather or frosts may interrupt the abscission process or “kill” leaves quickly. In these cases, the occurrence of marcescent leaves may increase.
Jim Finley
I already worry about how people who don’t like winter will manage. I’ll walk in the snow, and ski, and skate and enjoy it, but I know the extra-long winter will wear on others. I already feel some of them withering.
And now, this is what I see when I look up from my chair.
That window is out. My room is cold. It’s interrupting my “abscission” process (the natural detachment of parts of a plant, typically dead leaves and ripe fruit) and killing my writing quickly.
Consider this last line a marcescent leaf.
Thinking our way to true self
“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
“Can you eat an apple by yourself?”
That was the question asked of the children gathered at the front of the church. All of them nodded. Yes, eating an apple was an easy thing for them to do.
“Could you always do that, or did you have to learn?”
Roxanne Goodman, a performance instructor in popular voice with Carleton University, started her presentation with those questions. I think she wanted all of us — children and adults — to think and learn and honour our potential.
Every day she works with people who tell her they want to develop stronger, more beautiful voices. The problem is, she says, that those same people don’t have a good perception of their voice at the time.
In other words, they want to “eat an apple” but they haven’t yet, and they’re sure they’ll never do it as well as Ella Fitzgerald, Lady Gaga, or Elton John.
She shared a story from her own life to help us on our path to understanding. When she was a young woman she sang a solo in her church. After the performance a gentleman said to her, “You have such a beautiful voice.”
“It’s okay. It’s all right,” she replied.
Hearing that, he said, “Tell me, am I the only person who’s ever said this to you?”
“Oh no, people tell me that all the time.”
“Do you think that we are all lying to you?” he said.
After that she asked herself: if she was wrong about her ability as a singer, what else was she wrong about? What else could she do that she was telling herself she couldn’t do?
She started from there, with a new belief that she had a beautiful voice. She studied to learn the technical aspects and how to get the emotion out.
She made lots of mistakes and learned from those too.
She believes that anyone can learn to sing from their true voice if they do two things:
- Appreciate what they already have; believe in the beauty of their voice.
- Sing from the depth of their being, their essence.
She pointed out that Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t say we must do the thing we cannot do, but the thing we think we cannot do.
We sometimes think our way out of facing fears and opening ourselves up to the next step.
We can also think our way to our true self.
I apply Roxanne’s lessons to writing: appreciating the beauty of my writing voice, learning the technical aspects and how to get the emotion out, making lots of mistakes, and allowing myself to be vulnerable enough to let my readers see me.
Can you eat an apple? What else can you do that you’ve been telling yourself you can’t?
Start with one bite.
Listen to what she had to say: http://www.trinityunitedottawa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Reflection-181118.mp3
Visit Roxanne’s website: www.confidencebooster.ca
Go to the Big Soul Project Christmas concert: Saturday, December 8
Bicycles and women: Engineering social reform
I have a new respect for bicycles.
This one in particular. I wasn’t alive in the 1880s, but this bicycle directly affected my life nonetheless.
John Kemp Starley developed the Rover safety bicycle to replace the precarious large-wheeled Penny Farthings. The safer bicycle allowed more people across more classes to get around, and some of those people were women.
Can you imagine biking with a long skirt and petticoats tangling in and around the chain?
Around the same time that J. K. Starley was engineering a safer bicycle (and lessening the impact of fossil fuel emissions hundreds of years later), the Rational Dress Society formed in London, England to protest clothing that deformed the figure, impeded movement or injured a woman’s health.
Many people (men and women) didn’t like the idea of women traipsing about in pants.
How would they tell the genders apart, by gum?
But women of the time wanted or needed to get around, and the safety bicycle made it possible. If only they didn’t have to take their life into their hands every time they peddled along with long skirts dangling around a bike chain. The Rational Dress Society was right: wearing a long skirt while riding a bike was not only irrational, it was downright dangerous.
The demand was too great and the logic too sound. Society changed, and rather quickly for the time. Bicycles allowed women freedom of movement, both in terms of clothing and transportation, and that opened up other areas for them.
Without bicycles, changes to wardrobe might have been a longer time coming.
I doubt that J.K. Starley had women’s rights or environmental protection on his mind back in the 1880s, but those are the unintended consequences of his work.
I have a new respect for bicycles.
Reconciliation: Respect and peace
In late October we visited the old Coventry Cathedral, eviscerated by Second World War bombs, and saw these decapitated stair steps.
War leads nowhere
The stairway remnants, alone in the vast emptiness of the bombed out church, used to lead somewhere, but now they don’t. War robbed them of their purpose.
But the periphery of the cathedral serves as a testament to reconciliation. The cities of Coventry in England and Dresden, Kiel and Berlin in Germany have worked together to process what happened, heal the damages and reconcile with each other.
“Reconciliation” by Josefina de Vasconellos
The inscription below this sculpture reads: “. . . in the face of destructive forces, human dignity and love will triumph over disaster and bring nations together in respect and peace.”
Better yet, let’s try hard together to skip the destructive forces part and simply live in the respect and peace.
If trees could talk
I live in a land of timber. How could a simple tree impress a Canadian? But many times on our recent trip to England we stopped to marvel at the wonder of a tree.
Like this giant one at Winston Churchill’s Chartwell estate.
We asked the gardener to repeat the name of this tree several times. She stuck with the Latin, which we think was Cryptomeria japonica. (Would it have been too much to ask for her to say simply Japanese cedar?)
And this scenic one at Hampstead Heath.
But my favourite was this one. This tree could begin talking to me at any second and impart to me grand wisdom about life. I think this tree is telling me to stay rooted in what’s important because I already have everything I need, and to breathe.
What do you think?
Wonder walking in Britain
Last week one of my favourite bloggers, Roughwighting, wrote about adding an eighth day to the week: Wonder Day.
Her Wonder Day would not be for work, worry, doing or wanting. It would be for walking, dancing, holding hands, contemplating and enjoying the sweetness of life.
This week I’m wonder walking in London, England. As I walk and bump up against history on every block, I wonder and learn. As I meet new people, fall into the magic of West End theatre productions and expand my knowledge of British ales, I appreciate how “wonder” full the city is.
If a full Wonder Day is out of reach, even a Wonder Moment pivots a day from ordinary to holy.
What in your environment right now makes you wonder about it?
What in your environment right now make you think, How wonder-full?
Enjoy an ordinary, holy Wonder Moment.
