"My girl, sometimes we think we've tackled the devil, but he's still right there on our shoulder, supporting us." -my mother

"I need to hear it's going to be ok," was the greeting my mother received when we met for lunch.
"From him or from me?" she queried.
"From you."
"It's going to be ok," my mother said to me.

Life is full of uncertainty, and sometimes I just need to hear from my mother that it's going to be ok. I've needed to hear this at different times, notably when I'm feeling overwhelmed: for example, the first time I got dumped when I was 20 years old, and what a shock that was. It's sort of laughable now, since it's hardly a big deal anymore, but at the time I was pretty upset. And so my remarkable mother whisked me away for the weekend to go south of the border. We took long, long walks on the beach, during which she taught me all about international economics. To this day I can tell you about the relationship between foreign investment and the value of currency. She knows how to distract me, by stimulating my inquisitive nature. Though I do remember at one point thinking back to my relationship that had just ended, and considering how my life would look different now that my ex was no longer a part of it. Change can be frightening.

"Am I going to be ok?" I asked my mother.
"Yes," my mother said, with such ease and confidence. "You're going to be ok."

I've needed to hear her say this at other times too. The day I called home saying I was leaving UBC to pursue nursing because I didn't know what the hell I was doing with my life. And then there are the days you simply feel rotten, not for a reason you can easily put a finger on, but you feel like the very worst person to ever walk the earth. Thank god they're few and far between, but I've needed on those days to hear that it's ok, to be reminded the feeling won't last forever. Another time I called my mother in tears because I'd just been told that I'd been cheated on for the first time. The next morning my mother came downstairs to find me on the couch reading. She stood by the fireplace a moment, watching me and then said,

"You know there's a softness about you now. It's as though I can feel your relief."

She was able to sense what I was feeling, that despite the unfortunate situation, it somehow seemed right. And really, it did turn out to be ok. I'm fine. He's fine. We're all back on good terms, even our friends and family. We're not together anymore, but that's simply the nature of things: life is fraught with change.

What I love about my mother is that none of my so-called crises seem to phase her -- she doesn't think these times bear a lot of gravity or weight, or that they define me in any way except to make me stronger and more self-aware. She says I'm one to learn from my mistakes. I've pulled a lot of stunts over the years, wreaked my fair share of havoc, been reckless and flighty, exasperated all of my close friends by making absolutely god-awful decisions, but my mother has never thought any less of me for it. This never ceases to amaze me. In fact, I know without a doubt that she loves me, what they call unconditional love -- I've thrown so many reasons at her to get fed up and leave me to my own devices. Yet we've stuck together all these years, and so I've come to really trust the woman.

"Will it be ok if this relationship doesn't work out?" I asked my mother yesterday at lunch. But this time, she didn't give me the response I was expecting, yet it turned out to be exactly what I needed to hear.

"Have you heard the expression, Don't go borrowing trouble?" my mother asked me from across the table, serious and steely-eyed. "Whatever has you so scared," she continued, "Your reasons aren't good enough anymore. I don't want to know all the excuses you're making up out of thin air to sabotage the very thing that seems to be making you so happy. If you want to keep running, call the poor man now," she gestured to my phone on the table. "If you're going to lend patience to misery, get it over with already. But that's what everyone is expecting you to do, and I know deep down inside you hate that."

"Listen to me," my mother then said,

"It's ok to fail. Calm yourself. Stop being so intense. And cease your dust storm, weathering those around you with your needless worry."

 "And bring him over for dinner," she added. "I want to meet this one." 

Like I said, she's a remarkable woman, and a wise mother, albeit stark-raving mad at times. She has always spoken to me as an adult and an equal, even when I was a child. I've often thought she is the only person I've known to deeply understand me, despite all my running, indecisiveness and frequent poor judgment -- she sees my searching heart, my curious mind, my adventurous spirit, and that I live with the valid fears of becoming stagnant and stuck. Everyone else will roll their eyes, or mouth the words Up to her antics again, or talk about another fiasco brewing, but my mother knows me well. She understands the way I think, what scares me, what fuels my choices.

In the play A Thousand Clowns, Herb, the protagonist refuses to release his twelve-year-old nephew to child welfare authorities, declaring

"I want him to get to know exactly the special thing he is or else he won't notice it when it starts to go. I want him to stay awake... I want to be sure he sees all the wild possibilities. I want him to know it's worth all the trouble just to give the world a little goosing when you get the chance. And I want him to know the subtle, sneaky, important reason why he was born a human being and not a chair."

On the Pursuit of Boats and Happiness

The theme of this week has centered around chasing large boats and as always, climbing the heights of mountains. I'll begin with my first yoga class in three months at the newly renovated studio, One Yoga for the People in Gastown. That day eight of us found each other unexpectedly reunited along with our teacher Ryan. We had all taken the same yoga teacher training the previous summer, and for the first time in almost a year were under the same roof again, but now at the foothills of the coastal mountains, near the bed of the sea, and far from the prairies where we had first become acquainted.

Playing one afternoon during our teacher training.

Our teacher Ryan giving a lesson outside, wearing his signature hat that reads 'Sat Nam'

 _______________________________________

At the end of our class we stood around visiting in the newly finished studio. It was 8:15pm when Ryan mentioned that he was bound for Tsawwassen to give Dina a ride to the ferries.

"Oh!" I exclaimed. "Can I ride with you? I'm headed that way too, and it would save me a trip on the bus."

"Sure," they agreed, bustling around the studio, still chatting with the others and rummaging for their things.

"So... you're catching the nine o'clock ferry in Tsawwassen?" I asked, looking at the time. The drive would take at least forty minutes, with the cut-off for ticket sales in thirty-five, and we were still in downtown Vancouver.

"We need to go right now!" I said urgently. But is it any surprise that urgency is lost on yogis? Let's just say it took a while to round them up.

Britt sat next to me in the back while Dina sat in the passenger seat, yelling at Ryan to slow down as he weaved in and out of traffic at high speed, fidgeting with the music on his stereo and laughing good-naturedly on the phone with a friend.

"No! We have to hurry!" I implored Ryan, "or we'll never make it!"

"I would rather miss my ferry and live to see another day!" Dina insisted, not so calm now as she had been in the studio.

Ryan was tearing down Knight street, at one point screaming "FUCK YOU, GPS!" while ripping the automated voice out of its socket. It was dawning on everyone that we would likely miss the ferry, and for the first time I was experiencing a stressful situation among yogis, but I for one was loving it.

The rush was glorious and I relished the frenzy in the vehicle. Who cares about large boats and being on time?! We always had the option of throwing Dina into the sea and making her swim to the boat. Or we could have careened our vehicle right off the platform, flying through time and space to land on the stern and then all four of us could have gone to Victoria together! Say they had sailed away before we were able to propel Dina's body or Ryan's car at the ferry, we could have had such fun cursing them from the dock and shaking our fists in their direction, hurling insults at the ferry workers for not having loitered, protesting forever and ever the tardiness of just a few minutes until we got hauled off kicking and screaming, never allowed to return to BC Ferries again. Fuck the island! We'd be legends! Our story would immortalize us and be told to myriads of island-goers on how not to behave.

We felt alive, and almost died many times. Poor Dina sat white-faced holding onto the side of the door, Ryan was in his prime, brimming with excitement. Surely he must have been a taxi driver from India in a past life. Britt sat perched with a little smile on her face, quietly enjoying every minute of our wild race against the clock.

"This is our exit!" I shouted, "Right lane, right lane!!" and Ryan executed a California lane change perfectly.

We were on the last stretch approaching Tsawwassen with ten minutes to go. We were making miraculous time. Ryan was bouncing around in the driver's seat like a five year old, vibrating to the beat of the music, zig-zagging in his own lane just for the hell of it, and maybe to get a rise out of Dina.

"We're so close!" I exclaimed gleefully. "We're going to make it!"

And then horror of horrors, the obnoxiously slow driver in the fast lane. We were trapped and losing precious minutes that we didn't have to spare.

"Flash the stupid bastard with your high beams!" I screamed. Ryan flashed. But the driver wouldn't change lanes despite our tailing his slow-as-molasses ass. Expletives resounded. Obscene gestures were made eloquent. 

"Honk your horn!" I cried. Ryan didn't just honk, he blared his horn for twenty straight seconds. No response from the ferry-blocker in front of us.

"Old, privileged, good-for-nothing -- " one of us yelled out the window.

"Oh my god!" Dina said, putting her head in her hands. "This is so embarrassing."

With Ryan and I nigh road-rage, Dina beside herself at the both of us (though I'm convinced she was secretly delighted), and Britt enjoying herself thoroughly, the car next to us noticed the calamity and wisely let us into the right lane before we caused an accident. We went tearing past the oblivious driver to our left (I glared at him meanly), hastening once more towards ferry terminal.

I can't even say if we were all speaking English, the four of us were shouting at each other as we drove into the terminal and parked the car in the drop-off section. Dina had two minutes to buy her ticket.

"No time for hugs!" one of us made obvious, as Dina haphazardly jumped from the car, waving a hurried farewell, looking for her wallet, grinning wildly and running to catch her ferry all at the same time.

Britt and I waited in the car nervously, while Ryan ran inside with Dina. They looked like two pinballs toting bags, laughing, scolding each other happily for their part in our most recent debacle.

"THEY'RE NOT LETTING DINA ON BECAUSE THEY THINK SHE'S STONED!" Britt read to me from a text Ryan had just sent to her phone.

"But this is BC!" I lamented in disbelief. "Everyone here is stoned."

Ryan came back to the car a minute later. Alone. Yet another of his many pranks. Dina had made her ferry, signs and wonders.

From the terminal we set off, blaring music, and recounting our adventure to each other joyously, laughing and savouring the last bit of our adrenaline rush. Ryan opened his glove compartment and took out what looked like one enormous doobie. Oh boy, I thought. As if this night could get any crazier. But it was some sort of fragrant grass a friend of his had brought back from Africa. He lit it while driving at exorbitant speeds, and put it to our noses to smell until we gave him some nod of affirmation to indicate that indeed the thing smoked and lived among us, and he waved it around the car like a mad-man, our friend and teacher.

Practicing in the Garden

______________________ 

On a more serious note, I spent two days in Victoria framing a garage. 

My friend Ben (brawn, beard, bad language, views our friendship as community service -- that Ben) invited me to tag along to help him with the renovations he's doing on his house there. I have always wanted to build something, but never had the skills, though I agreed to go more because I had absolutely no idea what would happen if I spent two days alone with this man. I didn't really believe he would have the patience to let me help him with anything. 

My guess was that I would get thrown out of his house after a long and enthusiastic screaming match for sawing off a finger or swinging a 2X4 into his head, as I have never used a saw or carried lumber before, and that I would end up having to find my own way back to the mainland after a visit to the hospital. For the most part I liked this idea, because I have an appreciation for situations that involve unpredictability and putting to good use my independent nature, that and I think I'm intrigued by his frank disdain of me.

We had planned to meet at the McDonald's in Tsawwassen at 8pm, at which time I called to see how far away he was; Ben was still in Vancouver and running late. The ferry was scheduled to depart at 9pm. For some reason this situation felt all too familiar.

"I'll walk on," I said to Ben, "but not before hearing from you first that you were able to buy a ticket." 

My mother who was in the car listening to all of this, and already suspicious of the situation as I have also never used a hammer for anything in my life, began arguing with me before I'd even ended the call, attempting to make it clear that I absolutely would not be getting on that ferry.

I eventually convinced her that all would be well, lying through my teeth the whole time, and we made our way to the ferry terminal. We were parked at the drop-off section and I had five minutes to buy a ticket, but I still hadn't heard from Ben, nor was he answering his phone. Suddenly my mother and I could see a great lumbering man running in our direction from the other side of the fence where driving passengers were waiting to board, and Ben could be heard not just by us, but everyone else bound for Victoria, swearing at me to "go buy a fucking ticket or they won't let you on!" So on, and so forth.

Realizing his phone had likely died, hence the reason for not hearing from him, I purposely avoided the look on my mother's face as I am her only daughter and it would appear that a large bear of a man, whom she now refers to as Grizzly Adams, was yelling and gesturing at me to board a vessel that might very likely take me away from her for all time.

"Love you, mom!" I yelled, running towards the terminal.

Grizzly and I both made the ferry. We sat outside on one of the boat's blocks as it sailed away, the sky softly glowing orange and pink.

"This would be romantic if it was with anyone else," Ben snapped at me. I smiled contentedly and said nothing.

The story of constructing a garage is one I'll have to finish another time, as it includes a night of heavy drinking followed by weeping myself to sleep. Don't worry -- no limbs were lost, and I even got a ride back to the ferry. Framing a garage is the most hard work I've ever done for a man without any sort of recompense. I've been accused many times for having trouble with commitment, also for never pursuing anyone, but I have to say if putting up my own money to be voluntarily ordered around for two long-labouring days to build a garage in a garden full of brambles, complete with what we agreed must be a dead body liquefying in its very own garbage bin -- well if that isn't pursuit, I swear on my honour I'll never know what it is, and don't care to either.

Here are some photos from the latest trek I made into the mountains. I summitted Zupjok, Llama, Alpaca and Ottomite in the Coquihalla region; four peaks in one day, 20 kilometers, 1600 meters elevation gain, and it certainly made for one tired, happy gal.

Courtesy of Ryan, our exact trek to ZLA and Ottomite

First three peaks in the distance, it didn't take us long to get above the tree-line

Summit of Alpaca

One of the bumps between Alpaca and Llama

Needle Peak and Flat Iron to the top left, Zupjok in the foreground

Beautiful cornices

Large snow pack breaking away

Anderson River Group

View of Coquihalla from Ottomite

View of Zupjok from Ottomite

View of Yak from the trailhead

The world was beautiful, strange and mysterious. Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, sky and river, woods and mountains, all beautiful, all mysterious and enchanting, and in the midst of it, meaning and reality were not hidden behind things, they were in them, in all of them. ~ Siddhartha, Herman Hesse

I followed my mother to the states to see what she gets up to over here. As it turns out, I still don’t really know. She tends to take off and leaves me to figure things out on my own. I think she is a magician of sorts, always disappearing and getting people to swoon over her. I think maybe sometimes I am jealous of my mother. She is everything. Mostly fire I guess, but air and earth and sometimes water too. She is able to reach out and touch everyone and everything in a way I won’t even attempt, not that I'd want to either I guess. We met up for lunch, which turned out to be a memorable experience.

Mother: Did you eat that wild mushroom soup I made?

Me: No. You said you cooked it with chicken broth.

Mother: Oh, it's ok! The chickens just swim through it.

Me: Mommm...

Mother: What is it you're doing with your life again? Why aren't you in med school yet? You should listen to me. You’ll be a terrible nurse. You have no patience at all.

Me: We’re not having this conversation again. You just want to be the mother of a doctor. Maybe I want to be a hobo. Then what would you do? You are a mysterious mother. But not me, I just want to live in a cottage somewhere and grow my own vegetables.

Mother: Lady, here I am [She is speaking to another driver on the road]. Say, we should open a café together.

Me: That’s a terrible idea. I’m annoyed with people who can’t help themselves.

Mother: Mmm... I can see you snapping at customers to get their own coffee while you read a newspaper in the corner. Sometimes you are not very nice. We could call it Persnickety after your nature.

Me: I'm not persnickety. I'm nice to my friends.

Mother: Oh yeah. All two of them.

Me: Do you even know what persnickety means? I'm googling it right now. 'A snotty little scion of a degenerate family.'"

[We explode into laughter.]

She insisted on going to this horrendous Mexican restaurant, insisted it would be fun. But it wasn’t fun. It was awful. A Mariachi band serenaded us, shouted at us strangely, the entirety of our lunch, which comprised of wildly large dishes of deep fried cheese, rice with cheese, beans with cheese, tortillas with cheese. I didn’t eat very much. My mother charmed the Mexicans with their musical uniforms and violins and big voices. She is good at charming people, except when we’re screaming at each other. Good Lord. She is always the center of attention, which I don’t mind when I can sit back and watch and maybe leave. The ring leader of the singers got into a deep discussion with my mother on the qualities or the nature or the appreciation they have for Summer and Autumn and Winter and whatnot, I don’t know. I wasn’t in the mood for it.

“Can we go home?" I asked my mother wearily.
"Why can we never seem to get along?!"
"It's not that," I tried assuring her. "Everything's fine..." But the truth was that I'd just been hit with a wave of inexplicable exhaustion and nausea.
“No, you’re not! You’re just trying to spare my feelings.'
“No --” I  was about to counter, but stopped as my spine began to prickle strangely. I got up and walked out of the restaurant, my mother trailing behind me, waving and shrugging her shoulders at the mariachi singers.

My spine grew hotter by the second, and I felt beads of sweat form on my forehead. For about three months I had been frequenting chiropractors due to a yoga-related back injury, and had just been given a rather aggressive treatment a few hours earlier.

And then it began. In waves my back became searing hot and spasmed, and then I was afraid, never having felt anything like this in my life. My back was in traction. My mother was helping me to sit in the car and I was pushing her away and then she was sitting next to me while I laid my head between my knees. I was crying -- I can’t even remember the last time I cried from pain -- and she was stroking my neck.

I got out of the car and standing up, folded my body in half, letting my head hang freely towards the Earth, feeling the large tears slide up the corners of my face into my hair, allowing my back and neck to stretch out long and loose. I could feel my muscles contracting uncontrollably and shaking in my body, and I became aware of what I could do to relax. I was in the rain, a part of the warm electric air before the storm, putting distance between myself and the pain. I found that I wasn't thinking about the situation at hand, but my frequent longing to be alone, my mind prone to anxiety, my desire to be simple, and I thought of my teacher Ryan.

I came back from this strange, rainy day fraught with emotional and physical hardship, knowing this: every minute there is a death in me and a re-birth that I'm just not admitting. I scoff at so much that I experience and dance around in circles, telling myself I'm not a child though at times this seems all a game.

Maybe I have learned something after all, I think to myself, warm and safe at home.

I wrote to my teacher Ryan:

A storm has been brewing in the air lately, the last few days, so it's been very warm and electric. Last night just before it became dark I saw a cat in the garden, but it wasn't mine and it was shy. I wanted it to come over and say hi so I could pet it, but it wouldn't come. So I floated up into a handstand because I thought the cat would like that and I held the pose for a while, for the first time ever! and then I fell right over and forgot all about the cat because I'd sunk onto my back and there was the great warm sky above me. And the beautiful clouds. And the soft grass beneath me. I laughed and felt so free and happy as if life had stopped, as if I didn't have a story. I felt so good just laying there. I want to become expansive. I want to experience what it is to be without time. I want my body to become so in tune with my mind that I get to become a part of everything. I think for me this is why I do yoga.

It could have been the storm outside finally tempting the glass of the windows, calling my name to the night, tossing around the flower pots when I wrote this, hoping they wouldn't break, though hoping they would just as much, dirt and flowers and shards strewn about the lawn, feeling strangely at peace as though everything, even my sore body, wasn't in pieces just yet.

Listen here -- Sprawl II and The Suburbs (continued) by Arcade Fire

Once I was on top of this mountain napping when I heard a man say, "Cell phone bitches are ripping me off, but bitches don't care!" and I wanted to laugh aloud but I didn't as I was half-asleep.

I’m skeptical of people who seem to know who they are and I’m wary of those who profess to know too much about anything. I suppose you can know things like the periodic table and you can go on about that for a while or you can know how to work with tofu. People who cook with tofu but don’t really understand it produce something to the effect of what it is and what it sounds like: bean curd. I either have writer’s block or I’m forgetting how to live. Some pot smokers think they’re forgetting how to breathe. Who's to say what’s what?

“Truth,” said some professor the other day, “is what your friends let you get away with.”

The worst thing you could do is say, “Let’s agree to disagree,” unless we’re bickering over something petty. If we’re trying to deduce some ultimate truth, don’t be a distraction and point out that one of us thinks a certain way and the other another. But anyways, I don’t want you to think I’d argue about the nature of truth because I feel badly for people who think they are smart. They get all forlorn feeling  due to their intelligence, but the truth is that we are alone, the dumb fucks too. I just can’t handle people anymore, nor can I handle all the hipsters in this city with their skinny jeans, their stupid loafers, their ridiculous hair, their sad, mopey looks and their plaid blouses. Jesus Christ. I don’t like being in the city. There has always been in me a desire to be alone. My oldest longing is to own a small cabin in the woods and a canoe, tending to a little garden and keeping the company of dogs and trees and books. Yelling at tourists. Fucking city good-for-nothing tourists. Maybe I’d fuck the tourists. Probably. And then I’d read them things, conjure up some meaning for us and stick it in the air, let it linger in a room that smells like sex.

I never tell my mother anything about my life because quite frankly, I think she’s crazy. Yesterday my best friend Farnia (pronounced FAIR-NEE-AH) made the remark that if Hitler had had my mother in the Third Reich, we’d all be speaking German right now. We’re not joking. My mother is far too intelligent for our own good. Farnia has seen shit go down at my house. My mother has been to California twice to visit Disneyland and she’s not even American, yet somehow last week  a Californian Congressman leaves a message on her cell phone and says, “We’ll swoop in there and fast-track your paperwork” for whatever the fuck she wanted done with her friends. She is quite simply a terrifying woman. People in powerful positions revere my mother, reasons for which I am completely at a loss. She is strangely influential, which is why she and I are typically at each other’s throats as she is used to people listening to her and I despise people who can’t come up with their own ideas. I’ve done a whole slew of things, most of which I’ve never shared with my mother. Sometimes I fly to other provinces for a while and let her think I’m at a library in Vancouver. If I told her about the manner in which I conduct my life, I’d have to provide some rationale for it. And I don’t know why I do these things. I don’t have any answers.  Answers are for those pretentious hipster fucks I loathe so enthusiastically.

I hate to rag on my yoga teacher because I adore him, which I hate to admit since everyone admires him just as much as I do and I don’t like anything the yogic masses like as they’re these strange ethereal beings I’m quite positive never hear a word I say when they ask me how I’m doing after class. Anyways, I’m not ragging on my teacher Ryan -- I’m just using him as an example. One could say it isn’t his strong suit to be on time. And I think being rather inept at this suits him very much. He carried a watch around the entirety of yoga teacher training to be on time for everything and I thought this seemed very unnatural and detracted from the whole experience. If people are so eager for him to be their teacher, I think they should be prepared to wait a while for him. Being prompt is polite and boring. Making people wait is a good way to make them angry and he’d stir up every other goddamn emotion in us anyways, a quality of a good yoga teacher. He has a way of getting people all fiery and crazy and euphoric about being bendy and spiritual and upside down. And I mean, that’s fucking exceptional because most adults can’t even touch their toes. The night of the day I posted my love-hate rant on how absolutely bizarre I found yoga teacher training to be, Ryan and I were in the Blue Room, the stinking feral-cat-piss room, where he was standing on his head swinging from side to side and where I was relentlessly kicking up into forearm balance because I was hell-bent on nailing that pose. I fucked my elbows that night. Anyways, we were all yoga-swooney by the end of it and we said no hard feelings over my love-hate rant and we talked about our admiration for Kerouac and we discussed how absolutely trippy yoga can be and I asked him if he ever thought it was all in his head and I so liked his response that I smile over it whenever this conversation comes to mind. But I’m getting off-track. Actually I don’t really have a point.