April showers

Spring is finally, happily in the air. I am finished school. Oh, I have signed up for a few projects this summer already - how could I just walk away from such a long educational career? Not possible! But my exams are written, my papers submitted, my textbooks ready for re-sale at the book co-op. I thought I would feel celebratory, but I mostly feel TIRED. I suppose I should not be surprised. I do feel my creativity buzzing though, I am thinking about coming back here to write... thinking about starting a blog just for photos/art work... thinking about writing project(s)... thinking about painting.... thinking about re-decorating the apartment.... and then I think about taking a nap. Today I got none of the things accomplished that I set out to, but I did take some rainy-day photos that I am pretty happy with. I am going to start putting them here for now, and see how that goes. It feels more fun than flickr.

My new favorite song

Hello... very busy time over here. Too much school + job + other job + trying to eat and clean the house every now and then = no blogging energy. But lately I have been listening to this song a lot and thought I would share its awesomeness.

Project Prayer - Part Two

"Praying" is a pretty loaded word. It used to make me feel a little uncomfortable, which is one of the reasons I chose it as the focus of this project - I wanted to explore the discomfort and figure it out. I was going to write quite a bit about my own thoughts on prayer, in fact I have already started a post about it, but then I decided not to publish it just yet... since what I want first off is to know what others think. I will post mine in a while, once I have collected responses from you guys.
What I am most interested in, for this project (and in general) is people's ideas about prayer that have little or nothing to do with organized religion. I would like to know about the personal, private, creative ways that people pray, rather than the more conventional, by-the-books ways that they were taught. Bear in mind that I have basically no religious education and so some of those more traditional prayer practices will be unknown to me anyway - so if that is what does work for you then let me know about that too! These are the questions I have in mind, although feel free to respond in different ways if that makes more sense for your responses:

1. What does the word "prayer" mean to you?
2. What does your practice of prayer look like? Is it confined to a quiet, meditative state or a conversation with a higher power or is it a wild dancing party? If you don't pray, why not?
3. Who (or what) do you pray to? Is there a particular deity, body part or universal image that resonates for you? Why do you suppose this is so?
4. What has influenced your practice of prayer?
5. How has your practice of prayer changed your life, if at all? Do your prayers "come true" or do you see them working in some other way?

Please feel free to leave me your responses in the comments (though that doesn't seem to be the popular option with my blog!) or email me at the address listed in the contact section (people never put their email addresses in the text and I think it is to avoid spam... good plan).

I am planning on including any responses to the questionnaire in my final project. I will not be publishing any of people's personal email responses here. There is a small possibility that some of the final projects will be included in a short publication entitled "Stories from Montreal" which my university creates from undergrad work every year. All this is just to say that if you do send me a response (and I would love it if you did!) please let me know if you give permission for your responses to be included in either my project (likely only ever read by me and my prof) or in the book (likely only read by me, my prof, the other editors and future undergrads who are forced to buy it) or both. Also, please let me know if you would like your name to be included (just first name) or if you would like to remain anonymous. Both options are totally fine, I am not obligated to give any identifying info about my respondents. If you have any questions about the nature of the project, the publication, my university (including the ethics board) or anything else please feel free to ask.

Thanks!!! Can't wait to hear what people have to say. The project is due at the end of March, so I will be happy to receive replies right up until then. (Well, I would still be interested/happy to get replies after that, they just wouldn't be included in this project).

P.S.
If your response is "no way, praying is not my thing at all" that is just as valid and interesting for me, so please don't exclude yourself for that reason! Instead, I would love to hear why you feel that way, and what your thoughts are on the topic. Remember, that is where I was coming from too, originally.
P.P.S.
If you know anyone else who you think would be at all interested in responding to the questionnaire please feel free to spread it far and wide. I am just casting my net and will be happy to get as many replies as I can.

Photos: both from the playing-around session the other day... the view out my kitchen window and a close-up of one of my favorite candle-holders with a lovely-smelling beeswax candle glowing away.

Project Prayer - Part One

Ok. Enough procrastination.

I have been (supposedly) working on a research project for school since September. This project started out on Meditation, then kind of Yoga, and then finally (for the actual proposal) Prayer. Bless Anthropology's little heart for being so elastic as to allow me to do something as loosely defined as I am. Most people are doing ethnographies, meaning that they are going to study other people. I am doing an auto-ethnography, meaning that I am going to study me. Sounds narcissistic, and it is! Kinda. I will not only be studying myself, but I will be the main focus. I like the idea of doing it that way because it completely removes any of that traditional anthropology us/them dichotomy and it also feels like I get to be a lot more experimental about the whole thing. I have to admit that I do sometimes get irritated with the fluffiness of anthropology, as well as the simultaneous "we are totally scientists, this is totally a REAL science" and "we hate science, down with positivism!". It gets a bit tired. Let's face facts, anthropology is decidedly not a science. Don't get me wrong, I like science. I still kind of wish that I had just stuck with my high school ambitions to study zoology. But no matter how much it may want to be, anthropology isn't very scientific. It's really hard to apply any scientific principles to the study of culture (oh, when I say anthropology I mean cultural anthropology which is all that my university teaches, I realize that physical anth., linguistics and archeology all do use scientific principles). So when I started thinking about things to do for this project, and I realized just how much creative leeway we would have, I decided to fully embrace the fluff and do something as decidedly un-scientific as possible. So I decided to start praying, and to document my experiences as they unfold. Neat hun?
I was inspired by you! Well, by the internet, by the blogs I read and the books I have stumbled upon through them. Especially Eat Pray Love and The Red Book. In both cases prayer was presented in such a way that I could sort of, kind of, almost see myself doing it. At the very least I could see how it was a practice that greatly benefited those women, not to mention many of the women whose blogs I read. And anyway, it got me curious, thinking, wondering and generally feeling inspired. Hence, this project.

Hmm... explaining all this is maybe going to take longer than I thought. Rather than write one long post (who has time to read loooooooong posts?) I will split it up. I want to take my time explaining it because, for one thing I think it will help me get clear about what I am doing (oh the fluffiness of it all) and because eventually I am going to get you guys involved. I will be doing the thing all sociologists do, which is, survey. I would love to hear from as many people as possible, so I am going to put my survey/questionaire here and invite EVERYONE (and their dog... and their cat!) to reply. And those of you who I know in "real life" will be getting copies of it sent to them directly via email, lest they think I should let them off the hook. : ) But more to come on that later.

For now I will leave you with a couple of photos. This afternoon I spent a few creative hours playing with my new (from Christmas) camera. I love it, digital photography is so full of instant gratification. Although those suckers do eat batteries like candy.
The photos on the top are: Griffin (of course) ... I was actually trying to photograph my favorite purple scarf, but he decided to crash the photo session and the other is of a tiny corner of my altar, and the one below is me, doing the oft -used self-portrait method of ... standing in front of my bathroom mirror.

Sweet dreams

The second of February was Imbolc, which is a celebration of renewal. Traditionally it's associated with pregnant/lactating ewes, and the goddess Brigid. For me though, Imbolc is a kind of festival of dreams.
The idea being that early February is at the heart of winter, and so the earth and a lot of life's force is slumbering away beneath a blanket of blue-white snow. Of course the reality is that in a modern metropolis like Montreal, only the plants and raccoons get to sleep, while the rest of us are expected to press on with the same energy as we would have in summer. And the pristine fields of snow are in fact piled up along the streets or carted out of the city in huge dump-trucks (this blew my mind the first time I saw it).
None the less, I find myself slowing down around this time of year (slowing down from snails pace to near-stop) and paying more attention to dreams and intuition. It's also quite close to my birthday (as well as my mom's birthday and a few others who are close to my heart) so it is an easy time to get introspective. Dreams are a mysterious kettle of fish, not well understood in the land of science. I know that I dream often. Well we all do, I mean to say that I often recall my dreams, at least for the first few moments of wakefulness. I am lazy about keeping a dream journal so even though they are still circling my head in the morning, they usually flit away again by mid-afternoon and sadly, I have no record of them. I find it strange which dreams stay with me through the years, not necessarily the most meaningful ones but generally the ones I had the clearest memories of when waking up. And of course, the ones I noted down as quickly as I could.
I am not well versed in dream-interpretation. While I think there must me a wealth of interesting knowledge tucked away in the secret nooks of our dreaming minds, I am quite skeptical of something that tries to place universal meanings on personal reveries. But like I said... not well versed, so I withhold judgment (mostly). I am intrigued by the concept of premonitions in dreams, although I have not really experienced it. Ok, once, back in my midwifery days, I had a dream that a client was in labor. The dream woke me up and I noted the time (around 3am). The next day, lo and behold, I was called to her birth and I found out that her labor had started around 3am.
One thing I find frustrating about dreams is their tendency towards ordinariness. Sometimes they bring me to fantastic landscapes or allow me to fly or perform other feats of unexpected magic, but often they are merely a slight twist on the everyday. Last night I was a bit luckier than usual however. In bed, before sleep, I was listening to the beginning of Eat Pray Love on audiobook. When I eventually drifted off, I was unsurprisingly transported to Rome. Never having been there in reality, my imagination was free to invent a magical dream-version of the ancient city. I can only remember scraps of the dream, but I do recall approaching the city by boat, in the evening, on an imaginary ocean (Rome is not on the coast in real life). The buildings rose up before me, elastic in my mind. It was a strange and lovely place to visit, I wish I could've taken pictures.
Well, however you choose to celebrate Imbolc (or Candlemas or Groundhog Day), I hope that Queen Mab peeks out from behind the grasshopper-wing shutters of her hazel-nut chariot and sends some juicy dreams your way.
Dreamy reading for the cold winter days:
The BFG by Roald Dahl - all about dreams, snozzcumbers, frobscottles and whizzpoppers.
What are your favorites books for reading this time of year? Or do you have music to help keep away the chill instead?
Images: The imbolc candles with snowdrops I took from this website but I recognize it as an image from the Llewellyn day-planners; Vachel dreaming is from Little Dee from April 2006; and the photo of Rome (Forum and Colosseum) by Stephen Studd, taken from Getty.

Hibernation

I seem to be in a kind of creative hibernation. It could be my return to school, which always has a tendency to make me tired and sapped of energy to pursue my own projects. It could be that there have been lots of things to do, not least of which was celebrate my birthday this week. Or it could simply be the time of year, with the short days and blustery, cold nights. I just want to curl up with a book (or if I am feeling especially slow - a good tv show), a mug of hot chocolate and a cozy blanket. Although I do have ideas simmering away in the crock pot of my brain (ideas for my prayer project, my book(s), some paintings or drawings I'd like to try out, letters to friends, photography to explore, and writing for this space) they are staying put inside, for now. I do not seem to be alone in this trend, a few of the blogs I read regularly have also gone into hibernation for a little while. I have no plans to stay away, but I have also been pretty remiss about posting so I thought I would at least drop in to make excuses.

A "Little Dee" strip by Chris Baldwin from December 2004

Earth (or The Year of the Gnome)

So, as promised, I want to spend some time meditating on the element of Earth, what it means for me and why it is going to be what I focus on in 2008.

Earth. Solid. Practical. Living soil. Decay (transformation). Bacteria. Roots. Fungal networks. Caves. Stalagmites and tites. Secret passageways. Mountains. Rocks. Precious stones. Silver and Gold. Wood. The Forest. Tree giants. Ents. Seedlings. Vegetables. Worms. Mice. Moles. Bears. Hibernation. Dreams. Midnight. Full Moon. Snails. Home. Goddess figures. Winter. North. Burrows. Tombs. Temples. Bones. Statues. Crawling insects (beetles, ants, centipedes). Snakes. Hobbits. Gnomes.

Those are a few of the things that immediately come to mind when I think of Earth. I mentioned my book quartet a while back (at least I think I did), and although part of me is bursting to talk about all of my ideas (Adrien gets the brunt of my idea-overflow valve) I also feel the need to keep the story quiet. Afterall it is still germinating and feels tiny and fragile (even though it probably isn't).

The way I want to tell the story and the story outline have changed almost daily in the last two (no - almost three!!) years, since I first got the idea to write something. At first it was going to be an eight-volume monster, with each book being about a different pagan holiday (though not necessarily overtly) but I eventually let go of that plan, (though it still rears up now and then in different guises). I have settled fairly firmly on the notion of four books, each one associated with a different season/element. The first book would be the Earth book, and would take place in winter. That is one of the big reasons that I am loving the Earth theme right now, since I really want to get this literary project going and the place I have assigned myself to start is Earth.

Earth seems to be the best place to start, if only for the fact that it is the most pragmatic of all the elements and lends itself most to hard work. The problem is that I am an airy-faerie aquarius (for what it's worth) and so I am more of a planner than a do-er. I love to plan. I am an expert planner. When I was little I spent way more time planning games and adventures for my dolls, designing their homes and towns and the landscapes where they lived than I ever did actually playing with them. Well, that was playing, in a manner of speaking. Planning is best friends with imagination, or so I like to think. Which means that I have been kind of trapped in the planning stage since this whole wild idea struck me and have been fairly happy there. It is a natural place for me to be. Which is not to say I haven't written anything, I have written quite a bit actually. A lot of what I have written (over and over) are idea-maps or just outlines/notes on story ideas. I have taken a few stabs at writing the books, but so far none of it is keep-able... especially since I know nothing about writing (ie the early efforts are pretty bad, and I need a lot more practice) and since the storyline has transmorgified so many times. But if I ever want this set of books to materialize, and I know that I do, then I have to get started. The longer I hang out in limbo planning it, the bigger and scarier it becomes in my head. So 2008, being the year of the Earth Rat, and being for me The Year of the Gnome, will be the year I finally get the project out of my head and into the physical realm. Images: Tree with roots by Don Tremain (Getty); Forest path at night by Photodisc (Getty - ok the photographer's name is obviously not Photodisc.. I wish Getty would give you their actual name instead of the company that owns their stuff); Ta Prohm Temple in Angkor Wat Cambodia by Angelo Cavalli (Getty); Snowy forest in Finland by Fred Bjorksten (Getty); Thumbalina and Mouse in winter forest house by Wayne Anderson (Bridgeman Art Library).