A place where we only say goodbye.

I was watching Dead Like Me last night when I heard something that made me scoff. George said during one of her opening spiels “Everyone has lost a loved one.”

In my two decades on this earth I have never known someone to die. Well, maybe a very VERY distant relative or possibly mere acquaintances. But I have gotten away with almost twenty years of familial and friend immortality.

And I am left with so many questions.

What does one wear to a funeral? Is it still a social norm to go in black as movies would suggest?

I wouldn’t like that for my funeral. I would want a luau completes with leis and tacky bright coloured shirts. And there better damn well be a pig on a spit or I’m coming back to haunt all of you.

What happens at a funeral? I know it takes a long time to make a headstone. Do you still do a service in the cemetery? Is there anyway to get out of seeing a dead body at an open casket reception?

Do I make food? Do people make food for me?

Will all the relatives come out of the woodworks? Distant cousins and long forgotten aunts and uncles?

How much time is appropriate to take off work?

How long before someone dies and the time of the funeral?

Will people send me cards? What happens to all of those flowers, do I get to keep them? Will there be singing? Will I have to say something? I don’t want to say anything.

Please answer these questions for me because my grandfather died last night while I was watching Dead Like Me and scoffing.

And I’m not sure what happens next.

And a sunset couldn't save me now.

And I wouldn't raise my child
inside this city anyway
They grow up too savvy
and they grow up too fast
And they know about buying shit
and they know about sex
They know about investment banking
and also about brokerage firms
And they know about the numbers
and they know about the words
They know about the bottom line
and also about stones
And they know about careers
and about the real deals
And they all grow up and become
people's people with people skills

States and shark planes.

I spent the whole day cleaning.

I had set aside this day for studying for the impending International Law test I have tomorrow. But I don't have an International Law test tomorrow! Isn't that great?!

Nope.

No. Not at all. Because it was yesterday. When I got to class I threw up in my mouth and then proceeded to fail a university examination for the very first time.

I am date dyslexic.

Hrmm, what else.

I went to a party this weekend with peeps from work! I had a superz blast. I realized this morning though that I lost my necklace...

Lucky for me I took 200+ pictures so I can pretty much pinpoint the second it disappeared.

I've been feeling mucho inspiration from EVERYTHING around me. I've been painting, reading, sewing, writing, knitting, scrapping, drawing and just about everything else you can imagine that allows me to purge creatively.

I made pillow cases, want to see?

Aw, nuts.

Everyone seems sad this week. So I thought I would give you a happy reminder...

No matter how bad your life is, it is never as bad as the collective Michelle Tanner duo.

Happy Friday!

A comparison.

My summers are so much more fulfilling. When I’m in school I feel cranky and useless and angry all the time. So I wanted to know: what am I doing differently?

How does one find this answer? Easy, pie charts.

These are break downs of my day, on the left an average school day (not taking weekends into account). And on the right is an average summer day.

I can't help but notice my replacing of people with books.


P.S. A lot of people want to know how The Host was, ummm, AWESOME. Did we really doubt Stephenie Meyer for a second?

I once knew a girl in the years of my youth.

When I hear this song I am transported.

I can feel the sun on my legs as they rest atop the front dash.

My hair ruffles as the wind from the open windows blows into it, seemingly stretching each individual strand apart. My hand dances along with the breeze when I can’t resist the urge to stick it outside.

I reach over and turn the volume up and as a result the sing-along becomes louder.

I smell the ocean, hear the birds.

We reach the end of the road and she puts the CRV in park. I snap her picture, my picture, our picture, the beach, my feet, the empty ice-cream cups in the holder next to me.

Neither one of us steps out onto the sand and rock. We both seem to be waiting for something.

“We’ve already driven 40km.” she states simply.

“Port au Port?” I ask, ignoring her statement.

There isn’t even a pause before she responds.

“Port au Port.” she answers, and turns the vehicle around to drive the length of the beach again.

I reach over and turn it up just a little louder.

Aunt Hattie for the win.

Did you miss the love list? Probably not. But seeing as I don’t have a day off for the next nine days (and on the tenth day they will inevitably call me in), you will suffer through this. For me. :)

I DON’T KNOW HOW TO LOVEEE HIM, BUT I KNOW HOW TO LOVE THESE THINGSSS

Photo montages
The Birth House (omg, you’d love it)
Food that somehow breaks down the wall of awesome and hosts both peanut butter and chocolate within its one being
My new header (I’m glad you like it too!)
The song I posted in my last post
BOOK CLUBS!
Extra large coffees with a little cream and a lot of sugar
Getting paid two cheques because you didn’t pick up your last cheque
Post-its with secret messages written on them :)
Not having insomnia
Away from Her
Road to Avonlea! (was that not the best show ever!? I wish the CBC would release it on DVD)
May two-four (even though its foggy, and I have to work all weekend, and have no one to camp with… it’s still MAY TWO-FOUR)
Analyzing poll data

And the drums.

My latest favourite, so much good music everywhere!

A guy at work (my forty year-old hippie friend who sings Evita songs with me while he bakes and I wash dishes) asked me what my favourite song of all time was.

...

PEOPLE CAN DO THAT? CHOOSE JUST ONE SONG?! Not me, my friend. I love them all.



For the record, his favourite song was Barbara Streisand's Send in the Clowns... some hippie.

New header.

Time for a change, I think.

Do we like?

Making sense of the chaotic.

I just finished reading one of the most thought provoking books I have ever owned. Eat, Pray, Love (written by Elizabeth Gilbert) is a memoir of one woman’s “search for everything”.

There is one chapter in this book that Gilbert describes her thoughts on faith and religion itself.

It is me. All over.

I have a hard time explaining my thoughts on organized religion to just about everyone. My Christian friends don’t understand my inability to accept all aspects of their religion. While my friends with no religious beliefs don’t comprehend the faith that I have.

So here it is. I am going to type out ALL of chapter seventy. You are going to read it, out of respect for me. And hopefully you will better understand my views of humanity, faith and religion.

-------------------------------------------

I believe that all the world’s religions share, at their core, a desire to find a transporting metaphor. When you want to attain communion with God, what you’re really trying to do is move away from the worldly into the eternal and you need some kind of magnificent idea to convey you there. It has to be a big one, this metaphor – really big and magic and powerful, because it needs to carry you across a mighty distance. It has to be the biggest boat imaginable.

Religion rituals often develop out of mystical experimentation. Some brave scout goes looking for a new path to the divine, has a transcendent experience and returns home a prophet. He or she brings back to the community tales of heaven and maps of how to get there. Then others repeat the words, the works, the prayers, or the acts of this prophet, in order to cross over, too. Sometimes this is successful – sometimes the same familiar combination of syllables and devotional practices repeated generation after generation might carry many people to the other side. Sometimes it doesn’t work, though. Inevitably even the most original new ideas will eventually harden into dogma or stop working for everybody.

The Indians around here tell a cautionary fable about a great saint who was always surrounded in his Ashram by loyal devotees. For hours a day, the saint and his followers would meditate on God. The only problem was that the saint had a young cat, an annoying creature, who used to walk through the temple meowing and purring and bothering everyone during meditation. So the saint, in all his practical wisdom, commanded that the cat be tied to a pole outside for a few hours a day, only during meditation, so as to not distract anyone. This became a habit – tying the cat to the pole and then meditating on God – but as the years passed, the habit hardened into a religious ritual. Nobody could meditate unless the cat was tied to the pole first. Then one day the cat died. The saint’s followers were panic-stricken. It was a major religious crisis – how could they meditate now, without a cat tied to a pole? How would they reach God? In their minds, the cat had become the means.

Be very careful, warns this tale, not to get too obsessed with the repetition of religious ritual just for its own sake. Especially in this divided world, where the Taliban and the Christian Coalition continue to fight out their international trademark war over who owns the rights to the word God and who has the proper rituals to reach that God, it may be useful to remember that it is not the tying of the cat to the pole that has ever brought anyone to transcendence, but only the constant desire of an individual seeker to experience the eternal compassion of the divine. Flexibility is just as essential for divinity as is discipline.

Your job, then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship – just so long as those prayers are sincere. As one line from the Upanishads suggests: “People follow different paths, straight or crooked, according to the temperament, depending on which they consider best, or most appropriate – and all reach You, just as rivers enter the ocean.”

The other objective of religion, of course, is to try to make sense of our chaotic world and to explain the inexplicabilities we see playing out here on earth every day: the innocent sufferer, the wicked are rewarded – what are we to make of all this? The Western tradition says, “It’ll all get sorted out after death, in heaven and hell.” (All justice to be doled out, of course, by what James Joyces used to call the “Hangman God” – a paternal figure who sits upon His strict seat of judgment punishing the evil and rewarding the good.) Over in the East, though, the Upanishads shrug away any attempt to make sense of the world’s chaos. They’re not even so sure that the world is chaotic, but suggest that it may only appear so to us, because of our limited vision. These texts do not promise justice or revenge for anybody, though they do say that there are consequences for every action – so choose your behavior accordingly. You might not see any of those consequences soon, though. Yoga takes the long view, always. Furthermore, the Upanishads suggest that so-called chaos may have an actual divine function, even if you personally can’t recognize it right now: “The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.” The best we can do, then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to practice holding equilibrium internally – no matter what insanity is transpiring out there.

Sean, my Yogic Irish dairy farmer, explained it me this way. “Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine,” he said. “You want to stay near the core of the thing – right in the hub of the wheel – not out at the edges where all the wind whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness – that’s your heart. That’s where God lives within you. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to that center and you’ll always find peace.”

Nothing has ever made more sense to me, spiritually speaking, than this idea. It works for me. And if I ever find anything that works better, I assure you – I will use it.

I have many friends in New York who are not religious people. Most, I would say. Either they fell away from the spiritual teaching of their youth or they never grew up with any God to begin with. Naturally, some of them are a bit freaked out by my newfound efforts to reach holiness. Jokes are made, of course. As my friend Bobby quipped once while he was trying to fix my computer: “No offense to your aura, but you still don’t know shit about downloading software.” I roll with the jokes. I think it’s all funny, too. Of course it is.

What I’m seeing in some of my friends, though, as they are aging, is a longing to have something to believe in. But this longing chafes against any number of obstacles, including their intellect and common sense. Despite all their intellect, though, these people still live in a world that careens about in a series of wild and devastating and completely nonsensical lurches. Great and horrible experiences of either suffering or joy occur in the lives of all these people, just as with the rest of us, and these mega-experiences tend to make us long for spiritual context in which to express either lament or gratitude, or to seek understanding. The problem is – what to worship, whom to pray to?

I have a dear friend whose first child was born right after his beloved mother died. After this confluence of miracle and loss, my friend felt a desire to have some kind of spiritual place to go, or some ritual to perform, in order to sort through all the emotion. My friend was a Catholic by upbringing, but couldn’t stomach returning to the church as an adult. (“I can’t buy it anymore,” he said, “knowing what I know.”) Of course, he’d be embarrassed to become a Hindu or a Buddhist or something wacky like that. So what could he do? As he told me, “You don’t want to go cherry-picking a religion.”

Which is a sentiment I completely respect except for the fact that I totally disagree. I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s the history of mankind’s search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of religious cherry-picking. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving towards the light.

The Hopi Indians thought that the world’s religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm. More contemporarily, the Dalai Lama has repeated the same idea, assuring his Western students repeatedly that they needn’t become Tibetan Buddhists in order to be his pupils. He welcomes them to take whatever ideas they like out of Tibetan Buddhism and integrate these ideas into their own religious practices. Even in the most unlikely and conservative places, you can find sometimes this glimmering idea that God might be bigger than our limited religious doctrines have taught us. In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of providence are infinite."

But doesn’t that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn’t our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don’t we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while?

That’s me in the corner, in other words. That’s me in the spotlight. Choosing my religion.

Parked next to the BFC.

Where to begin? I haven't done a boring what-is-Sarah-doing post in some time.

Work is AWESOME. Everyone (and I mean everyone) is extremely nice and not dumb and wonderful. It's almost all university students, that's a good thing. I've consumed a lot of bagels and coffee though, not so good.

I'm actually sad I have the day off because I miss talking to everyone and eating bagels. Sicko.

I burn myself quite frequently though, I think people are becoming embarrassed for me.

Arriving yesterday in the post was the much awaited, extremely anticipated, Inuit picture that I purchased in Iqaluit over a year ago. I am getting it framed at Michael's for about four times what I paid for the picture itself. Hah.

I hung out with my lads the other day. We went to that special, special place.

We also walked around "old St. John's". Sometimes my sadness over living in this city allows me to forget how beautiful it is. So I took pictures of the pretty while downtown and it helped.

Do you have pictures of the pretty? What have you been up to, hmm?

Pork in my purse.

“Small things amuse small minds.”

I have a problem with this saying.

Robyn McHugh and I are living proof that small things amuse big minds. We don’t need to do crazy and epic things to showcase who we are.

We need five dollars and a half an hour at the Dollarama.

We need a couple toonies and bus ride around the city.

We need a kite and a breeze.

We need nothing more than each other’s company.

We’re just cool kids who do cool things.

Bliss.

Dear customers,

It’s great that you are deciding on the “healthy” route (as you call it) by choosing to drink green tea. A word to the wise: IT DOES NOT COUNT IF YOU HAVE A MILLION CREAM AND SUGARS IN IT. So don't brag.

Love,
your friendly neighbourhood coffee server