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The Joy of Diving

This year marks the beginning of my 64th turn around the sun and I plan to celebrate by jumping in the ocean. I could achieve this goal in the shivery brine of Vancouver ‘s coast, but this time I will pamper myself and let the warm salt water of Indonesia take me under. If you have never been diving, you are missing one of life’s greatest pleasures. Take the plunge and go for a dive. Diving is a…

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#A sport for all ages #Diving Indonesia #Meditations #Raja Ampat #scuba diving

An Absent Child

For the first time in 25 years, my daughter was not home for the holidays. For me, her absence is a phantom limb, a muscle memory of a part now gone, the burden I carry and recognize as a mother’s longing for an absent child. When your daughter lives overseas, she might as well be live on the moon. My far away child exists in a perpendicular universe, one I can intersect and visit on my…

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#absent children #air mail letters #communication #face time #missing our kids #motherhood #shype

Remembrance Day in Movember

This is about Doug. He was my step dad and I first met him when I was 8 yrs. old. It was not a good meeting. He was a stranger, and worse, he was apparently my new father. After my biological father’s death, my mother, a widow at twenty-four, did what she needed to do to survive. She entrusted my care to her parents, returned to university, got a teaching degree, joined the Air Force and met…

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#Do It for Dad #Father&039;s Day #Movember #prostate cancer #Remembrance Day #Royal Canadian Air Force #Step parents #The Hump #World War 2

Do I Know You?

Recently, I attended a celebration of life for a friend who died unexpectedly. Such a ceremony provides a positive sense of closure for those who mourn. It also marks an axis in life where we, the living, move forward recognizing that we have left a part of us behind. During the ceremony, individuals shared what was meaningful in their relationship with the deceased and ushered out the departed…

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#Enhancing relationships #friendship #Intimacy #Know your partner #Marriage #Questions to ask your partner

Milestones

Last week my son graduated from UBC. In Chan Theatre of Performing Arts, I took my seat, one wave in an ocean of parents, and prepared to witness another right of passage in the life of my child. I was proud to be there, relieved that the education was complete, grateful my son had a job and hopeful that possibly, perhaps, the Sanders Bank would lose a customer. What I hadn’t expected as I sat…

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Home Alone 2

This is, sadly, the sequel to my previous blog Home Alone. After surfacing physically unscathed from an attempted home invasion, I found my troubles far from over. I was still alone and therefore an opportunity, a target for mischief. Several days after the aborted assault my rescuing policeman returned to visit, this time alone. He came early on a Saturday and I welcomed him because I trusted…

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#abuse of power #abuse of power by police #police as perpetrators #police behaving badly #police harassment #single women as police targets #trusting police authority #victimization of women by police #women alone are prey

Home Alone

My husband has left me – for 2 weeks, a blink of an eye in planetary time, too infinitesimal to mention, but for me it is time enough for the pilot light of memory to spark a bonfire of irrational fear, one that burns hot, especially at night.

I am not a fearful person, but I fear being alone. I did not have such a phobia as a child or an adolescent. In my twenties I was taught to be fearful,…

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#crimes against women #fear of being home alone #home invasion #men as predators #questioning women&039;s complicity in sex crimes #women as prey #women as victim #women home alone

We Never Get to Say Goodbye

http://wp.me/p3q7Dd-cB

A person devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future. Camus

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage. Seneca

I have been away. My mother’s next-door neighbour phones. At Mom’s apartment the paper has not been picked up…

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#addiction #coping with suicide #depression #grief in the family #living with a depressed parent #loss of a parent #suicide

Can Shopping Make You Crazy?

Boxing Day

Christmas is coming soon and that reminds me of Boxing Day. Boxing Day in turn, reminds me of shopping bargains, which brings me to Black Friday and that makes me depressed. The local news carried live footage of Black Friday in the US and watching it, I was simultaneously mesmerized and horrified. Hordes of presumably sane individuals were wrestling, shoving and even pulling hair to get a full…

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#Black Friday #Boxing Day #Consumer behavior #crazy shoppers #Irrational behavior while shopping #luxury items #North American consumers #Ravi Dahr #shopping angst #Shopping Boxing Day #Yale University social scientist research

The Brothers

On the way to Everest I met two remarkable brothers. We were all part of an international group of climbers destined for the big Himalayan mountains and trekkers whose goal was to make it to Everest Base Camp. The trek itself is not to be underestimated. It is no small matter to get to Base Camp and most who tackle it train beforehand to withstand the physical burden of an upward climb in thin…

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#Everest #Everest base camp #friendship #international climbing groups #remarkable people #Sibling Bonding #training for trekking #trekking in Nepal

Remembering Jack

I might say I lost Jack, and lead you to believe that I somehow misplaced him, like I do my car keys. The fact is, Jack died, and lost is a euphemism, a soft, proxy word for death, to cushion the pain of its reality. I don’t like euphemisms. They detach my grief, and so, where I could say I Lost Jack, I prefer to say Jack died. He was important to me and when I write about him now, I want to feel…

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#avalanche death #back country skiing #death from chronic disease #euphimism #euphimisms for death #friendship #mentor #prostate cancer #sudden death

Friendship

And let your best be for your friend. If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also. For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill? Seek him always with hours to live. For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.

Khalil Gibran

Sometimes when I don’t expect it, the TV news breaks my heart. Recently, a woman described her anguish over a daylong…

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#cyber friends #Facebook #Facebook friends #friendship #Khalil Gibran #real friends #virtual friends

Am I Enough?

Being Competitive: Genetic or Learned Behavior?

“Take someone who doesn’t keep score,who’s not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing, who has not the slightest interest evenin his own personality: he’s free.” ― Rumi

“What does it mean to be the best? It means you have to be better than the number two guy. But what gratification is there in that? He’s a loser—that’s why he’s number two.”

― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

Being…

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#Am I enough?#Am I worthy of love?#Attention in childhood #Competing to survive #competition #confusing success and love #genetic basis of competition #learned basis of competition #self acceptance #self respect

Letting Go Again

Last week I moved my daughter to London, UK. For she and I, child and parent, the event marks one more step in letting go. For me alone, the event is a sober reminder that while the majority of my life belongs to the past; the bulk of hers belongs to the future. In London, when we stood for our goodbyes, my daughter was an iridescent helium balloon in my grasp, but then, I opened my hand and…

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#Adult Children #Independance #letting go #London #Mothers and Daughters #Parenting

The Beauty of Medical Maggots

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“If I could train maggots to resect brain tumors, I would.” Dr Mark Simard, neurosurgeon, Maryland School of Medicine.

St Paul’s Hospital was an eye opener. I arrived in 1985, a wide-eyed intern who tumbled down the rabbit hole into St Paul’s parallel universe, an astonishing new world replete with an exotic cast of characters, their colorful lifestyles and their bizarre medical problems. This…

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#AIDS #HLTV-111 #maggots #maggots in medicine #St Pau;&039;s Hospital #St Paul&039;e Emergency #Stanley Park #the homeless #Vancouver

Glamored on to a Bicycle

Road biking is a popular sport but few are more enamored than my husband. As I write he is off with his buddies, peddles furiously wind milling for hours on end. He will arrive home exhausted; shrouded in a cadaverous hue, only to inform me that he has had the best time ever. A man with a passion is a dangerous thing, dangerous because he feels compelled to share it with those he loves. In my…

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#cycling #road bikes #road rash #road tattoo

Ressurecting My Father

In the prairie where dinosaurs have laid their bones, so too are the bones of my childhood. And yet, I admit, I have more knowledge about the past of the dinosaur than I do about my own. So much of my memory of childhood is missing. Sixty years ago my father died in the grasslands, and I have left him there without a voice, absent from my life. But now I am restless. These last few years the…

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