Smudge

My mother wasn't allowed to play cards as a teenager. Snakes and Ladders had evil connotations (the game's called Chutes and Ladders these days). Heck, even thinking about sex was considered a mortal sin in Church of Christ PEI -- something that was hard for a horny Island teenage boy to handle. There were rules. The world was all explained.

So I should have known better than to mess with the spirits. This week, my smudge went rogue.

An Aboriginal colleague at work recently smudged our office. She is studying with elders the age-old tradition of burning dried buffalo sage to rid a space of negative energy and old trapped spirits. Apparently, my space in the office was a hot spot. So was Dan's. You can tell by how much smoke comes from the tightly wound bundle of dried sage as it's carried from room to room.

So I decided to bring the ritual home, to smudge our new house.

Suzy had taken the kids skiing last Sunday, so I had the house to myself for a few hours. I picked up a bunch of smudge sage at the local holistic bookshop and lit it on the stove. As instructed, I carried it around in a bowl -- my meditation "singing" bowl, in fact (yes, I have one). There was a lot of smoke. So much, in fact, that I was worried that the smoke detector would go off. So I stamped out the smudge.

That night I awoke at about 3AM to the sound of people running up and down the stairs. Then whining and moaning sounds, and children crying. I opened my eyes and saw a dark shape swirling erratically around the ceiling of my room. A moment after I noticed it, the shape came straight at me and swooshed at my head like it was trying to fly up my nose. Then it was gone. And the wailing and running sounds stopped.

I jumped out of bed, thinking that Simon or Jasper had fallen down the stairs. But they were asleep in their beds. And even Puddy the cat was undisturbed, asleep.

It took me hours to get back to sleep.

The next night, Simon awoke at about the same time in the night, screaming. When Suzy ran to him, he went right back to sleep.

Then, last night, Jasper was unable to get to sleep because he saw "visions" in his room.

Lordy.

Suzy says it's all coincidence. I'm not so sure. My colleague at work says she checked with her elders; they'd heard of this before. There was something here, in this space, and I had almost let it go. Apparently I shouldn't have snuffed out the smudge.

So, after school, Simon and I taped up the smoke detectors, and he walked through the house holding my little metal singing meditation bowl with a dried bunch of buffalo sage smoldering in it. We walked in circles in each room and gave thanks for what we have, for who we are, and for those who came before. He loved it. As I watched him, I remembered all those Sundays I'd sipped a bit of wine and eaten a morsel of cracker contemplating the "blood and body of Christ."

Ritual is important. Belief is subjective. The thing is: I saw something flying around my room the other night.

We'll see how things go tonight. So far, Suzy's the only one who hasn't woken up screaming since the smudge.

I love my wife, but I find it ironic that she may be closer to those in my past whose worldview held that there was evil in an ace.

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All you need is trees. Trees are all you need.

Last night I wrote a bit about death. Things were fine then. It was all so abstract and remote.

Then this morning at about 7:30 AM Suzy stepped into the shower and stepped out in excruciating pain. She hadn't pulled a muscle or twisted. Something random had happened. And we spent the whole day in the critical care unit at the Ottawa General Hospital. For a while there this morning we were talking with doctors about colon cancer, heart attack, pulmonary embolism.

We're still not sure what it was. By this time tomorrow we'll know if it's shingles or a pinched nerve.

Tonight I'm thinking: Maybe I should stop saying I'm ready to look death in the face. Or maybe I should staple my eyes open and yell Bring It On.

Why? Because I was two places today where I felt I needed to wash my hands a lot: The hospital, and a political fundraiser.

Maybe I'm not cut out for this new life I've created for myself, but I'd rather spend time with people who are dealing with reality than those who are trying to spin it.

I got home tonight to find Jasper (9) watching the knock-out Canada-Norway hockey match on TV. I looked at him as I loosened my tie (I only wear ties to political events). He was totally engrossed in the game.

"Jasper, would you mind if we had to live in the one-room cabin in PEI?" I asked.

"Nope. That would be great, Dad."

He didn't even look up.
One room. Family. Treehouse. That's fine.

He's nine. He won't even remember this day. My angst. My effort to take us to the next level. This level's fine. And our fall-back is my favorite place on Earth. So I got nuthin' to worry about.

Bring it on.

A tuft of down

I think about death a lot.

I don't know why, really. Life is great. I'm still close to the median age, and I like how Canadian life expectancy is climbing at about the same pace that the earth circles the sun.

It's fair to say that I don't want to die. My biggest fear is leaving my kids prematurely. I picture Jasper and Simon sad, lonely. Suzy would pause and move on. She's like that. This summer I awoke with a start early one dewey Island morning in the loft at Walden and noticed a tuft of downy feather stuck to the skylight above my head. A bird had struck the window so hard it had left its deepest feathers behind. I remember thinking: That's a bad omen. A week later a close colleague suddenly died.

I want to be one of those people who can look death in the face and not blink. I really believe that life can only be fully appreciated by being aware of the permanence and inevitability of death. The thing that sucks is that it is permanent and inevitable. And I didn't fully understand the word 'never' until I came to grips with "I'll never see you again." Or, "I'll never be able to sit and have coffee with you again." Or, worst of all, "I'll never know what you would grow up to be like."

There's a kinship with those gone before when the full depth of this kind of permanence is deeply contemplated. I'm into this now. I'm enjoying it, even though it's really hard. Because deep down I know that I'll be 'never' someday too.

Maybe it's maudlin or grim to sit still to think about this, but it's better than denial. I like to pull the astroturf off the graveside mound, and to do the shoveling myself. I knew I had to be the one to hold Angus to the very end (which was just 4 hours after the beginning), and read to Grandpa until his hand was cold. One of my biggest regrets in life is waiting after I got the call saying Dad had less than a day. I thought I had said goodbye. But when the final news came, my first thought was: "I should have called. Now it's never."

I guess I'm just in a weird mood tonight. I'm meditating again, and after months of frantic distraction there's a lot of clutter to clear before I can restore some sense of balance to my busy brain. So it starts with the big stuff and, moving silently to submission, I open my arms to inevitable. And it's OK.

Sometimes the simple things...

My super team at One Change has been working on a water campaign for about a year. We've got energy nailed (or screwed) with bulbs as the catalyst action. Like the light bulb is to the house, the tire gauge is the car, the simplest first action. The sound the tire gauge makes (Psst!) is the call to action of fuel efficiency. That works well.

But then there's water.

I thought we had the scoop on water a year ago when, with great fanfare, I flew to Alberta to present an idea to the Alberta government. Minister Renner's a great guy, and when I showed him the vinyl toilet tank bag we were promoting as the first action of water conservation, he smiled very politely but said he would be afraid of being known as the sh*t minister when toilets across Alberta overflowed.

That idea got flushed.

Tonight, on a train from Montreal, I pulled out a notebook and turned to my capable colleague Chris and said, "Ok, let's figure this out." Within 30 minutes we came up with a new idea and simple action that will generate an immediate return on investment 4x the cost of the campaign. It's never been done before and it's so simple anyone can do it.

No shit.

Walden

I'm having powerful cabin dreams. Usually this doesn't happen until February/March. I decided years ago that this annual phenomenon indicates that I've been away from Walden for too many months -- that I need to get back to the woods. But this year, the dream is different. I'm moving stuff around. I'm discovering new rooms or whole new floors that I didn't know were there. Sometimes the world around is blanketed by melting snow. Like always, Dad makes an appearance. He's been gone for 9 years but he's there in the woods. Usually he talks to me in the dreams. This year he's just watching as I explore.

Misc observations of an unremarkable evening

Why do new TVs have to sing a little song when you turn them on? Seriously. Who thought that up? Imagine yourself in the board room that the idea was first presented: "Customers will love it, like the TV saying 'Thanks for turning me on!'

It's the fifth anniversary of Project Porchlight today. Five years ago this morning Suzy walked a hand-written application form over to City Hall to register Porchlight as a not-for-profit organization. We debated whether the $90 fee was a good investment ...

Five years later I spent the afternoon on a conference call with a team of communications managers in New Jersey discussing the new fridge campaign. It's funny to hear otherwise very serious and strategic people say Gobble Gobble Gobble over and over.

From the "How did that happen" department: My new neighbour and friend Gareth was over on Sunday. We were standing in the driveway chatting about on-demand hot water and structured insulated panels as the kids played in the street. It's a quiet street, and we're both middle-aged homeowners. We turned to walk toward the house and as we entered the garage he stopped and picked up my grandfather Weale's ring off the ground. I have no idea how it got there, but there it was, sitting on a pile of bright red and browning leaves on the slope toward the drain. Grandpa died in 2000. The ring had been missing for ages. It's nice to have it back.