Spring Catch Up - Part 1

On moving, loss, travel, and the joys of spring

I opened my drafts folder to see what posts I have simmering along (there are quite a few in there, it turns out), but without providing a bit of context, it feels like any one of those posted on its own would just be confusing.

So, here’s a recap of the highlights of what’s been going on over the past few months when my Substack efforts have been few and far between.

1. Back to School and Inventing a New World Religion
   Confession: I may have underestimated the amount of time, effort, and angst to which I was committing when I enrolled in the Graduate Liberal Studies at SFU and embarked upon a Master’s degree. Master degree? MA. Whatever. A LOT of reading, thinking, writing.
   

   During our first two semesters, we tackled all manner of readings - from Freud to Frankenstein, Ecclesiastes to Convenience Store Woman, the ancient Greeks to contemporary philosophers. There were lots of readings that in some way pertained to religion and the meaning of life. The class discussions often wound around to asking variations on the questions, Why do we keep making the same mistakes? Why can’t people get along? What lies at the heart of conflict? What do we need to do to make our society better/healthier?
   
   I found myself obsessing over weighty subjects like war, death, and mortality. And, I wondered, what role does organized religion play in all of this?
   
   For my final paper for the second semester, I decided to invent a new world religion. The intent was to integrate elements common to world religions but also avoid the pitfalls created by organized religions that establish rules of membership all too often responsible for providing the rationale for excluding those who are not adherents.
   
   I created places of worship, wrote religious music, did sacred drawings to illustrate seminal religious stories, and roughed out the fundamental teachings of a glorious new, inclusive, kind, and tolerant nature-based belief system.

   

   [Mother emerged from the darkness of the cave…drew in one, two, three deep breaths.
   Note: The wild ethereal bird bottom right is a trickster-like character inspired by Tomson Highway’s play, The Res Sisters.]

   
   When I analyzed the likelihood of success for this new religion I realized, of course, that it was doomed to fail. My concluding paragraphs outlining what might be a better alternative to adding yet another religion to the thousands already in existence feel like the beginning of a new project. To keep this post to a reasonable length, I’ll save those thoughts for future missives.
   

2. The Nikki Wiki
   Over the past couple of years, I’ve made several trips adding up to multiple months on the coast to help sort through my late father’s artwork, completely dismantle the remnants of the farm, and empty the family home of nearly four decades worth of stuff generated by three generations of producers (and collectors) of stuff. In one way or another, everyone in the family is a maker - my dad, the artist, my mother the photographer who taught all her kids to be photographers who were also comfortable in a darkroom, me the writer, and my daughter a maker of all things from gorgeous hand-made tiles to sewing projects to artwork of her own.
   
   What to do with all this output now that one brother lives in the Bahamas, the other in Japan, I’ve moved to the mountains (and hope to someday transition to extended travels in a small van), and my daughter and her husband about to move onto a small boat?

   

   The bits and pieces of my writing date back to the earliest years of elementary school. The fact my brother ate my last bubblegum would seem to be a minor problem in the grand scheme of things but back then, it weighed heavily on my mind. It was serious enough that the transgression made it to the box of secrets where, apparently, I kept all my problems.
   
   Going through thousands of pages of my writing including whole novels I’d forgotten I’d written, multi-year correspondences with lovers, dear friends, and family (making me simultaneously miss the old way of putting pen to paper and thanking my lucky stars that cloud storage is pretty much unlimited) I realized that I don’t need to be lugging around all that paper anymore.
   
   BUT, the data contained thereon provided a pretty comprehensive history of my inconsequential life. Flipping through menus carefully saved (just in case I ever need to know the price of Mac and Cheese at that diner in Florida back in the 80s), the many rejection slips my poetry received from The New Yorker back when I was obsessed with infanticide and immolation, the drafts of plays, poems, essays, articles, and fierce letters to the editor, the receipts for turkey feed, birthday cards from my grandparents, the photos, newspaper clippings, collages, journals, plane tickets, and more… it was a bit like having my life flash before my eyes. One minute I was looking at a black and white photo of me at age five feeding a monkey in Singapore and the next moment I was wondering why I had felt the need to keep the dog tag from a dog that breathed his final breath at some point way back in the previous century.

   

   A high-speed document and photo scanner was perhaps the best investment my family made in recent years. Even though it worked away steadily for the whole time I was on the coast, uncomplainingly scanning and uploading tens of thousands of documents, postcards and love letters, fast-fading faxes, notes for angst-filled board meetings, parking ticket stubs and hospital menu cards, I still didn’t get quite finished.

   

   Some items didn’t fit through the scanner’s feeding mechanism, like this behavioural psychology assignment from the 80s. You will be pleased to know that I have finally released the decades-old chewed pens into their rightful place in the landfill. For the curious, the behaviour was never reinstated. And, thankfully, keyboards are a lot harder to chomp on.
   
   When I return to the coast to boat-sit at some point (see point coming up below), I will continue this scanning task knowing that though the volume is daunting, the job will come to an end at some point. Meanwhile, a storage locker holds the remaining boxes of documents awaiting my attention. Then, what? That’s a reasonable question. I mean, if I haven’t looked in those dozens of boxes before now, will I ever venture up into the cloud in search of my report card from third grade?

   

   My first published novels were for kids who loved horses. There were dozens of pages of notes, photographs, hand-drawn maps, show entry forms, etc. documenting the horses, dogs, barn cats, barns, trails, and riders so I could keep my rather large cast of characters straight from one book to the next.
   
   The brilliant thing about tech today is that should I need some detail as I work on the memoir about my father or the book about my farming days, a search will quickly pull up every document containing the word farrow or catamaran or hunger. The search function even does a reasonable job of finding such key terms in the thousands of pages of journal entries I scanned and uploaded, finally releasing those many hand-written volumes into the recycling bins.
   
   Hm… it’s getting late and I’m only through the first two points in a list of twelve. Let this, then, be the conclusion to Part 1 of the update. I’ll continue with Part 2 anon.

   

   Mama’s got the whole world in her hands… another piece from the new world religion that shall not speak its name. It’s better that way. Trust me.
   _______________________________________________________________________
   

   I’m curious. What are you holding onto that may make your descendants scratch their heads and ask, Why?