Dinosaur Chasers

Posted on April 30, 2010 by kristinshepherd

There’s a conversation stuck in my head. It happened a couple of weeks ago in my clinic.
Just two lines of dialogue between a four year old girl and her six year old brother.

The question I was asking that week was, what did you want to grow up to be when you were little? I’d had all kinds of great answers already: cowboy, movie star, cafeteria lady, tall.

So I asked these two, who are still little compared to most people in the clinic.

She said she’d like to be a dinosaur chaser.
And he said, what she means is a paleontologist.

What does that do to you, hearing that?
His answer was accurate, smart, precocious.

All the things I aspired to be when I was his age.
It’s possible I’m still trying to be those things.

But “dinosaur chaser”, jeez! There’s something honest and simple and exciting in that that rocks my socks today.

It makes me want to rethink and reword my desires. Here we go.

I want to be loved. Madly. Swooningly, if there’s such a word.
I want to be brave and honourable. Like Zorro or Robin Hood.
I want people to shout with happiness when I walk into a room. I want us all to be great friends.
I want to cure sadness and fear. In everyone.
I want to be some kind of genius cross between Katherine Hepburn, Meryl Streep and Judi Dench. I want them to shout with happiness when I walk into the room.
I want my kids, my lovely man, and my dog to live forever.

Those are mine today. I can hardly wait to hear yours.

Thanks to Alastair and Anna for being exactly who they are.

And thanks to you for the conversation,

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Blinking Indicates Help Is On The Way

Posted on April 21, 2010 by kristinshepherd

I saw this sign in an elevator yesterday.

Does it mean that if I blink help will come?  Does it mean that if you’re blinking, help is coming my way? Or your way?  I’m not sure.
I do need help, I know that much.

I saw the sign while returning a modem, having upgraded my tech life hugely over the last week.  I now have cable internet (it’s faster), new somethings in my computer that have maximized its RAM (so it’s faster), and an iPhone (it’s faster than waiting till I get home to answer emails, if my fingers are pointy enough).
I’m so upgraded, I don’t know what to do with myself anymore.

This is all, they keep telling me, in the interest of fascilitating the conversations I want to be a part of. Conversations about why we’re here, how to be well, and what we want to do with this “one wild and precious life”.  (That’s Mary Oliver, the poet.)

Still.  What I know I love is conversing one on one with people.  I also love one on hundreds, ie speaking publicly.  With my mouth, in both cases.

What I don’t know, yet, is this conversation that takes place with my fingers and the ether.  I feel as though I’m mumbling, hey, what do you love?, over and over, out a window, and just waiting.

This morning I tripped over a new Twitter page that was filled with responses to my tweets.  Had no idea people were speaking back.
I’m starting to get the hang of Facebook, and blogging, but most of the time I’m still blog-boggled.

When I tried to text my daughter this morning, I heard George’s raspy voice saying hello.  George is the tech guy who is teaching me how to use all of this equipment.  I guess his number is next to my daughter’s.  And I guess I was in the wrong place altogether – phone calls, not texts.  I’d called him by mistake at 8:15 am.

So I need help.
What I’d love is to accept that I’m deaf and dumb in this new environment, and that I’ll keep trying until I’ve developed the new techno senses of speech and hearing.

I’d love us all to keep trying, in hopes of finding huge conversations that we love.  Talk about finding your family.

Until that happens, I’ll just keep blinking.
If you see me on the street and you want to see a grown woman cry, blink back.

I’ll throw my arms around you.  Really, I will.

Thanks for the conversation,

kristin  

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Calling all kaleidoscopes

Posted on April 15, 2010 by kristinshepherd

A little kid came into my clinic this week with his daycare mom. He was gorgeous, maybe four or five years old. And shy, shy, shy. Couldn’t look at me, couldn’t bear me looking at him. He stared steadfastly and silently into the garbage can while I showed him where the toys were in my waiting room. His huge, sad eyes were filled with tears the entire time.

After a few attempts, I gave up trying to make friends and began my work with his mom. A couple of minutes later, when I looked over at him, he was holding the tiny stuffed zebra that lives in my toy box. I hadn”t even seen him leave the room to get it. He put it on a stool and went back to the waiting room. He came back a minute later with a plastic cylinder filled with liquid and stars. Then another trip for the kaleidoscope from the toy box. He just kept at it, over and over, until he had every toy in the clinic with him, at which point he looked content. Still shy, but not teary-eyed, and definitely more comfortable.

I”ve been thinking about him ever since. First, because I was that shy when I was a kid. I”m not much better now, in some situations.

Second, it made me wonder about what we each collect in order to calm ourselves when the going gets rough.

I collect food. Absolutely. I eat when I”m scared. Burgers, pasta, good bread and butter, and cereal, until I”ve stunned myself quiet.

I collect friends who tell the truth and who are kind.

I collect books of all kinds. I”m surrounded by them. I can look anyone in the eye when I”m carrying a book.

I collect my kids, who make me feel better no matter what.

And I collect naps, which are always good.

What do you collect to make you feel better? Cars? Clothes? Sex? Booze? University degrees? Vacations?

I”d love to hear.

Thanks to my little friend with the kaleidoscope.

And thanks for the conversation,

kristin

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Better than Chocolate

Posted on April 4, 2010 by kristinshepherd

I’m not so much into literal interpretations of resurrection myths, but I am completely into being reborn in any way I can, any time I can.

This Easter weekend has been the best ever.

On the death/life cusp this weekend:

1. A friend’s funeral. She’d have loved the sun yesterday. Hope it’s sunny wherever you are, Nancy.

2 (Excuse the leap from the meaningful to the completely shallow.) A complete emptying of the fridge. We’re eating mango chutney by the spoonful and toast and peanut butter over and over, having forgotten that the stores are closed twice this weekend. I paid $4.79 for a litre of milk this morning so that I could have a cup of coffee. No turkey and scalloped potatoes at our place. No foil-covered rabbits.

3. I have, and I say this with enormous satisfaction, completed my tax preparations for the year 2009. This takes a minimum of five days of nailed-to-my-desk suffering and unparalleled crankiness. I am jubilant.  (This is the only thing in my life that warrants the word jubilant, which is a kind of Easter word, don’t you think?)

4. I was up at 4 this morning, doing yoga. Wide awake, too stirred up by #1, too agitated by #2, too excited by #3 to sleep another wink. My sun salutation faces a large window that faces the lake. Which has been frozen for months and months, which feels like forever, which feels like purgatory.

I finished my yoga sometime after dawn, and ran (mindfully, sort of) for the binoculars.

It’s been warm all week, warm enough for crocuses and robins. And there was an enormous wind during last night’s thunderstorm.

And, yeah! for yoga, yeah for taxes!, yeah!, even, for friends moving on, the lake is open!

This afternoon it’s all diamonds in the sun, looking like some kind of heaven. And this, for the non-religious, is being resurrected, reborn, and saved.

Get yourself to the nearest body of water (even if it’s a glass of water in the sun).

Spring is here.

Happy Easter, and thanks for the conversation,

kristin

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A Body Sings

Posted on March 26, 2010 by kristinshepherd

A yoga friend of mine describes his morning practice as his body singing to him. Isn’t that beautiful?

I think of it every morning during my own practice when I begin to hear those sticky, ignoramus thoughts about oh-I’m-tighter/chunkier/older/more-gravity-stricken-than-i-was-when-i-went-to-bed. I hear that harangue, and I think, hold your neurotic horses, my body is singing to me.

I stop, listen to my breath and my heartbeat, and everything gets better.

I spent yesterday morning in a hospital room, sitting with a friend who is dying. That’s a harsh word, dying. Maybe she’s being born into something else. I hope that’s true.

Whatever it is, she’s only got the tiniest fingerhold on this life, now. She’s a pale, thin, porcelain residue of what she was before. No one home in her eyes, most of the time. Maybe you’ve seen this in someone you love.

She’s still beautiful.

I spent time with her by matching her inhalations and exhalations with my own. I didn’t know what else to do.

And I watched her heart thumping her body, her whole upper body beating with the force of it. It’s something to see, the stubbornness of that heart carrying on while the rest of her is saying goodbye.

This morning I started my yoga practice at 3am. That’s a great time for it when I’m awake anyway, trying to make sense of things that don’t.

I bent forward, and heard, oh, I’m a bit tight, a bit tired. Then I thought, hold your neurotic blah, blah, blah. I stopped, breathed, and listened to my own heart beating.

My body is singing to me.

It occurs to me, about five downward dogs in, that Nancy’s body is also singing to her. I don’t understand the song, and it’s a sad, difficult song to witness. It’s goodbye music.

I’m not coming to any grand, illuminating conclusion, here. She’s not going to leap off the bed, and I’m not going to fully understand life and death any time soon.

I just want to say, listen, if you can.

And thanks for my body’s music, your body’s music, and Nancy’s.

Thanks for the conversation,

kristin

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Bald Money

Posted on March 22, 2010 by kristinshepherd

I’m making a lot of money now that I’m bald. I shaved this head of mine for a play. I shaved it again when this play was performed in a festival on the weekend. Well, the play, Waiting For Godot, won the festival and will go on to another festival. So I’ll be shaving my head again in May.

If you haven’t shaved your head before, you can’t imagine the relief it is pack your shampoo, hair goop, hair dryer, and hair brush away under the bathroom sink. It’s like never having to wear clothes again, except that my head is a lot more attractive than the rest of me.

There are the “omygodshehascancer” looks. I mentioned these before. On a good day I only get asked about chemo once or twice. And the looks? I just don’t care as much anymore, except to send silent thoughts of love to my friends who do have cancer, and to their beautiful, bald noggins.

The new thing is the money.

My lovely man and I compete to see who can find the most street money during the day. Pennies, dimes, quarters. We find them in parking lots and on our walks with the dog, mostly. We scream when we find pennies. It reminds us that the universe is generous and abundant.  Every single coin goes into the found-money vase at home. I haven’t counted it, but I’ll bet it’d buy a lunch for us.

Since shaving my head, I’m so far ahead in this competition that he’ll never catch up.

I shop for groceries at No Frills, where you pay 25 cents for a cart. You get your quarter back by returning the cart after you’ve filled your trunk.

Here’s what’s happening. These days, I get out of my car, and on the way across the parking lot to the store, someone offers me their cart. The grocery store etiquette, in this situation, is to give them a quarter. Saves them returning the cart, saves me going to the cart area to get my own.

Except now, they won’t take my quarter. They think, she’s got cancer, I’ll help her out, here’s a cart.

It’s amazing. I take the cart back to the cart line, retrieve the quarter, and pick up the little carry basket I always use for groceries.

I made 75 cents the other day, just getting into the store and back.

I love this. It makes me want to yell thanks out to the universe to realize that many, many of us are generous, anonymously kind, and looking out for each other.

I’ll buy lunch for some stranger, soon, thanks to your generosity.

Thanks for the conversation,

kristin

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Women Piping

Posted on March 9, 2010 by kristinshepherd

I had the astounding good fortune to MC an International Women’s Day event on the weekend. It was called Eve-olution 3.

You should have been there. There were women on bagpipes (I’d never seen women playing bagpipes, and never asked myself why.) There were fabulous singers and dancers (ballet, modern, stepdance, African dance, Jamaican dance), there was poetry, and visual art streaming on a couple of screens beside the stage. By women, in celebration of women.

And there was an audience filled with women, men, and children celebrating with us.

It made me think of the women in my family.

My grandmother couldn’t hear women. I mean it. She said it was a special kind of hearing loss. I’m sure it began while her kids were kids, but toward the end of her life she just stopped hearing all women. If a man left the room to go to the bathroom, or grab a sandwich or go home, she just stopped talking to the women still with her. No point, she said.

This woman raised my mother, who has done pretty well, considering. My mom practiced piano four or five hours a day, as a kid, while her brothers played outside. That’s what girls did. Later, she raised six kids, feeding them, cleaning up after them, and having my father’s drink and dinner waiting for him every evening, like some Rob and Laura Petrie imitation, but without the humour. (My dad is wonderful, but is completely a product of his generation of men who Worked to Support a Family he Didn’t Often See. He is no longer taken care of by my mother.)

These days my mom is a painter who also sings in a great choral group.

My daughter, to skip forward in time, is doing a Masters degree in exercise physiology, studying the differences between male and female responses to exercise.  (When i called her about all of this, she’d just finished a day in the lab, slicing rat fat, if you can believe it.)


She loves the fact that we are an enigma.

My mom would say that being a woman is better than it used to be.

My daughter says that she loves being a woman, though it hasn’t been an effortless love.

I’d love to say that I am not sexist at all, that I think each of us as human beings, period. I’d be lying.  If I were not sexist at all, I’d have questioned the bagpipes being a man’s instrument.  I’ll bet I make all kinds of sexist assumptions that I can’t hear coming out of my own mouth.  (Not a bad thing to remember when I’m making fun of my gran.)

I don’t know what International Women’s Day means to you.

Are you celebrating? Are you piping?

Do you love yourself effortlessly?

Are we as independent of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ beliefs as we’d like to be, or have we inherited a kind of patina of their beliefs about being women? Can we drop those beliefs and allow ourselves to be a mystery?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for the conversation,

kristin

What she tells me is that the more science learns about women and exercise (and science only began to care very recently), the greater the mystery becomes. Nothing they’re learning begins to explain our differences, says my daughter.

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I Love My Body: A Manifesto

Posted on February 24, 2010 by kristinshepherd

Two weeks ago, I recognized myself. Same face, same hair, same body, pretty much, that I’ve had for years and years.

Today I am bald, having shaved my head for a play. And on opening night in said play, I miscalculated a fall from the set and transformed my right ankle and knee into much larger and more painful versions of their former selves.

I look like a pirate now. (Don’t say anything about pirates not being bald or lame for the most part. I’m irritable and impatient.  Some pirates are bald and lame. Let’s leave it at that.)

I have a new compassion for women who are bald for chemotherapy reasons. No one comes up to you and says, hey, you’re bald. No. What they do, after an involuntary bugging of the eyes, is desperately manufacture a close-to-normal face with a tight smile, and then flee.

I have been frustrated with the leg, which is healing at the same pace that glaciers used to advance. My house is littered with tensor bandages, a variety of braces, and a cane which I can never find.

I spend fifteen minutes a day doing one-legged downward dogs, one-legged spinal twists, one-legged forward bends, one-legged planks. I miss two-sided yoga.

This sounds whiny. I know it does. And the whining cannot help me physiologically or in any other way.

So. A brief manifesto.

I love my body. This is not an opinion. It is not vanity.

It is a declaration, a statement of intent, a decision.

Love is a verb.

No matter what I see in the mirror today, I will love this body. It’s where I live, it’s my spirit’s method of transportation, it’s the greatest teacher of some of my greatest lessons, among them pleasure, patience, self-care, loving what is, not caring a whit about the opinions of others, and trusting my own instincts.

I will do my best with this body, knowing that my best changes day to day depending on whether i’m feeling like an irritated pirate or Eckhart Tolle.

And I’ll trust that this body knows what it’s doing, no matter what it looks or feels like, and is always leaning in the direction of being well. Because trust makes me well.  I know it does.

Do you love your body? Could you love it more?

Thanks for the conversation,

kristin

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We are superheroes

Posted on February 6, 2010 by kristinshepherd

I learned how to use a whip today. This may be the only time in my life I get to write that sentence.  I also want to say, if you EVER get the chance to do so, take whip-cracking lessons.  I mean it.  It’s been a long, long time since i had this much fun.

I’m in a play called Waiting For Godot, and I play a guy, Pozzo, who cracks a mean whip.

It’s not as easy as it looks.  So we arranged lessons.

Luckily, I hadn’t given it any thought, so I hadn’t accumulated any reservations about it.

The whip guy was excellent. He teaches weaponry and stage antics (there is probably a more technical word than “antics”, but I don’t know it) full-time as a career. This, by itself, comes as a shock to me. When I was growing up, no one ever said, would you like to be a whip-cracking teacher? Would you like to teach people to fall down stairs without hurting themselves?  Does that sound like fun?

Well it’s fun on the learning end.

I can’t take you through the steps. Don’t even ask. I’d have to kill you if you tried it at home.

In about two hours I progressed from a kind of “thwit” sound followed by the whip wrapping circles around my ankles, to a stronger “thwack” which hit my bum and legs as often as not, to an incredibly satisfying, full crack which apparently is the end of the whip creating a sonic boom.

I learned to circle it over my head like a lasso before the crack, and then to do an impossible-to-describe move used by Michelle Pfeiffer in Cat Woman.

My face was ready to crack from smiling by the end.

Later, i thought, what is it?  Why so much happiness? I didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize or save any rainforest by doing it, but I do feel about forty years younger, now, than i felt this morning.

Maybe that’s the point.  Forty years younger makes me eight years old.  There’s something fantastically healthy about being eight years old in a 48-year-old body, in a 48-year-old mind.  For an hour, i was eight, i was Cat Woman, i was Indiana Jones, i was Zorro.  I was The Force.

I played with all my might at something that doesn’t earn a paycheque, doesn’t take better care of my kids, and doesn’t address the meaning of my life.  Maybe.

I think that’s great health care.  What do you think?  What would do this for you?

I’d love to hear.

Thanks for the conversation.

kristin

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Tough Business, Being Human

Posted on January 27, 2010 by kristinshepherd

There’s a NIM bin across the street from my clinic. I watch people walk by it on the sidewalk. Most people ignore it. Occasionally someone stops to look at its contents.  Once in a while, someone picks something off the top and takes it away.

I watch, fascinated, when this happens.  I think i’m afraid, too.  Afraid of what my life might be like if that were me.  I know i’d be a bit frightened if that person looked across the street at me and saw me staring.

Recently, i met a friend whose dad became a NIM bin aficionado when he retired. It began in a small way, with him seeing what looked like a perfectly good doll of some kind on the top of a bin near his house, and thinking, hey, I’ll bet my granddaughter would like that.

It grew from there. At some point he brought home his first vacuum cleaner. Most vacuum cleaners stop working, he says, because they’re dirty, and people don’t know how to clean them. He cleans them, and gives them to people who might need them. Now, having given his kids and friends many rounds of vacuum cleaners, he tells them to put them out with their garbage if they’re of no use. He also tells them they’d be crazy not to use a perfectly good machine.

His house is filled with vacuum cleaners, toasters, computers, lawn mowers, microwave ovens, blenders, lawn ornaments, and kids’ toys.

This is not a guy who just stops to look at contents. This guy climbs right in. Talk about reducing and recycling.

He’s had a few injuries from falling in and out of the bins. But he’s 70. That happens.

Recently, the cops told him he has to stop shopping in the bins. Who knows why, and it torments him to think of all of that great stuff going to waste, but he’s moved on to blue boxes and garbage cans in his neighbourhood.  He shops at the end of your driveway, now.

On a recent trip to B.C. to visit his son, he took a lawnmower that had been left by someone’s curb. When he got it out of his truck, it started on the first pull. He took it back to the owner’s house. It turned out the guy had gone in the house for a coffee. When he’d come out to finish the lawn, the mower was gone. There were no hard feelings.

The point of this story is not to suggest that every NIM bin shopper is a hobbyist who lives in a comfortable home in your neighbourhood.  It is not even to point out the obvious: that every single one of them is someone’s dad, or mom, or son or daughter, that every single one of them is trying to improve his life or someone else’s, and is helping the planet in the process.

What his story makes me most aware of is that i’m so often afraid, even if it only feels like slight nervousness, of so many things i see during the day: NIM bin shoppers, people who are intoxicated on the street, the mentally ill, angry people, two thirds of what i hear on the news.

It reminds me that i am not “at one” with my community or myself.  Yet.  And this story helps me feel better.

I think we should tell more of these.

Thanks for the conversation,

kristin

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