clearbluecup

Wow, what a busy couple of weeks! Since the end of July we've either had houseguests or been away, and now it's starting to feel like the summer is fading away and plans for the fall are beginning to form. It's been a great summer though. Busy and fun. What did we get up to in the last 19 days, you ask?

- Climbed the Chief in Squamish. As we were preparing to leave Tom said, "it's a short but steep hike, maybe a couple of hours". When we got there I saw a sign that said, "This hike is not a walk in the park," and there was a massive boulder at the trailhead that you had to climb over in order to start the hike. I wondered why they would leave a big rock blocking the trail like that, but as we neared the summit I realized that rock was left there as a filter. If you couldn't make it over that first boulder you wouldn't make it on the hike and you'd be better off to just turn back before you started. We hiked to the second peak, which involved using chains that had been bolted into a rock face to creep up a crevasse and then climb up a steel ladder to the top. Pretty crazy stuff, and Tom was wearing Beatrice on his back the whole time!

Of course, we realized that it is just as hard (or harder) on the way down. We avoided the chains and decided to take another route down, which was slightly less intimidating but still involved an hour or more of slowly and carefully picking our way down a very steep valley. It was the most challenging hike I think I've ever done, but very rewarding.

- The Shambhala Experience. Preparing, packing, driving, waiting, waiting, waiting, cleaning dust out of your nostrils, hauling the (waaay too much) crap we brought with us because we had a u-haul trailer and got carried away packing, setting up, carrying water, trying to keep the dust out of your bed and failing miserably, dancing, eating, hula hooping in the sun, listening to the beats pulsating through the night and fading away each morning, staying up late chatting to people who wandered through your camp, prancing around and playing dressup, ogling everyone else who is prancing around and playing dressup, watching the general state of the attendees go from excited and together to burnt out and zombified, beats stop, pack up, haul stuff, wait, haul stuff, driving driving driving. Phew. Like the Squamish hike, it was exhausting and much more work than I was expecting, but there were some rewarding parts too.

It would have been a far, far better experience if we didn't have to start it all off with an eight hour wait in 30C temperatures in order to get into the festival. I don't know what it is about Shambhala, but the lineups are notoriously bad and this year was no exception. We thought we could beat the rush by arriving at 8am on Wednesday, but it seems everyone else had the same idea. It took us all pretty much a full day to recover from the lineup.

Highlights included:
- dancing at the fractal forest stage on Thursday, as the music was beginning to get going and everyone was still excited and fresh.
- being in the fashion show on Sunday, even though I felt incredibly self conscious and knew I didn't do as good a job as I could have.
- lending my hula hoop to someone who asked to play with it and watching as she pulled out every trick in the book, using MY HOOP. It was pretty cool, and encouraging to know that with some practice my hoop can look that good.
- dancing to the guy from Juno Reactor at the portal on Saturday night. Woop! I love me some good psy.
- receiving compliments from strangers on the clothes I designed and made for myself.
- waking up Monday morning without a hangover. :)

Despite all these fun things, I don't know if I'll ever go to Shambhala again. I certainly wouldn't bring Beatrice again, although I don't think it was a bad or harmful experience for her this year. It's just that camping for five days is hard enough with a baby, and if it's the camping you are going for there are certainly cheaper campsites with better facilities to be had. If you're going for the music and dancing and carefree atmosphere, that experience is curtailed so much by having a child there that it's not really worth the price of the ticket. Maybe it would be easier if we had a babysitter there. But maybe not. And besides, I feel that I'm moving further and further away from that phase of my life, and it doesn't seem like such a high priority to get there just to dance in the sun with lots of other people, you know? I guess I'm just growing up and moving on.

So, this week we unpacked and have been trying to get all the dust out of the stuff we brought. By the time we left, the parking lot was covered in three or four inches of dust that crusted our feet and noses as we walked. SO MUCH DUST. *cough* Another unfortunate outcome of this year's Shambhala is that we lost three pairs of shoes there somehow. Nobody can tell exactly where they went missing, but Tom's good new shoes, his Teva sandals and one of my favourite grey hiking boots are gone. :( How did we lose ONE hiking boot? I didn't even wear them there. I'm really choked about this, and it's going to be at least $350 to replace all those shoes. That makes Shambhala one expensive party.

I'm actually looking forward to a little regular routine now - a short jaunt to the playground in the morning, writing during Bea's nap, playing in the afternoon and watching some Battlestar Galactica after dinner. You have no idea how excited I was to use our running water and pillowtop mattress when we first got back from Shambhala. Oh, the luxury! My regular daily life really isn't so bad.

You know Murphy's Law is in full effect when you start planning to get some creative work done during your baby's two hour naptime...

and your baby starts having 45 minute naps.

Somebody should write a book called Zen and the Art of Mothering. Somebody like me! I will send a memo to Beatrice informing her of her two hour nap obligation and then I can get on with all my writing.

I was meeting some friends; we were going to go on holiday together or something. We met in a hotel, myself and these two women. One was meeting her boyfriend there later, the other was a Samantha type - strong, blond and single. She showed me her resume, which was beautifully written in golden ink on golden paper. A single page of magical glyphs, perfectly arranged and perfectly displayed. I looked at it for a long time, trying to find an imperfection, and all I could see was a faint crease where it had been bent.

I don't remember all the details, and they weren't really important anyway. The girl with the boyfriend had to leave early because of his job - they needed him and so they had to head back. Our holidays were canceled. The woman with the golden resume left too. And I was left behind, with nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Chocolate icing and tissue paper - what else could a girl ask for?

Now that Beatrice is a year old I'm noticing a few things have changed around here. The biggest change? She wants to walk around ALL THE TIME. She is not walking independently yet, so this means our fingers are attached to her hands for balance and reassurance while she is walking. It also means that my back is hunched over and many of my wants and needs are going unmet while we are walking, because she protests any attempts to disengage my fingers by throwing herself onto the ground and wailing. I know this is a short-lived phase, and before I know it she will be walking around everywhere by herself and I will be running along behind her making sure she isn't getting into things she shouldn't. But I am getting a very sore back, and I'm starting to think it wasn't such a good idea to quit yoga.

Most other moms with babies the same age as Beatrice have started going back to work, and I'm noticing that the ages at the baby drop in group have suddenly shifted. Most moms with babies a year old don't come to the group any more, and there are now more babies around the 6-10 month age group. Predictably, this has revived my anxiety about having huge gaps in my resume, missing out on a career and finding value and stimulation in my life while spending my days fighting our fruit fly infestation and walking around the house with the baby 40 times a day.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend, who happens to be a fiction writer, and she was saying that she is looking forward to going back to work part time, just to get out of the house and have a bit of variety. She said that she has a very low tolerance for the mundane, and finds motherhood to be full of it. It's true: motherhood is, on the day to day level, full of dropped raisins and sticky hands, reading The Gruffalo from memory and living one day the same as the next. Of course, on another level motherhood is profoundly magical and meaningful, and it is a miracle to watch this little person unfurl from the tiny seed they once were. But the dirty sippy cups and temper tantrums tend to obscure the magic in the daily experience of motherhood.

I don't know if going back to work would really fix this feeling of anxiety and restlessness I have. It's the same feeling I had when I was working on the phones or slinging coffees and donuts. There is more to life than this. I am missing out.

It is the fear of missing out that is the root of my anxiety, I think. I am afraid I am going to miss my calling. I am afraid that everyone else is going to have a profession and I won't. I feel sure there is some meaningful career out there in my future, but I can't see what it is or how I will get there. I can see glimpses occasionally. I imagine myself sitting in my ideal office, doing my ideal work, which usually involves a room with a view and a beautiful oak desk, writing something powerful and important. But how do I get there?

And then I blink and look around myself. I am sitting at an oak table, looking out at the trees in my backyard, the tiny sliver of mountain view and the construction site next door. I am writing my thoughts as they come. Maybe the view isn't worth a million dollars and the words aren't going to change the world, but it's a room with a view and I'm writing.

The challenge, I think, is to find meaning and value in my daily life, no matter what that daily life is. I am in this particular situation because I made certain choices in the past. I made those choices for a reason, because there is value in what I chose. It is when I forget about the original choice that I start to get itchy feet and fantasize about skipping along to the next thing, the thing that is going to make my life perfect and fulfilling in every way. But in reality it is much harder to stick with my choice and see it through to the end, to keep working away even when it gets boring and mundane. To be still but not stagnant.