Some books are worth acquiring simply for the title; It’s OK That You’re Not OK, by Megan Devine, is one: being released from the pressure to be OK is a great gift.

Devine’s central thesis regarding grief boils down to “you’re fucked up, get used to it” or, more gently, “grief isn’t something you recover from, get over, or move through, it’s something you learn to carry.” Despite how depressing that seems on first reading, it’s liberating metaphysics for someone in my position.

Our culture sees grief as a kind of malady: a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible. As a result, we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like. We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support. Even our clinicians are trained to see grief as a disorder rather than a natural response to deep loss. When the professionals don’t know how to handle grief, the rest of us can hardly be expected to respond with skill and grace.

Reading the book unlocked a realization of just how much I’ve been trying to shape an “I’m OK” narrative, with deep hope that it would be true (or might become true on repeated telling).

On a personal level, repressing pain and hardship creates an internally unsustainable condition, wherein we must medicate and manage our true sadness and grief in order to maintain an outer semblance of “happiness.” We don’t lie to ourselves well. Unaddressed and unacknowledged pain doesn’t go away. It attempts to be heard in any way it can, often manifesting in substance addiction, anxiety and depression, and social isolation. Unheard pain helps perpetuate cycles of abuse by trapping victims in a pattern of living out or displacing their trauma onto others.

Writing I am not OK makes me feel like such a failure.

But it’s also such a relief.

I think I found the best hole on the Island.

It was an unseasonable 14ºC today, sunny with just a little wind, and so I took the opportunity to cycle my canoe out to Andrews Pond for one last paddle before winter.

It turned out to be a lovely day for it: just the right temperature for a more-grueling-than-everyday bicycle ride that’s mostly-uphill on the way there, calm enough on the water that I didn’t get blown around a lot.

I’m not a strong cyclist, and towing the canoe out to East Royalty remains at the edge of what I feel physically capable of; it’s good training for the mind, however: the last push uphill from Kensington Road to St. Peters Road is hard and the only way I can do it is to avoid thinking of the destination and, instead, just focusing a few metres ahead of me.

Autumn on Andrews Pond has a whole different feel than summer: the leaves are falling, the ducklings of summer are now full-fledged ducks, the sun hangs lower in the sky.

My gift to the pond today was to fish an Island Coastal traffic cone from the bank and load it into the canoe. I left it at the dock for them to pick up.

I’m still finessing the canoe-wrangling part of the process: it’s relatively easy to get the canoe into the water and out of the water; getting it back on its trailer is still something that takes a lot of fussing and cursing.

Beyond the joy of the cycle and the paddle, cycling along Riverside Drive towing a canoe continues to bring joy simply from the reaction of others: some are blasé, some do a double-take, some honk their horns in solidarity, and one person stopped their car on the side of the road and shot video.

Feeling confident paddling a canoe solo has been one of my great personal accomplishments of 2021, both on the metaphorical and practical levels. I look forward to getting back on the water next summer.

Fifty years after Canada moved to adopt the Metric System I’m still buying butter by the pound.

In the fall of 1989 my brother Steve and I found ourselves in the lineup for the premiere of Roger & Me standing in front of Steven Page and Ed Robertson from Barenaked Ladies. The band was less than a year old at the time, and hadn’t yet broken, but somehow we knew who they were; as a result, I’ve always felt kind of like I went to high school with them. Even though I didn’t. 

The band’s Odds Are escaped my attention when it was released in 2013, and so I’ve had the chance this week to treat it as the gift of a brand new song.

Struck by lightning, sounds pretty frightening
But you know the chances are so small
Stuck by a bee sting, nothing but a B-thing
Better chance you’re gonna buy it at the mall
But it’s a twenty-three-or-four-to-one
That you can fall in love by the end of this song
So get up, get up
Tell the bookie put a bet on “not a damn thing will go wrong”

It has all the hallmarks of a great BNL song: witty (but not too witty), tightly written, catchy hook. The kind of song it’s hard to get tired of.

Meanwhile, the great May Erlewine released a new concert video this week, recorded in September in Traverse City, Michigan. She opened the concert with these words:

It’s so nice to be here together, and I know that we’re different than before, and I’m happy to meet this one of you.

And it’s by some great hand, or by will, and by heart, that we made it here.

And I don’t know how we can talk about time, because it falls away with each word, and then it’s already gone.

And so the story it begins.

It belongs, and it lives in us.

Here we are.

I don’t know why I find those words so affecting, but I do; they bring tears to my eyes on each listening.

One of the highlights of the concert–and it’s not everyone who could pull this off–is a cover of Dolly Parton’s Here You Come Again, which Erlewine introduced like this:

So I also made a record, and some T-shirts to go with it, with my friend Woody, and we got together and we wrote a bunch of songs, and the album was released during the pandemic, which was unfortunate but it was a nice lovely, album to put out there.

And when we were writing the songs I was very intentionally not in love, and you know, as a hopeless romantic, that’s a feat, and so I fall in love every day, all the time, but I was feeling like I needed a break, and so what better way to take a break, than to write a bunch of love songs, and so I kind of feel like with me and love it’s like I’ll be doing good, just minding my own business, doing my own thing, and then love shows up, and it’s just like that Dolly Parton song, you know that Dolly Parton song, it’s like this…

Being a hopeless romantic, and being “very intentionally not in love,” both are things I can identify with.

Listen to the concert: you will not regret it.

I don’t feel like I went to high school with the members of The Wailin’ Jennys, partly because they seem like they’re all a generation younger than me, and partly because they seem one of those rare bands that organically sprang out of nowhere, a band that I seem to have always been vaguely aware of, yet know nothing about. (As an example of this lack of knowledge: when we saw The Small Glories play in Victoria in 2018 I had no idea that one half of that duo, Cara Luft, is also one third of The Wailin’ Jennys).

Which is to say: also on repeat this week has been their Beautiful Dawn.

Teach me how to see when I close my eyes
Teach me to forgive and to apologize
Show me how to love in the darkest dark
There’s only one way to mend a broken heart

That’s a good song for a hopeless romantic.

I was left with a Darcie Lanthier Green Party lawn sign after the fall federal general election, and opted, instead of recycling it, to use it to cover a hardbound Coptic-stitched book.

Five years ago today Catherine headed to Spain. The trip was something of a miracle, an oasis in the middle of cancer-times that, despite myriad worries about myriad things, turned out wonderfully.

She was gone, after extending the trip mid-stream, for almost a month, starting in San Sebastian with our friend Cindy for the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, then on to Seville, and ending in Bilbao.

Her last week in Bilbao was, by all reports, transcendent: she was befriended by the owner of a high-end clothing boutique, and through that connection introduced to a fascinating slice of the city’s creative class. She ate tapas at every turn, spent time at the Guggenheim, and just wandered and wandered.

There were more reasons not to take that trip than there were reasons to go, including that she had only the most basic travel medical insurance, and that her back was in constant severe pain. But it was something she needed to do; I think we both knew it was going to be her last great trip, and, despite the challenges, I think we both knew from the beginning there was no way she wasn’t going to do it.

Here at home the trip served another role, a preview, of a sort, for the inevitable time when Olivia and I would be living on without her. It was a trial by fire, but we did it, and in doing the fear of what life would be like after Catherine died was lessened just a tiny bit: we knew we could survive, at least logistically, on our own.

I arrived at the stable this afternoon to learn that Ashley would be my instructor today, overseen, in the background, by Jackie, who I’ve been working with since I started.

As I’ve found with therapists, no matter how good they are, sometimes a change is helpful, and this was certainly the case with Ashley: I learned a bunch of new things from her, sometimes because they were simply stated in a different way, sometimes because, having come to riding more recently, they were things she’s had to learn (or reverse engineer) herself in recent memory. And having Jackie there too reminded me of the larger trajectory, and of the things she’s always helpfully reminding me of.

I’m almost at the stage where I’ll be comfortable fetching Tye from the paddock, leading him back to the stable, grooming and saddling him, and being ready to ride. There are still a few rough edges, but I’m feeling more confident every week (and the every week has been key to this, as a fortnightly cadence was giving me too much time to forget).

Riding itself continues to be a grand adventure in humility, punctuated by small victories. When Tye and I are in sync it feels transcendent; when things go awry, more often than not I realize it’s because I’m being unclear, or I’m looking in the wrong direction, or I’m being too heavy on the reins, or my head is simply elsewhere.

No matter what I’m worried about when I arrive at the stable door, there’s simply not enough spare space in my brain to worry about it while I’m riding, and the halo of that extends for the rest of the day.

I had no idea about any of this when I made my first very tentative visit to Venture Stables in June, a visit I’d assumed would be a one-time thing. Thank goodness they asked me when I wanted to book my next lesson

Jane Robertson from the CBC was recording a segment on The Shed today, and I volunteered to provide the voice of the satisfied customer for the piece. It will air sometime next week.

Mary Margaret O’Hara is indeed a treasure.

When You Know Why You’re Happy, from her 1988 album Miss America, is but one stunning example.