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.

I told a friend of mine yesterday that I felt like I might be addicted to adrenaline, that I feel antsy unless there’s an ever-present thrum of looming disaster, and if one doesn’t present, I’ve become good at conjuring.

She helpfully recharacterized this not as an addiction, but rather as simply what became normal during the exigencies. In the calm of the hereafter, everything seems just so, well, calm. It’s disquieting. And antsy.

At the start of improv class tonight—yes, I went back!—we were asked what we hoped to get out of the evening, and I told the group that I wanted to experiment with intentionally seeking adrenaline as an alternative to having it awkwardly leak into my workaday life.

I reasoned that if I could ride the improv tiger, I might lessen both the unwanted appearance of the tiger at 3:00 a.m., and the unintentional introduction otherwise of the tiger into situations where tigers clearly don’t belong.

It’s too soon to tell whether this works, or even makes any sense, but I can say that I did achieve a certain level of ecstasy tonight, a brief few minutes where I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing, I was just doing it, listening to a different part of myself than I usually listen to. That was amazing, and worth the expenditure of gumption it took to get me to the stage.

I realized tonight, as well, that learning to ride horses and learning improv are more alike than I imagined: both involve trust, the giving and receiving of gifts, and being willing to be vulnerable in the face of greater forces.

There have been a few times I’ve been riding Tye the Horse when I’ve achieved an ecstasy similar to that I felt on stage tonight, a moment when I felt like I trusted Tye, and Tye trusted me, and we did something truly together.

And perhaps that is the key to confronting the tiger: finding ways of connecting, of finding togetherness, and learning to trust in the possible beauty of what comes next.

As he related to NPR in 2009, Steve Wozniak once placed a telephone call to the Pope.

In 1986 I produced a community radio segment consisting entirely of my (futile, but compelling) attempt to telephone the Kremlin; the loss of the cassette of that in a house robbery some years later is something that still smarts.

The Widow We Do Now? podcast continues to be an important source of support, solace, and inspiration. Last week’s episode featuring Constance Dahlbäck was particularly affecting, both for her reflections on life with her late partner, and on the life she’s living now.

The podcast has a companion private Facebook group, the “Widow Wives Club,” that has proved similarly helpful: having a space to blargh into, a space that’s safe, non-judgemental, and filled with people who know the terrain, that’s saved my emotional hide more than once over the last year.

A few days ago I posted this in the group:

I’ve realized recently that the process of supporting Catherine through 6 years of living with, and ultimately dying from, cancer made me feel like I was 75 years old: all that time in hospitals and hospice, all that fragility, all that ever-closer end.

But I’m not 75 years old, I’m 55 years old. And getting a handle on that, and remembering how to do that, that’s a thing.

Does anybody else feel this way?

This was a thought that emerged in a session with my therapist last week, a new conception for a discontinuity-with-everyone-else I’d been feeling for a long time.

The reaction to the post warmed my heart: I thought perhaps this was something I was uniquely feeling, but from the many replies starting with “YES!!” and “Every waking hour” and “Absolutely!” it seems like I put words to something many who spent a long time supporting a partner with an incurable illness experienced.

I met Catherine when I was 25; to emerge from the DeLorean of grief at age 55, after having spent a long season feeling 75, well, who the hell am I anyway?

I guess figuring that out is what’s next.

Through this WWF panel discussion at COP26 I was introduced to Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Co-President of The Club of Rome, and seeking further context I found my way to her presentation on the 1.5-Degree Lifestyles Report. From her talk:

I would like to first start by reminding everyone that actually a lot of this discussion already started in 1972 with The Limits to Growth, and I just want to read something that I think is absolutely fundamental when we talk about systems change and lifestyle change, which was already said and pronounced in 1972 by Donella Meadows:

“People don’t need enormous cars, they need admiration and respect; they don’t need a constant stream of new clothes, they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty; they don’t need electronic entertainment they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotion…”

While there’s a back-to-the-land quality to Meadows’ words, the larger notion that when we’re looking at systems change we should be looking at the fundamentals, not one-for-one replacement, remains vital.

This is, for example, a place where the shift to electric vehicles needs a closer look: we tend to look at this issue as “we need to replace our bad cars with good cars,” when we would be better served by framing the issue as “we need a way of getting from place to place” (or, even better, by asking “do we really need to get from place to place so much?”).

The Club of Rome played a larger-than-life role in the environmental history of Prince Edward Island; as the late Andy Wells told me when I interviewed him in 2009:

The first thing I came across was a videotape of the Club of Rome, and I persuaded [Premier] Alex [Campbell] to bring his whole cabinet together and to come down and sit in the viewing room and we played this video, and Alex converted immediately; he understood the problem. 

From Wade MacLauchlan’s biography of Premier Campbell, Alex B. Campbell: The Prince Edward Island Premier who Rocked the Cradle:

The economic positions that Campbell articulated as early as 1967 can be seen as a quest for local specificity, viability, esteem and quality of life. He promoted a vision for Canada’s national economy based on competitive and complementary regional inputs. His practical quest was for self-reliance for Prince Edward Island and the Atlantic region. In philosophical terms, Campbell’s arguments were a forerunner of debates about globalization that dominated the 1980s, or ongoing debates about the environment and limits to growth.

Campbell’s quest for “local specificity, viability, esteem and quality of life” finds echoes in The 1.5-Degree Lifestyles Report:

The focus of this report is on lifestyles and climate change. Lifestyles embrace much more than just consumption patterns and behaviours. Lifestyles include non-economic aspects of our lives, such as caring for children or elderly parents, spending time with our friends, play, engaging in voluntary work, activism, or supporting a local campaign or political party. All of these potentially affect, directly or indirectly, our well- being and our carbon footprint. Lifestyles are how we consume, and also how we relate to one another, what kind of neighbours, friends, citizens, and parents we are, what kinds of values we nurture, and how we let those values drive our choices.

These issues are largely missing from recent local political discussion of climate change mitigation and adaptation, which has primarily focused on the technical aspects of lowering GHGs, and has not taken a larger view of the lifestyle changes that will necessarily underpin the societal transformation we should be in the midst of right now if we’re going to meet our climate commitments. The depth of the political discussion rarely strays beyond “things can stay much the same, just with heat pumps and solar panels and bike paths,” and almost completely absent is a drive to seek consensus on how we will spend the much, much smaller carbon budget we’ll have in a just fashion.