A Shiny, Resilient Hold

Our suffering, our deaths, our births. Our rituals. It is not our acceptance of the falling apart, but our embrace of entropy, that breathes for us. We are maintained in our emotional homeostasis by our rituals.  It is, as we are taught by our small heroes in Lord of the Rings, the small and everyday things that keep great evil at bay. Our rituals teach us how to change through their consistency. Two years ago now, a close friend passed away. Her body gave in to a Probability--an unlikely cancer--and she slipped quietly from our physical world and strikingly into the world of rituals. She became a death ritual.  I want to talk about the death ritual because it’s something we’re all going to encounter and embrace at some point in our lives. It’s a hard and rocky fact that as we age, the body count will only get higher. You can’t undo loss and you can’t undo experience, and you can’t learn from death and keep it from happening. You just have to see it and then figure out how to l

The first time I ever thought that I might be attracted to women was when I was fourteen. I was in a hot tub with friends, we’d been having drinks, and one of the girls in the group leaned over and kissed me. It was hot. I mean the actual temperature; it was hot, and steamy, and she tasted like mint, and all of this, despite its fairly obvious connotations in hindsight, felt exclusively like a tremendous amount of confusion mounting up inside of me, overwhelming the experience in general. I was a teenager in a fairly accepting environment with not a lot of solid ground. Unlike my friends who were proudly (and of course nervously, and bravely) coming out as gay, or lesbian, or trans, I had not “picked a side”. I knew that I was attracted to men. And now it seemed I was attracted to women.  I was left wondering if maybe I’d missed something; did I just think I was attracted to men because that was the norm? Could my head really do that to me? Or maybe, everyone felt the way I did a

My family is a patchwork quilt. Pieces of age and youth, and seasons (of engagements and winters and babies), of lives, of hand-me-down overalls and personalities, carefully stored in the oak chest. Together, we map and hold the scraps. Stories and history all tied together. Friends join in with spare thread. Colours clash, Smiles crack, and finally it is a defender-- the armor of movie nights the tent of the young the greeter of visitors the spouse of nervous nights. My family is a patchwork quilt.

December brings about a vibrant display of emotional and community events in many of our lives. It is a time of remembrance and reflection; we find ourselves sitting with friends, or alone pondering those close to us who have passed. We reflect on what our history means--the choices we have made march their way across our dinner plates and through our everyday conversations. And as the days grow darker, there is a pull, a tugging that allows the sense of the many things outside of our personal sphere closing inwards, taking the control out of our hands, sweeping into our community conscious.  And so in this sense of reflection, and during this time of communities coming inward, I think about what drives us forward into this season. I come to the conclusion that our lives, each of them, is made up of Christmas stories.  Now when I say “Christmas stories,” I mean those personal experiences which linger in us and lengthen us, those which involve the miraculous. I’d argue that each