NaNoWriMo - Day 5

Yesterday was a difficult day (cf. yesterday's post). The fact that I was writing about a character who had just lost her brother to death made this both better and worse at the same time.

I did, however, make 13k yesterday, putting me well ahead of the official Day 4 goal (6,668). I hit 5k on Day 1, and have been trying to build on that momentum ever since. I am not going to peter out like I did last year.

I've joined a couple of NaNoWriMo Discord groups, and while they don't exactly fill the massive void left by M, they help. It's better than doing it alone, and having everything virtual again this year also helps a lot -- then I don't have to leave the house after a long workday for a write-in; I can just pop in for a sprint here and there while chatting with my husband in between.

I've also been keeping track of my progress in my bullet journal. I made a graph just like the ones they used to have on the old NaNoWriMo site back in the good old days, and I've been colouring in progress bars every day and noting both my total word count and my daily word count. All the stats I ever cared about are all in one place again.

The story is actually moving fairly slowly, which, if I remember correctly, is a good sign. I think most of my better novels felt slow to start (but read back at a good pace later). At least I should have enough plot to make 50k without having to filibuster too much. Right now the hitman is harbouring an eight-year-old girl in his shed, trying to figure out how to get her to safety, and the police detective (the one who just lost her brother) has just decided to go back to her precinct and demand to work again (they told her to take two weeks' bereavement leave but she is having none of it). I haven't even mentioned the villain yet but I've got two central conflicts in motion.

Today is a slower writing day so far though. I haven't done less than 2500 words in a day yet this month, but I was writing mostly in the mornings before work (800-900 words) and on my lunch break (300-400). This morning, my alarm didn't go off so I slept in and didn't get that writing time in so I started the day some 800 words behind and I'm still trying to catch up. I haven't even written a thousand words yet today.

I've never gotten up early to write before. This is the first time I've done NaNoWriMo with an honest-to-goodness job that didn't have a writer-friendly commute built in. I wake up about an hour before work anyway, just so I have time to dress and put my hair up (I work in food service) and eat breakfast. I figured I could write a bit while eating breakfast and man has that ever paid off. I think the reason I can manage 800 words in roughly half an hour (if that) is because my inner editor is still sleeping and therefore my imagination gets away with a lot more than usual. Also, nobody else is up and distracting me/demanding I give them attention. I'm not going to do this on my days off, but it's a good way to get your quota when you work eight hours a day at a job that is not conducive to writing at work.

I'm actually kind of enjoying myself this time around. M still permeates this event for me, and I'm glad in a way. I don't want her spirit to ever leave my mind during NaNoWriMo. As much as it hurts to write alone, and as sad as it makes me, at least I still get to kind of spend time with her ghost every November. I wish more than almost anything that my dream from yesterday would become real and that she would come back and we could write more novels together and dance together more, and I'll probably never stop hoping that, not even when I'm ninety.

But at least this time her memory and the pain of missing her is a help to noveling, and not a hinderance like it was for 2018 and 2019. I'm enjoying the process of writing this time, for the first time since I wrote Kyrie. Maybe writing half-asleep in the morning is helping me get out of my own head and to trick myself into writing without criticising it for not being the next Kyrie. This story has promise, definitely, but it needs to be able to breathe first before I can force anything on it.

UPDATE: Just did a ten-minute sprint, and now I'm at 14,079. Hoping to break 15k by bedtime.

The End Of Yet Another Era...

Last week I found out 'my' dance school (that I attended full time from 2009-2013 and then again 2015-16 and part time until Pandemic) is closing at the end of this month.

It hurts.

I've gone through so much change and upheaval already -- leaving my parents' picturesque house for good, leaving everything and everyone I ever knew, marriage to a man that in all honesty I barely knew before the ceremony... but I held onto that one constant that once the pandemic was over, once we could move out of the literal pit we currently live in (the town is in the bottom of a valley), I could go take Mrs. Clark's ballet class again and I could drive to class listening to White Heart as I looked at the streetlights and drive back home listening to Daniel Amos as I looked at the big dipper in the endless Alberta sky. That hope fueled me through much of this difficult first year of marriage and the pain of being separated from my friends and family back home. And now that hope to relive those wonderful days again, when everything was possible and everything was beautiful, is gone forever. I won't even get to take one last class at that studio. I don't even get to make that drive one last time.

I didn't know my last time was the last time. It's like a sudden death, in a small way.

I essentially quit dancing in the fall of 2019, despite being at my parents' house (read: within driving distance of the studio) due to the damage that my college professors did to me. They convinced me I wasn't good enough to even bother trying, so I stopped. I was too depressed to get out of bed, let alone go to class and feel even more inadequate about my abilities and myself as a person. I remember even texting the teacher and apologising for my patchy attendance, explaining that depression was kicking my butt. True to form, she was completely compassionate and understanding -- she always is. I thought I would come back. I really did.

I did up until last Sunday, when my sister told me the news.

I met M there, among other great people. I got my first pair of pointe shoes there. The teacher graciously watched and gave feedback on multiple choreography pieces I've done -- she even let me teach one to the ladies' class and let my sisters and I perform another in one of their shows. She hired my dad and I to build what turned out to be her last studio space. For most of my teen years, that class was my only joy in life. It quite literally kept me alive more than once. It wasn't just 'dance class,' it was that specific dance class, taught in that specific place by that specific person, surrounded by those specific classmates. It is irreplaceable, and now I can't go back. That dance school was quite literally a part of who I was, and with that gone -- among so many other things I've lost in the past two years -- it feels like my soul is untethered from me, floating aimlessly through space. I have no anchor left for it. I feel lost and alone in a world I don't recognise and never wanted to be in.

There are other dance classes and other studios. But dance will never, ever be the same again.

Music Day - Ten Thousand Lightyears

After the disco/dance/pop reign of Boney M., they took a page from ABBA's book and did some rather more serious and introspective work, and in fact they stuck to it longer than ABBA did. What you hear on the typical 'greatest hits of Boney M. album' is NOT the whole story, in fact, those albums only cover the first (and more frivolous) half of their career.

Perhaps their greatest (and most unrecognised) work is the first half of the album Ten Thousand Lightyears, a song cycle about escaping planet Earth for a better world in a plot that foreshadows Halo (assuming I understand Halo correctly, which I probably don't). This song cycle culminates in the epic title track, a slow burner of an anthem that so perfectly captures the sehnsucht for a better world that only Terry Scott Taylor/Daniel Amos can match that level of intense emotional longing.

The song starts with what sounds like a real live string bass, immediately followed by a slow sparking synth melody, then some gentle, airy percussion. This builds slowly for well over a minute before Liz Mitchell's warm voice soars out over the canopy of stars that the synths have laid out before her, painting a picture of a utopian world ten thousand lightyears somewhere out in space... they practice love and they know what it takes... lightyears away, far from pain... came to a place full of grace and of peace...

And it somehow keeps building. Some lovely harmonies follow, then some soft brass in the chorus. For all the mellowness and heart-wrenching lyrics, this is still very clearly Boney M. -- the percussion still somehow recalls hits like Rasputin.

In the second verse, the dreamer is awakened back into a rude and very not-utopian reality.

Suddenly it's ringing in my ears

Why is it now; I don't want to be here

...how I wish that this dream could go on.

By the second chorus, the voices have doubled into what sounds like a small choir, and the music continues to grow richer and fuller, sprinkled with some pizzicato strings and given added richness and polish with the brooding brass section.

Liz Mitchell is capable of incredible vocal depth and emotion, and by and large Boney M. underexploited this ability (probably the only thing they didn't exploit). One sees it on the infamous Christmas album a little bit, but this song was the best opportunity she had to do it with Boney M. proper and boy, does she ever seize it.

Title: Ten Thousand Lightyears

Artist: Boney M.

Album: Ten Thousand Lightyears

Year: 1984

iTunes here; YouTube here.

Obviously this song resonates a lot with me, as I often feel the exact same way. There is a place beyond the stars where Brittney and M and my cousin all live, and I so desperately want to go, to get away from the pain and abuse of this world. I'm not even thirty yet, but I am so, so world-weary. I understand what old people mean when they say they're 'ready to go.' I get it. I am too. I want to go beyond the stars and rest for the first time in my life -- rest from the constant terror that I'm going to breathe wrong and offend somebody or that I'm going to have someone at my throat because I did the literal exact thing they had asked me to do the day before and rest from knowing every single second of my life that I will literally always be a failure and a disappointment. I want to go there so badly it often brings tears to my eyes.

I'd give all I've got if that's where I could stay...

And I would. I really, really would.

NaNoWriMo - Intro

National Novel Writing Month.

I started last year and petered out before I hit 20k. I was depressed, I was struggling both emotionally and in my marriage, the creative well was completely dry. The two years before that, I hit 50k only by pure determination and I hated every word I wrote. The year before that, I took a hiatus. The year before that, school commitments cut me off at 37k (though I did go back the next July and add enough to push the novel over 50k). The year before that was 2015 and I wrote 50k of a half-decent story in a fog of indescribable pain and grief. The year before that, I wrote Kyrie.

It's been seven years since I was able to enjoy NaNoWriMo. Seven years ago, M and Brittney were both still alive. Seven years ago, the world was pregnant with possibility and I had not yet become this broken, hardened, cynical, angry shell of the vibrant and hopeful person I used to be. Sometimes I wonder if it's even possible to write anymore. That Kate is so far removed from who I am now, and I wish that wasn't so. I miss who I used to be, and I don't know how to go back.

But we're going to try. Maybe that Kate hasn't completely died -- hope springs eternal, apparently.

So, about the story...

I got the seed of the idea from a 'plot bunnies' NaNoWriMo forum AGES ago. I think I still have the username written down somewhere, so that if I ever do publish it I can give credit where credit is due. As it stands now, the plot follows a police detective who's just lost her brother in a drive-by shooting. Said brother frequently volunteered at the youth drop-in centre run by the local megachurch, pastored by a larger-than-life man who has been a pillar in the community for several generations. Police detective is obviously not allowed to work her own brother's case and is instead redirected onto the case of a child reported missing by her foster parents. But the more she digs into the girl's case, the more names she recognises from her brother's life... She begins to suspect that if she can find the girl, she can find out who killed her brother. But of course, she can't take her suspicions to her superiors, because then she'll be taken off the girl's case and won't get another chance to bring his killer to justice.

It's a story with a few big twists. It's also very much in the same vein as my 2016 story -- a modern-day parable following a child who society would rather ignore, highlighting how backwards the world can be... the ones who should care and protect are the villains, and the 'evil' ones do the right thing.

I have a bone to pick with Christian evangelical leadership, and since I've been expressly forbidden to do so with other human beings or on social media, I'm going to do it in my own private novel that nobody will see for approximately 65 years (and that's if I do end up publishing the thing). Writing has long been my only safe place to say how I truly feel about things (that's actually how this blog started), and I guess that's going to continue. Maybe when I'm dead my best friend will send it off to a publisher and then people will understand. Or maybe it's just going to languish on my hard drive and in flashes in this year's NaNoWriMo forums and this blog. It has the potential to be a really good story, but I just don't want to face the inevitable backlash from my in-laws (my biological family has long since gotten used to my 'quirks' and have stopped trying to change me into a hyper-positive Barbie doll because they've recognised that it is literally NEVER going to happen). This story is for me, at least for right now.

I'm still scared to do this without M. I don't know how to write 50k without her (even though I've done it twice). I guess it's more that I don't know how to enjoy (or even have) the wild and crazy process without her right alongside me.

But I've noticed that my choreography after her death took on a richer emotional depth and resonance. They come fewer and farther between, but they are richer and deeper and seem to touch people more. Maybe that'll be the case for my writing too.

Do I think it's a good thing that M died? No, absolutely not. If I had to chose between writing better quality work and having her here, I would chose her. It's not fun to write good quality work all alone.

I have, however, recently joined a couple of NaNoWriMo Discord groups. I'll never, never, ever be able to replace M and her impact on my life, but maybe I can find a couple of comrades here.

I have enough plot. But do I have enough spirit?

Tune in next time...

The Fading Beauty of a Dream-Chapter

We wrapped up another show's run yesterday. Even though I tentatively have another show on the horizon for July, I still feel the dip -- the sense of having nothing to do, nothing to work for. It becomes a big empty pit in my chest so quickly. It's like waking up from a dream -- I was surrounded by people, some friends even, for a month and a half and now in a matter of twenty-four hours, all of that is gone. The bows have been taken, the goodbyes have been said, and the weight of emptiness/loneliness/purposelessness has settled in.

In many ways, you can never go back. There will never be those exact people in the cast together again -- for some, this was their last show with us. Others will join for future shows. But these people, in these roles, in these shows will never happen again. It's well and truly over, and it will never be truly replicated.

I was reading C.S. Lewis' The Weight of Glory the other day, and in it he mentioned how we often can only see beautiful things when they're ending -- the sunset just as it fades to grey, the final cadence just as its echo dies away. I feel this now -- I was a lot snippier during this show's run than I think I ever have been during a performance run, and there were definite moments when I took it out on people who didn't deserve the amount of snark I gave them. Perhaps I'm becoming a jaded struggling artist with years of experience but nothing really to show for it except a reservoir of bitterness. But today, at the cast party, I realised with more clarity just what I've been missing out on -- all these human lives and personalities and idiosyncrasies that I could have been interacting with but didn't because I was scared they wouldn't want me so I thought it better to stay out of the way.

I've had realisations like this before, which brings me more frustration and despair right now because I also realise this is very likely just another one in a long line. After years of isolation and abuse/being manipulated and now the self-hatred that arose from that even though I'm no longer in that situation, I have virtually zero people/conversation skills. Not only that, I have an impossibly high standard of perfection for myself that means the second I feel awkward (as I do when talking to people), I beat myself up about it for not being better at it, not being more confident, not saying the right thing, not keeping my mouth shut when I said the wrong thing... it's easier to wait for people to come talk to me than jump on that merry-go-round of frustration and futility. At least when they come talk to me, they (sort of) have some idea what they're getting into, so I feel less bad about my stumbling. So now we have this situation where I want to get to know people and interact with them and learn their little things that make them special, but I feel paralysed from actually making the first move.

I'm rambling. When I don't know what to talk about/write or how to finish something, I usually start talking about my insecurities in a desperate attempt to help people understand why I am the way I am. I know I find myself better able to interact with a person once I know where their tender spots are so I can tread carefully when I'm getting near those spots. So I assume others are the same, and it continues to surprise me when they get angry about me about giving them this information about myself.

I'm still rambling.

All I wanted to say was that this ending today -- even though I didn't let myself appreciate the cast during the show's run and was grumpy for most of it -- felt like waking up from a dream. It was a chapter in the beginning of my dream life (being a performer), and today feels like the alarm going off and now I have to go to work and push a pencil and for what? a dead-end job with nowhere to go that means anything. I didn't appreciate the dream when I was in it, but I don't want to leave it. As much as I personally struggled with various things, I do truly love the performing arts world and the people in it, even when that doesn't come across (and I wish it did).



What do you see when they finally turn out the light?
What do you hear when the music is stopped for the night?
Is there an answer
Or just a dancer leaving an empty stage?

~ Leslie Phillips, Beyond Saturday Night, 1983.

Music Day - We Walk On

One of the most heartbreaking commentaries on life, maturation, and time that I have ever heard. This song embodies the monotony that I have spent my life thus far striving against. Listen to these lyrics and see if something deep within doesn't whisper (or scream) there has to be more to life than this. It can't just be plodding on from birth to death with little to nothing in between.

But the longer I flounder in this thing called life, the more I fear that this song is right -- this is all there is.

Title: We Walk On
Artist: Tonio K.
Album: Olé
Year: 1997
iTunes here; YouTube here.

Even the guitar seems melancholy.

The song's musical simplicity -- acoustic guitar with the very lightest of organ touches -- highlights a seemingly effortless but nimble and haunting lyric (in the style of Mark Heard, perhaps, or a pensive Rich Mullins). As the hopeless, fruitless tale is spun an electric guitar (very much akin to early Michael Roe/77s) comes in, strident and jagged, moving in fits and starts as if sobbing.

I don't know where the days go
They turn into weeks
They turn into years
Summers turn into Christmas, and they all disappear...

Ramblings on Artists, Depth, and Loneliness

9 January 2017, 9.21pm.

I've been pondering (so what else is new?): I think I'm starting to get an idea of why so many artists commit suicide or get addicted to any number of things.

It's lonely. But not just in that there-are-no-people-around or I'm-always-on-tour-away-from-my-family way. It goes deeper than that. I'm noticing increasingly that people in general don't think deeply -- but I do, and that one difference puts a disconnect between us. I guess I always sort of knew that in the back of my mind... and the fact that since I was a child people have remarked on my (sometimes) acute observations and how 'smart' I am should have tipped me off. 'Smart,' I have learned, is code for 'thinks about deep things.' This, in turn, is code for 'she's weird -- don't hang around her.' Even as a kid I was lonely. I thought it was just because I lived out in the middle of nowhere.

I'm realising, though, that there's this deep-seated loneliness that almost defies explanation. I myself didn't even realise it was there until this school year, though I've certainly felt it all my life. It's this longing to connect, on a soul-to-soul level, to someone, anyone, who thinks about deep things too. Someone who understands why it's important to feel, why we need music and dance and paintings and beauty and stories, what it's like for your heart and soul to ache and not know why. Someone who can see -- at least sometimes -- through my eyes and understand the hollowness that never quite goes away, even when I'm happy and content. This is probably why I have such an obsession with Daniel Amos, David Meece, and Prodigal -- because they saw it too. They feel it too. There are at least three other figures who have ever existed who get it. They can take the words out of my mouth -- and sometimes that is solace enough.

If this is the mind of the typical artist -- if this depth and these feelings are what makes the artist an artist -- no wonder so many of them die young. No wonder so many are addicted to anything that numbs the mind, that turns off these feelings that sometimes seem to hold us hostage whose existence nobody is willing to acknowledge. And suicide -- well, that's the ultimate 'off' switch. But is it really better to live without feeling? It would be easier, yes... but is it really better? This is the question we face more often than we feel we are allowed to admit.

This whole thing is even trickier as an artist with depression. Where does one end and the other begin? What level of deep-seated melancholy is 'normal' and when should I start to get concerned? Am I doomed to spend the rest of my life always seeing the ends of things clearly enough that I can never truly enjoy the beginnings and the middles?

On Losing Childhood and Imaginary Worlds

Over the past week or so I've started realising something. That despite all my vehement protests to the contrary, all the promises made to myself that it wouldn't happen, I grew up.

The other night -- my birthday -- I was watching my younger siblings play in the front yard. They were fully invested in their imaginary world, their story. And suddenly I realised that to them, I was not a playmate. I was not one of them. I was more like a second mother figure, constantly throwing cold water on their imaginations.

When was last time I was so fully invested in a story that everything around me served the story? My next-youngest sister and I had a fictional family living in darn near every tree on our yard, not to mention the trampoline and the playhouse our dad built and in every row of the garden and in the ditch... We could enter that world at the drop of a hat. It would take one second.

When was last time we entered that world? She and I hardly even speak to each other now -- our tastes are so different and it has divided us so deeply. It's a ridiculous thing, I know, but somehow our imaginary world was literally the only thing holding us together. When we stopped entering it -- and heaven knows why -- we stopped talking to each other. Could we find it again? Are either of us brave enough to try? Would we be able to get past the self-consciousness, the petty arguments, this silent gaping rift?

Suddenly I'm not a child anymore. I even made it through two years of college still sort of thinking that I was, or at the very least that the child in me wasn't that far away. That's how subtle it is. That's how slowly it happens. You don't notice it's gone until years after the last foray into the imaginary world. I think last time we were there I was fifteen -- admittedly, that's older than most are their last time -- and the only reason I remember that is because it was somehow a more conscious decision for me to enter that world that time. I pre-planned that day before it happened. I planned the night before that we would play our game. We got into it the same as we always had, but the preamble felt different to me. We didn't just jump in -- it was pre-meditated. It wasn't spontaneous.

What changed? I don't know. Certainly not self-consciousness -- at the time I had exactly zero friends and wasn't trying to impress anybody. I did get a job the next summer. I joined Facebook. I got my driver's license. I was diagnosed as severely anaemic. I went through the worst phase of my depression and nearly committed suicide. Was I really so wrapped up in numbing the pain I was feeling that I forgot about the most effective cure? Did I think it wouldn't work? Or did I truly forget it was available to me? Why did it never occur to me between then and now to try re-entering the story again?

I feel like I cheated her. She's younger than me, and so her last time entering the story was younger than mine.

Or maybe the reason I didn't notice was partly because I did keep connecting to characters -- but they were created by me, for me, not with her. I kept using different personas while writing, and now it's showing up as dancing and acting. Maybe that's why I cling so desperately to my performance dream -- because if I give that up, I have well and truly given up on the childhood I swore I would never completely lose.

If I were to try and join my siblings now, would they accept this new character? Would I accept their world? Do I still have the imagination to narrate myself out of a corner if need be?

The Musical From Afar and Chronic Indecisiveness

28 November 2015, 11.04pm.

Christmas musical weekend at my college. And I'm not there.

I see the pictures from my friends who are still there. I can almost smell the makeup and hairspray and plywood from the set, I can see the spotlights cutting through the artificial fog on the state-of-the-art set, I can still hear the voices of the school's best singers and performers, I can feel the angel robe draping over me, and I can still taste the apples we were provided with backstage.

How many times since I graduated have I dreamed about this place? Literally dreamed -- at least once a week I find myself back in the dorm hallway, overjoyed to be back. Invariably I find a friend or two and am disoriented when I find a freshman in a room that once held someone else. And then I wake up. Suddenly the nine-hour drive I thought was behind me is undone, and I'm still here in Alberta.

It wasn't school itself that I liked. I didn't exactly enjoy finishing out a ridiculously hectic semester by writing four papers in 36 hours. Oh sure, I loved some of the classes (all the performing ones, anyway -- musical theatre workshop and choir and dance and voice lessons), but mostly what I liked was performing. And in prairie Canada, that school was probably the best place to go to cut one's theatrical teeth. If I could go to that college without having to actually take history classes, that would almost be a dream come true -- something so good I might commit to never leaving.

So why am I not there this year? And why am I not sure if I'm going back next year?

First answer: money. College is not cheap. Especially when your $1800-a-semester meal plan is basically unusable to due the horrendous schedule and you end up spending even more money to buy food because you're not actually eating in the cafeteria.

Second answer: dance. Longtime readers know how much I love dance. I thought I could give it up -- and I committed to giving it up for two years when I went to college. Long story short, I didn't have to give it up entirely, but I did have to go from training at Advanced One to taking classes at Grade Three. And I lost a lot of stamina, a lot of technique, and a lot of the joy in my life. I've spent my year in Alberta so far overdosing on dance classes -- I'm currently taking the heaviest dance schedule I've ever attempted and I still feel so far behind my peers who kept training at the advanced level during my two-year absence. The stamina and technique and definitely the joy is back in my life, but the thing is, to return to college, to return to theatre, I have to give this up. Yes, there are some dance classes at the school, but the reality is that for all intents and purposes, I have to give up dance. I have to pick one or the other. I have to either go back to college, back to theatre and the life it infused into me after years of just being a shell and turn my back on dancing or I have to stay here, keep training at my actual skill level in dance and dying inside every time I see backstage pictures from the many performances that the school puts on every year.

I've been agonising over this decision ever since I realised this past semester how much I loved acting. And the pressure only got higher when the people around me, the people in my program and the people in my dorm started telling me that I should stay, that I should continue on for a Bachelor's degree in performing. I didn't know what to do with that. I'd never received such validation -- ever, in anything. Most of the time, people never notice me as a person, let alone any strengths I have.

And I'm going to end up hating myself, no matter what decision I make. It probably won't matter if I pick theatre or if I pick dance. I'm always going to be thinking, what if I had done the other thing...?

Music Day - Say Goodbye To Neverland

If I had heard this song two years ago, this would have been my theme song for the summer of 2013. I mean, not that there's anything wrong with the fact that Vox Humana (*cough* Sanctuary) was the soundtrack to that summer, but this puts into words the entire train of thought that was eating my mind at the time.

No you can't go back
Or defy the clock
Brace your mind for impact
Let your soul absorb the shock...

Sparse instrumentation (actually, this has 'award-winning modern dance' written all over it), and a gentle but sad vocal delivery, as if speaking to a child -- how do you break this news? How do you soften the blow? How do you pick up and carry on, knowing that life is fleeting...?

No you don't have wings
That was just pretend
Blistered feet keep moving
Give your spirit to the wind...

This perhaps sums up the entire mood of the song. I wish you could see the film playing in my mind. Blistered feet keep moving... like a dancer who's lost the fire for the dance, just going through the motions, mere technicality. Give your spirit to the wind... just like everybody else. Sacrifice your hopes, your dreams, your passions, your gifts on the altar of the 9-to-5 job. Let your soul die... nay, take the knife and kill it with your own hand. Only the wind may have it... so say the clones around us demanding that we fit their mould.

Breathe in, breathe out
Heart don't fail
Embrace the moment...

And yet, keep going. Keep going. The sad reminder that tomorrow is not promised to us, and we have to make the effort to enjoy it while we can, before it's snatched away. Add to that the potential for regrets to be compounded upon each other so quickly... It's a heavy lyric, and the chorus is almost a literal reminder to the listener: Breathe in, breathe out... then the plea for another moment, another chance to get it right: Heart don't fail... And then words that sometimes don't even make sense, they slip out so easily and without thought in this age of stock sunsets on Facebook: Embrace the moment...

Title: Say Goodbye To Neverland
Artist: The Choir
Album: Burning Like The Midnight Sun
Year: 2010
iTunes here; YouTube here. Buy directly from The Choir here.

Missing

I just realised that I will never again not be missing someone. Whether it's people in another province or people in another world entirely... I will be missing somebody or someplace for the rest of my life.

When I'm in Alberta, I'll miss the people I worked with at college. When I'm here at college, I miss the people in Alberta. And no matter where I go I will always miss Brittney and Deb.

How do you live fully even though your soul is divided between joy in where you are and longing for where you aren't? How do you live to the fullest when there's always someone missing? I can spend the rest of my life being happy that I'm with 'this' group of people right now, even though others are missing, or I can spend the rest of my life unhappy because no matter who I'm with, somebody's missing.

College has expanded my heart and broken it. Perhaps it's a good thing. But sometimes this world seems unbearably sad.

Time Bubbles

Moving to another province and entering a public schooling system for the first time in my life was... surreal. It felt like I was in a bubble -- that my life in Alberta was 'paused' and I had picked up a life in Saskatchewan that existed in linear time, but not on the same track my time in Alberta had been. (Believe it or not, this is the best way to explain it.)

They were so separate, so easily. In fact, so much so that when my mother and my sister came to pick me up on Thursday (to take me back to Alberta for reading week), it was very jarring to see them in that context. I'm used to my dorm mates walking around the halls and in our room, not my mother and sister. My brain was flashing 'incongruency detected' at me throughout dinner and then as we left the college campus. In fact, it didn't really start feeling normal until we stopped for fuel at Rosetown.

Saskatchewan and Alberta are so different. Saskatchewan has no trees. Even the towns are tiny and they're few and far between. I feel like the town I'm going to college in is one of the larger ones (maybe it's just because you see more people there though), and even their population doesn't reach a thousand. Once you cross the border into Alberta, the difference is almost instant. There's almost this sigh of relief -- civilization! In Saskatchewan, Subway is pretty much the only chain-anything you will see (outside of farm equipment dealers). I spent two months in Saskatchewan and I have yet to see a Wendy's. In Alberta there's one in nearly every town.

But enough about the social/geographical differences.

Coming back home after a two-month absence was kind of odd -- we parked in front of the garage, like we always do, and I grabbed some of my stuff, walked inside and dropped it all on the same spot at the table as I've always done. And as I did so, there was this sense that no time had passed. It was as if the 'Play' button had been pressed, and things were picking up where they had left off. It was like my entire time in Saskatchewan, all those classes and tests I've taken and the people I've met... it was like it had all been a dream, and this was my reality, here, now. And it was odd because I expected these once-normal things to be more foreign to me.

On one hand it was a relief... I was terrified that I would come back to Alberta and nothing would be the same, and I'm glad that wasn't the case -- nothing drastic has changed. But on the other hand it's a little frightening. Two months have gone by (almost). Two months. And it feels like nothing. This calls up the question: how much time has to pass before it feels like something? How much time can be wasted before we start to feel it? The answer scares me... two months between leaving the house and returning to it was as if maybe a couple of hours had passed. What if it's several years before you feel like time has really passed? Or several decades? You could spend decades wasting your life and not feeling it. You could conceivably spend decades inside a certain bubble of time and not realise it until it pops too late.

Seriously, it feels like I never left. Four days after leaving Saskatchewan I'm having a hard time remembering my dorm mates and all the classes as something that really happened, not just a dream I had. It feels so normal and 'right' here. I get the sense that leaving Alberta to finish the semester will be much, much harder than the first time I left...

Music Day - Elle G.

This has been running through my head for a week. As the green leaves turn orange and yellow and swirl around below my window and the grey clouds of the approaching winter hang over town, this song weaves its way around the inside of my head, adding a melancholy melody to the chilled wind whipping my hair around my face.

I miss my family and friends so much. I miss the forays to the mall and to antique shops, having time just to have fun and to slow things down. I miss the laughs of my sisters and the faces of my brothers (and vice versa). I miss going to church and knowing everybody there. I miss driving twenty minutes to anywhere during twilight, alone, singing. I miss the hugs from my three closest friends at church, every week. I miss doing choreography, without the shadowed pressure of 'you know you have a paper to write...' I miss telling my mother everything there is to know about my favourite bands, even though she doesn't seem to really care. I miss working with my dad in the blasting sun on the hottest day of the year, shingling the largest roof in Canada. I miss being able to quote Daniel Amos songs and not having to explain what I'm quoting and why I think it's so dad-blamed funny. I miss saying 'White Heart' and people knowing who I'm talking about. I miss hearing Petra playing from other rooms in the house rather than just mine. I miss having an unobstructed view of the sunset every night. I miss people understanding my peculiar brand of sarcasm.

This song touches the same feeling (though deeper and darker than mine). It is perhaps the most beautiful song the Newsboys ever recorded.

Title: Elle G.
Artist: Newsboys
Album: Going Public
Year: 1994
Label: Star Song
iTunes here; YouTube here. (For interest's sake, listen to co-songwriter Steve Taylor's live take on it here.)

I am comforted slightly by the fact that I still see the dancing. As I listen to this song, I still see choreography in my mind, the way it's always been. I guess I shouldn't be surprised... I've been doing this in my head since I was seven. But somehow I thought that I might lose the capability since I haven't had the chance to choreograph anything since the beginning of August.

I've sort of been singing this song to myself here from myself in Alberta -- you can't imagine the guilt I feel in leaving. Most of my siblings are still so young. I feel terrible for leaving them. Sure, I'll be back for Christmas and for the summer, but what is that? What is that when we will be apart for Thanksgiving and the crucial atmospheric weeks leading up to Christmas and depending when Easter falls (I haven't checked), that too?

Silence all
Nobody breathe
How in the world could you just leave?

I feel like I left everything for this, and the stupid thing is I don't even know why. God called me here, so there must be a purpose, but so far I don't see anything that was worth leaving my family for. Not for two years. The people here are wonderful and funny, but though several of them remind me of my family, they will never replace them.

Thumbs out on a desert road I am told
Leads to nowhere...

Maybe this world is a barren place for a soul
Prone to get lost
But heaven still hounds from the smallest sounds to the cries
Of the storm-tossed...

Music Day

I had this guy's music in my head all day at work... I Want To Be A Clone, On The Fritz, Meltdown... so we're making the small leap from the sarcastic Terry Taylor to the sarcastic (and cynical) Steve Taylor. (I may or may not be a sarcastic person...)

It continues to puzzle me that for as much as I like Steve Taylor's solo material, I only own four of his songs and that's been the number for a long, long time. Why only four? I have no clue. I like quite a bit of his stuff (as heard to YouTube) and iTunes does carry I Predict 1990 and a greatest-hits compilation that actually gives you a decent cross-section of his career to date. Plus, I saw both I Want To Be A Clone and Meltdown on vinyl at the record shop the other day (I didn't have enough cash on me, or I totally would have bought them. Along with the Vital Signs LP (White Heart), the Run From The Darkness LP (Daniel Band), and that Barnabas LP I saw that I can't remember the name of right now).

I like the mood of this song. It makes you think, possibly more than the lyrics do. There's a melancholy hollow-ness in the sound, even as it races past. The sonic story of so many 9-to-5 drones -- once-wonderful and amazing people caught up in the song of little dollar signs floating just out of reach, just beyond 'a little more overtime'...

Title: What Is The Measure Of Your Success?
Artist: Steve Taylor
Album: I Predict 1990
Year: 1987
Label: Sparrow
iTunes here; YouTube here.

Brooding sound, heart-piercing story, haunting question. As for the video, I thought it odd at first, but I just watched it again and it feels like genius now. There's all this big set-up and seriousness, and for what? You'll have to watch the video to find out exactly what, but even the absurdity of it makes a point -- 'you think this is ridiculous? What about wasting your entire life in the pursuit of little pieces of paper?'

Well put, Steve. Very well put.


I know better
Still I run...

Music Day

I've been listening to this song for a week. In a week where the radical shifts forthcoming in my life are threatening to strangle me, this song has been comforting me in a way not much else is. The other night I fell asleep repeating that word to myself -- Changeless, changeless... It was the only glimmer of anything I could focus on that didn't try to crush me with the pain of knowing I might never dance ballet again. My Father in Heaven, who holds my life in His hand, is changeless.

Title: Changeless
Artist: Terry Scott Taylor
Album: A Briefing For The Ascent
Year: 1987
Label: Frontline Records
iTunes here; YouTube here.

A Farther Edge...

I've been putting off writing this. There's a part of me that's excited, but right now the bigger part of me is the part that wants to pretend time doesn't move.

I'll try to condense the story a little... otherwise, you'll be here reading forever.

In February, I found out Briercrest college in Saskatchewan has a dance team. Several years ago I had considered going to Briercrest, but didn't really pursue it. After all, what was the point of blowing four of the best years of my life in some classroom just for some dumb piece of paper that doesn't even guarantee you a job unless it says 'M.D.' on it?

But when I found out they have a dance team... I don't exactly know what happened. It was like an explosion over my life. It was like God was poking me, telling me to go to Briercrest. At first I was willing enough... probably because I didn't think it was ever going to actually happen. I sent the application, and asked God that if He didn't want me there that the application wouldn't even be accepted in the first place. At this point, I didn't care if I was accepted or not.

Then the email came. I had been accepted.

And reality set in.

Did I seriously just apply to blow two years of my life at college because of a dance team? And a hip hop team to boot? Aside from modern/contemporary, that's the one dance discipline I don't do. Plus there's this little matter of my, um... varied (yeah, let's say that) sleep schedule. I'm actually going to have to carve out time to fix myself more substantial food than nachos and salsa (I can cook more complex stuff than that, I just hate all the time wasted on preparing it). And my family -- I wouldn't see them for months at a time...

And then the gut punch. Ballet class.

A hip hop dance team suddenly becomes little comfort when you realise you may never wear your pointe shoes again. I'm a rare bird who actually enjoys dancing on pointe, and it's not something I want to let slide after so many years of working toward it. It doesn't take long for muscle strength to fade, and if I go without for two years, I'll likely have to start from the bottom up again.

As I write this, it's very early in the morning (very early) on Sunday, the second of June. Later today is what I now know is very likely my final stage performance with my ballet school. My sister is also in it -- last Tuesday was possibly the last time we drove together to the dance school for our classes, one right after the other. My mother will have to take her next year. I don't want to leave this. I thought God had called me to dance -- right?

But then, God also allowed me to be accepted to Briercrest. And He ordained that I get a high enough SAT score to confirm my acceptance to the college. Everything is coming together so quickly, almost too quickly... there's so much evidence that God wants me there, for whatever reason. All that's missing is the money, but if God wants me there so much, apparently it's on its way.

I feel like Jamie -- the slippers or the Bible? Is clinging to dance going to be worth sacrificing whatever God has out in the unknown for me? Whatever He has must be good, because He is good. I just can't see it right now. So do I trust Him enough to actually go see? It must be something better than ballet, because God is good. Maybe not more enjoyable right now, but better in the long run...

I keep coming back to the words PFR wrote in the liner notes to their farewell album, The Late Great PFR, in 1997: "God was good when He called us to the road. God was good when He called us home."

It's still the edge of the dream... the plan God laid out for me. It's with different people, in a different place, in a different style of dance than I expected, but it's still His plan. However, at the moment all I can see are the faces of my dear friends who I may not ever dance with again, at least not on this earth.

But if Christ, and following where He leads, is the treasure in the field... how can I not go and 'sell everything,' even dance, for the greatest treasure? (For those who are puzzled by this: it's the concept laid out in Matthew 13:44 in the Bible -- '...the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.')

As I type this, I can barely see the screen due to brokenhearted sobbing. Ballet, and the people it connected me to, were such a huge, huge part of my life. How can giving this up possibly bring me anything better? I don't know, but whether I like it or not, I have to say God is good. His plan must therefore be good.


Changeless breaks the tide to shore
Changeless are the times and seasons
You are the same forevermore
I will keep these changeless reasons...
No shadow of turning falls
No promise is broken
No, nothing can turn my heart
From the words You have spoken
Changeless Your love
Deep as an ocean
-- Terry Scott Taylor, 1987

And should you come into the promised land
Remember
Remember
From where you came
And if your greatest fears are realised
Remember
Remember
Your sanctuary
-- Daniel Amos, 1984

Music Day

I hadn't actually paid much attention to this song -- after all, on the album it's preceded by Bye Bye Babylon, Sing Your Freedom, and Let The Kingdom Come; three of the best White Heart songs ever, one right after another. By the time you've listened to all that you're reeling from the sheer epicness of it all and your brain takes some time off to process it, thus mostly missing the next couple of songs.

But the other day I really heard this song for the first time.

And my reaction was... wow. Just wow.

Such emotion. Such honesty. Such raw vulnerability.

You can almost see Rick looking in the mirror as he sings that line... I look into the mirror; Have a silent fear; There is no-one really there... He nailed this song. Absolutely nailed it. He captures the apprehensiveness so perfectly.

Title: Eighth Wonder
Artist: White Heart
Album: Freedom
Year: 1989
Label: Sparrow Records
iTunes here; YouTube here.

I've been thinking about me
Wondering who I am
Trying to be somebody
Wondering if I can...