ola. gracias.

so i just landed after a week's vacation. there is a definite change in me, i dreaded landing in winnipeg again. my to-do list is so very very long and i don't know if i will be able to tackle it.

it was so nice being unconnected from the world...no internet, no phone for a week. i felt disconnected, but still loved and supported by all of the fantastic people out there who know me.

'twas a very good feeling and i am already longing for this simplicity again

my soul longs for a simple life, one where everyday isn't full of undoable tasks and where rest is just as much of a priority as changing the world is

where i count my health and own fulfillment as important as my advocacy work

where i value a leisurely walk outside as much as i value marching in the streets

someday i will get there . . .
gotta get this guilt monkey off my back first though

jeanette winterson is my hero.

Atlas was afraid.  His future was at the ends of his fingers, and too heavy to be moved. - Weight, Jeanette Winterson

i want this.

Real power is usually unspectacular, a simple setting aside of fear that allows the free flow of love.  But it changes everything.  - Martha Beck

recent learnings

ok, wow.
well, a flurry of comments, not on the page but in my inbox. interesting. nobody wants to talk about love publicly?

so, let me expand on my post below for fear you'll think me a heartless woman

i do believe that love CAN. i think love CAN be transformative. that it can change lives, cross boundaries, unite people at our very cores. i believe that love can be the most powerful powerful thing in the entire world. i have experienced it.

what i no longer believe is this idea that love conquers all, or that love will always win in the end. yes i think it can and should. but often doesn't. fear is a more powerful motivator than love and often kicks love's ass. love is so powerful it is frightening.

love can only conquer all in the context of a committed choice to stand firm through the scaryness.

to recognize this power and this fear and choose to stay in one spot regardless.

anyway.

head purge

hello friends
my head is spinning with so many things! help me get them out. so here's my list for today.

moving - wow. everytime i move i feel so loved loved loved. so many people offering to help out doing really really terrible tasks like packing my crap, moving my crap, unpacking my crap, and then cleaning my bathroom. what the heck? friends are fantastic.

related...its sort of an emotional ride because it is easy to feel alone when you are unpartnered and doing something depressing like moving and feeling that the entire burden is on you. this is also how i feel about money issues and other things - like i can't share this burden with anybody else and carry it by myself. moving reminds me how NOT alone i am. that there are so many wonderful people waiting and ready and volunteering to chip in. i still get surprised. what? you want to come on a sunday afternoon and clean my bathroom? really?
it makes me realize i am not alone at all, and so very very fortunate. thank you for the reminder, friends!

the other day i told somebody that i didn't really believe in love. she almost fell off her chair, which was sort of funny, and then she was further disillusioned when another colleague agreed with me. that was sort of funny, but also sort of shocking to hear myself say it outloud. i think i need to figure this out maybe. is love a choice or a force?

check out geez magazine - this is one of my contracts! it's fun and weird and full of fantastic people. so i'll probably be mentioning it here once in awhile. as a refresher i also work here, and also as a research assistant for the UofM.

my bachelor apartment is so full of crap i literally have to walk over things to go to the bathroom and out the door. i had to pee sideways because there's a huge plastic box in front of the toilet. apparently i have a lot of useless crap. moving is a time to purge! makes me excited, but i probably should have done it long ago, or not let this accumulation happen at all. really, i don't need a ferengi head on my shelf. anybody want to take it off my hands?

ok i love you bye bye!

this makes no sense

It is becoming increasingly obvious that i have no idea how to approach life.

I keep having this haunting feeling that everything i am doing i am doing wrong. i am trying to find strength in being myself but seem to always screw that up. i feel paranoid. when i speak from a place of vulnerability i feel childless and stupid. when i speak from a place of strength i feel i am putting up walls and barriers to people. i am very aware of when i am trying to impress people and i HATE that. but do it all of the time. i have been super judgmental of others lately and like to belittle and feel superior. that sucks. and is because i feel so inadequate lately in all of my tasks and jobs. i love being dramatic for attention but hate that i resort to that garbage just to feel good about who i am.
it feels like everything i do i regret or second guess. i should have tweaked that grant proposal. i should have taken the earlier bus. i should have not said that. i should have said that. i should have worn those pants. stupid stupid stupid things.
i am mad and tired of this circle. is this a common thing? do you get caught in this trap?
maybe its because my life feels so out of control. maybe its because i work 12 hour days. its probably because i have a million commitments and am terrified of dropping the ball and disappointing people.
ya thats it.
how do you find your core? and when you find it how do you stay there? and when you stay there how can you be comfortable with yourself?
advice please.

another one.

My experience has led me to believe that only by wholly entering, wholly feeling, wholly inhabiting other people and experiences, are we brought to any happiness and security.  Only by allowing ourselves to see what we already see and know what we already know are we freed from depression and ennui. - Eve Ensler

a difficult lesson

Freedom can come only from contemplating death, not from pretending it doesn't exist.  Not from running from loss but from entering grief, surrendering to sorrow. - Eve Ensler, Insecure At Last

scared of real life again. watch out - bad words here.

and i sit and i wonder who i am how i am and what i a feeling and where is Jeanette Winterson when i really need her? i am abandoned without a path or particular inspiration where am i going and what has happened to my purpose my sense of joy my inherent deep and prolonging knowledge of who i am and who i want to be? fuck. and fuck you. you apocalyptic horseperson full of pestilence and disease stop this relentless pursuit of my being and my personhood. why so much self-doubt? and when will it become self-pity? and what response will that bear why do i depend so much on your opinion of who i am and my loveliness to feel that i have a cosmic beautiful calling one above this world and flying solo high above this beach with both abandon and extreme caution and a scorpio carefully chooses her victims. but i am the target of my own poison, my divinely inspired hauntedness uncertainties and beauty i am beautiful but torturedly so. needing a head pat and a kiss on the cheek once in awhile. i am strong and confused beautiful gifted precise longing longing and tears and joy laughter and DSCs too many even and in want of a real home roots which run as deep in my home as they run through my heart and my body and soul a place to make soup and tea. you can come over and i can show you who i am in ways never before offered. that wasn't meant to be sexual; it is genuine and at face value a gift i want to give to you from me. my still waters run deep and trusted souls are invited to share with me, haunted and unsure blocked out faces and ghosts around every corner whom shall i trust? where is the divine when i fucking need her? lovely. i want to be lovely. or moreso recognize my beauty without a pat on the head anymore. i am fucking strong deep lovely gifted. and will everyday change grow learn wisdom and stature - just look at my church certificate proof i am growing changing never ever forget love

*copyright Bre 2011

stuck

hello friends

so...i missed posting last week. caught that flu that's been going around. Day 10 and i am still not completely ok.

wow, life changes fast sometimes. it feels like this entire year has been one large soap opera with dramatic things happening almost weekly. its kept my counsellor on her toes, i'll tell you that.

i've been in a really good space lately - really healthy and working through some past issues and past hurts which have been negatively affecting me. big things which have been haunting me for years, sometimes decades. i feel so stuck in these sometimes. i spent a day right before Christmas just praying and meditating - wow, its been a long time since i've done that. It was so good for me and brought a lot of clarity and healing and even forgiveness towards a situation i've been struggling with for a very long time.

i don't really know how to live this life. i wish i did. these patterns of small victories and major setbacks feels like it is getting very very old.

who the hell am I? maybe 2011 will bring some clarity.
probably not.

not very christmas-y, but whatever.

Freedom can come only from contemplating death, not from pretending it doesn't exist.  Not from running from loss but from entering grief, surrendering to sorrow. - Eve Ensler, Insecure At Last

well. here ya go.

a gentle reminder . . .

Everything seems new if you are ignorant of history. - Rick Warren

pressure cooker

it is a tricky thing sometimes to know what to post and what not to post; which struggles should be dealt with alone and which should be dealt with in community.

i think i may need help on this one.

i want to talk about my greatest fears, my greatest hurts, my greatest embarrassments, my greatest joys. i want to live an unabashed open life and to be unapologetically myself, with both pride and humility in my character's strengths and flaws. i want to be able to lay my fears out and pretend that i don't struggle with them alone, that i don't try to hide them anymore but find strength in unmasking them within my daily actions and reactions. i want to be able to actually love my quirkiness as much as i pretend that i do. i want to embrace myself in a way which honours and adores the beauty within my soul and my struggles and my shortfallings.

i want to not sound crazy when thinking of you all reading this.

i miss the mark in so many things, in so many ways. i want so badly to stop feeling that i need to be perfect, to not feel that daily pressure to do everything in the exact right way. i want to know that the world won't crash if i make a mistake. i want to know that i am loveable just as i am.

i want the freedom to act thoughtlessly just for one moment without feeling guilty or fearful.

Breaking bad habits, bad thoughts. Slowly methodically painfully. one step at a time...

spreading my angst around the province

so i was a guest on CBC Manitoba's weekend morning show last sunday - listen to part 3 here!

Topic was "church shopping." Though i sort of cringe at that term, I think it turned out pretty well.

Be well, dear readers/listeners!
Bre

cherished

i want a purple picket fence and a sense of stability. i want to throw caution to the wind. i want. i want to live this life as much as i can and to live myself as much as i know how. i want to draw lines around myself when appropriate. i want to let those lines down when appropriate. i want to know the difference. i want to be cherished. i want to be held gently, to not question who i know myself to be. i want to give myself grace. i want to know truth and speak it and live it. i want to be known. i want to be known. i want to grow where i am planted. i want to control things which i cannot; i want to be in these children's lives unconditionally. i want to stop living under this cloud. i want a hamster. i want to fly. i want to be less selfish and less confused. i want to live joy. i want you to see me, and know that i am enough.

emptyish

i've got nothing today that i have the freedom to blog publicly. sort of a horrendous week. ugh.

here's a cartoon to lighten the mood; copyright info included.

why do i do this to myself

so i posted this on FB this week, and have felt pretty naked and uncomfortable ever since. so here it is (slightly edited for mass cosumption), for the world to see. it was in response to some questions by a friend.


so i have this button that says Trust God but Question Religion. if i had a mantra right now in my life it would be that. that's where i am at, completely.

the bible was written by people at the top of the cultural hierarchy, for people in top of the hierarchy, mostly to support their ideologies. so it makes me mad. but there is some truth mustard-seeded within, here and there, so everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt i think and we can't discount the truths that may lie within just because some oppressive dude said it.

i beleve in the person and work of Jesus - i hold onto that. and i find meaning in that, though it is excrutiating and time taking and takes a lot of faith to sift through the cultural patriarchy and other things to really get to the real person of Jesus and what she stood for. but i still hold onto that person with my life - maybe an emotional need. but my life has been saved more than once within this belief and in this trust with this person-God who i don't actually understand or comprehend but hold onto dearly for meaning. and i find meaning within communities which struggle with these things too - SCM type communities - who wrestle with the inherent oppression found within Jesus, the bible, christianity and who struggle and cry together in this pursuit of some meaning in this upside-down life. they are hard to find, but they are out there. and give me hope and reasons to continue on with it.

this faith gives me hope. there is something inside of me which does not accept that what we see is everything that is going on. i want to pursue the erotic joy which audre lorde writes about in all that i do and all that i am (please read the article so that you understand my non-creepy use of the word erotic here). i have experienced and believe something very very very good and loving exists which we can't see, but we can FEEL. that is what i pursue. it is both my strength and my weakness, my tool and my crutch. it sustains me and kills me at the same moment. and what is more erotic than that? carpe diem. especially when the future is so uncertain.

up and down and up #2

so this is inevitably how every blog posting and academic paper i write go;

i sit and struggle and try to push myself as hard and as far as i can go
i write it down
i normally think it brilliant and super perceptive
i post it/hand it in
a day later i read it and freak out because i think it sounds the stupidest thing in the world and feel embarrassed about ever saying those things and surprised that i still have friends/teachers who respect me at all.

it is a cycle which has become sort of funny to me. is all part of the process i guess. self-doubt self-doubt self-doubt

anyway, i promised you a sequel. here it is.

last post was a long rant about my last year - challenges i faced, things i overcame, learnings i've learned, things i am still struggling with.

i didn't mention much about God, and that surprised me a lot. But that has been its own journey the last little while. so this is what's been going on.

somewhere in 2008 i felt i had somewhat of an awakening; a real understanding and picture of what the world could be and was intended to be - a place of justice and of true LIBERATION (that word still excites me, so i will yell it). There was a moment where all that i have been struggling with reconciling with each other - things which i believed in thoroughly but seemed to counteract each other - made perfect sense together - Christianity, spirituality, religion, justice, feminism, oppression. i felt reawakened, alive, excited about this new vision/understanding. I was once frightened of God and his violence; his unattainable demands; the biblical words and stories where justice seems to be perpetuated within its very traditions and words.

i felt an aha moment where God became ever-bigger and where everything i cared about made sense to me. A God of no gender, who demands and creates justice, a God of ever-love to all no matter what race, religion, gender, a God who truly reaches out to us in so many ways, who hates patriarchy, injustice, oppression, and all that dehumanizes people.

everything made sense, and i was passionate to work towards a world where the words Christian and feminism and justice are commonly understood to work hand in hand together.

this went super well, for about a year (but what a year!)

somewhere along the way i started to lose hope. to lose hope in real change, to lose faith in the church that i held so dear that it would ever break its own chains and patterns of oppression. i felt so estranged and marginalized from the community that was such a part of my self-identity. i couldn't stomach walking into a church anymore, hearing and feeling its inherent oppression - its hierarchical patriarchal structures which perpetuate injustices and are full of power struggles. i jumped around from church to church hoping for a place where i could really feel like i belonged, but gave up to find this, in Winnipeg at least.

i felt tired of being othered from both the Christian community for being a feminist, and felt othered from the feminist community for being a Christian. It is a battle that I am tired of, and needed to take some time off.

this is getting long. anyway.

somewhere i lost hope in God, in the church. the two seem so intertwined. how can i work towards such a hurtful, injustice-perpetuating place? how can i actually be feminist in Christian places, or vice-versa? I was tired of being beat up from every side. see last post re: bitch quote.

so i wandered my own desert. found great comfort in SCM. felt really disconnected from God and her church.

and, like always, my wandering has seemed to take me full-circle back to where i started. i do trust God. i don't trust the church, or any religious structure really, to not be a tool of oppression and colonization. and after about a year of not being able to pray, play, find comfort in, dialogue or dance with God without feeling so pained about everything, i have been back to exploring this relationship that her and i have. this perpetual dance we have with each other throughout life of discovering each other a bit more, gaining distance, getting closer, back and forth.

i have been praying again, journalling again, pondering her ways and seeking a connection with her, also feeling comfort and some fulfillment in her presence again. so am experimenting with this again, intentionally inviting her presence into my life, consciously trying to open myself up to what she has to say to me. its been fun - familiar but strange and frightening in many ways. trust is so difficult.

i recognize, even today, how crazy this might sound. i really believe in a divine being who cares about our daily lives, who walk alongside me and who i can interact with in fun and significant and wild wild wild ways. who i am trying to remember loves me no matter what, and how important it is for me to have that sort of daily presence in my life. i am excited about this, and humbled.

still estranged from the church, and largely happily so. but we'll see where that leads as well. likely the full circle will come again where i will once again feel welcome within its reach and feel that i can believe in what it stands for again.

we'll see.
thanks.

up and down and up up up

hello readership

so here is the you - knew-it-was-coming annual birthday retrospective. buckle up.

i have been 30 years old for about 1 day now. most everything feels the same. i even got carded again, which is sort of amusing but also sort of embarrassing.

i was thinking back to my birthday last year and am really taken aback at how different life is now than it was then. last year i decided on a theme for my birthday day, as well as for the year ahead, to revolve around courage, movement, and self-love. K R and C, my good friends, put up with my wackiness on that day. and still ask me how my theme is going. Well, here's the yearly report.

absolutely stellar.

It is so weird to think about the place that i was in a year ago. so . . . stuck. in so many ways. mentally, emotionally, even physically in many aspects of my life. i felt like i was in a huge hole that i couldn't possibly climb out of. i wallowed in hurts and was licking my wounds, scared to interact with the world and to trust again.

Courage was really important because all i wanted to do was cocoon myself and protect myself from the world. so much hurt and pain from everywhere. when i was younger i used to feel almost no emotion about anything - it was a way to protect myself from so much confusion and hurt. in college, in community, i learned to turn the switch on and feel . . . . which was exciting for awhile but once things turned sour i felt i had no skills to deal with it. That sort of kicked my ass with a vengeance during this time. i am a sensitive soul - perhaps too sensitive - in shocking contrast to who i was in my youth. I could probably have a better balance for this now, and am working on that. this quote resonated with me this week, being the feminist Bitch that i am;

Not all Bitches make it. Instead of calluses, they develop open sores. Instead of confidence, they develop an unhealthy sensitivity to rejection. Seemingly tough on the outside, on the inside they are a bloody pulp, raw from the lifelong verbal whipping they have had to endure - the BITCH manifesto


so after this year of whipping from all sides, i wanted to lock myself in a vault and forget about everything. Courage was important for me to not give up and to keep moving forward with life. And somewhere I found it. Thailand was a symbolically significant time for this. And I couldn't have found this courage without my community.

Movement - related. My psyche was so stuck in this place that i couldn't see which way was up anymore. dark dark dark. so much happened that year, all at once - the details of which i can't put on this page because it involves too many people i love. i felt that no matter how i tried, i couldn't get over this damned barrier. but somewhere along the way i have. clearly. i am no longer stuck in that mindset or thought pattern. i feel victorious and i also feel exhausted. and happy. and bigger and stronger.

self-love - if there is anything i still need to work on, it is this. i just don't know how to. it is difficult to unlearn everything you have been taught since a child. feminism has saved my life in this way and has allowed me to realize and believe that my voice is important, that i am important, that i am worth being listened to, that i will not be treated like i am not important anymore. victory on that! less victory on translating those into feeling that i am worth love, commitment, loyalty, time, gifts. less victory over my overwhelming reflex of self-blame for everything that goes wrong.

so... this year has brought much change, and many blessings. courage and movement - check. self-love - mini-check; still working on this one.

upcoming 2 posts: how God fits into all of this, and my focus for this coming year. stay tuned . . .
b