Memoirs of a Stina

Maybe they weren’t award-winning, but I had the fire to write them. And I liked my poems. They are finished products. And perhaps my songs are simple, but I had the affliction to write them. Finished products. And maybe my book wasn’t a best-seller, but I had such passion in writing it. And I am proud of my book. Also, a finished product. I have always written. I had always wanted to write a book, I just didn’t have that unique subject to write about, until the bike ride. The bike ride was more than three years ago. The book was published more than two years ago. Since then, I have been hungry.

I thought giving up alcohol would be revolutionary. It’s wonderful that it isn’t. I am the same me, though a little more bored. It is disappointing, because I need a revolution! The dust needs a blowing, the soul needs re-calibrating. « A precise use, application, appeal. » The love of writing, the adventurous spirit. I knew writing about the Camino de Santiago was not in my heart. I tried to write about hiking up the southern coast of France, I tried to write about my solo hike and camp excursion on the Ozark Highlands Trail. These were not in my heart, either, as it turned out. So what will my next muse be? That is the torment.

No closer to finding love, though much more comfortable without it. Nothing good ever came from being safe and comfortable, though.

Fourteen years until I can retire. I can finally see this on my radar, though not what it will look like, but I’m starting to visualize. Buy three acres in Arkansas and build a yurt? Live there a third the year, live at home in Toronto a third the year, and live in Paris with  my dear best friend, Anthony, a third the year? Sounds charmed, and vaguely possible. Four months until summer. What will my next adventure be?

So many compass points, so little magnetism, at the moment. A little CPR for the blog, then. Not lost, just…adrift.

Me. My version of Hurt from Johnny Cash. December of 2018. My shitty ukulele-playing. And some production added, February of 2020. Pretty fun. And I’m dreaming again…

http://www.dropbox.com/s/mt828n2srtf4p1r/Hurt.mp3

What cross do you bear? Knowing that is half its weight. At least. I know mine, and for that I am grateful. For with this awareness, I can choose how I handle its heavy load. My entire life, I have always felt like the outsider, the visitor, the one tagging on, arriving late, joining in to an already established circle of friends. There are varying amounts of room left for me, both truly and perceived. I moved around a lot as a kid. I went to three different elementary schools and five different high schools. Although lonely and isolating, the outsider identity is what I know best and thus am most comfortable with. Perhaps that is why I perpetuate this status as an adult. Never in one place long, always leaving for the next quest, either alone or with newfound friends.

But perhaps being forced to face the daunting challenge of leaving old friends behind and starting fresh in a new and foreign environment gave me the insight that this can be done, fairly easily, and that it brings new learning and stadiums of fascination that nourish the young soul. Perhaps it gave me the taste for adventure that so fully fashions my lifestyle. Perhaps it opened my eyes to all the other worlds that exist not just across the map but in the next city over. I vote this interpretation; the visionary adventurer over the left-out loner. I love my life, I love the exploration and voyage. I crave the fear of the unknown and thrive there.

So perhaps my role is, indeed, the outsider, the visitor. The older I become, the more comfortable, happy, and proud I feel in a role that once made me feel strange, odd, alone. Anyway, there are much worse things than being lonely. Some do not realize the cross they carry and become buried and broken beneath its weight. Not me; I’ve become strong and the cross my raft. Perhaps there will be love. Perhaps there already is. Of course there already is. I’m overflowing with it. One week until Mexico…

Oh, the winter. Longer than a season. From clocks back to clocks forward. Eighteen weeks of cold darkness. The inspiration of summer hastily extinguishes and I rush home to escape the cold; to an empty apartment where I do nothing but go to bed way too early and feel longing and guilt for all the things I could be using all this shut-in time for. I am hard-wired to move and all this rest is weighing fearfully on a frail consciousness revealed without the distractions of doing and going and seeing and adventures. I am wasting away, every year, more than a quarter of my life. I have too much time to lament my thinning hair, my face that is cracking, my vision that is blurring. I still have my body and when I can’t use it, I am lost.

Last night was the same. I came home, poured myself a glass of wine, and settled in watching « Camille Claudel 1915. » Then I put on « La Bolduc » but fell asleep half-way through, somewhere around 9:30 p.m..

Of course I could be doing things, exercising at the gym, running up the stairs of my thirty-floor apartment building, going to the rock climbing gym, and in the beginning of this cold condemnation, I do. But quite quickly my mind disallows it. What’s the use? The dark makes me feel hidden away, the coldness makes me feel buried and my step heavy. I turn in toward myself. Leaving the house is impossible. A forced hibernation I find long and painful to endure.

Some mornings, though, have somehow eluded the deathly grasp of winter’s suffocating depression. My sacred mornings! How I love to rise before the Sun, make an espresso and bathe in the peace of a new day, free from anxiety and over-thinking. When the world is still asleep and I am awake, I feel motivated, like I am getting a head start, like today might be different. Look at this morning, after all. Here I am, writing.

Perhaps there are simply stages of surviving this curse. Stage one, I ride on the life and enthusiasm of summer’s bliss. Stage two, depression. I wallow in and am flattened by the stark contrast between the boundless energy and inspiration I know in warm weather and sunshine and the lethargy and discouragement I know in the numbing, black winter. I let it defeat me.

But today feels different.

Perhaps it is the wisdom of age, not that wisdom automatically comes with getting older but it can if you are humble and open to learning. That, I am! How I want to learn how to deal with this eighteen week sentence! Perhaps it is the lesson of being receptive rather than combative when life brings you things you do not like or understand. The Camino de Santiago taught me this last summer. Had I forgotten already? Hard-wired recidivist, I also am! Or perhaps it is remembering that, yes, I still have my body. But I also still have my mind.

It is the ukulele and the piano. It is the books and the writing, too. It is the good company I have been so fortunate to find. It is the French films I have so long been meaning to see. It is the learning to cook and how creative and fulfilling that is. It is being still for a change and not hating it but embracing it; switching gears consciously rather than begrudgingly.

Stage three, acceptance.

Six weeks down, twelve to go. Perhaps it won’t be so bad after all.

The mighty Sun spills in with quiet power through my frosted, dirty window and open blinds. I can feel a radiant beauty envelope me; I am alight, energizing, eyes closed. I stop marking my students’ work, I stop worrying about my book launch party that will happen tonight. I just receive. Though mostly mild, but not today, it has been a drab and dismal winter, cloudy, no Sun. My skin has never been drier or whiter. But on this special day, the Sun has come to say hello, to kiss my face with shiny tiger stripes, to wish me luck and give me its blessing. Dear Sun, I promise. I will continue to roar. I will continue to let my fear dictate my path. My light is unique and needs to shine, like these radiant ribbons you paint on me with energy and fire this cuttingly cold morning. I am a flame, I am a tiger, according to lineage and the Chinese calendar, respectively. Indeed, Universe. Indeed, Sacred Sun! Thank you for your beautiful benediction. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have positive and important things to do…

Already, I don’t even remember what I wrote in that damn book. My memory is wonderfully weak that way. It’s why I wrote it, after all. To remember at all that extraordinary thing that I did. And what a gift a frail memory is. Then everything is eternally somewhat new and like a little adventure, again, and again. “You can tell Christina the same joke every week,” he said of me. Yet I can remember him saying that, already ten years ago!

So now I have three weeks of nothing but time on my hands. With such deeply burning aspirations to write, what a gift of a pocket of time to do so, right? Wrong. A void of time does not equal inspiration! I had wanted to write for years. But what to say, at such a young age and of so little venturing? I finally had something particular to write about. Unique, mine. So I did. It is done. Now what?

Shall I write about this minor elective surgery that has me cooped up and unmoving, lying about like a shut-in, watching movies and ordering food for delivery? Is this how people live? “Some people, some of the time,” he said. A lot of people, a lot of the time, I think. It’s a social experiment, that’s how I’ve framed it in my mind in order to survive. And I’ve kept quite lovely spirits through it all, I must say. Seven days down and fourteen to go.

I’ve watched “Lady in Gold” and “Big Eyes” and “Cezanne et moi” and “Violette.” I miss Paris, where every moment is poetic, every word spoken is lyrical, where nothing is mundane, and even the air I breathe is melodic and infused with inspiration. I wish I could go there and be poor and work as a waitress and never speak English again. I wish I could live in Bordeaux, a place I have never been, and Benjamin would be my neighbor. We would meet sometimes for dinner and get drunk and smoke one hundred cigarettes in an evening. He would encourage me and I would always be the foreigner, with the accent, who makes little mistakes with her grammar, and nothing could please me more than fulfilling this exact role.

The neglected blog, the scattered poems to sort through, the unwritten ones. Back to the couch, to waiting, to wasting, to incubating.