Current Mood: Pensive

Current Song: Crystal by Stevie Nicks

I’ve decided to give blogging one more shot before I decide whether I’m going to keep it up after almost (next month!) six years.  Thank you to those of you who filled out my survey from this past week.

I got some interesting comments around telling more stories, and more often than I would have thought, about being more vulnerable in my storytelling.  This has been a struggle for me for the last 30 years. It goes well with my new year’s resolution this year.

I resolve to have an open heart.  

I don’t know what this looks like, but here’s a story.

I belong to a book club.  I started it about a year ago now, in an effort to talk to and find an excuse to get together with my friends more often.  There are so many of us that love reading.  We read all kinds of things from sci-fi children’s fiction to autobiographies and everything in between.  You can find us on a Sunday in one of Vancouver’s many coffee and tea establishments passionately discussing some relevant topic.  I love my book club.  It makes me happy.  If I could make it into a job, I would.

The last book club we had, my friend Shazeen picked “The Cat’s Table”.  It is the latest work of fiction by Michael Ondaatje.  I have always been attracted to his luscious writing style.  Sometimes gritty, sometimes confusing, it is like food you’re trying for the first time. I want to shovel it into my brain by the heapfuls.  ”The Cat’s Table” had a very explosive collision with my own spirit.  In particular, this passage (try to ignore the medical improbabilities contained herein):

I once had a friend whose heart “moved” after a traumatic incident that he refused to recognize. It was only a few years later, while he was being checked out by his doctor for some minor ailment, that this physical shift was discovered. And I wondered then, when he told me this, how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from a place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us…How have our emotions glanced off rather than directly faced others ever since, resulting in simple unawareness, or in some cases cold-blooded self-sufficiency that is damaging to us?  Is this what has left us, still uncertain, at a Cat’s Table, looking back, searching those that we journeyed with or were formed by, even now, at this age?

Beautiful photo from Creative Commons Flickr

I think somewhere in the past, my heart might have moved a little bit.  Perhaps it’s slightly out of whack, closing itself off, making me self-sufficient, unable to understand sometimes, and being frightened most of the time of vulnerability.  Perhaps my heart is afraid of the strain that might come from jostling it back into its original spot.  I don’t know. It’s something I need to work on.  So I’ll continue to tell stories, open myself up to things that I have refused to recognize, and try to breathe it out when it gets too much.

I hope you’ll stand by.

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