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I spent my early years in Scotland marinating in the shadow of Castle Rock, gazing up at Edinburgh Castle and surrounded by ancient buildings. My first cathedral experience was St. Giles Cathedral. Despite being a monument to Presbyterianism, the Church of Scotland, the steeple is a richly ornamented crown and the Thistle Chapel brims with detailed and often whimsical wooden carvings. It is a testament to ingenuity and craftsmanship. (craftspersonship?) 

I have always been a fan of religiously inspired architectural marvels such as Notre Dame de Paris, the Hagia Sophia or the Gurudawara Sahib (The Golden Temple). Due to their prime geographical locations and fluctuating cultural relevance, these buildings often have complicated histories of disaster, restoration, consecration and desecration.

As a teenager, I kept a list of the monumental Gothic cathedrals and abbeys of Europe that I had seen. I was proud there were more than twenty.

I first saw Notre Dame de Paris, the most visited of France’s eighty-seven cathedrals in 1974 as a teenager during my trip to Europe in the summer after high school and before the start of university.  Unbelievably, I did not discover the adjacent and lovelier Ste Chapelle until I was over forty.

I drew from the limited knowledge of my Grade 11 art history course and studied the architecture of the naves, transepts, choirs and rose windows. I searched for Romanesque versus Gothic features and examined the fanned stone ceilings. I explained to anyone who would listen about the architectural miracle of the flying buttresses that allowed the stretching of these buildings to unprecedented heights. I thought about the skills and optimism of the thousands of stonemasons and carpenters employed in the creation of these monuments.

Being a weary, impoverished backpacking teenager, these cool damp spaces illuminated with the jewel-like reds, blues and greens from the stained glass windows and scented with the ritual incense and wax from the votive candles were timeless places of refuge and contemplation.  As I grew older, it seemed that every decade or so I would revisit Paris and take stock of my life since the previous visit. What had worked? What had failed? Where, why and with whom was I going next?

In the aftermath of the Notre Dame fire, some have justifiably commented on the unrepentant evils of the Catholic corporation (distinct from personal Catholic faith) and the patriarchal, evangelical and colonial values that these monuments represent. Humanities achievements and failings are best understood in their historical context and without resorting to retrospective condescension.

Notre Dame de Paris was built eight hundred years ago in Medieval Europe, a time when the most revered female, the Virgin Mary was celebrated for the impossible combination of chastity and maternity. The remainder of female mortals were restricted to any of the subordinate positions of spinster, wife, mother, queen, widow, repentant temptress or martyr. The role of the female was defined by her relationship to a more powerful male.

I think of it as a time when women achieved agency through deception, manipulation, cross-dressing and behaving for acceptance into the male world or by retreating into a nunnery. For many women, the veneration of the Virgin Mary replaced the divine worship of God. These Marians prayed for fertility, the health of their children and release from oppression. I like to remember all the women and other oppressed minorities who found solace and hope in the sacred spaces of these cathedrals.  

My favourite cathedral is Notre Dame de Chartres. Chartres Cathedral also has survived multiple restorations, reconstructions and three major fires.  Its distinctive asymmetrical spires rise above the cornfields that flash past the windows in a Van Gogh painting sort of way as the train hurtles towards Chartres from Paris.

I walked the labyrinth, the geometrically precise pattern inlaid in the floor of the cathedral.

By tracing the half-kilometre path to the centre and back to the perimeter of the labyrinth, believers experience a contemplative and restorative state. Walking the labyrinth as a hopeful newlywed in the early eighties,  I felt a powerful connection with the previous centuries of pilgrims who had paced the same path. To find a labyrinth near you and celebrate World Labyrinth Day on May 4^th, please visit The Labyrinth Society.

My second favourite cathedral is Antoni Gaudi’s, La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

The building was started in 1882 and the projected year of completion is 2026, a long-term project. The structure is a mash-up of botanical, branching designs, fractals rendered in Gothic and Art Nouveau styles. The distinctive Gaudiesque coloured tiles decorate many surfaces.

Disasters are a test of our resilience and humanity. The shared grief after the fire at Notre Dame de Paris underscores our commonalities in a time when current political cultures are trying to highlight our differences. Notre Dame, the Medieval monument to this humanity is a state asset and will require public and private funds for restoration. To understand more about the relationship between France, the Catholic Church and the maintenance of religious monuments read here.

While it would have been nice to see this scale of concern and generosity with some of our other recent humanitarian disasters, I welcome the extraordinary philanthropy and redistribution of wealth that has been offered to reconstruct this monument.

After last month’s reflections on Parenting, I have been thinking about Adulting. The OED definition of adulting is the practice of behaving in a way characteristic of a responsible adult, especially the accomplishment of mundane but necessary tasks. The American Dialect Society cites a tweet from 2008 as the first documented use.  Twitter is now a recognized source for first-usage citations of neologisms.

 I searched #adulting on Twitter and scanned the topics that surfaced. They clustered around finances (not enough money), fatigue (not enough time), eating habits (wanting to do better) and celebrating the completion of or the challenges associated with various domestic tasks. These included items such as meal preparation, paying taxes, cleaning and organizing domestic items.

I tried to find a Google source that provides a definition of an adult beyond the chronological milestones (eighteen or twenty-one years old) or the ability to complete mundane or necessary tasks. Was there a measuring device such as an Adultometer or list of competencies that could be tested? 

Meanwhile, I was in Palm Springs enjoying the fresh lemons from my neighbour’s tree and the superbloom of desert flowers after the wet and cool spring.  I was also watching the invasion of three teenage Canadian tennis players into the Indian Wells Tennis tournament – Andreescu, Auger-Alliasime and Shapovalov. After the eighteen-year-old Felix Auger-Alliasime narrowly lost his match in the third game tie-breaker, he posted the following tweet.

If you can meet Triumph and Defeat and treat those two imposters just the same 

Most of you will recognize this as a quotation from Rudyard Kipling’s poem If, published in 1910. ( link to the poem is below) Rudyard Kipling was a man of his time – an era of imperialism, colonialism and white male supremacy. This poem was inspired after a bungling of leadership in the Boer war and written as advice to his son. I parsed it for the recommended adult attributes and found this list:

Calm, Confident, Cooperative, Patient, Honest, Accommodating, Understanding, Humble, Optimistic yet Realistic, Creative, Resilient (Stoic), Practical, Decisive, and Compassionate. 

You might be able to find others? I would add that self-compassion, accurate self-appraisal, tolerance of ambiguity and understanding the necessity of forgiveness are also crucial to adulting.

We used to have a cartoon on the fridge when my kids were teenagers that went something like this.

“Why does my Mum always know how to push-my-buttons.”

“She installed them.”

Maybe the journey from child to adult requires the uninstalling of all the bad buttons from childhood that interfere with self-regulation?

A successful adult knows their strengths and weaknesses . They can identify, differentiate and manage the most primal feelings such as fear, sadness and anger. They have developed a repertoire of appropriate positive behaviours that can be draw upon to manage these strong negative emotions in themselves and others.

There is more and more evidence that contented successful mature adults have developed skills that allow them to self-regulate their emotions in most contexts. They are better at self-advocacy and the optimization of their personal potential. Educators are examining methods to teach emotional literacy – the ability to understand yourself, read others and choose the behaviours that will improve social interactions.

Felix Auger-Alliasime at age eighteen in his first major tennis tournament had the wisdom to accept and learn from his defeat. He then went on to become the youngest male player to reach the semi-finals of the next major tournament in Miami. He is mature beyond his years in triumph or defeat.

Being an adult is not a chronological state and adulting is not only completing tasks such as managing your finances, getting to work on time or eating well.   Adulting is the continuous evolution of desirable characteristics and emotional skills that allow individuals to reach their personal potential. 

If  Rudyard Kipling

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

This piece started out as a meditation the verbs, parenting and adulting, both examples of when a word that is historically used as a noun (eg: parent or adult) is transformed into a working word, a doing word, a verb, to parent – the activity of bringing up a child as a parent.

For the babyboomers, the parenting expectations and opportunities were different from their parents’ generation. With the advent effective birth control for women in the 60’s, motherhood could be postponed to allow for career development. Both parents could have careers and third-party childcare became the norm.  (Extended childcare with family and friends was routine in families of lower economic circumstances where both parents had to work.)   Although the word parenting was first coined in 1930, its usage took off in 1959.

Society, families and individuals struggled with what type of care would be best for the their children. Concepts of the ideal family, gender and gender roles became more plastic. I think the increased use of the verb to parent acknowledges the unpaid work that is required to raise children.

Women in the late ’60s and ’70s, were encouraged to pursue careers outside the home by the second-wave feminists such as Germain Greer and Betty Friedan, neither of whom had children.  Meanwhile, new feminist mothers were challenged and criticized by everybody else including their spouses and stay-at-home mothers for being negligent by outsourcing the parenting responsibilities.

There was also reverse criticism by working parents of the stay-at-home parent. The  stay-at-home was often seen as inferior, subservient, underdeveloped or unsuccessful to those who had fought for professional recognition outside the home. This disrespect was even more dire for male partners who stayed at home, where they were untrusted by both working and stay-at-home mothers.

Our post-war parents were disdainful of our child-rearing angst regardless of what choice was made.

“She’s killing herself. Why doesn’t she just stay home. They’ve got the money.”

“After all that training and now she is just staying at home with the kids.”

“How does he do it? Staying at home with the kids now. He was a computer programmer you know.”

“I don’t know why they had kids. They just park them at the daycare all the time.”

“That nanny they have holed up in the basement can barely speak English. How are those kids going to turn out.”

“How does she think she is ever going to keep her skills up if she takes all that time off with her baby?”

Most shamefully, often women professionals, doctors and lawyers and so on, were the greatest critics of our co-workers. The punishing intolerant system that we were somehow surviving by doing it all seemed to make it too hard to be compassionate. The combination of committed professionalism and competent parenting had not been engineered into the system. If a colleague was absent or couldn’t do the work competently due to a family emergency, the rest of us, often resentfully, had to pick up all the pieces. There were no redundancies.

Looking back at my struggle to do it all – and I truly believed it was doable, if only I was organized enough and worked hard enough – I could have it all – family, work-life balance, career, friends, hobbies and a healthy partnership. If I wasn’t successful then it meant I was insufficient, simply not good enough.  My success in the work place was predicated on a gender performance that was modeled on existing masculine ideals. This was decades before Sheryl Sandberg wrote Lean In.

None of us confessed to each other how crazy it was or how tired we were.  I lived under a cloud of guilt about inadequacy at both work and at home. I joined in the cruel criticism of those who weren’t doing it all. I had no self-compassion so how could I be compassionate to struggling colleagues.

Thankfully, this societal position has evolved somewhat and for the most part, the kids have turned out just fine. These kids are now young adults, millennials who are insisting that the culture change. Did they benefit from dual working parents and outsourced childcare? Are they more self-sufficient or more likely to pursue careers outside the home? Is parenting being shared more equally? Will they use a sequential model with a stay-at-home phase for each parent? Will they be less effective parenting due to the pervasive distractions of technology?

The physiological obligations of parenting such as pregnancy, labour, delivery and breastfeeding (excluding medical miracles) remain nearly exclusively female work.  We can choose to support, supplement, attenuate and remunerate this burden at both societal and legislative levels.

We may be approaching the feminist value of choice for all – to be able to participate in a society that respects each individual’s right to parent in a way that suits their children and their family structure. For most family units, these choices are significantly influenced economic considerations. They should not be limited by societal expectations. 

I think that the hardest part of the job of parenting is unpredictability. An effective employer or organization is one that allows enough flexibility for all its employees to parent well.  As a society, we need to address systemic issues such as access to childcare, job security and parental leave to allow parenting in all family structures to come first.

Meanwhile, I’m grateful to have survived it all.

I refer you to Anne Marie Slaughter from 2012 talking about why women still can’t have it all and a quote from Madeleine Albright in conversation with Anne Marie Slaughter in 2013.

 “I do think women can have it all, but not all at the same time. Our life comes in segments, and we have to understand that we can have it all if we’re not trying to do it all at once.”

I’ll be talking about the verb adulting next month or maybe not.

I’ve spent most of January in the small town of Nelson in BC nestled between the Selkirk and the Purcell mountain ranges.

The idea was to downhill ski at the local resort, Whitewater and overdose on deep powder snow. The resort is nestled under the magnificent Mount Ymir (the peak is at about 2400 metres for those who wanted to know). After a stunning powdery three-day start ski-touring at Stagleap park near Salmo, we had to adjust the schedule to accommodate the sad event of less than 20 cm of snow in three weeks.  The locals say it is the driest January ever and of course last year it “puked snow” for the whole season.

So I did more Nordic skate skiing including a full moon night ski. This is easier on my knees and better for my heart. I enjoyed the eclectic offerings of our new hometown – the recreation centre for yoga and swims, independent restaurants, micro breweries, the art gallery and scenic mountain drives to the hot springs at Ainsworth and the village of Kaslo.  In Castlegar, on the way to Red Mountain at Rossland – known to most of my generation as the home of 1968 Olympic skiing champion, Nancy Green, I marvelled at the conflation of the mighty Columbia River and the West arm of Kootenay Lake.

The area is dotted with charming small towns lined red-brick and wooden slatted buildings from the turn of the previous century when gold, silver and logging booms fuelled the economy and attracted those adventuring Norwegians and other speculating pioneers to the lands of the Syilx and Sinixt peoples.

The younger residents of Nelson vaguely adhere to a local uniform that features those Tasmanian all-weather boots, vanity toques that are worn indoors, flannel plaid shirts, jeans, felted slippers and cosy wool socks.  There is a daily practice of acceptance of the gender continuum and equity. My hatha yoga class is low on brand-name yoga wear and high on diversity.

Meanwhile, I nurtured my seasonal obsession with Open Tennis events by streaming too many Australian Open videos. I mourned the defeat of my idol Roger Federer to the upcoming Greek star, Tsitsipas.  I marvelled at the transformation of Raonic’s game by Ivan Lendl.

I watched Serena Williams performing with supreme athleticism, dignity and grace as she continues to shoulder the burden of the various prejudices against her gender, the state of motherhood, her race and body type. Naomi Osaka, no the world’s number one is standing on those shoulders. My reading was reduced to scanning tennis writing from all sources and listening to live, radio reporting of the games.

I struggled to finish Esi Edugyan’s book, Half-Blood Blues but managed to crack open her latest, Washington Black.  I couldn’t settle down to read anything else. My own writing stalled during an attempt at a magical realism piece much longer than the short story length I am comfortable with.  I choked with the revisions and a deadline for a non-fiction sports piece. Yes, I am concentration challenged this month.  I need to keep checking the tennis scores.

I have taken the following remedial steps.

Inspired by the recent death of Mary Oliver the poet whose work I was introduced to last year, I have decided that I want to stay amazed and need more poetry in my life. I have signed up for Poem Daily.

I have scoured the AO tennis writing for energizing verbs to apply to my writing as recommended by Joe Moran whom I have previously written about. I have converted this list into an inspirational graphic to celebrate all of writing, reading and tennis. Please read David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer in the link above for further inspiration for both writing and tennis. Thanks to Wordclouds

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The cabin was dark and cold this morning and I scuffled about finding candles and so forth so that my partner and I could cope without electricity. The reliable wrought iron wood stove soon provided some heat and eventually coffee. Power failures are common here in the winter. The storm winds blow the second growth trees down onto the lines. Much later, we would learn how extensive the damage to the power lines on Vancouver Island was and feel grateful.

It was the Winter Solstice, the morning of the shortest day of the year. I was waiting for the cable ferry to resume operations so that I could take the two-kilometre journey across Baynes Sound from my small island to the larger one. All the island’s residents and visitors are all at the mercy of a winter storm – a storm with winds reported to be gusting from forty to ninety kilometres an hour.

Eventually, the pale and fragile winter light found its way into the cabin. The candles became useless. I picked up my book, Milkman by Anna Burns and started to read.

Menacing deep green-gray swells filled Baynes Sound and lurched northward. The sky was filled with featureless deeper gray cloud.  There were no signs of the flocks of winter seabirds that take up winter residence in the usually calm bay.

Eventually, we left for the ferry to go into town, Comox that is.  These days I tend to avoid the acquisitive crises of the “Christmas Season.” I have recalibrated my material expectations and hopefully those of my family and friends. The exceptions, of course, are good food and wine. The planned trip to Comox was nearly necessary – food, wine, a swim and to watch a hockey practice of the Swiss Juniour Team. OK – that’s not me but it was on the list of things to do.

We help two other two drivers pull the fallen tree from across the road and drive to the ferry dock. The island is more exposed here than on the north end. Foaming driving angry white-capped waves fill the crossing. They splash, crash and smash against the dock rails and create pulsing sheets of fine spray. The wind catches these sheets, blows them across the pier and for seconds the air-born water obscures the flapping flags on the shrouds of the Baynes Sound Connector, the cable ferry.  My glasses are dotted with droplets that if left to dry will become crusty flakes of salt.  We learn that not only is the sailing of our small vessel impossible but that all the big ferries between the island and the mainland are cancelled too.

The sun comes out and there is a magnificent rainbow in the north that arcs across the brightening sky from the east shore of Vancouver Island. The clouds break up and hurtle north. The wind buffets about the solitary seagull that is possibly hardier or hungrier than the others. I imagine that the eagles are grounded, hunkered down and huddling in lower safer perches. A loose blue plastic barrel sails by on the surface of the water, tumbling in the chop as it is swept to shore. A fishing boat rockets by with a similar momentum and hurtles toward the safety of Comox harbour.   Mount Washington is still shrouded by all of clouds, fog and rain. Hopefully, some snow is falling at the very top.

There will be no ferry crossings now. We wait for the weather to improve and I resume my reading.

Milkman by Anna Burns is this year’s Booker Prize winner. It is a story told in the first person voice about a Catholic adolescent living in the civil war of Northern Ireland in the mid-seventies, a victim of ”religious geography” and long before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. 

The failure of the protagonist’s strategy of non-participation by “reading-while-walking” is the main thread of the story.  She tries to escape the horrors surrounding her by reading exclusively novels written before the twentieth century.

The author does not give any of the characters Christian names that may traditionally Catholic or Protestant but rather they are known by their relationship to the protagonist or their role in her world. There is first-brother-in-law, Tablets girl and those non-conformists who are beyond-the-pale. The Pale or English Pale was a medieval English community in Southern Ireland.   Some of the characters names evolve as the relationships change, for example almost boyfriend.  I enjoyed the chorus of the “wee ones,” her three still-innocent younger sisters.

The prose is populated with strings of compelling neologisms that provide powerful promulgation and yes, stuff happens – “staying, ordering, commanding, warning” and “depravity, decadence, demoralization, dissemination of pessimism, outrages to propriety.”

The story addresses tribalism, misogyny and the fluctuating morals and norms of a community at war. The author examines the distortions of everyday acts and the meaning of language where the abnormal and immoral are normalized in the setting of civil war.  Rumouring and intervening are sanctioned actions. Finding a cache of weapons in your coal cellar is expected and objecting to it is treason. The community struggles with the possibility that a non-political normal murder may have occurred among them.

A powerful stalker who, without touching her, systematically violates her mental and physical health erodes the protagonist’s identity and independence. The protagonist postulates her society has not learned to identify shame but rather substitutes fear and anger to avoid confronting that terrible emotion. The resulting tribalism, hatred and violence are viewed as resulting from the immaturity of the two societies. There are several references to the culture not yet having learned how to genuinely express either sorrow or regret and being held hostage to their own pride.  There is also a profound reflection on friendship and trust. “Trust was over…even if fondness remained.”

Milkman is a compelling read from an innovative voice that addresses the painful subject of how ordinary civilians conducted themselves during the civil war in Northern Ireland.

It is a stormy day here on the Sunshine Coast at the twenty-sixth latitude in the Southern Hemisphere. It is the equivalent of a Northern Hemisphere early June with the sunrise at just before five when the grandkids got up this morning. It is a good writing day.

The roar of fifty-kilometre winds rang through the night. Lush tropical vegetation and rain lashed at the louvred glass windows – louvres that are usually open day after day allowing the sub-tropical winds to flow through the house and make the humidity and heat more bearable.

The Coral Sea is one hundred metres down the street. Yesterday we were swimming in the warm sheltered waters of Tea Tree Bay in Noosa.  This morning though, the sky is grey and the sea is furrowed with fierce foaming waves that pound onto the powdery sand beach – a sand so fine that it squeaks when you walk on it. I see the solitary billowing neon orange sail of a kite surfer who is experienced enough to enjoy these conditions.

I have been travelling in Australia, most recently bike riding in Tasmania where the Dunalley oysters are the best I have ever tasted – briny firm-fleshed with a sweet finish.

I’m in a land where I have to remind myself what marsupial and monotreme mean. I’m visiting a continent where the animals have great Scrabble word names such as echidna, galah, goanna, quokka and quoll. I’m in a place where Qantas does not have a U. Qantas, the national airline name is an acronym for Queensland and New Territory Air Service. None the less, once you reach Australia, the internal flights of Qantas, Virgin or Jetstar are cheap and plentiful. Australia is like Canada with the population flung around the edges of a vast otherwise nearly empty land.

There is currently no writing routine other than intermittent journaling in the battered lavender book that gets stuffed into one of my bike panniers each morning. My reading is a sporadic listening to Australian Edwina Wren present the audio version of Geraldine Brooks’ The People of the Book, a historical fiction based on the Sarajevo Haggadah. It is a who-done-it with interesting information about the production and preservation of Medieval religious tomes woven around the plot.

On the flight here, I finished Joe Moran’s First You Write a Sentence. I recommend his book to anyone who reads or writes and I am looking everywhere for a chance to use more verbal adjectives and adverbs. Oh yes, vary sentence length.

Petrarch’s in Launceston, Tasmania is a delightful independent bookstore with a good collection of books by Tasmanian authors. I bought two children’s books, written and illustrated by Jennifer Cossins, 101 Collective Nouns and A – Z of Endangered Animals. I stumbled upon a beautiful pocket-sized edition of the Collected Poems of WB Yeats – a nice place to hide in as I wait for flights that are delayed or cancelled due to the recent weather extremes.

I desperately wanted to buy Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman but it won’t fit in my luggage allowance – maybe for the journey back to Canada. And also David Malouf has a new collection of poems, An Open Book – perhaps that would be the best souvenir of this trip to Australia.