walking the lines in February

February: 2010

This has been a strange month full of complex odd contrasts. Today, Sunday, the end of February, although the major earthquake in Chile has been the second item on the news, the first item all day has been – a hockey game. Yes, THE Olympic hockey game between the US and Canada. All month, the radio has been blaring the Olympics, day after day – I tried turning the radio off but I have been sitting and typing with CBC in the background for so many years, it is hard to work into the silence. So it goes back on but at a low buzzy level where I can barely hear it. It isn’t the Olympics that really bothers me, not the athletes, not the events even, or people having fun; somehow it’s an odd sneaky tone of triumphalism that creeps into the media; that says, see, naysayers and doommongers and liberal bleeding hearts do-gooders, the world really does belong to Coke and corporatism, so all you negative people can just shut up. And the thing that made me rejoice about the Olympics is that in some odd way, the people and the athletes took it back from the corporate spin, if only very briefly.

And today, my dear friend Mair Smith is in a hospital in Edmonton dying of thyroid cancer. She and I worked in the Alberta Status of Women together and did other feminist work ; we had long conversations about all kinds of ideas but our relationship changed somewhat after she went to Findhorn and became ‘spiritual.’ And today I sat on the porch with dear friends and had a conversation about how thin are the lines between spirituality, religion and superstition. Mair walked those lines with elegance and, yes, occasionally drove me crazy with her enthusiasm.

Yesterday, I read on some news site online about a woman who is running for governor of Texas who declared that all the government anyone needed was the right to private property, and the right to own a gun. Yes, I can occasionally see the temptation of such simplistic bizarre thinking in which you never again had to think about or consider anyone else.
And all month, I have been dealing with our beloved farm as a piece of real estate, a dichotomy that drives me really, really crazy.

But at least today was sunny. The heavy grey sky lid day after day, that sits over the lake and screens off the mountains, that seals in damp and despair, burned off by noon and I went outside, pulled my baby maple trees out the sawdust and watered them, planted some sprouting apricot pits and went for a walk.
We made a number of decisions about the farm this month, most notably, to invite a couple of our close friends to put RV’s on sites near the beach – a break with our traditional family culture of proud solitariness– but we did it because of money, because a farm endlessly needs money, needs infrastructure, needs fences, barns, pens, tractors, seeds, mowers, and so on. Needs to pay its taxes.
We also contacted a lawyer and real-estate agent and met with both of them in order to finish our subdivision, and put conditions on the sale of the lake shore lot that we must sell in order to buy out our sublings.
We met with the bank loan officer and I drafted a ‘business plan’.

This will all be an ongoing process for a while. And I hate it, loathe it, loathe the concept of land as real-estate. Want to hide from it all. My druthers would always be to leave the farm untouched and intact; to even let it go back to wilderness as much as possible. Instead, inch by inch, we are surrendering to civilization. To roads. To people. To buildings.
Everything we are doing makes sense and it’s all for the best of reasons. The people with RV’s are people who would be visiting and sharing the beach anyway. Our friends. The lot sale has to go ahead in order to save the rest of the farm. The lawyer is a good guy as is the real estate woman.
And it all makes me crazy. This land is not real-estate. It’s my home, a place I only want to protect and care for, a place that protects and cares for me. Not as real-estate, Not as private property. Not as a place that gives me rights or that I would shoot other people to defend.

Nor am I a person who should have to deal with money, real-estate, wills, taxes, contracts, or any kind of paper work,…I am a writer. Right now, I steal time to write; I steal time to work on my presentation on the new nature writing for the Banff nonfiction conference, the presentation I didn’t give last year but that is good because I have actually done a whole lot of work and research on it. I have a new YA book jumping at me, but not begun, a sequel to the last one. I am going to the coast in March to do research on the ethics of nonfiction book. I am almost done a series of essays on land issues. It all creeps along far too slowly, in among meetings and teaching and anxiety.
At night I huddle over the computer, watching BBC Mysteries, falling into them as if falling into a pool of deep water, wanting only distraction and escape.
This is a world which makes it endlessly hard to walk in balance, where contradiction lurks in every corner, where values shift and change, where the future lurks like a menacing shadow, and even a two week Olympic binge, however distracting it was, only staves off that shadow for a brief period.
How thin are the lines we balance upon. How deep and wide the contradictions.