What a joy it was to attend the UBC Connects speaker series last night. The 800 seats in the Kelowna Community Theatre were full. The audience was surprising. Usually when I attend a speaker’s series put on by UBC it is people in my cohort, the older, upper middle class alumni of the university that show up.

As I scanned the crowd I saw many men and surprisingly for Kelowna many darker skinned people.

Once when an architect came to a workshop I attended he said, “Are you people all related?”

He was remarking on the fact that Caucasian, well-heeled and beige wearing people were everywhere. But not last night. The University is bringing in diversity and making Kelowna more a reflection of a new social reality. I was surprised and impressed.

When the #metoo movement broke into its fevered, powerful presence and moved through the population, I was fascinated. Twelve million people posted in 24 hours their story of unwanted sexual advances. I spent two full days on #metoo twitter simply reading story after story. The scout master molested boys, the gymnastic coach was raping girls, the youth pastor was grooming and molesting both sexes. The trusted uncle continued the abuse for years. The brother who violently broke his sister’s back while raping her was reported to those on the site.

I sat and each time I saw a particularly moving post I reposted it and copied it. Immediately I put it up on Facebook. Finally, after 69 years of living with the secret of brutality and internalized shame, I saw others who were breaking out of their prisons. I sat for hours sharing, copying and posting. Tears were streaming down my face. And it was for joy. It was for the immense relief that finally, finally people were beginning to release the locked in shame. As person after person posted, I watched as they said to one another, “I saw you speak the truth and it gave me courage.”

What the #metoo movement did for me was to continue to fuel my desire to speak out. Tarana said something brilliant during her presentation. She said, “We have no language for this. We say, ‘ That is not what a sexual abuse survivor looks like.’ ” I felt my chest expand in excitement.

Yes. Yes That is it! As I sat crying at my desk in elementary school, not one authority figure, or teacher knew that this is what sexual abuse looks like. As I was sent to the principal’s office for pulling out a girl’s hair, the principal had no idea that this is what a sexual abuse prisoner looks like. As I made my way through high-school with good grades, earning the top Art Student award and moved on to three more university degrees, no one knew that this is what a sexual abuse survivor looks like.

They have no language for it because they have denied it. They have no way of recognizing it because they have kept their faces turned away. No one was there to protect me and I thought it was because I did not deserve protection. It was because I was somehow guilty. I learned to hide everything that was not required of the society in order to be powerful. My presentation was a guise, a mask.

And as I left the theatre last night I was talking to two students while we walked along the snow covered street. I said that the teacher in Kelowna that had been tried for sexual abuse was also watching child porn. I mentioned that we, as a society are ready to see sexual abuse in only a limited filtered way.

Why was his use of the child porn industry buried in the media? I asked the girls.

One answered, “Because we don’t want to sensationalize it.”

I walked ten blocks home in the snow storm and thought about how we are so terrified of the truth that we make a pact to ignore it. When I was a child, it was an agreement that children were possessions of their parents.

Today we are beginning to wake up to rape, and sexual abuse but we still refuse to look at the children. We cannot believe that children are purchased as objects to be filmed and then disposed of. It is a profitable business.

It is the time to see all of it. It is no longer an era where we turn our faces away if we don’t like the truth we are seeing. How else can we stop it if we don’t have language for it? How else can we stop allowing brutality if we are only interested in protecting our own version of reality?

We need to stop denying, and start believing people when they tell us their truth. It is when we are all willing to open our eyes that the legislation is authored; that the heartless are jailed; and the children are safe.

We are getting there. But we cannot be afraid to feel. It is where empathy begins.

I have been lucky enough to be juried into the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive with the guardian angel editor hovering over my shoulder. Elee Kraljii Gardiner has walked me through the seventh edit of my non-fiction book. And yesterday I submitted to her the eighth edit.

In the past six weeks I have spent four of them editing, rewriting, going deeper and it has been both a wonderful experience and a challenge.

To retell the stories of my childhood of violence and abuse is not an easy task to undertake. But it is necessary. The book itself focuses on the stunting damage of a trauma inducing event or series of events on the human psyche. What I saw in Paris as over 90 people were murdered links back exactly to my experiences with my father who suffered PTSD.

My intention in travelling through places which held a history of my ancestors was grounded in the urge to understand more fully how people become capable of cruelty.

My goal as I edit is to be fearless and open in connecting the cause with the effect. My goal is to look at ways that horrific events can be lived through without scarring the adult who is experiencing them using mindfulness training.

Children have little defence because a facility with language is what clears the debris from the Amygdala through the Hippocampus. If a mind is not developed, it is not capable of flushing out the dark events.

Left without language, left without an understanding adult to sustain us and give us the strength that allows us to talk about the experienced violence, leaves us forever after in its grip.

And so I devote myself to using my experience, my path of intense commitment to recovering my soul identity in order to teach others.

I can endure looking at things that I have kept hidden so others can learn. I can take a breath and open myself to others so they can see what happens to children who are in war zones; whose village is bombed flat; whose very ethnology is a death sentence; who have no rights to protection. My war zone was the fall out from my ancestor’s trauma. It spilled out between the walls of my home.

I share what I have learned with the desire to help others understand how hatred breeds social chaos. I firmly believe that understanding leads to change, to kindness.

And so I go through it all again. It is tough. But love is at the end of the darkness. Always.

My mind is always in two places simultaneously. First it is like someone crawling in an unlit tunnel. I reach out in front of me. What is there? What is the shape of possibility? What sharp edge of struggle will I tear my palms upon? What opening unseen will explain itself to my touch?

Secondly, there is what I call the predictor mind. I will achieve only the kind of love that I have previously experienced. I keep my focus on what I have left behind me in time to allow what is now or what is revealing itself.

The narrative of bygones restrains the possible map of my life. Only those small rivers I have previously sailed upon will be found in my future exploration. The past is the predictor. Only those horizons I have crossed into will appear on my journey. What was becomes what is and more firmly what I can expect of later.

What is expectation? Expectation is a reaching out, a feeling around, a replaying of the old story.

The mind works diligently to keep us safe. If your ship crashed upon a shore in a narrow river and you were abandoned to the lost land, you will steer away from the delta that expresses a topography reminding you of your last disaster place.

The mind works incessantly to prevent the very thing that cannot be prevented. The assaults of happenstance have already happened. The scars of old wounds are already etched upon the skin.

The mind remembers the sense of the punishing helplessness of abuse, disaster, ill conceived choices. It remembers all of it.

And so when I get up in the morning, I look at the sky. I ask the sky to show me what day this will be. The questioning dialogue is about my safety. What promises do you bring to me oh vault of heavenly blue?

I open the door expecting the clarity of clear sky to engulf me in warmth. But the wind attacks as soon as I turn around the protective corner of the house.

The act of dismissing a story about the sky and the wind and my place in all of it clears space. Dismissing the protective thoughts that arise like a body guard sharply speaking to me to ,”Be careful. Be very, very careful,” creates a place for promises.

Like a child, we can choose to move out the door into a new story. What if everything was just exploration? What if I am ultimately unaffected by the past? I can ask: “What skies are these?” And in true wonder, simply go find out.

The balance toward lofty goals and maintaining the foot hold on the place on the side of the rocky mountain side is always the issue. I cannot move further, level up, grab the next hand hold, slide my foot into the new foothold unless I am secure in the purchase I have now found.

The pause, the breath, the settling fully into place is something contemporary society does not honor. We are taught, I was taught that only activity and pushing oneself was a sign of strength.

But mountain climbers, rock face climbers, athletes of all disciplines know that it is in the resting that the readjusting takes place. To sit meditation is not a turning away from activity. It is a time to clear the mind to see what activity is in fact going to grow the spirit.

I struggle with my mind programming which tells me more is better. It tells me that moving through space is somehow creating something. As I was lifting the space heater today because for some mysterious reason the gas furnace has stopped producing heat, I felt the urge to hurry.

I thought, “Isn’t this curious. My anxiety about the furnace is causing adrenalin and the urge to move faster.”

I took a breath and spoke to myself in my mind. “Pick up each heater slowly and mindfully. The amount of time it takes you to get the heaters in the house will not change whatever ails the furnace.”

Looking with clear eyes at how weak and ineffective I feel when systems fail was important. It is not my skill to repair failing furnaces or washing machines or a list I could scroll out like the strip of paper on the old adding machines which would then turn round itself into a delightful pile of paper curls.

Things that I did which I could not do before: I removed the thermostat cover and replaced the batteries. Victory. I reset the clock on the thermostat. Victory. I punched off the programmed low heat. Victory. I flipped a mysterious switch on the furnace. Victory and nothing. Nope I got no response.

So I will phone someone who charges by the number of revolutions their tires spin as they head toward me. It is not the kind of magic or power or understanding that I can speak to. I have no language with machines. I fail them or they fail me.

Right now, apparently, the universe is asking me to focus on maintaining.

I am perennially curious. I move into areas of ignorance slowly like water on clay. Defining who I am and at the same time desiring to be more at ease; more at home in life; more at home in my body keeps me constantly seeking.

This last binge of understanding came when I stumbled upon Esther Perel. I had had no previous contact with her work. But after viewing one you tube video I binged.

When a starving person sits down to a plate at first, he or she needs to go slowly. So I watched the one video. I took notes. I shared the lessons on social media. I slept on it.

And then I spent four hours the next day learning.

The dissatisfaction which is central in my life is and always has been the deep well of loneliness. So many times I have read that an individual’s social connections are the greatest predictor for longevity and contentment. I read the statement in the writings of various researchers in its various formations. I took notes for years. I “got” the concept.

But what had always blocked me suddenly came to shining clarity as I listened to Esther. She talked about the Dowry of Relationships. The inheritance of ability to live in a kind, loving and intimate way with others is the legacy each of us carries from our family’s experiences.

My legacy was that those who were closest to me did the greatest damage. To be within an arm’s reach was damaging. To be dependent on love to a parent who broke my bones and another one who blamed me for angering her partner left me feeling only safe when I isolated myself. I escaped to the world of books.

I saw my parents form friendships which were to be quite frank, weird. The fat family with boils on their butts came to the house for my mother, the nurse, to inject them with penicillin. The woman who sat at our dining room table telling my mother about all of the ways that we, The Coach family, were lower status than her family was. Her daughter got awards. The mother had a new watch. See it. Then there was the hairdresser who hated her husband. She would show up when she had a truck load of stories about what a failure he was as a man. She marked the sides of all of the containers in the house to make sure the children were not taking any food she had not specifically given them.

And then there was my mother’s family: the brother that showed up to borrow four thousand dollars from my mom. I had to listen for years about how he “took” her money. The sister that stood me next to her nakedness in the shower and scrubbed my hair with some acid like soap that stung my eyes. When I cried, she told me what a baby I was. The other three siblings I only saw once, thankfully.

So the script I inherited was that friends are always in an unequal relationship. One is the status person and the other sits meekly while being bullied.

“Oh, that is the way you can be a friend,” I thought. “Smile and take nasty comments.”

And then at school I learned that my vocabulary, the way I spoke would cause others to gather around me and kick me while telling me I was a monster of arrogance.

My Dowry of Relationships is now the Hope Chest I am opening. I am taking out each experience and looking at it.

To be close is to be betrayed. To be close is to inevitably let in pain. To be open and honest is to attract rejection.

The results are so built into my mind habits that I am quite impressed with the strength of them. I dislike eating with others because my father beat me at the table. My mother force fed me in order to make me fat and not competitive with her as the “beautiful one.” I dislike riding in a car with someone because it means I can’t escape. I am trapped. My father had me sit where he could reach around and strike my face.

Groups of people cause me to feel like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I am watching my tail and ready to move should that person become unmindfully cruel. I will not go into an environment with alcohol. The loss of control, the verbal jabs that pass as humour, the group decision to choose one person out to humiliate inevitably happens in the presence of alcohol. I no longer wish to be a witness to this behaviour. To see others demeaned causes me physical pain.

The inheritance of distrust goes back at least to my grandparents. Their children suffered from the experiences that the parents had to endured. In their social interactions there was a wary circling kind of ritual that I liken to two people about to engage in a knife fight who are slowly moving around looking for an opening. The watchfulness of defence and protection was the over riding necessity in both of my parent’s families.

So my Dowry of Relationships is that in order to have a close relationship, one must endure being hurt, betrayed, disrespected. Inevitably, there is an ultimate price to pay. I get the same feeling when I watch film noir movie or detective show. Cynicism is an armour.

I am sitting with this new clarity of information and letting myself “real” ize it.

I do not see myself as a victim or as lacking social skills. I see myself as merely human.

What I do know now is that the inheritance of experiences will always script our lives until we clearly see the source of our decisions.

There is a time to just stop and sit. There is a time to forgive ourselves for not supplying the necessities of life to ourselves. There is a time to simply see ourselves as a vulnerable entity who is on a journey. I am grateful to the hours I spent listening to Esther Perel. She showed up because I was ready to learn.

The day started slowly. I took my time. The Kicking Horse Grizzly Claw coffee so dark in my cup, I sip slowly. The laundry is running again, redone because both my house guest and I put soap in so it was an explosion of bubbles creeping out the door. After four rinses the sheets are floating around and around in clear water.

I listen to CBC and learn about the Dunning Kruger Effect when people misjudge how much they know. Basically, knowing a little bit is dangerous but knowing more means individuals know what he or she doesn’t know. Got it?

Then I boil some potatoes with no plan. It is, after all, a Sunday and calls for a kind of vagueness.

I can still feel the nagging pain of tight muscles across my shoulders from my four days of shovelling snow. It was fun at the time. I felt powerful and useful. Somehow I invested the act of destroying the obstructing snow plow wall with some virtuous behavior in action.

The day is in between. It is not cold nor is it warm. There is no snow falling or predicted. But the sun comes out only like a feather’s brush of warmth on the skin and then disappears.

I think about the idea of a day holding promise. Each promise to the self, each action moves us closer to a new future. When I first wake up, I visualize the day bringing in gifts. I visualize myself moving into new habits and toward new possibilities. It is a dance. I move toward it. It moves toward me.

What will happen next has already been triggered on past days. What will happen far into the future is being created now. It is all a dance.

I sip my dark coffee and think about all of the things I don’t know yet. I fully understand the Dunning Kruger Effect. To know what I don’t even have a shadow of understanding about what I don’t yet know is to float in possibilities. I will be open. I commit to Sunday’s soft edges and shifting sunshine.

February has the ability to put us into a thrall hypnotic state of dull dissatisfaction. My mother shared with me the statistical data she had collected when working for a laboratory that tested people to see what malaise was at work in their bodies. February, she informed me, had just as many blood, urine, saliva tests as the proceeding eleven months all together.

The humanly shared urge to solve “the problem” hits the population in the North American dark sky cities in the most desperation. Why do I feel as if I am walking in a bog, or a tar pit? Why do I see my interior ability to generate energy declining and my exterior ability to solve problems declining?

When we look out on our psychic landscape it is like a desert. Flatness. No incoming delights; no wandering tribes of goodness coming toward us to set up tents and hold a May Pole dance.

The mind is like a bowling ball. We throw a thought… oh maybe when we are six and it just keeps rolling. The thought just keeps travelling on the same trajectory. We stand in what we see as a wet, gray sun deprived landscape. We stand in what we see as a white, cold, landscape of deterrence. And that tendency for our thoughts to roll on in a negative manner is most difficult in February.

I don’t think in all of my 74 years I have heard one person say, “I can’t wait for February. I love that month.” And Valentine’s day is planted there in that ice and rain and darkness. It is almost as if the depression is not thick enough: Someone decided to add another level.

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Sickness is more likely to occur in February. My neighbours are falling for it. Meanwhile at home, I sit next to my SAD light, gulping giant spoonfuls of nice cod liver oil. I go into a kind of Medieval villager’s response. I have a cross carved into my door… or at least I want to. My body begins to store fat so I can survive any possible apocalypse. I smudge my body, my house. I sit meditation chanting to clear the dark thought gremlins that try to attach to me. I watch comedies and turn away from the news.

I know it is a time that makes us yearn for another time. My mother told me of her experiences in the laboratory. People want to know why they feel like crap.

February is the month to just survive. We are mammals. We have all of the needs of animals. We are like plants. We thrive on sunlight, human contact, fresh clear water and the desire to look out and see some caravan of happiness working its way toward us.

There will be a May Pole. There will be a celebration of life. Neighbours will be working next to one another in the yard making flowers happen.

But now is a time of learning. When we share a state of darkness, what can we learn? We get to the very point of life and that is knowing full on standing nude in the mirror looking at our undressed souls. What is it I need? It forces us to look. It forces us to create our deeper relationship with ourselves.

February is a desert with fewer distractions. We can see farther. We can see more clearly. What are we learning?

The snow has finally come to us in the Okanagan Valley. We have passed through a warm early winter with the deepest excursions into winter being the gray spray of clouds on the water and the obscuring trail of dark icing on the hills. There have been winds warning us something was coming. And now it is here. The snow fell through the day, the late afternoon and at night. As I stood in my upstairs window, I could see it floating down under the street light.

And today the blue sky is crisscrossed by tree limbs obscured by clinging snow. The birds who disappeared somewhere, I don’t know where are back showing themselves on branches. They are absorbing the sunlight, taking to the air, enjoying the opportunity to fly.

Tomorrow, I will be back on the sidewalk with my broken handled yellow snow shovel attempting to keep the walkway clear for those who want a solid footing.

It is a lesson in attachment. The reaction and emotional involvement in the weather is tiring and ultimately useless. Watching weather front move across the lid of the valley is mindfulness practice.

The wind came. And offered me a chance to be fearful that branches would break off and attack my house. The gray graffiti mural artist wrote across the sky some message of clouds. I could have told myself I was deprived of sunlight, or connection to a more spacious view of the vault above us. And then the snow. It fell. It fell. It fell. And it brought with it obstruction of the roadways and highways.

I watched social media fill up with reactions that reminded me of people lashing out at old mean natured ex partner. I hate… him, her, that. I want another…person…partner…reality.

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And watching the patterns of the seasons in my life, is very instructive. At Christmas, because of past traumas, my mindfulness practice is abysmal. I choose to be depressed for weeks on end. I choose to feel unloved and incapable of positive change. It is a yearly season of the monsoon of mind flooding.

But now, now I can say, “How do I feel about this weather?” And the answer is the weather doesn’t care. It is now and now changes. It is the particular combination of moisture, wind, artic conditions. My job is to find a way to fit into what is.

The way I train my mind is to say, “Well, this is an adventure.” Yes. I do say that. It is like jollying on a dog to go outside and be in the day.

Yesterday, I walked 11 thousand steps shovelling my sidewalk. And I said to myself, “Look, you are having an adventure.”

The weather does not care what I think of it. It is up to me to find a way to live in whatever is happening. And, hey, I had heat and Netflix. It was a good month with lots of weather adventures.

I know it is a highly competitive topic to discuss. Some experts in distraction excel when they are mere children and go on to spent a lifetime honing their skills. But the spectacular presence of screens has taken the inability to focus and work toward goals to a new, unforeseen level.

Focus was never my problem. I was born with what I called my Obessive fairy over my shoulder. My brother who arrived on earth when I was four years eight months old once said to me that I was never a child. And to be fair I do remember lining my teddy bears up in chairs in front of an easel blackboard. They were wonderful students and sat glassy eyed as I told them information that would be necessary for them going forward in their plush existences.

Books held my attention for most of my life. I had a path straight forward in my reading landscape. The book I am reading now I put at the head of my bed so I could grab it automatically as soon as I get into bed. And next to that book would be a pile in intentional order of where I plan to go next in my imagination. As I got older, I purposefully selected long books because the sense of grief and emptiness that came when the book ended was so upsetting to me. There was always a feeling of death when I closed the back cover.

I would lay outside on the lawn and read. I would recline on a rock next to the summer swimming hole and read. I would sit in long car trips and read.

And then we purchased a TV and I began watching a series of Shakespearean plays. I watched ballet and opera. Returning to my books immediately after the show was my pattern.

Gradually, I fell in thrall to the screens. It began with my desk computer and migrated to the laptop. When I travelled, I had the iPad.

I began to watch newsreportage on a screen and migrated from biographies held in my hands with their hard covers and promises of weeks of accompanying a person on his or her life.

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My habits of watching passively while others are pasting memes and quotes and quips is massive. At the end of some days, I ask, “What happened to time?”

It was spent. But it was spent foolishly. And like a person who tries to carry water in two cupped hands… it just spills through my fingers.

The five year old person, the sixteen year old person who be shocked and appalled at how much time flows through my life with nothing to show for it.

But, I argue back, “Everyone does it.” We are all lulled into numb staring and somehow feel that something was accomplished.

I observe myself. I reset my short term goals. I start again. Screen addiction is a deeply ingrained habit. I will start with baby steps. And let us see where that goes.

Wish me luck.