i is a pixie, i's sorry but its true.
i is a pixie, sure as yous be you.
they said me was a pixie, at brownies one day.
beside the mirror pond, on the floor in brentwood bay.
i is a pixie, i's crossed over when i's seven.
i's been a pixie since, though i's confused 'round 'leven.
when they said me was a pixie, i took them vows to heart.
from the spirit of the chant we learned, i never did depart.
us pixie folks are for fixin' things, and we's jolly when things go wrong.
which oft' happens to us pixies, our list o' trouble, it be long.
at first we have a great big cry, o'er misfortunes and ugly strife.
and then we gets our joy back, by fixin' 'what just ain't right'.
.
we's got no reason to be happy, its not about things we've got.
because lots of us is poor, or in the worst of lots.
but we's jolly anyhows, like a rebel against the foe.
can't stop a pixie from dancing, ain't no matter what her woes.
she hears the music in the trees, she smells it in the ground.
the colours of the dying leaves, send her body twirling 'round.
the pixie's ma gets so afraid, she cuts off the daughter's hair.
but the pixie grows it back again, because she knows it wasn't fair.
you can't stop a pixie from dancing, or keep her close when she needs to go.
and she's a creature of the greatest vanity that you will ever, ever know.
at first you'll find her charming, you'll want to keep her for yourself.
but a pixie belongs to nobody, she's just a jolly fixer who loves to help.
if you want to meet a pixie, she'll be smiling in a pile of muck.
she'll be sorting out folks, one by one, and extra lovin' on the ones most stuck.
she'll be primpin' and preenin' like a right proud bird, ever looking to strut her stuff.
most'll forgive her for her swaggerin' ways, because they sees her heart, and its enough.
i is a pixie, i's sorry but its true.
i is a pixie, sure as yous be you.
they said me was a pixie, at brownies one day.
beside the mirror pond, on the floor in brentwood bay.
the end
Some background on pixies;
The Traditional Brownie Club Pixie Chant: "Look out, we're the jolly Pixies, Helping people when in fixes" Kristin's pixie testimony; " I was formally inducted into my pixie hood by the Brentwood Bay Brownie Club in 1976. Of course one is actually 'born a pixie' and some of us never even attended Brownies, because being a pixie is not about being a Brownie, being a pixie is having the inborn spirit of being a cheeky and joyful helper in this world. Most pixies don't "remember" that they are actually pixies until they mature into their truest life callings. That is not to invalidate my formal induction into my own pixie hood through Brownies, because it was the right path for me, but there are many paths to pixie hood, each of them as valid as the other. For me, due to my wonderful childhood experiences as a young pixie who attended Brownies, I would like to thank my Brentwood Bay Brown Owl for the encouragement to continue the good and jolly fixing activities, and for the inspirational craft making opportunities." In regard to my recent "coming out" as a pixie photo shoot and costume, Special thank yous to Peter Blake , Tokyo photographer specializing in sports and live music performance photography for the adventurous forest photo shoot, and to Melanie Uematsu Tokyo seamstress, instructor, and clothing designer for the inspiring costume. Your work is amazing, kudos to both of you! Thank you for making this incredibly vain pixie look so fantastic...
Last weekend I was using the Genesis Cards created by Liane Wakabayashi to explore a very important question in my life. In response, out of the 44 face down cards, I subconsciously selected the Inspiration card. When I saw the inspiration card I cried, because it was such an accurate answer to my question. Later I was fascinated by how closely the art on the Inspiration card matched the above image of myself, a photo that gave me very mixed feelings when I looked at it from the shoot. When I first saw the photo, I did not want my eyes to be closed and I did not like how the lighting shows the scar on my face from the cancer removal surgery. In consideration of the matching card, I wondered if perhaps to reach our deepest creative inspiration, we need to surrender that control, that "eyes wide open" part of ourselves, as well as let the imperfections and scars that display the difficult places we have been in life be seen. And what if when we embrace what is, and what has been even if it isn't not what we had planned or hoped for, it leads us to the path to greatest inspiration of all? Those are some pixie thoughts.
When I was a very little girl, around the size that I am in this photograph, I had my very own pet duck. My parents were raising my brother John and I on our idyllic 3 acre hobby farm just outside the beautiful 'garden city' of Victoria. My sister Katie would not make her unexpected entrance into the world for another five years.
It was such an exciting childhood to have farm animals, even if at times it was a bit scary. We had a large horned milk cow named Opal who would charge at us if we displeased her, and an overly protective rooster that would jump onto our shoulders and peck at our heads if he was in a bad mood when we went into the hen house to collect eggs. My favourite animal experience on the farm, aside from growing up with a black lab named Satan, was having my very own duck.
Perhaps you question the memory of a child so small, but if you ask my mother she will tell you that I remember more about my early childhood than she does. I remember everything. I remember my painful ear infections that resulted in middle of the night hospital visits while wearing footed toddler pajamas. I remember my best friend's grandmother's extremely large boosoms darting out toward me in torpedo shaped bras veiled in cotton gardening blouses while she watched after me in her garden when I was only a preschooler. I even remember asking myself my first existential question at two years old after I threw an empty bottle at the bedroom door from the crib in frustration over my mother's lack of a refill service. I laid on my back, took a deep breath, stared out the window and wondered, "Am I REALLY here, or is this just somebody else's dream?" after which I began to imagine that I was just a character inside the dream of another being's consciousness. I repeated asking myself this question through out my childhood and I could never determine if life was actually real or just some sort of a story being told by another.
But back to more important topics like my pet duck. He was ADORABLE. He was a baby duck, just a tiny little creature whom for some reason after he cracked open his egg, believed that I was his mother. Every day when I went out into the farm yard this little baby duck followed me round. I'd sit in the sand pile with my cars and my sand castle building toys. We had no box, just an open pile of sand from one of my father's unfinished cement pouring sessions. The baby duck would sit with me adoringly while I 'worked'. When I would go into the house at the end of the day, my mother would return the duck to his proper flock. Neither the duck nor I realized that my family's plan was for his family to eventually become duck dinners. Free from this knowledge, the baby duck would trustingly follow me down the driveway to visit that nearby grandmother with the torpedo boosoms in her garden full of pansies, or he would go down into the field with me to play chicken with the large horned milk cow. It was true love for both of us, for me and my duck.
This is an unceremoniously short story because one day, I accidentally stepped on my duck. I killed the damned thing. I was heart broken. At the tender age of two, I made a mistake and somebody died. My baby duck was dead. He was irretrievably deceased after only one moment of absence to my otherwise constant baby duck conscientiousness . I can still feel the pang of remorse, the horrific realization of my crime, the obsessive desire to go back in time in order to take back my terrible misstep and to save the life of my beloved pet duck.
I would like to say that I really learned my lesson on that day, and that I never made a mistake like that again. I'd like to say that stepping on that duck made me a better person or some such thing. But the truth of the matter is that I still step on ducks. I don't mean to, I try very hard not to, but occasionally it happens and an accidental metaphoric duck crushing event transpires. A dead duck is every bit as upsetting to me now as it was to me when I was only two. I wonder about the purpose of it. Why do ducks have to die? Why do we accidentally step on delicate things that break? Then I lay on my bed and I take a deep breath and I look out my window and I wonder, "Am I really here, or is this just somebody else's dream?"
The sun setting at a campsite on the Izu Peninsula in August
Me watching the sunset over the ocean 42 years after the first dead duck
My brother John died last month. The day after his funeral which I did not return to Canada for, I went on a camping vacation to probably the most incredible place I have ever visited away from the glorious gorgeousness of my own province. I went camping on a small volcanic island off of the Izu Peninsula called Niijima. The campsite was free and I was surrounded by a back drop of geographical beauty, joyful surfers surfing, and a group of creatively inspiring hula hoopers hooping. It was in the midst of this overwhelming outer good fortune that I was processing my own greatest inner turmoil both in personal circumstances and in state of mind.
Life is complicated. Death is complicated. Sibling relationships are complicated. Love is complicated. Creating our own physical and emotional health is complicated. Putting up 'boundaries' is complicated. Having a schizophrenic brother is complicated. To be honest, sometimes I am just really `gosh darned` tired of how freaking complicated it all is. But we can`t give up right? or so I am told by good friends.
Who is a person's brother to them? For every person it is a different relationship, as unique as the individuals involved and the circumstances of life they find themselves born into. Some of us don't even have a brother, so perhaps they dream of an idyllic relationship with the brother they wished to have had, sort of like a single person dreams of an idyllic relationship with a partner they wish for. In my case I had a real brother, a complicated one. I arrived in this world two years and three months after him. It was just John and Kristin until seven years later when we both won the lottery with the arrival of our surprise baby sister Katie.
My older brother's hand was probably the first I ever held on a regular basis, but only when we were terribly small toddlers, as ours was not to be an affectionate or pleasant relationship. I adored him, but the feeling was never mutual. I like to think that during the short time when I was still a baby that my brother John didn't mind me, because from my earliest recollection, my brother did not like me at all, ever. My brother was a reserved and intelligent person, and although wonderfully friendly to others, it was no secret that I was his nemesis. I was an overtly expressive little girl who received a lot of attention from strangers over my beautiful coloured eyes and my avid interest in connecting with the people who crossed my path. But as far as my intellect, I was never in the running for any sort of academic awards and my brother`s aptitude in math was always a great mystery to me.
my eyes forty years later, surrounded by the beautiful eyes of younger women on niijima
In our teens my brother was wonderful with our grandparents and all older people, whereas I loved children and thought elderly people were grey haired kill joys. John and I were night and day. Probably the only thing we shared was our love for and giftedness in music, something that our baby sister Katie would also inherit from both of our ill matched and soon to be divorced parents. But John even hated the way that I sang and used to scold me for it. Now that he is dead, I think I can safely say that I really don`t think there was one thing that my brother John ever liked about me, except that I moved to Japan.
In 2010 when I moved to Japan and my brother John said goodbye to me, he gave me a large and genuine hug. It surprised me. We had long ago negotiated an unspoken truce between us, but when I left for Japan I could actually sense his sincere well wishes for me as I embarked on my great adventure to a country that my family has always had a love for and fascination with. Twenty seven years ago John had embarked on a similar adventure. He went off to Europe and North Africa and worked in England in order to explore and make his own way in the world. It was during his two year international adventure that his schizophrenia appeared, the mental illness that he would suffer from for twenty five years. Schizophrenia, the medical condition that would isolate him from his friends and his dreams and his aptitudes and his potential for success.
family send off to tokyo october 2010, the day i got the HUG
If I had thought that John`s and my relationship had been challenging when we were kids, our relationship as he navigated every day with a devastating mental illness, was even more difficult. But we kept going. We were a brother and sister with completely opposite lives. I had the weight and wealth of responsibilities of raising four children at a very young age, my fourth child was born to me when I was only 24. John had the responsibility of trying to stay alive, and managing his episodes of psychosis, followed by a strict regime of medication and dealing with their many side effects. I watched his journey, he watched mine. We were brother and sister, two years and three months apart.
24 and 26, a mother of four and a young man after five years of schizophrenia
The misfortune and losses of my brother`s life are too extensive and depressing to fully list, but I was witness to how he kept going. The fact that he carried on despite of everything was ultimately how he won my admiration. It was the most difficult on my mother who would become repetitively distressed as she witnessed her son`s world becoming smaller and smaller. She was understandably tortured by the upset of him suffering from the medication side effects of his parkinsons like tremors, shaking so badly that it was hard for him to feed himself, in additional to the diseases of cancer and diabetes which were added to what John had to deal with. What upset her the most was that he spent almost all of his time alone. I don`t know when we all understood and accepted that John would never finish his degree in sociology, or have a proper career worthy of his intellect, or raise a family, or be fit and healthy and play music the way that he used to. It was one loss at a time. I guess we all just kept going.
Something that has been interesting to me since John`s death is realizing what happens when a family group carries a member who is sick for many years. When that family member dies without warning, the group is disorientated. That person who needed us, to whom we were so important to has suddenly vanished. Twenty five years of our family group`s journey has included taking care of, and including, and being concerned about a person who was mentally ill. By his death, although it was of natural causes, the physically weakest person in our family group who in some ways defined us, has abandoned us. What do we do now without our person to carry? Who are we without our John?
John has always made me re evaluate my thoughts about what we each `contribute`in this world. I cannot imagine raising my four children without a schizophrenic uncle, as he so greatly contributed to who they are so far as developing their compassion and kindness toward others. Using his intelligent mind to converse with each of them while caught inside of a shaking and suffering body, my brother John taught my children to respect all people, including those in unfortunate circumstances.
Now that my brother`s life journey is over and the story of his spirit has been told, it feels like I have a greater amount of responsibility to tell the stories that are mine and yet to unfold. John`s death at 46 sent me into a crisis about my own life, about where I should be, and about what I should be doing with the story of life that I have been given to tell.
I had to take everything apart and figure out if I should return to Canada to be with my family in the immediate coming years, or if I should stay in Japan. It has been a long long time since my big brother John has held my hand, but by him leaving this world last month, as I faced a future without him, my hand has never felt emptier.
So there I was on Niijima at a Hula Hooper retreat in one of the most beautiful settings in the world, trying to sort out what to do with my life again. Fortunately I was with my Jewish friend Liane Wakabayashi, an artist and a writer who created the Genesis Cards. The Genesis Cards are these wonderfully beautiful tools that can be used to facilitate creativity and life direction through the intuitive process. http://www.genesiscards.com/ With the Genesis Cards Liane patiently helped me use my intuition to map out my life direction.
My assumption that I should leave Japan was clarified as a ruse. I will stay in Japan. It seems that I have more stories to live out in this great country. I feel grateful and excited for all that comes next for me, even though I also feel deep sadness that I don`t have a brother back home anymore. Keep going sister. That is how I feel about my life when I think of my dearly departed brother John. In the beauty of the earth I hear John saying `Keep going sister.`
Scroll down to see related videos. One from Niijima, and one from Canada.
The music festival on Niijima with the surfers and the hoopers
My younger sister`s song `If I`m not Dead`with her band Pawnshop Diamond in Vancouver
Today is the last day of March. Winter has confirmed its reprieve and the sakura cherry blossoms are in their full and glorious bloom. It is the season of new beginnings, of school year starts, and for gathering in parks with friends and family for picnics and outdoor baseball games. March is also the anniversary month of Japan's Great East Earthquake. Two years ago the earth broke Japan while the world heard and watched it being shattered via live aerial footage. All of Japan has been affected economically by the break, with an estimated recovery cost of $309 billion, the most expensive natural disaster in the world, but the people of Tohoku are the ones who have had to live with in the circumstances of the country's brokenness every day since, including coping with the memories and terrible traumas of the events that transpired immediately after and continued during the initial weeks after the disaster.
This month I had the opportunity to visit the Oshika Peninsula, one of the areas that was hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami, a body of land estimated to be 17 feet farther to the East since the quake. The land on Oshika has also dropped by over a meter making previously beautiful sandy beaches a memory as they are now submerged under the tide. On the streets where there were once homes and businesses there are now only remnants of empty lots with cement pads that used to be foundations. The land is owned by local residents currently staying temporary housing units. The owners are not permitted to rebuild their homes because their land is now too low in relation to the sea.
I went up to Oshika in order to 'volunteer' in hopes of being a
little bit helpful, but mostly I was just reminded that I am a complete
idiot comparative to those who are walking out their lives after being
broken by the earth.
Caroline Pover, an active leader in local recovery efforts on Oshika and the mastermind of brilliant practical help projects such as school uniform sponsorships and the 'free store' gave us a tour of the peninsula. One of the other volunteers mentioned that her husband had visited Tohoku shortly after the quake. A resident living in the disaster area told her Japanese husband that he felt that Japan had been split in two on 3/11. He said that now there are two Japans; the Japan that experienced the disaster face to face and now understands the meaning of life, and the Japan outside of the disaster zone that does not yet understand the meaning of life. This comment made me wonder what it might be like to understand the meaning life, and how that wisdom looks to have come at the most terrible of prices.
It also made me think about the kinds of things that break the rest of us, those who aren't living in an area that has been hit by a natural disaster. It made me wonder if the things that break us are also the things that are bringing us closer to understanding the meaning of life, perhaps considerably more slowly than the residents of broken Japan. The events and circumstances that break us regular people, like the untimely death of a person or animal or business who is a center piece within our world, and the things from our pasts like being victimized by a person in a position in power over us when we were vulnerable, or the separation from a person we love due to circumstances, or being estranged from family members or friends, or an addiction that is drowning us, or the impractical messy things like unwelcome long lasting economic hardships that devour our best efforts to provide for ourselves or our families, or illnesses and injuries that take us away from our loved ones and our dreams, and events of the heart like a lover's abandonment, or a partner's betrayal, or deeply loving while not at all being loved. Those kinds of experiences of not having the things that we really really need in life whether they be economic, physical, practical, or emotional can sometimes break us on the inside the way that the earth broke Japan from the inside out in Tohoku two years ago.
In the disaster hit areas of Japan where it is estimated that nineteen thousand people lost their lives and where ninety thousand people are currently residing in temporary shelters instead of in the buildings that until two years ago they called their homes, people have gone without many of the things that they really needed and yet because so they seem to know something that the rest of us don't. What meaning of life can we also come to know by our comparative lesser brokenness and what can we learn from this part of Japan that already 'gets it'?
In addition to visiting Miyagi twice this month, I have also been hosting an old friend from home who is visiting Japan. He and I attended school together from the age of twelve and we were always both a bit broken. His brokenness was manifested in the perfect combination of hilarious hyperactivity with intellectual brilliance that resulted in frequent detentions in Mt. Newton Middle School's supplementary desk next to the janitor in the bowels of the boiler room. My brokenness was more along the lines of being a religious zealot, which was and is so much less cool. While this friend of mine was here visiting I wondered who each of us would be if we hadn't both been a bit broken from life. Is it even possible to separate ourselves from our brokenness, and therefore is it possible to separate the people of Tohoku from everything they have endured together over these last two years? Who is Japan without this busted up part of it that still struggles with the very basics of life, where idiots like me visit in an attempt to be of some 'help' like we did last week throwing in a couple of extra hands for the local seaweed harvest, or a few weeks earlier by cheering up the residents with live music and an art workshop? And should we attempt to help anyways, even if they are so much the wiser than ourselves?
Artist Liane Wakabayashi and I at the workshop
I think it is important to try to help, even if we are not of as much use as we would hope. Because I think it is important for the people who are living with the long term consequences of 3/11 to know that the other part of Japan, the part that does not yet understand the meaning of life, is still their Japan, and that they are not forgotten amongst the members of the rest of their beautiful country or by the rest of the world. Our visiting faces assure them that they are remembered as is their struggle to recover some sort of normality. No we do not understand it, and we will never equal them in their wisdom, but they continue to be loved by us, and love as each of us knows, is always the very most important thing, even and especially between those of us who have always been a bit broken.
Twelve months ago I meandered into a stand up drinking
bar in Shibuya by accident, because I had a bit of extra time in the
late afternoon, and because it seemed like an interesting place to be. I
had been living in Tokyo for three months and had just come through an
unreasonable series of travails. Still weak and recovering from a bad
bout of pneumonia that had seen me hospitalized a few weeks earlier, and
only arriving in the country six weeks before that, I was still
completely and passionately in love with the enormous city of Tokyo, a
place that seemed to pull to it my kind of people; creative, eccentric,
and brave souls. Being happy hour, the bar began to fill up with an
equal collection of Japanese and expatriates who were winding down from a
long day out on the job. It was there and then that I met the talented
photographer Alfie Goodrich, who would more importantly become my
friend. Alfie was with another photographer, and the two of them and
myself began a fascinating and humorous conversation with an interesting
young journalist from America who spoke with a strong Southern accent.
Sometimes you meet people that you understand very
quickly, and who understand you. Alfie and I were like that. We were
born in the same year, 1969. We were the baby busters who arrived on
this planet after all of those baby boomers had already blazed their
path to greatness and used up a considerable amount of resources in
doing so. Both of us understood what it is like to get to the table too
late for the big helping of easy come opportunities. Alfie and I also
had the shared history of being freelancing artists, him as a
photographer and me as a performer, who had managed the pressures of
supporting children without the security of being an employee. Pursuing
your professional passion when it is only your own provision that you
are risking is one thing, but to pursue your passion with a small crowd
of foot growing dependents that need supper every night, that is a more
complicated and costly type of bravery.
After discovering that we had a lot in common, Alfie
suggested that we do an exchange of talent. He would photograph me and I
would write an article about portraits for his website Japanorama. This
would also allow me to meet his beautiful family. About a week later
the two of us did the planned portrait shoot and I got to spend an
afternoon with the Goodriches. I even got to take a nap in the kids room
before eating the delicious supper that his wife prepared for us that
evening, because people who are recovering from pneumonia need a lot of
naps. Supper with the Goodriches was actually my first meal shared in a
home since I had arrived in Japan. Until that evening for almost four
months my every meal had been in isolation, in public, or in a hospital
bed.
During the photoshoot before my nap and supper with
the Goodriches, I was surprised at how quickly and accurately Alfie was
able to capture the images that expressed what I was feeling. Before we
got together I had confided in Alfie about some of the things that were
happening in my life and what I wanted to say in the portrait. At that
time it had taken everything I had within me in order to survive and to
overcome the initial circumstantial difficulties that met me upon my
arrival in Japan, the place where I felt so passionately it was my
destiny to be. My youngest son was eighteen and back in Canada living in
a small apartment on my friend's property during his grade twelve year.
The trials I was encountering in Japan were making it hard for me to
predict my long term situation and my ability to provide for him.
Popular opinion back home was that I should give up on things working
out in Japan and return to Canada. However after almost dying by myself
on my apartment floor in a city full of strangers a few weeks earlier,
and experiencing fever induced hallucinations, and honestly being
terrified that my young adult children were possibly hours away from not
having a mother anymore, I had come to believe, possibly for the first time in my life, that I was actually an
incredibly important person. Since those scary moments of facing my
mortality I believed that I was important enough to pursue my dream of
having a life in Japan where I felt I could be of much greater benefit
to others than in a dead end local job back in Canada. It was in
consideration of the way that I was feeling, stronger than ever in
spirit, albeit still needing frequent naps due to my physical state,
that I wanted Alfie to record those emotions visually through the medium of a photographic portrait. I wanted him to capture my
feelings of spiritual strength during a time of physical weakness. I
knew that I did not need to return to Canada. I knew that I just needed to be
myself, to stick some tough things out, and to believe that things would work
themselves out, which they did.
A brilliant photographer and a beautiful person,
Alfie put into images the sentiments that I was feeling. He helped me to
express that I was not ashamed to be who I am, to pursue what I feel is
my fate, and to ask for and to receive help along the way to it. The
photographs that Alfie took remind me that I am an intense woman who
resides in a physical form that reflects exactly who I am; strong,
solid, mature, feminine, and non apologetically passionate. I do not
behave in a way that has a stamp of socially accepted responsibility on
it. Instead my life is about learning, experimentation, and the determination to be of the greatest benefit
possible to others by using my talents and accepting and rejoicing in
the life experiences that are uniquely mine while following the exact
pursuits that bring my soul the greatest amount of joy. I found almost
dying while alone in a foreign country a wonderful reminder of such
things and I am grateful for every single circumstantial trial that met
me upon my arrival in Japan. Those experiences made me a stronger and
more determined person.
The above would make a wonderful conclusion to what
happened when Alfie and I collaborated on a portrait session, however
there is more to the story that makes those photographs from one year ago even more meaningful to me. The unexpected and unpleasant event of having plastic surgery on my face four months ago due to a cancer diagnosis has permanently
altered my appearance. I will never again have the scar free face
that Alfie photographed. How much more precious to have those Alfie
Goodrich images now that I am temporarily disfigured and awaiting my
physical healing and long term facial changes as created by my
plastic surgeon? Alfie and my portrait session and the circumstances
that followed reminded me of the importance of grabbing the moments of
now, to work with the artists and circumstances that are available to us in each moment in order to create what we
can, when we can, things that may no longer be available to us in the
future. I believe it is the fleetingness of opportunities that makes our
'now's so precious. Thank you Alfie for grabbing that winter now with me
and for giving me the gift of documenting images of my strength and
beauty in Tokyo in January of 2012. You are a wonderful artist and I
consider myself privileged to have been photographed by you and to call
you my friend.
To see more of Alfie's amazing photography click on the links below;
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