Keep Going Sister

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

top photo gratitude to Rob Moreno

The Things that Break Us

Oshika Peninsula Miyagi Tohoku

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. 

Portraits

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;

More of Alfie's work

A couple of roosters meet up in Tokyo 

trying out those crazy ass japanese boots... not so much

The Good the Bad and the Ugly

I really really wish that I was only a super wonderful person. This is not a self esteem problem, this is a reconciliation to reality problem. Because although sometimes I am a super wonderful person, there are other times that I am neither super nor wonderful.

I would like to be only super and wonderful the same way that I wish that life were always happy and filled with the experiences that I seek each day instead of the ones that are trial some. I have noticed that most of us like to categorize everything into a good box and a bad box. We like to fill up and sit inside of the good box, while shooing away anything less than pleasant over and into the bad box, the one that we want to drive off and drop off at somebody else's house, preferably at one of those bad people's houses. But as far as I can tell, life is not only good or only bad, and neither are we. My observation is that all of us have beauty, all of us have blessings, all of us have pain, all of us have travails, and all of us behave in ways that we later regret, especially when we find ourselves caught in the wrong set of combined circumstances. Those times when unfortunate events seem to pile up on us in a way that makes us feel terrified or furious or out of control are like terrible storms that bombard our souls. Everybody gets caught in a storm now and then because there is no set of rules we can follow in order to avoid all of the pressures that life throws at us. President Clinton later referred to his infamous Oval Office sex scandal as a time in his life when he was under incredible external pressure that resulted in him winning a battle for the country while losing a battle for his family. We have all had moments when a storm blew in and our piles of sandbags were breached resulting in things that we loved getting washed away or damaged.

A few weeks ago Storm Sandy hit the East Coast of North America with a vengeance. Some terrible things happened in those communities as a result of a bizarre and random set of combined barometric pressures and powerful weather systems. But when you look at the image of Storm Sandy from space it is actually quite beautiful. How could something so destructive simultaneously hold a form a beauty? I think it is because every thing and every person has both an element of beauty and an element of ugliness, or a shadow. I don't like this fact of life because I only want to be beautiful. I only want to be the super and wonderful person that I am when life is running smoothly. I hate that I am also one of those bad people that I want to put in the bad box and send away to that bad person's house. I hate that I lose my temper. I hate that I have a jealous streak. I hate that I am self righteous and stubborn. I hate that I am incredibly self absorbed and at times insensitive to the feelings and needs of others. But so far as I can tell, this is life. Each of us like Storm Sandy are simultaneously beautiful and ugly. 

This concept of beauty with ugliness, light with shadow, can also transfer to the way we feel about the things in life that we automatically put into the bad box. One of my favourite pass times is people watching. Here in Gotemba we have an Outlet Mall, an ideal place for people watching. Shoppers come from Tokyo and other areas to spend the day buying things in a quiet and peaceful setting. A few weeks ago when I visited there with a friend I noticed a young couple with their only child. She was about ten years old and severely handicapped. They were having a day out as a family at the Outlet Mall, a place that their daughter's wheelchair could easily be pushed around. The mother was connecting her daughter's feeding tube as the other shoppers were going into the Food Court while avoiding looking at the handicapped child. This young couple had things that most of us would put into the bad box, a child so severely handicapped that she could not even be fed orally. Who would want that life? But as I watched the couple they were actually having a really wonderful day together as a family. It made me wonder about the secret beauty that might be hidden inside of that storm, the moments of love that they may be sharing with a very special little girl. I wondered about who that little girl had transformed her parent's into due to all of the physical challenges she faces every day. I wondered if perhaps these two people should actually be envied rather than automatically pitied. 

Later that afternoon I went into the Prada store. The items inside were undeniably gorgeous. I could not help but enjoy the beauty of the quality fabrics and designs. It would be impossible not to be excited to bring something home from that store as it would be an experience of owning and touching and having something beautiful. But while I was looking at the clothing I noticed that there was nothing in that store that would have actually fit my bodacious and curvy physique. Apparently Prada, as well as the other extremely expensive stores where we are supposed to envy the financial ability to shop in, do not have any clothing for a woman who has any other body type than that of a stereotypical display mannequin. Am I really supposed to wish that I could be this prototype of what has been culturally decided as desirable and elite? And why would I want to be in this elite social status when achieving what I am supposed to want looks to me like a tremendous amount of internal stress and pressure toward attempting a life style of perfection in order to look good to others. The constant attention and effort toward a supposedly perfect appearance that creates an experience of being envied by those with less social and economic power looked incredibly burdensome to me in that Prada store. I saw the shadow of having what is also beautiful. I would still love to own something from Prada and I am not saying that having beautiful things is less moral or undesired, I am only saying that there is also a measure of pain, a burden that comes with having what other people envy and that there is a dark side to every experience of light.

This made me wonder if we should automatically pity the parents of the severely handicapped little girl while envying the people who can afford and fit into the high end designer clothing? And if we might be wasting our time chasing an evasive kind of happiness while the most peaceful people on the Outlet Mall grounds are quietly connecting a feeding tube while being thankful for gently slanted concrete walkways? And is it possible that all of us are actually equal, that we are all having our own varied experiences of joys and sorrows, beauty and ugliness, light and shadows, whether it is coping with the emotional stress of self imposed pressure to attempt perfection or whether it is coping with the challenges of finding places you can easily walk around with a little person in a wheelchair? 

This makes me question my attitudes toward others, especially the bad people, as perhaps they are not the bad people at all. Perhaps they are simply people who have been caught in many terrible storms and not given enough love when they were young and vulnerable. And as much as I would only like to be one of the good people, I know that I am both beautiful and ugly. I am light and darkness. My self absorbed, stubborn, self righteous, and jealous streak is as intact as ever. Can I be reconciled to my own humanity and can I use it to give me more empathy toward the humanity of others? 

What kind of life can I create by including those things in my bad box, the things that make me sad, the unwelcome events, the things that I want to send away because they cause me pain? Maybe I need to stop trying to send that bad box away and start being grateful for those shortcomings and life heart aches because they help me to find joy in the little things, the things like the beauty of a full moon every month, the same way that the young couple at the Outlet Mall found joy in the smoothly raised cement walkways.

Maybe life is less about having things like relationships, security, or desired circumstances, and more about what we can create for ourselves and others by being a whole person, a person who accepts that they have good, bad, and ugly parts. Perhaps that is why I should not automatically pity the parents with the severely handicapped child, or envy the person who's lifestyle meets the target market of a Prada store. Neither life is all good or all bad, both are about becoming and about learning. Everybody's life experience has value and maybe accepting our own humanity and failures and life circumstances enables us to accept the humanity and failures and misfortune of others in order to create more forgiveness, compassion, and kindness in this world. Maybe the things in our bad boxes are our secret treasures. I like this idea. It makes getting cancer on your face seem pretty lucky.

link to seeing sandy from space

Being Naked with your Neighbours

Public bathing is part of the culture in Japan. Until a few decades ago many families did not have their own baths and showers. Each neighborhood had its own bath house and in the evening people made their way to it in order to get clean, to relax, and to catch up with each other about the day. Many of these bath houses still exist, and even though now families have their own bath tubs and showers, almost all Japanese families still take the time to go to onsen when they get the chance. The onsen bathing is segregated by sex, but children of both sexes can be found on either side.

For a Westerner, it is disorientating to be naked among strangers, and even more intimidating to bump into a person that you know. Ya, so this is me naked.....and apparently that is you naked..... maybe next time i will bump into you at the grocery store instead of here at the onsen where we are both naked....this kind of neighborly experience feels pretty awkward for a Canadian who always preferred to put my bathing suit on in a change room, and who learned very fancy ways to put on one item of clothing on while still wearing another, then taking off the first one after I had replaced it with the second one. I went to boarding school during junior high, so I have great skills at changing clothes without ever being seen naked. Those skills are wasted in Japan.

Not being one to miss out on opportunities to learn from another culture and to appreciate all of the things that other cultures get right, I have recently started to get into onsening. The most profound part of the experience of this activity that I find so intimidating is how it has affected my sense of adequacy versus inadequacy. When we onsen we cannot hide anything physical from one another. Being naked in public requires us to accept things about ourselves because in the presence of others there is not time to obsess over our imperfections as it would only draw more attention to them. When I am naked with my neighbors in a bath house, even though no words are spoken between us, I know that they know that I have had children, just like I can see the maps of stories written on their bodies.  The other women see my comparatively curvy build, and the dramatic cancer surgery scar across my face when they look into my light blue eyes, so different than their own. My body silently tells them that I am a bit of a war torn woman who once had a completely different life thousands of miles away from here and now she chooses to bathe with her new neighbors, to be a part of their world.

In the onsen I am different and I am flawed and nobody panics. There is peace among us. We are all adequate. We surround each other with thoughts of kindness and acceptance. In our ultimately vulnerable state I even become less afraid of aging, because when we are naked with our neighbors, together we inexplicably become more beautiful.

Website link to One of the local Onsens

Are you going to be my mommy?

Fall 1989 falling in love with those would become my husband and my  children a few weeks after meeting them

Twenty three years ago on a Canadian Thanksgiving Monday, I got engaged on a picnic table in a coolie on the Prairies. For those who are not familiar with Canadian geography, the prairies are the part of Canada where we grow our wheat and our canola. It is a place where families are farming into their third and fourth generations on the same land that was pioneered by their ancestors. It is the kind of a place where if you `have chickens`, you might have a flock numbering into the thousands, and your nearest neighbour might be two miles to the East of you, or three miles to the South. In these parts of rural and agricultural Canada, a coolie is what I call a dip in the flat land. A prairie coolie is not really a valley, because there are no hills high enough or mountains there to make a valley with. The first time I saw the prairies it was from the inside of a car riding down a highway. I had a sort of panic attack for the mountains. I had never been separated from the security of their height around me and what felt like a veil of protection. On the prairies the sky is a huge dome that surrounds you in every direction. There is no where to take cover and `hide`, only field after field for as far as the eye can see. Although there is not a large population on the Canadian prairies, in my experience some of the highest quality people in the world reside there. These people are the salt of the earth. It is difficult to explain, but if you ever visit the prairies and sit at the kitchen table of a couple who makes their living growing food for others, and drives an hour and a half each way down gravel roads in all weather conditions just to get their children to weekly violin lessons, you will understand how wonderful human beings are capable of being. Prairie people are not my heritage, they are the heritage of the man that I was married to for twenty one years. I was very lucky to have had such incredible people in my life, particularly my in laws. I learned so much from my former husband`s family about all sorts of things. It is a much different part of Canada than my coastal Island home. It is also the part of Canada where I got to watch the displays of the Northern Lights, or the Aurora Borealis.

The first time I saw the Northern Lights was on the way to meet my children. That sounds strange I know, but let me explain. My former husband was married for three years before our marriage. Ten months before he and I met, his first wife was killed in a car accident leaving him a twenty one year old widower with two babies. The baby girl was 23 months old when her mother died, and the baby boy was nine months old. Stephen and I had been corresponding by mail while I was studying and travelling in Europe. I had learned about his situation from a mutual friend who was from his prairie town and was studying with me in England. I had sent him a note of condolence which initiated our correspondence. Both he and I are wonderful creative writers so it was the perfect way for our relationship to progress. When I returned to Canada from Eastern Europe it was just weeks before the end of communism there, which is another story in itself- with twists of smuggling contraband items into Transylvania Romania and having an ambulance ride and life saving surgery in Budapest Hungary-but a story to be told at another time, so back to young love.

A few days after my return to Canada Stephen drove through the Rocky Mountains to meet me in Victoria. There was intense opposition to our relationship in Victoria, and eventually we left together for Alberta where there was intense support toward our relationship. The drive took us about twelve hours through some of the most inspirational mountain landscapes in the world. As we left the Rockies, we came into the prairies. I had never seen the Northern Lights before, and we drove through the city of Calgary at night. As Stephen proudly pointed out the city landmarks I had one thing on my mind, I was only an hour or so away from meeting my two future children! The excitement is indescribable. As we left the city of Calgary and headed toward his home, it was like the horizon opened up above Stephen`s home town and the lights in the sky danced for us. It was one of the most exciting and awe inspiring sights and moments of my life. I knew that under those dancing Northern lights were sleeping angels, two of the greatest loves of my life. Stephen`s parents awoke upon our arrival and lovingly welcomed me into their home and their family while still wearing their pajamas. I immediately looked in on those sleeping babies and I knew with out a shadow of a doubt that I was with my family. 

The next day was spent in much excitement as I got to know the most wonderful one year old boy and the most amazing two year old girl in the world. That afternoon I laid down with the little girl who would become my daughter to help her fall asleep for her nap. A real talker, she did a lot of chatting with me about things, about her various toys and plans for the day. She was looking at me very closely when she paused and asked me a very serious question. `Are you going to be my mommy?` I looked into her beautiful brown eyes and I answered her with another question. `Would you LIKE to me to be your mommy?` She did not answer me right away. She took quite a bit of time to think about her situation. We were quiet for a considerably long time together on the bed. In retrospect I like to imagine her running through my credentials. I was only twenty years old, and I was sure to make a lot of mistakes along the way of raising her, and hurt her feelings, and not be able to be the kind of mother that some of those more experienced and mature mothers might have been. I like to think that when she made her decision it was based on knowing that despite all of my faults and my immaturity, that something in her two year old self could tell beyond a shadow of a doubt that I absolutely loved her, and that the two of us would grow up together. Finally she announced with dramatic formality, `Yes I would like you to be my mommy.` Those were the most beautiful words that I had ever heard. I think she said yes to love, despite all of the risks involved. 

my two girls and i being silly together at the farm this summer

Last night I found out that two of my favourite students married each other yesterday afternoon. I love the kind of bravery that marriage requires of us, and that it is a mutual kind of courage to embark on such an adventure. My two students said yes to love, despite the risks involved. In every marriage that I have witnessed, both people have sincerely wanted to be able to make their partner happy, and they have wanted to be happy with that person for the rest of their lives. They know the risks involved by making such an attempt at life partnership. If the marriage does not work both of them will end up with a lot of egg on their face, and they will also have to endure the emotional tragedy of divorce. These two beautiful souls who had the courage to say yes to love in the Gotemba City office yesterday are perfectly matched in their kind and gentle heartedness, their intelligence, and their inner beauty. I know that they are going to be happy together and it delighted me to witness their bravery. It makes me think back to my own marriage and the very strong and contrasting reactions it caused in different people. Some people saw all of our potential to create an amazing and wonderful life together, which we did for many years, joyfully raising four brilliantly artistic children together, and creating plays that brought so much laughter and tears into the lives of our audience members. Other people upon hearing of our engagement only saw the impossibility and danger of the match, which was also a part of our very challenging life together. It makes me ask the question, what is the value of love? Is love only valuable if it has the happy and hoped for ending of growing old together? And what is the ultimate happy ending? Can the ultimate happy ending of love be an acceptance of the person who was once your lover and whom you hoped to be spend your life with as a fellow beautiful soul whom you must part ways with in order to follow your own purposes in this world? Can you wish him or her kindness toward whatever new thing he or she will create without you along on the adventure? Should we only love the people with whom there is a high probability that things will work out with? Or should we have the courage to try and possibly fail after doing what we know was our very very best? I will never regret my marriage and the incredible life that my husband and I had together creating a family and so many experiences of entertaining beloved audiences with our theatre productions. I am proud of us for being so young and so brave and for trying so hard. I know that both of us are still creating, it is just that we are creating different kinds of offerings of love and kindness now, and in different geographical locations.

My former husband has returned to that beautiful prairie in Alberta, and I have left Canada in order to be with another group of people who have recently experienced tragic loss. I arrived in Japan six months after this country suffered one of the biggest disasters in their history, just like I arrived into my two oldest children`s lives ten months after their mother was taken away from them. I walk beside people who are recovering from loss or trauma. It is what I am good at. Where there is tragedy I have the ability to see future possibilities. Right now Japan is my place to create kindness and love toward those who are with me here. It gives me joy to see all of the potential in this country after it suffered a broken heart, the same way that I saw my oldest daughter`s potential when she laid beside me awaiting her nap. In my eyes, where there is brokenness there is a greater capacity for love. That is also my hope for my failed marriage, that my former husband and I will only hold kindness toward each other and a sense of gratefulness for every moment of joy that we had the opportunity to create when our life was shared in marriage. I am very happy to have said yes to love on Thanksgiving Monday in that prairie coolie, because I do not think that the purpose of love is always in the result that we originally hoped for. And I think that love must be brave in order to be properly beautiful, and in order to be brave we must risk losses. I am so happy when people are brave enough to love, to take a chance. Love on people, love on!

stephen and i in character and costume for a show that we took to various fringes in western canada

Now That I`m Less Pretty

Two days before the shock of my more serious surgeries. This is me arriving home on Wednesday morning after walking from the train station during a huge downpour after my date in Hiroo. You can see a small scar on the bridge of my nose from my first cancer removal surgery a few weeks before.

Friday afternoon five minutes after my two surgeries, the larger area of skin cancer removal, and the  reconstructive plastic surgery to cover the missing skin over the bridge of my nose.

Friday night, six hours after surgery

Saturday September 22, 2012, the very WORST morning after of my life.  Enduring the hell of excruciating pain, social isolation, physical hunger, and worst of all, being the owner of an asymmetrical nose. 

Saturday afternoon, managed to have a shower in hopes of feeling human again

Monday morning, back to work. After all, this is Japan. Weeks later my adult students confessed that some of them cried after seeing me for the first time after surgery. I received several very kind get well gifts during my second week.  

Wednesday one week after my date in Hiroo. That morning I started to suffer from a fever and what appeared to me as an infection on the incision. I ended up in emergency that evening after almost collapsing during teaching a class that afternoon. I started a cycle of antibiotics upon leaving the hospital.

Me in the natural light

Maybe Friday or Saturday? On antibiotics, starting to heal up, no more fevers.

Three weeks after surgery, me in the classroom

Three weeks ago I was on an operating table getting my face changed for the rest of my life. I know that there are people who have endured much worse events, but for me, losing my original face was hugely traumatic. It was a loss. Each of us are managing our various losses in life, losses of our health, our youth, our relationships, our dreams, or our loved ones, we are all losing things. I do not have the corner on losses, but I do understand what it is like to suffer them. I see our losses as something that we balance every day. We tell ourselves `I don`t have this, but at least I do have that.` or `Then I had that, but  its okay because now I have this.` When the balance that we have reconciled ourselves to is upset by losing something that we might have felt was our compensation, it shakes us. I have always had such a pretty face and it has made the other things that have been difficult in my life easier to bear. When I lost some face in that Japanese hospital surrounded by strangers and a language that I do not yet understand, I lost an important part of my life`s compensation package. In less than an hour I lost my `pretty` and ever since I have been thinking about losses and about what our faces mean to us. Our faces are our first foot forward out into the world. Our faces are what we present to strangers to convey confidence even when we are feeling less than so. Our faces are also where we express our most intimate feelings to those who are closest to us. Our faces are a really big deal.

The abrupt loss of the original prettiness of my pre-surgery altered face happened within a matter of hours. I was attending an appointment with a surgeon because a previous surgery that was supposed to remove skin cancer on the bridge of my nose had not been successful. When the surgeon saw me at ten that morning he told me through my interpreter that in only a matter of two weeks since the previous surgery the cancer looked to have visibly spread. This meant that he needed to operate as soon as possible. He informed me that because I would be losing quite a bit of skin during the second surgery, he would be doing plastic surgery in a third surgery to cover the bridge of my nose where the skin that had cancer would be taken from. He told me that as a result of these two upcoming surgeries my nose would be pulled up for a year until gravity stretched out the skin to make it look more normal again. As I sat in the chair of his office reviewing the photos of other people`s faces who had needed the same kind of surgery, I concentrated on not throwing up or passing out in horror at their various levels of resulting disfigurement. I was in shock. How do you prepare to lose your pretty face? Only 48 hours before I had been recovering from one of the most exciting dates of my life, I was on top of the world, and now in approximately three hours I was about to become dramatically less beautiful or risk my life expectancy. With my family and friends on the other side of the world in Canada, but for my interpreter and the hospital staff, I was completely alone in a foreign country and about to get a different face for the rest of my life. 

Although I am not used to being unattractive, I am used to loss. The first traumatic loss in my life was also a sudden one and it happened when I was still quite a little girl. I was seven years old when my beloved playmate Davie Johnson who lived just down the country lane from our farm, died in the night of meningitis. Davie and I had adored each other from toddlerhood. He was fascinated by my endless stream of imaginative ideas and my almost white blonde `popcorn hair `. I was enraptured by Davie`s playful creativity and his incredibly gentle and sensitive heart. When my mother told me that Davie had died in the night, but that it was actually fortunate for him as otherwise he might have become something called `a vegetable`, I remember collapsing onto her bedroom floor into the fetal position and sobbing on the fresh new carpet from my deepest deepest place. These new and terrible words, `died`, `meningitis`, and ` becoming a vegetable`, which was apparently some sort of physical state where you cannot move or speak, had completely broken my seven year old heart. What a terrible way to be initiated into this world of earthly mortality and devastating disappointments. Over the next year and a half of my childhood I remember having random and unexpected emotional breakdowns and crying in situations that brought up how much I missed my beloved friend, until eventually Davie no longer being with me became normal in my world.  I think the things that we lose during our lives become such a part of who we are that eventually we cannot imagine who we would be without having lost them. I cannot imagine who I would be without the experience of loving and losing such a close and special friend during my childhood. I could never ask for or want that kind of pain in my life, but I would not trade the love I felt for Davie for escaping how much it hurt me to lose him. I think it will become the same with going through this trauma of losing my original face. I think this experience of being less pretty will become an integrated part of who I am. 

People lose all sorts of things during the course of their lives. I know that losing a portion of my beauty a few weeks ago is so much less than what others have lost or are losing. People have been diagnosed with terminal illnesses and are losing things like being with their children or grandchildren as they grow up. I don`t know what the things are that you have lost or are losing. Davie`s parents lost a beautiful and brilliant child and his older brother lost his best friend and his only sibling. Some people lose parts of themselves during their childhoods because of the harmful actions of others, and other people are the children who`s parent is leaving them in an untimely death before they are ready to face this world without that mom or dad. There are much more difficult things to lose than having such a pretty face, but this loss of my beauty has triggered me to write about the exploration of the journey of losses.I  don`t know or have the answers, I only have the curiousity and the desire to learn more, to be more. I want to do the work on the inside, on the way that i spiritually think and feel about life, in order become even more beautiful than I was before this most recent physical loss, even if it is with a less pretty face. I know that I am fortunate to have had a skilled Japanese surgeon, and I know that this time of having dramatic scars will pass. I don`t know exactly what I will look like after my scars heal, comparative to the disfigurement in those photographs I saw when I was in the hospital, but I do know that this experience of loss and trauma is now a part of who I am, just like Davie`s and my friendship will always be an important part of my life and the person that I grew up to become. I will always love Davie Johnson very very much, because some things, things like love, unlike our beauty, can never be taken away from us.