Shawn L. Bird

Original poetry, commentary, and fiction. All copyrights reserved.

hyper-ventilating October 16, 2012

Filed under: OUTLANDERishness,Pondering,Writing — Shawn L. Bird @ 9:29 pm
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I have met some ‘famous’ people over the years, and while I may be in awe of their talent, they generally turn out to be people pretty much like me. I know that. But at the moment, it’s rather difficult to BELIEVE it.

As you’ve noticed if you’ve read this blog for any time, I love Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, and I am amazed by her talent and her generosity to her fans and other writers. I have posted questions on her Facebook page and on the Compuserve Writers’ Forum, and she has provided helpful (and sometimes lengthy) responses.

For these reasons, I am hyperventilating as this week ticks by, because in less than 48 hours I will be meeting Diana Gabaldon (and J. J. Lee, Jack Whyte, Mary Balogh, Anne Perry and Michael Slade, not to name drop or anything) 🙂 at a fund raiser for the Surrey Writers’ Conference, and on Saturday I have the honour of sharing the scene that Diana had helped me with in a 15 minute blue pencil appointment at the conference.  I am nervous, excited, and slightly terrified of making a fool of myself.

My son said, “Just don’t be a fan, Mom. Be professional.”

Yeah. Easier said than done, kid!

 

What’s the point of fashion, anyway? October 13, 2012

Filed under: Literature,Pondering,Reading,Writing — Shawn L. Bird @ 9:04 pm
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Fashion matters because every day people get up in the morning and, with the palette of clothes they find in their closets and dressers, they attempt to create a visual poem about a part of themselves they wish to share with the world. 

J.J. Lee.  Measure of a Man. p. 53

I was raised by a mother who loved fashion and filled her basement with fabric, patterns and notions.  She crafted beautiful garments, and rarely threw anything out.  Which meant when we moved her from Kelowna here to Salmon Arm, we moved eight closets full of her clothes, and a hundred or so pairs of shoes.  It also meant that Vogue magazine was a staple in our house, and that I grew up with a keen eye on clothes.

J. J. Lee wrote his biography of his father within the context of his time as an apprentice tailor.  His father’s suit provided an exploration of the suit as symbol and metaphor in his own life, but also in the life of all men.  Clothing makes the man, and he was trying to figure out the man the clothing made.

I love his expression of fashion as a visual poem.  It’s very accurate.  Our clothes give the message we wish to send to the world on any particular day.  Whether it’s laid back casual with jeans and a Tshirt or cute and quirky with a hat, bright tunic and leggings, we say something about ourselves.  But we don’t wear the same thing every day, just as we wouldn’t write the same poem every day.

Every day we adorn ourselves to be a visual poem.

I like that.

 

Fare thee well, Raylene October 8, 2012

Filed under: Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 7:30 am
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Last week cancer claimed 52 year old Canadian singer Raylene Rankin, a member of  Cape Breton Nova Scotia’s Rankin Family.  Her stratospheric soprano voice empowered the harmonies of their Gaelic folk songs.  Here is the Rankin Family in 2010 at Toronto’s Massey Hall, performing one of her signature songs, “We Rise Again.”

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Requiescat in pace Raylene Rankin 1960-2012

Keep those angels entertained, Raylene.

 

interviews & changing times September 27, 2012

Filed under: Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 3:41 am
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Today a group of my students were interviewed for an upcoming documentary about living in a small town.  It was interesting to hear their feedback after the experience.  They wondered if the interviewer was trying too hard to ‘connect with the youth of today’ by “dropping f-bombs in every sentence” and telling them that she and her friends had taken acid in the 90s.  They weren’t impressed.

In the staff room the other day, we were commenting about the kids in the smoke pit.  At our school, it is an area about eight feet square, marked by cement barricades a couple of feet high off to the side of our entry, just outside of the parking lot (and therefore, presumably not technically ‘on school grounds’).  There are maybe a dozen kids who hang out there off and on over the course of the day, though I’ve never seen more than six at any one time.  There are around five hundred students at our school.  The teachers were discussing how ‘once upon a time’ the smoke pit was packed, and it was full of cool kids.  Now, the kids in the smoke pit are the losers, generally looked at with disdain by the other kids.

I can remember teaching in Prince George, where probably a hundred kids stood in minus twenty, being cool, and smoking.  Once, they watched a moose wander past, and then get shot by conservation officers.  The smoking area was always lively and crowded, murdered moose, not withstanding.

Not these days.  It seems that kids are getting the message about healthy living.  They smoke less than their parents and grand-parents.   Since according to experts in the workshops attended by my ex-social worker spouse, the real ‘gateway drug’ is tobacco, does this decrease of activity at the smoke pit mean kids are less likely to graduate to harder drugs, and therefore less likely to find themselves popping acid by the train tracks like the interviewer, who’d attended this school a decade ago?

I don’t know, but I hope so.  I’m really happy they weren’t impressed by her stories and foul language.  Whoever says youth are getting worse isn’t keeping their eyes open.  Personally, I like what I see.

 

Time takes care of all things September 8, 2012

Filed under: Grace Awakening Myth,Literature,OUTLANDERishness,Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 9:51 am
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“Time is a lot of the things people say that God is.  There’s the always pre-existing, and having no end.  There’s the notion of being all powerful–because nothing can stand against time, can it?  Not mountains, not armies.

And time is, of course, all-healing.  Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of:  all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.

And if  Time is anything akin to God, I suppose that Memory must be the Devil.”

Diana Gabaldon in Breath of Snow and Ashes

I found this quote rather profound.  Memory being the Devil ascribes evil to our past.  Beyond haunting, it implies danger, cruelty and manipulation.  Do our memories really do that?

Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory shows up in Grace Awakening Myth.  She and Lethe, the goddess of forgetfulness, are working together on Ben to sculpt him just the right combination of memories to keep him optimistic.  They work together to keep him whole, because he would not be able to bear contemplating the possibilities opened up by his more painful memories.

I wonder if our own memories often work the same way?  If we are successful in burying the negative history, we are re-working our own memory.  I suppose it must also work in reverse.  We can ignore all our positive experiences and craft ourselves memories of a terrible childhood, and use that strange, inaccurate perspective to fuel our behaviour.  We can view ourselves as down trodden over-comers, and use that to force ourselves to deal with current challenges.

Gabaldon’s quote is from Claire’s perspective.  Claire has a lot of memories from life in the future and in the past.  She has a complex web of memories that she might like to escape.

What do you think?  Are your memories an inspiration to your future, or are they a challenge to overcome?

 

secret to longevity September 7, 2012

Filed under: Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 11:48 am
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According to a Yahoo News story, the oldest living person is in China, and just turned 127.   The lady lives alone with her only child, a son, whom she delivered at age 61.  I was trying to imagine why it would take so long to get pregnant, and how odd it’d be to have a child so late in life.  The article goes on to say, “According to ChinAfrica, researchers say the reason people can live so long in this part of China is because they work from sunrise to sunset, climb mountains doing farm work, get adequate sleep, sleep in separate beds from their spouses and many soak their feet in hot water every night.”

Did you catch that?  Sleep in separate beds. 

That answers a lot of questions, doesn’t it?  I can’t help wondering whether the sacrifice is worth it, though.

 

little boxes: thinking outside the big boxes! August 28, 2012

Filed under: Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 9:58 pm
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I have a friend who was raised, along with his 7 brothers and sisters, 2 parents and dog, in a one thousand square foot, non-basement home.  Many people in the early years of the baby boom and before can say the same.

When I see the humongous monstrosities of four or five thousand feet that have one or two people living in them, I feel concern for the message this sends about North American attitudes.  Do we need as much stuff as we fill these spaces with?  Do we need to waste the fuel to heat and cool these spaces?

In Europe, apartments are significantly smaller and in some big cities, people pay big bucks for what amount to tiny dorm rooms.  Ikea has several promotions in store showing how liveable ‘my small space’ can be at five hundred square feet.

Deek Diedricksen takes it even further.  With mostly found materials, he builds houses and living spaces that are under one hundred square feet.  Some of his spaces are under twenty square feet.  This is definitely thinking outside the box.  His micro homes are more about statement and novelty than function.  There are no kitchens or bathrooms inside a twenty square foot space.  There is no heater or insulation (or stretching space!) to get you through a Canadian winter.  However, there is room for you to crash in the woods during a summer vacation, and there is definitely a lot of creativity here.  The point is made.  You can live and sleep in small spaces.  You don’t need a couple thousand square feet per person!

Check out some of his innovative designs and ponder…  What if?

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RIP Neil Armstrong. August 26, 2012

Filed under: Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 7:09 pm
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I was four years old when I joined a group of men in our back alley looking up into the sky.  At their pointing, I was certain that I could see a little black dot: the rocket carrying the astronaut crew that arrived on the moon.

I was in my teens, when I was in an audience to hear astronaut Jim Irwin talking about what it was like.  He described looking back on Earth and thinking it was just a blue marble.

Neil Armstrong echoed that thought when he said,

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

You may remember how in the movie Men in Black the alien disguised as a talking pug says,

“You humans!  When will you learn size doesn’t matter?  Just because something’s important, doesn’t mean it’s not very small.”

This concept is reiterated at the end of the movie in this clip:

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Requisate in pace, Neil Armstrong.  You captured a moment of greatness that emphasizes our exiguity.

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normal or amazing? August 23, 2012

Filed under: Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 4:58 pm
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I’ve been thinking about this in terms of mid-life crisis (or mid-life analysis, if you prefer).  It seems a lot of people reach a point where they look around at where they’ve been, and just decide to toss out the societal constraints that ruled their earlier decision making.  After years of youthful striving for ‘normal’ (that boring conformity), they’re now stepping out.  Whether it’s tossing a twenty year marriage, starting a new career, or leaping into the bucket list with heretofore unobserved enthusiasm, there does seem to be a change that comes with the ‘middle years.’

I find myself that a lot of things I ‘always wanted to do’ have gotten done in the last year or two.  It’s not that I conscientiously aimed to accomplish those things; it just seemed that the stars aligned and they happened, almost without me noticing.  I found myself somewhat astonished to recognise the accomplishments or changes.  So now I’m thinking, if I was able to do those amazing things without intent, what could happen if I make an intentional effort?  To be honest, my past experience suggests that intention tends to lead to failure for some reason, so perhaps I should just let the universe take care of things?  At any rate, staid and normal are out.  I am getting whackier as the years go by.  I will be an amazing, creative, and crazy little old lady eventually, I think, and I’m embracing that.   How about you?

 

poetry by Shane Koyczan- Stop signs August 17, 2012

Filed under: Poetry — Shawn L. Bird @ 9:20 am
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Shane Koyczan is a talented poet from Kelowna, my home town.  You might have heard him at the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. In case you missed him, here’s one of his slam style love poems called Stop signs:

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