You are the entertainment

I don’t usually read too much into my dreams. But this one seemed rather apropos of….life in general?

In my dream I was organizing an elaborate house party. I don’t recall what the occasion was, but whatever it was, I was all in! I had hired a bunch of artists to transform the house into a theatre. There were people building a stage, setting up lights and sound, and planning make up. They were a wild and creative bunch, and I was excited by the unconventional energy.

 I had also invited a lot of people who had agreed to come, but what didn’t seem to be clear to them (despite repeated explanations) was the role they were to play in this production. It wasn’t so much a sit down event: everybody had a part to play. I was excited, but as the preparations went ahead, the excitement in general seemed to be lacking and tension was growing.

At one point I was trying again to explain things to my brother. (Poor guy, it’s not his fault he was featured in my crazy dream!) All he would say to me was: “I like to sit in the front, on the left hand side.” He even showed me a diagram showing his preferred seat.

“No!” I exclaimed, exasperated. “Did nobody tell you?  You are the entertainment!!”

That landed like a lead balloon.

The next thing I knew, the stage crew was taking down the stage, the costume and make up people were leaving….someone had called everything off. “But….couldn’t we do something small….an open mic event?!” No….no takers. The artists, I was told, had figured out that no one really wanted to be there, and decided to cut their losses and leave. “But of course I would have paid you, no matter what happened!” I said to them, crushed. It made no difference.

I then woke up, relived that my disappointing dream hadn’t happened, but also vaguely uneasy. It’s true, after all, or I believe it is: we are the entertainment. It feels like, with Covid etc., that there is supposed to be an possibility to…..opt out of life? But there really isn’t, ever. There is no substitute for showing up,  acting out a story with other people.

Anyway. I am lucky, I suppose, that my life doesn’t actually lack drama, the good kind I mean. I don’t care for artificial drama. But there’s always a challenge, something to match my wits against, a mix of personalities to deal with, and yes…..costumes (no boring or ugly clothes for me!)

Dang it though, it could have been a very good dream party….

A childhood memory of music

I was driving home from my stepdance class today our local radio station was playing classical music as they usually do weekday evenings. As a piece of music wrapped up they said it was Mario Bernardi conducting.

This immediately recalled my childhood when we would go to the orchestra frequently and Mario Bernardi was the conductor. I spent quite a few hours looking at the back of his head, if I wasn’t looking up at the ceiling or at the organ. Back then classical concerts were more formal and I do not recall ever hearing Bernardi speak. Nowadays the conductor is also a sort of PR representative for the orchestra and will turn around between pieces and talk to the audience about the music. But as a child I was left entirely to my own imagination, which was quite up to the task of keeping me entertained with my own interpretations of what I heard.

I hadn’t thought about Bernardi in years however, and my first thought was that he must be dead, and to feel a sense of belated loss at the thought. He did in fact pass away in 2013, after a lifetime of musical achievement and honours. He was born in 1930, eight years before my dad, and would have been in his 50s when I saw him on stage.  He was married, had one daughter born in 1969, and two grandsons.

There is a kind of existential terror in the realization that I’m slowly outliving the icons of my childhood. One, it’s a reminder of my mortality. But even more poignantly, it’s the realization that whatever they were going to pass on to me, they now have, and their role has ended, and I’m left with whatever I can remember, interpret, pass on. This is really very humbling, especially as I can still quite clearly recall being the daydreaming child in the concert hall, and most days, I don’t feel a great deal cleverer either. I’m mostly just the same person, getting lost in the music.

I suppose, if I want to quantify all the ways music has affected me, the list would look something like this:

—I have danced all my life, and consider it a key part of my identity;

—I did join an amateur concert band as an adult, and those experiences were key to me becoming, shall we say, a reasonably functional adult (I put most of my angst aside; I learned to be happy and belong) I haven’t kept up my music since having kids, but I still benefit in the big picture from the experience.

—Until recently I attended live music regularly, including classical

—I encourage my children to dance and play music 

I guess that is pretty decent. A life that is worthwhile , and not dull (at least to me!), and touched by beauty and meaningful patterns is an appropriate appreciation of this man who shared his art with me, a child way up in the second balcony.

I liked this interview: a bit of his personality comes through. 

An interview with Mario Bernardi

Saturdays

Technically it takes three to make a pattern, but two times is noticeable enough for me on this case, so I’m paying attention anyway.

I noticed the past couple of weeks that I was very sensitive emotionally on Saturday nights. In both cases we’d done something enjoyable that should have put me in a good mood: a date night, an evening out to dinner with our  extended family celebrating my oldest daughter’s birthday. Nothing upsetting happened.  However, as soon as I went to bed I found myself plagued with sudden anxious thoughts. The first time the thing my mind fixed upon was something my husband said about a (mostly benign) heart condition that runs in his family. The second time it was an article by Paul Kingsworth, a writer new to me, that took a rather bleak view of the world.

Both times I needed to make a concerted effort to calm myself and I spent part of the next day feeling discombobulated.

I just find it interesting that I seem to be most likely to be affected this way on Saturdays. I don’t really know how to explain it. But I’ve become more mindful the past few months of where I am putting my attention. As my focus shifts, I can feel the change in my mind and body. I guess I just have to be extra aware on Saturdays. I will perhaps look for a mindful reading or practice particularly for Saturday evening.

Paradise

This is so beautiful.  25 minutes of poetry and peace with my laundry and 3 year old on a Saturday morning.

Jonathon Pageau: How I interpret scripture

Sometimes I write about “political” things here but the truth is, such considerations are never ever sufficient on their own. Simply put, if a way of thinking ONLY leads you into conflict and anxiety, it’s insufficient. The way we see and interact with the world should elevate us, in the midst of the big crises and in the mundane moments. Call that the insight of midlife for me, at least the part where I can put it into words.

What openness looks like

Africa Brooke, from An Open Letter:

“YES, I could choose to carry animosity in my heart based on the pain my ancestors experienced and the injustice still taking place in many different parts of the world - but what does that do for me, my mental state, my community, and those I interact with in the present day?

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“I'd rather acknowledge reality, and focus on solutions.

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“I wasn't really raised to ask many questions, but in adulthood asking powerful questions (even when they are simple) is something that has become a non-negotiable - and that's what I will continue to do.

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“I will continue to trust myself and question things. I will do my own research before responding purely based on emotion. I will keep myself open to having challenging conversations if I have the capacity to do so, and if I don't have the capacity to engage, I will still not shut anyone down - unless absolutely necessary.”

Full article here

I just read Ms Brooke’s article and I have nothing to add really, except that I always want to have her words nearby. To me, this is what openness toward people and experience looks and sounds like. I don’t think you could go that wrong trying to live by the words I’ve quoted here, either day to day or in the long term.

What is your sacred space?

JBP/Stephen Crowder Bitchute link**

JBP/Stephen Crowder YouTube link

(Length of dialogue: approx 1 hour)

I haven’t been listening to “political things” in a while. I find the oppositional stances people take to each other on issues unhelpful when repeated constantly. Dialectical conversation can be useful, but that rarely is what actually happens: it’s just one side trying to humiliate the other. The real world is very complicated and none of us perceive it in its entirety; I don’t know why this is such a hard thing to admit.

What I particularly appreciated in this dialogue was JBP’s comment on how people are not recognizing the need for the spiritual and religious in their daily lives. He argues that it is a universal human need, not a choice. Lacking a deliberate, conscious religious practice, religion comes back through unconscious patterns. 

My friend Joe responded and added to my observations with this insightful comment I want to share and keep for my own reference:

“I agree with you and JBP about people not recognizing the need for the religious and sacred in their lives. I would go further and say people are not recognizing the religious and sacred in their lives. We still have the religious and the sacred, we have substituted things like politics and various other ideologies for what was once the domain of a more singular idea of the religious and the sacred.

“I think we have forgotten that it was our shared story - the thing that bound us together as a community - that was the main value proposition of religion. It represented the shared story that served as the social glue to define the membrane of community. Because of the current lack of a shared story, we tend to treat people who have a different map of the world as if they are less than, or unworthy.

“A media engine that feeds on attention and is willing to take on that role religion once had - of crafting the narrative of what's true and not - what's sacred and not - what's good or evil - is breath cancer. It destroys the necessary integrity we need to function at our best by straining on our focus that we are best served when we understand that community is ultimately what we need to live in and depend on to carry us forward through time.

“I could be missing something (s).”

**As a side note, it’s interesting to compare the sort of comments on the Bitchute video versus YouTube. The commenters on Bitchute sound a lot more…..angry and alienated?  I am aware that there are people out there who might think less of me for listening to Dr. Peterson (whom I know a lot about) and Mr Crowder (whom I know much less about, but he says nothing here that I find particularly startling). To my ear though, the dialogue between the two of them is inviting and reasonable. The Bitchute commenters disagree: they see the dialogue as stupid and irrelevant at best, and proof of some truth-suppressing conspiracy at worst. They have dismissed both men because they do not support the views that the commenters endorse.

The Bitchute commentary is not something I would participate in. But I found it interesting to read, once I figured out what I was reading. There are groups of people who have formed their conclusions and simply stopped paying attention to what others are saying. Of course it is impossible to pay attention to everything and everyone, but I think it’s worth some thought that when people are shut out of conversations or leave them, they are still around, somewhere. You can’t wish or censor people out of existence.

To be involved and exposed

“Courage… is the sine qua non of any attempt to deal with the threat of senility – courage to face the truth, and to live fully in the face of it. With courage a person can go about living in another way – a way that will give maximum chance of dying with his faculties intact. This other way is not the way of the welfare culture in which we are all immersed. It does not involve the constant search for comforts or the obsessive pursuit of health. On the contrary, it is a way of benign shabbiness and self-neglect, of risky enjoyments and bold adventures. 

“It involves constant exercise – but not of the body. Rather, exercise of the person, through relationships with others, through sacrifice, through the search for opportunities to be involved and exposed. Such, at least, is my intuition. The life of benign shabbiness is not a life of excess. Of course you should drink, smoke, eat fatty foods – but not to the point of gluttony. The purpose is to weaken the body while strengthening the mind. 

“The risks you take should not damage your will or your relationships, but only your chances of survival. Officious doctors and health fascists will assail you, telling you to correct your diet, to take better forms of exercise, to drink more water and less wine. If you pursue a life of risk-taking and defiance the thought-police will track you down, and your lifestyle will be held up to ridicule and contempt.

 “It is not that anyone intends you to live beyond your time. Rather, to use Adam Smith’s famous image, the old people’s gulag arises by an invisible hand from a false conception of human life – a conception that does not see death as a part of life, and timely death as the fruit of it.

“Each of us must decide for himself what the life of benign shabbiness requires of him. Obviously dangerous pursuits like hunting and mountaineering have a part to play. Equally important is the forthright expression of opinion, so as to win grateful friends and implacable enemies, a process that enhances both the consolations of social life, and the tensions of day-to- day living.

“ I am not sure that I could live like my friend the writer and campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali; but there is an adorable recklessness in her truth-directed way of life that makes each moment of it worthwhile. Going out to help others, in ways that involve danger and the threat of disease, is also a useful form of exposure. The main point, it seems to me, is to maintain a life of active risk and affection, while helping the body along the path of decay, remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth.”

—Roger Scruton, Dying in Time