Tag Archives: life

Off and Away

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I’m off on another adventure!

Today I leave, with a group of others from London-area, to spend the next nine days in El Salvador. We will be UN observers at the upcoming presidential election in El Salvador and then will have the opportunity to visit PWRDF partners there: the Cristosal Foundation and CoCoSi. I’m looking forward to learning more about the work that these two partners do.

I may have been quiet on here as of late, but I have been writing! Stay tuned to justgeneration.ca (or like it on Facebook!) to see updates from me as I am able to send them back from El Salvador. I do not expect to have regular and amazing access to the Internet there, so sending blogs and photos back to justgeneration.ca will be a priority over putting them up on this blog. A large story will come when I return, however!

In the meantime, I am anticipating warmth for the first time since…. August?! In a temperature change felt only when I moved to Australia (or on extreme chinook days in Southern Alberta!) I’ll be going from a balmy -19C (-30 with the windchill, I’m told) here in London to a gorgeous high of +32C in San Salvador today. Bring it on!

Self + Image

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The thought first occurred to me when I was meeting people at my new job for the first time.

“So, what brought you to London?”

     “I’m studying at Huron College”

“What are you studying?”

     “Theology”

And just like that, I am the Christian kid. I can see it happen. I am immediately in one of two boxes: the “oh brother, here we go” box or the “interesting, tell me more” box. My time on the West Coast has conditioned me to assume it will always be the former, though I’ve been pleasantly surprised when that hasn’t always been the case.

It is strange for me to be reconstructing myself in a new place. I knew very few people in London before moving here and so have been starting over in a lot of different ways. A lot of the things that were central to my way of life and who I am in community are no longer with me. I am re-finding myself but also reconstructing myself and reconstructing the self that others see.

In my last job in Victoria I was just another person working alongside people with similar values and beliefs. It was over time that it “came out” that I was a Christian and, for the most part, people were pretty cool with that. In fact, it became a great way to break down some of the bad stereotypes of Christians not caring about marginalized populations. However I was able to start from a place of presenting myself without the preconceived notions of who I should be as a Christian person. In my new job I don’t have that and it feels like an added pressure or weight on me as I go about my work.

Every church that I visit in London soon discovers that I am a new theological student and suddenly I am no longer looking for a place to call home and worship but am seeking a potential field placement for second year.

School is the other place where I find myself having to forge an identity. I rewrote a paper three times before submitting it today. It was a reflection paper that was meant to delve into the question “What I bring to ministry” but I did not agree with the starting point for the paper and thus struggled with the whole thing. How does one gracefully reject the premise of the first paper submitted for a course, make a good impression, but not present a false self? On a graded assignment? (That reflection papers can even be graded is another source of tension for me.)

I know that all I can do is “be myself”. However self is formed in relationship with others and when new relationships occur, especially a lot at once, self has to adjust. It is a lot like a mobile: when some of the figures shift, all of them must move around until a new balance is achieved. It is hard not to be reactionary and head to one polar extreme when faced with something so different from what feels normal. It is tempting to be someone I am not just to make the point of what I am really not…

I came to Ontario to challenge my West Coast worldview. I guess I am getting what I asked for!

Week One: The Theological School Edition

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It has been awhile since I had to build a life that revolves around a school schedule. My last degree, my MA, did not have a physical class schedule and, as we were all located in many different time zones, school happened when I fit it into my life. Now, however, my life is having to have a distinct school rhythm. I need to regain the art of packed lunches that can be eaten in the classroom. My lack of foresight around this became very evident on Thursday: between 8:40am when chapel begins and 2:30pm when my last class ends I have no breaks. To make matters worse, the last two hours were two instead of the one I was expecting, they happened in an airtight sauna of a room, and they were my first class of attempting to learn a new language (Biblical Hebrew). To say I was cranky would have been an understatement.

With nine textbooks to read from weekly, plus the book for my “book report” in one class, I have never been so thankful that I am a fast reader. Mid-week, my head threatened to explode with the stress of having to figure out when everything was due. So I made a handy colour-coded schedule that is stuck to my cupboard door. Then, when my eyes mutinied in a staggering headache from over use (both from reading and from the scourge that is Plants vs. Zombies), my godmother came to the rescue and took me away from the house for several hours of shopping – both the necessary supplies shopping and the for-fun shopping – and we discovered a fantastic cafe for lunch. (Incidentally, it is in this cafe that I now sit as they have the perfect atmosphere for me to be able to think, read, and write. And they have wifi.) Feeling energized by that and by some living room floor yoga, I was able to tackle the Hebrew alphabet for several hours last night.

But I think the class I have engaged with most, at this point, has been Systematic Theology. My prof looks like Bob Ross (though with slightly less hair on the top of his head) and has nearly as soothing a voice but a superior sense of humour. We spent most of our last class talking about some of the influences existentialism, in particular Kierkegaard, has had on our current ways of thinking theologically. Having read a fair bit of Kierkegaard and having spent a great deal of time immersed in existentialist theories of counselling practice, I found it fascinating. I have filed away these ideas in the “When I actually have time to think about other things” file so that I can further process how my ideas of how I practice as a counsellor fit, or do not fit, with my theology and my views of the individual and society.

Today is my favourite kind of day. It is sunny and cool, but not too cool. Instead of the 35C+ we experienced earlier this week, or the muggy thunder and lighting with tornado warning storms of Wednesday, it is a perfect 18C with a cool breeze that makes cycling perfect. It has the feel of an end-of-summer-beginning-of-autumn day. I’ve cycled about 17km so far today, with another 5 or so before I get home, and that has done wonders for my sense of well-being. I have read a chapter of Church History, glanced at the Hebrew alphabet, and done some work on my bicycle (it is going to take some time to get my bike back to top shape after the movers messed some things up. Fortunately that is the only damage they did to my belongings.). This afternoon will include tea and textbooks before making applesauce while watching a movie recommended by a good friend.

Week one, I own you!

Boxes

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I’m in the process of boxing up my life to prepare to move. The process of going from the order of my lovely little home to the chaos of packing is a little unsettling and I’m looking forward to taking this chaos and unpacking it to order when I get to London.

All of my furniture has been sold or spoken for.  My dresser is gone and my clothes and linens are in two large totes on the floor in its place. My armchair is gone. The bookshelves went in a “bookshelves for boxes” trade with some friends who moved a few months ago but needed shelves for their books. My bed is gone and I’m camped out on my very comfy thermarest. The couch will go in two weeks and then I’ll have nothing left but boxes.

Spare moments are few and far between right now, with most of them taken outside of my house: partially because of the sunshine and partially because being at home seems to mean needing to pack.

***

I’m at the library right now. Well, I’m sitting right outside because I overheard staff talking about a fire drill at some point today and I thought I’d rather sit in the sunshine and use the wifi than have to pack up and move mid-way through something if the drill were to happen. There is a distinct odor of urine around me that I hope I haven’t sat on top of. I’ve seen a number of my clients walk by and passed even more on my way to the library. The way that they and I interact in public, while largely driven by them, is yet another set of boxes. Sometimes we exist in completely distinct worlds and frames and there is no acknowledgement of the other. Sometimes, like yesterday, we’ll run into each other downtown and walk a block together, talking and enjoying the day, before going our separate ways.

Approved and Accepted

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Spring is in the air, summer is not far away, and changes are afoot.

Some of you may know that this last year has been a year of a lot of change and transition for me. My temporary full-time position came to an end and so I took a two-month leave and ran away to Africa to hang out with my sister in South Africa for Christmas and New Years. I came home to working two jobs on a casual/on-call basis and have been working (nearly) full time hours at that for the last four months. I’m going to keep doing that for the next two months…

…and then I’m moving to London, Ontario!

Let me back up a little bit further. A little over a year ago, I embarked on a fairly intense process of intentional discernment with the idea of determining whether or not I am being called into a position of ordained ministry – that is, to be a priest. That process has entailed both one-on-one conversations with my spiritual director, the priest at my current church, and the Anglican bishop of my diocese as well as group discernment (what I have called reverse group counselling with myself as the lone ‘client’ and a whole group of people talking with me), formal interviews, and weekend-long assessments. It has been both exhausting and intensely rewarding.

Three weeks ago I had a full weekend ‘retreat’ (aka Church Big Brother) with a group of other candidates from across British Columbia where we were in conversation with assessors from all over the province. Their job was to assess our competencies, strengths, weaknesses, and gifts for ministry. The resulting report heartily recommended that I be approved for training and ordination as a priest.

Step two: school. A funny thing happens when you say you won’t do something. You frequently end up doing it. My standard response to the question of whether or not I would do a PhD when I announced I was doing my MA in Counselling was, “No, because I’d like to be done school by 30.” Well, here I am, past that, and going back to school, not for a PhD but for another Masters. Yesterday I received my offer of acceptance from Huron University College (on the campus of Western University in London – anyone else see the humour of me moving east to go to a school called Western??) to begin study towards a Master of Divinity degree, starting in September.  This is a three-year program approved by the Anglican Church of Canada for training postulants for ministry within the Anglican Church.

As much as I am loathe to leave Victoria – I love it here – I am looking forward to living back in Ontario after nearly 20 years! I’ll be closer to family and friends than I’ve been in years and am looking forward to exploring a new corner of the country. Now all I need to do is figure out how to get my stuff from here to there and collect boxes to put it all in!

Two Journeys

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ImageImage

Journeys.

In the last few weeks, few months, year, I’ve been on a journey. In some ways both of these pictures are representative of that for me; one directly and the other indirectly. Both of these photos were taken this month (if you follow me on instagram, you’ll have seen these and other images from my adventures already) as I travelled around different parts of the country working towards this new adventure. To the left was a weekend trip I took to the Interior of BC, to a retreat centre in the Shushwap. To the right is train tracks in Wolfville, NS, where I went for a meeting of PWRDF‘s Youth Council.

It is exciting? You bet!

Am I a little nervous? Definitely.

I’m still waiting for some of the pieces to fall into place (really, there is only one more piece left) before I feel comfortable broadcasting to the world.

I think that this voyage of discovery is one reason I have been rather reluctant to post anything on here in the last year or so. I have been doing a lot of thinking and a lot of writing in the last twelve months. However much of it has been in aid of my own internal processing and not really for public consumption. When one is so engrossed in internal and personal discernment, there isn’t a lot of creative energy left over for generating different content for the world. When one’s head is in internal space, it is difficult to move outside of that in order to share, still in a meaningful way, thoughts in a public space. Thank you for respecting that, and I look forward to sharing more soon.

Absences

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Its been nearly a year of silence.

I’ve done a lot of thinking.

A lot of reflecting.

Reading

Growth

Talking

Discerning

Refreshment

Relaxing

I don’t know how much I’ll be around here, and I certainly won’t be blogging as much as I was before. but I think I’ll keep things open and see where it goes.

Tweed Riding

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Today was the second annual Victoria Tweed Ride.

We all got dressed up in our finest tweed etc. etc. and gathered on the lawn of the Empress before beginning our bicycle ride around town.

It was a gorgeous day.

Sunshine like that makes me happy.

One stop saw us spend some time at the Moss Street Market. It was the first time I’d been able to visit this year and it resulted in me having some magnificent Wicked Dilly Beans by the Food in Jars Canning Co. with my dinner this evening. Yum! I don’t know if I have tried anything pickled that I did not like.

After wandering through back streets and main roads, we made our way to Craigdarroch Castle for lunch and tea.

What a perfect day.

(Well, almost perfect. I broke my saucer as I got home. It is in five pieces so I may be able to glue it.)

Friday Photo

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Photos of fog are difficult to capture. They seem to look better in black and white.

I haven’t said much about my trip to St John’s 2 weekends ago. Here is the St John’s bit…

It was the spring meeting of PWRDF youth council, the council for which I am BC/Yukon representative. Since it is a 14+ hour trip to get from this Island on the left coast to that Island on the right coast (and Oh did I ever complain about this a whole heap on twitter!), I went two days early to spend some time in St John’s before the meeting. I was last in St John’s when I was 11 years old and I couldn’t tell you if much has changed. I have some specific memories of St John’s: Signal Hill, Cape Spear, fog, and rain. I was able to experience them all again this trip.

We walked up Signal Hill on my first afternoon in St John’s, and proceeded to be nearly blown off of the top (unzipping my jacket and trying to fly may have helped). We were unable to see much of anything. There were many cannons up on the top of the Hill and I’m not sure how the cannon operators could have ever seen their targets for all the fog. The lady operating the gift shop inside of Cabot Tower was fairly surprised that we had walked up the hill. Really, it wasn’t too far, but it was very foggy. From the top, it was as if we were in a cloud with no view of the city whatsoever.

I was booked into a hostel right downtown, in the middle of a street of colourful houses, with the other BC/Yukon rep. We befriended another in the 4-bed room and the three of us wandered around, exclaiming at colourful houses, going into shops, and finally stopping for fish and chips and beer at one of the local hot-spots for fish and chips.

The next day saw us needing to head out to the conference site mid-afternoon. Oh what to do for a morning in St John’s? With Signal Hill down and an iceberg seen (but others, not me… but it was out of our reach for that day), what to do but steal/borrow a van and drive the very hill and foggy half-hour drive to Cape Spear.

Cape Spear. The Most! Easterly! Point! in Canada. (L: The rocks and waves and crashing waves at the Most! Easterly! Point! M: Me contemplating the rocks and waves and crashing waves in the fog at the Most! Easterly! Point! while Tessa takes pictures. R: DANGER!)

The conversation went something like this:

Gillian: If my Dad were here, he would say something like “You’re not really at the most easterly point unless you are touching the water off the end of those rocks.” Mind you, it would mean jumping the fence and climbing down slippery rocks in the fog. Oh look, a Danger sign!

Tessa: Remember that we are the only vehicle in the parking lot right now and you have the keys and we have no cell reception. Maybe don’t go. It would be a long walk and I don’t want to get stuck here.

Gillian: Its okay, that’s just what my Dad would say. I never actually listen.

The End.

Thursday: The Bicycle Edition

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Now that I live downtown, I spend less time on my bicycle. However, I also find that I’m doing a little more in the way of “riding for fun”. Since I am mere minutes away from Dallas Road by bicycle, it has become more of a cycling destination for me than anywhere else ocean-side in Victoria (my previous closest ocean involved a heart-attack-inducing hill).

This weekend is the Tweed Ride in Victoria. What is that, you ask? Basically, we’re all going to cycle around town in our fancy tweeds, stopping here and there along route, including tea with fine china on the lawn of Craigdarroch Castle. I’ll update with outfits etc. after the ride.

In preparation, I spent last weekend doing a bit of a tune up on my bicycle, including a full clean, replacement of the handlebar tape – we’ve gone from obnoxiously bright blue to sleek metallic grey, and adding a shiny new bell. I had high hopes of a removable basket for the front, and even cycled to three different shops to check them out, but forgot to take into account that drop handlebars don’t do baskets very well/at all.

In unrelated-related events, I was going through some of my bookmarks and items “favourited” on Etsy this evening and have compiled some pictures of some fantastic things that should probably make their way onto my bicycle at some point!

So I already have this. It is fantastic, though I haven’t yet used it for a six-pack or a polo mallet. For the Tweed Ride, I plan to use it to hold my Beatrix Potter lunch box (who knew I still had that?!? Mum’s writing is on the inside with our phone number from Bleecker, so it has been around for awhile!) which will contain sustenance and my tea cup and saucer. Pretty fantastic invention, if you ask me!

By the same makers, there is the wine bottle version. I think this would be very handy for the next potluck bbq or birthday party I attend. Alas, one lovely thing from the Walnut Studio is probably enough. For now (they have a can holder as well! and lovely saddlebags, if I had a saddlebag holder). If I’m not careful, my accessories will soon be worth more than my bicycle!

I’m not too keen on the idea of having a rack on the back of my bicycle with large, unwieldy saddlebags. I swing my leg over the back and I could definitely see myself catching on one. Plus the weight. And it might look funny. Basically, I am very resistant to the idea of saddlebags. But these… oh my! They are lovely! And they come in different colours! I like how they fit right underneath of the seat, attached to its base, so that there is no way that I would find it annoying from the foot-swing-over point of view (though I could see myself getting annoyed at it hitting the back of my thigh if that was a possibility). They do, however, seem to be quite spacious and, while I couldn’t do my grocery shop into one of those, it would hold a one-person picnic and book. Really what more do I need on a lovely sunny day.

Just when I thought that I was sold on one of the above bags, I had to go and see this lovely beauty by the same maker. This looks like it is not only more spacious but would be more functional as an off-bike bag as well as on-bike. Unfortunately (or luckily, depending on your perspective), her shop is closed for a few months, so I will have to make do with admiring from a distance.

Lastly, because everything can’t be overly serious, there are the planters. Seriously, how could one not become attached to the idea of having small planters on the bicycle! It is like spring all year round!

But in all seriousness, I love my bicycle just the way it is and am pretty happy with how it rides and with the bits and pieces I currently have attached. It is just fun to dream! The weather is supposed be lovely in this part of the world for this upcoming weekend. I hope it is in your part as well, and that you get to head out for a walk, if not for a bicycle!

(Images from the linked websites)