No Time to Be Timid

We are bombarded by bad news, but we haven’t even grasped the half of it. This blog of mine can’t be a place for constant doom, but it can be a place for encouragement. Today’s theme: There’s no time to be timid. Get out there and fight the fascism! You can do it!

Those of you who have been with me for a while know that I don’t do denial. Fascism and authoritarianism are spreading worldwide. The US has fallen and Canada will be next if we don’t face reality. Empower yourself to act.

Here is a task: speak to someone about the situation. I’m sure they are worried too. Speak to more than one person. Decide what you will do. Everyone can do something. Here is a nice list of 30 lonely actions anyone can take. Choose one. It doesn’t have to be the best one or the right one. Just choose one and see it through. You’ve already done one—you spoke to someone about your worries. You’ve already started.

There is an old saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.” Doing one thing will encourage you to do it again or to choose another. Talk to another person. See if they want to do something else too.

It’s only fair to tell you what I am doing. Well, a lot I think, particularly when I realize I’m 9 weeks out of open heart surgery and what was the worst year of my life. I wrote a dozen or so letters from the hospital in the two or three days after I left the ICU last time. I’ve written a dozen or more since. They go into a “political action” file I keep. It makes me happy. I don’t get discouraged if no one answers. I keep writing. I will not be silent because silence is complicity.

And while I’m still getting back on my feet, when I’m walking, I’m stickering.

Three rolls of stickers that say “Poilievre Wants to be your Governor” in black writing on a yellow background.

Stick with it


Where did I get them? I had them made at a local printing company. They deliver. It’s not that hard. And I get a moment of glee every time I stick one somewhere. I have other stickers too—I’m thinking of printing ones that say “Bankers not Wankers.” What do you think?

Next it will be delivering flyers to mailboxes. You don’t have to invent or reinvent the wheel here. 350.org has a lot of posters prepared in the “Don’t Get Played” campaign. Print some. Go for a walk, put them in mailboxes. Sit at a picnic table in a park with a sign that reads, “Election Conversation?” In my experience, people want to talk. Hand flyers out on a street corner. Go with a friend. You can do it. If someone is rude to you, tell them to have a nice day and move on.

Don’t do what the US did. Don’t sleepwalk into fascism. Face the fascism and do something about it. Don’t be timid. You CAN do it. I believe in you.

And in case you think I’m a Doomer, I’m planting the tiniest Saskatoon Bush ever. Because that’s another thing I’m doing—finding JOY when there is joy to be had. I believe in joy. And I’m going to believe that one day, I’ll get a berry from this tiny thing. I believe I will live in Canada, a free, sovereign country, and I will eat Saskatoons grown in my garden.

The tiniest Saskatoon Berry bush ever.

Optimism

Arc of Recovery

I keep seeing my health disaster as a metaphor for the global disaster. Or maybe it’s the other way around. The global troubles mirror my own. As I recover, I keep trying to impose a recovery metaphor on the bigger world too. It might all be wishful thinking.

I would like my recovery to be orderly. I want predicable progress towards something more like who I used to be. This mirrors my desire to have an orderly recovery from whatever [waves arms frantically in all directions] all of this is. The world order is upside down. As Prime Minister Trudeau said, “Make that make sense.” We can’t.

Recovery, for me and for all of us, will not be smooth.

I’m not expecting to get back to normal. Whatever that is. Whatever that was. Normal is an illusion, an ever-shifting sand dune, nostalgia. We live in the present and the present is full of surprises. I just want to get little better than I am now.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about my long held belief in Dr. King’s notion that the arc of the moral universe is long and bends towards justice. Most of my life, I’ve had a beautiful graph in my head, a mostly smooth arc, rising (admittedly not as fast as I’d like) towards a just society.

Of course that’s nonsense. The arc of that graph is far from smooth. Ask anyone being lynched. Ask a refugee facing years of displacement and heartless bureaucracy. Ask someone who doesn’t have clean water. Ask someone who has been colonized. Ask a mother whose child was killed by the police, knee on his throat, unable to breathe. Ask school children who have been shot. Ask those with bombs dropping on them. I could go on and on. Get too mired in the details, and that arc in the graph starts to look pretty jagged and might even be heading downwards.

In 2018, Mychal Denzel Smith wrote about the context for Dr. King’s famously hopeful characterization of history. According to Smith, King’s “use of the quote is best understood by considering his source material. ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’ is King’s clever paraphrasing of a portion of a sermon delivered in 1853 by the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker.” King abbreviated Parker, who said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” This is a statement of hope, of faith, not of fact.

Oh, how I wish it was fact. Again, too bad for me. Too bad for all of us. Wishing something is going to be doesn’t make it so.

A dear friend of mine looks adversity in the eye and says, “Onwards!” I hear her voice at times like this. “Onwards!” Time only moves forward. Maybe there’s a simpler way to look at recovery. Cicero said, “Where there is life, there is hope.” I can stick with that for now.

Five signed copies of Patterson House to give away

(Hi everyone! Thanks for helping me celebrate. The books are gone to five fabulous readers.)

Who doesn’t like free books?

I’m delighted to let you know that my publisher, Inanna, has been taken over by Radiant Press. This means that my two books with Inanna will live on! They will not go out of print. What better way to celebrate than a book give-away?

To celebrate, I offer a free, signed copy of Patterson House to the first five commenters on this post who offer me a Canadian shipping address.

I hope you enjoy Patterson House and I’m so pleased it will continue to be available to readers. Thanks for all the hard work by Inanna and Radiant Press!

Elusive Sleep and Disrupted Time

Anyone would say I’m doing well. I’m healing, thank the great goddess. But. It’s hard work and by 7pm, I need to lie down. Sometimes that happens before 7pm. The nights are long in recovery. Much as I yearn for sleep, a little unconsciousness, a brief vacation from pain, I don’t sleep.

I have trouble falling asleep, thanks to a combination of pain and a new mechanical valve that ticks. I’m trying to get used to the sound, but at present it is like a dripping tap. It keeps some part of my brain in a state of wakefulness and watchfulness. Will it tick again? Yes. Always. It will still tick after I die. It’s fast. More like a loud clock than a dripping tap. It should be consoling; it is proof of a working valve. I meditate on making it my friend, my reminder that everything works now. This will take time.

When I fall asleep, it is not for long. Shifting my position means waking up. I’m up every hour, uncomfortable, and think, “How can it possibly be only 11:30?” Or 1:30. Or 4:30. But that is the time and there is more night to get through. Sleeping, like everything, feels like work. This is a hard truth of recovery. Instead, I would like the night to have 6 or 7 hours of blessed oblivion. If only. Instead, I get a series of short naps. If I’m lucky.

This probably sounds familiar in some way to many folks. Our sleep is off. I know this because there exists a booming industry dedicated to helping us sleep. From pills to podcasts, there are a lot of people ready to use capitalism to help me sleep. Sleep hygiene is a big thing. Meditation apps have whole sections about sleep.

We can’t sleep.

I once read an article that our practice of sleeping in one long block of time is a new construct. In pre-capitalist times, people had two sleeps—-the big sleep and the little sleep. In between, they would get up, look around the cave or the farm, stoke the fire, check the animals, have sex, snack. When capitalism took hold, the factory owners wanted people more productive and made their nights shorter by saying 8 hours of sleep in a row was the right way to sleep. Right for who? It didn’t take long for millennia of natural sleep patterns to be disrupted forever. But I sense that if left to our own devices, (and if we turned off our devices) many of us might go back to a big sleep and a little sleep. My broken sleep might be a good thing. It might be anti-capitalist. I like that idea.

Related to my poor sleep is my poor sense of time. Since my brain injury in 2016, I’ve struggled. Now I’ve had four general anaesthetics in under a year. That’s hard on anyone’s brain. I simply don’t follow time anymore. Don’t ask me the schedule. I don’t know. I cannot know. I use ALL the tools. Calendars, reminders, alarms. Those devices that plague our sleep have their uses. And I have my husband reminding me too. I’m lucky.

However, like my inability to sleep, I don’t think my inability to track time is just a “me problem” anymore. I sense that our collective perception of time has gone off. How can we possibly have lived through five YEARS of the pandemic? (Some find it easier to just pretend it’s over. Maybe denial helps them sleep.) How can it possibly be less than a month since the global order fell apart? (That is what has happened.) How can I have gone into the hospital in an era when the United States was an ally, and come out when it was a threat? Too much happens in a week, a day, an hour. Tick. Tick. Tick. It’s constant. It will continue after I’m dead. Exhaustion has taken hold and even sleep doesn’t seem to help.

To wake up tired is an awful thing.

Best to stay focussed on recovery, to let these ramblings belong to the night, and give the day to the little things we can do to get better and to take what action we can to keep our communities strong. Something to plan while I’m not sleeping. It’s 5:36. Maybe I can get another half hour of sleep.

Fingers and Toes Crossed: The end of Jane’s no good very bad year.

This story has gone too far. There are too many plot crises. It is, simply, unbelievable.

I’ll try to do this quick. In November 2023, it became apparent I would require heart surgery. My heart was damaged by radiation treatment I received to cure cancer I was diagnosed with in my 40s. As they prepared for surgery and did all of their tests, they discovered my lungs were also damaged by the same radiation treatment. I had lung cancer. Given the state of my heart, they couldn’t operate on my lung and vice versa. It took a while for the medical team to figure out a safe way to move forward. (In fact, for a short time, I was told that there was no safe way to move ahead, nor would they if they didn’t think I would live two years. I spent several weeks believing nothing could be done.) Fast forward: open heart surgery to repair one of my valves in March 2024 and lobectomy in early May. Two back to back major surgeries. Another valve would have to be repaired, but that was “in the future.”

The future came fast. My recovery peaked in August. The second valve was failing and on January 16, 2025, I had a second open heart surgery to replace the second valve. Then, the unthinkable: they had to go back in and fix a problem that happened in that surgery. A week later, I had another sternotomy. This surgery did not have to touch my heart, but had to be done. Trust me: I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t have to. That was Saturday. Now it’s Wednesday. I’m sitting up beside my bed. Typing.

It’s a miracle I’m alive. I’m going to settle for that now. Thank you to everyone who has kept me alive and a special thanks to all the friends and loved ones near and far who have kept me in their thoughts. Every time, I felt the Operating Rooms positively crowded with your good vibes. It helped.

Here’s the really wild part: This is not my story; it’s a story I keep getting pulled into. I hope it is ready to let go now. I have things to do, words to write, a garden to grow, a bike to ride, people to love.

A photo I took along Dallas Rd. In YYJ. The Straight is in the background but the real star of the show is the dark and moody sky.

Moody Sky

Living the Stockdale Paradox

As surgery approaches, I have things to say.

I want to rail against how long it took to get here. There was time wasted, time that sapped my strength and energy. I have feelings about that. I try my best to put it to rest. To be at peace with it. But crisis brings issues into focus. I’ve come to understand in a deep way that I was neglected as a child. This childhood neglect has coloured my life, what and who I care about, what causes I fight for, and how I react to neglect today. It shaped me. As all our childhoods do. This is good learning for me. It explains myself to me.

I used to joke about the neglect I experienced and say things like “I was raised by wolves,” or say the neglect was benign. It was not. It’s good to be clear about that. I can be at peace with it while still knowing it is true. I don’t have to pretend it didn’t happen to live a happy life and do my best to be a good person.

Anyway, the time wasted in getting to this surgery is a trigger. It falls into the category of neglect. I have taken it hard. It’s important for me to know that. I don’t have to pretend it didn’t happen to survive this.

For a long time, I’ve had this quotation from Admiral Jim Stockdale taped up near my desk. “Never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.” Recently, I learned this quotation is so famous that it has a name: The Stockdale Paradox. Stockdale was a prisoner of war. He knew about brutal reality.

The brutal facts of my current reality are daunting. But I know them and I live them at the same time as I believe I can overcome them. I am optimistic. I have experience overcoming. I can do it again. Being rigorously truthful about what it is I face is an essential part of what I have come to understand as a practice. Like meditation. Or deep breathing. Or yoga.

Unfortunately, my practice of being brutally honest about the conditions I face, my full embrace of the Stockdale Paradox, is often misread as negativity or pessimism.

On the contrary. My optimism is grounded in reality. My survival depends on truth-telling. And I will survive.

The thing I want to say is that all of our survival depends on truth-telling and on confronting brutal facts. Know them. Believe them. Whether they are personal medical disasters, like mine, or social and ecological disasters that each and every one of us face, confront them. Know them. Believe them. And believe you will prevail. Denial is the killer. It prevents us from taking appropriate and timely action.

Kind freinds have sent words to me. One said the word “valiant.” I like that word. Be valiant with me.

See you on the other side.