Shadow Side Part II

We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together.
- Carl Jung "Answer to Job" (1952)

It's a rainy day after a stormy weekend, figuratively speaking. In other words, I was pretty angry this weekend and I realized I had been pretty angry for a while.

I had a good conversation today about this with a friend and I've continued to think about it all day, between trying to get work done and managing mountains of laundry.

One website I found suggested a person consider the five qualities they hope others would see in them, consider their opposites and find ways to accept such qualities in themselves. As I did this exercise, I did feel resistance about being those shadow qualities -- except for one that I just shrugged about.

I said to my friend this morning: How does a person do it? My question is really how does a person do this civilly and politely, in a way that integrates both shadow and light?

This afternoon I started wondering whether every aspect of ourselves has a shadow side to it, and how we ever function in an integrated, authentic way. The Jung quotation above -- Jung is the author of the concept of shadow -- helps me see that this work is necessary when unacknowledged shadows turn to neuroses, to dis-ease.

I talked with another friend this afternoon -- the laundry was not engaging and the clients had not called back -- about the idea of how to put forward an integrated self, how not to only show the acceptable parts. We decided that the essential work is done internally and that life flows out of that. It's not that we can work hard to show our true selves, warts and all, but just that we be where we are in the world, and work to be more at peace with both shadow and light.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with someone who knows more about this than I do. I'm planning to ask her about this as we talk. I'll report back. It feels unsettling but in a good way.

Feeding the Masses

On travels, we've made detours to the World's Biggest Axe, Pineapple, Banana, Nickel and Apple -- and I'm only getting started. I like big things.

But one of my favourite Big Things is cooking for large crowds of people. In university, I always volunteered to cook on retreats. The bigger the crowd, the more I like the challenge. And the other part of the intrigue for me has always been cooking delicious food for cheap cheap cheap. (The secret: cook from scratch. A million times cheaper than packaged almost every time.)

So, two weeks ago, I got a call from a friend who works at Welcome Home, a refugee centre in Kitchener. She had heard that I was the weird person who liked feeding the masses and asked if I was interested in making a thank you meal for their valued volunteers. Someone else would make dessert. I said yes without looking at my calendar. (Fortunately I was free to do this.)

The last time I remember cooking for a crowd was a couple of years ago when I singlehandedly (and single-brain-celledly) cooked and served a meal for 50 people in my own home. That one was a fundraiser for the Stephen Lewis Foundation. It was during my homemade pasta stage. Don't get me wrong -- I still support wholeheartedly what they do, but by the time the guests arrived, I was ready to collapse into a pile of polenta.

This one would be different, I told myself. With age comes wisdom. Or laziness.

I would have access to the Welcome Home kitchen, which has one or two ovens with stovetops and a microwave, but during the meal itself, I would have plugs only to keep food warm. Some of the attendees would be Muslim and would not eat pork. I assumed it was quite possible that there could be vegetarians in the crowd too.

I solicited ideas but they were invariably too expensive, too time-consuming, too meaty and/or too "same old same old." I had a little idea -- ham in a crockpot with a variety of salads -- so I pulled out my cookbooks and the plan came together.

The meal is tonight. Yesterday I was talking with a friend -- bragging really -- telling her that I thought I was going to be able to make supper for 25 in less than half an hour. "I just made muffins," she said. "It took me longer than that."

It turns out my estimate was conservative, but not by a lot. So, in the interest of public education, I thought I'd walk you through the process of feeding the masses, in case you want to take it on sometime.

Thursday: In the half hour before my hair cut, I set off, grocery list in hand, to ValuMart. I bought 17 new potatoes, two pounds of asparagus (from the US -- the season approaches here!!), a pound of baby spinach, a bunch of green onions, two lemons and a clamshell of strawberries. I picked up a spiral-cut ham on a great sale, four jugs of juice, two bottles of sparkling water, two packages of bow tie pasta, four cans of white kidney beans -- and a bunch of other groceries my family needed. (Tip #2 - Multitask your shopping and food prep where you can. It doesn't have to be a separate trip or a distinct task.) I haven't separated out the grocery bill altogether, but I think the cost for the meal came to somewhere around $50 or 60, or $2-2.25/person.

Friday: While cooking our supper, I quartered and boiled the new potatoes. The boiling took quite a while, and I also knew that the recipe (a garlic-lemon-oil potato salad) worked a lot better if the potatoes were pre-cooked and cooled. Chopping the potatoes took about five minutes in total. While they steamed away, I made a salad dressing for the spinach salad -- using rhubarb from our garden, boiled with vinegar and sugar, then strained, and mixed with oil, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper. (Tip #3 -- It makes a huge difference if you have a stocked kitchen. All I needed was a Tbsp of Worcestershire sauce and a teaspoon of sugar. It would have been a far more expensive proposition had I had to buy these kinds of ingredients too.) That done, I turned to the vegetarian dish. I had found a great recipe in a Moosewood cookbook, but when I went to make it, I discovered that we had indeed finally used up all the sundried tomatoes we made last summer. So much for a well-stocked kitchen. It was time for Tip #4: Know where to compromise. In this case, I substitute a can of tomatoes and decided to roast to beans, tomatoes, onions, garlic and spices, rather than sauteeing them. It worked and ended up being a time saver too. I decided to stop there because my fridge space was getting tight. The work of the day probably totalled about fifteen minutes, including time rummaging for tomatoes, but not including cleanup, which unfortunately I had to do.

Saturday: This morning, pancakes were requested of the chef and so while I stood a-flipping, I boiled the water for the pasta, cooked, rinsed and slightly oiled it so that it won't be sticky later. I also broke the asparagus into 1-inch pieces and steamed them. I decided to rinse the spinach even though it was pre-washed. I had food poisoning once and That Was Enough for me: now I don't eat cookie batter if it has eggs, and I'd rather not give people any kind of unpleasantness on my watch. I cut up strawberries for the salad and grabbed some sunflower seeds that will be added in. The potato salad, the spinach salad and the bean salad are all gluten-free and dairy-free. Just before noon, I mixed up a concoction I found in the LCBO magazine a year ago as a glaze for ham -- it's the only one I ever use anymore: almost equal parts of maple syrup and Dijon mustard, mixed with hot pepper flakes. I drizzled it over the ham (discarding the bag of gross sauce that came in a bag with the ham) and put it all in the crockpot on low. It took a while to cook the pasta, but the actual work time for all of this was probably 20 or 25 minutes.

Later Saturday: I have two last-minute tasks. The asparagus pasta needs to be tossed in a lemon sauce that's made at the last minute. Maybe not the best of plans, but oh well. It looks like a sauce that will be fairly easily made, or at least so I hope. I also have to pick up bread or buns at the store. Probably another fifteen minutes. And then to deliver it all.

And that's it. A maple-mustard ham, garlic potato salad, lemon asparagus pasta salad, tomato-bean casserole, rhubarb vinaigrette spinach salad and bread. In about an hour and a half, including shopping time.

Can you see why I like doing this so much?

Pregnant at 42

OK, seriously, I'm not. And glad not to be. It's just that I'm really close to meeting a milestone with hits on this blog for this month and I was hoping a controversial title could take the place of another controversial post. Whaddya think? Let me try to make it up to you for tricking you: if you haven't come across this guy yet, you absolutely should. Apparently he was on SNL last week, so I'm a bit late to the party, but he's also just made the Billboard Top 100, so I'm thinking I'm not the only one. The other thing I've been thinking about this week is what I call incidental community. This, for me, has come lately primarily in the form of other dog owners, but in the past it has been other sports parents. When I say incidental community, I mean people who come together on a regular basis, sharing our lives largely on the basis of being thrust together by circumstances. What's interesting is the possibility for depth in such relationships. Now off to eat pickles and ice cream.

Power of Story

I had a massage scheduled for today and because my back has been really bad lately, I decided to keep the appointment, even though I felt very worn out and frazzled after some long days and short nights. My massage therapist could feel that I wasn't in the usual relaxed space for a massage. Part of that was that she had me flat on my back. When we put a pillow under my hip, I was able to relax more, but not completely. We often talk while she massages me but today she had been very quiet, listening to my body. I asked her whether she would be distracted by talking and she said perhaps. I explained that listening to a narrative has the same effect on me that music does for others -- I can ride the wave of a story. So she started to tell me about her upcoming trip to New Mexico. From there, she went on to Henry Moore sculptures and the Newfoundland coast. Because I'm nothing if not an achiever, I asked her at the end whether I had been able to relax, in her opinion. I had thought I had. "Oh yes," she said. "It was remarkable actually. As soon as I started to tell you stories, you dropped all the tension from your body." It makes me think about other lessons I've learned: that relaxation for me doesn't look like stereotypical R&R. I can't sit on a beach for more than about a half an hour, but I can walk a beach forever. I like to learn on holidays, but learning in an utterly informal way. What it takes for me to relax and be refreshed is really just having my imagination engaged in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way. No tests at the end. No heavy mental lifting. Just curiosity being fed. It's been a gray, snowy, sleety day and I'm weary -- but at the same time, learning all this while having a nice massage has refreshed me altogether. I'm curious what stories do for you, and whether they play a similar role in your life. What helps you relax and be refreshed?

Professional Development Day

I found out, not long ago, that the purchase of books can be written off against my income as a freelance writer. It was not for that reason, however, that I took my daughter off today to the local University Women's Club Book Sale. It was for a whim, something fun to do on a PD Day. We spent an hour in rooms of varying heat, browsing through books and DVD's, looking for treasures and for the elusive copy of Nacho Libre that I seek. We got the most in the children's room, where paperbacks cost a quarter: we found HG Wells The Invisible Man, Frances Burnett's The Little Princess, two books about Dog Adventures, a good book by the author of Hatchet, and Mr. Popper's Penguins. We paid our $1.50 and moved on to the Adult Paperback, VHS and DVD room. The instant we walked into the room, my piano-loving girl spotted the sheet music at the back of the room. While I trolled for Nacho Libre, she browsed through folk, choral, and classical music. I joined her and was astounded to see every theory book of my youth. The covers brought back vivid memories. We chose two music books: one inspired by the Narnia books and the other being music about cats. We entered the Better Books room, which was by far the hottest. We nearly bought a 19th-century Canadian naturalist book, a 1929 copy of Pilgrim's Progress, a book about Egyptian art and more, but we moved on to the gymnasium where books were two dollars. There we wandered and found little until the table right before the door, where my daughter found a humourous dog book and I found a copy of The Cook Not Mad, a reissue of the earliest cookbook in Canada. For two dollars. Three receipts checked at several checkpoints later, we were all of $7.50 lighter, and so much richer. ** Late this afternoon, I stopped in at the Waterloo Potters Guild sale. I planned to buy nothing. Famous last words. I collect pottery mugs and I have a lust for pottery bowls. Two mugs spoke instantly to me: they were coming home with me and I was to hand over my credit card and ask no questions. One looks like lush green hills going off into the distance, while the other is pewter-gray on the outside and magenta on the inside. ** Now this is my idea of a day of shopping.

Almost There: The Gray Report

My birthday is less than a month away and I think, by the time I get there, all the dyed hair will be gone. It will have taken less than six months and has been far less painful than I thought it would be, thanks to a great hairdresser and supportive friends and neighbours. I realized today, I rarely think about my hair anymore, where for the first few months, I was very aware of the changes.

However, I had a bit of a setback last month: I went to an event to celebrate World Down Syndrome Day, run by my sister's charity (circle21.com) and my parents and all my sibs were there. It was the first time I had seen any of them since I had my hair chopped off and I was pretty punchy on the way there.

And then, my own mother didn't recognize me. Ouch. "Did you think I was some old lady?" I asked. "No," she said. "You just didn't look like yourself." A friend later described it as a 'prophet in his own home town' kind of moment.

We had a great evening, but the reaction rankled. Afterwards, though, as I reflected on it, I realized it wasn't so much what was said as the distance between who I am and who I've been perceived to be. I feel surprisingly comfortable with this decision, but I have a fair bit of insecurity about whether others will roll with it or be taken aback, whether my decisions unnerve them or are a non-issue. It's not so much that I need bolstering, but the opposite reaction makes me quiver.

It made me think, too, about the decisions we make that are contrary to our family cultures: the women in my family go gray very early and conceal that fact. What does it mean if I swim against that tide? And why should I then expect to be recognized?

On a lighter note, I bought Lush's Daddyo shampoo: it's purpler than purple and smells of a patch of springtime. Apparently it whitens and brightens white and pale blonde hair, although if you use too much, your hair takes on a faint purple hue. So far, I'm not turning into Katy Perry. I've used it twice. But it makes me happy to smell it.

Five Things on an April Morning

I. Want to know what is weird? Watching The Titanic movie for the first time and reading a glossy lifestyle magazine during the commercials. I watched the non-first-class passengers get caged up so they had no chance of freedom, and then read about vacation homes in developing countries that are barely used by their owners. I started to feel more complicit than usual and I put the magazine away.

II. Last night at the park, my pup was the It Dog. Three different pooches decided ours was their Best Friend, and our Lucky had to take turns wrestling each one. He loved it.

III. I am very excited that we have booked our short trip to Newfoundland. Dave was born there, at the northern tip of the province, and hasn't been back since he was a toddler. He's presenting in St. John's, and then I'm flying out a day later to join him in Deer Lake, sans children. We're staying at a B&B, then driving up the Viking Trail (THE VIKING TRAIL!!)to St. Anthony where we will visit the Grenfell Mission where his parents worked at the hospital. I'm also hoping our visit will coincide with icebergs, whales and a Viking Feast Dinner Theatre (A VIKING FEAST!) Then we head back down the coast and spend a day exploring Gros Morne National Park, staying at a place that has been described as an IKEA showroom. (Maybe a VIKING IKEA SHOWROOM!) And then we come home. Or, away, depending on how at home we feel on the Rock.

IV. My back is really bad this week. I need to call my physiotherapist but I'm waiting until it feels better.

V. I'm loving what I'm doing, work-wise these days. There are huge challenges and decisions to be made, but most days, I'm astonished that people pay me to have such a good time. One of the things I'm noodling over this week is the idea of running writers retreats. I think it's going to happen, but there are a lot of ways it could go. I would welcome any ideas about what your perfect writers retreat would be like. (And no, I don't think Joseph Boyden would be available to rub our feet and tell us bedtime stories...)