“. . . Show me the truth about myself no matter how beautiful it is.”
—A Benedictine nun, as found in Wake Up to the Joy of You by Agapi Stassinopoulos
This is the scene outside my window today. We are snowed under. Homebound.
Some would say this is the ugly truth of winter. I say it is the beautiful truth.
A time for an in-breath. A time to take full advantage of my word for the year: FOCUS.
A time to seek out and, more importantly, believe my own beautiful truths.
My word for 2022 came to me in December as I was reading a post on The Spectacled Bean.
What would my word for 2022 be, I wondered . . . Oh wait, the laundry needed to be changed.
. . .
Right. A word. 2022. That was what I was thinking about. What should . . . Oh, but then my husband was going to the grocery store. I just needed to tell him we need milk.
. . .
Back again. Think, think, think. What would . . . Sorry. A notification popped into my computer screen. I needed to respond to that.
. . .
If only I could focus, I thought.
That’s it!
FOCUS.
One thing at a time. Multi-tasking is a myth. I aim for a more productive 2022 as a result.
Do you have word for 2022?
I began the solstice morning with a sun salutation, “a humble adoration of the light and insight of the self,” as it says in Yoga Journal.
[I have been practising yoga via Zoom through the pandemic with the amazing Andrea Robertson of bodyandbalance. No matter where you live in the world, you too could improve strength, flexibility and balance.]
On the darkest and longest day of the year, we salute the sun. It is returning to us here in the northern hemisphere—but not for a while. We have months of darkness first.
Darkness is a scary place of uncertainty, but it’s full of possibilities too. Darkness makes dreams came true.
“For the first time, Chris [Hadfield] could see the power and mystery and velvety black beauty of the dark. And, he realized, you’re never really alone there. Your dreams are always with you, just waiting. Big dreams, about the kind of person you want to be.”
—From The Darkest Dark by Chris Hadfield
The darkness of a movie theatre makes enjoying a movie possible. The images are clear. Any light—from a cell phone, for example—is unwelcome.
Darkness makes us uncomfortable, but it also forces us to focus. If we carry a flashlight out into a black night, we must choose where to shine the beam. We narrow our outlook to what’s important in the moment.
I salute the sun. And I appreciate that, at a time of year when it is less present in my life, I must narrow focus and choose where to shine my beam.
While reading Denial by Beverley McLachlin this week, I came upon the word nonplussed.
Nonplussed is one of those words that people don’t use in conversation. We are left to conclude its meaning from where we find it in writing. Up to this week, every time I’d read the word it had meant unperturbed.
In her book, McLachlin used the word in a way that did not mean unperturbed. Quite the opposite. Her character was taken aback and surprised by his circumstance.
Seeing this, I was taken aback and surprised. Nonplussed, as it turns out.
I said to my husband, “What do you think nonplussed means?”
“Surprised,” he said.
Huh. I touched my finger to the word in my e-book and selected “Look up.” The answer came:
I am not nonplussed (unperturbed) by these definitions. I am quite nonplussed (surprised).
What to do with a word with two opposite meanings?
May our politicians never make use of the term. Misunderstanding and world conflict could result.
No, no, nonplussed is a word not to trust.
I attended a concert on Friday night. Due to COVID restrictions, the venue needed to bar access to every other row of seating. They did so with humour.
The sign above made me laugh, and think.
We often seek some wonderful new event or item for our lives, and we expect it to appear immediately and directly in our path. POOF!
Not so fast. Maybe we can find what we seek, but not right away and not in the first place we look.
Seek, and then keep seeking, with the whole heart.
galore (adv.)
https://www.etymonline.com/word/galore
1670s, from Irish go leór, and equivalent Scottish Gaelic gu leóir “sufficiently, enough,” from Old Irish roar “enough,” from Proto-Celtic *ro-wero- “sufficiency.”
My father was adopted.
He was raised with love by a family with Irish roots. My entire life I associated strongly with that Irish heritage. I sang and danced during the loud and proud St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in Canada’s Ottawa Valley.
Then, this past Christmas, my son gave me a DNA test as a gift. The results showed my Irish DNA at the BOTTOM of the list of the ethnicity estimate, at 2 %.
2 %. I couldn’t have been more astonished.
A second surprise lay in store. The largest percentage of my DNA indicated Scottish and Scandinavian heritage. I am three-quarters Scottish and . . . Viking, I guess?
In September, as fate would have it, my son headed off to Edinburgh, Scotland to do his Master of Physiotherapy. We won’t travel there just yet (you know . . . COVID), but we’re making plans for future trips. I began to read Love of Country: A Journey through the Hebrides by Madeline Bunting.
I read about the land of my DNA. I read of crofts (small rented farms with a right of pasturage held in common with others), and machair (fertile plains), and lochan (small inland lakes). I learned the roots of the word galore (see above) and mused about how wonderful it is that galore really means that you have everything you need for the given moment.
All of this got me to thinking about where I’m from (Scotland/Scandinavia) as opposed to where I am really from (the Ottawa Valley, Canada).
This past week, the book Where Are You From by Yamile Saied Méndez passed through my hands at the library where I work. It is the story of a child who must answer where she is from—no, where she is really from—to the point where it hurts.
When people ask someone like me where I’m really from, it means Where were you raised? What is the place that formed you?
For racialized people, the situation is reversed. For them, where are you really from means What foreign country did your people come from?
That makes it a backwards question, because for any of us, the place where we are really from is the place that has formed us.
My DNA says that the foreign countries my people came from were Scotland and the Scandinavian countries, but I’m really from a farm in the Ottawa Valley. I’m really from a place where we dug in the dirt to grow our food, where we wore hand-me-downs, and where neighbours and families helped each other out. On any given day we had everything we needed. Sufficiently, enough.
In other words, we had plenty galore. What a fine place to be from. Really.
Somerton Smith 