Tag: Life

The Aviator Next Door: A Cross Border Love Story

I am a Canadian woman married to an American man. I landed in central Florida nearly eleven years ago at the behest of an irresistible adventure and romantic whim that became very real, very fast. We met online and married three weeks later. This is – for everyone who has asked the question – what I was thinking.

That he wasn’t an axe murderer was an auspicious beginning. I did a level of due diligence. I found him quoted in the New York Times as a Pan Am pilot talking about a plane shot down in Russian airspace. What he essentially said is that is what happens when a plane drifts into forbidden airspace. No sentimental or political analysis. Just the facts.

I would come to experience this as a seasoned pilot’s worldview. A+B = C. Little room for gray. Best attitude for a pilot navigating the core physics and philosophy of flight. Planes go up and planes come down. To do so safely, there are inflexible rules and checklists to follow. I would come to learn most pilots are similarly oriented.

In a clerk’s office in Kissimmee, Florida, our adventure took flight as we said our “I do’s.”It is fair to say our marriage was a stick of TNT in the iceberg of my life. I was single, solvent and settled in my Canadian life. All of a sudden, this guy meets and mirrors every adventurous notion I had ever had. He was fun, he was handsome and having been a pilot, I was pretty sure he had an innate sense of discipline and responsibility. No one had died on his watch.

As the months and years evolved with my American husband, the depths of the man I married slowly surfaced. He loves poetry. Rudyard Kipling. Robert S Service. Yeats. Robert Frost. He enrolled in art school in Italy where he lived for twenty-five years. There he discovered a talent for painting he had set aside during his working life. He became an expert interpreter of Renoir, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Picasso, Gerome and others. It was entirely engrossing to watch him at an easel, as he moved through the stages of creating a cartoon, transferring it to canvas and sketching out the form of the image before oils touched the surface.

Among many things we had in common, he loved to travel. Mind you, I always disembarked at the gate while he was the one who parked at the gate. Still, it turned out we had travelled to many of the same worldwide destinations. New York. Paris. Rome. New Delhi. Buenos Aires. Hong Kong.

You might think a love of travel would be obvious being a pilot and all. But not necessarily. Many pilots, he told me, were happy to start their work day in the morning as long as they got home for supper that night.

We share a favorite story about those hours long “getting to know you” phone calls back in the beginning. When he learned how many international destinations I had travelled to, he said with an eye roll: “This conversation might go a lot quicker if you just tell me where you HAVEN’T been.”

He once described landing in Hong Kong, one of the more challenging in the world at the time. He recalled the approach step-by-step as if living it while speaking. Every considered bank, every turn of the wheel, interplayed with the nuanced movements of the throttle and ailerons to line up the massive jet perfectly with the lights of the landing strip. In his recall, he was describing a kind of magic which, thinking about it, flying still sort of is.

We both love to eat. He waxed on about asado meals he had in Rio and Buenos Aires. Slabs of steak to order were brandished on swords carried by uniformed waiters. At a restaurant in New Delhi, they made chapatis in a deep round oven in view of the diners. He talked about meals prepared by guides on an African safari. I compared different meals on a horseback trek across the Andes prepared by Argentinian and Chilean gauchos.

We took a road trip to Newfoundland where I had gone to high school and still had many friends. It was outside our norm to eat fried cod we had just jigged that afternoon. There was something indescribable about bringing the man I loved back to my old childhood haunts. Something of a full circle moment contrasting the instability of my young life with the steadiness I found in the old pilot I loved.

I am grateful for the time and grace granted to me and my husband. Our marriage has not been without struggles and drama interlaced with many sweet spots. The years have done what years inevitably do. Today our focus is making the most of the time left to us. It has been an incomparable life we would never have experienced if we hadn’t met. It is boundaried but that was the deal we signed up for. Looking back, I wouldn’t have changed a thing except I might have grown up a little faster.

From that unconventional beginning, I sit here today on our farm thousands of miles from my home and native land on Canada Day. There is much I miss about Canada. I love our values. We are nice people by and large. Civility and mutual respect is a shared ideal. There is a social contract and tacit agreement to take care of the least among of to preserve the security and dignity of the whole. Moving to America and marrying an American has given me a front row seat on this culture and country that couldn’t possibly be acquired any other way.

Yet amongst all of the upheaval and overwhelm, a single human story of love and resilience survives. I will never fully understand the forces – internal or external – that threw my husband and I into each other’s path. We both recognize there has been something universal and timeless in it.

Maybe that is the conclusion and lesson to draw. With all that goes on outside in the world, what ultimately matters is what happens inside each of us. Pursuing our inner dictates and journey is what ultimately matters. I love my old pilot dearly and that doesn’t change – no matter what country we are in. And that is what I choose to celebrate on this national holiday. And will on the upcoming birthday in his country.

Plus One Year’s Eve

Well, folks. I made it. This is my 366th post in a row having officially started writing this blog one year ago tomorrow. Happy anniversary to me.

Funny how anniversaries and life just seem to creep up on you. No fanfare or fireworks. Just progression.

I started this blog as a place to gather my thoughts while I committed to writing a book. There has been a book sitting in me for years, or so I’ve been told. I finally wanted to let it out.

So did that book get written? That depends on how you look at it. I wrote enough copy to fill a book certainly. But the technical aspects of book writing were never brought to bear on this project.

A beginning, middle and end to start. No. I chose to share my thoughts and insights into a range of eclectic topics as they arose or came to my attention. In that sense, I honored my own unfolding process and not a publisher’s checklist.

It has been an opportunity to share wisdom I’ve gleaned over the years through the writings of others.

It has been an opportunity to explore and share where I came from and how I healed from it.

It has given me a chance to publicly grieve the loss and raise up some people I admired.

I have a better sense of what matters to me and what I will no longer tolerate. Peace is top item on the list of goals these days. I have turned my back on drama.

This has not been a journal. I’ve done that before. In journals, I shared my deepest fears and insecurities. I bitched and wailed and generally pursued a story line of “woe is me.” This blog was deliberately something other than that.

I distilled the key learnings and strategies that kept me going on my “woe is me” days. I shared what I did to endure and prevail over “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” I worked at learning to forgive myself.

The gap between intellect and emotion can be vast. Such is the process of learning and growth. All of us seem to be slaves to unconscious programming we work our whole lives to understand and overcome.

I have carved out a little niche. An intellectual mini-garden that I can nurture and visit frequently. I don’t yet know what my next steps are. I will write a final post tomorrow just for the symmetry of ending on the same date I started last year.

I will once again this year attend the Getting Away to Write workshop in New Smyrna Beach, Florida next week. A geographic coda to this writing exercise as I started this blog there last year.

I must thank all of you who subscribed and read what I wrote. The comments were usually spot on. Insightful and helpful. The likes were encouraging and kept me motivated. I’ll pop up again from time to time in your inbox like other bloggers.

It’s time now for coffee and morning meditation. Time to ground myself and prepare for the day. It will be deliberately low-key as most of my days are lately. Such a welcome gift.

I love living this way. Forgiving myself as well as forgiving those who trespassed against me. Marinating in the memories of a lifetime and looking back with gratitude. Enjoying the living environment I’ve created whilst living with someone I love who loves me back.

Above all else, I’m certain that my journey – like a billion other journeys taking place in the world out there at this moment – is but a single cell in the vast corpus of life on our planet. Both unique and utterly ordinary.

Whatever is ahead, I plan to enjoy the remainder of the ride to the best of my ability.

Thank you for sharing part of the journey with me.

Perchance to Dream

It is rather brilliant how we keep the harsher realities of life at arm’s-length as we go about our day-to-day lives.

Death occurs around us all the time. It is happening somewhere right now to someone we don’t even remotely know and now never will. We rarely feel death’s bite until it is up close and personal. When someone in our family dies, or in our circle, however, the hole left in our own little world is palpable and vast.

Whether suddenly or after a long illness, the transition from interacting with a thinking, breathing individual to internalizing their utter absence is wrenching. It can stir up all manner of emotional reactions and invite you into a period of self-reflection. If you’re lucky.

Starting out in life, mostly we are lucky enough to ignore all of that. As young people struggling to find their feet and make their own lives, the primary focus in early adulthood is on building an education and career and home and family. Not for everybody, especially these days, but for many.

In his book, The Myth of Normal, author, physician and public speaker Gabor Mate challenges the collective concept of “normalcy.” He challenges our notions of what currently passes as “normal” in our physical and psychological lives in the Western world.

Instead, Mate says, our culture and the institutions it has created, are founded on very unhealthy and unstable ground. We have built most of our health and support systems focused on intervention and not on prevention.

In this sense, our society has built responses based largely on reactive and superficial markers. Doctors rarely have time to dig deep enough into a person’s history and social/emotional context to gather information about conditions that might underly and caused their illness.

Mate asserts that personal and cultural trauma contributes significantly to all health problems – both physical and psychological — and the physical and psychological cannot be fully separated from one another.

I could not agree more. It is life’s inequalities and access to opportunities that shape us. Also – as Mate explains – we are all defined for better or worse by the circumstances of our birth and the family we are born into. The continuum is widely divergent.

We paint over the divergence from our personal experience of “normalcy” with stories or rationalizations. Our co-created narrative attempts to explain away why our “normal” family is somehow legitimately different or unique or better than or less than others.

In our family, my mother dictated the value of accomplishment above almost everything. My father saw value in great wealth. While these were their espoused values, their reality was markedly different.

Ongoing struggles in both parents with addiction and self-esteem. Inter-personal violence. Destructive power struggles between my mother and father as they sought to prove superiority over the other.

So we had a house. And cars. And my parent’s had careers. And a marriage. And social standing. Until, one day, suddenly, they didn’t.

It is hard to grieve the death of a way of life. I look back now on how radically and permanently my life changed when my parents split up and we left the town I was born in. It would be rare for a child to make sense of what was happening to them in a traumatic environment at the moment. Children’s primary job is to survive and grow. Making sense of how they did that must come later.

I think of this when I reflect on the Ukraine or Gaza. The reality they are living through – the children in particular – will become their memory of ”normal” up the road. Yet we all seem to proceed with the expectation that to succeed in life, the survivors must simply put the past behind them, step up to do what must be done to make a life and integrate themselves as productive and “normal” citizens.

We do ourselves no favors by ignoring death’s reality and eventuality around us and for us. Traditional farmers seemed to have a better handle on this than city folk. The cycles of birth and death can be daily occurrences in lives lived close to the land.

Collectively, we are all “whistling past the graveyard.” So the trick is not necessarily to focus on death and its certainty while we are living our lives. But we shouldn’t discount it either.

Poet Mary Oliver dealt with an abusive childhood background by turning her focus to nature and exploring her own sense of wonder. It is available to all of us if we but look. We all need to figure out what Oliver famously asked of us: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” 

Answering that question for yourself and living it out is the rebuttal you will draw on when facing your own death. It will also allow you to create your own personal and unique sense of “normalcy,” and not one imposed on you by others.

It’s in you, believe me. All you have to do is find the courage and character to act on it. That is what I tell myself anyway and, for the most part, it is working.

Just This Today

Because this one fact is just that important to contemplate and remind ourselves … again and again and again ad infinitum. Because truth is true and worthy of reminding ourselves. Frequently.

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” —James Baldwin (THE FIRE NEXT TIME; Vintage Books & Anchor Books)