Thanks to Jay and Nahlah  Ayed

The Bluetooth speaker Jay gave me and the CBC program 'Ideas', eased my way into this Sunday morning. I took an audio voyage from approximately 600CE to the present/future. Jay gave me the speaker just before he returned to Korea, and soon after that I downloaded the CBC Listen app. Since then I have used both to provide an alternative to the repetitive soundtrack of my mind while doing necessary tasks. 

This morning I did physiotherapy exercises first thing as usual; if I don't, there is little hope I will do them later in the day. 'Ideas' transported me back to Old English poetry via a programme, 'The First Good Poem in English'. I took one course in Old English at university, so had a limited introduction to 'The Wanderer', the poem referred to in the title. I was entertained so thoroughly that I frequently lost track of the only thing I have to do, keep count of repetitions. The scholars interviewed read extracts from the poem either in Old English or contemporary English and spoke of their interpretations of it or of the beauty of its language and alliterative style. It tells of an aged warrior, an exile lamenting the loss of his lord and land and the past. Most seemed to think that a few lines suggesting a Christian tone at the beginning and end of the elegy were probably added by the presumably Christian scribe when it was first written down in the Exeter Book long after it was originally composed. It's not a long poem, so I am going to read it again. The work of an aging poet who lived perhaps over twelve hundred years ago, an exile from the time, place and friends of youth, seems timeless and especially apt at this moment. 

Then as I made and ate breakfast I listened again to 'Ideas', the first of a series of CBC Massey Lectures from 2020 entitled, 'Look at that device in your hand.'  presented by Ron Deibert of Citizen Lab. It was Miriam who mentioned this particular series to me last Friday on our walk. She was a mathematician working for Irish Rail at the time when it was beginning to move into computer systems, a bit later but like the women in the movie 'Hidden Figures' who worked for NASA in the early 1960s. She was reminded as she listened to the series of how energized she had been by the fact that she was contributing to advances in technology that would eliminate some of the most boring and time consuming aspects of the running of an efficient railway system. Now she sees so many of the unintended consequences of these same advances, such as those pointed out in the 'Ideas' series. Her youthful enthusiasm has been thrown into question lately. I tried to assure her that the positive intended consequences can not be ignored. They allow me to travel in space every evening to S. Korea without leaving the house and in time from about the seventh century CE to 2021 between getting up and eating breakfast on an ordinary Sunday morning. 

A drawing of Jay done by one of his students last week

Aside from that, l'm reading a very good book, The Sum of Us, by Heather McGhee. It's a carefully researched and well written study of the roots and continuing growth of racism at the heart of the limited democracy that continues to struggle to survive in the USA. My back continues to improve, biking has started and I can walk farther all the time. I'm also waiting for rain. The forsythia and crocuses are starting to bloom, but things would be more colorful if we had a good rainfall. 

On Monday, March 29 at 11:50 I get the Covid 19 vaccination. Yahoo! 

Tomorrow will be March 15, 2021. 

Jay will turn 40. 🎂For me, his birth is a wonderful moment to celebrate. He and I have had good thumb chats this week. They are the anchor of my every evening. 

But this past week has also been a time to remember less joyous events: 

On March 11, 2010, Jim died. "What falls away is always and is near,"

On March 11, 2011, I was on O'ahu with Caroline when the Great Sendai Earthquake rocked Japan causing a tsunami, nuclear meltdown and thousands of deaths. Fortunately, the waves that hit O'ahu were not deadly. When we drove along the shore the next day, the only evidence of them that we saw was at the mouth of a small river where ocean water was rushing in, pushing the fresh water upstream in big waves. Kids were surfing up river. 

And on March 11, 2021, Canada acknowledged those who had died this past year from Covid 19. 

I no longer even think of trying to ski or snowshoe this winter. It's spring!! We moved the clocks forward one hour last night, there's no more snow on the ground in the valley and I seem to be able to walk farther and farther without much pain. 🤞 

Miriam and I this past Friday on the first CFUW hike of the season on the Rail Trail along the shore of Kal.Lake

Last week as I walked on Kin Beach, this young woman rode by. I was impressed by the statuesque formation she and her horse presented and surprised when she told me that she had got the horse as a rescue only a year ago and trained it herself. 

Lake Okanagan is ice free. 

The geese are floating gracefully again over its surface. 

Vernon continues with its plan to spend an outrageous amount of money to kill a few of them. Although the number has been increased from 150 to 250 it still strikes me as wasteful in every respect. 

On Friday I had my third appointment with the physiotherapist since November 26. I intended to make it the last because $80.00 a visit seemed steep; I don't have any health plan beyond the provincial one. Also the pain had certainly diminished but not gone away, and I was beginning to think that after three months the same would have been the case even without physiotherapy. I entered the office for this last appointment intending to carry on doing the exercises I had been given and going on ever longer walks. But as Monty Python said, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition."  And that's exactly what I got from Carey. His explanation of how bones heal laid bare my uninformed assumptions, his outline of new exercises and his unexpected use of needles in my muscles combined with the fact that this time the fee was only $75.00 crushed every aspect of my argument against continuing. I am booked for another appointment in early April. 

I don't know if it's the pandemic, ageing, living alone, recovering from injury or an ultimate submission to the unrelenting media exposure to Covid, Covid , Covid with its contemporary tendency to dwell on individual emotional and psychological reactions to this overwhelming external reality, but I have never been so conscious of and spent so much time on my own physical, mental and emotional needs, wants or whatever. It's crept up on me slowly. At first I fought it, thinking this attention to self was unnecessary and self indulgent. But as I don't have much else to occupy my time I carry on doing physio exercises with intention, walking ever longer routes, cutting my hair with unwarranted care, applying cream to face and body, making changes in my wardrobe and home decor that I would never have even deemed necessary before, hovering over house plants, writing and reading and all manner of self centred pastimes. 

My newly reorganized sun room

I'm beginning to think that the importance attached to self care these days is often warranted because the stresses placed on family and work life in this uncertain time of pandemic must sometimes feel insurmountable for younger people. I suffer little of that, but old age no matter the historical period makes its demands on the body, mind and spirit. And maybe at its best caring for the self makes a person more aware of the necessity of care itself and hence of the need to help others whose cares are much greater than our own. 

The pandemic is forcing Canadians of my generation and following to question the delusion of control over our personal destinies that some of us have basked in during 75 years of peace and prosperity. We are now facing uncertainty as never before in our time. But people through the ages have had their complacency ruffled. Plague, drought, flood, famine, corrupt governments and wars have regularly forced human beings to rework their systems, to return to struggling together against the odds and even to endure mass migration. Now it's our time to be compelled to accept the tenuousness of our situation. Perhaps we will even learn to appreciate the much more dire case faced by millions of people around the world and do whatever we can to promote greater equality and more sustainable sources of energy at home and everywhere. I'm thinking again about Rutger Bregman and how influenced I was by his books, Utopia for Realistsand Humankind. I probably wouldn't have read either of them if it had not been for lockdown which has made me pay more attention to many things that I  previously would have thought I didn't have time for. What did I have time for?

There's always time fora laugh. An old poster on the wall of a coffee shop in Lake Country. We went there after a walk on the rail trail.