When I wander through the forest, the trees demand my attention. Especially here on the west coast, where trees can stretch more than 90 metres into the sky and be as wide as 20 metres in circumference, I am dwarfed by their massive expanse. I often stop to stand in awe of them, gazing up to their dizzying heights. Read the rest on our Substack!
After performing Chopin for a business conference crowd, Michael Jones sat down at the piano in the hotel lobby and started playing his own music. A man who’d been in the audience earlier stopped to ask what music he was playing now. When Michael said that it was just a piece he’d written himself, the man, whose voice was slurred with alcohol, asked “Who will play your music if you don’t?” Those words stuck with Michael and soon after that, he transitioned into playing more of his own music and less of Chopin’s.
I was reading something this weekend about pain and how it’s the body’s way of telling us there’s something we need to pay attention to. And then I thought… it works for the heart and the mind too. Read more
“So… what made you move to Shawnigan Lake?”
It’s one of the most common questions I get from people I encounter in the tiny village I moved to at the edge of a lake on Vancouver Island. “It was time for a change,” I say, or “I’ve been wandering since I sold my house in Winnipeg, and this felt like the next right thing,” or “My kids all grew up and moved away so I thought it was my turn for an adventure,” or “I wanted a place with gentler winters.”
My name is Krista and that, over there on the left, the one smiling at you kindly from her writing desk on the West Coast of Canada, is Heather, my business partner-slash-work-wife.
I’m holed up right now in the office I have at my church here in Winnipeg (located almost in the dead-centre of Canada, a couple hours drive straight north from North Dakota in the U.S.A.). In addition to helping run the Centre, I am currently also employed by Good News Fellowship as their Leadership Coordinator (I basically do all the pastor-type things except preach).
“I don’t know who I am. I’ve shaped my life around other people for so long that I’ve lost sight of myself.” I used to hear some version of that sentiment quite regularly, ten years ago when more of my work involved coaching people. It was especially common among women in the 40-60 age range – women who’d spent years raising children, holding a marriage together, and/or building a career. Read more
“You need to pause to let joy in.” Those words popped into my head one day last week while I was sitting on the couch, weary after a long day of book-launch-related tasks, which followed several long days of gathering the things I need to make a home and unpacking them into the cupboards and closets of my new place.
Pause to let joy in? I was puzzled at first, and then suddenly I understood what my internal wise guide (which I call Tenderness) was trying to say to me. I hadn’t been pausing much in recent weeks, staying busy nearly all day every day. Moving across the country, launching a book, trying to keep a business afloat, re-launching a course – ALL. OF. THE. THINGS. Even when I had some moments when there was nothing that needed to be done, I was rarely truly pausing – at least not in a mindful way. I was mostly just filling those moments with mindless stuff, like endless episodes of Real Housewives (don’t judge me).
I’m not going to lie. I am nervous about you. No. More than that. I am anxious and border-line dreading you. It’s not your fault, really. You just happen to be the year of another U.S. election cycle, my kid starting with a new volleyball club, a reduction in my income for the next six months, me finishing up my position with my church at the end of June (and a likely further reduction in my income), and another year of trying to make our business work at the Centre in the midst of global economic uncertainty, climate change, and wars breaking out everywhere. Read more...
“By the end of the week, we’ll have turned you into a blues band.” Gulp. I could feel the anxiety rise when I heard those words. A blues band?! Me?! I have no musical talent and my Mennonite body is rhythmically stunted from all of those “dancing is sin” messages I heard growing up. How could I contribute to a blues band?
That statement still stands as one of the most intimidating things I’ve ever heard from the facilitator of a leadership workshop. Not surprisingly, it also turned out to be one of the most life-changing. Of course, in order for it to become life-changing, I had to get out of my own way first. I had to loosen my grip on some beliefs about myself and be willing to be uncomfortable for a while. By the end of the week, I had indeed written a verse for a blues song and performed it together with a rag-tag bunch of other equally intimidated participants over dinner in front of hundreds of people.
For many and varied reasons, 2023 was a hard year. I’m fairly confident that that was true for a lot of people. The first ‘post-pandemic’ year marked what felt like a desperate fervour to ‘get back to normal’ – despite the war in Ukraine grinding on, despite the climate crisis becoming more obvious and keen, despite growing political division and fascist ideologies becoming accepted and implemented world-wide, despite the ever-tenuous Israel-Palestine situation literally exploding and turning into little more than death and destruction (not to mention other areas of the world that got less press), despite rapid inflation and deep economic hardship for everyone but the richest of us, despite the fact that COVID is not, in fact, finished mutating and harming us. This last year it has felt like the whole globe is in one giant humanitarian crisis all of the time. There’s literally nowhere to go to escape tragedy. Read more...
I had a dream once, that my body had become part of the landscape. The curve of my belly was now a hill that people and animals were walking across. Small children were playing on my forearms and trees were growing in the soil between my fingers rooting my hands to the ground. It was not an unpleasant dream – in fact I found it quite comforting to witness my body sinking into the soil and becoming a part of it. I awoke feeling rooted and at peace. Read more
“He was a poor man in a criminal justice system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.” – Anthony Ray Hinton
For nearly thirty years, Anthony Ray Hinton was in solitary confinement on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Largely because he was Black and poor, the justice system failed him. Despite the fact that there was convincing evidence that should have exonerated him, he was convicted by an all-white jury, and then had multiple appeals rejected by a systemically racist justice system intent on covering up past errors. With no money to hire good lawyers or skilled experts (i.e. the ballistics “expert” his lawyer hired was blind in one eye and didn’t know how to use the necessary equipment), he stayed in jail anticipating his execution.
I wake up among the treetops. I peek out the window near my head and I see the shadowy lake below, surrounded by the shadowy trees. Across the lake, I hear the train that was probably the reason for my waking. I close my eyes and a smile creeps across my face. I love the melancholy sound of a train passing through wild spaces. I don’t care for it much in the city, but out here, away from civilization, the clicking and clacking and screeching of metal on metal, especially in the middle of the night, sounds to me like kindness and sadness all mixed together.
Sometimes, when it has rained all day and everything is damp, it’s nearly impossible to start a fire, even if the wood was under a tarp. Last night was one of those nights. The challenge was compounded by the fact that the only paper I had on hand were the pages of my journal and I was reluctant to tear out too many.
I came here, to the lake, feeling discouraged and a little burnt out from putting so much free content into the world. This is the time of year I have to be the most active on social media because we are marketing our Fall programs, both online and in-person. I always find myself getting knocked off my equilibrium in times like these. I start seeing social media as a monster with insatiable hunger and I am one of many who are chained to the beast and must never stop feeding it lest it turn toward us to make a meal out of our bodies. The beast keeps changing its algorithms, which means that we, its feeders, need to keep finding new and novel ways to satiate its hunger. If we don’t, we can’t pay our bills and capitalism eats us alive. (Yes, I can be a little dramatic sometimes.)
Two months following my mother’s passing away, the grief was still raw and painful. I had these sudden waves of intense sadness that flooded my inner organs and brought me to tears – the kinds of tears I had to clench my teeth to hold back while being on the subway full of people.
My friend came to visit and stayed at my apartment for a night. I asked him to walk with me to the nearby park. It was the typical mini park that hides in surprising corners of Japanese streets. The kinds that would bloom with white-pinkish clouds of cherry blossoms when the season comes. That night was a spring night – The weather was cool and fresh. We walked in silence as I sometimes shared with him bits and pieces of how I was feeling about my mother’s passing away. I couldn’t remember what I said. The only thing I remembered was the magical moment that followed our immediate entrance to the park.
I can’t fix it. I want SO BADLY to fix it. My daughter is in distress, she’s far away, and all I can do is be here, listening, at the other end of a FaceTime call. I feel so helpless. My words feel empty and void of purpose. My emotions swell into desperation as my nervous system sends my brain scrambling to find at least one small thing that is fixable by me, her mom. There is nothing.
This is the hard stuff of parenting young adult children from a distance. I feel so frequently helpless when their lives overwhelm them. I can’t show up with food, I can’t rush over to their apartments to hug them or do their laundry… I can’t even send them a plane ticket back home because “home” is no longer a physical place. (And yes… the niggling guilt over selling their childhood home sometimes pokes at me when the desperation swells.)
I wonder sometimes if I still have hope. Every time I read the news (and those times are becoming fewer and fewer) there are more reasons for despair. We hear dire warnings of what will happen if our global climate increases by yet another degree. All around us, there are more and more massive climate-related catastrophes flooding cities, heating the oceans, and burning up big swaths of forests (and all the homes in those forests). All the while, there seems to be so little political and collective will to make the kinds of real changes that are necessary. Our elected leaders seem increasingly more impotent in the face of it all.
I’ve come to the woods to remember who I am. As I write this, I’m off-the-grid, offline and unplugged, tucked into a tiny cabin by a lake, with just enough solar power to occasionally charge my laptop so that I can write. I cook over a propane stove and haul water in a bucket to wash my few dishes. The only bathroom facility is a compost toilet in a little outhouse just a little further up the hill. I brush my teeth with a cup of water and then spit into the woods. I haven’t showered or looked in a mirror for two days. When I need a break from writing, I wander down to the dock and watch the ripples on the lake. In the evenings, I light a fire and sometimes I read under the light of my headlamp.
I was crying in the church basement while my toddler ran circles around the room. I was certain I must be doing something wrong as a parent. My brother’s two sons were upstairs, sitting in cherubic silence on the hard wooden pew, while all the grownups around them listened to their grandpa (my dad) deliver a sermon. But not my child – my child would never sit still in church, no matter how I bribed her with candy or colouring books, no matter how much I pleaded.