HerKind.com

Here's my review of Lisa Moore's new book, February. It's a wonderful book.

Loss of a Family Man

I love discovering new literary voices and my book reviewing gigs allow me to be so lucky. Here's my review of Jeanette Lynes' debut novel (she's already a successful poet) from the weekend Globe. I highly recommend the book, it's a lively and delightful read about four women working in an airplane factory during WWII.

These Women Take Flight

Lately, I've been captivated by a pair of eagles in Sydney, Vancouver Island who hatched a trio of eaglets earlier this month and are diligently feeding and protecting them as they grow.  Hancock Wildlife has placed birds-eye cameras by the nests high up in the trees allowing people to watch this pair, and another on Hornby Island, who just this morning hatched one of their two eggs.

To be able to watch nature in action is pretty amazing. One evening I saw an intruder that looked like another eagle try to snatch one of the eaglets. Another time the male eagle dropped off what looked like a dead rabbit, which startled the female when it tried to hop out of the nest. She killed it right before the prying eyes of thousands of enthusiastic bird-watchers. The eaglets,  hatched two and 4 days apart from one another sometimes fight to be the first to feed; the eldest pecking at the youngest until he/she plays dead just to stay out of its way. The chat rooms go crazy when these things happen. Some people lament nature's cruelty saying they can't watch. They give human qualities to the eagles, calling them mom, dad and babies.

One clever chatter coined the term "nestovers" when the eagles feed their young in the evening from the same fish or fowl they caught in the morning. They worry the parents aren't catching enough food, that the littlest one isn't eating enough to sustain him or that his nest-mates will peck him to death. They imagine they see blood in the nest, they wonder if the parents are experienced enough to shepherd their eaglets into the world. They say they'll cry their eyes out should anything happen to them and fret when one chatter informs the room that 40% of eaglets die while learning to fly.

The other night a fight broke out between the die-hard nature-watchers and the ones who can't stomach the ups and the downs of natural life. Lots of caps were used. Finally the die-hards left the room and the others traded quips about how they were killjoys and why can't they just lighten up! Mostly the chat rooms are a friendly places where people catch each other up on the days events on the nest and eventually, during the long stretches when the eaglets are sleeping, talk to one another about their own lives, where they live, what they do for a living, their kids, grandkids, etc.

It all reminds me of the first summer I lived in Vancouver and joined a small but dedicated group of swan-watchers in Stanley Park's Lost Lagoon. Before then, I had never really been much of a nature lover, mostly because I had rarely been exposed. My family didn't have a cottage and I guess I was an urban, concrete-jungle kinda gal, thriving on the adrenaline a busy city provides. Vancouver's urban setting is against the backdrop of nature and it changed me. That and the summer trips I took through BC and Alberta where wildlife is much more abundant than say... downtown Toronto.

Me and the other swan-watchers initially gathered to witness the incubation and hatching of the cygnets, but over the couple of months of meeting at the nests, we soon began to know each other above and beyond the swans. Some I kept in touch with, some I only saw the next year at the nests. We were all very invested in the success of the eggs and the new little lives. How thrilling it was to watch them take their first swim, how fascinated we were at how it all happens by an instinct that we as humans learn all too often to second-guess in ourselves.

It's instructional and awe-inspiring.

Watching the eagles breed is a nice reminder of that part of the country and my fairly recent appreciation of nature.

My first summer back in Toronto, I wrote this post about my experience with the swans.

Back when I was swan-watching in Vancouver I wrote this story for a local paper.

Sometimes there's really no cure for loneliness except more solitude. Other times the cure is to connect, face to face, or at least voice to voice with a kind-hearted loved one, or a like-minded new friend. Or go for a long walk in nature.

Those sentences aren't meant to sound like platitudes. I find them to be true, for me at least.

The state of loneliness, or even the odd afternoon of feeling lonely, isn't a popular topic to discuss. I think people pretty much shy away from declaring loneliness as their frame of mind. I know from experience that admitting you're lonely can clear a room. I recently read a blog post discussing a new book called The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century by psychiatrist team Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz. The book apparently discusses why people have fewer trusted connections now, in the age of hyper connectivity, than in the last few decades. The blog post talked about how lonely people are often social misfits and how social isolation is a health risk. I hear this alot, especially around Christmas and it always kind of scares me.

I spend most of my time alone, at least 75%. Some of it is deliberate. But not all.

I also spend quite a bit of time feeling lonely. Sometimes it's overwhelming, other times it's useful. Solitude is good for the soul, but too much of it is not recommended. It's a delicate balance. Either way, I have learned to push through loneliness. I know now what it's based on.

I never once felt lonely until the day my mother died at the end of 1997. At the time, I was just learning about how much solitude I needed but never once equated that need or practice with loneliness. After my mom left the world, I was utterly bereft and have never really recovered. This is because, try as I did to replace the friendship and kinship I had with her, I finally had to face the fact that it couldn't be done. She was my preferred company, my best friend, the one person with whom a single conversation offered me the gifts of comfort, intellectual sympatico and stimulation and just plain fun. We shared many common outlooks and ideas about life and how to live it. We had an extremely strong connection and I still believe that even if I was not born of her womb, we would have found each other in the world.

Feeling this way does not mean I haven't moved on with my life, cultivated strong friendships and continued to be a social animal. This does mean that my particular brand of loneliness is not easily "cured" (for lack of a better word). It only means I have learned to live with it and am still learning not to react impulsively because of it.

After my mom died, I realized almost immediately that I had a different, newer, more intense need for my friends than ever before. I was perhaps a bit hard on them for not meeting this need to my specifications. At the time, in our late 30s most of our careers were on an upward movement, many of us were settling into serious coupledom, marriage, kids. I could never see enough of my pals and because I felt I never saw them, and my best friend was gone, why not move away and start fresh in a part of the country that I perceived had a more balanced approach to life.

It worked for a time in the sense that a change is as good as a rest. But slowly, the loneliness crept back in. Just like a Vancouver cabbie once said to me "the rush is in you, not the city you live in," it's also true that loneliness does follow you. Living there, taking a stroll along the seawall could sometimes alleviate the feeling. Montains, ocean. Living here, I often feel stuck. But I've learned this is also something immovable living inside me. Toronto doesn't inspire movement in me. Vancouver does. A true inner struggle that I'm still working out.

Working at home I spend a lot of time talking to people electronically - email, instant messaging, Facebook, Twitter. I can spend days in a row without hearing the sound of my own voice, and yet I have "talked" to quite a few people. It counts, and it doesn't count. You can feel all talked out before you even get to any real connection. I enjoy it, but there are times when I just have to tune out the noise of e-connection for real live human interaction. The truth is, the voice, the eyes and the body have it. Nothing can ever replace the soothing touch of a compassionate friend, the synchronized laughter of a shared joke, or that certain knowing look during a conversation.

As for lonely people being anti-social, or socially anxious. That's a strong denial of the denial of loneliness in our culture. One really has not a lot to do with the other. I can spend days and weeks alone, and then walk into a party or gathering perfectly alone and not have a problem. Maybe not everyone who spends as much time alone as I do can do that, but to paint any segment of the population with one brush is most annoying. Especially when it's the social culture itself that is contributing to the feeling of isolation.

I guess I just think that loneliness is a fairly misunderstood state of mind. And before we take it out to examine whether or not it needs to be medicalized (the next step I'm sure), we should spend some time trying to understand its source. I think we'll find that it is highly individual, and fairly common.