Woah

Gemini (May 21-June 20)
It is said there are only two stories: man goes on a journey, and stranger comes to town. And when you’re the one on the journey, you’re likely the stranger in someone else’s town. So who do you want to be? The huckster selling the monorail? Or the hero chasing out the horse thieves? Considering your role in other people’s stories will help ensure a happy ending for your own.
--Sid Skye, Eye Weekly

Who do you wanna be in other people's stories? Me, I'm not really down with the idea that protecting private property from theft would make me a hero but I'm interested in the question.

I've been in Toronto for 18 hours and I want you to come for dinner. Like, now.

Hey all,
I'm home. Or in someone else's home in my adopted home town. It feels bizarrely familiar. I could *swear* I just left for the weekend. It's been less than 24 hours since I got in from NYC (and my awesomely awesome birthday with Loralee) but nothing seems out of place. I can navigate the transit system with one eye open (thx to Roxanna for the bus station pick up and escort home!), the prices are all what they should be ($1 for water, not $3) and the bank tellers are unreasonably perky. Yep. It's Canada.

I did cycle on the wrong side of the road twice this morning and was a bit amazed by Canadian money but otherwise, same-same. I'm staying in the apartment of a special-friend who is away right now. How perfect. I spend 18 months totally working through longing only to come home and sleep in the bed of someone who's smell makes me a bit achey. Of course! It's so delightful though. I rode down King st West today and yelled out "I love it here!" to the street.

I'm totally overwhelmed with all the stuff I have to take care of while I'm here and that mostly makes me want to curl up in bed and disappear into a book. So I might be a little slack in getting back to you. I would however, love my TO friends to come join me for dinner this Wednesday night, say 7 ish. 28 Temple St (2 blocks south of King, west of Dufferin). Bring whatever, something to share. I'll make a big soup or somethin'.

Toronto lives inside me. When I would cycle around Sydney I was constantly mis-guessing how long things would take. Of course, I just hadn't been there long enough and so the city wasn't engraved on my heart. Toronto is. I have a memory of each and every neighborhood. Today I cycled about five blocks and in that time, I went by a pub where a friend propositioned me one cold winter night. The apartment of an old colleague who gave me a bag of apples the last time I saw her. The apartment where a friend took me to lie down after I got dizzy from wine during dinner. I discovered this friend was genius at silence. We lay there for an hour, not speaking.

I like the fact that I know where to find things. I like the sun today. I like this heatbox of an attic apartment. I like dialing local. I like that I'm about to hop on a fixy, cycle down one of my most storied streets and go meet a cherished ex in the very neighborhood where we fell in love. I'm sentimental and getting to indulge in my sentiment every minute of the day is delicious.

I love being here but I'm also glad it's relatively brief--I leave in mid-July for 4 months in San Francisco. I need a slow re-introduction to my life here. It was hard to leave and I packed away alot of my love for it/you. I'm kind of wary about staying again because...because it feels like a bloody marriage. I've been married to TO for over 13 years. My whole adult life. And in that time, I'd never left for more than two weeks at a time! For the first time, I left to go have flings with other cities and communities and now Toronto is looking at me asking: So Chanelle, are we going to make this real or what? I'm not saying that you can't go away whenever you want. It's not that. You can have all the freedom you need. I just need know: will you be with me for the long haul? Will I be the one you come home to?

And I don't want to answer because, well I can't commit yet! I'm looking at the life I had--was that gonna be it? Is this what I want from my life? I come back here and I start to do the exact same kinds of things I did before I left. I want to organize saucy anti-racist feminist cultural events, build radical networks and community, have friends over, picnic in the sun, write, theorize, bake, bike, advance the ho and homosexual agenda. Make the world more awesome and less cruel, without going crazy in the process. I have traded dating in for meditation but otherwise, I am the same girl I always was. And guess what? I still have the same question I left with: Is this the life I want?

I don't know if I can settle down again till I can answer that. Or maybe I'll be a terminally indecisive Gemini, return and wake up every godamned morning asking that question until I die. (and that's the problem. Death, I mean. It is my fear of it that sparks all this angst). I'm hoping I get to wake up and know that I'm living the right life. Experimenting with everything in my life has been one good way to explore that question. So is silence and stillness. Speaking of which....time for meditation. Hope to see you Wednesday.

yours,
cg

Off

Hi lovely friends, remember how I was all like "It's great that I'm leaving! I need a new challenge!"
mmm. Yes, well.
Of course immediately after that it became a heartbreaking series of goodbyes, whirlwind race to divest myself of a year and a half of accumulated things and agonizing decisions over where to head next.
Yes, as of last week I hadn't yet decided where to go after San Francisco. SO!
Here's what happened...
1. I'm in San Francisco seeing friends and going to the Sex Work Film Festival
2. I'm flying to NYC on Monday June 8 to spend a few days with Loralee and celebrate my 35th birthday. Yessssss!
3. I'm returning to Toronto for a few minutes!

After Toronto: Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, then back to SF in late July for a road trip with Loralee AND I will be living in SF doing this program. I'm so thrilled and honoured and excited to have been chosen for a program I respect so much.

Ok, borrowing a computer! Late to meet everyone! Love you lots!

xx
cg
p.s. props to Sunny Drake for pointing out that staying in Australia and Sydney in particular simply offers *different* challenges than leaving--the ones related to staying free and flexible when I start to get comfortable, in a familiar place surrounded by folks who know and care about me. Deep.

Leaving Australia

I've been in Australia for nearly a year and in about a month—on June 5, I leave. My next stop is the States but so far I only have about two weeks planned out. Beyond that I’m not sure and I don’t yet know when I’ll be coming to Toronto. I’m pretty sure it will be in 2009 but can’t say exactly when yet until I hear back from a training program I’ve applied to in San Francisco.

The reason I'm leaving Australia and not coming to Canada are the same. Well actually, I have to leave Australia because my visa is expiring but even if it wasn't, I'm ready to go. This country has been very good to me (as it often is for white folks) but I've gotten comfortable and I'm not really challenged anymore.

I've slept on a thousand beds, in truck cabs, cars, buses, planes, trains, floors, vans, backyard tents, grimy hostels, the couch of friends-of-friends', swags, a teepee and a wildly rocking sail boat. I've slept drenched in sweat, freezing in three layers of clothing, with my toes peeking over the end of a nine year old's bed, in a few farmhouses, a luxury resort, under the stars in the middle of the desert, in beachfront bungalows and my most memorable: in the Northern Territory, crammed into a back seat of a hatchback piled on top of my luggage with about a foot of space between my head and roof. I got around.

But the worm turned for me a few weeks ago at the launch for the book Femmes of Power. It was exactly what I'd be doing in Toronto. I mean, as if I wouldn't be at that launch. At the end of the night I had a slightly strained interaction with an acquaintance so I walked over to Pike and my friend Rachel and asked for reassurance "It's okay if not everyone likes me right?". "Of course! But you are liked! blahblahblah" they exclaimed. But something twigged inside. I knew that night that I'd been in Australia too long—I've started worrying what people think of me. And that, my friends, is the end of the fun.

I get all cozy when I’m in community surrounded by folks I’m connected to and share some kind of history with. So despite my efforts to remain on the margins, I slowly recreated major facets of the best parts of my life in Toronto: I made great friends, started to feel connected to the queer community and increasingly involved in community organizing. Oh, I fell in love too.

While that’s all very happy-making, those are not the best conditions for experimenting with life. When I feel comfortable, familiar and connected, there's a strong incentive not to keep taking risks that might result in negative effects on the relationships that have become to so important to me. Essentially, I become complacent, living my life in an everyday way and deepening my friendships instead of growing and challenging myself. I didn't cross the bloody planet to worry about whether Sydney queers will like me. Booooooring! So it's time to go. It's time to be strange and uncomfortable, lonely, liberated, homesick and new again. I want to put myself back on a steep learning curve and I need to create a heap of space so I can focus on a couple of writing projects that are dear to me.

So while I’ve started to get excited about visiting Toronto again, it’s not necessarily the best idea for me right now. It took me months of heartbreak to deal with my homesickness too so I’m not keen to re-open all those wounds when I know I’m not done travelling yet. I will keep you updated though.

OH! Some bizness to attend to!
I will write again later about what I got from Australia but for now, some bizness I need to attend to. First, my friend has been storing a bunch of my stuff in her basement for me but she is selling her house and I need a new storage solution by May 31. Does anyone have space I can use for a heap of boxes? I have been paying a monthly fee and am happy to continue doing so. Alternatively, is anyone willing to volunteer to move my stuff to a new storage space? It's a big favour and I can either pay, barter or thank profusely and bake for anyone who can.

Second: I have a mobile phone that a friend has been using while I've been gone. She no longer wants to keep using it and I could disconnect it and pay out the rest of the contract but it's a very good plan for cheap. Does anyone want to take over my cell? The cost is $45 for unlimited calls anytime day or night within Toronto. With taxes and assorted bullshit, it works out to $61/month. Your only responsibility would be to pay the bills on time and not wreck my credit rating as the phone stays under my name.

Thanks for your love and support peeps.

Peregian Beach, night, piKe.

Tonight was one of those nights that was so lovely that as i pressed my face up against Pike's and looked out at the stormy ocean, I held my breath and thought: what if it's never this good again? What if I reminisce about this night for the rest of my life?

The wind was roaring, the waves were crashing in from all directions always threatening us with spray, the night was lit only by the sky chunky with stars and we were standing there with my friend Hilary who had just arrived from Brisbane. I showed Pike the phosphoressence in the sand, we ran with Hilary's dog alongside the sand dunes and when I was far enough away so that no one could hear me, I sang to the ocean. We did interpretive dance and talked about our plans for when we returned to Toronto. Then we used our cell phones to light the way back through the grove of eucalyptus trees to the townhouse we're staying at in this sleepy little beach town.

I should know by now that it won't all end, that this won't be my last moment of perfect happiness but still, when it comes, I always worry. How could it possibly be any better than this?

Lullabies to Pain: 10 days in meditation jail

P.a.i.n. and the Olympics of Austerity

As I sat in the silence of the meditation hall, starving, in unrelenting pain, bored to tears all I could do was compose this story in my mind, over and over. Everyday I refined it, edited, gave it a new title, added in little jokes. Once I disguised the fact that I'd laughed at one of my own jokes by covering it up with a cough. (I was thinking about the grimacing lady who served me oatmeal and stewed prunes every morning). But then I left the retreat and found it hard to describe what happened. Is it a cliché to say that it feels like I awoke from a dream? It's hard to reconcile how I could have spent most of the retreat in misery but leave in a state of easy contentment. Because, I think, I developed a friendship with pain.

Pain—my beloved, my sister, my friend. Pain—stabbing, shooting, throbbing, tingling, creeping, aching, darting, numbing, pounding. Pain--when we just sit and observe, we see that there are infinite varieties of it but they are all just sensation. With nowhere to go and nothing to distract me, I could only sit and observe the pain wracking my body. I'm used to being in chronic low-grade pain but nothing like this. After sitting for hours upon hours, my neck felt like I was being stabbed with a paring knife, my ass felt like it'd been hit with a 2X4, my knees felt like I'd fallen on concrete and my muscles were locked in a vice-like spasm that spread from my ear down to my upper back. Some of these pains would last day and night, some only appeared when I sat. And hunger. We ate two meals a day—at 6:30am and 11 am. When lunch came at 11 am I'd already have been meditating for five hours. The lotus flowers in the pond weren't even fully open yet.

For eight long days I was in pain from the moment I awoke at 4 am till we collapsed into bed at 9:30pm after having done 10 hours of meditation. I talked to my teacher (the only person we were allowed to talk to) about it. She suggested yoga and explained how to distinguish injurious pain and psychosomatic pain. I carefully rationed out my ibuprofen, I stretched or did yoga at every break, I used massage, hot water bottles, changed my meditation position. Nothing worked. There was no escape.

On one of these miserable days, I was “visited” by a voice. From a sort of dream-like meditation state, I imagined a woman who sat with me, rubbed my back, told me I was going to be okay and kissed my forehead. She was kind, patient and compassionate. She was me. It was the first time I'd ever tended to myself with the kind of tenderness I might extend to a friend or lover in miserable pain.

Mental Menthol
A day or so later, some kind of miracle happened. The technique is to first develop a deep concentration through a focused awareness of breathing. Consider the space between your nose and your upper lip. Now consider that spot for ten effing hours. Then do it--again--the next day. This trains our minds to become sensitive and sharp enough for the second stage—simple observation of the subtlest sensations in the body. By day eight, I could feel the course of every breath, every muscle twinge, I could feel my bones and muscles and eye sockets and hair follicles.

On the afternoon of day eight, my body melted. An incredibly cool air blew right through me and my skin was alive. I was pure vibration. This bright cool tingling sensation began to break up and dissipate my pain. Muscles that had been locked for days sparkled and sang. It was like a fire of frost. And when it subsided, the pain in those areas would have disappeared. It never returned.

Very, verly slowly, new areas of pain began to melt. In what is probably the kindest thing I have ever done for myself, I learned to nurse my pain like an injured friend in the home of my body. I welcomed it explicitly: “Come on in, pain. Rest. Take whatever space you need. You're welcome here for as long as you need. Make yourself at home.” Over the course of an hour or two, the frost/fire would move to different areas, melting everything in it's path.

I was incredibly relieved but tried not to goad it on (“oh god, please move to my neck!”) It was what it was and I had to accept my body's own pace. But still, on day ten, I was out of patience for a stubborn knot of pain in the back of my neck, a knot I've probably had for ten years. I was so tired of sitting with this one. I didn't know what to do with it. In desperation, I began to sing it a lullaby. “Rock a bye baby in the tree top, when the bow breaks...” suddenly it began to sizzle..."the cradle...” and melt “will fall...” and then the pain began to break up and evaporate as the others had.

Not all of it disappeared, but I have befriended my pain. I can't believe how I once resented and rejected it when it just needed some tender attention. Pain, you are so dear to me.

By the end of ten days, about 80% off all the pain in my body had disappeared. After sitting motionless for roughly 100 hours, I returned to Sydney with less pain and more flexibility than when I'd left. Today my yoga teacher commented on how “bendy” my spine is.

From a Vipassana perspective what happened was the healing of old sankharas (“reactions”) or what we might in therapy-speak call “neuroses”. All the old shit I'd never fully healed or processed that had gotten locked in my body was transformed through the simple process of careful, patient, equanimous observation. But before this were the times I silently screaming: “I remain equanimous with this pain! I REMAIN EQUANIMOUS WITH THIS PAIN!!”

Most people experience some physical pain but emotional stuff is more common. Not me! And I love crying! grief! sadness! Bring it on! No luck. I had some Really Deep Thoughts and one really good cry—about politics of all things. On day three or four or five, I was ruminating on the racism of the so-called “trafficking problem” and burst into tears of anger. I had a few moments of sadness during the week but nothing compared to that, which made me feel like a weirdo. I'm supposed to be uncovering ancient traumas and instead I found myself trying to explain racism and sex work politics to my fellow meditators (we were allowed to talk on the last afternoon).

Despite being in the Olympics of Austerity (no talking, reading, exercising, music, art-making, writing, snax) I felt free. Freedom from avoidance, from habit, fear, craving, hatreds, denial. As Pema said “No escape, no problem.”

Sailing, it turns out, is kinda hard
Then I came home for a minute before leaving for a friend's birthday celebration in Brisbane which turned into an impromptu week-long sailing trip involving snorkelling, gruesome seasickness, getting rescued by the coast guard from 5 metre waves, living in a space the size of a bathroom with 4 people, intense beauty, shipwreck photoshoots and breakdance lessons on the beach under the moonlight. It was full on. So yeah, i'm feelin' pretty full up on adventure right now. I've been traveling for 14 months and spent about 10 days out of the last 6 weeks at my home in Sydney. I'm back home, and writing this from my kitchen table in a squat where I'm staying with an international crew of such fucking great folks and I desperately don't want to leave the house. But...it looks like i'm leaving Monday for a desert road trip. I've got one year here--I'm going for it.

Up next is a “Unpacking white privilege in queer communities” workshop I'm running in response to some of the gross racism I've witnessed in the queer community here and the big Sydney Mardi Gras celebrations. I'll be facilitating the workshop with Pike who—excitement!!--arrives at the end of February.

Much love...Goodnight all...

Shh

Just a quick note...tomorrow morning I fly to Sydney, take a train for 2 hours to Blackheath and then...stop talking. I'll be doing my first 10 day silent Vipassana meditation retreat. I'm excited and nervous. Yesterday during my meditation, I got really antsy, desperate to move and jump. This almost never happens and it made me panic a bit. What if it kills me to sit there ALL DAY? But that's the point. It will be uncomfortable. Rise at 4 am. No food past 12 noon. Bed at 9 pm. In the meantime: stare into my mind. What's there?! I can't wait to find out!

And some backstory on the past 2 weeks: xmas in rural Queensland with Lenine n' Fam, watching The Castle as part of my the "understanding australia" series (and so I can finally get the jokes), learning to dive under waves, rip heads off a prawn, read a "rip" in the ocean. NYE in rural New South Wales with 4000 queers...fireworks, cabaret, friends under the stars, slow dance parties, hugs, tears, amazing performances by my own friends (the best kind evah). more later.

love,
cg