Daniela Ginta, Freelance Writer

Gratitude makes the journey better and so does kindness

Month: January 2015

Of Growing Boys, and Tears, And Stories, and Soft Grey Caterpillars

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On January 29, 2015

In Learning, Life Stories, Motherhood

Striving‘I cannot do it!’ Little boy says it loud and though no tears come into his eyes, I could hear them stomp behind the words. Loudly; tears.

It is about a game. Cute, old-fashioned design, itty bitty characters that look like baby crocodiles… Yes, sigh, the one Nintendo game little boy gets to play is wrapping him up in frustration like a cocoon.

What a long day the day had been. School in the morning, a laughter-all-around Lego building time with a friend who came for a visit, plus a whole lot of playing outside with big brother in and around a melting igloo… And so much more, all that a child’s world brings for him to see, smell, fear, dare through, be silly about, be serious about, be there every minute of a day so long and rich.

‘I cannot do it!’ He says it again. Loud, frustrated, chin trembling.

The mom that I am wants to say ‘You can do it’ but how is that not patronizing when a kid is frustrated to sky and back. Games like that are not easy, I am told. Like many things in life, there are levels. You learn, you persist, you get to the next. But when you only have one hour and fifteen minutes three times a week to make it happen… a battle ensues, I am also told.

Here is the things though: When the world tells so often of things you can get just like that – yes, instant gratification is an occurrence that creates false realities whether we want it or not in our children –  what to make then of the occasional hurdle? Electronic game or not, frustration caused by inability to do what you want to do, what you expected to be able to do so easily, or somehow hoped that invisible arms will make it happen for you… how to then?

‘I cannot do it!’ If you’re a little boy, and tired, you say it again and again. And big brother looks into your big round sad eyes and says ‘I can help you.’

Mom (that’s me) says ‘That is not help, but cheating.’ Two boys, four eyes, big and bright and wondering… But to help, Mama, just this time, I can help him… Big brother melts, understands and insists. To help is to tell him he can do it, I tell him.

“But I cannot!’ Feet stomping, big pouty face. Hug? Yes and no wrestle on his face. ‘I can’t.’

Yes, you can one step at a time… ‘No, I cannot!’ Tears. Sadness. A thought strikes true. I turn to my screen and type ‘inspirational man with no arms and no legs’. Just like that. I had heard about him but never really searched properly; there are only that many hours in a day. Today has more.

The two boys and their four big eyes watched and listened, and I did too, peeking at their faces and wondering about it all. You can search and see. Nick Vujicic is his name and he will inspire you.

He talks about frustration, about failing again and again and not giving up, he talks about taking steps – one at a time, to reach your destination. He talks about falling down and getting up, and how it never ends until it ends… He would know.

Two boys with bright big eyes looked at me and asked ‘how could he do all of that?’ knowing the only answer there is. Because he did not give up; because he chose to see the gifts that he had, rather than cry about the ones he did not have.

Sighs, smiles, crooked and sweet, no more tears.

‘Mom?… I can try again.’ Yes indeed. Thank you. I was grateful for help. All settled and peaceful, the evening rolled along like a big, grey and soft caterpillar, smiling at us… until. Until it all went black again, and a crow of hungry ‘Can I please have help just this time?’ swooped down and scattered the caterpillar’s fluff all over. ‘I cannot’ returned for one last flight through the house.

No, I will not, could not, should not. Allow for that kind of help.

That’d be like falling back twenty steps after you’ve advanced ten I tell them. They stop and listen. ‘But not every time,’ they plead, ‘just this time.’ I trade hugs and stories for half-smiles and listening ears. No is a must.

I am not cruel, but loving this. What a good chance. Sit down then. Boys listen to stories of little kids crying because they could not draw like their older siblings could; getting help when help meant locking them in a box that said ‘I cannot by myself…’ and how love should be fair, and encouraging and never ever indulging in ways that cripple. I tell stories of people lost, people who loved ones help by saying no. It turns serious but they listen.

Faces lit with smiles. Yes, they get it. Yes, they feel loved when a no is lovingly said, and fair and encouraging, and I do too. I thank the man who gave us a push today over the hurdle.

No arms, no legs, no worries, he says. How could one do it like that? By not giving up, by getting up again when falling, by reminding yourself of the brightness of the day when the night threatens with too much darkness… using the light of the day to brighten the night ahead. Belief.

The night caterpillar returns fluffy and grey and sleepy. Grateful. We snuggle on the couch reading stories of mice with big ears and big courageous hearts and then we snuggle some more. Bedtime, hugs, ‘your special kisses, mom, and then I’ll give you mine…’ A nightly ritual that brings sparkles from many days of love and brightness into all the nights that threaten to be too dark. Not now, not yet, not ever?…

Goodnight, sleep tight, wake up bright… Two boys with bright eyes and big smiles learned a lot today, I did too; they’ve grown so much and so have I. More tomorrow, again and again… one step, two steps, can never take two at the same time. Just as long as you know where you’re going… When you forget, I’ll remind you both. Of a day, of tears, of smiles, of a day so bright and a night so soft… Goodnight…

It’s a Together Thing – A Kamloops Story

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On January 27, 2015

In Armchair Mayor Column, Kamloops, Life Stories, Social issues

(Initially published as a column in the AM News on January 24, 2015)

I saw her talking to someone in a parked car as I was walking towards mine. Then she wobbled her way towards my car. I was already in when I noticed she was standing by the passenger’s window.  I rolled it down.

At first I could not understand what she was saying. She had no teeth and her words were coming out mangled. She must’ve been 65 or so, maybe older.

‘Can you drive me to the Crossroads please? I will give you ten dollars.’

I bought a few seconds of thinking with a somewhat troubled smile, but realized soon enough that I could not say no. I just couldn’t. And I did not want to take her money either.

I said I will. She smiled and climbed in. Slipping on ice made her movements rather awkward. She had an almost empty bottle in one hand and was clutching an old purse with the other. She smelled of booze; that answered the question about the empty bottle. She poured the rest out.

The side of the road was icy and the car slipped a few times. I felt the woman’s gaze on me as I was trying a few maneuvers.

‘We can do it, me and you. Try again. Put it in reverse.’ Her voice was encouraging and the words were coming out less fragmented.

We got unstuck and drove away.

‘You’re a good driver,’ she said full of admiration. Right. If only. I laughed and said thank you. I felt a bit uneasy as we all do when something unusual happens, but I knew this was more than driving someone a few blocks through the downtown.

I turned right and drove into the heart of the downtown. The sun made the ice glitter and it looked pretty. I thought of how many people in this very city will not see that or hate it altogether for that is what you do when it’s cold and all that means warmth has been peeled off of your existence.

‘My name is Joanne. What is yours?’

I said my name and she repeated it slowly.

‘Are you named after your mother?’

I said no, my parents just liked the name. For a couple of seconds my mind flew towards one of the many times I asked my mom why she named me Daniela. She would always smile, her own thoughts carrying her to the time when I was born. There was always another story of my early childhood tucked in with the answer. Slices of life that help us understand.

I asked Joanne where was she from. Nova Scotia, she said. ‘I have nine sisters, but I don’t talk to them on the phone.’ I thought of her as a little girl, playing with her sisters and dreaming of growing up and… The contrast with today’s wrinkled face smelling of booze was sad.

What is life? How does it turn its ugly face and ghoul eyes at some of us… Life becomes a beached whale, abandoned on a beach that holds too much garbage, it just does and we often have no answers. It stinks.

Life can flip from gracious to ungracious in a few moments, and the witnesses to the ungracious disappear like scared birds. Ungracious scares us.

Joanne asked if I know where Crossroads is. I do, I answered. It’s the building that used to be an inn and now it is managed by ASK Wellness who made it into a shelter for the homeless. Fragmented life putters around the building at any given time. It’s a place of hope and despair at once.

Joanne repeated my name one more time, quietly, as if to memorize it.

‘Are you mad at me?’ she asked out of the blue. No, I said. Why would I? I hoped no one would be. Then again, being human makes us prone to emotions of all kinds and a person on the edge of life wearing all the paraphernalia of failure often serves like a mirror we’re never ready to stare in.

‘I like your name, it’s beautiful,’ she said as we parked in front of the building. Someone was sleeping on the sidewalk, lost in an old bright green sleeping bag.

Joanne opened the door, stumbled out with the empty bottle in one hand and the purse in the other. She bowed with a big smile and said thank you, leaving me with my thoughts. Sad and bittersweet, grateful that I was given an opportunity to remember that life is not a high note but a repertoire of many, some so low they growl at you, others so high they hurt your thoughts.

Balance and grace. How do we? How do we mask the failure, how do we fall and how do we get up? It matters to have someone to love you, it matters to be truthful to yourself and know that you can do more than humanely possible; you need a hand to help you up sometimes, hugs to remind of warmth and you need to be loved.

What happened to Joanne? Her journey from Nova Scotia to here and to today, what happened along the way?

Compassion starts with looking into someone’s eyes without judgment. It’s the hardest thing. We all carry stories, we carry our own mountains and valleys we crossed since we can remember, we carry guilt and heartache and all the hope one can muster when hope is a flotilla of broken vessels, most submerged… Can you still do it?

Is there an end to hope? I guess hope is like a torch. Some people carry it with them for as long as they can, and then they attempt to pass it on. It’s up to those who are still standing and have strength to take it and carry it forward. To use it to light a fire that will help warm those who are cold, and cook food if they need it.

It’s a together thing. The hope, making the journeys smother for those who have it rough. No one can do it alone. When we can, as much as we can. Never turn your eyes away when another pair of eyes is trying to find yours. You are the lucky one. You are giving hope and are, in turn, given the gift of humbleness.

Like Joanne said… ‘We can do it. Me and you…’

Children Need To Take It Outside (and Us Too)

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On January 22, 2015

In Armchair Mayor Column, Environment, Kamloops, Learning, Life Stories, Motherhood

(Originally published as a column in the AM News on January 16, 2015) 

The good thing about sleeping in an igloo is that when you get up you’re already dressed for the day. In our case, that helped even more since we slept in and woke up at 8am and school was to start half an hour later. We made it though.

Lunches had been packed the night before, so with simple breakfast and a quick fixing of the igloo morning hair, we were on the go soon after, pondering contently over our sleeping in and under the snow.

My youngest wanted to see that happen two years ago when we built the first igloo in the back yard. Back then, we had hot chocolate one night under the snow magic cupola with candles on and that was good, but not enough. We postponed the sleeping in the igloo until it got too late and the said construction was used for impromptu sledding and one-of-a-kind games. Fun but not enough.

Last year’s winter had too little snow to build an igloo, but that changed radically this year with the arrival of truckloads of snow that fell as we made our way into the new year. The igloo had to happen and it did.

A few days later and still in time before any flurries or, God forbid, rain, we decided to make it happen. So we waddled our way in the way penguins do, on our tummies, wiggling all the way in, and became privy to a night sleep like no other.

Yes, the floor did get a bit icy in the meantime, hence less soft than that of a newly built igloo, but many wool blankets and good sleeping bags helped us through. We had a couple of additional breathing holes – no such thing in the arctic where the outside temperatures are less lenient than here – and with all the snuggling in the world, the four of us drifted off to sleep. Hats on, of course.

Stepping outside of one’s comfort zone is always a journey of discovery. Around the dinner table or during other times too, we often talk about the ways of the past. We read about the way people used to live (some still do) and the contrast with today’s comfortable lifestyle bursting at the seams with needed and less needed, or plain useless amenities is truly shocking.

With the everyday journey through life here and now, we want the boys to be mindful of the world around them not in an entitled way, but in a grateful and awe-inspired one. We want them to see the nature not as a medium they have to conquer, dominate and tame so that they are safe, but as an environment that offers protection and enables life by the sheer design of it, and is worth of respect. Moreover, children should be guided by us adults, in harbouring respect for the past and the people of the old who lived in nature, with nature and with knowing that they cannot ruin it, lest their lives will be ruined as well.

We have nowadays apps telling us how whether we are walking fast enough, whether we are sleeping enough and they guide us through the process of buying and cooking our food. We have books and instructions and workshops for everything, and somehow over the course of many generations, we have learned that being inside the walls and having access to a lot keeps us safe and happy. We have become contained.

Comfortable homes and decent living conditions are a great gift of today’s world- albeit not for everyone on the planet unfortunately. Trouble is, if it is not intertwined with reverence towards the living world that is the ultimate and primordial provider of building blocks that allow us to make it happen, we fall, and our children follow swiftly, into the trap of believing we are the masters of it all.

Connecting with nature in ways that allow for contemplation and awe help us trace our steps back and in turn, we help our children understand which way they should go if they want to make the world last. We have to achieve respect for nature, and no, it is not optional, not if we mean for our children to have a planet to live on. Respect and gratitude for life are big yet easy to ignore concepts.

You do not have to be a dedicated environmentalist to realize that our natural world is out of balance, nor do you have to be a parent to think and worry of what lies ahead for today’s children and for all of us who will still be around for a few good decades.

Simplifying our lifestyle short or long term by taking ourselves out of the comfort cradle we have become so accustomed to, helps us revive concepts and instincts that are not gone but merely asleep. Putting ourselves in situations that deprive us of the usual comfort may just be the catalyst for that. Sleeping in the igloo was not the most comfortable in some ways, but it was a revealing experience in all ways.

With no new year resolutions in place still, and through waking up in the middle of the sleeping outside night with the feel of fresh cold air stuck to my face, I realized that I should just stick to the one resolution I try to make every day and often forget, but get reminded of through something like igloo sleeping: to be grateful for the simple things within reach that I need to survive, and immensely grateful for everything else on top of it.

Sunny Sides Up – An Update

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On January 15, 2015

In Environment, Kamloops, Learning, Life Stories

This is all, folks!It was just one magpie to start with. When you’re used to mice running around (in your living room, that is) a magpie is a festival of beauty. In black and white, of course. It would sit in the majestic, wide-crowned have-yet-to-identify tree in the front yard, wobbling front and back but regaining balance thanks to the long black tail. Everything has a purpose, I do believe that.

We left the mouse manor behind on the last day of December and settled in yet another house on the hill, mouse-free (so far) and bright as can be. Plumbing woes were also left behind as our new home has a brand new bathroom, which to no toilet/laundry/shower hardcore dwellers like us is a well-deserved relief. Not an ounce of bitterness, but gratitude still, after the long month of all the above mentioned deprivations. A game changer as they say.

My desk is still by a large window; no view of the winding steel colour water or of the ‘moving dots’ on the occasionally sun-drenched north shore – that is how we referred to the dogs we would spot from our previous house. The imagery was fascinating and even more so, the reality of not being able to spot more than a dot, in case of the smaller dogs. Size humour can brighten one’s day, regardless of circumstances; it sure brightened mine during the days of mice galore and bubbling toilets.

Nowadays it is the magpie that catches my eyes. A second one came by two days ago and today I counted six. The tree is becoming popular. I also noticed a blue jay and a bird I could not name until I did what every able body who owns a computer does. Yep, Google. It was a northern flicker, a type of woodpecker. A lover of wildlife I am, but birdwatching has never caught my interest to this degree. A wide window and a few curious magpies, plus their sudden interest in a particular patch of snow in the front yard can do that.

So a new chapter begins. New house, brightness, views of snow-enveloped Kenna Cartwright hills and the mountains stretching far into the north, birds with beady eyes and curious behaviour, the next door grandpa walking his pug and waving as he notices me at my desk, a new road is contouring as I write this.

If you add some good sledding in the front yard, a newly built igloo in the back and a return to our evening walks with the boys, plus a good supply of new birds to look at (a small ‘what-could-it-be?’ just landed in the tree) we are about to get busy.

The magpie is back, smug as can be in the big tree as a whole bunch of unidentified small birds crowd the top of a much smaller tree across the street. Inequality reigns supreme in nature.

Today might be the day when I’ll coax the boys into creating some bird feeders for the many feathered guests, and even a bird house or two down the road. That might just erase the somewhat bad memory of the two bird houses we built a while ago that served no bird, but instead became wasp nests. Yes, we do seem to have a thing for pests. Or rather they do for us. No one said nature’s ways are easy to understand; they are sure fascinating though.

 

Things I’ve Learned In The Year We Bid Goodbye To

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On January 4, 2015

In Armchair Mayor Column, Kamloops, Learning, Life Stories, Self-improvement

(Originally published as a column on December 26th, 2014 in the AM News)

It’s always a good thing, to draw the line and sum it all up; good and bad, all that was thrown our way to learn from.

You’re never done learning, that much I know and there is a subtle irony that hides behind every ‘I know enough’ that comes out of hiding as soon as you utter the very words. Some sort of a divine punishment if you will, an extra measure of humbling which we all benefit from.

December came to us with the said measure and more, as the main drain pipe in our house broke open and thus created a different kind of hot springs right in our basement. Not only that, the entire mouse population seemed to take shelter from the cold weather right in the house.

We sailed through some challenging weeks of no toilet close by, no shower or laundry on the premises with as much dignity as we could muster. Mouse traps kept on doing their thing while we pondered upon the simple things that were out of each at that time, such as a running toilet need. Too easy to forget and too unfair to do so, given the continual reliance on it.

As the month ended we took off to the coast to spend Christmas with family and friends, not before stopping for a few days on one of the Southern Gulf islands where we left time at the ferry terminal and all we took with us to the small cabin tucked in the woods was a collection of snuggles and lazy mornings to use as we saw fit.

It reminded me of what’s truly precious: time with our loved ones. It’s easy to forget, because life tumbles fast over our heads and spins thoughts into a mound of worries and milestones and things to do that becomes hard to manage and a time thief of its own kind that prevents us from noticing simple joy.

I was reminded of this most precious gift of time and love as my father passed away this summer, after a long suffering that lasted eight years. Memories of my parents – both passed away now – abounded in the last months and pushed me more towards witnessing my own boys’ journey through life, not letting a day go by without acknowledging the wonder of it all.

My oldest is saying goodbye to childhood and entering teenagehood. There is much to see and know about the world for him, and as for me, this is yet another opportunity to witness all of that alongside him and his younger brother, who is becoming an older child.

I was there for all the steps that take a child from reading out letter after letter to reading sentences and then books. It still charms me to see him curled on the sofa with a book much bigger for his hands to hold but not big enough for his mind to open up to…

We discuss matters of large worldly importance and the oscillation between acting all grown up and still clinging to being a young child is not in the least annoying though it is puzzling. I’ve learned to see all of that with a mind that understands the inexorability of time.

If I can think of one think that this year has taught me that would be that it all goes away in a blink. That time and the consequences of our actions, in how we spend our time, in how we earn and spend our money, in how we give and receive – everything from love to time to a listening ear when needed, it all happens in a blink.

This year I’ve learned to never take things or people for granted. You could say I added it to my previous belief that I shouldn’t. But life has it in such a way that we forget.

Nothing is as permanent as we want it to be. Nothing stays the same, but evolves, and often not in ways that are predictable or that fit with our plans. Life doesn’t wait, and if you’ve come to see it once, you may forget but you will be easier reminded of it all once you stop for a moment to observe life’s tumbles.

May that we all do in the year to come, may that we all come to know that what matters is what we have the least of nowadays, and that is time with those who fill our hearts with joy, and a world that we can breathe and exist without fear of skies darkened by our own reckless actions.

May we be aware that we will have, once again, 365 chances to make it count, and we have the power to choose to make it so. Happy New Year!

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