• Web of Life

    • April 30, 2010 9:17 am

    Dearest Readers,

    It means so much to me that this blog is being read and that it is inspiring people. The more I embrace the world of social media the more I feel that Great Connection between us all.

    It’s amazing what the Internet has done to change our relationship to one another. As disconnected, disparate and distanced human beings all alone on our little islands we are now sharing instantly our common bond via the Web.

    Each morning, before I post, I check out the blogs that are on my Reader’s List. Each morning I check Leanne Coppen’s blog Living with Breast Cancer. In yesterday’s Inspiring Works post I told you that Leanne died. But today I still went to check her blog. I couldn’t not. It’s a ritual I’m not ready to let go of just yet.

    What I found there amazes me. Comment after comment from Leanne’s readers expressing sympathy, condolences, grief, joy, rage, gratitude and love. How many of us were brought together in this virtual community of compassion? Has there ever been anything in history that has connected people so immediately and with such depth as the World Wide Web?

    Back in the late ’90s there was a great pop song and music video by Jamiroquai called Virtual Insanity. It’s a very catchy tune and really fun to dance to. The video was super innovative at the time. The lyrics are all about the total craziness that technology generates and how much of what we’ve invented is “not Nature’s Way.”

    But for all the insanity that new technology breeds it also creates this unbelievable unity among us. We are truly a global community today because of blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the like. We may be taking it too far sometimes (I just read a great piece in The New Yorker about a guy who walks down the aisle, kisses his bride and later goes down on her in the honeymoon suite Tweeting all the while) we are also benefiting from its broad reach.

    A couple of readers sent me messages yesterday thanking me for this blog, for sharing my life, letting me know my words “echo far and wide”. This means more to me than I can say. Not because I’m being read by lots of people, though that does make me happy, but because I am a part of this marvelous web of strangers coming together as friends.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: Despite the grief we feel, the losses we must bear, the seeming unfairness of certain circumstances, there is a Great Connection of which we are all a part. I can feel that Connection both here, in this virtual world, and here, in the centre of my heart.

    Good-bye But Not Gone

    • April 29, 2010 9:41 am

    Dearest Readers,

    Yesterday I received a message announcing that my friend, Leanne Coppen, has died. She was living with cancer and fighting it with every cell in her body. Her blog, Living with Breast Cancer, often stood in for the Inspiring Message of the Day on this blog. She was full of hope and irreverent humour and inspired many, many people with her words.

    Leanne and I went to high school together. At 16, Leanne could best be described as a hippie love chick. She had long hair, wore baggy sweaters and long pendants and her wrists and fingers were covered in bracelets and rings. She liked to smoke dope and talk about peace and love and so did I. We were good friends.

    Leanne and I had many conversations about what we perceived as the f’d up state of the world and how Peace and Love were the only solutions possible. Once, we got into a deep discussion about currency. Why were there different currencies, we wondered? It’s One Planet, One People. There should be One Global Currency, we decided. “A dollar is a dollar,” we reasoned.

    This became a mantra for all that we believed: A dollar is a dollar!

    Leanne and I got our first tattoo together. She got a Sun on her lower abdomen and I just couldn’t decide what to get. We sat in the tattoo parlour poring over pictures. She asked me questions, trying to help me figure out what I was looking for. I saw one of her pendants, hanging on a long chain from her neck. It was a Peace Dove. “That’s it,” I said. “This?” she asked, holding it up. We then held each others’ hands through the pain of the tattoo needle.

    Today, that Peace Dove, faded now, 22 years old, feels like Leanne on my shoulder.

    One other memory stands out among many. I arrived at a party where Leanne was already waiting with a male friend of hers I had not met before. Upon my arrival, he looked at Leanne and said, “Yup.” Later, when he was out of the room she said, “Before you got here I was telling him about you. He asked if you were pretty or beautiful. I said, “Beautiful.” That’s what his ‘yup’ was in response to.”

    Leanne, who was stunningly gorgeous and whose beauty both made me jealous and inspired me, thought I was beautiful! This was a defining moment in the Celia McBride self-esteem books, lemme tellya.

    Once, my beloved friend Eden, who was and still is Leanne’s best friend, said, in the typical stoner language of the day (well, we were stoned a lot of the time!), “Where did Celia man go?” Forever after I was Celia Mango to Leanne and Eden.

    Last fall, Leanne and I re-connected. We had stayed in touch over the years and had seen each other probably every five years or so and it had been about that since the last time we’d got together. I emailed her to see if we could have a visit because I would be in Toronto. She emailed me back. “Celia Mango! How completely fantastic to hear from you!”

    How I cherish those words now.

    Leanne, you still feel really present. I’ve been talking with you since yesterday. Remembering, sharing, celebrating your life. Leanne, dearest, you introduced me to Goethe and you wrote as deeply as he did. Your words will be remembered, monuments will be erected in your name. Your legacy has only just begun. Believe it.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: O Death. You take the body but not the Life. Sadness, grief, loss. All real, all necessary. But beyond those feelings is the Everlasting Spirit, the Indweller of all Beings, the Great Reality: Peace and Love. Therein lies our comfort.

    Walk Through This

    • April 14, 2010 9:46 am

    Dearest Readers,

    As some of you know, my friend Leanne is fighting for her life right now, battling Stage 4 breast cancer that has moved into her lungs and is not responding to traditional treatments.

    Her blog, Living with Breast Cancer, is worth following not only for its inspiring message but for Leanne’s irreverent humour and acerbic wit.

    Below is a link to an orientation video from the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation about the “Weekend To End Women’s Cancers”, which Leanne participated in last year. She comes in around the 6-minute mark looking gorgeous in a black floppy hat.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ej5SRg5j0o

    Top Ten Morning

    • March 10, 2010 10:11 am

    Dearest Readers,

    I’ve only been awake for two hours but here are ten things that have already inspired my day:

    1. Watching someone walk through her fear by getting up in front of a group of strangers to give a speech for the first time.

    2. Hearing a man say he has never in his life known what it means to be obsessed with something.

    3. Feeling the cold, fresh air of a -10C morning.

    4. Realizing that it is now light out at 8 a.m.

    5. Feeling the deep stretch of my spine in Sarvangasana — Shoulder Stand.

    6. Reading my friend Leanne’s blog: Living with Breast Cancer.

    7. Watching the sun peek over the mountains and head into the sky.

    8. Petting the soft and silky fur of the little monkey cat I live with.

    9. Having a brief conversation about the unity and community created by Canada’s Olympics and being reminded of what a thrill it was to be a part of it.

    10. Breakfast.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: I will name ten things that have already inspired me so far today. I will do this to remind myself how amazing life is and how rich it is to be awake and alive.

    Crash the Pity Party

    • January 16, 2010 7:44 am

    Dearest Readers,

    My world has become very small in the last week because I’ve been in a recording studio every day co-producing an anthem for the Big O project. I’ve heard clips of news from the outside world but have not been really engaged in what’s happening.

    I knew there’d been an earthquake in Haiti but it took reading my friend Leanne Coppen’s Living with Breast Cancer blog to actually Google and follow the story.

    So I just learned that 3 million out of Haiti’s 10 million people are right now without access to basic amenities like food, water, shelter and electricity. Three million. That’s about the size of Toronto proper. Can you imagine that entire city’s core in such a state?

    How can I, on the other side of the world, living my tiny little life, doing my great big art project, respond to this in any kind of meaningful way?

    Ignoring it is one reaction. “Oh, I can’t do anything about it so, oh well.”

    Guilt is another. “Well, I can feel bad for what I have, at least.”

    I can send money. “It’s the least I can do.”

    Or I can practice gratitude and rejoice in my life today. I’m alive. I get to live another day. I can take that in, deeply, and not take it for granted like I do most days. I can turn today into the fullest possible celebration of living by being thankful.

    If you read Leanne’s post you’ll see that she has found a way to be grateful in the face of devastating circumstances. She crashes her own pity party by looking at what she has, not what she has not. This is the most inspiring message of all, anytime, anywhere.

    Leanne’s post reminded me that I have to count my blessings. When my life becomes so insular that all I’m thinking about is my stuff, I can’t see the forest for the trees. I’ve become self-centred. I am blind to all that I have been given and I often focus on what’s wrong rather that what is right.

    I need to be reminded pretty much constantly to remove myself from the centre of the Universe, to step back and look at the whole picture, and remember that I am a part of the whole but not the whole part.

    It’s pretty easy to practice gratitude when I’ve got my basic amenities covered and I don’t have stage four breast cancer. What about when the quake/cancer hits, when the rubble/chemo buries everything? When we are stripped of all that we hold dear? For what then can we be thankful? Leanne reminds us that it’s still possible to find something and rejoice in it.

    Rough count of blessings? About 3 million.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: My way of giving back is to be grateful. To enjoy this day and live it, fully, as thought it were my last.