Lisa Tilson

It has been a great week and I am feeling pretty fired up. On the top of the list is that I get to teach some yoga! For the next four weeks I will be subbing Rai Kaur’s Class for her every wednesday night, starting tonight. It has been a long time since I’ve taught, I can’t wait to see what lessons sitting in the Golden Chain will teach me this time. I feel like my connection to the teachings has become more subtle. I don’t feel called to prepare a lecture like I used to, I feel more interested in seeing the teachings speak for themselves through the yoga.

Next, it looks like I have a chance to be part of the happyfrog blog team attending the Green Living Show at BC Place this weekend thanks to my friend Daveo. (With the bonus of a free ticket!) I guess that is why I passed it by in the dozen promotional emails I recieved this week urging me to go buy tix. Hopefully my work hours will allow me to get a bit of play time in for this show. It would be great to get a bit of experience and exposure in such an inspiring atmosphere.

Then, (!) Isabelle called from Granville magazine to see if she could interview Justin and I for her urban agriculture article. This is exciting for us, because we get to do it as a couple (if we can find the time!) Last time I spoke with her, she interviewed me for a local food piece she was doing for an American magazine (which is being released in March by the way). Being the sole interviewee gave me a chance to develop my own voice on the subject of local food and low impact living, as it is normally Justin who articulates a lot of the concepts. This time, as a couple again, we will be able to give a more balanced idea of what happends in our garden. Yay growth!

Finally, I hope to start working on my podcast again in the near future. The technical issues from last time appear to be resolved (although a new, exciting and huge release from Wordpress could put a damper on my widgets…) and I am ready to try again, time permitting - afterall it is about time to start seeds indoors.

That’s about it for my update, ideally this month will bring more frequent posts!

Blessings,

L.

I spent most of today outside of my box expanding my horizons. I went to my first web conference (my first anything conference) called Northern Voice 2008.  There, I learned things about blogging and social media on the Internet that I don’t entirely understand the basics for. I went alone (which means I had to make friends with people I wouldn’t normally get the chance to be around and thus have a really hard time relating to with such a basic technical awareness!).  Next, then I came home to update my blog software, only to find myself learning command line, of all things! I will talk more about command line in another post as it is its own little box.

Northern Voice is a conference about the voices of the web, blogging - live, video, micro and otherwise, pod-casting (weee!), social media, wiki, tagging, stats etc. Today’s schedule had two streams: either spend time in the 101 section learning about each type of media or attend the random sessions of interest pertaining to the media. Myself, having never had formal instruction in any of the above, decided that it would be best to establish the basics. Wrong. The basics meant: why should you blog? what is a podcast, what is a wiki? was therefore, believe it or not, below my skill set! So, I hit up the instructors for pod-casting tutelage on the lunch break and learned how to fix my broken podcast, which now works but is incredibly slow to upload due to the formatting of the file (I believe). Tomorrow I will learn about how to make that more efficient. To be honest, if the only thing I come away from this conference knowing is how to get my podcast up on my site, I will be more than happy. My one suggestion would be that they have 200 level courses for those who want to develop basic skills in the function of their media of choice and consequently make the sessions longer.

Tomorrow there is a whole gamut of things on the NV08 schedule, I am mostly interested in the future of social media (for Yoga West) and getting published (book to blog or blog to book). Then I have a choice, I can stay for the afternoon events, or I can go to the library to participate in a workshop on fantasy writing called “Possible Worlds”. Since I will have enough to run with on the blogging front I think it will be time for a break for computers - writing workshop it is then.

I am going to go and rest my brain, here’s to renewed zeal for the blogosphere!

L.

There are two topics in this world about which I am very passionate: women’s studies and the environment. There are several others that are important, but none other topics on which I have a difficult time articulating myself. Today I realized the difference between the “raging feminist / environmentalist” one who is not raging. One may liken the two to a poor writer and a good writer. They may both have the same passion on the subject, and be equally as intelligent and knowledgeable of the topic, however one has the vocabulary and the space to express themselves, where the other has not yet found how exactly to do so. The raging feminist or environmentalist are passionate and knowledgeable, but cannot express themselves, where the non raging types seem to have no problem.

Rage and passion. I believe the rage develops after the passion begins to develop, and continues to do so until one has a way to articulate their views on the topic so that one, they feel that they have expressed their views and two that their point has been heard. This evening I became a raging environmentalist at a meeting between the community gardeners in Vancouver and the City of Vancouver representatives. Though upon first examining my behaviour one might think that I am an insolent woman who can’t keep her mouth shut, looking deeper one sees that I am somewhere between passion and being able to express my passion, ie: raging. I became stupified by the amount of information my mouth wanted to say, the amount of time in which I had to say it, and the words that would not come so that I may have articulated myself intelligently. I could even see it happening and I could not control it. I could not make what I was thinking come out in a way that didn’t sound angry.

I never realized the extent to which passion and rage were intertwined, and that rage is actually a positive thing (being a clear representation of just how much one cares about their topic). Clearly though, it is not appropriate in most situations to become angry at someone or a group of people in regards to the topic if one wants any results. So just how to move from that state of rage to the ability to transmit information in an effective and inspiring manner? I conferred with a friend, we shall call her TT, after the meeting to reflect on my somewhat erratic behaviour and she helped me see that perhaps I had lost sight of what I actually liked about the environment, and that I needed to look at both, my love and passion, and what angered me. I felt immediately clearer (the blood flowed from my hind brain back into my fore brain) and I realized how silly I had been. How could I have lost touch of what I loved, only to focus on what I hated? No one wants to lose the battle for the thing they love, and its interesting that the thing I loved had been (temporarily) lost to me as I only focused on the negative.

Maybe writing these blog posts will be less challenging now that I know not to begin by trying to experess my rage? There is still the question of articulation and vocabulary, so we will see.

I have been rather vague lately about the course my life has taken in the past weeks. I have hinted at a large movement in another direction of my life but have not revealed any details due to the volatile nature of posting something this huge on my blog where my mother, who was at the time unaware of said movement, could find it and thus learn about it without me talking to her. I felt that this might be a touch disrespectful, and so I kept it to myself, hinting vaguely so that I didn’t go crazy (not that I can’t keep a secret).

I have now informed my mom of said movment and am ready to come clean. We have decided to move. Not just, “we have decided to find another appartment in another community in this fair city of Vancouver”, but we have decided to move, in the “Martha, grab your teeth we’re moving to the country” sort of move. Justin and I have recently invested in an SUV… soon to be powered on veggie oil so as not to polute the environment any further. and have been for quite some time now eye-balling a morsel of property in Lillooet, “BCs little nugget” Mhmmm. There I said it. We will be viewing the propery in less than two weeks, and I will keep you posted.

Every once in a while I get into what have come to call, the vaccum space.  Its a period of time where I have a hard time keeping my head on, I become spacey, I have a hard time having conversations with people, I get nothing done and on top of it all it seems that time is being sucked into a vaccum. I am currently in that space. ARgh… damn the phone… Okay so today, after pondering, I think I have figured out what happens to land me in such a deschevled state.

1. I am really busy with something.  This time normally happeneds after school ends, after I spend a lot of weekends in a row doing things that are energy consuming (canning, extreem gardening, family stuff, Christmas)
2. Due to my predominant Hera characteristics, I forget about myself for too long (see explination below)
3. Everything suddenly goes back to normal.  Justin goes back to work, I’m at home with a huge pile of laundry and often a dirty kitchen.
4. The suddeness of normal leaves me with nothing, and I realize that I haven’t felt myself in a long time.
5. After a couple of days of doing nothing and wandering around in my house coat, I realize that I need a nap and I sleep for 1-4 hours.
6. I am able to feel myself and start doing what I do again.

The Greek Goddess Hera:  Today I finished the Hera section in my book Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Shinoda Bolen.  The Hera section has been particularly enlightening to me, as she has been the predomanent archetypal energy since I was about 14, possibly younger.  Briefly, she was the wife of Zeus and represents commitment, marriage and the archetypal wife.  Generally a Hera woman treats her marriage like a career, no matter what else is happening, the marriage comes first.  When she is single, she is searching for marriage, and when she is married, its all she is really concerned about.  The positive polarity of the Hera woman is that she is very aware of the energies in the house, and knows exactly what is happening with the marriage.  If the husband responds positively to this, they are ensured a close and committed relationship.  The negative polarity however, is that she lets her own goals and committments slip, including those to her purpose, her family and friends.  You can see where this is going.
Since I have gotten married, my life has been amazing, but I have seen the tip of some of these tendancies, which I have tried to control by belonging to clubs or groups alone, especially those types that are mostly female.  However I have felt myself slip.  This morning I was meditating, which is really the first time I have done so since christmas, and the thought popped into my head: What would I be doing if I wasn’t with Justin? I simultaniously felt slightly guilty for thinking such a thought (unecessary) and felt that I wasn’t doing anything right now for myself.  I have let my podcast slip, I haven’t read hardly any of the interesting books I got out the library two renewals ago and I have been spending all of my time thinking about the life changes in my house right now and none about how that might be effecting me.

Today was the nap day.  I slept for an hour and a half when Justin left, and then have felt restless for the whole day, like I don’t have enough time to do what I want to do with myself all the while, watching the clock tick by until it is nearly five pm at which time I have to go to a healing thing that I don’t know if I even want to go to because I haven’t spent any time doing what I want to do. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG.   Phew.  So, I’m going, because its one of those groups that I belong for the sake of forcing myself to feel myself.  Its a place where I can focus on me and healing myself without feeling like I need to justify it.

As a side effect of all of these thoughts in my head, I have realized that I am rather sensitive to the household energies, and that it sends me into a spin when I don’t take the time to integrate newness inside myself.  My goal is to be able to do this before I get to the point where I forget about myself; invoke a little bit of Artemis.  It is wonderful to see what my tendancies are, so that I can enjoy the postive polarities of the seemingly negative characteristics.