"Survival Gear" Revisited

Hi Everyone,

I delayed this post for one day so that it coincides with Halloween. I’m not exactly sure why I felt the need to do that because I’m not really a fan. I’ve never been good at Halloween. I’ve written about this before, in my second book, A Year of Days, in a chapter titled “Survival Gear,” which is ostensibly about Halloween, but is essentially about what I needed back then to survive in this world, a topic that feels all too relevant these days as our current world feels increasingly on the edge of not surviving.

Last week, I had to cancel a planned trip to Edmonton where I was going to have a reading event at Audreys Books. Some minor health issues and a bout of anxiety made it impossible for me to travel. As I dealt with that, I read a few articles about how anxiety is on the rise these days. There’s a new thing called eco-anxiety that psychologists are having to deal with more and more often. The topic of anxiety is appearing in so many newsletters and blogs, it feels as if it’s almost as prevalent as Covid. In a New York Times article called “Climate Change is Keeping Therapists Up at Night,” I saw myself reflected. I long ago lost count of the number of times over the years that I’ve been told I was over-reacting to dire claims of the causes and effects of climate change. Now it’s a reality no one can ignore.

I felt badly about cancelling my reading event, but everyone I heard from was very supportive (thank you all so much for your kindness). I heard the phrase “self-care” often. The idea of self-care made me aware of the number of times I logged into my news sources each day. It was a shock to realize how often I did that, as if me checking the headlines every few hours was going to prevent another slaughter of civilians caught up in political conflicts or another mass shooting or a rogue hurricane going from little more than a big wind to a deadly force in a matter of hours or yet another species on the verge of extinction.

So why am I connecting all that with Halloween? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself in my recent daily free-writing sessions, the ones where I just let my hand go and see what comes out. Most of it is blah-blah-blah, but just when I think it’s nothing but a waste of time, along comes something worthwhile. Writing is like that. I have to write to figure out what I need to be writing about.

On my neighbourhood walks over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a variety of Halloween decorations popping up. I like looking at them in the daylight and I like that they disappear in the dark. I don’t enjoy the ones that light up. Halloween is for the darkness. As the decorations became more and more visible, I started thinking back to my “Survival Gear” essay, so I pulled it out and re-read it. It turns out that some of the same questions I’m asking myself now aren’t new to me. What does it take to survive, I asked myself back then as I’m asking myself now?

In my original “Survival Gear,” I talked about my own childhood Halloweens (my mother made me a Christmas tree costume) and then about how bad I was at making costumes for my kids (ghosts from sheets), which then took me to thinking about the regular clothes I’ve put on my body over the years. Why? Because isn’t that what we do each day: get up and decide which of our daily costumes we’re going to wear to take us through the next twelve or fourteen or sixteen hours? For some reason, also in that old essay, I referred to a couple of old photos of a very young me with my parents, which took me to a delightful story about bones. Here it is:

“I don’t remember ever dressing up as a skeleton on Halloween, but I should have. I like the bones of the body. My dad and I used to sing a little song around the house, impromptu bursts that could have happened any time of the year, but probably a lot around Halloween. Dad would usually start this singing ritual, maybe on a Saturday morning as he refilled his coffee cup from the percolator on the counter. We liked the song’s simple beat, the rhythmic sensation as the lyrics traveled up and down the body, up and down ‘dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.’ The ‘Dry Bones’ song is an old spiritual, but we seldom bothered with the ‘Hear the Word of the Lord’ refrain. We’d begin by following the song’s lyrics as written and listening carefully to the words. We liked to catch each other up on the order of the bones. Dad might sing ‘the foot bone’s connected to the heel bone, the heel bone’s connected to the leg bone…’ and I’d say ‘You missed the anklebone!’ Sometimes we reconstructed the melodic skeleton and our neck bones ended up connected to our hip bones, our thigh bones connected to our shoulder bones, or our head bones connected to nothing at all. . . How about a belly button bone connected to an ear lobe bone? Or a chin bone connected to the butt bone?”

I’d forgotten all about singing that song with my dad. Reading about it again makes me smile. Of course, I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t want to edit it, tweak it, make it better, but I wouldn’t touch it now. As written, the whole scene feels like it’s at the centre of me, securely lodged in my gut bone. I have no way of knowing if that memory is accurate or a wistful reimagining, but I do know that Dad and I used to have fun with that song and at this point, that’s all that matters. I’m so glad I’m a writer, because if I wasn’t, I’m certain that memory would have disappeared forever.

The original “Survival Gear” is a bit of a scattered essay, but I think that’s what I like about it. In the end, I decide that some of my most essential survival gear is found in words and pictures. And that is still true today, but I have to manage it. Over the past week, I’ve limited myself to checking my news sources only once a day. As soon as I did that, I felt better. The world is still a scary shit show, but I’m back to getting up and writing first thing in the morning rather than clicking on a news site.

In the meantime, my new novel She Who Burns is out there gaining readers each day. Next time, I’ll share a little more about its journey from mere speck of an idea to something that exists and will hopefully survive, at least for a few years. I’ll also talk a little bit about a new offering I’m working on for 2024, where I delve into a writing process using my Tarot decks, tentatively titled “It’s in the Cards.” Stay tuned.

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