Category: Seasons and Holidays
puppets

Molly and Frost on Spring Cleaning

Molly and Frost on Spring Cleaning

This article first appeared in the Island Word, spring, 2010.  It’s just for fun.  Used by permission (from Molly and Frost).

Serena and Monika have been having a rather ruff time of it lately, with the extra-long winter, seasonal colds, and now our shedding coats to contend with. Spring means mud to dogs, and for some reason that appears to trouble them as well. They need a break. With the return of longer days, an hour saved at the computer is an hour gained for the park. So we’ve given them the month off of column writing, filling in with our canine advice on spring cleaning and decorating for the season.

If there is a theme to home decorating this year, it is Entropy. A true monument to chaos may be above the means of some, but if you have pre-teen children, dense fir, the energy of a Border Collie and the oversized paws of an Australian Shepherd, you can come close to perfection without knocking yourself out.

The first rule of household entropy is to blur the boundaries of indoors and outdoors. Bring mud in; take chewy toys out. Bring sticks in; take bones out. Bury them, and start over. Bring mud in….

Focus on decorating below the knees. What catches a dog’s eye is what’s on the floor. Bouncy tennis balls are a must-have accessory: especially in tough economic times, these classics never go out of style. A few bones scattered about complete the look, and will make any four-pawed visitor feel more casual and welcome. Note: humans should wear shoes to avoid injuries.

As for floor coverings, while the humans have taken to hard flooring for easy mop-ups, we miss the cushy, odorous, full-sensory experience of carpeting. A good compromise is carpet on the staircase, where we can take our extra-nice bits for a good long chew-and-drool session while surveying the living area from a slightly raised vantage point. Hard flooring is fine for everywhere else, but don’t be afraid to allow it to acquire some scratches and stains. If the choice is between scratching the floor or clipping the toenails, it’s no contest. An unscratched floor is…unnatural.

A bonus to having dense fur is that it functions to collect all other loose floor dust into neat clumps resembling small animals that migrate into the corners and around the edges of rooms. These are particularly comforting when we are otherwise alone in the house. As we like to say, “If you’ve got furballs, you’ve got company”. They also make good “practice pets” for very young humans who have yet to develop their canine-friendly social skills.

Did somebody say vacuum cleaner? No, no. Bad Vacuum Cleaner. Noisy. Scary. Put it away—far, far away.

That’s better. Now, on to the kitchen. Don’t like bits of food and gravy in the dishwater, or sticking to the sides of your dishwasher? Here’s a tip from our house to yours: The Doggy Prewash Cycle. We lick the plates, then our people load them into the dishwasher to be sterilized. A similar principle works for cleaning up most organic spills on the floor. Milk, gravy, meat juice, raw eggs, and just about anything else from the refrigerator is no problem when you have two long, efficient tongues on hand to tackle the mess. Indeed, our humans often wonder how dogless households handle such problems. Here it’s nice and easy, and there is time left over to get to the park before the sun sets. Everybody wins.

Well, that’s about it! We could change the bedding and put clothing away, but nobody sees those parts of the house, anyway! With the front room and the kitchen are ready for surprise company, we are ready for the park!

Molly is an energetic Border Collie/Fence Climber cross from the SPCA, who specializes in retrieving yellow tennis balls and ten-year-old children. Frost is a rehabilitated show dog with big brown eyes, soft paws, a sterling pedigree and a devotion to “protecting” us from all other dogs in the park. Writing is a secondary vocation for them, ranking far behind their first commitment of being housedogs and playmates to the Grünberg-Patterson family.

Dr. Serena Patterson is a Registered Psychologist and Monika Grünberg is a Registered Clinical Counsellor in private practice. If you have problems other than household maintenance, you can find them at at Grünberg Patterson Counselling and Psychological Services in Comox. Failing that, try the park!

 

foliage

Embracing the mid-winter darkness

Darktime:  Embracing mid-winter

This article first appeared in the Island Word in 2005.  It is one of our favorites.

DSC_0089Winters in the Comox Valley may not be known for extreme temperatures, but we certainly should take bragging rights for surviving the dark and the grey. With little snow cover at sea level and frequent overcast skies; sometimes the evergreen forests seem to absorb the light like sponges absorb water. Neither of us has lived anywhere else where the dark and grey seemed so thick as it does here at the wet coast. Even in the depth of a Yukon winter, Monika remembers the beauty of starlight reflected upon snow, the crispness of the cold air, and of course the Northern Lights. Serena braved one bitter winter of square tires and morning ice fog in Saskatoon, but the sun was bright on the snow.

Not that Serena minds the dark much anymore. Fond of good food, conversation, reading, sleeping, and making crafts, Serena looks forward to the months when she needs no excuse to stay inside and dream by the fire. She thinks of seeds tucked into the ground, soaking up energy and perhaps looking forward, in their plant-like way, to being trees. This is a creative time of year; the time of slow food, needles and thread, words, and warm company.

It wasn’t always thus. Her first year on the Island, the dark took Serena by surprise. What saved her winters was learning to ski. Now her indoor activities are balanced by exercise up in the snow, where, for a few hours, she is above the cloud cover. That is enough; after a few hours of skiing or snow-shoeing, with a pot of soup waiting at home, Serena finds life to be about as good as it gets.

For Monika, balance is important. Even though she likes it when the leaves in the forest behind the house finally fall, and sunlight once again streams into the house, she also loves the dark and its mystery and silence. Favorite winter time memories are about going up to the mountains in the afternoon, at about the time when everyone else seems to head down, to ski or snowshoe in the solitude, with the dogs and something lovely and hot to drink in her pack and a headlamp and a cell phone, just in case.

Monika frequently finds reassurance and calm when in nature. She loves the slow heartbeat of the tides and the ocean surf, and the vastness of the night sky that tells of an even slower heartbeat: where stars and galaxies expand and contract. The light that we see at night may have left its own star before human civilization began on earth.

Where Serena finds these experiences unsettling (yikes, we are so tiny and insignificant), Monika feels the frantic pace of everyday stresses and worries slow down and fade compared to the really big picture we are a part of (sigh of relief, we really are but a tiny part of a much larger picture, and that shrinks many of my worries into their proper and perspective: insignificance).

Many people do find the dark to be difficult. On a physiological level, we need natural light to regulate our body’s sleep and wake cycles, and to trigger the production of natural melatonin, a hormone that helps to regulate our mood and energy level. Winter is a time of higher costs and more seclusion. In old times, food and warmth were definitely harder to get in the winter, and many people still find it a harder time for survival.

Winter Solstice is probably one of the very earliest holiday seasons in the Northern hemisphere. With the food gathered in, winter brought time for music, crafts and stories, and people came together to share warmth and light, as well as companionship. Later religions, including Christianity, adopted this time of the darkest, longest nights for their own celebrations of new beginnings and hope. The “Sun King” of the pagans gave way to the “Son King” of Christianity, and images of the Goddess become incorporated into images of Mary, the Queen of Heaven. It still seems right to us, as we pass the longest nights of the year, to welcome back the infant sun, the beginning of light returning, with candles and hope and song. The dark of the winter is a time ripe for magic, stories and music.

Just as the darkness of the season can be overwhelming to some, the brightness of the holiday lights can bring a despair of its own. Next to the hardships of being lonely, missing a loved one, having financial worries, or of just not feeling particularly happy, the cheeriness of the holiday season and its consumerism can feel contrived, incessant, and oppressive. In the shadow of the holiday lights there are many people among us who fight depression or who grieve strongly. Like those people who tell us to “smile!” when they don’t even know us, the relentless blinking of the Christmas lights seems to order us to feel better than we do, and threatens that, if we don’t cheer up and join in, we will be labeled sour-puss grinches. At times like these, we long for the gentleness of candlelight, which comforts and accepts a wider range of feelings for the season.

It is said that we need the dark in order to fully appreciate the light. In the dark, a candle is more beautiful, and a stained glass window reflecting on snow can take your breath away. Perhaps we also need light in order to best love the darkness. After a day of bright snow we can best love the comfort of a dark room, a cozy fire, a blanket to snuggle under. Serena, who loves word play, spends part of each Solstice playing with the words of light and dark. “Lighten up!” is followed by “darken down”, “let some light in” becomes “let some dark in”, “enlightenment” becomes “endarkenment”, and so on. She loves to sit with these expressions, listening to them and tuning in to feelings and thoughts, deep inside, like the seed under the ground.

The dark may bring gifts of its own. Under grief lies appreciation for how beautiful and irreplaceable a loved one was in our lives. Under despair may lay a reservoir of hope. When we feel most alone, we may also become aware of being connected to the whole world around us.

Both of us make a habit in the winter of lighting candles. We name some of the flames after loved ones who are not here and who we miss. We name others for people for whom we hold wishes and hopes for healing, people we want to “hold in the light”, as our Quaker friends say. Some of these are people we personally know, who are struggling. Others are people we do not know personally, and who are spending the dark season in war zones or out in the cold without safety and comfort. We name candles for our wishes for the New Year—wishes for our own happiness, for projects we want to complete, and for a better world of peace and justice. The purpose is not to push back the darkness, but to play with the balance, bringing together the gifts of the light and the dark.

Monika Grünberg, Registered Clinical Counsellor and Serena Patterson, Registered Psychologist can be contacted at their practice in Comox at 339-3269, or via their website at grunbergpatterson.ca.

water

The salmon return

The salmon return

This article first appeared in the Island Word in fall, 2007.  It is one of our favorites. 

Our Morrison creek is alive with salmon—Coho since the beginning of September, with Pinks and Chum to follow. By Christmas it will stink to high heaven, but we won’t mind. Well, not much anyway. When the salmon come, we feel blessed beyond blessed.

The first year that we lived on the creek was a pretty good year for pinks. We lay awake at night, listening to the “splash, splash” of struggle and spawning; the sounds of life returning to the source and starting again.

That year, Serena vowed to live on the creek long enough to lose her fear of dying. This is how the salmon end their individual lives—face first into the current, fighting to go further inland, just a little bit further, a and further back to the place that they began. Having fishy sex. Leaving their bodies behind for the next year’s fry. How do they find their way home? Is it something that they smell? Is it the way the water feels?

The salmon remind Monika of the circles that connect us all to the earth. Without the salmon, there would be no forest—salmon provide important nutrients to the soil as it is dragged to rot beside, or miles away from, the stream. Nowadays we think of trees and plants as the main compost for the forest floor. But before there were trees, there had to be water creatures to prepare the ground. Salmon continue to carry an annual supply of nutrients from the ocean-source to the land. Our rivers and streams are like arteries and capillaries that allow the salmon, like red blood cells, access to the rest of the body that lies above the sea. Without the salmon, would we exist? Possibly not.

Monika is moved by the pain of the salmon as they leave their bodies to the creek bed and the forest floor. Serena holds fast to her theory that they die in ecstatic reunion, giving themselves over to the joy and the completion of coming home. But we share in gratitude as we look over the fence and through the thicket that shades the shallow water where they swim, splash, spawn and suffer (or not) the completion of their lives.

Each August and September we listen with hope and dread—“will they come? How many? How many years will they come up Morrison Creek, before they disappear from too few hiding places, too much direct sun, and too much pollution in the water?” Urban salmon run a gauntlet of drainage pipes, lawn chemicals, disturbed soil, direct sunlight , dogs and curious human children with sticks and stones. And before they get here there are nets, lice, oil spills, plastics, and hungry seals. Some years very few arrive behind our house.

For over ten thousand years, people on this coast waited for the salmon with the same faith that they felt waiting for the sunrise—of course they would come. The night may be long, the year might be hungry, and it was natural for children to wonder whether the cycles of life might stop. But adults knew differently. “Trust, little one,” they might have said, “It’s a promise—they always come. That’s how we go on.”

To now question whether the salmon will come ought to be as unthinkable as wondering whether the sun would rise. The planet is alive because all of these systems work: the forests that cleanse and renew the air, the rivers that collect the water and run it back to the ocean, the salmon that come upstream to feed the forests as the ocean returns its bounty, the birds and the bears that carry the nutrients inland, the clouds and the rain that lift, then shower waters on the land. A major break in this chain needs to shock us.

Monika has signed us up to sample forage fish for Project Watershed. Serena is coming along with reluctance; she would rather stay warm and dry on the weekends. Last year we scrapped two cars for oil leaks, leaving us with one subcompact car (aka “the pod”) and an electric bicycle (aka the “Putt-putt-No-putt”) to meet the transportation needs of a family of 4, six if you count the dogs. (T. says pointedly, “you can’t take the mutt-mutts on the Putt-putt”) We plant dense native shrubs along the creek side. We are doing what we can, and we know it is hardly enough. Just by being North American humans, reasonably attached to our society and its “grid”, we are part of the problem. Our individual remedies are stop-gap measures; trivial in the grand scheme of things.

What is needed is a deep, cultural change. Behavior change is hard to sustain and to share if it is driven by negative emotions—fear, guilt, shame of being a polluter. Even duty to the collective can’t keep us behaving well as environmental managers. We need positive reasons, as individuals, to be careful of our neighbors in this ecosystem. We need to feel love, wonder, and curiousity about the world around us. We need to reawaken to just how amazing all of this is.

Can wide-eyed, open-hearted wonder help save an ecosystem that is in peril? Does prayer, or meditation, or communion by any name with the great circles of life matter? We have to believe that it does, and so we do. We work at tuning in; at really seeing what is around us. We open ourselves to amazement. And once we begin to practice that amazed attention, we are surprised and still a bit unbelieving when it gives results in return. Our own fears diminish; we are calmer and happier. The life forms around us do better. We walk with a lighter step, perhaps leaving a lighter footprint. We don’t need to buy as much stuff. We feel, and move toward, our own place in the cycle—our own “home.” Our appreciation is contagious, as we show others what we are noticing, and how astounding a bird’s nest, or a bug, or an earthworm can be.

We hope to stay by the creek for a long, long time. We hope that the music of the salmon will accompany our own deaths, wherever and whenever they occur. We talk each year about recording it, just in case, but we don’t. We want to believe that it will always come back for real, and we want the full force of our grief if it does not.

We hope that our readers will visit some salmon this month. Eating salmon would also be good, especially if it is wild-caught or harvested from land-locked tanks. Return the bones to the earth in your garden, or under a potted plant, or carefully to a salmon-bearing creek. Give thanks as you do, and say some kind of prayer for the return, every year, of these sacred creatures.

 

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Grünberg Patterson Centre for Counselling & Assessment has been providing services in counselling, psychotherapy, and education since 2004.

It is an honour and privilege to live and work in the traditional territory of the K’ómoks First Nation.

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112-2100 Guthrie Rd, Comox, BC V9M 3P6

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