report from Kentville
On our way up to Saint-Anne yesterday morning, Mom and Paul and I hit a nasty snowstorm. The 101 was closed off from Coldbrook all the way to Yarmouth, so we were forced to stay overnight in Kentville with friends. We're hoping the snowplows have made it through that stretch, and if the wind isn't blowing too hard and reducing visibility, we're going to try again later this morning.
Actually, the truth is that I'm still in Bedford. My sleep cycle has been wonky lately, and today before I even finished packing I lay down for a nap, and when I woke up it was 9pm. Even that sleep wasn't all that great, as I was lucid dreaming nearly the entire time - a funny state when you're aware that you're asleep, your dreams are vivid (and somewhat controllable) and you generally feel really heavy in the head.
Not only was I tired, but I was battling the twin demons of not having any particular deadline (the program doesn't actually begin until Monday afternoon), and not really wanting to go up there. I mean, as much as this is a great opportunity, it has the potential to be a complete disaster, perhaps of the same magnitude when I started my first day of Grade VII with a Garfield lunchbox that originally belonged to one of my stepsiblings. One thing in my favour is that the French component means I'll have to think a LOT more carefully before I say anything, which will help keep my misinterpretable remarks to a minimum. And, if this program is even half as much fun as it was to learn Polish in Poland, it'll be great. And, even if it tanks, it's only five weeks. It's only five weeks. It's only five weeks. It's only five weeks...
I also took a few hours to watch the game - did you know that this season the Buffalo Sabres were 48-0 when leading 2-0? The Senators snapped that streak as well as one of their own - for the first time in new franchise history, and the first time since the 1927 Stanley Cup Final (which was actually just a best-of-three), they've taken a 2-0 lead in a playoff series. Wow. The Senators in these playoffs have astonished me with their maturity, patience, composure, speed, defence, and scoring. They're a lot of fun to watch, especially the top line of Spezza, Alfredsson, and Heatley, and there might be a few future Hall of Famers there. But Buffalo's packing a few players of that calibre as well, and the President's Trophy winners won't be knocked off lightly.
Actually, my pick at the start of the playoffs was New Jersey defeating San Jose in the Finals. Ha-ha.
After the game was over (it took two overtimes), I went back to packing.
Ordinarily packing's the easiest part of getting ready, but my Uncle Cliff and his partner Shelley are travelling all over North America not only with their message of spiritual cohesion to heal the planet, but also with my suitcases. (They were in a panic and needed them badly; to my slight chagrin nobody asked me before mom lent them to them, but at the time we didn't know that I would be going away myself so soon.) So I've got a couple of weekender bags, my backpack, plus my maternal grandfather's old suitcase that got a bit mildewed in storage - I spent some time the other day scrubbing it out and letting it dry off in the hot sun.
As you might expect, I'm a little bit jealous of my suitcases, which are going to all kinds of interesting places, but I hope they don't come home with a compromised sense of reality and a propensity for pseudoscientific logic as I don't doubt many of her audience members will. This isn't to say that I doubt her sincerity or the significance of what can really only be called a miracle. But too many people who've had near-death experiences report the same kinds of "new awareness," and you really have to wonder how much of the visions are really just brain chemistry - being dead for any amount of time kind of screws with you! I don't think all the people thinking and praying for her son hurt him in any way, and it probably did everyone a world of good, both directly and indirectly.
That being said, I think a relatively mundane explanation for his recovery could be found if we were more willing and able to search for one. She loses me at the point where the energy beings tell her to tell everyone to sit for an hour at 1111 GMT (that's 8:11am here, 7:11am Eastern - not 9:11 / 8:11 as we might think due to our being on daylight savings time now) on July 17th and think some kind of unifying thought. I don't think it'll do any harm, and it might serve us well to pause and meditate or reflect, but I wouldn't expect July 18th to be quantifiably different from July 16th either, unless the ritual itself has some sort of placebo-esque impact on a lot of people. That wouldn't be a bad thing either, but it might do some incidental damage to the development of reason and intelligence within humanity.
Well, I wish all of us well, and revisiting Shelley's experiences remind me that there are much more important things in life than the welfare of my suitcases.
Actually, the truth is that I'm still in Bedford. My sleep cycle has been wonky lately, and today before I even finished packing I lay down for a nap, and when I woke up it was 9pm. Even that sleep wasn't all that great, as I was lucid dreaming nearly the entire time - a funny state when you're aware that you're asleep, your dreams are vivid (and somewhat controllable) and you generally feel really heavy in the head.
Not only was I tired, but I was battling the twin demons of not having any particular deadline (the program doesn't actually begin until Monday afternoon), and not really wanting to go up there. I mean, as much as this is a great opportunity, it has the potential to be a complete disaster, perhaps of the same magnitude when I started my first day of Grade VII with a Garfield lunchbox that originally belonged to one of my stepsiblings. One thing in my favour is that the French component means I'll have to think a LOT more carefully before I say anything, which will help keep my misinterpretable remarks to a minimum. And, if this program is even half as much fun as it was to learn Polish in Poland, it'll be great. And, even if it tanks, it's only five weeks. It's only five weeks. It's only five weeks. It's only five weeks...
I also took a few hours to watch the game - did you know that this season the Buffalo Sabres were 48-0 when leading 2-0? The Senators snapped that streak as well as one of their own - for the first time in new franchise history, and the first time since the 1927 Stanley Cup Final (which was actually just a best-of-three), they've taken a 2-0 lead in a playoff series. Wow. The Senators in these playoffs have astonished me with their maturity, patience, composure, speed, defence, and scoring. They're a lot of fun to watch, especially the top line of Spezza, Alfredsson, and Heatley, and there might be a few future Hall of Famers there. But Buffalo's packing a few players of that calibre as well, and the President's Trophy winners won't be knocked off lightly.
Actually, my pick at the start of the playoffs was New Jersey defeating San Jose in the Finals. Ha-ha.
After the game was over (it took two overtimes), I went back to packing.
Ordinarily packing's the easiest part of getting ready, but my Uncle Cliff and his partner Shelley are travelling all over North America not only with their message of spiritual cohesion to heal the planet, but also with my suitcases. (They were in a panic and needed them badly; to my slight chagrin nobody asked me before mom lent them to them, but at the time we didn't know that I would be going away myself so soon.) So I've got a couple of weekender bags, my backpack, plus my maternal grandfather's old suitcase that got a bit mildewed in storage - I spent some time the other day scrubbing it out and letting it dry off in the hot sun.
As you might expect, I'm a little bit jealous of my suitcases, which are going to all kinds of interesting places, but I hope they don't come home with a compromised sense of reality and a propensity for pseudoscientific logic as I don't doubt many of her audience members will. This isn't to say that I doubt her sincerity or the significance of what can really only be called a miracle. But too many people who've had near-death experiences report the same kinds of "new awareness," and you really have to wonder how much of the visions are really just brain chemistry - being dead for any amount of time kind of screws with you! I don't think all the people thinking and praying for her son hurt him in any way, and it probably did everyone a world of good, both directly and indirectly.
That being said, I think a relatively mundane explanation for his recovery could be found if we were more willing and able to search for one. She loses me at the point where the energy beings tell her to tell everyone to sit for an hour at 1111 GMT (that's 8:11am here, 7:11am Eastern - not 9:11 / 8:11 as we might think due to our being on daylight savings time now) on July 17th and think some kind of unifying thought. I don't think it'll do any harm, and it might serve us well to pause and meditate or reflect, but I wouldn't expect July 18th to be quantifiably different from July 16th either, unless the ritual itself has some sort of placebo-esque impact on a lot of people. That wouldn't be a bad thing either, but it might do some incidental damage to the development of reason and intelligence within humanity.
Well, I wish all of us well, and revisiting Shelley's experiences remind me that there are much more important things in life than the welfare of my suitcases.