THE PRUDE AND THE PASSION PARTY

Me: (at the Pearly Gates) Knock knock! St. Peter: Who’s there? Oh, it’s you. Are you expecting to be admitted here? Me: Well, I thought I was sent here. Perhaps there is some mistake. St, Peter: (checking the records( Could you step aside. We have some questions to ask. Your conduct while on Earth has raised some concerns. Now, our records show that in June of 2012 you attended a gathering which had been assembled to view a variety of products intended for use by passionate people. Is this true? Me: Well, yes. St. Peter: And our records show that the products promised physical pleasure. According to this report, at the first half of the party the saleswoman displayed lotions, liquids and creams with appealing smells, tastes and tingles, suggesting possible applications for them. Is that correct? Me: Yes. That is correct. St. Peter: And our records also show that after the break, that same saleswoman displayed a variety of battery operated devices, mostly long and a bit round. Some were said to vibrate. Is that true? Me: Yes. That is correct. St. Peter: How, then, do you explain your presence there? Me: I was invited to go. St. Peter: Hmmmmmm. I can see that an invitation might have led to this, for someone else. In that case, it would have been perfectly understandable. But our records show, in your case, a distinct aversion to sales parties. You had often been invited to product gatherings in the past, Amway parties, TupperWare parties, jewellery parties, clothing parties, candle parties. Is that true. Me: Yes, that is true. St. Peter: And our records show that you refused these invitations. Is that true? Me: Yes, that is true. St. Peter: Which, as I say, would lead us to think that you would refuse this invitation as well, unless, of course, you had a tendency to appreciate things that might be thought of as—how shall I say it—risque. May I now point out one other confusing detail? This, clearly, was a party of a different sort. Shall we call it a tiny bit risque? Me: I suppose it could have been thought of in that way. St. Peter: Our records also show evidence that throughout your life, you had been a bit of a prude. There is plenty of evidence for this. The evidence began early in your adult development. Let’s see, you, for example, found Love Story a bit shocking when you saw it at the movie theatre. Is that true? Me: That is true. St. Peter: Once again I ask you: How do you explain your presence at this particular gathering when so many other party invitations had been refused? Me: Okay. I confess. I could not resist the temptation. You see, I was invited to this party by women of a younger generation, women born long after Love Story was released. To be honest, they might not have known I was shocked by Love story. St. Peter: Perhaps you should say more about the particular temptation that took you. Me: They said they believed it would be fun to have me there. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were right about that. St. Peter: And was it fun to have you there? Me: Actually, I can’t say for sure. It’s not the sort of thing you can ask. But I can say for sure that I had some fun. St. Peter: Fun with the products? Me: A little, perhaps. But it gave me hope also. St. Peter: Hope? How so? Me: There I was in a roomful of young women, some of them married, some of them mothers, some not yet partnered. It was a bridal shower, a bit like so many other bridal showers where women wish other women the joy of housekeeping by giving them baking pans and dishcloths. We ate a lot of good food, just like at other showers. St. Peter: But this one was different. Me: Yes, this one was different. At this one, there were good things to eat, but no baking supplies. I believe the difference was in the wishing. At this party, women were wishing the bride a life of physical pleasure. A life of physical pleasure! I thought it a marvellous thing to hope for.

STUNG!!!

I’ve been stung!!! The first sting occurred on Wednesday, early evening. I was walking up the veranda steps when—Pow!!!! Something got me in the heel, just above my sandal strap. A less truthful person would report my having said, “Oh my, that hurts.” The second sting happened about an hour later, as I walked, barefoot, (the sandal strap was bothering my swollen ankle) across that same veranda. That one hit the bottom of the unstung foot. Was it a wasp? No, It was a rose briar, attached to a clump of rose leaves. The tireless wind had plucked them from the nearby rose bush. Even a less truthful person wouldn’t credibly be able to report that I said, “Oh my, that hurts.” The third sting struck on Thursday, on the arm just above my watch strap. That one was definitely a wasp. Shamelessly, he headed off to join his house mates, who had taken up residence in the safe haven under the broad front steps. “I’ve been stung!!” I wailed at Mark. And then, to add emphasis, “I’ve been stung twice!” Mark has a proven track record in wasp warriorship. Was it only last weekend that he sprayed a line of killler foam into a wasp home in the siding behind his deck? Buoyed by my confidence in him as the potential solver of large problems, Mark rose to hero status. A less truthful person would report that he cried, “I’ll save you Mother!” That’s how bravely he acted. Striking up a pose that Superman would have envied, he pounded a foot on the veranda’s bottom stetp. The results were immediate. Out flew a colony of wasps, heading straight for Pirate the dog, the innocent by-stander. “Help Pirate,” shouted Mark. Pirate and I have been stung! Surprisingly, since Pirate—though not much for profanity-- has not been known as the silent type, didn’t say a word, he just ran in desperate circles until he was at last captured by Mark, who extracted a tormentor that had accidentally become entangled in the long hair between his eyes. When the excitement had died down, and the killer foam had been sprayed, and all that remained was the hum of the colony now trapped, suffocating in a formerly safe residence, I went inside to remove the watch from my swelling arm. Pirate followed me in and caught an airborn wasp. He chewed it into little pieces and swallowed every one. Mark went home to check the deck for wasps. Just one mor eexample to prove that each of us has our own way of responding when we’ve been stung.

FEEL THE VIBE!

Yesterday Lenora LeMay and I had a visit from the VIBE team. VIBE (Vermilion is Being Empowered) is one of the 38 mental health in schools capacity building initiatives led by Alberta Health Services Addiction and Mental Health in partnership with Alberta Education and funded by Alberta Health and Wellness. The team came to Hope House to show us what they have done with hope. Inspired by a 90-minute Telehealth seminar given by Lenora, they had designed 5 hope lessons for the Grade 5 health curriculum. Then, having attended a two-day hope workshop given by me at the Alberta College of Social Work 2012 conference, they designed 5 lessons for a high school curriculum. They brought gifts—a book of hope images designed by the kids, and the cuddliest hope-opotamus we’ve ever hugged. They came to show us their work and to ask if we had ideas of how they might add to it. They invited their funders to the celebration. All in all, it was hope work the way we like it—collaborative, creative and expansive.

A THOUGHT ABOUT HOPEFUL STORIES

Borrowed from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel It will come out all right in the end. If it isn't right, it's not the end.

WISDOM FROM MICHAEL ENRIGHT

“I’ve learned that laughter is prayer; work is therapy and music and poetry are gifts from Heaven. I’ve learned that you should not do too much planning. Always leave room for chance or plain old fashioned luck. And you should constantly do, because action is more fulfilling than doing nothing.” --Michael Enright, convocation address to York University, aired on CBC Radio, The Sunday Edition, June 17, 2012: Well said, Michael. Only I would add that prayer is also prayer, except when something starts you giggling in the middle of it. Then prayer is laughter.

ROBINS

We thought they'd gone elsewhere, or met a dreadful fate. But here they are, doing nest renovations, repairing the damage from the recent House Finch invasion. There they hop, purching on benchbacks, startling off at an unexpected bang. The renos are done now. The sitting has started. All things being lucky, there'll be babies poking their heads over the nest edge right about the time when the veranda is buzzing with the guests Mark and Tracey have invited to their wedding. How could their timing have been better? A little bird magic!

starting

It’s the season for miracles. One trip outside treats you to the twitter and caw of a hundred—maybe a thousand birds. Each of these birds was once the liquid in an egg. And then, by warmth alone, a heartbeat began. Who would have the audacity to suggest that there might be no hope when life, so unaccountably resisting all odds and reason, persists, insists on beginning this way?

A LITTLE MEDIA GOES A LONG WAY

Thanks to Cam Tait of the Edmonton Journal for helping us celebrate Hope Foundation's 20th anniversary with an article about our history. UNIQUE ORGANIZATION PROVES A LITTLE HOPE GOES A LONG WAY

broadcasting from denver

Thanks to Carol Jeanotilla and her Hope Journal program, I spent a pleasant 45 minutes chatting about hope. Rumour has it that feedback was received from as far away as Brazil. Here are Carol's instructions for downloading a podcast: Go to www.castlerockradio.com/archives.html Simply find The Hope Journal listing, click on us and then click on the air date - 4/26/12 - to listen any time 24/7.

LIBRARY IN THE MORNING

For the last week I’ve been going to the library everymorning before going to work. It’s a pleasant place, a library in the morning, in your housecoat, with your hair still askew and your eyes barely open. I am preparing a summer reading collection, biographies, fiction, a little history, a really fine assortment of materials to keep me happy all summer. What better place to do it than at the CNIB Library, now that it has revised its website? If you are an eligible client of theirs, you can browse for books, locate audio and braille editions, and download them to read on your own personal machines. It’s a miracle really. If he were here, I am certain that Sir William Mulock would be delighted by the development. He was, in his day, a forward-looking fellow, the kind who would implement snazzy new ideas. In 1898, Postmaster General Sir William Mulock granted free postage, known as franking, for all braille material sent through the mail. Later, after the invention of sound recording, audio books were granted the same privilege. It would be impossible to calculate how much it would have cost to distribute all the braille and talking books by mail over the past 114 years. Until very recently, almost all blind canadians ordered books from the CNIB Library in Toronto and waited for them to arrive in the mail. But times have changed. I was getting CNIB books by mail before Canada had its 100th birthday. I was getting them before anybody got to the moon. And getting books free in the mail was a wondrous thing which I loved, and I doubt if any Canadian was more grateful to Sir William than I was. But getting books on the Internet, in the cool of the morning, before leaving for work is even better.

THE FUTURE IS NOT THE PAST

Statistics predict the future based on the past. They are important in telling us how things were. And here is something to remember when you get to thinking that things never change for women. For more than 100 years there was virtually no chance that the Premier of Alberta would be a female. And then, in 2012, there was only one question: In the race of five leaders, which of the two female contenders would get the position?

HOPE LADY ON DENVER RADIO

Join Wendy Edey and Carol Jeanotilla on a live broadcast of The Hope Journal Show from Denver, Thursday April 26, 9:00 AM Mountain Daylight Time. Wendy will be discussing the psychology of hope, the language of hope and the role that humor plays in hope. Listen-in live on your computer by going to www.castlerockradio. The broadcast will last 1 hour.

FAMILY VIOLENCE TREATMENT HAS CHANGED

This week I attended the Knowledge Sharing Forum for the Alberta provincial Family Violence Treatment Program. It was truly an enlightening experience. The room was filled with probation officers, group facilitators, addicitions counsellors, social workers and psychologists. The mood was distinctly positive. I hadn’t really known what to expect, but I do know I wasn’t expecting that. The last time I attended such a meeting they were talking about confronting the offenders, forcing them to take responsibility for their actions. The tone was aggressive. It was hard to find a place for our hope and strengths strategies in that emotional climate. But that was then, and this was now. I met many hard-working people who are deeply proud of the work they are doing. The work is positive yet honest. There is a recognition that many offenders hope to be something other than violent, that they would do things differently if they knew how. There is an enthusiasm about working constructively with that hope.

iPhone CHANGES THE WORLD

My sister brought her iPhone to my house, loaded with an ap for blind people. She took a picture of the Angel Food box.
“Angel Food,” said the iPhone. That impressed me a little bit, but only a little bit. We’ve had the ability to convert text to speech for 30 years.
She took a picture of the flower vase on my table.
“Glass flower vase,” said the iPhone. Now that impressed me. Of course I already knew it was a glass flower vase, but a thing that can take a picture of a flower vase, and translate that picture into words, might just change the world.

WHY DOES HOPE TALK WORK?

So much of what we learn in one profession helps us to understand other professions. When it comes to understanding how humans decide what to do, it’s “Feel first, think later,” according to Julie Sedivy, co-author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You. This, I believe, is why hope talk works. When we talk hope in a structured, confident manner, we feel hope, and we act out hope also.
It works with people who have depression, and it works with people who have chronic pain. It works for athletes, for corporate boards and also for advertisers.

RECIPE FOR FASCINATION

Put two ideas into a jar, shake well, open the jar, and see what you have.
Will it be humour, some fabulous new invention, or two separate ideas—shaken, but not combined?
I have built a career on the two-idea mixing concept. You can see it played out if you consult the Internet in a search for the answer to the question: “What does she do, anyway?” You can see the combining there, lodged in the titles of speeches made and articles published. What do you get when you combine hope with getting old, with offender treatment, with having Parkinson’s Disease, with parenting a child with disabilities? What do you get when you combine hope with being a cancer physician, a corporate CEO, a refugee, a patient getting her teeth cleaned? What do you get when you combine hope theory and practice with the work that counsellors do?
How I love the things you learn when you shake ideas in a jar! No wonder I’ve been so fond of the career that chose me! No wonder I’m so often fascinated by the things that happen when others combine and shake ideas. Take this combination, for example: THE SOUND OF TASTE
Did you know that bacon taste better to people who hear the sound of its frying? This is true, according to Barb Stuckey, food inventor, idea shaker and author of Taste What You’re Missing.

IF I WERE A SIGHTED PERSON...

There are quite a few things I would do,
like getting my driver’s license,
and catching people’s eye.
Among other things,
I’d identify birds by using bird books.

What could be more fun
Than flipping through the pages,
Spying a bird with a cry of
“That’s the one!”

Me: I heard the most beautiful bird song this morning. I was talking to Donna on the phone at the time and I just had to open the door so she could hear it too.
Him: There’s a new bird in the robin’s nest on the veranda this year.
Me: What kind of bird?
Him: I don’t know what it is.
Me: Maybe it’s the bird with the beautiful song.
Him: Maybe. It has a very red breast.
Me: But not a robin?
Him: Smaller than a robin.
Me: And it’s head?
Him: Red head.

If I were a blind person,
I would try to remember
That I live in 2012
When anybody can go to the computer
And search for “smaller than a robin, red head, red breast, Alberta.”

Me: I think it’s a house finch.
Him: (looking at screen) I don’t know. I’ll wait until I see it again.
Me: I am sure it’s the song of the house finch.

If I have to be a blind person,
And it does seem that I do,
Then I’m glad to be one in 2012,
Even if I can’t say for absolute certain it’s a house finch,
Because here I sit, blogging,
While listening on the computer to a most beautiful bird song.

HOPE, WOMEN, POLITICS, MEDIA

I am delighted that we have female party leaders running in our election.
I hope women will be as comfortable in politics as men are.
I hope to help them be comfortable by promoting a Name It, Change It a website that identifies how sexism in the media gives male candidates the upper edge when it comes to getting elected, and provides a media guide to help media write fairly about female and male candidates.
I hope our media will use that media guide.
I hope we will support the media writers who use the guide, and withdraw attention and support from those media outlets who choose to get attention by disadvantaging females in politics through sexist coverage.

hope and strengths strategies for health care professionals

Sign up now for this workshop presented by Wendy edey and Rachel Stege!



Saturday, May 5, 2012.
9:00am until 4:00pm.

The Hope Foundation of Alberta presents a 1-day workshop for Healthcare Professionals who would like to:
* Learn strategies for talking about hope with patients
* Consider false hope, denial, and acceptance in the context of being hopeful
* Explore ways of maintaining your own hope while doing your work

Who: Healthcare professionals (Note: Participants should be actively working in a healthcare discipline)

Cost: $100/person. Lunch will be provided.

Call 492-1222 to register. Limited to 12 participants.

HOPE FOR COURAGE

Here’s a hope story for you. 100 years ago a band of 8 musicians played to the end while the Titanic sank. People began telling the story as soon as the first survivors were rescued, and we are still telling it today. In fact, an artifact is now being examined to prove that it is, as claimed, the violin played by by the bandmaster, Wallace Hartley. Why is it that we cling to stories like these? Could it be that each of us hopes that, somewhere in us, there is a spring of untested courage that would bubble up at the last?
The Band Played On: The Untold Story of the Musicians Who Went Down with the Titanic

HOPE LADY PREPARES A SPEECH

I am getting ready to speak at the Greater Edmonton Retired Teachers Association Second Wind Conference, taking inventory of my resources.
I will start with a good title. A good title gets you going. How about, Audacious Hope and the Search for the Future Me? That’s catchy. It puts your mind where it needs to be for a hope talk, in the future.
I’ll take hope tools. After all, the hope tools have built my speaking reputation. If anything can dig up hope, the hope tools will do it.
I’ll take a little humour, of course. That’s what people want in a keynote speech, a little humour with their morning coffee. Humour coats whatever else you put in a speech for easy digestion.
I’ll take my personal experience with teachers, not so much my experience as a student. Those experiences belong in hope talks at other conferences. But it just so happens that I live in a family populated by passionate teachers, hard-working teachers, retired teachers, first-year teachers, experienced teachers in the prime of their careers. Teaching, I have learned from them, can be an enormously challenging, often frustrating, and absolutely fabulous career. On any given day, in any given year, teaching is more or less of any of these three. I understand the idea of a passionate career. It gives me hope.
Then also, because I have no choice in the matter, I’ll take along my own body, the body of a woman my age, a body which, to my consternation, often requires that I call meetings of its parts to assemble an order of things before agreeing to get up after sitting on the floor, or spending a long night in bed. It refuses to remember those university days when I used to choose sitting on the floor. I’ve tried to make it promise better days. But so far it hasn’t been the greatest listener.
Remembering other times, like the times when I was a parenting expert, those times before I had any kids, I wonder if it would be easier to give a hope talk to retired teachers if I had the body of a 30-year-old.

HOPE HEARD FROM A BIRD

Drawn by the song of a bird so sweet
That I could not help but envy his mate
I stepped out the door in the sun to greet the promise of a late March day.
Where geese were honking, crows were cawing, magpies magging, swparrows tweeting.
Robins nesting and ten thousand waxwings had come to our block
To feast for a pleasant hour.
So even though the forecast says, “SNOW!”
And I cannot pretend that I have not heard,
I’ll remember the birds saying,
“Spring’s the word.”

20 YEARS OF SUCCESS

This week my colleagues and I have been charting the history of success of the Hope Foundation of Alberta. It’s been inspiring to see how much things have changed since 1992, when there was no defined field of hope studies, no international database of hope research literature, no book of practices and strategies for nurturing hope in children, no structured approach to bringing out hope while listening to stories, no organized collection of hope and strengths tools for counselling and group work,. But from my vantage point, the most inspiring part of all is that while these developments were occurring, the Hope Foundation was providing direct, services to many of the most disadvantaged citizens of our city and province. We were creating a better life through counselling for people who had been told by their physicians that there was no counselling they could get unless they paid a lot. We were training staff at charitable organizations who had no budget for staff development, only budget for service to their clients. We were helping schools develop hope programs to change the lives of students in ways that will remain untested now, but will reveal themselves 20 years from now. How did we do this? you ask. Well, that’s a long and complicated story.
It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a remarkable combination of skills and attitudes to keep such a high level of momentum going for 20 years. After all that hard work, you would think we might simply sit down on our 20th birthday and celebrate for a while. But instead, we are engaged in a process of restructuring the organization that will carry us into the future.
I have been through processes of restructuring before—both at Hope Foundation and other places. Thinking back to those days, to the worst days of restructuring, I recall angry meetings, fearful meetings, frustrated meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings!!!!!!! Sometimes, in a desperate search for a simple hope, I’ve thought, “Won’t it be nice when I’m 80 years old and nobody expects me to put my effort into restructuring?”
And then, a few moments or a few days later, I start to notice the 80-year-olds in my life. What are they doing? They’re restructuring, having meetings, meeting with their doctors, their lawyers, their realtors, their families. The healthy ones—healthy in the whole-person sense—are facing reality and being hopeful at the same time, maybe even being hopeful first, trusting that reality will be there regardless. I look at the healthiest of them, and I see the models for how I want to be, then and now.
So how do I feel whenever the challenge of restructuring is presented to me, at work and elsewhere? I mean, honestly. How do I feel? Well, sometimes I am hopeful, sometimes not so much. But it’s the same day on any given day whether or not I am hopeful. Only the possibilities of how I will act are different. On days when I am not hopeful there are still possibilities, only I don’t see them. And that is why, when I have the choice, I would choose to be hopeful. Sometimes I can, and sometimes I can’t. When I can’t, then I have to wait until I can.
Charting our history of success is ever so much more hopeful than starting with our biggest problem and expecting an immediate solution. This is the philosophy that has made our counselling program such a success. How grateful I am to be working in an environment that compels me to work from a hope perspective. We still have the meetings, but we also have the philosophy and relationships to support us in hope while we chart the next steps on the path of success that will bring surprising results in the next 20 years.
As I write this, I am preparing for a hope presentation to women seeking help from the Elizabeth Fry Society. With all that they have faced, and al lthat they are facing, you’d think they’d have no hope. But they’ll have hope all right, and thanks to 20 years of successful work done by so many people associated with Hope Foundation, I’ll have the tools to help them find it.

AUDACIOUS HOPER, LENORA M. LEMAY

Audacious hopers hope for things no practical person would dream of hoping for, things we are certain can never happen, given the current circumstances. Audacious hopers have led the way to change throughout the history of humankind, and they are, thankfully, here with us today.
One of my favourite audacious hopers is Lenora M. LeMay, a long-time colleague at the Hope Foundation of Alberta. It is to her that I turn when I need to catch a case of hopefulness. It is from her that I often borrow hope to tide me over when my own supply gets low.
That said, the process of hoping that happens between Lenora and me is rarely a simple unfolding of positivity. I often try to convince her that things are impossible. I try hard and I ought to be able to succeed at this. I can be very persuasive when I make up my mind to be. But Lenora has a way of refusing to take “no” for an answer. If I say a thing can’t be done, she says it can. If I say: “Tell me how,” she comes up with some idea that has at least 10,000 flaws when I count them. That’s the thing that makes Lenora my hope hero. She sees possibilities where I don’t.
The results of Lenora’s hope-motivated persistance combined with her boundless energy can be seen in so many accomplishments credited to the Hope Foundation over the past dozen years. Because of her, Norquest College started a program of hope studies embraced by many health care professionals. Because of her, there is a book of strategies and practices for doing hope work in classrooms. Because of her, the work of the THI, arguably the most important research project I did at Hope Foundation was finally documented—eight years after I finished working on it. Because of her, the administrative structure of Hope Foundation has functioned through hard times without sacrificing any of the program areas.
Even as I write this, I can hear Lenora reading it. I know what you are saying, Lenora. You are saying, “Oh stop! I didn’t do any of this alone. All my colleagues helped, and so many people from outside as well. Board members helped me. Kids helped me. Teachers helped me. My husband helped me.”
This, Lenora, is definitely true. But I hardly think that you can seriously deny that your steadfastness is the common factor in all these examples. Audacious hopers inspire others and make room for them to help when there’s work to be done. There’s probably no limit to the number of things that can be accomplished if you decide not to care who gets the credit.
Over the years I’ve learned, usually later than I wanted to, to step back and watch you in curious wonder. I have noticed how, at some point, I then find it impossible to stay back. Compelled by an irresistible force that can only be labelled as hope, I find myself joining you in trying to make possible the thing I wanted all along.
It’s scary to work with audacious hopers. They test our courage. They dare us to disappoint them. We are constantly challenged to position ourselves in relation to them, to search ourselves for that which matters most. Sometimes audacious hopers make us want to hide. Hiding seems easier than facing the hard stuff.
My years at Hope Foundation have exposed my ears to the stories told by thousands of audacious hopers in the heady days after success—large or small--has been attained. These stories challenge me to wonder what I would have done if they had asked for my help during the trying time. From this has come one firm conclusion. When audacious hopers tell their stories, about the people they met on the journey, I’d rather be listed with the ones who supported than named as a barrier that had to be thwarted.

YOU CAN BEAT STUTTERING

Everyone ought to have a friend like my friend Jim, a man who goes out of his way to send me information that ought to give me hope. Last week he sent along an article about Annie Glenn, wife of the famous astronaut John Glenn. Limited by a stuttering disability, she was successfully treated.
John Glenn’s True Hero

THEM

When reporters ask how to refer to performer Rae Spoon, Ray replies, "I prefer to be referred to as "they". There are so many things we would not guess--a good reason to ask.

A REST FROM COMPASSION FATIGUE

I liked the time in Calgary with the Carewest Day Hospital staff,
Workshopping hope and compassion fatigue with 2 family physicians, 2 nurses, 2 secretaries, 6 therapy assistants/aides, 2 physiotherapists, 2 occupational therapists, 2 recreation therapists, 2 social workers, 1 psychologist, 1 SLP, 1 geriatric psychiatrist and a manager.
I liked the way we worked together,
How they whined: “If your chronic pain group gets 2 hours for a hope collage, why do we only get 45 minutes?”
I liked the excellent food at the FCJ Christian Life Centre
And the memory of my previous night spent imagining a nun’s past life in a convent many times re-invented since 1893
“I hope everything suited you well,” said the smiling hostess who bid us farewell at day’s end.
“You say it was a workshop, but it sounded like a playshop to me.”

GETTING A JOB

A tip of the hope hat to Edmonton's last milkman on his final run; Barry Svederus retires Friday after 34 years, marking the end of an era
Sometimes you hear the most amazing stories about being hired against the odds. They give you hope when you despair at how difficult it can be to find work. How I wish I’d seen this story earlier this week, when I was searching for hopeful stories to tell at our hope and strengths group for people with chronic pain. People were saying it was unlikely that they could be hired, given some of their life conditions.
That conversation, quite naturally, led me to want to tell them a story about an unlikely hiring event. Of all the getting-hired stories I’ve heard, I do believe this one takes the cake.
‘A native of tiny Elnora, Svederus was working at a cannery in Wetaskiwin when he sought a job driving a milk truck in Edmonton.

Arriving for his interview at the former home of the City Dairy, a building off Jasper Avenue that had a towering milk bottle on its roof, he was hired,
even though he applied in his bare feet.

As a joke that day, friends had filled his only pair of dress shoes with ballbearing grease.

"I think they hired me out of pity," Svederus says.

"They figured I was so poor I didn't own a pair of shoes."’

BETTER CONNECTIONS

Imagine how the world would be different if we began each day assuming that people we haven’t met are dying to connect with us. Elevator rides would be as lively as they are when a child boards asking to press the button, and everyone gets organized to make it possible for her to push the button. Future classmates would introduce themselves to their neighbours before the teacher arrives on the first day of class. People would get as much sympathy after their leg casts were removed as they got when others could see that they were wearing a cast. Internet dating sites might go out of business. They probably wouldn’t be needed if we were able to approach people, assuming that they are dying to meet us.

OASIS OF HOPE IN JERUSALEM

There is a place in Jerusalem where anyone can get free eye care regardless of religion. That place is St. John Eye Hospital
Built in Jordan in 1960 to serve a population too poor to get medical services, the hospital suddenly found itself in Israel when the ground on which it stands changed hands in the war of 1967. The staff at St. John are Jewish, Christian, Muslim. One thing they can all agree on—giving people back their eyesight is a good thing. And so the doctors and nurses cross borders every day, and the patients cross borders every day, and the borders are heavily guarded, and sometimes they don’t get to the hospital in time for surgery. But they keep on working, year in and year out so that people of all faiths will not be unnecessarily blind.

ROMANCE WEEK

Reading Week is ending today. No romance happened in our family, as far as I know. Reading Week has developed a bit of a reputation—Romance Week, I have come to call it.
Last year in Reading Week one child proposed on a cliff in Kawai. Two years ago Reading Week brought a call from Stanley Park announcing the engagement of another child.
Thirty-nine years ago I didn’t get engaged in Reading Week, but I did jump on a plane for a visit to my love who was attending Acadia University in Wolfville Nova Scotia. My mother, having not quite yet come to recognize that she would no longer be the most compelling force in my life, crossed her arms in unspoken disapproval. “It’s quite a lot of money,” she observed. She was correct in that. The round trip ticket was costing over $200! But alas, since she wasn’t paying the bill, her sensible observation fell upon uninfluenced ears. It really wasn’t about the money anyway. She could see, I think, that things were about to change.
So I didn’t cross my arms when my daughter took the plane to Vancouver, and I kept them hanging loosely when my son left for Kauai. Valentine’s Day may be the poster holiday for flower shops and candy stores, but it’s the airlines that rake in the money in Romance Week. When they start buying the plane tickets, you might as well start planning the wedding.

THE HOPE IN CHRISTOPHER PLUMBER

“It gives people hope about how to treat provocative subjects” Christopher Plumber

“Of course I’m near the end,” says Christopher Plumber, poised to win an OSCAR at the age of 82. “What I’m looking for now are parts where I don’t die in the end. I want to go on.” AN OSCAR NOD FOR CHRISTOPHER PLUMBER Plumber is talking about his role in Beginners, as an elderly man confessing to the world that he is gay. What a delight it is to listen to him, a man with a vision of a future in which he will fully participate.
I confess that I really needed to hear from somebody with Plumber’s attitude. I was getting a little bit depressed about all the fuss over what age we should begin the seniors benefits. I looked around and noticed all the money being spent by seniors. I wondered how we could ever get more of a commitment to invest in the future of our kids. How many trips to Florida, how many homes in Phoenix could be sacrificed without even touching the outer edge of deprivation?
Not all seniors can be expected to embrace the future with Plumber’s sense of wonder. But I do hope to age with a perspective that resembles his.

HEN MUSIC

“Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections.” (original source unknown)

These days I find that I am the reluctant coordinator of a music program. It’s an uncomfortable position to be in, given that I like music to be good, and my own musical abilities are inconsistent at best. “Some day,” I promise myself in the spirit of hope, “we will find a music leader and I will return to the roll that suits me better, a helpful participant, a loudish singer, a generous giver of advice, much of which should probably be ignored.”
These days I hear myself clucking like the Little Red Hen who sought to bake a loaf of bread. At each step in the process she asked for help from her neighbours. I am the little Red Hen of the email generation. “Who will help me learn the music? Who will help me play the music? Who will help me sing the music?”
Sometimes, when the answers come in, I think I am the Little Red Hen, whose neighbours were far too busy for the gathering and preparation. “I would like to help you, but I’m going to Saskatoon.” “I’d like to help you, but I am hosting a party.” “Then I will do it myself,” I cackle.
And that’s where the whole Red Hen thing breaks down. In the end I am never really doing it myself. There are always people there to help, albeit fewer than we would wish. And there are days when I go off to California, or Calgary and I am not there to help. Through it all the email continues. Every week, in response, there is at least one note from Barb, a busy-but-infinitely helpful person. And every email from Barb concludes itself with this quote: “Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections.” And even though every person who gets Barb’s email also gets this message, it somehow manages to speak directly to me.
Would the Little Red Hen have been happier in the age of email?

ROBERT MUNSCH SAVED MY SKIN

If I had been thinking clearly, I would not have been telling stories at the library on Family Day, given that most of my stories are crafted for the ears of adults, and there would likely be children at the library. But T.A.L.E.s had a contract to tell at libraries, and there weren’t enough tellers for all the libraries, and the T.A.L.E.S tellers always help me out when I need help. So I said I would tell for an hour at the library on Family Day. You know how it goes.
If I had been thinking clearly, knowing that most of my stories are for adults, I would have started planning months ahead of time, polishing kids stories, developing an all ages repertoire. But I was busy and anyway, I reasoned, adults like my stories because I tell them the way we tell stories to children—with repetition, and participation, and a little music to carry the tale. How different, I wondered, can children be from adults when it comes to stories? And that is how I talked myself out of spending months planning a new repertoire. You know how it goes.
If I had not suddenly panicked, I might not have written the desperate 11th-hour note to my tale-telling friends, asking what stories they would be telling at the library on Family Day. But they, sensing my panic, responded with words of comfort. Tell animal stories, they said. Take your washboard with the collection of sticks and spoons, they advised. “Tell them the story of the Paperbag Princess,” said my sister. She once heard me tell that story to adults.
If I had been thinking clearly, I would have run screaming from the room when it became clear that my audience would be composed of ten tiny tots, some rolling on the rug, others in the arms of moms who would not be in a space for listening to stories designed to entertain adults unless those stories first entertained the children. But I could hardly have reached the door without stepping on a toddler, and the husband who once promised to stay with me for better or worse decided to stay for my performance, and the clock said it was time to start the hour, and somewhere in the nether reaches of my mind’s ear, a tiny voice asked me: “What would Robert Munsch do?”
So I abandoned all the stories I had planned to tell, and we counted monkeys jumping off the bed, and then we joined some noisy neighbours in a lusty argument about who owns the moon, and then we sang about cats. Every time I left a space in a song or story we had been repeating, a child’s voice would chirp the missing words, and thus the time rolled on.
Because most of the tots were still listening after half an hour, we entered an extended version of Three Little Pigs, where my farmer’s daughter childhood memories compelled me to teach them how pigs really sound. They don’t say oink, you know. (we lost one spectator there—sent out screaming in terror, from the din of authentic-sounding pig grunts and squeals. I guess that’s why they tell city kids pigs say oink.)
If I had been thinking clearly, I wouldn’t have offered them the choice. But there was still fifteen minutes left in the hour, and I couldn’t think of another story to start, and they had been good. They deserved to be let out early, didn’t they? Would they like to be finished now?
But they didn’t want to be let out early. They wanted a story about three little trains, which would have been fine had I known a story about three little trains. Flustered, I paused for a moment. In my mind’s ear, Robert Munsch said, “Start a story about three little trains.” I knew the first few words, and so it started.
“Once upon a time there were 3 trains, a very long train, a medium-sized train, and a tiny little train with only one car. The big train had many, many cars. There were 58 cars of grain, 67 tanker cars of oil, 89 cars loaded down with cars and trucks on their way across the country, and 28 cars carrying other things. The medium-sized train had 49 cars full of people. The little train had only one car, with an engineer and a conductor.”
On and on went the story. After every sentence there was a breath, and during that breath, I listened for the voice of Robert Munsch, waited to see how the next sentence would start, and when the next sentence started, , I waited to see how it would end.
If you really think about this story, you’ll probably guess what happened and how it ended. According to robert Munsch, the stories we tell to children ten to follow patterns. There was a problem, many solutions were tried, and eventually the little guy saved the day.
“Well done,” said the husband who promised to stay for better or worse.
“Thank you,” said the library staff.
“You got off lucky,” said the voice in my mind’s ear. And so I promised myself and all libraries with Family Day aspirations that I never again would volunteer for something that might turn into a storytime for toddlers unless I had developed an age-appropriate repertoire. Robert Munsch saved my skin this time, but I don’t know for sure if I could count on him every time.

WISDOM, SUFFERING AND THE BEST TREATMENT FOR CHRONIC PAIN

“Societies like ours are structured technologically to deal with knowledge - it's what the Internet is great for, as TV, radio and print were before it. We're not as good at wisdom.” –Rick Salutin, The Toronto Star 2012-02-17

This week I am hoping for wisdom—a shared wisdom among those of us who try to help people with chronic pain, the wisdom to direct people in pain to the right treatment at the most opportune time. . Others are also thirsting for wisdom, though each of us travels the route that starts with our own area of expertise. Lately we have been asking and answering questions about our hope and strengths groups for people who have chronic pain. The answers, so far as we can give them, are—in a word--confusing.
Q: Do our groups cure chronic pain?
A: Not likely, but then, medical treatments don’t cure it either. That’s what makes it classify as cronic.
Q: Do our groups reduce the pain?
A: In some cases we notice that people who are showing visible signs of pain in session 1 are showing fewer visible signs in session 3. More than that we cannot say. What we do know is that people report receiving benefit from attending.
Q: What pain-reducing strategies are you using?
A: We introduce some relaxation exercise, and facilitate the sharing of information among the group members. Above all, we emphasize that we are hope specialists, not treaters of pain. Most of our efforts are directed toward creating an environment where hope and other positive emotions have an opportunity to flourish. That is the work that sets our groups apart. We use our knowledge to help people gain a sense of themselves as people who have hope, people who have strengths.
Q: Why do you bother with that?
A: Because it’s hard to feel good about anything, it’s hard to laugh, it’s hard to go out, it’s hard to seek the best help, it’s hard to feel confident when you are dealing with the combination of chronic pain and the difficult things that happen to people who have chronic pain. People with chronic pain get frustrated. They get tired of trying. They get angry. Hope and other positive emotions help with all these things.

As I write this, I am aware that thousands of Albertans with chronic pain—having begun at the office of their family physician--are referred to pain specialists. Their referral is handled in a central system that keeps them on a waiting list for more than a year, always hoping that the next doctor will stop the pain. They are on a journey. Who can say for sure what any of them might do differently along the way if they had a good laugh, or an opportunity to tell stories about their strengths, or choose pictures for a hope collage? Who can say for sure what effect any of this might have on the ability of a body to make the most of the medicines the doctors offer?
All of us—helpers and sufferers alike, hope for an end to the suffering. And in thinking about the sufferers I know, I wonder how we can take the information that we have, and generate the wisdom to offer the right treatment to the right people at the most opportune time.

OH, THE JOY!

Me: financially speaking, I’m not as wealthy as I was yesterday.
Myself: How do you feel about that?
Me: Sounds like something a counsellor would ask. But if you really want to know, I feel happy, joyful, delighted, smug, proud, satisfied and generally pleased as punch.
Myself: Let’s have a little summary here. Your personal wealth has decreased and your positive feelings are in overdrive. What part of this do I not understand?
Me: Well, let’s start with the facts, shall we? One of my students mentioned a book several times.
Myself: And?
Me” She was using that book to help her clients because it suited her better than other, more favous books that had been recommended.
Myself: And?
Me: I thought I ought to know about that book, and the best way to know about it would be to read it.
Myself: And?
Me: Well, as you ought to know, a blind person doesn’t simply decide to read a book. Most books are in print, and some technology and a lot of luck tends to be required.
Myself: So?
Me: So I searched on line for the book in the CNIB Library.
Myself: And you found it?
Me: No. I hadn’t really expected to find it there. It’s a kind of workbook, not the sort of thing the CNIB Library is apt to have. So I searched on line in the Edmonton Public Library.
Myself: and you found it?
Me: Yes, I found it, but only in paperback, and all the copies were out.
Myself: So you put it on hold?
Me: No. I searched on line for an audio copy of the book.
Myself: And you found it easily?
Me: Well, perhaps not easily. The first page showed me ten links to the book. All of them in print.
Myself: It must have been in the next ten.
Me: No. But it did appear as link #26. It was on a website called Read How You Want. Not only was it there in audio, but it was available either in braille, or in DAISY format, a direct conversion from e-text. You know how I’ve been complaining lately about e-text? Every e-text book could very easily be converted for direct use by blind readers if only the publishers and authors would say that it should be so. So far, the authors and publishers have not been very helpful in this regard. But this book is available. Once I found it, I had it. And now I am $13.00 poorer. OH, THE JOY!!!!!

HOW POWERFUL IS HOPE?

“What happens when the medical system and hope collide?” This is the question raised by MS WARS: HOPE, SCIENCE AND THE INTERNET an episode of The Nature of Things that aired February 9 2012 on CBC TV.
It all started in 2009 when Dr. Paolo Zamboni,
an Italian surgeon whose wife has multiple sclrosis, launched a small study in which favourable symptom reduction was achieved when some MS patients had simple surgery to open veins in their necks. After that, according to host David Suzuki, there began a race between hope—a phenomenon that spread among patients like wildfire over the Intrnet, and the long-trusted medical process of testing hypotheses and developing treatments. The medical establishment was directing money into long term projects—the development of stem cell research, for example. The patients, seeing a chance for some relief in the present, successfully diverted these funds to support studies of Zamboni’s so-called Liberation Therapy. It is still unclear how much of the benefit of liberation therapy is attributable to the placebo effect, but it is clear that many patients have achieved cymptom relief, often at great expense as they travelled to far-away countries for a surgical procedure which was routinely performed in Canada for other purposes, but disallowed as a treatment for the symptoms of MS.
Regardless of what the long term results may show, in the current battle that Suzuki frames as hope vs medical establishment protocol, hope is the clear winner.

THE HONEST BIOGRAPHY

Hoepe is a personal thing. When you make a presentation about hope, people listen more quickly than you speak. In doing so, they view everything you say in context, in their own frame of reference. You start a paragraph, they finish it.
Hope, it seems is interesting to just about everybody. And so, in preparing biographical notes for up coming hope presentations to university students at Circle K, scholars in Educational Psychology 446/546, teen-age girls at Edmonton Public Schools, local people of the Lakedell Agricultural Society, patients at the Parkinson’s Society, retired teachers, grieving lunchtime learners on staff at the University of Alberta, staff at a seniors’ day program, staff at Alberta Children’s Services, and conferences for suicide prevention, Alberta College of Social Workers, and offender treatment, I offer this one statement to establish, beyond all doubt, my credibility. “wendy edey is the author of several imaginary books.”

HOPE AND SUICIDE PREVENTION

I am searching for the articles that explicitly link hope and suicide prevention. It’s surprising how little I am finding. Somehow I had expected to find more. Though some of the writing mentions hope, the word is usually in the title. After that, it’s not mentioned again.
Here lies a great opportunity for the growth of hope work. People like to talk about hope. In my experience, people who are thinking about suicide like to talk about hope, not in the first moment, but later, after you’ve heard them speak of suicide, after they get past that first terrifying few minutes of declaring that they don’t have any hope. They like to come at hope from the back door, to talk about what they would do if they were more hopeful. They like to talk about it in symbols. They can tell you about a picture that could remind them of hope if they saw it first thing in the morning, and then, as an act of hope, they can make a plan to hang such a picture within sight of their beds. They can name a person who comes to mind when they think of hope.
So often, when people talk to us about suicide, and we listen, we hear only the hopelessness. Hearing that, it falls to us to introduce the idea of hope, to open up the conversation. Here lies the opportunity for hope work, to develop the hopeful ear, to listen as a hopeful person would listen, with the conviction that the hope will be in there somewhere and we’ll find it, when we search. These are some early steps that we can take to link hope and suicide prevention.

UPS AND DOWNS

“Ask yourself what a hopeful person would do, and do that thing.” It’s one of those things a hope specialist is apt to say, one of the things I say. It sounds just right when I say it into microphones on stages to packed audiences. It sounds good when I say it in a counselling session. And when I say it to myself, well, that’s another story.
Another story started when David and I approached the elevators in a large Vancouver hotel. These were no ordinary elevators. There was no button that said UP. There was no button that said DOWN. There was only a touch screen with a wheelchair sign on it. Now here was an opportunity for hope studies.
A hopeful person, expecting a good outcome, would have marched right over to the desk to ask how a blind person would use such an elevator, given that it had only a touch screen on which to press the floor numbers. But I wasn’t convinced there would be a solution, and we had a suitcase, and so, when the little sign popped up, instructing us to choose Elevator C, David chose Elevator C, and we boarded it as soon as it arrived.
Elevator C, like its new elevator neighbours, was no ordinary elevator. It had no rows of buttons that could let you select the floor you wanted, all the way up to 33. In fact it had only a button marked OPEN, and another for EMERGENCY. There was no need for buttons given that the elevator, having been instructed by David’s tap on the touch screen, already knew it was destined for 33.
When we got off the elevator, we looked at the situation that would greet us going down. It was no ordinary situation. There we found no UP button, no DOWN button, only a touch screen of numbers with a wheelchair symbol. When David touched the screen to indicate a planned trip to the lobby, a sign told him to wait for Elevator B. A hopeful person would have called the desk to ask what plan had been put in place for a blind person to get down. But we needed to get settled, and then we needed to go out, because the sun was shining out there.
I didn’t speak to the front desk that day. I didn’t speak to the front desk the next day. I did speak to the front desk on the third day, as I was checking out.
“The elevator has a voice feature,” said the desk clerk. “You activate it by pushing the wheelchair symbol.”
So now I know, and I am glad. But I would have known sooner—if I had done what a hopeful person would do.

FOR PANDORAS EVERYWHERE

I often wondered if people named Pandora were pursued for conversations about hope?
And then someone named Pandora crossed my path.
She said, “People tease me. They ask why I opened the box and let all the bad things out.”
So I have resolved to be grateful to all the Pandoras of the world, grateful that they held onto the hope.
We don’t need all the evils that reportedly escaped from Pandora’s box, but we certainly do need the hope.

WHAT A MOTHER CAN DO

In the mix of hope and politically motivated change, there is an order of things. First we believe that something is possible, and then we engage enough people for a long enough time in the hard work of making it so.
So far the current storm of rhetoric about future seniors benefits is failing utterly to engage my hope. Personally, I hope there will be seniors benefits for my children. My children represent a broad and very picture of society. Some of them will live their adult lives as well-paid professionals. Others will earn minimum wage doing work that is important to all of us.
With our leaders scrambling for attention, it seems that I am being asked to choose between two visions. In the one vision, there are no sacrifices to be made. Then, in thirty years or so, everything will be all right. In the other, catastrophe will befall us at any moment. Neither vision engages me as a possibility worth working on. And yet, as a hopeful person, I am still waiting.
What is it that would engage my hope? I am waiting to hear what we are aiming for, an end I could believe in. And then, with that hoe planted firmly in view, I would like to hear some ideas about sacrifices we boomers need to make now so that all my children can have security as seniors. When the debate takes that direction, I think I may begin to hope, and when I hope, I seem to be more ready to work on the hard stuff.

WHERE IS OBAMA ON HOPE?

Obama is talking less about hope these days, mentioning the word hardly at all, being, in general, less explicit about it than he was in the previous campaign. Has hope become unimportant to him then, or is it simply the natural progression of events in the career of a man who took on the mantle of power with great passion and discovered that, without the ongoing sacrificing support of many others, he cannot fix everything? If I were in charge of the world, I’d call him up and ask him, but since I am busy, and he is so hard to reach, I’ll bet on the natural progression theory.
I remember how he thrilled me back in 2008 with his ever-present use of the word in all its forms, his passionate support for hope, his gathering of hope around stories for the past, his urging of a country—no, the world—to move toward it. I remember how it warmed me to see how a message of hope brought the citizens of a country together to vote in a manner they likely had not intended at the start of the campaign. Here was evidence of hope in action, the realization of a hope lady’s dream.
Obama is still doing hope work today, albeit in a more subtle way, working, as we say in hope studies, implicitly rather than explicitly with hope. He’s finding hopeful stories from the past. He’s praising good work in the present. He’s using the word imagination and setting up the picture of a possible future.
Yes, I say it’s a natural progression, much like the one we see in so many instances. Explicit talk of hope gets you started, and then you get down to the hard stuff. Those who have a natural tendency to be hopeful handle the hard stuff more gently, more positively than those who prefer to embrace the future by bashing their opponents to smitherines in a good scrap.
That said, THE HOPE LADY is watching, hoping, for signs that Obama has not forgotten how important it is to mention hope every once in a while.

MOVING

If you are going to move, you can move the way I would move, the big and final way. You book a truck, you pack your things, you get your keys, you get the truck, you load your things, you deliver the things, you return the truck, you unpack. Presto! You have moved.

Or you can move the way Lawrence is moving. You pack some things, you get your keys, you get your buddy to move a few things with you. Then every day after that, you move a few boxes at a time. As time goes by, you begin to do things you would do if you lived there. One day you and your buddy can sit on your couch and play video games. Another day you can invite friends over for a simple dinner. Some day you will move your bed, and then you’ll be sleeping at the new place. Today you say, “I think we can manage without getting a truck!” This is the ease-yourself-into-it way.

And from it all, there is only one logical conclusion to be made. Moving into your own place is like so many other things in life. There is more than one way to do it.

THE DAYS OF MINT!

I love the way language changes—the new meanings for old words, the old words that make a comeback. You can see it everywhere, once you decide to notice. Look in the news, where our modern search capacities track such phenomena. Journalist Tom Spears, for example, has noticed that the Ottawa Citizen printed ‘iconic’ 370 times in 2011, not even once in 1990. By 2032 it might appear thousands of times, or maybe none at all. Nobody knows which word would achieve iconic status, taking its place and soaking up the printer’s ink in the event of its demise. If I had the tools I’d find out how often ‘hope’ appears in the news, whether its use has grown or shrunk. Perhaps some day I will have the tools, maybe even be lucky enough to know how to use them. But that isn’t likely to happen tomorrow. The question is, what shall I do while I wait?
A few stories come to mind, might as well take a moment to tell them. This Christmas season, with the family gathered for kitchen chatter, seemed like the perfect time to drop a phrase that once echoed in our house. “Beats for you,” I said. Everyone understood.
I don’t know what ‘beats for you’ means in other households. In ours, it means, ‘Turn the clock back 20 years and imagine us smiling at one another, giving a playful push.’ “Beats for you,” the pusher would say with a grin. A mutually understood implication bubbled unspoken just below the surface. The intended meaning could, I confess, have been delivered with more directness. But what self-respecting just-about-teen-ager would say to his brother, “You have been fortunate to avoid the full force of my wrath on this particular occasion?” If you wanted to make a veiled threat with a smile, you’d warn of potential ‘harsh beats.’
I have no idea where the language of beats came from. Maybe it started at school, maybe on television. I know I didn’t start it, but I will confess that I encouraged it. I used it, though probably not at the office. It is difficult to imagine what direction my career might have taken had I—assigned the job of disciplining an employee—opened with a grinning exclamation, “Beats for you.”
Childhood is a veritable breeding ground for the introduction of expressions. This, possibly, is because youth so often exclaim. Most of our out-of-fashion exclamations began with kids and youth—cool, neat, rad, mint! Mint! What’s that you say? You’ve never heard anybody say ‘mint’?
Well, if you’ve never heard young people exclaiming ‘mint!’ every 14 seconds, then it is clear to me that you never attended Jericho Hill School in the mid 1960’s. The school was out in Vancouver, many miles from my Alberta farm home. I was 11 when I arrived. “I’m from Alberta,’ I told my new roommate.
“Mint!” she said. Being the new kid in the dorm, I let it go, didn’t mention it the first time, or the fiftieth time I heard it. I knew her a little better by the next day, so I said, “What does ‘mint’ mean?”
“What does ‘mint’ mean?” she repeated, drawing a wondrous breath. “What does ‘mint’ mean? You don’t know what ‘mint’ means? They don’t say ‘mint’ in Alberta?”
“Well,” said I cautiously, not wanting to cast too dull a light on my ancestors, “I suppose it’s possible that they say it, and I simply haven’t heard it.”
“Mint,” said she, rising to the occasion with the gravity of a philosophy professor accepting an honorary doctorate, ‘mint means nice.”
“Mint!” I replied. Twelve hours later I had almost forgotten that there was once a time when I didn’t say it, except in reference to certain candies my Granny kept in her purse.
Some days I get down about language, start thinking that no new language is ever good, that all new words of exclamation start with F. Sometimes I long for the days of ‘mint!’ Most often it’s the talk shows that bring it on. It’s listening to the endless programs where callers are encouraged to call in complaining about how the language has gone to the dogs, how the apostrophe is wrongly used, how young people can’t even write a business letter.

Then I go out shopping, and a cashier just past her 16th birthday asks me, “Will that be cash, or card?”
Out pops my credit card. She picks it up, peers at it, runs an affectionate finger over the security chip. “Perrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect!” she cries. And here is the message, the sign, the affirmation that the days of ‘mint!’ are still with us, albeit in a different form. I know that all is right with the world.
In 2011 Everything Became Iconic

DAVID JOHNSTON'S MESSAGE OF HOPE

Here, from our Governor General is a message for the future.
Governor General David Johnston

OTTAWA— In the little over a year since I was installed as Governor General, Sharon and I have had the opportunity to travel to almost every corner of our
country—and to meet with Canadians from nearly every walk of life. It has been a remarkable experience.

What has struck us most is the generosity of Canadians. Generous with their talents, their time and their treasure. More than 80% of Canadians make some
kind of financial donation to a worthy cause every year. And some 12 million Canadians spend over two billion hours volunteering.

Those are impressive numbers and speak to the kind of people we are—and the kind of country we’ve built. We are a nation of barn raisers.

Whether it’s because of the geography we share or the climate we endure, giving seems to crop up everywhere in our society. We are bound to one another.
And every day, in countless ways large and small, Canadians demonstrate their gift for giving.

I have been reflecting upon the generosity of Canadians while thinking about the year ahead. In every new year lies the promise of a new beginning.

An opportunity to improve our lives and enrich our country. And as Canada approaches its 150th anniversary, in 2017, it’s time to renew our efforts to imagine
the kind of country we want—and to start building it in the New Year.

Imagine a smarter, more caring Canada. A Canada where giving—in all its forms—time, talent, altruism become an even more integral part of our daily lives—a
main stream part of being Canadian.

During the holiday season, each of us can plainly see the effect that the spirit of generosity and goodwill has upon our lives and our communities. And
each year we ask ourselves, ‘Why can’t every day be so full of sharing?’

Indeed, ‘Why not?’ An everyday culture of giving is one of the defining features of successful societies everywhere. This has been the case throughout Canada’s
past, but we cannot take it for granted. Together, let us renew our gift for giving as we look to the future.

CHRISTMAS 2011

In the hour before dawn on Christmas morning
With the air as soft as a downy pillow
And the traffic so light you could play on Rowland Road
As the toddlers’ parents ponder a post-present nap
And the teen-agers parents wonder when they will be able to open,
We are walking the streets with Pirate
In the face of a looming crisis.

In our pockets there is no bag
To capture the inevitable.
Bags abundant still at home
Useless on the closet shelf.
David in the throws of worry
Me above it all.

“Ridiculous!” I scoff
“To be so utterly concerned.
2,000 walks, 2,000 bags
Who can boast of such a record?
A perfect pick up history.”

“I have a Kleenex,” David says.
“Neurotic,” echoes my reply.
Self-proclaiming Pirate chooses,
“Here’s the place where I shall go!”

Then from the shadows rings a voice
A front-porch-sitting Christmas smoker,
“Merry Christmas,” cheery call.
“Leaving us a present are you?”

There proudly sporting the smuggest smile
That ever graced the pure of heart stands
I, awaiting Dearest David
As he calmly demonstrates
the infinite worth of prior planning
And the pick-up power of the lowly Kleenex.

READY YOU ASK!

“Are you ready for Christmas?” they always ask. It’s a strange question, don’t you think? What would it take to be so ready that a person would answer with an unqualified “Yes!”?
I, though I’ve never found the language to admit it openly, am always ready for Christmas, so long as you don’t measure readiness by the completedness of shopping, or the evidence of baking, or the perfection of carols practised beyond the genuine probability of error. What I do notice though is how, every year, despite the calendar, and the counting down, and the planning, and the scheduling, never cease to be surprise when Christmas arrives. “It’s here already,” I remark—though not too loudly. Would I want anyone to think I hadn’t been expecting it?

PREPARING FOR CHRISTMAS

And as I played the familiar carols
Getting them ready for special occasions,
Feeling the ancient rhythms,
Absorbing the timeless beauty

I wondered at so very much complaining
about Christmas music played too soon in stores
And so very little
About the rush to early shopping.

GIFTS THAT KEEP ON GIVING

Shall I pause to celebrate
The timeless gifts that keep on giving?

The accordion that came when I was 11
Accordions build lifelong character.

The china on the festive table.
China builds family memories.

Much-loved music playing on the stereo,
The clothes that bring the compliments.

And the very best of all,
Delivered 38 years ago today
With a promise and a ring,
A husband.

MARGARET-ANN ARMOUR IS A TEACHER

I never cared for chemistry classes. “Get it over with as quickly as possible and make sure you pass,” was what I said. But if I ever get truly interested in chemistry—interested for more than one day—which I’m not promising, I may very well owe the credit to a most remarkable teacher--Dr. Margaret-Ann Armour. It is almost 24 hours since I spent an hour with her, I am not preparing for an exam, and I still remember some of the things she taught me. Now that is something to notice!
Margaret-Ann is internationally known for her passionate teaching. She has a style that makes science accessible, relevant and interesting. “Science is not something done by a group of experts sitting in a lab somewhere,” she says. “Science is all around us, in the natural world and in our own bodies.”
Her teaching ideas are designed with a hook to draw people in, and an unshakable belief that we’ll want to be there once she’s got us.
She told me she could make a yellow compound and then shake it. As she shook it, it would turn red, then green. I was a little bit impressed at that point—a little bit. Then she told me that if we left the compound to its own devices, it would turn red, then go back to yellow.
I listened politely, but then, without even meaning to, I asked a question. “Why does it revert?”
“It’s because the dye in the compound picks up molecules of oxygen as you shake it,’ she said. “But the compound isn’t stable. So it slowly releases the oxygen again.”
It was a story, and I like stories, but since there would be no exam, I expected to forget it some time within the next few minutes. Margaret-Ann, however, was not finished with me yet. “That’s how it is with blood in our bodies,” she said. “It picks up molecules of oxygen in the lungs and the heart sends it through the body. It deposits the oxygen in the cells along the way, then goes back for more.”
I have been taught about the lungs and blood before. I hadn’t bothered to give it much thought. But when I heard myself telling the story to others, I knew that a skilled teacher had been messing with my attentions.
We got into that conversation because she was telling me, at my request, how she engaged the interest of young aboriginal students at a camp the Hope Foundation sponsored on the University of Alberta campus. “When those students came in to the lab the group was quiet. Normally I would get things going by asking questions. But that wouldn’t be the right thing here. They need time to feel that they belong. So I talked for a while and then I went right into having them make nylon.”
The process of making nylon went very well. By the time the nylon was made, the students were involved. They were ready to ask and answer questions. After that, they went on to make Bakelite.
Not missing a chance to engage me, she assured me that I would understand what she was talking about because of the work I do. I would know how important it is to consider first the needs and interests of the people you are trying to help, how important it is to hook them, to make participation irresistible to them.
The lesson ended on schedule. Margaret-Ann went away, but not without leaving something behind. For here I am today, writing about compounds on THE HOPE LADY Blog, and wondering how much the average person would know about chemistry if every teacher could teach like Margaret-Ann.

A CHRISTMAS INVITATION

Me: We got an invitation today. We were invited to do something.
Myself: Really? We’ve had a lot of invitations lately, but I don’t recall getting any today. What have we been invited to?
Me: We’ve been invited to give up a grudge, one we’ve been holding a long time.
Myself: I don’t recall being invited to give up a grudge, unless, maybe, you mean that letter we got that said nice things about us.
Me: That’s the letter all right. So are we going to?
Myself: Are we going to what?
Me: Give up the grudge.
Myself: You mean today? You want an answer right now? What’s the rush?
Me: There’s hardly a rush. We’ve been carrying this grudge for decades. But I’m finding it a bit of a burden, and I’m just wondering when we’ll be giving it up.
Myself: Well I don’t really know when. The grudge, as you call it, is perfectly justified. We were wronged, you might recall, treated rather badly. I would say we’re owed an apology. I hardly see how a pleasant letter can stand in for that.
Me: What about several nice letters? There have been a few of them over the years, you know.
Myself: Well, I hardly think several nice letters spread over a long period equals an apology. Apoligy is the standard form of invitation when it comes to giving up grudges.
Me: Standard, maybe, but maybe not the only form. What about a few invitations added to a few nice letters? There have been a few invitations to events, as I recall, and never a word of hostility. Surely that counts for something.
Myself: Maybe. But you never really know where words of hostility could be hiding. Maybe they’re written between the lines.
Me: I’ve got that covered. I’ve been looking between the lines of every letter. There’s nothing there except white space. But, look, I’m not hard to deal with. Maybe today is too soon to part with something so familiar as this grudge. Maybe we won’t be able to part with this grudge until tomorrow. What do you think?
Myself: Tomorrow? Well we’ll see what tomorrow brings. I’m not making any promises. This will take some time to consider, and I’m pretty busy, what with Christmas coming and all.
Me: So just tell me one thing, will you? What is your biggest fear about giving up this grudge.
Myself: Fear? What do you mean, fear. I have nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a grudge, after all. What’s so scary about a grudge?
Me: Plenty, I’d say. Most of the world’s wars—maybe all of the world’s wars—are fueled by grudges. I’d call that scary. And here’s another thing. Only half the world’s apologies are generated by genuine remorse. The rest are matters of convenience. Try as I might, I can’t really think how it was convenient to write these nice letters. Now here’s another idea. Could you give it as a gift?
Myself: Give a grudge as a gift?
Me: No, dummy. Could we give up the grudge as a gift? Give the gift of forgiveness?
Myself: Well, there’s a new Christmas idea, the gift of forgiveness. But then, you’ve got to be careful with these new ideas? One year it’s a new idea, the next year it’s a trend. You know how these things get going. One year it’s Cabbage Patch Dolls. Another year it’s I-phones. Pretty soon the whole world is changing, and everybody’s talking about the new trend. Can you imagine what might happen if everybody started giving the gift of forgiveness for Christmas?

A COUNSELLING STUDY WITH FASD

Lisa Rowbottom is studying counsellors who intentionally modify their strategies to meet the psychological counselling needs of people who have FASD. It isn’t easy finding people to study, but she now has three, and is hoping to find a fourth. I spent an hour or so answering Lisa’s questions last Thursday morning. The benefit of that time went to me as well as to Lisa. She got a research participant, and I, preparing in advance to make good use of that hour, got the incentive to pull together my thoughts. In doing so, I noticed how counselling people with FASD is a process to which I haven’t given much dedicated thought. I’ve simply plunged in when the need arose, and felt my way in, paying heed to my knowledge about the complex set of emotional, cognitive and behavioural barriers I’d be likely to encounter, and the stories of real people that give me cause to hope that the effort is worthwhile.
I’ve lately been observing how, when it comes to growing up with FASD, things happen, but they happen slowly. A person who had never been able to communicate in writing will, in the early 20’s, suddenly start text messaging friends. A person whose grasp of math has never allowed for serious money management will, at the age of 29, take a score sheet and manually calculate the Yahtzee totals.
At conferences I often hear it said that people with FASD, showing remarkable verbal ability, appear to be smarter than they actually are. They talk a good line, but their actions don’t follow their words. The flip side of this is also true. People with FASD, in my experience, use their verbal ability to talk a good line sometimes, and a bad line at others. They ruminate. Their words influence their mental health in a very negative manner, and our words about how they never follow through compound the negativity, for us and for them.
FASD is a disability—a very complex disability—not simple, like blindness or deafness. If you fail to see it as a disability, if you try to break it down into parts and address them one at a time, you’ll get brain fatigue trying to understand it with logic, broken heart protecting yourself in its emotional storms, and a case of frustration so big that only an extended tropical vacation can cure it.
At conferences I have heard it said that insight-based psychotherapies don’t work well with people who have FASD. Frankly, I don’t think we know what works and doesn’t work. That’s one good reason, I’d say, for Lisa to be doing her study. Another good reason is that others, like me, have probably developed some undocumented strategies to use with people who have FASD. Undocumented is the operative concept here—explaining why we find so little useful counselling information in the literature. Alas, we counsellors have something in common with people who have FASD. We’ve been slow to develop.

WE MIGHT

We might get an artificial tree next year. That’s what we’re saying now, listening to the words we are saying, trying to figure out whether we mean them.
It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. In the corner of our living room stands a tree so fragrant that Mark and Tracey can smell it through the crack under the door to their upstairs apartment. It’s a tree with character, wide, embracing, flattish on top, shaved at bottom. Skinny branches extend their curving needle fingers to clutch at the bounty of treasures accumulated over the decades. Last night’s dinner guests said: “what a lovely tree, so full, not a single bare spot.”
The 2011 tree is everything an artificial tree will never be—difficult to handle, original, quirky. David acquired it at a Food Bank fund-raising event on Churchill Square. He asked them for a tall one, not realizing that he was making the choice to take home a tree that required the carrying strength of Hercules with a trunk that only a logger could love. He might have asked for a different tree, had it been a Thursday evening, or a Saturday afternoon. But that is not how it was. He had got it in the true Christmas spirit, in a sleepy haze at 5:30 AM on a Friday morning at the end of a week of working long hours of day and evening due to the commitment required during City Budget time. He had gone to get it at the earliest possible moment so that he’d be home in time to help Lawrence get his car into the repair shop before work.
All day, bottom in a pail of water, the tree languished stiffly in the garage, limbs imprisoned in string, silently wondering how we’d find a stand to hold it. “We might get an artificial tree next year,” we said, locking the doors behind us, hoping time would bring wisdom.
It takes a family to manage such a tree. Friday evening became an impromptu guys’ night out for Lawrence and David. After a period of experimentation resulting in the sacrifice of a dozen branches and approximately 10 billion long needles, they went shopping, came home with an electric reciprocating saw, and wrestled the trunk into submission.
Mark and Tracey loaned us their tree stand. It’s a bit more secure than ours for such a heavy tree. And we thought maybe we shouldn’t bother to get a new tree stand for ourselves, just in case we meant it when we said we might get an artificial tree next year.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

Two people sent emails early on Wednesday morning with stories to bolster my hope. I hadn’t asked either of them for that. Nevertheless, they had chosen the best possible day.
There are days when I really need somebody to tweak my hope. Wednesday was one of those. I was giving two hope presentations, one at the George Spady Centre, the other to the ATA Guidance Council. I was planning to say that you have to pay attention to hope, to notice it in amongst everything else. And there, offered on a silver platter, were two things I could notice—two things that gave me hope.
Jim had sent an article from the Globe and Mail. Secret Santas paying off strangers’ layaway accounts
Generosity, according to the story, had started with one person and gone viral, the way the urge to burn police cars tends to go viral in a riot. It happened in a store in Michigan, where an anonymous shopper paid off some debts for others. Publication of the story set off a trend of copycat behaviour in other stores, stores in other states. The very idea that generosity could be contagious was highly hope-enhancing, given all the Black Friday, threaten-and-crush news we’d been hearing, given the expectation that Black Friday behaviour will soon be present not only in the U.S., but also here in Canada. That alone would have been enough to put me in the mood for a presentation. But there was more.
David sent me a letter to the editor that appeared in The Edmonton Journal. Raise would close salary gap
Accompanying the letter was a note that said: “You could have written this.”
What he meant, but had not said, goes something like this. “Wendy, here is a completely straight-up no-nonsense letter saying something you’ve been harping about since the early 1970’s—that we can reduce the wage gap any time we choose to do so by giving equal dollar raises instead of percentage raises.”
It was affirming to know that one person has been listening to me. It felt good to see it written so plainly. It sounded good to hear somebody else say it. It gave me hope that we might actually begin to do something about the wage gap—some day. All this hand wringing about how we need to reduce the wage gap, need to reduce the need for food banks--gets a little tiring.
I do hope I will soon begin speaking out about one possible solution—to somebody other than David.

WHAT TRACY BEAR WISHES THE MEDIA WOULD REPORT

Tracy bear: “I rode the elevator in the Education Building with five other women. All of them had Ph.D.’s. All of them were aboriginal.”

CITIZEN HOPE

I hope to live in a country where a person can do a good day’s work and live comfortably on the wages earned for the effort. It’s a good hope to set your sights upon, a comforting hope, an easy hope to coddle. It’s a good hope to keep in a decorative box on your mantel, good right up to the moment when you open the box and take it out.
Like so many hopes of an ethereal nature, I’ve found that this one burns a bit when you hold it close and put its feet to the fire. In our house there lives a man who gets up every morning before I do, leaves for work before I do, and usually gets home after I do. For his efforts he is paid $11.00 an hour. Where will he live in the future?
“We’ll buy you a place to live,” I say, lifting the lid of the box where I keep my hope and peering inside. Facts are facts. We do not yet live in a country where a person making $11.00 an hour can save for a property purchase.
Free housing, you think. That ought to help make that $11.00 salary go a little further. But, when you really look at it, there’s no such thing as free housing. There are condo fees, and taxes. There’s the power bill, and the heating bill, and the phone bill, and the cable cost. You only have free housing when someone else pays all of that—not just this month, but next month, and next year, and maybe forever, if the hard day’s work you are able to do is not likely to earn you much more than $11.00 an hour.
In my world there are some seniors who live well. They have a comfortable home. They travel a bit. They can afford to hire some help when they need it. I hoep to be one of those. It’s a scary thought, the possibility of endangering this hope so that a person earning $11.00 can have a decent life. Isn’t that the government’s job? Or is it mine?

“If you wait for a better time… better than this very moment, if you wait until you feel settled, divinely inspired, perfectly centered, unburdened of your
usual worries, or free of your own skin, forget about it. You will be waiting tomorrow and the next day, wondering why you never managed to begin, wondering
how you did such an excellent job of disappointing yourself.” –Eric Maisel, Coaching The artist Within

WHO WANTS HOPE?

Who wants hope and turns to me
To see if I have some?

An endless parade of people oppressed
By depression and poverty and family illness,
The guidance counsellors at schools bent with tragedy,
Care-givers in a drunk tank,
Pain doctors,
People with Parkinson’s,
Offender treatment staff,
Spouses and children of someone with alzheimer,
Downtrodden agents of child protection,
Day programmers for disabled seniors,
Student counsellors learning their trade,
Colleagues at Hope House,
My own family.

With no solution for any of these,
Sometimes I think there would need to be
A bottomless pit of hope to mine
With stories and pictures and words of encouragement,
And most of the time I think there is one.

BRING A HIPPO TO HOPE HOUSE, NOVEMBER 24

Symbols of hope change lives. They stand at the head of world-altering movements. They help people face the days that threaten to be too painful for facing.
The hope-opotamus is a symbol of hope, a little stuffed animal of any colour that we can give away as a symbol of hope. And that is why we are asking you to bring a hippo to Hope House.
We are having an open house on November 24, 4:00 to 7:00. We’ll be showcasing our important work. We’ll be drawing the prize-winning names from our raffle of a WestJet trip for two and tickets to performances of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.
The hippos you bring will, through the act of bringing them, become hope-opotamuses. Soon they’ll be going out to people who tearfully or smilingly approach us looking for hope and help.
You can find Hope House at 11032-89 avenue. The University is well served by transit. If you decide to drive, park on 89 Avenue, and avoid getting a ticket by getting a parking pass for your dash from our reception desk.
So join us on November 24. You’ll be giving us hope, and helping us spread it.

HOPE LADY IN THE NEWS

HOW TO FIND HOPE IN HOPELESS TIMES

a hope letter in today's edmonton journal

HOPEFUL COUPLE A REMINDER

THINGS ARE BETTER

Things change. There’s hope in that. The Loud and Queer Caboret is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Stories about it are everywhere. Tickets are in demand. It wasn’t a big deal for me until I understood that, 20 years ago, the event went unannounced to the public. It wasn’t safe to put on such an event in Edmonton, would not have been wise to alert the media. There was a need to protect the audience, lest anyone be discovered there by someone who might report to an employer, or a family.

HOPELESSNESS INACTION: WHAT WOULD A HOPELESS PERSON DO?

I hardly ever write about hopelessness. I generally prefer to leave that to others. But I saw the mmost magnificent example of hopelessness, and it seemed that I ought to record it.
I shared a tiny meeting room with a few others. It was a chilly autumn day, the kind that tends to show itself in rooms where the heating system has failed to respond to the change of season. “It’s cold in here,” said Mary.
“Yes it is,” said Louise. “I’ll report it to the receptionist.”
When the meeting was over, we emerged into the toasty warm reception area. Louise walked up to the desk. “The heating isn’t working in that room,” she said.
“Oh,” said the receptionist.
“I think it needs to be fixed,” said Louise.
“Oh, they don’t fix things around here,” said the receptionist.
“It really is too cold to work in there,” said Louise.
“If I called,” said the receptionist, “they wouldn’t come. It took me a week to get a light switch changed.”

THE FAMOUS FIVE ARE A SYMBOL OF HOPE

All Canadians owe debt to Famous Five; Their fight was a foundation for human rights and equality laws

Paula Simons: “In Canada today, we are all, women and men, straight and gay, third generation, or aboriginal or brand-new immigrant citizen, persons, with the same legal
rights and privileges. We all get to vote.”

It wasn’t always that way. Five women made it possible, Emily Murphy, Irene Marryat Parlby, Nellie Mooney McClung, Louise Crummy McKinney and Henrietta Muir Edwards.

DAD'S DOGS

“Hope is a healthy, positive orientation that allows us to think about the future and feel okay in the present.” –Wendy Edey

I spent a couple of hours with a dozen spouses and adult children of people with late-stage Alzheimer Disease. We talked about these caregivers as people first, people with their own way of dealing with things, their own likes and dislikes, their own sources of pleasure and comfort. Then we talked about hope, then about their present troubles, and their future worries.
Hope is a difficult topic for this crowd. Their loved-ones have passed the stage of independence. If they are not already living away from home, they likely will be in the near future. Some cry each time their visitors leave. Others are unable to offer their visitors even the smallest flicker of recognition.
The people who attend caregiver groups are a loyal lot, full of compassion, hobbled by the conflicting pressures of their own beliefs. Prolonging the lives of their loved-ones seems cruel, not doing so unconscionable. Long-ago promises of stayng together in sickness and health are broken by force.
As the end of our time grew near, I asked them: “Given all that we have said today, what is it that gives you hope?”
One family, mother and daughter, told the following story.
“Dad has two dogs, plush toys. He thinks they are real. He cares for them, hugs them, pets them, tells stories about them, cries when bad things happen to them. We found the first dog at a garage sale and took it to him, never thinking how much he would treasure it. He was with us when we bought the second one. He hugged it and said, ‘It isn’t real, is it?’ But it also was real to him.”
This story had a very appreciative audience. One person spoke up. “You can’t leave anything in a nursing home,” she said reasonably. “Things get stolen.”
“Oh yes,” said the mother and daughter. “The dogs wander off. Sometimes the staff brings them back. Sometimes we go searching for them. Dogs wander off, you know.”
“One time Dad packed the dogs in a kennel for a trip he imagined he was taking on WestJet. Where he found the box we do not know. The cleaning staff didn’t realize there were dogs in the box when they threw it out. We went right to the store and got similar dogs. Then we bought four more look-alikes.”
Hope is a healthy positive orientation to the future that helps us feel okay in the present.

EVIDENCE THAT HOPE SYMBOLS CHANGE THE WORLD

CFL PLAYERS TO WEAR PINK TO HELP RAISE CANCER AWARENESS

HOPE SYMBOLS HAVE CHANGED THE WORLD

All over the world, at this very time, people are gathering around symbols of hope. There is the Arab spring, the Other 99, the colour Pink.
In a global sense hope symbols draw together individuals into a greater whole. They say, You are not alone. Others care about this cause.” Because I am not alone when I engage with a hope symbol, I say, “I am interested.” Then, as those hope symbols take on personal importance for me, I say, “My participation matters. I can make a difference.” That is how hope symbols have defeated the numbing progress of apathy. That is how hope symbols have propelled us to take actions we might not have taken. That is how hope symbols have changed the world.

SO MUCH BETTER

Here is something that gave me hope. I was invited to read a story to a class of teen-agers who have autism. Should it surprise us that they love a good story?
Most of them are boys, some are girls. Some speak clearly, others—not so much. Some can introduce themselves with a smile, for others the very idea is a minefield of anxiety.
The comings and goings are capably managed by four staff. Calm and cool they appear to be, at any point when chaos threatens. And though I sympathize with the teacher who worries about doing it well, and striving to do better, and having one more idea when nobody else has one, I am overwhelmed by the enormity of how far our education system has come, and how miraculously things have changed in the course of my adult life.

OCCUPYING EDMONTON

I stood on the edge of Churchill Square
Where a crowd had gathered to “occupy Edmonton”
A crowd of aged and babies,
Of centres and lefts and lefts of centre,
Earlier tallied at thirty,
Swelled to maybe a thousand.

The crowd was cheerful and peaceful,
Holding signs about global warming,
Being fair and ending poverty.
“Save our billionaire,” read one sign.
“Pay five hundred million in taxes.”

Though the media said it was nothing
Since the crowd lacked a crystal clear focus.
Here were a thousand citizens
Who truly believe that things can be different
Just saying no to powerlessness,
Just saying no to apathy.

And hope rose up inside me
For are not apathy and powerlessness
The things that keep the many down
Making all the influence available
To be placed in the hands of the few?

THE PEOPLE WE LIKE

I asked the Internet to find me a question to answer. It’s part of my October commitment to keep on writing, no matter what is happening in my life. Here is what the Internet asked me: “If your parents were just people your own age, would you like them enough to be friends with them?”
“Well,” I said in response, “I’d say this is a moot point. If my parents were my own age I wouldn’t even know them. We wouldn’t tend to bump into each other. My parent’s were/are rural people. You’d find them farming, or shopping at the Co-op, or throwing rocks at the curling rink. Somewhere along the line I turned into a city girl not often seen on farms, in Co-op stores or cheering on the curlers. Generally your friends hang out where you hang out.”
“Insufficient!” said the Internet. “You are ducking the question.”
“Yes,” said I, “I admit to ducking the question. But I do have an excellent excuse.”
“And what is your excellent excuse?” said the Internet.
“My excuse,” I replied, “and I think it’s a good excuse, my excuse for ducking the question of whether I’d like my parents enough to be friends with them turns out to be the wrong question. The question that perplexes me is: if I were the age of my kids, would they like me enough to want to be my friend? And, practical person that I am, the mother of city kids, I then must wonder: where would I have to hang out to meet my kids, and what would I have to do to get my kids to choose me if they met me there?”
My mind, in response, strays to unexpected places. Picture me having fun at poker games, paintball centres, evenings playing world of war Craft, scrap-booking parties, smoking on frozen front porches.
Now, back to the question. I don’t think I’ll answer the question. Suffice it to say that I love my parents. I love my kids. And I think I may have inadvertently come upon a few good reasons to maintain the generation gap.

helen keller on pessimism

"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit." - Helen Keller

If I could talk to Helen Keller, just spend an hour or two spelling words into her hand and hearing her speak in reply, I know exactly how I’d spend it. I’d start with a question: “Helen,” I’d say, “Would you please help me understand how it is that you have been able to maintain such a relentlessly optimistic outlook?”
It’s funny that I should be asking questions of Helen Keller, a folk hero who died in 1968. Helen Keller never knew it, but she and I have had a lengthy, rocky relationship. Life is full of surprises.
I dared not admit it in public, but the truth is, I did not admire Helen Keller when I was young. Admiring her was so fashionable, so done! I prided myself on being an original thinker, a critical analyst. There was much about the legend of Helen Keller that bothered me.
Her writing bothered me. I read some of her books and judged them to be untruthfully sappy. Her comparability bothered me. I looked upon the real deafblind citizens of Edmonton and felt the pain they must have felt when they were expected to measure up to her standards. Her wealth bothered me. I saw how impoverished other deafblind people were, lacking the financial resources of Helen’s wealthy father. Her teacher bothered me. I saw how isolated most deafblind people were, lacking a lifelong devoted teacher like the ever-faithful Anne Sullivan.
It is not too surprising that I felt something akin to joy when I began to discover evidence that Helen might not have been perfect. I heard Helen’s voice on the radio. It sounded horrible, almost not human! “Aha!” I said to myself, “You weren’t perfect!” I read that attending a dinner party with Helen was an experience in frustration. Helen, unaware of table conversation, would constantly interrupt. “Aha!” I said to myself. “More proof that you weren’t perfect!”
So now that I’ve finally come clean, confessed all this in public, it humbles me to also admit that somewhere along the lifeline, I joined that throng of billions who consider Helen Keller a personal hero. I know she wasn’t perfect, yet I look to her for inspiration. I think she would have been a great supporter of hope studies. Her comments on pessimism are actually unarticulated comments about optimism. She lived a philosophy of hope.
Helen Keller was not born a hero. She had potential and she became one, took her place as a hero—a celebrity—a well known person with power and influence. She possessed superior intelligence and didn’t waste it. She had wealth and she used it. She spent years in the company of an uncharacteristically faithful teacher and she put those years to very good use. As a deafblind person, she was a curiosity, a creature who could interest the public. She is my hero because she put all of this together and did extraordinary things. She attended dinner parties with powerful citizens. She wrote books. She addressed large crowds. She used these opportunities to work for charities and speak out on important issues. She was, in fact, a radical social activist.
When I was young, I thought I was alone in my rebellion against the lily-white saintly image of Helen Keller. In fact, I was not alone. I would later discover that many other people with disabilities were travelling my cynical path. Yet I have never met a person who could successfully present evidence to show that Helen was an ordinary, run-of-the-mill person. Nor have I encountered evidence that she was anything but an eternal optimist.
As such, she remains, in my estimation, a personal authority on the power of optimism, coupled with opportunity. If it is true, as she wrote, that pessimists don’t discover the secrets of the stars, or sail to uncharted lands, or open dorrs to the human spirit, might it be partly because they don’t have opportunities, and partly because they don’t do much with the opportunities they have?

LOOKING FORWARD

If Thanksgiving weekend can be as warm as a yellow-leafed summer,
Then surely November 11 can be as temperate as a lovely Thanksgiving.