Cat Skinner Club

My Tribe

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Everyone I know and love is having babies.

Ok, not EVERYONE, but close. While sharing in their joy and excitement, this also leaves me feeling a little bit like the last unicorn.

The last year and a half in Schnooville has been an incredible exercise in learning my independence, and really growing very happy standing on my own. I’m happy with the woman I am, and satisfied with my life, and I’ve decided that I never want to feel like I need someone else in order to have the kind of life that I want.

As a result, I began to think about how I might complete the rest of the puzzle without anyone else, if for no other reason to stop feeling like I’m waiting for someone to fall into my life. I stopped looking. I began imagining single-parent scenarios, and made a list of all the people I knew I could count on for support if I decided to go down that road.

Then something extraordinary happened.

Is there a “right” way to have a family? Is the conventional two-parent, heterosexual model the only one? In this day of two mommy and two daddy families, can we really believe that only a mommy and a daddy can create a positive, loving home in which to raise a family?

Not in Schnooville. Here, we’re looking beyond the traditional Western model. The vast and mysterious universe has served up an order I wouldn’t have even thought to place, and now I’m turning my world around and examining each corner and each line to see how everything I thought I knew about life and love can be renovated and remodeled for a bigger, better reality.

I hope to be able to share more of this wonderful story here, but first there are big decisions to make, and very important people to share these decisions with. There will be no immediate pitter patter either. A lot of love and groundwork must be laid down first. What I wish to impart is that life will give you wonderful things if you open up your heart and trust in powers that are greater than us all.

Possibility is one of the most exciting things I know. It invites imagination, dreaming, and hope in abundance. The way we embrace possibility tells us so much about the people we are, and the way we move through our lives.

This possibility is just too good to walk away from.

The Long, Hot Summer

LHSWeb

Yes of course if you live anywhere near Toronto that’s a ridiculous title for this post, but the alternative is “The Dripping Wet Summer”. You can tell me which is more appealing. I’ll take either, and both. One is steam rising from the pavements sensual, and the other is the freckle-faced glory I crave during our epic winters.

It’s been a few days since I’ve been here, and I can blame this on two things:

1.) I have a show that opens on Thursday. Please see the image above.

2.) I have fallen deep into the Rabbit Hole and Wonderland is more spectacular than anyone could describe.

And so, I return to Schnooville to tell you this:

When you start to listen to what the Universe is telling you, and when you trust your own heart, it is the most profound magic you will ever know. I’m exploring some of the deepest corners of who I am, and what I want my life to be. At the end of the day, when all of the outside influences fall away, the answers seem so simple and clear. I’m challenging everything I thought that I knew about myself.

Love is not about losing yourself in someone else. It’s about finding yourself reflected in them, and looking deeply into your own soul to understand that the beauty they see in you, the beauty they love in you, is yours and yours alone, and it is the greatest gift that you have. You alone must sustain and nurture your own light so you can reflect back the love you are fortunate enough to receive.

All of the healing, understanding, acceptance, courage, strength, power, wisdom, and joy you seek are sitting there, somewhere inside you, like boxes of memories from ancient ancestors. When you finally tackle the mess, you’ll be amazed at what you begin to unearth.

The Life Aquatic

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There is an ocean inside you.
I can hear it between your words
as clearly as the yawning roar
from the pearly slit of the seashell at my ear.

You have held these tides at bay
and have quelled the undulation of the waves
with the steady power of your gaze,
but the fathoms are so strange and deep
that they wake you, feverish from your slumber.

Who will you become if you surrender?
If you abandon the exhausting tread
to sink slowly, and steadily
into the velvet green of unknowable fathoms,
will you be dangerously far from the all-illuminating glow of the sun?

Or will the ancient, secret levithan
fold you carefully to her scaly breast
and sift her golden treasures
from the silt and sediment that has settled
upon a trove so vast and bountiful
that the solar glare suddenly seems so garish and so strange.

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High Holy Days

Playground love - Olivia Bee

Playground love - Olivia Bee

It’s ten o’clock. I’ve just come home after an action-packed day at the office followed by a lucrative production meeting which only served to make me love my business partner that much more.

As I walked home from where the donated cab ride ended, I knew two things; I wanted to sit on my terrace, and I wanted to smoke a cigarette. The former I do frequently, the latter not so much.

I fetched my dog from the main floor of my almost two hundred year old house, dropped off my things and took a pee break in my stifling attic apartment (would that the bedroom window would open!) and headed to the 7 eleven to satisfy my nearly-never craving. (Please note, I do not advocate smoking, but I was feeling nostalgic for Paris).

With Arthur in tow, I encountered a gigantic party in my neighbour’s yard, with a tent and blue lights, and now as I am typing this the exuberant strains of Punjabi music are the soundtrack to my perfect evening at The Fortress.

I’m lit by the blue glow of my lap top and a single beeswax pillar. I’m wearing a Japanese style robe procured from some unmentionable vintage shop and a pair of lacy red shorts. I’m sipping Perrier with a splash of Cassis and I am thanking every Deity from every pantheon for my unbearable sense of freedom.

My neigbourhood is alive with gardens, bursting forth in a riot of spring-ripened blossoms. Every ten paces is a fully-blooming lilac bush, and Arthur and I stop and drink in their heady scent. Each and every morning my life is put into perspective as I stroll through this familiar neighbourhood, and I am so, so grateful.

I won’t be taking a vacation this year. I will be looking to make some extra cash on the side. The bottom line is, I will not give up this freedom for anything. Nothing in all of the world is as important as this feeling.

(Cassis and Perrier is not an ideal combination, in case you were wondering.)

I’m thinking of a few select people who have touched me deeply in this last year of my life. I’m thinking of any of you who have borne witness to my metamorphosis, and my growth. I’m thinking of my girlfriends who are equal parts relieved that I left a very bad relationship, and worried that I will never experience their wedded bliss or child-bearing joy. I thank you all for your love, in whatever capacity you were able to give it. It has been fuel to my fire, and although I know my path has been one of seeking independence, I recognize that you cannot be truly independent without knowing that you can accept love when you need to.

We all need to.

Long have I maintained that I lead with my heart. Some of us lead with our head. Some of us from the gut. Or the elbow. All of us need to know we are loved, I don’t care how smart you are, or how many credentials you have earned. To say you don’t need someone to soothe you, or hold you, or cheer you on is ridiculous.

Accept love. I dare you. It’s incredibly difficult, and I know. Accept that you are deserving of love, and that people want to give it to you, whether it be platonic or otherwise, because they see the noble nature of your soul.

I’m not ready yet, but I will be. Perhaps after a languid summer of freedom, filled with experiments in charcoal grilling and the perfect Sangria. Perhaps after cottage trips that grow blurry in their re-telling.  Soon I will be ready, I can smell it in the promise of summer that hangs in the breeze.

Will you be there when I am?

Still, Centre, Quietly Turning

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I’ve neglected my writing, my ficus is dead, my dog is angry with me because I haven’t been home all week, and my job is hectic enough right now that my boss went out and purchased our own in-office Bozo the Clown inflatable punching bag.

Still, I must persevere, and share a morsel or two in the interest of communion.

A fascinating new work colleague was kind enough to take me to a dance show tonight, and I wasn’t really into the first act, I will confess. I was tired, and kept fantasizing about my dog, and my pyjamas. The second act however, consisted of two exquisite “dancers” and a multimedia artist accompanying them with a series of looping pedals and what looked like a mandolin. These “dancers” were in fact Dervishes, and one of them was a woman.

She began the piece, against the backdrop of grainy film footage of several male Dervishes, whirling in blurred soft focus. She was regal, and all in white, with mosaic-like shards of mirror sewn into the hem of her voluminous skirts. As she began to turn, she instilled in me an immediate sense of peace. I was transfixed; and my eyes didn’t leave her. The tension in my shoulders eased, the line between my brows softened.

Eventually, she was joined by a stately man in red and black who began to turn with her. Both were lost in their own mind-space, somewhere with God, but acutely aware of where each other had claimed their space. The were moving about the stage too, it wasn’t rooted to one spot. The music was layered over the sound of a record that had come to the end of its rotation, which only now strikes me as poignant, and it was a delicate compliment to their quiet contemplation.

The man and woman then moved closer to each other and began turning very closely with one another, while still maintaining their own perfect rotation. After spinning quite steadily for about fifteen minutes, this was indeed a feat. They were perfectly aligned, perfectly in tune to something greater than us all, and perfectly respectful of each other. It was so, so beautiful.

If we are in harmony with self, and in harmony with spirit, perhaps these moments of perfect union become more possible.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi