Skip to main content

Dancing Missionary


As a kid I was in love with the idea of being a ballerina.  I would cut out pictures from magazines and paste them into my scrapbook, I took session after session of dancing lessons in freezing cold church basements and I imagined myself performing on a stage someday.  In retrospect, I did not LOVE dancing, I LOVED performing, but for a few years it captivated me and I was determined to go become a dancer.

I would sleep on the pull-out couch on Friday nights and  on those nights I got to stay up late and watch the Dukes of Hazard.  Then one fateful day, I was sleeping on the pull-out couch and I ended up getting sick with a stomach bug and  instead of the Dukes of Hazard, I blearily watched hour upon hour of coverage of the 1984 Ethiopian famine.  It profoundly  touched me and opened my eyes to a world I had not conceived of before.  In the days and weeks following, the dawning of this new awareness, as I began to grapple with the enormity of this suffering, provoked in me many questions.  I distinctly remember asking my mother why we did not just put some food on a plane and send it to them.  Her response was that things were a lot more complicated than that and that that would not solve the problem.

Growing up in the United Church, I met missionaries who had lived in India, Guatemala and Africa.  It began to sink in that the famine  was one of many emergencies in the world borne out of inequality and injustice and that my way of life was extremely privileged.  I decided one day, that the best career for me would be to marry my two interests and become a dancing missionary.  I'm not certain what I had in mind or how I thought the division of labour would work but it seemed like a perfect blend.

My daughter was planning her career the other day. She was suggesting that she could be a police woman three days a week and do art two days a week. Or, alternatively, she could do policing one month and go to art school the other month.  She shared that "I can do anything I want, I might even work at a bakery too."

After hearing her talk about her plans for her career, I could not help but remember my dreams of becoming a dancing missionary and the unexpected way those ambitions were fulfilled and transformed.  I also realized that the questions of how to fit it all in and make sure we have a job that fulfils different parts of ourselves begins young.  These questions come well before the ones about "work-life" balance that seem to preoccupy  me in my older years.  It seems that once, there was a way that how to balance was not even a question, it was a wonderful, exciting answer.






Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I entered August without you.

 I won't visit you this month.  You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you.   I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.
1 comment
Read more

Fists full of lettuce

 It is a pot of a variety of lettuce plants. It was planted by my mom.  She has been living with Stage 4 bile duct cancer for at least 1.5 years (that we know of, probably a lot longer).  Standing and gardening are becoming harder as time goes on. She learned about gardening from her dad as a kid and kept on gardening every year of her adult life.  Sometimes the gardens were tiny or rudimentary, but with the help of my dad , they have become major and, at times elaborate, growing projects over the years.  Now it is a collection of raised beds and regular beds that hold a host of plants, vegetable and flowers. Something that was clear that first spring with Stage 4 cancer is that gardening would continue in a big way, cancer or no cancer.  It was important to order the seeds and start them inside and get them planted outside, no matter what. Spending time together in the summer with cancer now consistently involves gardening and following instructions. Plant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still.   We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue.  Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision.  They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped.  Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...
1 comment
Read more