Some Thoughts During This Time of Social Distancing

So here we are. How are you all? I hope you’re all as well as you can be under the many circumstances.

As we come out of our second week of social distancing (re: staying home and doing our best to #flattenthecurve), I find myself reflecting on the ways in which I share about my life and my experiences. Regarding social media and the internet, I’ve always been aware that my tendency is to quietly experience life and maybe reflect/share about it later through a blog, or a poem, a story or something else. Sharing all of the weathered storms has never been my norm, and many instances of my life have passed by ‘undocumented’ in certain ways. I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever given a great deal of thought to the what and how I share—even though I have a blog. I’m a relatively quiet and perhaps introverted person, in a relationship with another quiet and perhaps introverted person, who share two little people who are decidedly not quiet and relatively extroverted children. Our girls love people and visits and the type of social activity that can exhaust their parents the most. (To be fair though, they also love being at home and seem to really value their downtime). Our lives then, have often felt too busy to document, too full of work and the day-to-day to really dive in and talk about what’s been going on, because of course, as with anyone—there’s always a tremendous amount going on. Living, learning, surviving, holding on, falling down, letting go, letting in.  

Now though, as I strive for the sense of peace and goodmindedness that so many of our ceremonies and teachings guide me to embrace while being almost 37 weeks pregnant and mindful of the precarious nature of our physical reality, it feels like these previously quiet experiences might need to go somewhere. Every day I find myself in a more concentrated struggle to balance the fear, stress and anxiety I feel regarding the physical wellbeing of my family and loved ones, with our emotional, spiritual and mental wellbeing. I admit I’ve found it hard to understand the decisions that some of the people around me are making or have made, and then trying to make peace with what I can’t control. It has not been uncommon for a day (or even the same couple of hours) to include a smudge, a cry, a moment of calm and focus followed by a surge of frustration and helplessness, an upswell of excitement, a sense of dread and what could be called fear or grief—all accompanied by waves of gratitude for every moment that Kehte, myself, the girls and the baby are together, safe, healthy and well, and for all of the people who are continuing to work, to strive, to fight for one another’s survival. 

It is a strange and difficult time. As a collective, we are going through this shared experience together, and yet much about our experiences is different. The challenges we had prior to this crisis have perhaps been compounded, still need to be weathered, and still need to be revisited again in the future when we face the task of getting back to the old (new?) normal or reshaping our professional and personal lives and spaces—not to mention the policies and practices that ought to create safety, fairness, equity and equality for all of us and future generations of people.

On a personal level, I have already registered how some things that mattered a few months ago, do not matter in quite the same way now; and things that felt resolved and settled, suddenly need to be revisited. This flux is not wholly unfamiliar. After all, for the past year I’ve known that at least part of my energy was going to be focussed around processing change and recovering a sense of balance following the completion of my doctorate last year. What I can sense a bit better now though, is how those changes and the balancing act are going to be further underscored by current events. And I suppose when I really think about it, we are always responding and changing (perhaps in subtle ways) to the circumstances around us. So perhaps no real surprises there. But in the absence of surprise, I hope to be able to channel all these things I’m feeling into the most positive, accepting energy I can manage. A kind of surrender and an unwavering faith in the generosity and compassion of people, creation and spirit, even as I do the physical, practical work of just staying home and protecting my peace as best as I can.

As I write this, I’m settling in to rest for the weekend, and also gearing up for my last week of work before I sign off and turn my focus to my maternity leave. Working at home with the girls the last two weeks has been one of those beautiful challenges that isn’t really a challenge at all when you really think about it—overwhelming yes, but the kind of overwhelm that fades relatively quickly and is peppered with joy and love. All in all, I’m proud of the patience and honest communication we’ve been offering one another in the house, and completely inspired by Ione and Vivian’s capacity for creativity and play, and Kehte’s commitment to our wellbeing. I can only hope I’m offering them something just as wonderful in return, lol! And I’m definitely looking forward to being able to spend even more time with all of them before the baby arrives. I want to absolutely treasure these moments. It’s not always easy for me to practice the kind of wholeheartedness that Brene Brown talks about in her books, but if there were ever a time when I needed to lean in to love, joy, belonging and connectedness—it’s now. Indeed, gratitude is proving to be the best way to lend some grounding to my life right now, and even though I need a helping hand to practice it sometimes (by literally using a Gratitude Journal), I’m grateful I have a tool to use. 

And with that, I’m going to sign off and go play with some paint. Sending so much love and light to you all. Stay home. Stay safe. Wash your hands. Take care for one another. And if you are able to, happy creating 🖤.

S. 

The Great Decluttering

It’s taken me quite some time to ease into 2020. At the end of 2019, my family and I took our third trip to Disney World. It was an adventure that felt really great and important to do because in 2019 I finally finished my doctorate and defended my dissertation, and we attended a lot of work events that were held in venues that were beautiful spaces, but not really oriented to families. Going to Disney World then was good fun for us all, and took us away from the pressures that often accompany the holiday season. When we returned though, I found myself asking a lot of questions about what the next year was going to be like for us? Would we take a break from Disney World now? Were there other places in the world we wanted to see? And what should we really be considering as we move into this next phase of our lives—one where I’m done school and have more time than ever in my life to spend with the people I love most and on my writing, language learning and other creative projects? 

These questions also felt really important to answer because earlier in 2019, we learned we were expecting a new baby in Spring of 2020 (yay!). Suddenly, I found myself looking at the home and life we had built in a new way. Did we have enough space for all of these little people? Was there a way to rearrange our space to better reflect what our growing needs were going to be? How was I going to support the needs of these little beings as they transitioned into young adults, with all of the experiences and changes these transitions bring? How could the forest around our home help them stay connected and grounded? Did our house and the things in our house (furniture, clothings, belongings) line up with the way things felt outside? And more, was there an alignment between the different areas of our lives—our work, our schools, our forest, our home? Were we living as sustainably and responsibly as we could? Did our spaces and the activities we were doing in these spaces feel true to who we are and the ways we are encouraged to be as Ogwehoweh—peaceful, respectful, grateful to the human and non-human beings in this world that sustain our existence? 

This last one in particular has been a fascinating question to think about over the last seven weeks and has resulted in a lot of reading, decluttering and thinking about our future. And the answers were, as one might imagine, a combination of yes…and no. But despite the fact that we still have work to do to bring more balance to our lives, shaping our intentions about that work and our space has been a truly satisfying experience. For example, I found myself ending 2019 by doing a massive decluttering to help eliminate the stress I’d sometimes experience when my morning was rushed or our routines were disrupted. With Kehte’s help, I reorganized some spaces in our house to make them more organized or family-friendly, and I started work on building a capsule-like wardrobe filled with fewer items of clothing I actually wanted to wear on a regular basis. Completing these small projects alerted me to the kind of space I wanted to be living, learning and creating in, and I could appreciate how being so busy with school the last seven years hadn’t left me with a lot of time to do be really thoughtful about what I was a) bringing into the house, and b) how the accumulation of those things was impacting the way the house felt. 

All of this wonderful decluttering and thoughtful energy has followed me into 2020, and Kehte and I spent the start of this year introducing new evening and morning routines that allow both of us to use our mornings to have the best and most peaceful days I feel we’ve ever had. To feel nourished, rested, organized, and prepared. And though we still have some unpredictable mornings, it feels good to not punish ourselves or feel like we are falling short, and instead know that we are setting ourselves up to give our all to the work we are fortunate to do, and to each other. It’s been a good experience so far, and over the next year I intend to continue exploring the ideas that have helped me with this transition so far: decluttering, minimalism, low-buy or no-buy, ethical consumption, etc., while also refocusing and going deeper with my creative work. I anticipate this will all be something of a process, and a slightly different one than learning about publishing and making books, but I’m nonetheless excited for all the ways I hope it will grow and support the creative aspects of my life, because the creative parts have always helped fuel the others. And of course, I look forward to sharing some of that journey here :). 

Til next time, happy creating, 

S. 

A few new decluttered spaces. There are before and after pictures, but suffice it to say—this has been a transformation!

November and All the New Projects

Hi everyone and happy November! I’m just wrapping up a short vacation and have been enjoying the chance to catch up on some of my creative projects. October was a hectic but interesting month. I travelled to California for the first time to attend the 2019 International Conference of Indigenous Libraries, Archives, and Museums, which is organized by the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums. It was such a great conference and it gave me a lot of ideas for things to do and ways to move forward at my work (I work at the the Deyohahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre in my community). 

I also attended a great event that Deyohahá:ge: cohosted with the Archives of Ontario towards the end of October. Over the summer and early fall then, I’d been busy thinking about and reading about archival practice, Indigenous knowledge and language revitalization, along with other interesting areas that have stemmed out of my various work and research projects. Because this blog is mostly a space for me to write about my (creative) writing and art, I’ve decided to create another place to write and share about these other areas in case anyone finds them as interesting as I do. In order to do that, I’ll be starting a new blog that focusses more specifically on my research. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes because I’ve always found so many intersections between what I do—writing, art, learning, researching, and trying to live a good, peaceful life, but I also recognize that each of these areas (writing, research, and art) has a life of its own. I’ve started to create the site and upload some content but it will be a few months or so before I launch it. So that’s something I’m looking forward to but in the meantime, I’m continuing on with my creative work—the work I treasure the most!  

I’ve said before that being in school for as long as I was took a toll on my creative process. This past month, I’ve been in rebuilding mode. Getting reacquainted with how I outline stories, how I set daily targets, how I set aside time for editing. I have seven projects to write across three different series to work on and I want to finish all of them within the next two years (a few of them already have first drafts and outlines), but finishing them will take time and focus. At present, I’m currently doing NaNoWriMo to get a draft of the The Lightning Song done, which is the second Cora Solomon story after The Fortune Teller’s Daughter. The moment I’m done that, I’ll be doing final edits on The Wall of Bones (The Vampire Skeleton series) and The Fortunes of Ithaca (Fortune & Fall series). In short, there's lots of exciting new stories on the way but it will take me some time to finish them up.  

Happily, there are other projects that I have finished that I’m really excited to share about. The first one is the follow up to the children’s book Treaty Baby. The new book is called, We Give Our Thanks. It’s illustrated (as Treaty Baby was) by my sister, Alyssa. I wrote the book two years ago, and she worked at the illustrations last summer. We released the book a few months ago and it’s one of my favourites!

The second project is a few poems and some art that appear in an upcoming issue of the Hamilton Arts & Letters magazine. I wrote a ton of poems over the last four years that I’ve been slowly putting together into a collection but for now, being able to share a few of them was nice. I’ll update with a link to the magazine in a future blog but in the meantime, here's one of the art pieces that was included in the edition. 

A third project is Akwa:ji:ya', another book in our Cayuga language series, which I didn’t write but have been having a lot of fun illustrating. I love working on the Cayuga books. I’ve been really doubling down on my Cayuga language learning the past few weeks and making efforts to speak as much as I can. I’m determined to level up my speaking this year and so a lot of my spare time is going into that!

And a last bit of work that is forthcoming is a short story that's part of an anthology launching in December. The book is called Bawaajigan and features a lot of wonderful work by several Indigenous authors. I’m excited for it and really love the story that's appearing in it.  I wrote it a few years back and it was inspired by dreams and some of my travels through Upper New York State.

Anyways, I’m very happy to share about these projects while I continue working on others. Being on vacation this last week has given me an opportunity to clear my head and sharpen my focus on what I want most and what I’m most grateful for: family, health, language proficiency, and creativity. There’s been a lot happening in our lives, in our community and in the world this year, and everyday there seem to be more and more reasons to think on and question how we can grow, change, make better decisions, and challenge ourselves to leave even less of an ecological footprint while still making a lasting, helpful impact on the people we like and love. For me, art, creativity and reflection is a huge part of navigating these questions and manifesting change in a positive way. I look forward to making more art for the rest of the year, and to start thinking about the projects the new year will bring! I hope you’re all well and until next time, happy creating :).  

S. 

Canoes and Other Thoughts

I’m drawn to stories that share the lives, adventures and experiences of women. Fiction and non-fiction. Poetry and Memoir. Quiet stories about someone’s life, or sweeping tales of their adventures. And of course, I am especially fond of science fiction and fantasy, so I love female protagonists in speculative fiction as well (Circe, The Broken Earth Trilogy, and the Their Bright Ascendency Trilogy are some recent favourites). There is courage, heartbreak and heroism across all of these different forms of stories and I’ve been inspired in different ways by each of them.

Recently, this interest has extended to wanting to hear and learn more from the female characters in Haudenosaunee legends. I’ve always been interested in our legends but now that my dissertation is done and defended, I’ve been spending my time reading through various story collections with more care and attention—an endeavour that requires its own post. As such, this blog holds some very preliminary thoughts about the stories I’ve read so far (a work in progress if there ever was one).

While reading, I came across a particular set of tales concerning a young man who lived with a cruel uncle. In both cases the story is titled after the young man even though in them the man is essentially rescued by a young woman (and in the other, two women) who help him escape his uncle. In one version, the young woman helps him escape with the help of her seemingly magical companion and her canoe (waiting at the nearby shore). I found this—and her—so interesting. I have been curious in the past about the lack of emphasis on the female heroines in the stories or legends I’ve read and am doing a closer read of the stories now to see just how pronounced this gap is (perhaps it is not so much as I think). This effort aside, I still found myself imagining a different title for the story, like “Young Woman Rescues Future Husband From Crazed Uncle”, because I was so curious to hear more about her.

From my learning over the years, I know there may be reasons I am not hearing more about her or from her perspective; that there are implicit biases and politics at play in the ethnographic work in which many of these stories came to be recorded, and choices made about whose story and what topics are being centred in written narratives. Perhaps there was more to her story, perhaps it’s even somewhere in the records—it’s too soon to say for my own inquiry whether it is or isn’t. And—perhaps not. This lack of record was something that came up while I was learning more about Jikonsaseh, the first clanmother, and it’s not quite so surprising that it’s coming up again. Other Indigenous scholars have written about the anthropological and ethnographic records—what they include and what they do not, how they do or do not resonate with our lived experiences as Indigenous Peoples, here and now, that might be missed in the way that our culture was documented or collected.

Nonetheless, while reading this tale about the unfortunate young man and his unscrupulous uncle, I found myself captivated by the woman’s story. How did she cultivate her powers? What are her powers? Where did she meet this dog that can change its size with the switch of her whip? How did they become friends? How did she know there was going to be trouble? What is her story? Clearly, these questions brought a lot of new thoughts and ideas to the surface, and I’ll continue to reflect on them as I continue my reading. All in all though, the imagery of her, her canoe, and her story has been on my mind for several days, and it eventually resulted in this new painting. 

A Woman and Her Canoe by Sara General

At the same time I was reading these stories, the the Two Row on The Grand was just concluding. This is an event in which a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people paddle down the Grand River together in a symbolic enactment of the Two Row Wampum, each in their respective rows. I haven’t personally been able to go on the event because of school and family commitments, but I’m very interested in canoeing and fortunate that our community offers the activity for free for our members every Wednesday at the Aka:we Canoe Club at Chiefswood Park—so my family and I are looking forward to trying that out. 

Finally, a few days ago as the Two Row on the Grand event was winding down, my brother-in-law reshared an old Facebook post he’d written that said, “Paddling is a great fun. Hodenosoni: were once renowned for their abilities to paddle great distances and navigate dangerous waters. Mobilizing fleets of canoes for war and trade. Now the women of Ohswe:ken, New Credit and Kahnawake are keeping the tradition alive. Nia:wen” (Deer, 2018). It was a post that reminded me of our people’s connection to canoeing and the way that Indigenous women keep our knowledges and practices alive—at a time when I was reading stories with similar themes.

Anyways, I’ve always found that reading our stories and legends help me to draw connections and make meaning of events and happenings in my life, at least when I’m paying attention. Admittedly, I’m not always paying attention and so the meaning-making doesn’t always occur the way it has in this post—but I do appreciate it when it does. It is nice to be connected to particular ideas or people (like the woman in the story), at particular times and across spaces. It is nice that different aspects of our stories resonate to different listeners, or readers, potentially at different times in our lives. This connection is one of the many powers of stories, really—the magic of them.

At any rate, I look forward to reading and sharing more thoughts as I continue reading, and I hope that there will be some more canoeing in my future. Til next time, happy creating everyone.

S.

Links:

More information about the Two Row on The Grand can be found at their website: http://www.tworowonthegrand.com/

Renew Everything

One of my recent paintings :).

My husband often reminds me of the saying, a change is as good as a rest. For the most part, I think that this is true. I've experienced a couple of changes (of scenery, of projects) over the last few years while I was working on my dissertation and they've been restorative in their own way, but none of them have been quite as helpful as having an actual chance to just rest—which is exactly what I did while I was on vacation for the last two weeks.

Being on vacation and resting has been absolutely glorious. Before my vacation started I was feeling exhausted and burned out from years of the everything: school, work, various roles. I knew what I needed was a kind of renewal of everything. A renewal of me, of my relationships, of my sense of purpose. And I feel like I took a lot of important steps towards this renewal. 

I did a lot of things over the last two weeks: I caught up on sleep, I listened to whole albums of music, I painted a ton of new paintings, I organized my creative writing projects, wrote for some of those projects, did a bit of planting and yard work, bought new video games, and thought relaxedly about what I want for this post-dissertation part of my life. 

I also spent some time thinking about the kind of art and stories I want to create, the way I’m going to organize my learning from here on out, and the kind of work I want to do. I wrote several blogs about each of these things that will likely come out sometime after this one (since I also decided I want to get back into a more regular blogging schedule). But nothing too strenuous. Nothing with a deadline. And honestly, this was one of the best parts of the whole break. It was so refreshing to stop and try to make sense of things by not trying to make sense of things.

One of the things that was most helpful to me was taking a break from social media—which I know means there are some future changes coming about how I engage with social media. You don't have to search very hard to find compelling arguments to be careful and intentional in how you use the internet and social media, and while everyone’s experience of social media is different, those arguments resonate with me. I love sharing ideas and learning about how people are navigating our world, but there's no question that social media can be exhausting, depressing and anxiety-inducing.

I know this and yet there are still a lot of things that I enjoy about the internet and social media. For all that there is bad, there are aspects of each that have inspired and helped me to learn and do the things I like to do better. Still, it was good for me to take a break from both to once again reflect on the energy I want to put out into the world, the way I want to move about Turtle Island, and how to do so in a way that feels fulfilling—in a way that feels like it’s restoring rather than draining me. Of course, I know that we can't be in this kind of restoring space all of the time. Energy is always moving after all, and over the last few years I’ve been trying to get a bit better at moving along with it, even as I do my best to cultivate a happy, peaceful life for myself and my family. Creativity is a big part of generating that peace and happiness and it is towards creativity that I’ve been feeling myself wanting to turn.  

Now that my vacation is over, I have what feels like a ton of creative projects to get back to working on. Some are nearly finished, others are only in the conceptual stages, but all of them feel like things I’ve been trying to work at for years but been unable to given my crowded schedule. It will be wonderful to spend more time working on them now. At the same time, I plan to incorporate more rest and solitude into my schedule for the rest of the year. Burnout is not a fun experience, and I recognize that it’s something I can avoid. I’m going to do my best to take good care of myself for the rest of the year so that I can make the most of the time I’m spending with my family and on my various projects. And I’m honestly so excited to make and share these projects. There are novels to finalize, art to make, comics to create, podcasts to start, and so, so much more. I’ve been waiting to fully embrace my creative work for a long time, but even though I feel so excited—I want to do it with as much care as possible. All in all, I’m looking forward to jumping into the next half of 2019. I hope you’re all well and wish you all the best with your creative endeavours!

S.