A meditation on courage

Comfort for the Apocalypse, January 2025

Jan 10, 2025

Holy doodle, it’s been a tough week over here. Things kicked off Sunday night with indirect contact from someone who created a lot of drama in my family a couple of years back, and then Monday brought an ENT appointment where a camera was threaded through my nose into my throat. It was intense and briefly painful, but at least now I know my vocal cords are working at 100%—something my surgeon wanted checking on in advance of the thyroid surgery I’ll be having later this year. Add to that the latest (enraging) American threats and the devastating images coming out of LA, and, well, let’s just say all my fear and helplessness triggers are fully activated.

But also this week— I put out a call for people to join a new music session on Gabriola and was rewarded with enthusiastic responses. And on Tuesday I went to the open mic and played my fiddle (and socialized) with folks in a warm and vibrant community space. I talked to my therapist, and returned to my meditation cushion for the first time in awhile. Despite everything going on, I come to the end of this week feeling okay and looking forward to friends and community visioning this weekend.

All of this, combined with some thoughts spurred by this week’s Feed the Monster, has got me thinking about how I haven’t declared my word for 2025 yet. This is one of my annual rituals which helps me set my intention for the year, but until this week nothing was arising for me organically. In the last few days, however, it’s becoming increasingly clear that my word for 2025 has to be Courage.

A couple of years ago, at my fiftieth birthday party, there was a magical jam session that went on late into the night. Some of my dearest musical compatriots were there, calling out tunes—some I knew, some I didn’t—and we plunged into them one after another. There were snippets of genius and other points when songs completely fell flat or petered out because someone forgot the next verse. But that’s the beauty of a free-flowing jam session—it’s all about the ephemeral and unpredictable moments that arise when we meet one another artistically. The magic of live performance arts, especially those improvised, lies in creating brilliant flashes of light that appear for an instant and then fade, impossible to recreate.

I wasn’t always able to do this, though. Growing up as a classically trained violinist, I learned music through structured methods and books, never reaching the level where I was allowed to interpret music on my own. It was youth orchestra and private lessons, where adhering to the standards set by others was the goal. While this training gave me a solid background in music theory and a good ear, it left me unable to play without sheet music in front of me. When people asked me to jam in my late teens and early twenties, I struggled to respond. I had a gap in my understanding of how to collaborate with others to make music.

Flash-forward a few years to my mid-twenties, and my musical life was reborn. By then I was playing in a band, writing songs with others, revising old tunes, and figuring things out in front of my bandmates on a thrice-weekly basis (yes, you heard that right—my original band the Flying Folk Army rehearsed three nights a week, plus gigs). This was a new way to make music for me, one akin to jumping into a fast flowing river: I had to take the plunge, and float or tread water until I finally caught the current and began to swim. No doubt it was challenging; it meant making mistakes, accepting vulnerability as part of the process, and learning as I went. But the rewards, both in terms of the camaraderie I experience with my band family, and the long term gift of being able to play music anywhere/anytime were greater than anything I had imagined in my young playing life.

By the time that jam session on my 50th birthday came around I hadn’t been playing much at all. I have struggled to make music since moving to Gabriola Island for a variety of reasons, and had been feeling cut off from musical community. On that night, I found myself inside a circle of musicians instead of trapped in my own head and musical shortcomings for the first time in years. It felt like coming home—or, to carry on the swimming analogy, like returning to my natal river.

Later, in the kitchen I was talking with my friend Ben and it suddenly occurred to me that the moment of musical existence we had just shared relied primarily on a kind of courage. The courage to show up in a circle of strangers and play music, to make mistakes, to be bad at something for a long time in order to get good. And the nature of that courage, when opened up in the act of creation such as a jam session, is actually a form of generosity, making space for others to show up in the same way. Of course, this isn’t just true for music—it applies to everything we put out into the world. We start by opening our vulnerable selves up. Then (often supported by others), we find the strength to step out. And in doing so, we give back to ourselves and to those around us. It’s an act of mutual aid, reciprocity—whatever you want to call it—that ripples outward and makes more art, connection, and possibility.

For nearly two years since that chat in the kitchen, the mantra “courage is generosity” has flashed in my mind occasionally, but never has it been more present with me than this week as I prepare two community offerings here on my island—both of which are pushing me out of my comfort zone. One of those is the Gabriola Field School which you can read more about at the link, the other is a monthly traditional music session for acoustic instruments (which this island is strangely lacking in).

Talk about feeling vulnerable! I make these offerings because they’re things I’d love to participate in, but I have no experience leading either an arts study group or a traditional session. And yet, here I am doing it anyways. Fortunately, I am bolstered by a few things I’ve learned along the way in this life of community organizing and making music. First, progress only comes when we’re willing to step forward. Second, most people won’t stand back and let you drown (and if they do, that’s on them, not you). And third, all projects have a life of their own - which means that once launched, the responsibility for them is shared with the other participants.

I’m no longer the young idealist who believes we are just a single revolution away from the world we want to live in, but on my good days I still believe it’s possible to open up space for one another to dance, cry, create, grieve, grow, love, make music, and everything else. When I access my courage, so too do others access their own, and together we do change the world through each tiny co-creating act (another way of saying feed the world with light).

In closing a brief essay on courage, AC Grayling writes:

Although ordinary life demands courage, sometimes in exceptional amounts, there is yet another kind of courage required for the task of being human: the courage to meet the new and to accept the different in the chances of experience. Rilke gave luminous expression to this idea in his Letters to a Young Poet, by saying that we need ‘courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter’. He meant the courage to accept love when it offers, to face death when it comes, to bear the burdens that life imposes in return for its gifts; and above all the courage to create something to mark our own individual responses to the world, however modest, for even when the courage to do this is unostentatious and private, it can make a crucial difference to the content or the quality of our lives.

Indeed, this is the spirit of the new year for me, and I will work to accept both the burdens and the gifts it offers.

January recipe: Marinated apple and cheese sandwich

This recipe popped into my feed and I made it with minor modifications (I had some really incredible gouda I wanted to use instead of cheddar). The recipe makes enough for 4 sandwiches, the apples will keep in the fridge a few days.

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 Tbsp. honey
4 teaspoons whole-grain mustard
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 small shallots, thinly sliced (about 1/3 cup)
2 small garlic cloves, grated (about 1/2 teaspoon)
1 tart green apple (such as Granny Smith) very thinly sliced crosswise
1 tart-sweet apple (such as Gala) very thinly sliced crosswise
Salted butter, at room temperature
8 slices sandwich bread (substantial enough to hold in the apples)
4 to 8 ounces aged gouda cheese, sliced
1 1/3 cups baby spinach

Directions

Whisk together vinegar, oil, honey, mustard, pepper, and salt in a medium saucepan; bring to a simmer over medium, stirring occasionally to dissolve honey. Stir in shallots and garlic. Remove from heat.
Place apple slices in a large, shallow, heatproof dish; pour hot vinegar mixture over apples, and toss to coat. Let stand at room temperature 45 minutes, tossing occasionally. Drain apples, and discard vinegar mixture.
Spread a generous layer of butter on one side of each bread slice. Divide cheese, apple mixture, and arugula evenly on buttered sides of four bread slices. Top with remaining bread slices, butter sides down. Serve immediately.

In the studio

In December, I created a little art book celebrating the life of my Great-Great Uncle Gustave Weisskopf (also known as Whitehead), who flew the world’s first heavier-than-air machine—beating the Wright Brothers to first flight. The project brought together textiles, mixed media, and bookmaking, and now I’m busy in my studio working with those creative energies.

Three things

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff is an incredible distillation of the issues our world is currently facing, while still remaining hopeful that we can collectively make change - and definitely one of the best books I read in 2024.
On our Best Behaviour: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good by Elise Loehnen should be required reading for all women ready to challenge the assumptions embedded in our system and in our upbringings. ““We have been trained for goodness,” she tells us, “Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power.”
Godshot by Elsie Bieker is haunting novel set in a drought-stricken California town. It chronicles the coming-of-age of Lacey May, a teenager drawn into a dangerous cult led by a charismatic preacher. Though written a few years ago, it is an incisive commentary on our current moment. A gripping read for those less inclined to non-fiction.

And finally….

It seems wrong to exclaim happy new year in the face of a daunting political and environmental moment, so instead I will say, wherever this finds you—may you be well and find courage to accept both the gifts and the burdens of the year to come.

Please like and share this newsletter if it resonated with you—it encourages me to keep going! Love and struggle, that’s what it’s all about.