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In Januaray, I gave my digital camera to my friend, Sara (of the Star Wars Action Series fame). Her camera broke almost two years ago. She has been making do with her computer camera, which led to some truly innovative strategies and arresting images, but still, her talent is big and needs more tools, and besides (and more to the point) I’m greedy: I wanted a new camera. So.

But I could not seem to find the time nor the energy to buy this new camera. During these cameraless days, I borrowed one from a friend for a day. I also took a page from Sara’s book and used my own computer camera a few times. And I downloaded images from the Internet, gaining a new skill I needed anyway. Then, about a month ago at a dinner party, while affecting the look of a listening dinner guest, I said out loud, “I need a new camera.” My friend David responded, “I have an extra camera. It’s yours.” And voila, a free camera! (This from the man who earlier, and randomly, had expressed what I believe to be the most perfect tee-shirt caption. First he sighed, then he said, longingly, “I love toast.”)


A few days ago, I was again affecting the look of a listening friend while internally struggling to keep my new-job anxieties down to a quiet roar, when I suddenly blurted out, “I need a world map!” I had just come back from a work retreat in Antigonish where I had met my new colleagues, most of whom hail from India and Africa, and whose hometowns or work towns may as well be waves in an ocean, so unspecific are their locations on my washed-out mental globe (though I do congratulate myself for nodding my head and furrowing my brow thoughtfully during my conversations with them in a way that surely conveyed, “yes, yes, Tajikistan, yes, I share your geographic, political and cultural understanding of that place deeply.”)


“I have a National Geographic world map right here. Take it. It’s yours.” The map was sitting right there on my friend’s desk, acting like any old reference tool one uses on a daily basis, except his job does not require him to refer to a map. Naturally, I wanted to make fun of him because that’s just what I do, but my need for the map was greater than my desire to tease. I took the map, bit my tongue, and even remembered to say thank you.

This asking-and-receiving thing has been happening so much in the last four years that I have to remind myself to be surprised when it happens now. It all started in Montreal around my 37th birthday when my friend, Rosemary, gave me a book. This book is out there. I mean, it’s “out there.” Which makes me shy about sharing its title. I’d feel more comfortable discussing the quality of my orgasms on this blog than talking about this book with the faceless hoards I think of as my readers. I’m not afraid of being skewered, I’d just rather have a face-to-face with my skewerer. So, I tell you what, if you to write me offblog, I will tell you the title. And here’s another gift: you can save your expensive scientifically-backed arguments for someone who really may not know they are a flake. I know I'm a flake. You may as well tell me I have freckles. There’s no discussion to be had there because there’s only one reasonable response to that. “Duh!”


We all walk our own paths, and what arrives on them is often just plain odd, and, as my lovely guru/therapist keeps trying to hammer into me, no two paths are alike (Liz, why don’t you just make your kind of paintings instead of trying to be that painter over there?). So, I’m loath to suggest that following my idiosyncratic path will improve anyone’s life (who would jump up and down at the idea of living in someone else’s furnished apartment, making sort-of-good-enough wages, and not knowing where you will live after June because ever since your apartment in Montreal burned down, you have not been able to commit to a home?) I'm definitely not suggesting that this thing I'm about to tell you about is the solution to all your problems, or even that it works, or even that it's true. It's just my wacky experience, and I thought I'd share. That's what blogs are for ...

Before it burned down,



my Montreal apartment was the most beautiful, spacious, gracious place I’ve ever lived (on my own).



Just before Montreal, In the last week of my grad program in one of the most soul-destroying cities I’ve ever lived in, I was gathered with my tiny group of meditators in one of the tiniest apartments I’ve ever lived in.


In the middle of our quiet conversation about life, I practically shouted, “I don’t want to move back to Toronto! But all my work contacts are there!” One of my beautiful meditators asked me this: “can you stop striving so hard and trust that you will get to where you want to go?”


No. I didn’t say that out loud, but I did think it. I thought it hard. And then I thought, why not? I had nothing to lose by trusting. And trusting did not stop me from also thinking about how to find work. I could do both. Plan A and Plan B.


A few days before my grad show, I was venting all my work/life anxieties to a friend who promptly gave me an exercise to help me sort out my life choices (I was graduating from a painting program after all … hahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahaha!) The exercise consisted of drawing three columns on a sheet of paper and three headings: “good”, “bad” and “solutions.” I had 15 minutes to write down everything I enjoyed in the good column, and then another 15 minutes to write down the obstacles to my joy in the bad column. For the solutions column, I was given unlimited time. I was to do the exercise somewhere with good energy, like a park, or a café.

I took myself to the only café that did not serve brown crayon melted in hot water, claiming it was coffee, and set about my task. Within three minutes, I was in tears. Sure, I love painting. But who can make a living out of that? I was about to give up the exercise when I told myself that the least I could do was finish the task and get some satisfaction from proving to my friend that he was cracked. It’s not that I lack commitment. I am deeply committed to my givey-uppy approach to life. It has always proved me right. If you give up, it won’t happen. That’s a 100% guarantee. Those are odds I can live with.


But by the end of half an hour, and against all odds, I had a plan. I had remembered I had some savings (who forgets something like that? A miser, that’s who). So, with my savings, it stood to reason, I could start a dog portrait painting business. Don’t ask how I got from savings to dog portraits. The important part is that I had a plan! I am not good at much, but I can nail a likeness as surely as a toaster can make toast. Why not exploit that talent? But where? Toronto is too expensive for such a fragile enterprise. I would have run out of my savings in a month. Not to mention it's lousy with ex-boyfriends. So, what about Montreal? … MONTREAL? … YES!

At the time, I had no contacts in Montreal. I’d had boyfriend from Montreal while at university (who is still a close friend, but who now lives in New York). When we visited his family, I fell in love with his city. So, I put it down in the good column. In the bad column I put that I had no contacts and nowhere to live. In the solutions column I put that I’d move to Toronto first after graduating and from there I’d make reconnaissance forays to Montreal for an apartment. As I’m fond of saying, a gal can dream, can’t she?


As I walked out of the café, I decided I would keep my new plan to myself to protect it from naysayers. But as most of my friends know, questions are like truth serum to me. If someone asks me a direct question, I involuntarily answer it. A few days later, at my grad exhibition, one of my profs politely inquired, “so what happens now?” As if I had never in my 41 years encountered the esoteric concepts of “secret” and “self-protection,” I responded immediately with, “I am going to start a dog portrait painting business in Montreal.”

And then I cringed. But the snear I feared never came. Instead, the prof said, “Montreal is a great city! That sounds like the right place for what you want to do.” So I repeated the plan in case he’d misheard me, because who graduates from a school steeped in Derrida and Foucault and then says, OUT LOUD, to a professor who worships at the alter of every French philosopher that ever was, “I want to make dog portraits”?

“Sounds great!” he said again.

The next morning – THE NEXT MORNING – I got an e-mail forwarded to me from one of his colleagues in Montreal who was looking to unload her apartment in Montreal ASAP because she’d gotten a new job in Toronto. Within the space of two e-mails, and before I’d even had my morning coffee, I was the new renter of an apartment in Montreal. The first thing I did (after making coffee) was to send out a mass e-mail with my new coordinates. Almost immediately, I heard back from my friend, Nicolas, who I’d met while I was at grad school and he was at Stratford (up to this point, I had no idea where he was originally from), to where I drove 40 minutes a few times a month to treat myself to real coffee at Balzac’s. Nicolas wrote, “Guess what? I’m from Montreal! Moving back exactly when you are!” Turned out Nicolas’s Montreal apartment was five blocks away from mine.


To make a long post longer, the book Rosemary gave me did not reveal anything new, rather it confirmed a phenomenon I had been experiencing for a while, but for which I'd had no name. The book talks about the power of asking. So, I decided to make my asking more conscious. As I lay in bed one day avoiding my studio and all the dog-portrait commissions I did not have, I asked for more books. Specific books. Inspiring books. In the foyer of my building sat an old wooden chest, probably a steamer trunk someone left at the turn of the last last century.


On top of that trunk a few days later sat a pile of books someone, who was moving out, had left. Great books. Books I had wanted to read. I took them. When I needed clothes, there they were. Beautiful pieces, too. Once, as I was passing the trunk on my way out to replace a burnt-out light bulb in my studio, I saw a light bulb on the trunk. Seriously. Turns out it was also burned out, but still …

Last fall, I expressed a wish to do work that called upon all the skills that I love using (vs. all the skills I have that lead me to soul-crushing work), and work that would be meaningful. I had applied for a job that seemed the perfect fit at first, but between my initial interview and waiting to hear the “it’s yours!”, everything in my body said “noooooooo!!!!!” Against everyone’s best wishes for me, I withdrew my candidacy without a cogent explanation. You can’t really say, “um, my gut says this ain’t for me.” I took flack from my community, faced the void of no other prospects, and decided to just trust.

And a few months later, I got my dream job. Now, I don’t believe anything lasts forever, not even dreams, but that’s not a problem. When dreams change, all you have to do is change the asking accordingly. But you also need to be open to seeing your dream happen in ways you did not expect. To wit: one of my dreams this year was to travel through Asia. Also, a number of my friends have recently voyaged through South Africa, and their passion for it put it on my map as well. Australia is also there. I had no idea how I would undertake any of these travel plans, but I did feel it would happen. As I sat in one of the workshops during my retreat in Antigonish last week, it struck me that I was surrounded by amazing people from Asia and Africa! In other words, Asia and Africa had come to me! And yet, that’s not the whole of it. On the ride to the airport, our Executive Director informed me that in August or September of this year, I’d likely be travelling to India or South Africa for my job.

And then she asked (get this) “would you mind?”