I’m drawing ‘MAYbe 20 Monsters’ again this year.
MAYbe 20 Monsters is challenge I made up for myself a few years back in which, shockingly, I draw maybe 20 monsters or more in May.
Why monsters?
I like drawing monsters!
I’m drawing them all on the one page and later I’ll create a scene that incorporates them all.
Once upon a time, I tried to cram AllOfTheFun into my birthday, as if I wasn’t going to have another chance to do fun things all year.
Now, I have picked just a few things and I am doing them without the stress of trying to fit everything into one day.
This post is brought to you by a very relaxed Christine.
As I was writing a post about Memorial Day here in NL today, I was struck by the fact that this province has been mourning the loss of those soldiers for 105 years.
We all know there were close to 800 soldiers in the regiment who were part of the ‘big push,’ the ‘July Drive’ at Beaumont-Hamel and that the next morning only 68 men answered roll call.
That loss affected life in our province for many years. It had an enormous emotional, personal, cultural, and economic impact on the people of NL.
Those are all facts.
Sad and horrible facts.
Writing them down today in the context of also preparing posts to honour the Indigenous children whose graves have been located near the so-called “residential schools” that were actually essentially assimilation centres where children were abused and mistreated threw the whole thing into stark relief.
This province has been publicly mourning the loss of those men for all of these years but our country has essentially left Indigenous people to mourn alone.
Even though there were far more victims. Even though the personal, emotional, social, cultural, and emotional impact has been far wider.
Even though Canadian government and church policies are clearly at fault.
This wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a lack of knowledge. Residential schools and other racist policies were by design.
Yet, there has been no public mourning until now. And it still isn’t a formal day of mourning, it’s a movement but not a public policy.
I recognize that it is a different sort of situation. And I know that a public day of mourning is only the beginning of what needs to be done.
Reconciliation is going to be a long process and there is a lot of work to do.
But a formal public acknowledgement through a day of mourning would be a step forward.
PS – My friend Cate has written an excellent post about the movement to cancel Canada Day. Please check it out.
It snowed today.
On June 10th.
Two days after some straight-up summer weather.
I couldn’t work up a full positive attitude but I do feel kind of resigned to the facts here. (Acceptance is important, right?)
June is often awful here in Newfoundland and Labrador. And we have had so many foggy, rainy, cold Junes that our recent good weather is the aberration, not this.
It’s pretty rare for us to have our patio furniture set up by this point and the leaves are hardly ever put by now.
But still, the fact that it is has been so warm and so green makes this snow a sort of insult.
This was not in the plan.
One of my biggest challenges with ADHD has always been with breaking projects into smaller pieces or in understanding how small efforts will add up to a larger whole.
I’ve referred to it before as a ‘reverse forest for the trees issue.’ It’s not that I get so caught up in the trees that I can’t see the forest, it’s that the forest is one solid unit – I have to work hard to see that it is composed of a series of individual trees.
However, a combination of a food level of medication and some excellent systems has made piece by piece planning and work readily available to me for the first time in my life.
It really takes a lot of stress out of things, doesn’t it?
No wonder you can all work so steadily!
