A lot of enlightenment has been flying my way these days, which is good, but I sure could use a break. Maybe a bit of ignorance for a while, just to take a breath? Alas, it doesn’t work that way; we can only do what we can to cope with what is revealed.

Tracy and I went off for a few days of sailing through well-worn nautical paths in the Gulf islands. The sailing has been great, the weather idyllic, but it feels quite different to me compared to past cruises. So much has changed for us, for me, over this spring, and my perspective has altered. I tried to think about why this should be, and I may have learned why Tracy and I have such very different views on our lifestyle.

For the last few months I’ve been working full time restoring Volkswagen campers. I enjoy the work and feel good about saving these wonderful vehicles from the wreckers. Everyone I’ve met that has experience with them always speak of such joyous memories, and although there’s a downside (greenhouse gas emissions) I still believe that keeping them on the road is a good thing. Simply put, there are no other vehicles that offer that kind of utility coupled with decent gas mileage and affordable price.

They take a lot of work and pretty much most of my life’s energy. I haven’t written and haven’t blogged. I haven’t kept up maintenance on my sailboat and haven’t been sailing until now. This has been the longest sailing hiatus I’ve had since we bought Fainleog 4 years ago. Given that sailing and the “liveaboard life” has consumed a great part of my energy and interest over this time, this is certainly unusual.

When I think about it, my lifestyle was a large part of my identity. I worked primarily as a writer, with stints here and there as a renovation carpenter and a writer/researcher/illustrator for a series of government marine training manuals. The lifestyle was slow and contemplative, and deeply introspective. In many ways it was a small life, but a profound and thoughtful one. I would even go as far as describing it as monastic at times.

Yet it’s paradoxical how my gaze was directed inwards, while at the same time I travelled further and further afield exploring BC’s coast. Somehow the two are irrevocably related, and the experience would have been vastly different if I had simply tied to the dock and sat there. One necessarily followed the other.

For those who really adopt sailing as a lifestyle, the notion of it as a spiritual practice no doubt rings true. I’ve thought long on what about it that seems to reach so deeply, but the conclusions I’ve come to are incomplete at best, and a subject for a different blog post. But the take away message for me is that living aboard, practicing my art, and sailing became a complete way of being, and part of how I saw myself. Like I said, it became part of my identity.

Tracy’s experience was vastly different. She chose to maintain her regular career ashore, and most of her life’s energy was directed outwards, at working with the elderly. The boat was her home, with all that implies to a woman, albeit a small and cramped one. Sailing to her was a little vacation, like going on a camping trip with one of my Volkswagens, although fraught with a great deal more anxiety. It had little to do with who she is and sailing was far from a spiritual experience. The marine environment is beautiful around here, but has little to recommend it beyond that.

I’ve gained this perspective because my own has changed. My life’s energy is no longer directed inward but outward; my focus much more material than spiritual. The consequence of that has several dimensions. One way it has changed is the experience of sailing has altered for me. No doubt it could regress pretty fast to that earlier mysticism, but so far on this trip it feels pretty superficial, like a vacation. Fun, lovely view, good sailing, but beyond that, neither here nor there. It’s just sailing. And it feels much less like a part of me and more like a thing a guy does. Like lawn bowling or golf.

From this much more detached perspective I can now see how for Tracy it’s not such a big deal. Nice to do, but expensive, and with a number of pitfalls. As a hobby or a sport, or even as a way of vacationing, it doesn’t make much sense; there are much cheaper and safer ways of experiencing something equally as charming.

Perhaps this is why sailing is such a middle-class indulgence: you have to be quite well off in order to justify the costs when statistically, most sailboat owners use their vessels two weeks a year.

I believe that If Tracy quit her job and we both abandoned our lives ashore for one at sea, she would undoubtedly come to know what so moved me about this lifestyle. She is a deep, sensitive person and in her eyes I see some recognition of what so moves me about sailing when we’ve been cruising together for a few weeks.  But I don’t think that’s in the cards.

I sense we are at a crossroads. If my focus will be ashore, there is little reason to keep Fainleog. We have her for sale now, but there is little interest as the market is quite poor. But everything has a price at which it will sell, and if we dropped the price even further she would move on to another owner. Right now I toy with the idea of  making money ashore during the “season” for camper vans, while in the winter return to my quiet life afloat. The problem is that sailing off season in these parts can be quite limited as system after system howls across the coast and like I said before, it’s more than sitting at the dock; the inward journey and the outward are linked and they go together.

I need to find out if Tracy would be willing to cut loose from shore and journey with me afloat. She has already let me know that she won’t entertain blue water sailing, but there are other options.  My identity is somewhat fluid but hers is fixed and involves a certain way of life. I’m not sure how much she is willing to challenge that. In this regard I don’t see it working as a part time effort; it’s one or the other because so much is at stake, and I’ll never own a sailboat just for the privilege of nice holidays.

I wonder, is it just men who so define themselves by what they do? Or is it irrespective of gender? I’ve had so many different careers and so many different identities, and it gets exhausting after a while. While there is a core identity that stays with me always, a big part is defined by what I do and how I live my life, and that’s always changing. The liveaboard muse identity is slipping away and another has yet to take it’s place. Businessman? Volkswagen Mechanic? Neither of these are appealing to me, so they are simply stopovers to God knows where. Somehow I don’t see myself going back to where I was aboard Fainleog; after all these years, I’ve never found myself back where I was after a change like this; the road only goes one direction, and I’ve never known where it leads until I arrive.

After a lengthy delay I’m at last updating my long-neglected blog. The thing about blogging is a blogger should write what they have to say. Not just what comes to mind or a passing fancy, but something from the gut, something significant to them, and hopefully to others.

This has been a hell of a long winter and spring for me. I’ve been lost in limbo, stuck in Joseph Campbell’s mythical labyrinth. A lot of musing and brooding has gone on to be sure, but it all seems to land in swamp water. Never a firm place from which to make conclusions or to assert from. Unlike some folks, I only describe what I know from deep reflection and analysis; there are enough half-cocked ideas out there without adding to it.

So I wallow in the unknown, and accept as best I can that change only comes with the dissolution of the old. It’s a hellish process but the only way forward.

But Monday night changed it all for me. Certainty arrived in a violent manner, and I’m still reeling from it. I’m referring of course to the Federal election. As I tweeted last night, I’ve never been so ashamed to be Canadian than when I realised my countrymen gave Stephen Harper a majority.

Although I am centre left by left, I am always willing to debate and discuss other perspectives, and if they can withstand analysis, I consider myself lucky for the chance to expand my world view. So my repulsion for this prime minister is not based on any particular political stance, but by his cynical, illegal, antidemocratic behaviour. He is the Silvo Berlusconi of the Americas, without the women or charm.

I could go on at length about the great many ways he has attacked democratic traditions, mechanisms of accountability, parliament, and truth itself, but the list is too long and I’m too weary to hash it all out, in all it’s startling grimness.

Mr. Harper is a manipulator of the uninformed and the ignorant, and 25% of electorate have proven themselves the rubes he believed them to be as discussed by this Tyee article. He also counted on (correctly) that another 40% were simply too apathetic to get in his way. What this means is that the Canada I’ve known for my entire life is slipping away.

Of course there was always a certain mythology about Canada, the do-gooder, inoffensive country that was always trying to lend a hand to the other guy. A progressive country always looking to better itself and its citizens. We witnessed almost a century of quiet social and humanitarian progress that made us proud. Although we often disagreed on the way to improve things, there was always a general consensus: we elected leaders with admirable credentials, people who were better informed, better educated and had even grander ideals to lead society forward.

But that ended last night. As PM, Mr. Harper is supposed to be a grand leader with high visions, but instead he lied on television to his citizens about how our democracy works and shut away the media and prevented them from asking hard questions. His vision was to spend millions of dollars and endless months smearing the brilliant Mr Ingnatieff, turning countless uniformed Canadians against the Liberal leader. Never mind the man’s intelligence, his accomplishments, his worldliness, and his experience.

This is how Canada now treats its elites, it’s brightest and best. What we want instead is someone who “kicks ass”. Rather than reaching out to the world to help, as in our famous land mines treaty or acceptance of the International Criminal Court, Instead he wants to buy extremely expensive fighter jets, and eliminate 25% of the federal deficit by cutting billions of aid to the third world, resulting in potentially millions of needless deaths.

Mr. Harper’s vision is not one of construction, but of devolution. The only things he wishes to build are institutions of death and punishment. What a generous society has built over the last hundred years, look to the Conservatives to destroy.

Stephen Harper is a populous, politician of the worst kind, because he appeals to the lowest and most banal of Canadian society, and unfortunately there are a lot of them. All my life I’ve encountered people who were uninformed and ignorant, racist, bigoted, homophobic, and sexist. Until the latest incarnation of the Conservatives came along, these individuals really had no place to park their vote federally because by and large federal politics was forward thinking and progressive. It was imperfect, but its heart was in the right place.

Of course its not just these types who embraced the Conservative spin; the powerful, the wealthy and the ideological Christian right also supported Harper, but they constitute a much smaller segment of society. Harper could never have succeeded without the votes of those concerned only with their own personal interests, rather than the larger social significance of their choice. People who believed the Conservatives are the best economic manager, the best to defend their paycheques, a belief not based in empirical reality.

Canada now has a government serving the interests of fundamentalists, bigots, corporate interests, and generally ignorant and/or selfish Canadians. What possible good can come of that?

I’ve watched as the western world swung right over the last 30 years, and watched as Canadian society became harder, meaner and more unequal. Except for the top 10 or 20%, our lives have never been so economically and socially precarious, and yet millions believed the Conservative spin that much more of what got us here will somehow improve our lot.

The best predictor of the future is the past and after what I’ve witnessed over these last few decades, I can with some confidence predict what that suddenly-empowered 25% will take this nation. Greater poverty and inequality. More homelessness. More financial stress on everyone. Social unrest and increased fear. Greater distrust of Canada by progressive nations. More crime. More suffering. Far fewer services for the unwell, the old and the disabled. A larger wealthy economic elite.

Welcome to the new Canada.