ah, it.s been so long since i updated that i can.t possibly remember all the things in detail that we have seen and done. this is maybe for the best...i.ll just give you all the highlights so far.

oaxaca was dry, desert, sun. color and parades. calm colorful colonial areas blurring into hectic markets. elotes. GAS DE OAXACA (a truck drives by fiona.s house daily, shouting this out along with a catchy tune). giant quesadillas filled with potatoes, quesillo (stringy cheese), and margaritas that, after one, cause blurring of vision. and a twelve-person band (raices) playing folk music on lute-like instruments, varying in age from 16 to 65, with this occasional intricate tap dance to the music. one of the best things i-ve seen so far, for sure. and a night of salsa dancing, mescal and margaritas and blurry embarrassing dance moves. on my part.

mazunte - winding terrifying van ride up and then down a mountain. and then the beach. blue ocean, orangey sand, huge crashing waves all night. cuccarachas in our palapa. a scorpion in our palapa. eating swimming eating swimming reading reading reading. warm pacific ocean. a boat ride, our guide harrassing turtles, pelicans carrying human babies off to sea... (well...) nights sitting out in skirts and tank tops under the stars, bad electronic music exploding from the hostel all the way down the beach nightly... ocean love.

san cristobal. 3000 m above sea level. freezing first class bus ride. freezing mountain town. cloudy day, for the first time since landing in mexico. chills. fresh baked bread and huevos rancheros, browsing book stores, a night of blurry wine drinking, 1.50 glasses of wine (dangerous). a boat ride down the canon de sumidero - crocodiles, pelicans, vultures, and one shy owl hidden in a cliff-side cave, and a boat-ride through a rain storm. cold, chills.

palenque, down the other side of the mountain into the jungle. hot, humid, our hotel room is a tree house. we have to climb a ladder to go up, and we have a rusty slide to come back down again. more cuccarachas. las ruinas... magical. huge huge stone structures coming right out of the jungle. the sound of howler monkeys all night last night, eerie and pretty damn magical. jungle sounds. thinking about summers spent camping, sounds that are not city sounds. keep thinking it will be summer when i get home, and then remembering...

SIGH.

this country is incredibly beautiful - the cities that pulsate and meander, the beaches, the jungle, the desert, the mountains. i.ve been to like 5 different ecosystems in the course of a few weeks. it-s pretty neat. it.s flown by though, can.t really believe i-ve been here for three weeks already. and school starts in three more!

and now, christmas eve, waiting for my turn to use skype to call the family.

oaxaca

...

Fiona and Hector had Sunday off, so on Saturday night we took a very windy bumpy road right up a mountain to a group of towns called the Pueblas Malcomunados, which means something along the lines of the co-operative (or communal?) towns. They are all working together to create an economy from ecotourism, with lots of hiking trails, zip-lines, horses to ride, etc. Hector talked with someone in one of the villages who told him that everyone must put in a year of volunteer work in the community; our waitresses who served us lunch, for example, were working on a volunteer basis, in order to help out the communities. Very interesting. It is quite nice to have Fiona and Hector here to show me around and to speak spanish with the people we meet - i am learning so much more this way, and getting a deeper understanding of this area. We spent our first night up in the mountains in a cabana in the woods, and it was COLD. we kept a fire going for hours but still i woke up shivering in the night. However once the sun came out it was fairly warm, sort of in a Vancouver summer kind of way; a cold breeze but a hot sun. Took a beautiful hike through the forest, up through a little canyon, into a cave, up to a mirador, where we could see all the way down to the oaxaca valley. Beautiful.

We went back to Oaxaca sunday night, and the next day Fiona and I took a trip to Monte Alban, the biggest archaeological site in this area. quite impressive, with beautiful views. we didn't get going until about 1pm though, so it was quite hot. but we took lots of breaks under the mesquite trees scattered around, where we ate papaya and coconut and pineapple. yum.

Yesterday i took a break from sightseeing, had a nice three hours in a cafe in the morning while fiona worked, read a book about the history of the color red that fiona lent me - all about how the search for the perfect red dye changed history and structured economies and class structures. very interesting, especially reading it in this place where crafts are so alive, old traditions continue in the form of woven rugs, bright green or deep black pottery... and of course mexico is where they eventually found the perfect red in the form of cochineal.

anyways. being somewhere sunny is beyond nice. it does me good. i don't know how we in canada are expected to get through winter after winter after winter of rain, grey skies, cold bones. i guess we do it, but my mood has certainly lifted since arriving in this hot sunny place. but maybe that's also just because i'm on vacation, far far away from all the bureaucratic buzz that's been around lately, what with dealing with an accident, an injury, a student loan that needs to be paid, a school that requires a ridiculous amount of brain power and paperwork just to get accepted and registered. sigh. not going to think about any of that right now.

This afternoon Fiona and I are going to head to a little town called El Tule, where apparently the (supposedly) largest tree in the world (diameter-wise) is growing, and also slowly dying due to decreasing amounts of water around...

i am safe and well and warm in mexico.

flew in on thursday night, stayed in a hostel in mexico city my first night. my cab ride from the airport was pretty exciting - mexico city is surpisingly beautiful, with colorful houses and all these flowering trees everywhere, and people wandering down the middle of the streets selling balloons and snacks... an organ grinder near my hostel, but no monkey. the city is huge though, overwhelming incomprehensibly so. i left the next morning for oaxaca, not ready to tackle such a giant city yet with my terrible spanish and jet-lag. bused to oaxaca friday morning - the city just went on and on and on as far as i could see as we drove out of it. 19 million people!

the ride to oaxaca was beautiful. the outskirts of mexico city went from suburbia to farmland. and then once we hit the state of oaxaca we were up in the mountains with these amazing views, and the hills were covered in cacti as far as i could see...cactus forests i suppose. stunning stunning mountains everywhere. i was so tired but kept forcing myself to stay awake and look at the scenery.

fiona met me at the bus station. we wandered the streets of oaxaca, stopped for an elote - this delicious cob of corn covered in mayonnaise and chili and queso fresco and lime. had some coffee, watched some fireworks which are i suppose a regular event here. went to fiona and hector's friends' house for fondue and wine later. sat outside in a tank top. i can't even begin to describe how nice it is to be WARM. sigh.

the next morning when fiona went to work i wandered to streets of oaxaca. communication problems are becoming commonplace already. my spanish sucks. accidentally ordered an iced espresso. yuck. drank a few sips, ordered an "americano CALIENTE por favor." sigh. ate a taco in the market south of the zocalo. lots of meat. yuck. sigh. wandered some more, lots of art galleries here. a beautiful photography gallery in a beautiful old building. the zocalo was full of pointsettias for sale everywhere. the market was incredibly busy; the touristy part of town with the old colonial buildings is super calm and quiet, and then all of a sudden you wander a few blocks and it's just jam-packed with people. i don't feel as conspicuous here as i did in india. people don't stare at me, for the most part. i do definitely stick out here like a sore thumb but i'm not a freak. but my bad spanish is embarrassing. fortunately i can understand much better than i can speak. all of fiona's roommates of various north american and european backgrounds speak spanish with each other. perfectly, to my ears. i want to speak spanish. SIGHHHH.

but anyways. oaxaca is beautiful.

more later.

goodnight moon

hm. still out of work, waiting for my doctor to see my x-rays and tell me what to do with this achy crooked shoulder of mine. i'm back from my parents' house in mission, where i just spent several days being fed, reading by the fire, and cuddling with lil' guy (the weird family cat who likes to drool all over people's chests and eat their clothes). it was nice. i could have stayed for weeks, except i knew i'd end up getting fat. i don't think i even left the house for the three days i was there. it's so nice to have parents who will let me come home and hang around and eat all their food and interfere with their routine and then even pay for my train ride home.

i babysat last night for some kids i adore - i used to nanny them full time when they were 9 months and 3 years old respectively, and they are now 3 and a half and 6. jacob (the older one) is one of the most precocious lovely kids i've ever met; he's a die-hard obama fan and has categorized canada's political parties by color: "green is best, orange is ok, and blue is bad!" he also told me one day, with big dramatic eyes: "stephen harper likes WAR!" this was back when he was five. ha. he showed me his new fish yesterday, whom he has named 'William Shakespeare Noah Skytrain'. and it is pretty neat to be able to still hang out with ayomi (the younger one) - i watched (and hopefully helped) her learn to talk and take her first steps, and now here she is, this weird little happy pixie kid who talks in full sentences and has grown about two feet!

jacob is in grade one, which is the grade of some the kids in the class i volunteered in (it was a one-two split, with a two-three split class sharing the big open-concept classroom). it's a pretty neat age - they are still so young and eager to learn and maintain that sweetness that younger kids have. it's a hard grade to teach though, from what i've heard - you pretty much single handedly have to teach them to read within the space of one school year. that is no small task, especially when a lot of kids aren't necessarily getting any help at home. and when they are still so young and full of energy and unable to sit still a lot of the time.

hanging out with these older kids gets me excited for teaching. i love the babies i look after - katie, whom i have been nannying since january, is just the most lovely happy hilarious thing ever, and i am very attached to her. there is something really nice about getting to know kids when they are still babies, and watching them change completely and cultivate these distinctive personalities. but i'm definitely excited to teach and hang out with older kids who have the capacity for more complex thought. i'm excited to get to read books to them that have more than one sentence to the page. books that go beyond "where's spot? oh, THERE'S spot!" i'm excited to be able to talk politics on a kid-level, to teach them all sorts of neat things and watch their eyes light up. to take them on field trips and get to know them all individually and help them get through any difficulties they might have.

and. i leave for mexico in less than two weeks!

also, i watched 65_redroses the other day, which is pamela's friend's documentary about a girl coping with cystic fibrosis. it was a great movie, but very sad. they filmed the doctors giving the main character a double lung transplant, and it just astounded me. i know that doctors do organ transplants, but i guess i'd never thought about the logistics. humans have figured out how to remove someone's lungs (remove them!) and then replace them with the lungs of someone who is dead (!) and somehow keep the person being operated on alive throughout this. this is totally and utterly amazing to me. how can this be? how did they ever learn to do this? and what the hell have i ever accomplished on that scale in my life? humans have the capacity to do amazing things like lung transplants and going to the moon and flying. and all i ever do is sit around and read books.

the body aches and that ache takes its time

having an interesting week. on tuesday i was biking home from work when i got hit straight-on by a car (a BMW no less!). it was...scary. i have been in one cycling accident before; i got car-doored (also on my way home from work) a few years ago. after that one i got up off the road and the woman who hit me gave me a ride home, though i ended up going to the hospital several hours later when my wrist started to hurt like crazy - i had apparently sprained it but the adrenaline and such had kept it from hurting right away.

this time i ended up in an ambulance, in a neck brace, in a serious panic. it was such a crazy feeling, watching a car drive straight at me, expecting it to stop and then all of a sudden i was on his hood and then flying onto the pavement. and thinking all the while "holy shit, i just got hit by a car". i remember feeling my helmet hit the road pretty hard - it's such a weird feeling knowing you're getting hit by a car, and having no control over your body and knowing that this isn't good. i got up right away and went and sat on the sidewalk, in total shock. another cyclist called an ambulance right away and then it was all this crazy dream of being put in a neck brace, being strapped down and carried into an ambulance and then sort of going into shock, going into a serious panic trying to digest what had just happened, and fearing the worst.

well, in the end everything turned out pretty alright, considering. i walked out of the hospital four hours later, with a possible fracture in my collarbone, a sprain and a torn ligament, and a possible sprain in my knee. my entire body aches, more so today than yesterday, but... yeah, could have been so much worse. i keep going over the accident in my head and it's kind of nightmarish, when i remember clearly the exact moment of being hit and knowing it.

i think the thing that gets me is how easy it is for these things to happen; how quickly things can go from being fine to being terrifying. so many things could have gone so wrong - who knows what would have happened if i wasn't wearing a helmet? and beyond that, the thing that scares me is that i was practically stopped at a stop sign, in my own lane, on a quiet side-street. i was almost at a stand-still! it just frustrates me how vulnerable i am as a cyclist, as a pedestrian. the guy who hit me was perfectly fine, with barely a scratch on his shiny black beamer. it just frustrates me how powerless we are - those people who choose not to drive, or who can't afford to drive. i suppose drivers are vulnerable too, but when it comes to car vs cyclist, or worse car vs pedestrian, we all know who's going to end up worse-off. i just hate that i have no choice but to have to deal with cars each and every time i get on a bike. i just hate how many people out there drive so recklessly, when they could so easily kill someone... i just wish that the city could create some off-road cycling paths in this city, close some streets off from vehicle traffic and give us cyclists just one or two roads where we need not worry about cars. one day...

well, other than that, everything is just lovely. my nephew linden is almost seven weeks old already (!), and cute as a button. i leave for mexico in three weeks, where i will get to spend some time with my dear friend fiona, and then josh is flying down to meet me and we'll have almost three weeks to travel, explore and certainly to spend some time on the beach eating guacamole and drinking margaritas. and i am starting to look forward to school. i have no idea what to expect, i have no idea if i will love or hate teaching, but it is something new and exciting and i think i might like it - if not forever, at least for a while, until i go back to school again, and again, and again.

secret city

Rereading old blog posts. i feel so much nostalgia when i do that. it's funny how things repeat. i was about to write a post about bikes and vancouver, and how much i love both of them, and how much they go together, and how one helps you appreciate the other... and lo and behold, i've thought all of this before. funny that.

It's good to know that i've been loving this city for a long time. but the more i use my bike to get around, or just to explore, the more i love it, the more vancouver feels like something that belongs to me, that i belong to... it's this sense of discovery, of finding secret places. there's a vancouver radio show i've been digging: (http://lifeafterradio.ca/), i really loved the episode about secret places. (especially the girl whose secret place is the changeroom at a department store, where she hides out and listens to people's conversations...i love that!)

it made me really think about how we gain a sense of community and ownership of a city by having places that feel like ours. because cities are big and overwhelming and impersonal, and we need to make sense of that a carve out a space that makes us feel less alone, less tiny. at least i do. i dunno, there's this sense of magic in having a place that is secret, that is ours alone, at least in our minds... a comfort to have places you go when you feel a certain way. i remember being a kid, and hanging out in the forest behind my house and feeling this sense of magic, being in this imaginary world that was both in my head and all around me... and at the ashram my house was right beside the orchard, and every night after satsang i would go lie down under these 100-year-old twisting silver apple trees and love the feeling of being hidden in the grass, with cricket-song all around my head... i dunno, it just felt like my place; it gave me a sense of magic and wonder that i haven't felt in a while, and it reminded me how important that is...

so yeah. i've been doing some late night biking, discovering places and routes and sounds in vancouver. there is a tunnel with the smoothest road, such a smooth bike ride, and everything sounds kind of distant, dreamy inside of it. it reminded me of 'lost in translation' for some reason. and there's a specific point in the tunnel that gives off a warm blast of fishy air. it's this mix of sound and texture and smell and all these sensations put together that make it feel like mine; like only i have noticed or felt these particular sensations in this particular order... and there are secret gardens everywhere... i went and worked at the cottonwood garden last week, such a great place! chaotic plots of this and that and little sculptures and winding paths... i climbed a cherry tree, high high up, me and the cherries and the bees. warm cherry juice and bare feet on bark. maybe all these places are special to me because they give me this sense of childhood - they remind me how it is to just be, just experience with my senses instead of thinking thinking and missing my surroundings. ("born he knows nothing and feels everything") and bikes are just so conducive to that - they really connect me with that sense of child-like excitement, connect me with summer days when i was little, connect me with my surroundings, because i can explore everywhere, and hear the sounds around me, and feel the wind and the weather and the rain and the sun, and i can smell everything, the good and the bad... and i stop thinking, i just experience. i love bikes!

smoothbeautifully folded

the little horse is newlY


Born)he knows nothing,and feels
everything;all around whom is

perfectly a strange
ness(Of sun
light and of fragrance and of

Singing)is ev
erywhere(a welcom
ing dream:is amazing)
a worlD.and in

this world lies:smoothbeautifuL
ly folded;a(brea
thing a gro

Wing)silence,who;
is:somE

oNe.


-ee cummings

quoth the raven

Well. How do I sum up the last week? For those of you who don't know, I'm spending two weeks living and working at the Yasodhara Ashram in the Kooteneys. It feels like months have passed since i left Vancouver. I have done some serious self-reflection and hard thinking in the past week; I have been delving deeply into things that I've been completely avoiding lately, and it's been a really emotional week. I've been a bit of a wreck since I got here - day one was incredibly miserable. I really and truly just wanted to turn around and come home, and not be in this place with a bunch of crazy chanting strangers, and especially not be alone with my thoughts. But my thoughts are not as mean as i thought they were, and as I've gotten to know people one-on-one every single person has totally surprised me with how down to earth and kind they are. There are some really cool people here - people you would never expect to see at an ashram. Teenage boys talking about gratitude for life, meditating on the roof in coveralls. Retired school teachers and a crisis counsellor and an animator... It's pretty funny actually. There is such a wide range of people here, in terms of ages, life experience, backgrounds, beliefs. This really is just a haven for normal people who are looking to connect with themselves, with others, and with their spirituality in whatever form that may take, and at least for me to connect with a specific place. And it's such a beautiful beautiful place. Every morning while i walk to yoga class i say a little hello to my raven friends (there are two who live here), take in the mountains, the lake, the 100 year old apple trees, the wild flowers, the quiet. I say hello to thunderpaws the library cat, and to the noisy canada geese, and Raj the giant pine tree. It is SO quiet here. Birds, wind, footsteps, flowing creek, windchimes.

It's so easy to judge; I remember feeling this way at the Sivananda Ashram as well - feeling totally new agey and crazy chanting all these sanskrit hymns, but eventually i learned to just take what i felt was important and apply it to my own ideas about spirituality and about what kind of person i wanted to be. And i started to love the chanting and singing - it really isn't much different from choir where we sang all the time about jesus. And these songs are a lot more non-secular; they're mainly just about gratitude, in my interpretation. And i like singing. And maybe my interpretation is all that really matters here. There is something here that people do daily called 'The Divine Light Invocation'. For the first few days i felt really uncomfortable doing this ritual and talking about being divine light and all that. I felt like i was being forced into a specific spiritual practice that didn't fit me and that felt kind of prescriptive. But i've started to like it, because i've started to interpret the idea of divine light in my own way. Maybe it doesn't have to be some sort of god, it doesn't have to be about Swami Radha or Swami Sivananda or Swami anything, or about some celestial being. I dunno, to me it just feels like a ritual to be grateful for life in general.

This place is run pretty much completely on karma yoga - all the residents here work six days a week 8 hours a day to keep it running. So the work we do feels pretty meaningful - lots of gardening and grounds-keeping and cleaning, and lots of breaks throughout the day to just reflect on our day and write down all the things we've been thinking about. And the work is fun... hoeing weeds, riding up the hillside in the back of a truck, rolling around in manure (oops), frolicking on hillsides, digging holes at the beach (three people, one hole...many laughs...), finding tiny tiny carrots, carting wheelbarrows, making beds (not THAT fun...) and one day i got to walk around on the roof of the main building counting broken tiles and washing walls. eye level with ravens, beautiful view of the lake... sitting in the sun. cleaning gutters with a toothbrush. i dunno, it's a weird way to spend my holiday i guess, but i'm having fun. there's been a lot of laughter working with other people, and it's really interesting to work for your own living rather than for money; washing dishes that i ate off of and weeding food for the ashram and fertilizing trees that made the cherries that made the jam that i ate for breakfast (don't get me started on the food here, it is soooo good).

Every afternoon there is a reflection break - half an hour to write about the day, what you've been thinking and how you've been feeling, and then you share it with a small group. It was pretty intimidating at first, sharing my personal thoughts with a group of strangers, but i realized pretty quickly that there's not a lot of judging going on, and people have been really supportive. I've had some really helpful conversations with some people here about how i'm feeling and where i need to go from here; i even cried in front of my reflection group the other day, which felt kinda weird but also not so weird... i keep bursting into tears all the time here (mainly in private...), cause there's just so much time to think think think. And i guess a lot of you know i've been going through a pretty rough time lately, emotionally. But i'm seeing things more clearly i think, seeing where i need to go from here in my life.

Well, it's hard to really describe what it's like living here, because it really is another world. I've had some really special moments here already, moments of just feeling happy and forgetting about the things that have been nibbling at my mind constantly for a long while. But it's also not really the real world, and i can't stay here forever. I just hope i can learn something from this experience and take it home with me. I am actually really looking forward to coming home at the same time as wanting to stay here longer - looking forward to my new apartment, going back to work, trying to start some new rituals and habits in my life and see how that goes...

miss yous.

trees are cool

I'm very cozily snuggled up on the couch at my sister's house with the best cat in the whole world curled up around my laptop (white macbook, black cat. very pleasing aesthetically), his head lying on my left hand while i try to type. You could hear his purring in the next room, if you were here. I LOVE this cat.

I had a really nice week. Not only am i getting cat love from Lil' Guy, I'm also catsitting for my boss' two little kitties (they sleep on my feet at night) and soon Meg and I will be looking after Tuna, Brit's true love. It's amazing what good company cats are; how nice it is to read a book or (attempt to) type with a kittie curled up on your lap. Yes, I know, you're probably all rolling your eyes. I'm aware that I'm probably going to be a crazy cat lady at some point in my life. But seriously, sometimes humans just get you down. They're so confusing, undependable, melodramatic, and you can't lock them in your house until you get home to make sure you have someone to cuddle at the end of the day. You know?

I'm technically on holiday right now, though so far I haven't had much time to relax. I took a two-day introduction to permaculture class at the UBC farm on tuesday and thursday. Not only did it allow me to meet a group of really lovely, involved and caring people of all ages, it also re-inspired me back onto a path that i've been veering on and off of for the last few years. In a way it feels a bit scary, because i've been trying to just focus on the teaching thing, and just go for it, but to be honest i really haven't been feeling all that excited about it. I love (some) kids, and I feel passionately that a political and environmental education for young ones is one of the most important ways that we can start to see some changes in the way the world works, but as for being a public school teacher... it just really hasn't been getting me all that excited. It's not that education isn't something I want to pursue eventually, just that there are other things that get me so much more excited, and maybe I should pursue those things first, and then go into education when i have more of a practical, hands-on education in something that I can then pass down to the next generation. Important somethings: how to grow our own food, how to care for the land, how to build and live in healthy caring communities.

I learned some amazing things in the last couple days at the farm. Yesterday we got a rudimentary lesson in grafting, which is something i find totally magical. For anyone who doesn't know, grafting is a method of growing fruit trees that has been around for thousands of years (according to Wikipedia the Chinese have been grafting since 2000 BC!). The basic idea behind it is that because of cross-pollination it is extremely difficult to reproduce the same fruit, say apple, twice. If you plant an apple seed from an apple you love, the chances of the tree that grows from this seed producing a fruit anything like it are extremely small. And since it takes such a long time for a tree grown from seed to bear fruit, you won't know whether the apples are delicious or terrible for 5 to 10 years. To get around this, people use grafting. The technique consists of taking a specific root stock and fusing it together with the shoot from a tree that you know grows the desired fruit. The root stock is selected for its size (which will determine the size of the tree) and disease resistance, while the 'scion' or shoot is selected for the fruit. (Apparently pears in BC are grown on quince root stocks. weird). So nowadays people are using dwarf root stocks for easy harvesting. Most commercial apple orchards are using such a small root stock that the trees are not even free standing - they have to be trellised like beans. Very odd. Anyways, the weirdest part is the process itself - there are several methods but it all comes down to exposing the fleshy part under the bark of both the root stock and scion, then taping the two together until they heal together and fuse into one tree! I think that's just incredible! I propose we see if that works with humans. I wouldn't mind trying to fuse an extra arm on or something... How did they discover such a thing? I guess it's a funny question, because we tend to think "oh, how could anyone discover that without modern science", but when you think about it it makes sense, as they obviously could only discover something like this by observing and understanding their environment in a tangible, everyday way; something we tend to leave to science these days as we go about our weirdly detached lives.

This is something that really inspired me about the course as well; beyond learning some really interesting practical skills (cob building, aspects of design, companion planting, etc) we were really forced to think about ways to be more present, more thoughtful, more aware of ourselves as part of a community. The first activity we did on the first day was to go into the woods and close our eyes and listen to the sounds around us, and then to open our eyes and go around sticking our noses in the dirt, on the trees, all around, seeing how many smells we could find, and then closing our eyes and touching things, relying on a stranger to lead us around. Everyone felt a little silly and awkward at first, but it really stuck with me how much we forget our senses, and the wonder of things all around us. We spend so much time thinking thinking thinking, anticipating, dreading, remembering, planning, that we forget to look around us and appreciate what we have right this instant, to really and truly see (and smell and taste and feel and hear) how much beauty there is everywhere, every day. This aspect of the workshop really struck a chord with me, and I have been thinking about it a lot. I have been living in my head so much lately; I feel as though I have spent so much time in the last few years worrying about my future, trying to plan ahead, trying to figure out my life, trying to sort out and fix and understand difficult relationships, romantic and otherwise, and also worrying about the past, regretting things and remembering things and all of that... and what does any of this get us? Of course it's important to spend time thinking and digesting, and planning ahead can be really important too, but there needs to be time in my life for just being happy with what I have, for turning off the anxiety and worry and realizing that, despite the parts of life that are difficult and that are part of being human, there are always reasons to be happy and to be grateful. I am really trying to do that right now – I desperately need a break from my own anxiety; I can’t remember a day lately that I haven’t woken up feeling worried about the future and rethinking the past.

Sarah, one of the employees at the farm who taught the grafting section was also the leader of my internship at the farm a couple of years ago. I had a really nice chat with her about her path to where she is now. She did an apprenticeship a while back at Linnaea Farm (where she first learned about grafting) on Cortes island that I’ve been looking into, and had nothing but good things to say about it. It looks like an amazing program: it’s been around since the eighties and incorporates a full permaculture certificate into the program, on top of all the amazing experiential learning that I’m sure you’d get just from being there day in and day out. And they have a really cool elementary school on site, so I could still work with kiddies. This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time; spending a full growing season on a farm and learning by doing. Every year I chicken out (no pun intended), maybe because I’m afraid of the commitment it entails; leaving the city and my life behind for 6 to 8 months, living in extremely close quarters with a small group of people, making a decision about my life so far in advance. But just being at the UBC farm made me remember all the reasons I want to do this. I never feel as happy as I do when I am learning or when my fingers are in the dirt. I love the peacefulness it brings me, being somewhere quiet, watching things grow. And I really believe that this is something that needs to be learned and passed on. We are losing so much important knowledge about how to feed ourselves, how to keep the land healthy and productive. There is so much that has been lost already – plant varieties, knowledge, and good land and healthy soil. I don’t think I want to be a farmer, necessarily, but I do really want to learn these things and see where it takes me. I remember as a kid I always wanted to be either a farmer or a writer, and maybe I should keep one of those dreams alive. I do love chickens.

my smallness conversely important

February, sunny kitchen. There is a bunch of forsythia branches sitting on our new turquoise table, looking awfully spring-like and pretty. I am going to volunteer in my first classroom today, a grade 1-2-3 split that meg has been working with as well. I have to say I am quite looking forward to it; it is about time I start figuring out whether this is what i want to do with my life. Despite the career angst, though, I'm happy. Things are coming together, sometimes, sometimes.

Also, my friend Tara posted this Al Purdy poem, it's definitely worth sharing.

The Darkness

- particularly in Renfrew County
when I chased that porcupine
from cellar to woodshed
from lawn to road with flashlight
and felt affection for it
that I couldn't explain to myself
but do explain
as if it embodied
all the lost
doomed animals crushed to death
on highways or swallowed and eaten
by fiercer animals - by man
Why should some comic beast
like a briar patch on four legs
be anything but that?
Anyway I'd stand there
beside the porch when bugs were gone
with everyone else asleep
looking up at that great ocean
that place where you're able to think
father than you're able to see
billions of miles - or think you do
for surely observing light from that distance
is having your mind touch its source
having it brush against stars?
my smallness therefore conversely important
my heart beating across that void
a tiny pump supremely unimportant?
Then I laugh
how ridiculous to invent methods
of receiving yourself or pretending
you touched the far edge of the cosmos
Only settle yourself on the shore
of this bright sea this glittering enormity
and close your hand on a scrap of it
the darkness the massed nothingness
say I have grabbed some and held on
Surely if that frightened porcupine
could represent all dead animals
then I may I allow myself this conceit:
to feel with hands and heart
the black reaches of light-absence
and the whip of comets
pulsing like swift little fish
when lights leap like car headlights
gleaming on wet pavements in the sky
What this comes to is religion
not the conventional stuff
but some sort of lost kind of coherence
I've never found in people
or in myself for that matter
only in the unhurried natural world
where things are uncrowded by things
with distance between animals
star distance between neighbours
when the grouch irritable universe
fumbles with understanding
and a god's coherence
Look down on me
spirit of everyplace
guardian beyond the edge of chaos
I may be a slight reminder
of a small tribe that occurred to you
when you were thinking of something else
even tho I am of little importance
and conversely of great importance
I am waiting here
until the dark velvet curtains
are drawn and the scrap of darkness
I clutched in my hand
has changed to light.


- Al Purdy