February 15, 2023
September 2022/ February 15, 2023
Golden light, long slanted shadows across the fields. I’m tall like a giant, stretched out from my feet by the sun. Wendy stitched this shadow back onto my feet after she did Peter’s, I’m SO glad to see my enormous self again.
There are no clouds in all the strong blue, the breeze is a quiet conversation among maple, birch and locust. Two long-legged stink bugs have landed on my window screen to bask and the cat snores her contentment beside me. Starlings murmurate, geese chevron toward field and lake so I have Joni in my ear.
Yesterday morning, or maybe a month from now the migrating juncos animate the forest floor with their charcoal grey bodies.
Always smell the roses, says someone.
(September) I do wonder if this process – of building something in relative isolation from the world for presentation in the world – will ever become easier. Likely not, so long as I ask questions of Us that I don’t know the answers to. These are the only questions I find interesting, so.
I worry that my idea, that we learn and evolve as a collective of souls even if (especially if?) we are separate from each other, will not come across. That the expression of the strength of our impermanence will be lost in its translation onto gallery walls, under gallery lights.
(February) It’s a thing I love about us, the reason I love playing music that is never the same twice: humans shift, change, find their ingenuity over time, especially when challenged to wake up and out of slumber. More and more of us are challenged like this.
Blog writing, like the comforter I tucked myself in with. It’s been a marker for a moment of wonder, a response keenly felt, for understandings that might have a capacity to mend. Twelve years of sewing the story I knew and felt into a larger one I imagined. The writing had become a lullaby; I woke up in January.
The women voted with an X, then talked for three days. They have imagined a different way to be in the world, they have agreed that they are aware of themselves as … autonomous, sovereign. It’s a simple thing, but it means they must leave the colony.
I am a bit like this, feeling some other way to see and write that I have no words for.
Thank you for telling this story, Miriam, Frances, Sarah, Women who chose something different that honours all of us.
I want to tell stories like a gardener, with the tools I have to hand. Your stories, mine, Maureen’s – who on a bitter cold January night sat on a twelve-inch-square piece of cardboard in front of the LCBO with pneumonia, with her cup out. She is my age.
The stories from the forest where my cabin is – they are a good mirror.
I know who the old trees are in the neighbourhood of what keeps me awake and asking questions. The ones who send me the nudges I need, before I know I need them.
I’m listening to Jacob Collier, which is like smelling roses. Feels really good to be human.