A Mighty Nut

 

The last time an acorn got my full attention, I was seven or eight years old. I disguised one in a wax candy wrapper and presented it to my older sister while she was walking with her schoolfriends. She opened it and Gotcha! I don’t remember if she threw the “candy” at me once she unwrapped it, but she should have done. I was kind of a brat.

That momentous prank occurred in Sorel PQ, where autumn differs vastly from autumn in Victoria BC. Many trees shed leaves out here, but cedars, pines and firs generally dominate the landscape and so do their cones and needles. Horse chestnuts often nail unwitting pedestrians on Cook Street, and I code-named the mystery trees along Bushby Street “cereal trees” for clogging the gutters with a windfall resembling Kellogg’s “Special K”. Victoria is also known for harbouring (or should that be “arboring”?) Garry oaks in sundry locales, but I have never noticed an abundance of acorns in any of the ’hoods I’ve called home.

Until this year. At some point in the last few weeks, acorns have appeared almost everywhere. No street seems exempt. The main drag is choked with them. The parking lot is sticky from acorns crushed beneath car tires. Walking anywhere is chancy when you can’t tell by looking if the shell is soft enough to give underfoot. Some are, many aren’t. No wonder the squirrels around here are so tubby; they can’t possible consume every acorn they see, and storage becomes a problem for everyone once the attic is stuffed.

Now I know why it’s called Oak Bay.

The most memorable card my mother ever gave me was very simple. On the front, a watercolour sketch of an acorn and encouragement to stand firm. “Remember,” the message read inside, “each mighty oak was once a nut that stood its ground.”

Mum was a riot.

Sunday in the Park with Ru

 

This is my soul food. Sitting on a park bench, overlooking snow-capped mountains and a tranquil ocean, listening to birdsong on the breeze that stirs my hair, scenting the sea in each conscious breath. I am warm in the sun and caressed by the wind, connected at once to the earth and the divine, a tiny (but significant) part of a greater whole.

Sometimes I’m too restless to sit, so I walk among the trees. It’s a different kind of soul food in the forest. While the infinite horizon and big sky are cleansing, the forest is nurturing and intimate. Tender in a manner that eludes even a calm day by the water. I feel present and presence, as if the trees themselves are welcoming me into their company. Whether I’m by the ocean or in the woods, I always emerge from the park with a renewed sense of strength, hope and peace of mind.

It’s become a weekly ritual. Ter drops me on Sunday morning and I spend some time feeding my soul. It’s been sunny through most of May, but this morning I woke to clouds and a damp chill in the air. I’d planned to bring the Canon this week, so when Ter asked if I still wanted to go, I said why not? No rain was predicted and my camera has a “cloudy day” setting. I put on my hoodie and off we went.

I sat for a while by the water, marvelling at the mirror surface of an ocean that’s rarely so still. There was no wind to speak of, though the birds across the cove were almost hysterical in making such a racket that meditation was darned near impossible. I spied an eagle cruising close to their trees—didn’t get a photo, but concluded that warning shots were being fired in defence of offspring. Nature isn’t always benign and peaceful.

When the not-predicted rain started to sprinkle, I left the open ocean for the shelter of the wood. I have to say, the woods might be my favourite place on a damp day; the foliage is lush and the scent intoxicating, not to mention that wondrous sense of being alive within a living entity. It’s utterly remarkable. Anyway, I wandered the trails and took a bunch of photos, particularly fascinated by the tiny bursts of colour amid the omnipresent green, until my phone binked to advise that Ter was on her way. By then I had hiked around the park’s perimeter, even finding myself on the street when the trail I was on took me between residential properties.

“Did you have a good time?” Ter asked when I got into the car.

“Yep,” I replied. “Time for tea!”

Because the best thing about this cloudy chilly sprinkly Sunday in the park was knowing that a warm, dry home awaited when I was done.

With love and gratitude,

Elements

the view from my bench

One of the many magical things I’ve discovered about Esquimalt is the wilder side of Victoria’s Inner Harbour – this lovely little part of the Capital Regional District features a coastline of tiny mountaintops poking up through the ocean, gusty winds at unexpected intervals, and an up-hill/down-dale topography that provides a better workout than anything I could probably get in a gym. And the same stunning view of the Olympic mountains is as readily available here as it was from the Ocean Room.

A recent flânerie took me, with my Canon, down to Saxe Point Park, the “over the bridge” version of Beacon Hill that features far fewer flower beds and a slightly less cultivated atmosphere than my former stomping ground. I walked the park’s perimeter with the ocean on my right and the urban forest on my left, until I rounded the point and came upon a wooden bench situated with a rock rise at its back and a stunning view of the water out front. By then a rest was welcome, so I sat down on the bench and took a minute to absorb the environment. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath in, let it out, and noted:

The sun’s warmth on my face;

The air stirring in my lungs;

The rock solid beneath my feet;

The sound of water gently lapping the shore.

In short, it was a perfectly pure mindful moment in which I was acutely aware of the four main elements that makes this world so beautiful. Wood and metal were also present in the bench beneath me, but this Virgo counts them with rock in the “earth” category.

This dimension is fraught with contrast. Life is not designed to be easy, but our loving, friendly and generous Universe has provided a glorious venue in which to find respite from the human experience. All we have to do is pay attention to it, and to ourselves. We are connected to the earth in ways we don’t fully comprehend, yet that moment on the bench at Saxe Point defined my connection more keenly than any book or documentary ever could.

It must have done, because I’ve remembered it.

Survival of the Flittest

not our visitor, alas

For weeks, Ter has talked about getting a hummingbird feeder. She’s ventured out specifically to get one more than once, but the line ups to get into Canadian Tire are around the block before opening time these days – you’d think the Leps were coming to town but no, it’s probably because the corona lockdown has everyone engaged in knocking home improvement projects off the honey-do list. The backyard will be the primary vacation spot this summer, so get that garden in order!

I digress.

Finally, Ter found a feeder somewhere else and brought it home, where it sat for a few more weeks on the table in a corner, cooking, as my grandfather said when asked why his new suit still hung, unworn, six weeks after purchase. (It must be genetic. I do the same thing; a new shirt is not new if it’s been hanging in my closet for a month before I wear it to work.)

I digress again.

The hummingbird feeder is a tribute to Mum, who enjoyed watching the little guys congregate around the feeder outside her window back in the day, therefore it seemed appropriate that ours be installed in time for Mother’s Day. A sack of sucrose crystals was purchased along with the feeder, so on the Friday preceding, Ter and I followed the instructions by washing out the feeder, mixing up the syrup (wincing slightly at the cherry Kool-Aid colour), and affixing some picture wire from which to hang the contraption on our little balcony.

Oh, yeah. The balcony. Well, the floor of said balcony is angled to allow for drainage when it rains (and when it rains in Esquimalt, it rains); setting the step stool in place took some finagling before finding a relatively flat surface. My balance is pretty good, but while a tumble over the railing from the second floor likely wouldn’t kill me, I’d rather not go there. With Ter at my back and the rail at my knees, up I went to hitch the feeder to its hook.

Ta da! Not a problem!

Within twenty minutes, we had our first customer, a sizeable-for-the-species specimen who stopped by to sample from three of the four ports before zipping off to wherever hummingbirds go after topping up their tanks. The same (?) fellow came by a few more times before nightfall, and has made periodic visits every day since. We don’t always catch him in the act, and the liquid level hasn’t dropped a whole lot, but he’s definitely around. And when the season ramps up, I hope to see a frequent flurry of the little guys. In fact, I’m inclined to sit quietly in a corner and watch for them – a meditative moment with Nature. And who knows? If I have the Canon with me, I might even get a picture. “See that little blur ... ?”

Come and get it, boids!

Red Robin

Sometimes the best photo ops occur when I’m not expecting them.

I was on a flânerie during one of the first sunny days in March. I’d been out with the Canon, exploring the neighbourhood, following the bus route from the stop out front to the terminus at the top of the hill and back around to home again. My mission was primarily to take photos of the water from our new location, and one in particular to use with a blog post (see “View From Another Window”).

Mission accomplished, I’m walking toward the little church outside my building when I notice a lone robin hopping merrily around in the parking lot. At first it doesn’t register, but suddenly I decide the burnished red of its breast against the stone grey asphalt will make a good picture. So I stop. So does the robin. We eye each other for a second. I slowly reach for the camera and the robin, startled, hops away.

“Oh, no!” I exclaim in hushed alarm, “please, wait until I get a picture!”

Amazingly, the robin pauses. I raise the camera, hit the power button and take reckless aim, hoping the bird will be somewhere in the frame since I can always crop the photo later. Click! I lower the camera and the robin immediately bounces on its way.

Relieved, I offer a heartfelt thank you in its wake.

Only when I load the photos onto the computer do I realize the little guy did more for me than wait. He posed.

Did he hear my plea for him to linger?

You bet he did.

Butterflies and Hummingbirds

Apparently, my mother liked to watch hummingbirds. She put sugar water in the feeder on her patio and throughout the spring and summer, the little gaffers showed up in droves to get hyped on empty calories. When my sisters and I cleared out her room last March, a Christmas ornament in the shape of a hummingbird lay on her dresser. It now lies on the end table next to her photo in the Ocean Room. Yes, I pinched it and now, whenever I see a hummingbird, I think of Mum.

When she passed away a year ago this very day, butterflies were everywhere. ’Twas the season, after all – summer had just begun and the world was bright with life in all its vibrant glory. What a magical time she chose in which to make her transition. In many cultures, butterflies and hummingbirds symbolize transformation, whether it’s a massive change in this life or moving from this one to the next. I suppose it’s natural to see significance in a hummingbird hovering outside the window when Mum has been the subject of conversation, or to startle at a butterfly flitting over the lavender bush a heartbeat after she’s crossed my mind. Some might call it coincidence, but I don’t believe in coincidence. I believe in our ability to transcend dimensions with a thought. I think of Mum and she is here. I may not see her, I may not even feel her presence ... until I glance through the window and see that tiny bird pausing just long enough to catch my eye and make me wonder.

With love,

This Wind

It has a personality of its own, this wind. It alternately teases and threatens as it blinds me with my own hair and pushes me along the sidewalk. Even the trees are daunted, shivering at its touch as they never do in spring. They feel its insistent tug on their leaves. They know its mercurial nature, its changeable moods. They know, and so do I.

It smells of autumn, this wind. Crisp and cold, blended echoes of wood smoke and dark moist earth tickle my nose. The stink of seaweed at low tide is equally pungent on a cloudy day. The placid time of green perfume is past. Winter chill rides on this wind.

It has teeth, this wind. I sense its potential to bite as it brushes by my cheek, though when it hints at more than a nip, I have the sense to stay indoors.

It’s a vocal beast, this wind. It whispers through those shivering trees (and what do they hear that makes them tremble so?); it murmurs and moans and even chuckles as it chases the leaves in frantic circles around my feet. Once in a while, it roars. It picks up the ocean and flings it at the shore. It pummels the roof with rain and howls along the street, funnelled between buildings that amplify its voice to epic decibels.

It can also be a friend, this wind. It strokes my hair and kisses my ear, and curls like an amiable arm about my shoulders. I like it best in this congenial humour, when it accepts me as part of Nature’s greater whole. We sit together by the sea, saying nothing. We are aware of each other and content in company—then, without warning, the mood shifts. The sky lowers and the sea grows dark. The waves churn, white-capped and surly, in the rising gale. It’s time to go indoors.

It’s in front of me, this bullying wind. I would hurry, but the playful menace blows me back toward the beach, goading me, pulling at my scarf, tearing at my hair. Seagulls float overhead; they’ve figured out how to work with this wind. So have the little birds. They make themselves into torpedoes and aim themselves for home. What a good idea! I huddle into my coat. I duck my head. I push against the flow and manage to gain the street. It comes from all directions, this crazy-making wind. I can’t see through my hair, I can’t hear past the wailing in my ears, but I persevere and gain the safety of home.

Upstairs, I stand at the window with a mug of tea in my hands. I watch the raging surf and the wild trees, and am reminded of something humbling.

I am so much smaller than this wind.

Blustery Days

My earliest memory of hella high winds formed when I was about five years old. I was in kindergarten in Sorel, at a school that was, I believe, walking distance from home.

I don’t remember much about kindergarten except that I didn’t like it. It was new and strange, and full of kids who spoke French when I was the only one who didn’t. I don’t know if I lasted the full term, or if my folks pulled me out after I pitched a four alarm tan-tan in the driveway one day; so much of that time in my life is long gone but for the dramas that tend to stay with a person well into adulthood. Allowing for said dramas to become exaggerated over time, I have a clear sense of losing my mind one day, and my mother telling the kind folks who had come to pick me up to go on their way. I don’t remember anything more than that, but if Mum does, I bet the story’s as embarrassing as the one she likes to tell about the day I first saw snow.

I digress.

While I was still in kindergarten, I remember stepping from the school into bright sun and big wind. The leaves were doing their swirly dance on the sidewalk and skittering into the street. I was wearing my plush green winter coat, which was heavy enough to keep my feet on the ground when the wind tried to lift me off them. It was so strong when it hit me that it felt like a big hand curling around my legs. It tugged so insistently that I was sure I’d achieve liftoff like Piglet in the stories by AA Milne—to this day, on a big windy one, I’ll generally ask of no one in particular, “Can I fly Piglet next?”

Fast forward to November 2015. Ter and I had ventured out to do some Christmas shopping and the wind was so strong when we got home that folks were parking on Dallas Road to watch the ocean pound against the shore. I love a stormy ocean, and while I normally watch it from the shelter of my living room, this time, I couldn’t resist. “I have to go look,” I told Ter, and promptly left her to struggle with the shopping bags while I headed up to street level.

Our street sits a bit lower than the main road. How much lower became evident when I reached the top of the slope and was struck full in the face by a blast of salt spray—and this before I got across the road. I waited for a break in the traffic and crossed over to join the other nut cases hanging out by the railing.

Wind roaring. Surf crashing. Gulls hanging overhead. Kids in their twenties spreading their wings and leaning into the teeth of it, letting the wind hold them upright. Small dogs being carried because otherwise they’d be airborne. My vision immediately obscured by the spray on my glasses. The sheer force of the wind felt like that long-ago hand trying to push me back into traffic, shoving so hard that it seemed almost enraged. I fought back, kept my feet, staggered a few steps along the sidewalk. You can’t breathe in wind that strong; it jams itself down your throat and stays there. And all the while, you are reminded of how fragile, how mortal, you are against this heaving, howling, living entity.

Jesu Maria. Get me out of this.

With the wind helping me along, I trip-and-a-trip-trip-tripped back toward home, where Ter had managed to secure the Tiguan by the curb and wrestle our loot into the house. “Well?” she asked from the top of the stairs. “How was it?”

“One of the stupidest things I’ve ever done,” I replied, gasping.

“Yah,” she said, “while I was trying to drop the hatch on Tiggy, the wind swooped in and snatched one of the empty grocery bags. The last I saw, it was zipping toward Moss Rock Park.”

I could very easily have gone the same route.

Last week, the west coast was treated to a hat trick of storms over three days, ending with the remains of Typhoon Songda predicted to be the most intense of the trio. Once again, folks pulled over to watch the ocean do its thing. Ter parked Tiggy behind the house for the third act, as did most of the neighbours. The street out front was empty that night. The wind ramped up for a bit of a show before dinner, then died back by eight and never really took off.

I didn’t even try to go outside.

Voodoo Medicine Man (4)

how the wrist grounding point feels!

There are four main “grounding” points in acupuncture: one between the first and second (or is it the second and third?) toes in the top of each foot, one in the soft spot between the thumb and forefinger on the top of one hand, and the fourth between the tendons in the underside of the opposite wrist. This last point is a particularly shallow spot and tricky to hit; if I didn’t trust my voodoo medicine man implicitly, I would never ever have gone there the first time. He tells me it’s important and (I don’t know why) I believe him. Our compostable containers may generate their own current, but matter is bound by physical law, and one of the dandies is that electricity should be grounded or bad things can happen.

Anyway, once placed, the points are activated in the same manner as the lug nuts on a tire: top left, lower right, lower left, top right. My guy tries to spare me as much as possible, so we always get the shallow wrist point over with first.

The first time this point was activated, a small star exploded in my palm. More than a mere carpet shock but less than a lightning bolt, it was so intense that my thumb and two fingers were numb through the next three points. Adding insult to injury, my guy likes to shake them up after twenty minutes, giving each point a little twist to keep the energy humming. I’m pleased to report that the intensity of this little point hasn’t gone supernova in some time, though it remains worthy of a summoning breath before it’s activated.

Last visit, my voodoo doctor set about placing the grounding points—but this time, he reached to start with my right wrist. I gave him a quizzical look and said, “We usually do this one on the left.”

He caught himself at the same time. “It’s the right wrist on a male patient,” he told me.

I could have said, “Gee, thanks,” but I find the subject fascinating so chose to pursue the line accordingly. “Really?”

“Yes. Right on male, left on female.”

The human body is a universe unto itself. I pondered this in silence for a second, until he followed up with something that had me howling from more than the zap of an activated acu point:

“I don’t know how it would work on a trans-gender patient.”

Against Our Nature

When did Man decide that he is separate from Nature? Was it when he ceased to exist as a hunter/gatherer and began to farm the land rather than accept what was offered? At some point, it obviously occurred to his burgeoning ego that if he could choose what to grow, then he must be in control of and thus separate from—perhaps even superior to—Nature.

He mistook the earth’s willingness to work with him as something less than cooperation and more like mindless servitude. He lost his respect for the natural world and began to exert his formidable will over it, flooding arable valleys and redirecting rivers, overplanting the soil, overfishing the oceans, and sucking out the oil buried beneath the planet’s skin. He perceived flaws in the fields and orchards and began to tinker in the name of perfection, and now we have genetically modified Frankenveggies designed to… what? Last longer on the supermarket shelves? It can’t be for our nutritional benefit, else fish genes would have been evident in prehistoric tomatoes.

And don’t get me started on the biological misconceptions; that because we can think analytically we must be smarter, thus better, than the other animals. Have you ever watched a crow crack into a discarded Starbucks cup? That takes some ingenuity.

You know what makes us different? Our ego. Our arrogance. Our intellect. In fact, the most unpleasant facets of humanity are pretty well responsible for the present discord between Man and Nature. Of course the planet exists to serve, but so do we, and in believing ourselves separate from it, we have failed to nurture the resources meant to nurture us.

Abuse can only be endured for so long before the tables turn on the abuser. A planet once eager to embrace us is now fighting to save itself, and if we’re caught in the upheaval … oh, well.

We are not separate from Nature. We never have been. We are born of the same stuff as the rocks and trees and birds and rain and stars. We are a vital part of a greater whole comprised of other vital parts, each subject to the same law as the others. We are all alive. Living, breathing, adapting, we are all beings responding to the energy of intention. To cut ourselves off from this wondrous collaboration of particles is truly the means to our end.

The tide is turning, slowly. More and more people—the unlucky inheritors of a world we’ll leave to them—are reawakening to the relationship we have with the rest of creation. Many of us are trying to mend the broken ties and reconnect to the wonders of the world around us. Nature may lack the intellect, but forgiveness and compassion are universal traits. It might be too late … but it’s never too late.

With love,

Rocky Road

I took myself to the beach the other morning. As I sat by the water, being one with my rock, I caught a movement from the corner of my eye and turned my head to see a fat black spider crawling over the log a few feet away from me. Before my brain identified the type, the thing fell off the log and disappeared between the pebbles.

I had not seen a spider like that at the beach before. It looked exactly like the one Ter described discovering in her office: a fat, chunky body and short stubby legs. Weird, that a bug seen twenty kilometres away on one day would suddenly appear in the wild a few days later. It seemed a little improbable, despite my talent for imagining things into reality.

Then I spied it again, closer this time, creeping sideways over the pebbles. How it got so far from the log so fast—wait a minute. Sideways? Spiders don’t crawl sideways … good grief, it’s not a spider! It’s a tiny little crab! And it’s not alone!

The one I’d seen first was climbing back onto the log, so there were clearly more than one of the species; three, in fact, as yet another weeny little guy was crawling a little further up the beach, slipping and sliding over rocks as big as or bigger than it was, on its way to … where?

Once convinced that I wasn’t hallucinating and they weren’t converging on me (which took a little doing, by the way), I realized that they were heading toward the water. The tide was way out, far enough to reveal a fair stretch of sand, so the crabs’ collective destination was yards away, the crawling equivalent of miles over really rough terrain. I observed the three little critters struggling up, over, and around each pebble in their path, sometimes tumbling into a shadowed recess in between, sometimes pausing (for breath?) in a patch of sun, and I thought, All they want is to reach the water before a crow or a gull spots them. They’re trying to get home, but it’s a long and rocky road.

Then I realized we’re all trying to get back to where we came from. The path is long and bumpy, part in sun, part in shadow, some uphill climbs, some sudden drops, a mix of straight lines and meandering detours, all of us aiming in the same direction and most of us unaware of it. Many of us are more concerned about evading the crows or the gulls so we lose track of where we’re headed. We all lose our way once in a while, but we’ll get there eventually.

Us and the crabs.

Magic and Wonder

I spent some time at the beach this morning. My plan was to try my usual post-yoga meditation in the wild rather than in my living room, but it didn’t go as expected.

The surf was rougher and much too loud to enable a truly quiet contemplation. It did, however, drown out the traffic and jogger noise at my back; all I could hear was the wind and the water, and the ocean itself demanded all my attention. I took a bunch of pictures before I made myself set technology aside in favour of breathing.

Alas, mindful breathing did not happen. Trying the match the ocean’s rhythm was impossible. The waves were too inconsistent, playful with an untamed edge. Failing to connect with nature because I was distracted by nature proved ironic and a tad annoying—but here’s the weird thing: when I finally admitted defeat, the magic happened.

I noticed that the rising waves became translucent just before they struck the shore. The sun got caught in the curl and completely changed the water’s colour from steel blue to absinthe-green. One in particular stood out. It seemed to pause at its peak, meeting and holding my gaze for a heartbeat, then it moved on … but not before a curious thought came to mind:

We are one, you and I, born of the same source. We are energy in different forms, yet we are connected to each other.

This is true. Everything in our world is energy made matter at differing vibrational levels. Don’t ask me how the Universe does it. It just does. Rare moments occur when the obscure notion of connection between us and everything else is suddenly less obscure, which brings us to the Philosophy Question o’ the Day:

Whose thought was it on the beach this morning? Mine, or the ocean’s?

Whole Lotta Shakin’

For the uninitiated, coastal BC sits in an earthquake zone. A couple of continental plates are jammed one atop the other and one day a shift is going to occur that will make Abbostford a waterfront city. We’re located on the east side of the Pacific “Rim of Fire”, a volcanic and geologically unstable circle that may be likened to a sleeping dragon: we move with the rhythm of its breathing, but we get a jolt when it coughs.

Gods help us when it wakes.

I’d still rather live here than in the prairies, where tornadoes have an annual season, or the tropics, where hurricanes/monsoons/cyclones are equally predictable. I know enough about quakes to have the infrequent, “OMG, we’re gonna die!” freak out, but such thoughts don’t stick around. If they did, I’d have relocated years ago.

I’m good with the occasional tremor.

In truth, they happen every day. We just don’t feel most of them. I’ve convinced myself that every little shaker is releasing the pressure on the subducted plates and thus delaying or reducing the oomph of the inevitable Big One, but no one knows for sure if this is so. We won’t know until it happens.

I will confess, however, that the 4.3 or 4.9, depending on who you talk to,  event that shook me awake on December 29 lasted longer than was comfortable. Just as I thought it was over, the shaking resumed with a little more vigour. “This is it,” I thought (the first time I have ever thought that), and in the next instant … nothing.

My heart took longer to quit pounding than the quake itself lasted, but time assumes a disconcerting elastic quality when Nature is in charge. Compared to others felt over the years, this one was impressive.

They are usually over before they can be identified. I once thought the photocopier was due for servicing, but an earthquake had rattled through the print run.

While prepping for work one morning years ago, the bathroom floor lurched beneath my feet. “Ter!” I yelled, continuing to apply my eye makeup, “was that a quake?”

“I think so!” she called from the other end of the house. End of conversation.

Another time, also at Rockland, I was in the tub when a large truck rumbled past the house. Ter poked her head into the bathroom to advise me otherwise. I glanced at the painting on the wall above me and thought perhaps we should move it elsewhere.

There are no paintings on the bedroom walls, just in case.

10:30 p.m. on Boxing Day 2012—I recall the specifics because the house cracked and trembled as the train roared through the basement and I thought, “No! Not during the Game of Thrones marathon!”

The Northridge, California quake in 1994 was memorable not for being felt in BC, but for the six weeks that followed, during which the office I was with answered countless calls from the public, varying from practical requests for info on what to put in an earthquake kit to panicked pleas for advice on what to do when a shaker hits. One caller was ready to pack up and return to Ontario, but my “the earth is breathing and sometimes it coughs” explanation relaxed her enough to reconsider.

“It’s not to be feared,” I said, “just prepare as best you can.”

I wonder sometimes if I was given the same advice about life before I was born.

Halloween Hangover

It’s November first and the world is choked. Mother Nature is throwing fits worthy of a screaming toddler: heavy wind, pounding surf, sporadic bouts of pouring rain—and then a rainbow appears as if to apologize for the tantrum.

Ter comes home from the grocery store. “Boy, is everyone out there cra-bee!” She’s been a little grouchy herself, on the heels of bolting a Bucky’s “Frappula” yesterday. It tastes like a Viva Puff mallow cookie and drops you like a drained corpse when the sugar high wears off. I suspect that a few folks have indulged in the seasonal specialty this weekend, and if they haven’t, the honking horns and crashing carts at the store today must be the result of those “one for you, two for me” trips to the candy bowl last night.

Then there’s the time change. Spring forward, fall back. I got the saying right, this time, but it hasn’t stopped me from feeling disoriented and easily annoyed … though the latter may be attributed to the bowl of caramel/cheese popcorn I devoured with my chocolate tea yesterday afternoon.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Because it’s fun, silly.

Last week, the office held a cake walk that turned into a charity bake sale when no one else in the building turned up to play. I looked at a table piled high with cake, cookies, muffins and more, and was truly grateful that the only gluten-free item was the pineapple upside down cake I’d contributed and had no desire to reclaim. Oops, but there were the mountainous meringues donated by someone who had promised to bake but ran out of time—I’m not a huge meringue fan, but these babies came with blueberry whipped cream and one of my evil office fairies coerced me into splitting one with her (for a good cause), hence the buzz in my ears that began last Thursday.

As Nic would say, Blerg.

Tomorrow, everyone at work will be sick of candy and bakery treats. This will not stop me from refilling the Vader bucket with the last of the Rockets, treacle kisses, lollipops, jelly beans, tiny Mars and Snickers bars that I bought to get us into the Halloween spirit. Neither will it stop me from indulging if I get too stressed—it is the workplace, after all.

I am advised that the Red Cups are back at Starbucks, launched at opening time this morning to get us all into the holiday spirit and onto insulin drips after New Year.

Buckle up, folks. ’Tis the season!

The Rainbow Connection

September 20, 2015

It’s a natural phenomenon, a scientific given: shoot sunlight through vapour and a rainbow appears.

An ordinary miracle. Ordinary because it happens all the time. Miraculous because the timing is often … curious.

A photo was posted of the rainbow that appeared in Florida over the facility where the celebration of Dr. Wayne’s life had just occurred. I was doing the dishes that night, pondering the symbolism of it, when Ter called me from the Ocean Room:

“Ru, you’ve got to come and see this rainbow!”

The day had been rainy and dark, and fraught with frustration at the ongoing renovation of the suite downstairs—I am so frigging sick of construction that I already hated our new neighbours and I had yet to meet them. Not their fault; I’ve been subjected to construction/reconstruction racket since the lunchroom next to my office was built last March. There has been no escape, no sanctuary, all summer. Work on building the elevator shaft at home (what we jokingly refer to as “the Trump Tower”) began in June, and at the office, the eighth floor was reconfigured to accommodate new staff in July/August. At least weekends had been quiet, until the place downstairs sold in September. Now the weekends are shot because the new folks are doing it themselves—and guess what? They have day jobs too!

So that rainy Sunday had me perilously close to the end of my rope.

Dr. Wayne’s rainbow seemed significant, hence my pondering when Ter called. Rainbows may be the mandatory adherence to physical law, but they mean so much on a spiritual level: Hope. Joy. Love. A promise that all will be well if it isn’t already—and when I joined Ter in the OR, I saw the most incredible display of glowing colour arcing over our house and plunging into the sea. I almost wept.

Instead, I grabbed the Canon and ran outdoors to capture the moment. The pictures do little justice, and once I admitted defeat, I merely stood in the misty breeze and admired the incandescent, hard candy colour, all the while marveling that it had come to me at all.

“It’s going to be all right,” a quiet voice whispered.

And it will be.

I promise.

With love,

Burning the Ground

The world is on fire. The entire west coast is burning so hot that the sky over Victoria is thick and jaundiced with smoke. You can almost smell it. The photo I took on the weekend looks like it was tinted sepia. It wasn’t.

It’s unsettling, the colour of chaos. BC is burning in some areas, flash-flooding in others. If only we could direct the water toward the fire sites, one might find some divine providence in it all. This early in the season and the wildfire budget (how the heck can you budget for disaster?) is already exhausted. The fire crews on the ground and finance folks waiting to pay the bills are or will soon be equally so.

The glorious spring we enjoyed has morphed into the summer from hell. Drought conditions create rock-hard soil so when the rainstorms come, the water bounces off the ground and rushes straight through people’s basements. Intense dry lightning sparks new forest fires almost daily. Rising night winds whip the flames to the point where they create their own wind and start crowning—that’s jumping from treetop to treetop, folks—and the dry brush underfoot, the wreckage from pine beetle infestation and heedless foresting practices, ignites to meet in the middle.

It’s not just in BC, either. If the prairies aren’t battling tornadoes and thunderheads with hail the size of golf balls, they’re on fire too. Fire crews in the US are fighting as hard as ours to hold off hungry flames with yummy homes and vacation cottages in their sights. Hundreds—thousands?—of people are evacuated with a half-hour’s notice and nothing but what they can stuff into their cars. Lives may not be lost, but they could be irrevocably changed.

I heard that a little earthquake recently rattled Nova Scotia (?!) I’m sitting in a subduction zone where, when that one plate shifts, Abbotsford will become waterfront property, and I’m getting a little nervous. “Mother Earth is waking up,” Ter said the other day, “and she is pissed.”

Her comment got me thinking. If Mother Earth had been Father Earth instead, would we have treated her with more respect?

Full Flight

The sport of kings may cost a royal ransom to play, but the plebs can watch it for free. Or, rather, the price of admission. Or the cost of cable. Nitpicking aside, I watched the Kentucky Derby for the first time in years this year. I didn’t pick a horse. Well, I kind of did, just because I wanted an upset, and I think my choice came in fourth—I don’t even remember now. It doesn’t matter, either, because I don’t bet on horse races.

Ter used to visit the track with her dad when she was a kid. He’d give her a couple of bucks and off she’d go to the wicket, but her clearest memory is of collecting the multi-coloured ticket stubs discarded by the losers. I think she was there for the love of horses, too.

My speed-freakishness probably started in another life, maybe when I was Charlie’s girl and he took me to Newmarket for the races in 16-whenever. The origin of my love for horses, however, remains a mystery. And since I’m currently on a bender about the beauty in nature, I have lately been reminded of the saying—though I don’t recall who said it—that the most beautiful sight in creation is that of a horse running at a full gallop.

Personally, I think that a horse grazing beneath an apple tree is just as beautiful, but for sheer robbery of breath, never mind a thundering herd. A single horse in full flight is one of the most beautiful things I can imagine. The sun on a burnished coat, the light in a dark eye, the flowing mane and rippling muscle, yikes, the dream interpreters claim that horses represent sexual power, but really? Can’t they just be beautiful for beauty’s sake?

I will admit that watching the Derby can get my pulse racing, but the best race I ever saw was the Belmont Stakes in 1973, when Secretariat put twenty-five, no, thirty-one record-setting lengths between himself and the second place finisher. That was a race won by a lone horse in full flight.

And it was beautiful.

Moss Rock

During my post-Station Eleven flânerie, I hiked up to Moss Rock Park, a scrubby expanse of rock and brush at the top of a hill overlooking Fairfield. From there I was able to see the entire neighbourhood and the ocean beyond it, not precisely a bird’s eye view, but a grand vista nonetheless. High-end houses rim the park’s perimeter, but the sense of isolation fit the mood of the post-apocalyptic novel I had finished reading hours earlier.

There is one scene in the book, where the heroine, Kirsten, is faced with imminent death. Refusing to let the face of the man holding the gun to her head be the last thing she sees on this earth, she lifts her gaze and watches a bird wheeling across the sky. She absorbs as much of the surrounding world as she can—the crickets chirping, the smell of the grass, the warmth of the sun on her skin. She remembers the people she loves, she feels how desperately she loves them, and she thinks, I am not afraid.

I knew someone who chose to die in this park. I was hardly close to her; I didn’t even like her that much—we worked in the same place for a time and didn’t get along that well. When her husband died, she couldn’t face life without him, so she disappeared and a few days later, the searchers found her at the top of the hill. It was sad news, to be sure. It’s the most personal decision anyone can make, whether or not to continue in this estate. Understanding may not be possible to those on the outside, but compassion certainly is.

This was my first visit to the park and, naturally, I couldn’t go there without thinking of her. I sat on the lone bench and watched the sunlight on the water. Birds wheeled across the sky. Insects buzzed over errant flowers, paintbrush drops of colour against the stone. The air was warm and silken, the breeze whispering through the dry grass, and I thought, I know why you came here. And I knew why Kirsten, while staring death in the eye, chose the open sky to be her final sight before the end. It’s what I would choose—what I will choose, assuming I have a say—to take with me when I go.

There is nothing more beautiful than the world we’ll leave behind.

Alien Observation

My favourite time to walk along the water is before 8:00 a.m. Mornings are better than afternoons or evenings; if I’m enjoying a flânerie after 8:00, I become an obstacle for joggers on iPods, joggers pushing baby strollers, joggers with big dogs, joggers in pairs, joggers in groups—you get the idea.

Last Friday, the sky over the ocean was so dramatic that I chose to walk home along the cliffs and marvel at the majestic light piercing the clouds. You’d think the prevailing sound would be the surf rolling or the wind singing through my earrings, but more constant than the rhythm of Nature breathing was the staccato “pound pound pound” of rubber hitting asphalt and the accompanying “huff huff huff” of a cardio system under duress.

I wanted to scream at them: “Stop and look at this picture, you idiots; this light on those mountains will never come again!”

It’s kind of annoying to feel like I’m poking along the pedestrian highway and that I should get out of their way, but I get irked when they blow past me, too. The thought occurred that if I was an alien who’d just beamed down from the mothership, I would immediately assume that earthlings run everywhere … and I’d be sorry for the poor beasts.

Chin Up

I sat at the beach this morning and wondered why I felt so down. I watched the waves roll in, one after the other, noting how they hit the shore in increments, how they vary in strength. I thought about how far they come before they reach the shore, if they begin in Japan and cross the whole Pacific Ocean to land at my feet, or if they’ve just tripped up from Washington state. Either way, it shows marked perseverance on nature’s part, just as a crow pecking at the pebbles for its breakfast exemplified a focus I’ve lately been lacking.

On my way to the beach, a cyclist passed me coming the other way; as we came abreast of each other, he called, “Good morning!” I answered automatically and don’t remember if I smiled. I appreciated the greeting, though. He didn’t have to say anything, but he kindly acknowledged my existence and in so doing, reminded me that the world—that life—is wonderful. So I consciously called to mind my favourite Louis Armstrong song and made myself loop it until all the words fell into place:

I see trees of green, red roses too,

I see them bloom for me and you

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world …

It was a start. Hard work to keep it going, but a start nonetheless. Sitting quietly in the glow of the morning sun, I set aside the song for a minute and pondered the weight of my spirit during the past few days.

It’s been heavier than usual, no doubt about it.

I see skies of blue, clouds of white,

Bright blessed day and dark sacred night

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world …

Gratitude, I thought. To which I crossly replied, I’m always grateful. Every day, I am grateful. I say it, think it, believe it.

Yeah, Ru, but are you grateful enough?

Oh, s***, I am so not going there. I am not buying into the brownie point system I was taught in church. Grateful is grateful; there is no pro-rating. If I’m wrong, then the Zen Buddhist/metaphysical spirit stuff I’ve been absorbing these past years is as much a lie as the Christian orthodox crap I abandoned when I set myself free.

The colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky,

Smiles on the faces of people passing by …

It’s not a matter of how. It’s a matter of what. Agreed, you are grateful. Now, what are you grateful for? and be specific.

Coming up with a list was harder in my bleakened frame of mind, but once I started, it got easier. Then I realized that the past few weeks have been so distracting that I’ve let my practice slide. As summer months go, July sucked. I had more dental work done and spent a lot of time in pain or on painkillers. The suite downstairs came off the market and went up as a rental. People at work were going through their own stuff, which subliminally affected the whole team. The novel continued to frustrate me. By the end of the month, I had even lost interest in writing. That really depressed me.

I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do

And really saying,

I love you …

It’s okay, Ru. Yup, life sucked and you lost your focus. You can get it back. Your teeth are fine, you’re off the drugs. You’ve met the folk who will be your downstairs neighbours. Work is work, but that won’t change. The novel will come back online. And you’re inspired to more than write again. You’re simply inspired.

I hear babies cry, watch them grow

They know much more than I’ll ever know

And I think to myself …

I flâneried around the point on my way back home. There’s a monument on the green that’s been in place for years but I’ve never paid it any attention. Today, I was prompted to look at it. It’s called “Millenium Peace” and was a gift to the city from a couple who wanted to honour Earth Day in 2000. The plaque quite plainly states that the piece is—and this is what really leaped out at me—“a touchstone of gratitude”.

There’s that word again. It’s not a matter of being grateful enough. It’s about gratitude for specifics. For the little things as well as the big things. For sun and sea; for love and hope; for my family and friends; especially for Ter; for my little bears and my favourite teacup and an extra day off this weekend. It’s even about the pain I endured during prep and installation of my dental bridge, when I was able to find moments of joy within moments of not. I am grateful for it all.

As I reached the corner of the street where I live, I met another random stroller who acknowledged my existence with a friendly “Good morning.”

“Hello,” I said back—and this time, I smiled.

What a wonderful world.