Oct 092009

Now

1. The kitchen, like a painter’s studio, spackled with colourful ingredients at all times. Piles of ripening pears, lumpy potatoes and gourds, hot peppers and spices, saucepans of chai. Something is always being invented; ratatouille, raw fruit crackers, walnut butter, cilantro salsa. The fridge brims.

2. Two of my mainland womenfolk, who won’t know one another until the 11am ferry, are coming to spend Thanksgiving with me. We will eat, visit Jessy’s farm, make music, hike the Sooke potholes and watch the turkey vultures blackening the skies on their migration across the Juan de Fuca.

3. Craig the Floutist shows up for a morning sun visit and within moments, he is surrounded by Yves’ miraculous collection of exotic flutes and didgeridoos. I make spice tea while the boys toot and whistle, rumble and blow. Only more delicious than the music is the unbounded enthusiasm between us.

4. Love is like a warm fire that I wish to be near all day long.

5. We can’t find the mallets to play The Lid Tree in the backyard, so we gather handfuls of acorns and chuck them at the instrument instead. Ping! Dong! Tang!

6. Community, I love who we are becoming – the way we raise each other up with light, love and understanding. The easy and boundless optimism. The torrent of generosity, the beauty, laughter and creativity! This is the new condition. And it’s quickening. I am so, so grateful to be alive for it.

7. Placing two of Daniel’s photographs on my piano yesterday, it is as if the whole room fills with the sunlight of belonging. One is of Mamacita, a miracle cat, nose to nose with a seal cub on the beach, the other is a family of photogenic goats and one dog, under a rainbow of handkerchief prayer flags in the rainforest.

8. I would be tortured by my ache to live in wilderness versus my desire to collaborate with culture, if they were, in fact, opposed.

9. Sitting in the October heat, bearing witness to my body humming with love.