June 5, 2024
Gleanings
- A while ago I had some of that Aesop hand soap that is something like forty dollars a bottle. Used it up. Refilled the bottle (it’s a nice bottle, not forty dollars nice, but nice enough) with plain old fragrance-free Seventh Generation and did not really think much about doing that, except just now I was like I wonder if there should be a note in the bathroom for guests to not get too excited about the soap.
- Yet, it does make sense, too. I just take one step and another. I text one friend and another. I cook one meal and another. I read one book and another. I write one sentence and another. I hang one item of laundry on the line and another. I’m seeking coherence to this grand brief project called life.
- It’s been brought to my attention that I talk a lot about the weather, which I’m assuming is partly because I’m Canadian, but mostly because I’ve loved clouds and snow and thunder for as long as I can remember loving anything.
- In this case, I’d say: “Faulkner is dead. Let’s get A/C.”
- Having been housebound for five days, our walk was neither long nor far, but perfect for my wants and needs – a healthy dose of nature’s serenity. Surrounded by nature, I feel engulfed by calmness and the result is always a sense of renewal and replenishment. It’s my personal reboot — equilibrium restored, peace in my soul, joy in my heart. Corny? Undoubtedly, but true nonetheless.
- And then, another turn, and you’re out in the sunlight again. Birds are singing, flowers are springing, war is still raging, and those young people you’d set your hopes on for the future, are mindlessly gunning their motorcycles down the street.
- I actually don’t know how I got to it, but in the spring of 1989, as I was graduating with a honours BA in poli sci and was planning my move to Toronto to do a Masters at York, I made the difficult and life-altering decision to stop weighing myself. And I haven’t weighed myself since.
- 48 Things I love today on my birthday
- The goal is not to stop helping or abandon my core way of gazing out at the world—with wonder and love for my people and passion for the possibilities of more beauty and justice. The goal is to become ever more attuned to when help is connected, or when it is a compulsion, when it is consensual, or when it is controlling, when it is diving deeper into the marrow of life, and when it is a subconscious effort to escape life’s inevitable and sometimes gorgeous and sometimes cruel chaos.
- The first time Anna made and brought me a cup of tea, I said that was all I needed from her. Her familial obligations had been met. But then she made me a carrot cake with cream cheese icing for my birthday this year, which seemed like more than anyone could want. More recently, she saw that someone she followed on social media was posting about heaps of morels in Assiniboine Forest, which is one of my favourite places on earth and where I’d only ever found one or two morels. So she screencapped/sent me the info, but at the same time remarked: “I can’t believe I just brought you local mushroom news.” I responded: “You’ve reached your final form.” Like she was a Pokémon.
- I just planted the last of the dahlias. Saving something over the winter to plant again and have hopes for, is possibly my pride moment of the year, aside from the guitar thing and the fact that my daughter is a flaming badass.
- Life is difficult, and navigating it is difficult. I believe in triggers, though I can’t always predict what might affect me. Despite the hurricane, I’m not scared of wind storms. The other day, however, a cookbook fell open at one of Doug’s favourite recipes and I blinked away tears. His handwriting. A shoe store window displaying the red running shoes he yearned for (he asked for so little) that we couldn’t find when we were shopping for sneakers. And this weekend, a tent full of butterflies.
- Yesterday, waiting for a break in the weather to swim, I finally went anyway, a light rain brushing my shoulders, the water cold, the sky turning above me in its otherworld of clouds. I don’t why I waited for so many years to swim daily in cold water, held in its generous buoyancy, the sun, when it comes, lighting pools of green so clear the tiny fish show up, glittering. I loved the way my footprints in the grey sand disappeared underwater almost as soon as I’d walked out, erased by waves, just like that. And how the hoofprints of the deer who’d come to the shore, earlier than me, to drink were imprinted deep in the sand like petroglyphs.
- I love that the pancakes were the ruse.
