Wow, what a day.

I’ve been waiting for it and it didn’t disappoint. I am in a state of deep vulnerability hangover. I am on so much endorphines now that my cheeks burn. Simultaneously feeling like too much and not enough. Also, making a mental note to do a deep dive on the adrenaline vs. oxytocin-fuelled work and how this may show up in my work and my life. I believe that I have heard about the dangers of relying on adrenaline-fuelled work in the beginning of the year at Taiaiake Alfred’s lecture. Months later, I have heard about the role of oxytocin (manifesting as both care and eros) in the work on For the Wild podcast and I feel in a very quiet and anti-climatic way that it’s time to bind them together.

My daughter brought two snails from school. She has put them into a snack containers, emptied of mango pieces I’d cut for her this morning. She even put soil, blades of grass and a half-open dandelion. She said that she rescued the snails from some younger kids and was planning to let them go in our garden. She gave them the names: Johnny and Tourbillon. When we got home, we said good-bye to Johnny and Tourbillon and set them on the grass in front of the house. I watched them for a while, while the kids ran off to see friends down the street. Then I went for a walk and when I came back Johnny and Tourbillon were gone.

I watched a screening of Dolly Kikon’s documentary Abundance, which I did because Rosie invited me and I do want to show up for Rosie so badly. The film was about the relationships of Lota-Naga (Dolly’s and Rosie’s people) with the forest. In the end, the subtitles explained how the gouvernement of India tried to strip Lota-Naga of their Indigenous rights and use the forest for development. And I thought, wow, Dolly could have just made a film about that – political struggle and resistance and all that and no one would have blamed her. Instead, she chose to make a film about foraging technics and living in abundance and harmony with the forest.

I find it funny, almost ironic, how I meet all these amazing people under the pretext of speaking about systems change and climate justice and activism. I drink these conversations like one would drink maple water in Spring. But if we were to boil down all these encounters, the verbal and the non-verbal part, the metaphors, the laughs, the stares, the gestures, the moments of pure connection, the warmth of our bodies, the raw, the human, the divine, if we were to make a syrup out of the sap of this day, it would boil down to ferns, snails and joy.