Another day full of humid heat, little mishaps and uneasy feeling that something is not right. Maybe just atmospheric pressure. Maybe just hormones. Maybe just a lack of adrenaline. Maybe something deeper.

I saw a first fully golden tree. It was beautiful and scary, like a botched time travel experiment.

I finished Tmmy Orange’s There, There and cried. I started listening to Gabor Mate’s The Myth of Normal. Also started reading Alice Elliot’s And Then She Fell. Are three books in one day enough?

Then, in the midst of this unease and ill timings, I managed to carve out fourty minutes for a walk around the village lake. It was waiting for me there – a perfect sunset. Not just any sunset – the very last minutes before the sun hides behind the one-storey skyline of my placid suburb. Silhouettes of trees and clouds reflected in the dark water. Perfectly circular ripples running across these silhouettes. Someone, small fish or frogs or maybe turtles, popping on the surface and re-disappearing. A fat dragonfly flying along the shore. I sat down and took off my sandals, so it feels more like a meditation. I want to learn to meditate. I had a thought, what if I do it wrong, that I chased away. I don’t know if one could meditate wrongly, but there is no wrong way to watch a sunset.

The trouble with me and meditation is that I come from evangelical culture that tends to be very performative. There is always you and the Other whom you try to impress. And you keep trying and trying, harder and harder, never entirely sure of the effect. Being an Orthodox (or a Catholic, I suppose) is so much easier. You just show up and someone absolves you – there is a sure way, a ritual, something older and bigger, something someone else does for you. Compared to this, being evangelical is hard work, an almost megalomaniac pursuit. Even now I have to remind myself not to try so hard – no one is watching, no one is comparing, no one is giving out gold stars either. Just sit down and watch the sunset. Oh, and the liberating thought that all of this: the sunset, the ripples across the water, the perfect harmony are not there for me, were not created for me – I just happen to be passing by. I am not the centre of the universe – the centre of the universe is everywhere.

My daughter told me this morning that she wants to spend her whole life in Canada. Why, I asked. Because she feels good here and wants to live where she knows everything and feels good and to be close to me. And if I move, I asked. I’ll consider it, she said carefully, although I would still love to be in Canada. Will you move, she then asked. I honestly replied that I don’t know. I saw that my daughter has something I never had when I was little, something I never had period – the assurance that everything she needs, everything that makes her whole and happy is already there where she lives. I don’t know what it’s like. I always wanted to be somewhere else, I guess I still do. I never felt whole or completely at home. And yet, I often feel that I miss home. The thing is, when I miss home I don’t know who or where I miss.

But bless her. She is growing into someone vastly different from me. With a different feeling of attachment and possibility. Somewhere deep inside her, I believe there are still the shadows of our forgotten ancestors and the echoes of songs I never sang to her in the language she doesn’t speak. Bless her.