It was one of those days when I almost cried from the sense of loneliness, misunderstanding and disconnect. I’m getting better at recognising those events as they happen and not giving in to them, at least not completely. But whatever the reason, be it hormonal, emotional or just physical exhaustion, I don’t want to deny what I am feeling or brush it away. I think, in fact, that days like these happen whenever my sensitivity becomes heightened for whatever reason. It is not that I am feeling different things, I’m just feeling everything I usually feel but more keenly and with more urgency.

So, I will try to list what I felt today, without analysing, judging, censoring or explaining it. Slight irritation and disappointment at the start of the new week. Anxiety for my kids. Lack of motivation. Overwhelming feeling of disconnect at work. Sadness and frustration. Even more keen feeling of disconnect from the people I work with. Desire to leave and lack of desire to be anywhere else.

This was my day. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad either. There will be other days. One day I’ll try therapy to understand what is happening to me on these days, or rather what is happening to me every day. Maybe the answer is simply everything. White supremacy, capitalism, death, crisis. It is happening to everyone, only I can afford to feel it on certain days. Maybe.

On days like these I like to imagine myself home. I know that when I was home there was a hell lot of things that annoyed me. I know that home now is nothing like I remember it. Still, I indulge in these one part memories, nine part fantasies. Funnily enough, I have vivid memories of some repeating activities without actually remembering why I was doing them. Like, I remember regularly going to Glavposhtamt. Why? Did I go to pay bills? To send letters? To whom? I remember mostly being alone and recognise with some surprise and sadness that this is the persistent pattern of my life. Imposed separation from my father in my teen years. Living far away from my family in may twenties. Feeling alone now, disconnected from my bloodline and my culture. It’s harder than I thought it would be. I’ll have a lot to discuss when one day I finally decide to try therapy.

Today was rainy, so I was the only one walking along the bike lane and the only one in the forest. I wanted to see if trilliums were already blooming – I saw one, but only leaves. Trout lillies are poking out too and what I love the most is the growing feeling of familiarity. I marvel at how the forest can be so quiet and so full of many things at the same time. Soft sounds of rain, smell of rotting leaves and algae from the deep puddles that never ever dry, fluttering and shrill little cries of brown creepers – tiny birds whose existence I didn’t know until today. Fungi eating away the dead wood in various stages of decay. Thick cover of leaves hides all kinds of life.

On the way back I touched the branch of a sumac and squealed with delight when I discovered that it was covered with a soft padding. At that moment I thought, maybe the problem is that we do believe in heaven. Maybe this is what keeps us from throwing all we have into fighting for what we have. Maybe, if we thought that was our only chance to make it right, we’d be better at making it right.

I am feeling too lazy to work or journal. The weather went from abnormally warm to chilly. The kids and I spent the morning picking up the earth-worms washed by the rain onto the asphalt and putting them back on grassy earth. There are too many worm victims to save them all, of course, and, lacking basic knowledge of worm ecology, I do not know if what we do qualifies as saving, but we figure this is better than seeing them squashed by the wheels or drowned in the puddles. My five year old sun solemnly instructs every worm he saves: don’t go back there! Stay on the earth! Collectively, we decide that the only honourable purpose for a worm’s death is to be eaten by a bird and thus continue the cycle of life. Then, my daughter starts picking up even the dead worms and putting them on the lawn. I think the birds will like it better to pick their worms off the grass, than off the stupid parking lot, she explains. As usual, by saving someone else we save ourselves.

I saw the first dandelions today – the first dandelions! I was looking out for them, but I was not expecting to see them for another two or three weeks. Ironically, my first dandelions waited for me in Mile End, in the very belly of the city. They were pocking through the crack between the asphalt and a wall near the entrance to Café Saint-Henri. I would have missed them, if I didn’t have to come back to pick up the headphones I left in the café. I love dandelions with all my heart. They are the most decolonial flower! Their roots are deep, they always grow in tight-knit families or communities, they grow everywhere, pierce through every crack and I especially love how year after year after year they lift their joyful yellow heads on the immaculately dead green lawns of my neighbours. They are food, they are medicine, they are delightful toys for children. Dandelions are everything.

So many other good things happened today. Small things, but they happened when I needed them most and they were medicine of homeopatic kind:

Rain

Spending a day between Parc-Ex, Mile-End and Little Italy

Great conversation with Nicole and Stephanie at Sanctuary Sangha

Great conversations with Bonnie and Demi and May (do I get paid to do that?!)

Conversations about women elders who continue living way beyond the medical expectation

Spending some time in a flower shop

Just the overall feeling of being outside, away, of slipping out of corporate reach.

Such a good day.

I haven’t journaled for two days and I feel the pressure building up, my brain buzzing with unsaid words and unresolved conflicts, I had hard time sleeping this night. It’s getting ready to explode and explosion is exactly what I am trying to avoid, because baby it’s ugly when it happens. So, I am looking for a release in writing, in walking, I need to learn how to meditate, I really do. I need to calm my breathing, to slow my pulse to get back to the state when I hear the birds again, where the bird song is louder than the hum in my head.

I am binging on the books now, both knowledge and stories, also poetry, audio and text, buying, lending at the library, queuing others up in my ever growing next-to-read list. I’m not sure this is healthy, but I am so hungry and desperate now – every bit of knowledge looks good. Is hunger for books connected to loneliness?

I like dwelling at the margins. Margins are where change happens, where new things emerge, new language, where shimmering is. Margins is the only space in a book where nothing is written and everything is possible. Mainstream is boring in comparison. The problem with the margins is that when you stay too long you become, well, marginalized. And marginalisation is lived well better in community than alone. So, the problem is, again, not marginalisation, but loneliness. The secret ingredient I am looking for is a community and sense of belonging at the very margins of the story.

Good thing we knew what time it would happen, because at first it didn’t look like anything much. I’ve put the glasses over other glasses and squinted through the two pares of glasses to look at a small organge disk that was missing a tiny piece at the bottom right part.

I ran in and out of the house to check on the progress of the black disk that was swallowing the orange little by little.

It was getting colder and quieter and the light was getting dim and pale. As the light was disappearing, the shadows disappeared as well. The orange disk became a crescent that was getting slimmer with every second. Then the light went out. We took our glasses off and for one glorious minute stared at the dark blue disk with a pale halo around it. Somewhere in the distance a large group of people cheered like at a football game.

Then it was over and the light came back faster than it took to disappear.

It is such a luxury to have lived a day when the only and the most important thing that happened was the meeting between the moon and the sun.

I have expected to see my crocuses squashed and broken under the weight of the recent snowfall. Instead, they emerged victorious and wasted no time to greet the spring snow sun.

A house finch joined the usual chorus of cardinals, robins, chickadees and song sparrows today. I heard a downy woodpecker in the forest.

While walking in the forest today, I had to stick to the large paths, as the smaller ones are too muddy to follow. I couldn’t hear the birds, silenced by the cacophony of human voices, and I kept thinking: what if we just learned to keep quiet as a species? What if our survival depended on our ability to be still and listen.

Oh, and how could I forget the wonderful walk to the city park we took this morning. We halted on a little bridge listening to the brook. (“Mama, did you know that water sings?!”) and soon were joined by a girl a little older than my daughter. The girl, Layla, took us to the stones at the edge of the brook and taught us to “fish” for leaves and sticks in the stream. It was wonderfully fun, even as Elise’s foot slipped into the water.

Now that I know his song, I start noticing the pattern. He’s there every morning, at the same spot, singing to his invisible kin. The Mohawk word shé:kon that we translate as hello, actually means “still, again.” As in “I still love you” – “shé:kon konnorón:kwa.” It makes sense to greet this bird in Mohawk, not only because we meet on an unceded land where he is native and I am a settler, but because he helped me to understand shé:kon as an expression of gratitude for the continuation of life. Shé:kon to the sun that rises in the East, a minute earlier with every day, shé:kon to the bird that sings at the same place every morning, preparing to read a new generation of beautiful red songbirds. Shé:kon to the wild geese that fly over neighbourhood, making us look up. Shé:kon to the crows, who know my patterns better than I know theirs. Shé:kon, as in “you are still here, I see you, I acknowledge you.”

A phrase in the Wolf Willow Institute email startled me today. Apocalypse means revelation. How could I forget this, given my past? I read the book a dozen times, yet, if someone asked me yesterday what the word meant, I’d say “end of the world” or “end of times.” Apocalypse means revelation. The question is what is being revealed. I you’d asked me now, I’d say cracks. It feels like they’re everywhere, like the very surface of time, space and reality is covered in cracks that look tiny at a first glance, but go deep. Monsters are hiding in them, but also possibilities and maybe the two are the same.

My neighbourhood is worn-out by yesterday’s storm. There are broken branches everywhere and the snow looks dirty and out of place. We woke up in a cold house, but with electricity, so we decided to make the morning special and have a breakfast at Cafellini before barely making it on time to school. On my way back (there is no driving, because the driveway is covered in snow and we already changed to summer tires) I heard the loud, insistent song of the cardinal. With every step, the sound got louder until I finally saw him – the beautiful red bird perched on the hedge of the last house on our street. He was singing, unperturbed by my steps or by the wet noises of the cars. Somewhere across the road, unseen to me, another cardinal was answering him. It went on for a long time: two cardinals, one visible, another invisible, singing back and forth. They continued, as I moved on, through the chirps of robins, sharp cries of grackles, joyful noise of sparrows and a single cry of a blue-jay somewhere at the distance.

I think there are two ways to wisdom, both equally exciting. One is looking inside: a deep exploration of one’s own story, origins, relations and ancestors, digging through layers or trauma and wisdom, discovering who we are in time. The other is more about space: letting the world to become alive for us – no longer an object or a backdrop for our story, but a place full of stories that are just as important as our own. This is what I experienced this morning, as I was listening to the duet of the cardinals – the world as a living, breathing, unfolding story of life. The cardinals were singing to each other, oblivious to my presence. Their song started before I came and went on after I left. It was guided by the millenia-old instincts of which I have no understanding. My role was witnessing this miracle – an act that had no benefits for the two cardinals, but was life-changing for me.

This spring, my suburban neighbourhood becomes alive, exciting and mysterious to me through the birdsong. I leap from joy when I can trace the song to the singer. I start noticing the patterns of flight. I got all excited this evening, while walking towards the school, when the three crows flew over me and I was able to tell that they are craws and not ravens.

I keep a lot of these observations to myself. The only people able to get excited about my cardinal, crow and raven stories are my children. On the way home tonight, I entertained my daughter with my very inapt description of the grackle’s feathers.

I don’t want to become an expert on birds. I love learning facts about them, but I don’t want to reduce the birds to the science of them: the density of their bones or the span of their wings. I want to keep falling deeply, endurably in love with the web of living things around me. Be they grackles or stones – I want to let them know that I know that they are alive.