I slept badly last night and spent the day battling my anxiety. But tonight, long after I’d put my children to bed, long after I should have gone to bed myself, as I am looking outside at the full moon and at the orange flicker of a burning stove in the dark of my neighbours’ backyard, I realize that I am no longer scared of the night, no longer scared of loneliness, no longer afraid of anything.

The first sound I hear waking up is the insistent cries of baby robins asking for food. At least, this is what I think is happening. Those robin babies are very loud and I think that the nest must be somewhere right outside my bedroom window.

The dawn looks gray. I think it’s fog, until I realize it’s not. Later I learn that the wind’s been blowing from the West, bringing the smog of wildfires from the Prairies. I am grieving for all those forests and houses and Treaty territories disappearing in the fire.

Things have been disappearing in my community too, little things. Back in spring, when the leaves were still tiny and neon green, they’ve cut an old tree on the street I take when I walk my kids to school. And a week or two ago I noticed that an old house I loved because of its white porch, blue shutters and a wild garden, was eased to the ground. The garden is now a construction site for a larger and more luxurious mansion.

When they were cutting that old tree, I stood in the middle of the street, determined to witness its final moments. Its life was longer than mine and more meaningful in many senses. It was a home, a shelter, it was the guardian of the soil, the keeper of seasons, the provider of oxygen. I wondered, what its fellow trees were feeling, the ones who grew next to it and those on the other side of the road, from where I was watching. Since the trees don’t move around, they must grow very attached to their companions. I touched the bark of one of the trees in a gesture of condolence. Even now, as I walk past the place where the tree used to grow, I feel its absence and I know the other trees feel it too.

Montreal smelled of smoke and worry. The Village smoked of weed, freedom and human misery. The smells mixed in an unpleasant way. I got a small red jasper stone as a gift. The note said it will ground me and help me get out of my head and feel more connected.

Tonight is prom night at the high school across the street. The kids’ cheers are loud, but not nearly as loud as the hungry cries of robin nestlings or the voices of my own children when they want my attention. I hope these kids will be ok,

I can imagine a tired bird

But I can’t

Imagine a bird tired of being a bird.

I think that we are the only ones

Who get tired of being ourselves.

And I can’t understand

Whether this is a fatal flow

Or a super power.

What a strange species we are.

I am writing this by a creek on a Saturday afternoon

Water running so loud it overtakes

The song of the Great Northern Flycatcher

And the chirping of the Least Flycatcher

Going about their lives up in the dense spring foliage.

Isn’t it ironic how desperate I am to catch a glimpse of them

And how indifferent they are

To whatever it is I am doing.

From now on, in the evening

After I put my children to bed

I can slip into my old running shoes

And hurry across the street to an old reservoir

To watch the sunset.

I always have company:

A woman in a yellow boho blouse

A teenage boy on a squeaky bike

A couple with a glass of red for two.

We stand not too close to each other

And soak in the orange light

While slowly turning

Opposite from the sun.

One of my favourite books is The Book of Delights. Every time I come across something that makes my heart flutter, if only for a moment, I whisper “Delight!” and smile as if it was an inside joke.

I am getting good at this. This morning I stopped on the corner to listen to the choir of local birds: sparrows, cardinals, juncos, robins and a lonely white-breasted nuthatch.

I went for another walk in the evening delighting in the fact that an evening walk no longer means a walk in the dark. I delighted at the sight of the thinning ice and the joyful little brook that was still and frozen only two weeks ago.

Walking in the early spring is a little bit like living in reverse: the world around looks like late autumn, except it is full of hope.

Autumn, which I love dearly, is always tinged with regret and a feeling of inevitability. Winter is always death. Spring is the awakening of the spirit. Those are the teachings of the Medicine Wheel and they are also the teachings of my people.

My people used to celebrate the new year in March and count their age in Springs and in Summers. My people used to know the spirits that lived in the brooks. They were female spirits, the tricksters. We called them Mavkas.

Mavkas used to disguise themselves as beautiful women and seduce village boys. Sometimes they would do it for laughs, sometimes out of revenge and sometimes they would fall in love. In these cases, it was always the humans who betrayed them.

My ancestors used to believe that the universe was feminine. The trees, the rivers, the tall grass of the steps, the soil that could sprout every kind of seed, and the stars.

Today, I have heard someone saying: what if the universe was born not in a Big Bang, but in a sensuous exhale releasing the mirriads of carbon dust particles into the womb of the great unknown.

This was my way to therapy today. About 45 minute walk with little pauses to pay attention.

Sometimes I play this game with myself: I try to think of all the way I am connected with an object or a place I see along the way. Today, maybe because it was the beginning of spring, my therapy day or the conversations I was having, the intimacy with the city felt almost overwhelming.

We’ve had a row of sunny, unseasonably warm days that have melted away the snow. I am telling myself that it is way too early to believe in spring. The snow may yet return. I am checking the brownish carpet of last year’s unraked leaves, half-hoping half-afraid to see the purple heads of crocuses peeping through. Too late for caution. My body is already rejoicing. The willow on my street is also rejoicing. She is sprouting those soft fluffy buds. Where I come from, we call them kittens. Where I come from, we cut some willow branches and bring them to church on Palm Sunday to be blessed. We bring just about anything to be blessed in church, especially food for big holidays. I used to think about these traditions: how very backwards. Now I think: how very animistic.

I have learned so much over the past several months. I have learned not to get in the way of my body. To let it grieve or rejoice over the smallest things. To not question the wisdom of the smallest things. To remember my ancestors in everything. My grandmother Vira in her last years used to say she wanted to live until spring. That was the life goal – to live long enough to see the spring. I think it’s a good one. In her last years, my grandmother was lost in the labyrinths of dementia. She forgot the calendar and the people around her and the events of her own life, but she never forgot the seasons and the names of her children. The last time I saw her, I was preparing to leave for another country for a long time. I always thought it was more important to leave, than to stay. Always believed that something good was waiting for me out there. The last time I saw her, my grandmother emerged from the depths of her dementia, just for a brief moment, in a beautiful fluid motion. She looked at me with her eyes now almost devoid of colour and said: “Take care of yourself out there, baby.” I cried and I knew I would not see her again.

She died in the winter of the year that I’d left and I didn’t come back to say good-bye. This is one of the many many many things I would have done differently.

Let me count one by one the things that I am grateful for:

It is full moon

The spring came early

The birds are starting their wedding rites

We are one week away from Spring equinox

The sup is running, the water is running, my children are running on the way home from school

My son is giggling his happy laugh turning the pages of his brand new anthology of the universe

And I am reading Ada Limon’s poems next to him.

I am holding all of you in my heart. I am holding everything that is wrong. Every heartbreak. Every absence. Please, don’t think that just because I feel happy at this precise intersection of time (an evening of early spring) and space (at the foot of a child’s bed) I forgot about you.

I am tucking you in safely under the blanket. Caressing you in a circular motion. Sleep, I whisper, it will be ok tomorrow.

There will be Spring equinox, then Summer solstice. There will be long twilights after the sunset. Early mornings. Birdsong. Light bugs in the dark summer garden. It will be enough, I whisper, it will be enough.

I haven’t slept well tonight. I was tossing and dreaming of Jenny. Except I wasn’t dreaming as much as I was trying to access her. Blair, my spirituality teacher, says that dreaming is just another way of being in the world. He says, we have to get better at dreaming, if we want to get better at living in a conscious way. In my dreams, I was coming up to Jenny and hugging her and telling her how much I love her. In my dreams, she seemed beaming, the way I always saw her in life. she seemed happy.

In my dreams, my brain was flooded with words, the way it is always flooded with words. Endless words, enough to fill every crack in the universe, except that the cracks keep getting bigger.

In the early hour of the morning, in that state between frantic dreaming and awakening, I realized with clarity why I was hurting so much. Losing kin hurts. Kin are people who are neither your family, nor your friends, although I guess they could be both. They simply make sense. Their way of being, of moving through the world, of fighting, thinking, loving, makes sense. And because they move through the world in this way, the world also makes sense. Until they are gone and you have to get used to live in a place that is colder and emptier.

When I got up and looked at my puffy face – what a sight! – I had the same clarity. Thinking about Jenny, there is one thing that I do not regret. I have never failed to validate her. In every conversation, in every email, I always said how much I admired her, how incredible she was. When we first met, I had told her how I saw her ten years ago and how all this time I dreamed to meet her. I never held anything back. What a lesson. To know that one thing you will never regret is telling someone how you feel about them.

In the morning they ask me how I am

To which I reply, heartbroken

They shrug, as if saying, still?

As if saying, you were heartbroken last week,

There is a limit, a quota, and as it comes,

You’re sucking all heartbreak out of the air

Hoarding it all for yourself

Maybe, you should leave some for others.

To which I reply, maybe.

In physics they taught us that everything ends

Eventually.

Joy, wonder, anger and sadness – everything dissipates in entropy.

But how about silence, I wonder,

How about loneliness and your overwhelming absence,

Is there an end to the end

Or does the end unfold endlessly

In the never-ending succession of lost things?

None of these subjects are suitable for morning small talk

So I shrug and ask instead

How are you?