Today I celebrated le redoux by walking to the edge of the forest (Wikipedia helpfully suggested that the English word for it is thaw, or January thaw, which seems fitting since we’re still in January, other synonym may be a warm spell). I keep wondering if there is a word in Kanyenké’ha or Anishnabemowin for this short reprieve between wintery chill and what it may sound like. I hope that if there is such word, it was not lost, that there are people who remember it and pass it on.
I realize now that I do not have a favourite season, probably never had one. I have many favourite periods, intersections of time and space: le redoux in the middle of cold Canadian winter, the time in the early spring when the snow crusts over and the sap is running in the trees, the short three days in may when crab apple trees suddenly cover themselves in pink petals, the sunset of a very hot day on the Almanare beach, the time of chestnuts blooming in Kyiv, autumn between late September and the end of October.
What I love about the winter forest is how very few people are there. It seems empty at the first sight, but of course it is not empty. Nor is it silent. The trees groan, screech and whisper with the wind. I hugged a tall and slender tree and I felt if shudder and move and for a moment I thought I heard something similar to a heartbeat.
The sunsets still happen at 4pm, but there is hope being reborn amongst the cold.
The last thing I dreamt before waking up this morning was being at some kind of conference of a gathering by the sea. It is something I recognize as a recurring dream: being with a group of people in a far-away place. Once it was a warm and futuristic city that looked like Singapore of my imagination, with slender white sky-scrappers and light-rail bridges everywhere. Once or twice it was Kyiv – every time I see it in my dreams, it is filled with golden lights and looks achingly familiar and futuristic at the same time. I remember that in that dream I was running around, trying to get the best view from above on the old city and its golden domes. Every time I dream about Kyiv, even now when I write about dreaming about Kyiv, it fills me with ache. Tonight I was at the seaside and the sea was warm and welcoming and although my days were filled with some agenda, I could rise up very early each morning and walk by the sea. I just made up my mind that the next morning I would take a towel with me and start the day with a dip, when I woke up, feeling happy and light.
The day then didn’t proceed as I expected it – it wasn’t bad or good, just an ordinary mixed day with moments of tenderness and laughter and periods of annoyance, with kids being alternately sweet and stubborn. But then we read a funny story before the bed and I nested myself next to my son to cuddle his feet and read to myself until he fell asleep. As I came to see my daughter, she was already asleep and looking at her peaceful still childlike face made me gasp with a familiar mix of love, tenderness and sadness.
This January I’ve been reading and listening and thinking about the two dimensions of time: chronos and Kairos. For me, Kairos happens every evening – it’s this moment when my kids’ breathing slows down and their little faces relax, their eyelids flutter then close and they drift to sleep. People often joke that we never love our kids as much as when they sleep, but it’s true on a deeper level. It is at that moment that time stops and we see their innocence so clearly and we are desperate to protect them from the world and from growing up and from million other things. It is pure Kairos: crisis, hope and opportunity all in one.
This morning, as I was sitting in the dentist’s office, my phone randomly showed me a collection of photos I took while walking through the Mont Bruno park in August or early September last year. I remember being quite fascinated by different mushrooms and seeing a garter snake. I remember that the trees were still green, but the ground was orange, brown and yellow with the fallen leaves, as it always is in the forest, even in spring. I remember the day being long and generous, in the shadow of the trees, between the lakes, in the luxury of the solitude.
As I was looking through the photos, I thought “so much beauty happened to me that day.” And then I paused, delighted by the fact that I was able to think for a moment in Mohawk way. See, in the Mohawk language, everything exists in the relationship to something and in order to say something, anything at all, one must establish that relationship. There are 86 pronouns, most of them can only be used in a connection with the verb. One of these pronouns, wake- shows that “I” am the object and something is the subject – something happens to me. Wakatshennò:ni means I am happy, or, if one wants to be precise, that happinness happens to me. I do not know the root word for being beautiful or even if such word exists, but I thought it would be so right to use it with a pronoun wake- “the beauty happens to me.”
Maybe, in a similar fashion, hope, inspiration, creativity, insight are the things that happen to us, so we can know ourselves as parts of a much bigger story.
From afar, they look like a solemn procession of metal giants.
Now that I have to go to the office twice a week (I do not mind the going part, but ah, how do I hate the being in the office part!), I start seeing my time in the bus as a thing of beauty and mystery – a time when time itself is suspended, when I exist outside of my daily routine (this time is neither work, nor play, nor family nor a personal time in its strict sense), yet I very much exist. A lot of my thinking, wondering and dreaming happens on this morning bus ride (I do not feel the same way about evening buses that tend to be crowded and uncomfortable). I secretly like the feeling of moving through space, yet being outside of time. Sometimes I read. That is, I oblige myself to read, so as not to waste valuable 30 minutes, but in reality my reading never progresses more than half a page – the rest of the journey I let my gaze and my thoughts wander.
The trip itself starts among the low-rises of middle-class residential suburb, continues to the highway, passes one sprawling mall, then more highway, ligned on both sides by industrial buildings, a second mall and ends in front of a brand new station of a brand new electric rail. On an alternate route, it goes: suburb, highway, mall, more highway that runs along CN railway, then a very ugly part of a bigger suburb that consists mostly of car repair shops, questionable bars and cheap fast-foods, a somewhat fancier part of the suburb, an urban university campus and finally a metro.
Regardless of the route, it is on the first short portion of the highway that one sees a bit of the land. First, it is just a large field with few spindly trees and a large sturdy farmhouse in the middle. Then, as the highway makes a gentle turn left, towards the mall, one can see the blue shape of Mont Bruno and a second smaller hill on the horizon. Then everything disappears, replaced by concrete and metal shapes of the windowless shopping containers.
It is a brief and not particularly beautiful view, but I came to love it. I think it tought me how much of the land was taken, misused, altered and appropriated, yet even in its subjugated form the land remains alive and beautiful. Even through the dirty window of the bus, even as a parenthesis between urban sprawl and commercial zones, the land offers everything: a vast open space, a view of the horizon and blue shapes of the hills covered with forest. The land appeals to the wild and authentic part of me – the one that hates every minute spent in the office and the very proximity of Sainte-Catherine, but loves the high ceilings of the National Library, the hush of bookstores, the friendly rush of the cafés, being out and about – as far out and as much about as I possibly can.
Most of the people I knew a year ago have moved on to other things, but I still feel like I am drifting in between. This morning, looking at the black shape of the newly build sky-scrapper outside of my dirty office window, I thought about the phrase from Mina Salami’s Sensuous Knowledge that I heard a few days ago: some of us may be locked in golden cages, but even though the bars of the prison are gold, it is still a cage. I feel this way about the whole corporate capitalist system – even though the bars of my cage are not quite golden, they are gilded – yet, it feels more and more like prison. I don’t know if it’s burn-out, a mid-life crisis or a menopause.
I am reading Sandra Newman’s Julia, a feminist retelling of Orwell’s 1984 – I believe I have not been this enthralled in a book since reading Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land in the beginning of 2022. A strange thing is happening – I realize that I read this book through the lens of the inter-generational trauma that I carry in me. I know the truth of it through the mirrored experience of my ancestors – great-grandparents generation that lived and died in purges, forced displacements and artificial famine. Chapter 12 is particularly horrifying – it describes the famine organized by the party regime in Semi-Autonomous Zones – one doesn’t need to know all the facts to feel it resonate through one’s bones and flesh. Somatic knowledge is a powerful thing.
One of the reasons I started journaling this year is to understand the way my trauma, especially intergenerational trauma, shapes me and the ways I may heal from it. My goal this year is to gain deep knowledge, the one that will help me to understand myself and relate to others from a place of intentional kinship. I hope that with time writing will become a reflex and this reflex will bring forth a deeper truth.
I am trying not to fall back in a corporate fever trap by placing accents on what’s important. Children are important, calling mom is important, being outside, movement, eating, replying to non-work messages, slowing down, breathing. Reading, journaling, taking pictures of fleeting moments, anticipation.
Rain on snow then snow on rain… I wonder if we will have a week of decent winter this year.
It is good to see old friends and remember that no matter how old and how long ago, they are still friends and they keep a part of you.
Conjugating the Mohawk word – nòn:we’s (like) with person-to-person pronouns. I like you, you two like me, she likes you all, they like all of us, you and I like him. I imagine what it might be like to be a fluent Mohawk speaker. To place every action, feeling and intention in the web of closely knit relationships. Pronouns are not external, independent words – they change the verb. I like you is not the same verb as she likes them. It is not the same feeling either.
Coming back home in the evening to Leonard Cohen’s concert playing on TV. I wonder what he would have thought of it all.
Today I feel happy, while I feel all other things including grief, confusion, anger, exhaustion, hope and hurt. Still, today I feel happy because I created a framework for mutual learning and accountability of our grantee partners. This framework is simple, written in human language, it venters love, trust, humility and collaboration.
I have not yet shown it to anyone, but I feel that I did my best work. That for once I managed to translate the language of my heart into the professional codes of my job. And now, while this framework remains my brain-baby, still hidden from the world, even from my friends and co-conspirators, I want to note this. Regardless of what other people think about it, it is a good work. Regardless of how it gets distorted by corporate colonial system, it is a good work. It is good, because it makes me feel whole. It is good, because it bridges the gap between the brave, genuine and vulnerable me and the professional me. It is good, because it is me without a mask. It is good because I wrote it not to impress someone or show how smart I am or test-drive new fancy concepts – I wrote it from the heart, from everything I learned in the past three years, from my place of trauma and from my place of compassion. It is good because it is healing.
Small Rebellions 