This morning I felt gloomy and restless, so I swapped my usual coffee-and-book routine for a walk in the forest. It is only a fifteen minute walk from my home to the forest. In the summer, I go there almost every evening, at least for a quick visit while the sun is setting and my kids are using up their daily screen quota on some silly Netflix show. I should probably be a better mother and get them to walk with me, but the truth is, I quite like walking alone and my children are not eager participants of aimless rambles, so in a way it’s a win-win, even if only in short term. In the winter though the days are short and I rarely have one of two hours of daylight to do as I please. So, today was a gift.

Every time I go to the forest, I remind myself that I should change my approach to wellness and mental health. I should schedule work around wellness and mental health, not the other way around. This time I told myself that I would try to plan one mental health day every two months, choose them well in advance and stick to them no matter what. I think I had a similar idea last March, during another walk in the forest. I ended up working in a crazy rush through spring and then from September to December. I ended up sacrificing myself, not just my wellness days, but my sanity and emotional balance for the work I love. This is the pattern I keep repeating over and over. In my twenties, I used to come to the office on the weekends, stay until midnight, take overnight trains to location visits and survive on a mix of RedBull and Ibuprofen. I was ambitious, driven and most of all I was taught that I, an Eastern European woman, had to work ten times harder to compete against mediocre expats from Western Europe and North America. It took me a long while to realize that I never had a chance in that competition, but the pattern of trying harder, doing more, running myself to the ground just to prove that I am good remained.

This year, although I usually hate new year’s resolutions, I will schedule my life around walks in the forest.

This year was born tired. Even in naive, privileged Canada, the air seems heavy with expectation of the worst. In Ukraine, 200 russian missiles struck overnight, mainly residential areas. I no longer rush to check whether one of these residential areas used to be my home. It is terrifying that Ukraine doesn’t seem like the place that has it the worst anymore.

I am wondering if I am right in trying to protect my children from the news. Should I tell them the truth? Or rather, what truth should I tell them? Whose truth? I tell them I love them. This much I can say for sure.

I have started reading Moon of the Crusted Snow advertised as an Indigenous post-apocalyptic novel – both adjectives appealed to me equally. So far I don’t like it, the writing style is rather dull and characters seem to have been written by an AI, but I am only on the second chapter and trying to give it time.

I had never liked journaling and never made an honest attempt at it, until now. I used to love blogging and was quite successful at it. I love blogging because it is about epiphany, seeing the divine through the lens of every day experiences. This is exactly my writing style and it reflects my expectations of life. I wake up expecting profound revelations, I open a book with a pen in hand – craving to find a prophetic life, I go for a walk expecting a life-changing encounter. I am dramatic, to put it lightly. If I’d lived in the Old Testament times, I’d be one of those mad folks in the desert. I wonder if I was born this way, or if this love of drama was ingrained in me in my pentecostal youth. Anyways, journaling never was my kind of discipline. It is a good reminder that the prophesies and epiphanies are indeed rare, but life keeps happening.

The sun came out for the first time in I-have-no-longer-any-idea-how-many days.

We went for a walk “to say hello to the forest.”

First, we said hello to the trees. Then, we said hello to the geese. It worries me that the geese stayed for winter. How will they survive once the snow finally truly comes and settles? And what about spring? How will we know it’s spring without the long plaintive songs of returning flocks of geese?

At last, we said hello to the forest. It looked naked and shy in this snowless weather.

There were so many people walking. On the way back we passed the construction site, where a few months ago they’d cut trees and destroyed a part of a biking lane to build luxury townhouses. I remember seeing the devastation for the first site, seething with a feeling of loss and helpless rage, calling it to myself terra nullius. Today the construction site was eerily quiet. Are they sleeping, mama? Yes, dear, even capitalism sleeps sometimes.

This is why January 1 is my favourite day. Everything is closed and everyone is walking outside with no other purpose than the walk itself. There are no incoming emails, not even commercial offers. The only day when the capitalism sleeps and I feel myself breathing a little easier.

We came back home, made a hearty meal and played the rest of the day.

And just like this he’s gone. The cat with whom I shared 14 years of my life, with whom I crossed an ocean, with whom I moved from country to country, from one house to the other to the one that finally felt like home. The cat who had a million of little annoying habits, who always wanted something, who was always somewhere nearby, the cat who owned us more than we owned him. Just like this he’s gone and I am mad at him, because he left at such a dreadful moment, he left into a cold October mist, he left when there are no good news to cheer me. He left without giving me a chance to say good-bye, without telling me he’s leaving. He just went outside and never came back. And now I’m looking at the glass door, trying to make out his black shape and white collar in the dark, where there is just emptiness. His name is Echo and he left without a trace after fourteen years and with all the bad things that happened this autumn, this is almost the worst.

But the prophecies, they will cease,

The tongues, they will fall silent,

The knowledge, it will pass away,

But these three will remain:

The quiet delight of a long weekend of doing nothing

in the space between the end of Spring and the beginning of Summer,

The wonder of blowing on the white feathery head of a ripe dandelion

and watching its parachutes float and hover in the space between grass and sky,

And the long golden rays of the sun,

setting down somewhere behind the rooftops of the low-rises on Clairevue Boulevard

in the space between day and evening.

But the greatest of these is love.

The end of Winter is synonymous with grief. The snow melts and the cracks in the earth and the asphalt shine through its thin layer. I feel constant sadness, the brokenness of the world around me. Not around, I correct myself, as now more than ever I feel adrift in the general brokenness. The cracks shining through the thin layer of snow, of civilization, are identical to the ones in my heart. The end of Winter feels like a church with perfect acoustics: every personal pain and longing is mirrored and amplified through the millions pain points scattered across the universe. I am just one of these pain points, but without me the chain of transmission may be broken. With me, the chain becomes a complete circle. In the end of Winter, I refuse to look forward towards brighter and warmer days. I refuse to hurry towards the beginning, but choose to stay here, in the stage of dying, melting away, crumbling, and ending. There is a strange comfort of feeling broken in a broken world.

Putting my younger child to bed may take anywhere between forty minutes and two hours. That’s plenty of time for self-reflection. Today was a warm day, for February. I took a walk around lunchtime, went all the way to the forest. On my way, I noticed that the clouds were pink. I listened to a good webinar. The sunset tonight was even prettier than the lunchtime clouds, I had some good conversations and children ate their salad without fussing. It was a good day. Then I remember that for a couple of families in Ste-Rose, a small town north of Montreal, today was the last day they hugged their children. Their children were murdered by a public transit driver who slammed his bus into a daycare, intentionally. I pray that one day these parents find some form of healing, but they will never have a luxury to forget what happened on February 8. I remember parents, children, family members, neighbours pulling at the rubble in a desperate effort to save their loved ones after the earthquake. I remember about the war, because I remember about it every day of my life.

So, how pretty was my sunset? Can one have a good day? Has one a right to “live, laugh, love” in a desperately broken world? Am I being insensitive? Or celebrating my own survival, the fact that the worse only happens to others? I am grasping at straws and then I find a quote by Arundhati Roy that expresses perfectly how I want to show up in this world. It doesn’t make anything better, but I write it down.

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” 
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

Today

marked eleven months of the war

that twelve months ago, I would not have imagined.

I am sitting on the fifteenth floor of a corporate high-rise,

The kind with wooden panels, soft lights, high-speed elevators and bergamot-smelling hand cream in a gender-neutral bathroom,

And listening to a story of hunting a deer

I am looking out of a wall-sized window on the imperfect symmetry of glass, metal, concrete and smoke

I am thinking that it used to be a forest.

The last day of the two and a half years of my life

(the same two and a half years that may still cost me months of therapy)

(the two and a half years when I met my best friends)

(the two and half years when I became a better person, sometimes because, sometimes despite of all that happened)

wasn’t at all eventful

except this one moment, when, as I was walking through the storm

I realized that the clock in my head stopped ticking.

Earlier, I didn’t even realize the clock was there

I didn’t hear it

or maybe I thought it was a sound of my own heartbeat.

That clock that for two and a half years kept telling me

do more, work harder, meet your deadlines,

never be late, never be sick, never be weak,

make sure you are better than everyone else,

because nobody would want an average person with your accent.

Well, guess what? On the last day of the two and a half years of my life

the people who used to praise me for working hard, meeting my deadlines,

being better than everyone else, weren’t even there to say good-bye.

But the ones who were

who were there for me all the time, didn’t say

thank you for being such an asset to our capitalist system

instead, they said

you have no idea how much we love you.