Monday is a contemplative day. I gave up the idea of being productive on this day. I gave in to my natural tendency to wander, fiddle, jump between ideas and occupations, talk to myself out loud. I fell in love with Kai Chang Thom and spent some time obsessively reading about her work and searching for her podcasts. I spent time reading up about the patterns on vyshivankas. I do not blame myself for being unproductive, neither do I feel bad. Instead, I feel the length of the day, the passing of time, the way things fit together, the echoes of Rosie’s drumming.

On the way to and from school we stop multiple times to perform the sacred ritual: pick up the ripe dandelions and blow their seeds in the wind. We are strategic, we try to blow near the grassy patches, choosing the ones untouched by the mower. When I was a child, I used to blow dandelions for luck, my kids do it with solemn trust that the seeds will give new life. When I was a child, I used to weave dandelion crowns, wear them, the leaves the wilting flowers to die. My children would never pick a yellow dandelion, they let them to the pollinators. But the magical ritual of the ripe dandelion preserves itself through the cultures and generations.

On our way to and from school we are stopping to listen to the tiny peeps of the nestlings. Then we notice a bluejay defending her nest against a crow and worry helplessly, wishing the crow to fly away, but not willing to offend her by throwing stones or sticks. Finally, the crow flies away. Then we look at two robins collecting food for their offspring.

The greatest gift I gave myself this spring and am now giving my children is learning to recognise and name the local plants and birds. I have always truffled with loneliness and lack of belonging, but now, as I step outside and see them, and know them: colt’s foot, dawny yellow violet, bloodroot, eastern phoebe, song sparrow, I feel that I belong.

The sky looks like a giant painted dome of an orthodox cathedral today. Of course, it’s cathedrals that look like heaven, populated by saints and fantastic creatures, winged angels and various representations of divinity.

I had a calm day, which made me restless. It’s hard to lean in to the calm after an adrenaline filled week. I realize that regardless of how hard I try to distance myself from the greedy, adrenaline-dependent part of myself (let’s call her Ego), I’m still drawn to speed, pressure, thrill and the feeling of constantly being at the edge of something. Like most people, I am drawn to self-destruction.

Here is to the dancing at the edge of the crumbling world

Because this is who we are

Because our ancestors danced

Under the stars and under the canopy of the thousand-year old trees.

They danced because they didn’t know any other way to feel alive.

They danced because they just started realizing that they were alive

And it was all too much.

And now, what we have left is concrete and partly defaced murals

What we have is a lack of space to exercise our humanity

What we have are the cracks between the asphalt and more asphalt

Where we grow dandelions, fern and tiny seedlings of trees.

We must dance, no

We must choose to dance

Because there is still no other way to feel alive.

Children dance when they hear the music

Hunters dance for good luck in their hunt

Warriors dance to give themselves courage to face death

Women dance to please ancient goddesses whose names they’ve forgotten

Lovers dance for each other.

I like to imagine that we are flying in space, in an ever-expanding universe, still propelled by the force of the big bang that dragged us all from nothingness into being. And because we will never be able to possibly even remotely make sense of it all, because we will never be able to put it in words, we let our bodies do the speaking and the comprehending. We dance. We make love. We dance.

Wow, what a day.

I’ve been waiting for it and it didn’t disappoint. I am in a state of deep vulnerability hangover. I am on so much endorphines now that my cheeks burn. Simultaneously feeling like too much and not enough. Also, making a mental note to do a deep dive on the adrenaline vs. oxytocin-fuelled work and how this may show up in my work and my life. I believe that I have heard about the dangers of relying on adrenaline-fuelled work in the beginning of the year at Taiaiake Alfred’s lecture. Months later, I have heard about the role of oxytocin (manifesting as both care and eros) in the work on For the Wild podcast and I feel in a very quiet and anti-climatic way that it’s time to bind them together.

My daughter brought two snails from school. She has put them into a snack containers, emptied of mango pieces I’d cut for her this morning. She even put soil, blades of grass and a half-open dandelion. She said that she rescued the snails from some younger kids and was planning to let them go in our garden. She gave them the names: Johnny and Tourbillon. When we got home, we said good-bye to Johnny and Tourbillon and set them on the grass in front of the house. I watched them for a while, while the kids ran off to see friends down the street. Then I went for a walk and when I came back Johnny and Tourbillon were gone.

I watched a screening of Dolly Kikon’s documentary Abundance, which I did because Rosie invited me and I do want to show up for Rosie so badly. The film was about the relationships of Lota-Naga (Dolly’s and Rosie’s people) with the forest. In the end, the subtitles explained how the gouvernement of India tried to strip Lota-Naga of their Indigenous rights and use the forest for development. And I thought, wow, Dolly could have just made a film about that – political struggle and resistance and all that and no one would have blamed her. Instead, she chose to make a film about foraging technics and living in abundance and harmony with the forest.

I find it funny, almost ironic, how I meet all these amazing people under the pretext of speaking about systems change and climate justice and activism. I drink these conversations like one would drink maple water in Spring. But if we were to boil down all these encounters, the verbal and the non-verbal part, the metaphors, the laughs, the stares, the gestures, the moments of pure connection, the warmth of our bodies, the raw, the human, the divine, if we were to make a syrup out of the sap of this day, it would boil down to ferns, snails and joy.

I almost got a piercing today.

I walked into a salon that I’d been passing by every week, thinking every week that I should go there and get a piercing. I finally walked in. I signed a release sheet and chose a jewellery and got ready and then the piercer started telling me all this stuff about the healing period and all the things I will have to avoid and all the things I will have to do and for how long. And I thought to myself, shoot, I should have planned this better. I should have googled, at least. How come you google every person you come in contact with, the names of books you saw once in a library and song lyrics, but you don’t think to google how to avoid infection after getting your cartilage pierced. But hey, it’s me. I walk into things on pure instinct, trusting my gut, not planning through. Most of the time it works. Montreal worked. Dancing classes worked. Most of my commitments to people and things worked. T

he piercer said, it’s a bigger commitment than a simple ear piercing. I’m fine with commitments. I walked away today, but I’m still resolved to get my piercing. I will do it in the Fall. When I will be seeing a therapist, when I will have more clarity, when I will be closer to turning the page. I really will.

Now, though, I know why they don’t charge you up front in a piercing salon.

I am sitting in the dark womb of my son’s bedroom, listening to quiet music that is supposed to help him fall asleep, but usually works on me faster, than on him. At five, he still refuses to fall asleep alone. At five, he still crawls into my bed every night. Now he is sleeping and I am looking for reasons to delay my exit. Light and work and maybe a glass of wine are waiting for me in the living room, but I like being in this liminal space, out of time and tethered to the present moment. When I was a teenager, I’ve been told, and I believed for a very long time, that the only right way to live was to look beyond the present moment and into eternity. My don’t know if it was right, but it surely didn’t make me happy in the long run. Now I am feeling more and more the irresistible pull of the here and now. The warmth of the setting sun in my face, as I am walking home after a run. The first sip of strong latte from a coffee shop on my way to work. A glimmer of a lake somewhere in the distance. Feeling safe and well right now, feeling love towards so many people. Wanting to tell them: I love you. Send them a letter. I love you. Be well.

I am starting this week, like most weeks, in extremely vulnerable state. I do not doubt my capacity to show up authentically, neither do I deny the incredible privilege to meet and talk to some of the brightest people one could meet. What scares me is the lack of capacity to withstand the pressure of the system. What scares me is the apathy, the hustle and the “good enough.” what scares me most is the crushing lack of emotion and vulnerability in our internal meetings. When emotions are allowed to enter the room, they are weaponised. There is never a pure, unadulterated joy of being together, working together and creating together. There is never a celebration – not of some remarkable achievement, but of our everyday humanity. In short, there is a lack of love.

Today is out 11th anniversary of coming to Canada. This is the first anniversary without Echo. For many years, we used to take selfies on that day, marking the passage of time. First with Echo, then with Echo and the kids, on the balcony of our appartement, on the deck of our house. Today was rainy and we didn’t take a picture. Somehow, without Echo it no longer makes sense.

Echo was a birthday gift from my future mother in law just a few months before our wedding. I really wanted a cat and she really wanted to give me one and my husband always maintained the story that he was not consulted on the matter and that Echo was my cat, although, let’s acknowledge that he was the one who took the most care of him.

We drove to the in laws house to pick him up – he was locked in the bathroom to prevent trouble with other animals in the house. He was tiny, less than two months old, and throughly traumatised. He was howling on the back-seat throughout the two-hour drive back home. Later, we discovered that he was fine with long road-trips, as long as he could move around in the car and settle on someone’s lap.

There were several times when I was properly scared for him: once, when we were temporarily living in Chateau de la Pascalette and he was chased by the groundkeeper’s dog, second time when he had some sort of urinary infection and I had to leave him in the hospital overnight, the third time when we came back home to find the traces of a break-in and couldn’t find Echo for a very long time – he was hiding somewhere, when we found out he had diabetes, when he disappeared for many hours, twice, while we were in chalet. When he actually disappeared for good, I wasn’t scared. I didn’t plan it this way, but I felt that it was time. I was the last person who saw him, the one who caved in to his insistent, urgent meowling and opened the door for him to go outside. I a way, I am glad that it happened the way it did. And I am grateful that I have a date to remember him – not the date of his birth, which we do not know for sure, not the date of his death that seems ephemeral, but the anniversary of the day when we landed in Montreal, carrying a four-year old cat with us.

I am wondering if letting go of Echo is a foreshadowing of other things. I am asking myself of what and who and when I will have to let go and how I will know that I am ready. I have no answers to any of these questions.

My daughter told me tonight that she thought she saw Echo in the bathroom, where he used to wait for someone to give him to drink. She thinks it was his ghost. And I felt a strange, comforting presence on my walk tonight. It may be Echo or someone else. I don’t say that I believe in ghosts, but I do not say I don’t believe in them. I believe in invisible threads that connect us to a multitude of beings in our past, present and future. Sometimes these threads pull us through, sometimes they hold us back, sometimes they simply hold us.

I did my first 10K in months today. I wasn’t planning to, initially, but the weather was so nice, the lakes so peaceful and it felt good and easy just to be moving, hitting the ground with my feet, breathing in the forest.

The raven nest we noticed in the corner of the very ugly building of our local high school. There are always five or six ravens in and around the nest and it looks like they’re having a very busy family life.