We had snow today. Over a few hours, the temperature dropped from 15 to 2 degrees and rain turned into snow. Then, like this, it stopped.

I slept badly and woke up tired. My brain went again into frenzied overwhelm, dreaming of meetings, people, events, not wanting to let go. Being deprived of exercise for two days doesn’t help. Being in the city and in front of the screen too much doesn’t help either. I need trees, birds and a lot of movement to heal.

The theme of letting go keeps showing up for me in major way. First, it appeared in Sanctuary Sangha, in my conversation with Nicole and Stephanie. To the question what practices I need to prepare the ground for my work, I instinctively replied letting go. It reappeared yesterday in conversation with Bina: what do we need to let go of to do our work? Finally, I just thought about it today. I need to let go. Of projects, hustle, nervous excitement, exaggerated expectations, ego. Say it again, letting go of ego. I wonder if there is a going to bed ritual for that.

Also, quite unexpectedly, I was elected on the board of COCo. And Griffin wrote. They said, if you have time in the next few weeks to connect. To which I immediately thought, I’m so busy in the next few weeks. And the second, wiser thought: that’s why I need to slow down. Maybe, I’m becoming someone I can finally live with. Cheers to that.

My son thinks that babies can’t die, because they are little. I’d give anything to make that true.

It’s full moon. I am tired, or rather tethering between deep underlying exhaustion and bursts of creative and communicative energy, by which I mean the times when I actually reply to people’s emails. also, I missed my dance class today and feel this temporary loss.

I am in this strange space when I am doubting and second-guessing everything I say or do. Like being in a space with many amazing and creative people who care about anti-oppression and feel like I don’t belong there. No, worse, like no one wants me there, although everyone showed me nothing by kindness. I’ve met hundreds of new people over past year, yet something in me still can’t believe that people may be genuinely interested in me or seek out my company. I need to understand why and how this imposter syndrome flares up.

The day is sunny, but cold because of an icy wind. Still, we walk to and from school and I try to go outside every minute free of meetings.

I feel tired and unwilling to move, think or talk for most of the day. However, it’s the day of the kickoff of the grantee cohort and I have to be present. Turns out, being tired and out of sorts doesn’t stop me from holding space for others. Maybe, because in this diminished state I take up less space myself. Feeling less energy, I don’t fidget or show my impatience, I don’t get upset when conversation goes overtime or when we miss things on the agenda, I don’t overanalyse. I’m just happy to do the best I could and decide that this is enough.

Strangely, everyone loves the meeting and my teammates comment on how seen and liberated they felt. The day left a good taste in my mouth. I felt tired and lowkey, but not exhausted. I felt enough. Or maybe I felt ok with not being enough. Maybe, as it often happens, the signal I’ve sent to the universe is resonating back to me. I said that I wanted to learn to let go and lo and behold, I am learning.

Thank you

I am too tired to write about this weekend. The most important thing about it is that nothing really happened. On Saturday, we played in the yard and I dug out kilograms of gravel that the city had put in my yard and replaced it with dead leaves and soil and planted flowers. On Sunday, I walked in the forest, which, I have come to realize, has become a church-like tradition and has even (maybe) filled the void I’ve felt ever since I left the organized religion. Except, when I was going to church, I always felt lonely and out of place, whereas forest is pure bliss, especially when it’s quiet and nearly empty of people, like today.

I finished Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the streets. I’ll be thinking about it for quite some time and probably citing it excessive, but I don’t have the keen feeling of loss I felt at the end of Julia or The Comfort of Crows.

– Mama, when you are dead, will I have another mama?

– No, baby, I will always be your mama.

– Did I have another mama before you?

– No.

– so, you were always my mama?

– Yes, I was and I will always be.

– ok

A non-exhaustive list of reasons to be late to school on a spring morning:

Stopping to pick up the worms who ventured on to the road during the rain

Stopping to listen to the trrrrrrrrril of an enthusiastic black-eyed junco

Stopping to check the bird nests in the still-naked tree branches

Stopping to pet a friendly dog

I am torn between my irrational fear of being late and the guilt I feel every time I urge my kids to hurry. Is being on time to school really that important, when the spring is coming and the front- yards explode in colour and we are learning to recognise birdsong?

On my way back, I come to a realization that I’ve managed to walk my kids to school every day of this week. Quite an achievement for a more-than-fulltime working mother. The week’s been long and overwhelming, as usual, but I feel well. Maybe, I tell myself, looking at the twisted and wrinkled bodies of the trees that look like they are dancing with their many limbs lifted to the sky, maybe the reason is looking at these trees every morning.

My little town has so many trees. Trees dominate streets and yards, they tower over one-storey bungalows built mainly in the 60s and the 70s and large houses with wide drive-ways and two-door garages built in the 2000s. The trees trump them all. The trees are the reason I moved to this town. Three tall maples in the front yard, two in the back, an large fir just to the right, in our neighbour’s yard and her twin across the street and finally the poplar tree right outside of our fence – an enormous monument of a tree, a home to many generations of squirrels and kinds of birds, a world in herself.

I tell myself, it’s those trees that make me alright when things are not alright, that keep me grounded when the world spins too fast. These trees are medicine. They make me feel safe. They make me feel whole.

A few years ago, I have heard or read in some book about an app that gives you an option to calculate a route according to what’s good for you. Instead of offering the fastest itinerary, it will offer you options that goes through the park, or passes by the greenest streets, or will just offer you a different route every day to keep your attention and imagination engaged. It felt like a good idea when I first heard about it and it feels even better now.

Nest week I will spend three days in the jungle of Montreal. I will try to notice how it influences my mood and my energy level, but also try to find way to take my daily medicine.

I went to the forest during my lunchtime. It was colder today and light rain was starting, but I haven’t been to the forest since Sunday (actually, I have walked in a forest on Tuesday, but it wasn’t my forest and I was’t alone, so not the same) and I was getting curious to see if the red trilliums were yet in bloom. So, I went to the forest.

The trilliums are still not in bloom and the forest looks like it is taking time to wake up – during this time of year the change from winter to early spring to actual spring is so subtle that one has to check every couple of days and look closely not to miss it. If I wasn’t looking closely, I would have surely missed Carolina springbeauties at the side of the walking path, neatly tucked behind a protruding root.

I stopped for about five minutes to listen to the birds: in the absence of the cardinals, the robins were leading the choir, aided by the goldfinches, black-eyed juncos, two smaller kinds of woodpeckers and brown creepers. I thought I saw a red squirrel dashing from a tree, but it must have been my imagination.

Then, as I was heading back, it happened. I saw a big bird take flight from a tree, cross my path and settle on another tree, then take flight from there to settle a little further. It was about a size of a crow, only more elongated and elegant, with striking white spots on its black wings and a head so red it seemed almost out of place in our northern forest. It was a woodpecker, but I never saw one so large, so magnificent and so silent. I gasped and stood still as long as I could see him among the trees.

I spent some time in the afternoon looking at different pictures and descriptions of woodpeckers to finally determine that the one I saw was a pileated woodpecker – le grand pic – one of the largest and most impressive in the family, the one that prefers the woods to the domestic comfort of the backyards.

The woodpecker made me realize something. Over the years, in my teens and twenties, I was going to church, hoping to meet God there, to experience some kind of rapture or epiphany that would take me away and outside of myself. I sometimes found it, or thought I found it in the communal worship in the evangelical church, but I left it because it started feeling like too much noise and not enough mystery. Finding this elusive experience in the orthodox church was easier. The experience there was permeated by the smell of incense, the solemn vocal music and the painted faces of the saints. Everyone moved around me in some mysterious communion and even though I always felt utterly and deeply out of place, I also felt this bigger-than-me presence that brought me to tears every time.

Now, the woods have become my church. I don’t go there for a walk or excercise or even a naturalist exploration. I come to experience communion with something bigger than me, a rapture, a moment of pure awe and adoration. Like with any church, it doesn’t happen all the time, but even when it fails to appear, the feeling of wholeness and healing is always there. Meeting the woodpecker today was a moment of pure, unadulterated worship.

The difference between the forest and a church is that in my church-inspired experience I was never 100 percent sure that the epiphany I just had was not a product of my wishful thinking, that I didn’t fake it and then convinced myself it was real. The woodpecker, on the other hand, was real. I saw it and admired it and came out of the woods altered and knowing that what I just saw and experienced was real.

The woodpecker must be sleeping somewhere in the forest, as I am sipping wine and writing this. It doesn’t care about my search for God or its own role in my spiritual awakening. And maybe for the first time I am looking for God outside of myself. It feels new and real.

I realized to my surprise, that yellow is the colour of early Spring. Forsythia is in yellow bloom, colt’s-foot opened their yellow eyes along the walking path, and the daffodils sprinkle the front yards.

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.