I am feeling too lazy to work or journal. The weather went from abnormally warm to chilly. The kids and I spent the morning picking up the earth-worms washed by the rain onto the asphalt and putting them back on grassy earth. There are too many worm victims to save them all, of course, and, lacking basic knowledge of worm ecology, I do not know if what we do qualifies as saving, but we figure this is better than seeing them squashed by the wheels or drowned in the puddles. My five year old sun solemnly instructs every worm he saves: don’t go back there! Stay on the earth! Collectively, we decide that the only honourable purpose for a worm’s death is to be eaten by a bird and thus continue the cycle of life. Then, my daughter starts picking up even the dead worms and putting them on the lawn. I think the birds will like it better to pick their worms off the grass, than off the stupid parking lot, she explains. As usual, by saving someone else we save ourselves.

I saw the first dandelions today – the first dandelions! I was looking out for them, but I was not expecting to see them for another two or three weeks. Ironically, my first dandelions waited for me in Mile End, in the very belly of the city. They were pocking through the crack between the asphalt and a wall near the entrance to Café Saint-Henri. I would have missed them, if I didn’t have to come back to pick up the headphones I left in the café. I love dandelions with all my heart. They are the most decolonial flower! Their roots are deep, they always grow in tight-knit families or communities, they grow everywhere, pierce through every crack and I especially love how year after year after year they lift their joyful yellow heads on the immaculately dead green lawns of my neighbours. They are food, they are medicine, they are delightful toys for children. Dandelions are everything.

So many other good things happened today. Small things, but they happened when I needed them most and they were medicine of homeopatic kind:

Rain

Spending a day between Parc-Ex, Mile-End and Little Italy

Great conversation with Nicole and Stephanie at Sanctuary Sangha

Great conversations with Bonnie and Demi and May (do I get paid to do that?!)

Conversations about women elders who continue living way beyond the medical expectation

Spending some time in a flower shop

Just the overall feeling of being outside, away, of slipping out of corporate reach.

Such a good day.

I haven’t journaled for two days and I feel the pressure building up, my brain buzzing with unsaid words and unresolved conflicts, I had hard time sleeping this night. It’s getting ready to explode and explosion is exactly what I am trying to avoid, because baby it’s ugly when it happens. So, I am looking for a release in writing, in walking, I need to learn how to meditate, I really do. I need to calm my breathing, to slow my pulse to get back to the state when I hear the birds again, where the bird song is louder than the hum in my head.

I am binging on the books now, both knowledge and stories, also poetry, audio and text, buying, lending at the library, queuing others up in my ever growing next-to-read list. I’m not sure this is healthy, but I am so hungry and desperate now – every bit of knowledge looks good. Is hunger for books connected to loneliness?

I like dwelling at the margins. Margins are where change happens, where new things emerge, new language, where shimmering is. Margins is the only space in a book where nothing is written and everything is possible. Mainstream is boring in comparison. The problem with the margins is that when you stay too long you become, well, marginalized. And marginalisation is lived well better in community than alone. So, the problem is, again, not marginalisation, but loneliness. The secret ingredient I am looking for is a community and sense of belonging at the very margins of the story.

Good thing we knew what time it would happen, because at first it didn’t look like anything much. I’ve put the glasses over other glasses and squinted through the two pares of glasses to look at a small organge disk that was missing a tiny piece at the bottom right part.

I ran in and out of the house to check on the progress of the black disk that was swallowing the orange little by little.

It was getting colder and quieter and the light was getting dim and pale. As the light was disappearing, the shadows disappeared as well. The orange disk became a crescent that was getting slimmer with every second. Then the light went out. We took our glasses off and for one glorious minute stared at the dark blue disk with a pale halo around it. Somewhere in the distance a large group of people cheered like at a football game.

Then it was over and the light came back faster than it took to disappear.

It is such a luxury to have lived a day when the only and the most important thing that happened was the meeting between the moon and the sun.

I have expected to see my crocuses squashed and broken under the weight of the recent snowfall. Instead, they emerged victorious and wasted no time to greet the spring snow sun.

A house finch joined the usual chorus of cardinals, robins, chickadees and song sparrows today. I heard a downy woodpecker in the forest.

While walking in the forest today, I had to stick to the large paths, as the smaller ones are too muddy to follow. I couldn’t hear the birds, silenced by the cacophony of human voices, and I kept thinking: what if we just learned to keep quiet as a species? What if our survival depended on our ability to be still and listen.

Oh, and how could I forget the wonderful walk to the city park we took this morning. We halted on a little bridge listening to the brook. (“Mama, did you know that water sings?!”) and soon were joined by a girl a little older than my daughter. The girl, Layla, took us to the stones at the edge of the brook and taught us to “fish” for leaves and sticks in the stream. It was wonderfully fun, even as Elise’s foot slipped into the water.

Now that I know his song, I start noticing the pattern. He’s there every morning, at the same spot, singing to his invisible kin. The Mohawk word shé:kon that we translate as hello, actually means “still, again.” As in “I still love you” – “shé:kon konnorón:kwa.” It makes sense to greet this bird in Mohawk, not only because we meet on an unceded land where he is native and I am a settler, but because he helped me to understand shé:kon as an expression of gratitude for the continuation of life. Shé:kon to the sun that rises in the East, a minute earlier with every day, shé:kon to the bird that sings at the same place every morning, preparing to read a new generation of beautiful red songbirds. Shé:kon to the wild geese that fly over neighbourhood, making us look up. Shé:kon to the crows, who know my patterns better than I know theirs. Shé:kon, as in “you are still here, I see you, I acknowledge you.”

A phrase in the Wolf Willow Institute email startled me today. Apocalypse means revelation. How could I forget this, given my past? I read the book a dozen times, yet, if someone asked me yesterday what the word meant, I’d say “end of the world” or “end of times.” Apocalypse means revelation. The question is what is being revealed. I you’d asked me now, I’d say cracks. It feels like they’re everywhere, like the very surface of time, space and reality is covered in cracks that look tiny at a first glance, but go deep. Monsters are hiding in them, but also possibilities and maybe the two are the same.

My neighbourhood is worn-out by yesterday’s storm. There are broken branches everywhere and the snow looks dirty and out of place. We woke up in a cold house, but with electricity, so we decided to make the morning special and have a breakfast at Cafellini before barely making it on time to school. On my way back (there is no driving, because the driveway is covered in snow and we already changed to summer tires) I heard the loud, insistent song of the cardinal. With every step, the sound got louder until I finally saw him – the beautiful red bird perched on the hedge of the last house on our street. He was singing, unperturbed by my steps or by the wet noises of the cars. Somewhere across the road, unseen to me, another cardinal was answering him. It went on for a long time: two cardinals, one visible, another invisible, singing back and forth. They continued, as I moved on, through the chirps of robins, sharp cries of grackles, joyful noise of sparrows and a single cry of a blue-jay somewhere at the distance.

I think there are two ways to wisdom, both equally exciting. One is looking inside: a deep exploration of one’s own story, origins, relations and ancestors, digging through layers or trauma and wisdom, discovering who we are in time. The other is more about space: letting the world to become alive for us – no longer an object or a backdrop for our story, but a place full of stories that are just as important as our own. This is what I experienced this morning, as I was listening to the duet of the cardinals – the world as a living, breathing, unfolding story of life. The cardinals were singing to each other, oblivious to my presence. Their song started before I came and went on after I left. It was guided by the millenia-old instincts of which I have no understanding. My role was witnessing this miracle – an act that had no benefits for the two cardinals, but was life-changing for me.

This spring, my suburban neighbourhood becomes alive, exciting and mysterious to me through the birdsong. I leap from joy when I can trace the song to the singer. I start noticing the patterns of flight. I got all excited this evening, while walking towards the school, when the three crows flew over me and I was able to tell that they are craws and not ravens.

I keep a lot of these observations to myself. The only people able to get excited about my cardinal, crow and raven stories are my children. On the way home tonight, I entertained my daughter with my very inapt description of the grackle’s feathers.

I don’t want to become an expert on birds. I love learning facts about them, but I don’t want to reduce the birds to the science of them: the density of their bones or the span of their wings. I want to keep falling deeply, endurably in love with the web of living things around me. Be they grackles or stones – I want to let them know that I know that they are alive.

The biggest snowstorm of the winter came in spring. Tons and tons of heavy wet snow two months too late. Snow buried my crocuses and the new leaves of tulips, bent and broke more limbs of the lilacs. We haven’t had electricity for almost 24 hours. I kept kids at home and we moved from a cafe to McDonalds, from there to the library then back to our cold dark home, trudging through the wet snow and debris left by the storm. the electricity came back on after 9pm, after i’d put children in bed and went to bed myself, hiding under covers in my thermal underwear that i used to put on to run by -20. The day was long and exhausting, but looking back at it, it wasn’t a bad day. We got to spend a lot of time together, work less and not feel guilty about it, be small and helpless and dependent on the external circumstances and all in all it wasn’t that bad.

Vika’s birthday.

The sunny days turned into cold wind that turned into cold rain that will turn into 20 centimetres of snow overnight. Every time, we say it’s the last time. Last year we had an icy rain on April 16 and I remember my tiny crocuses frozen into whimsical ice sculptures. Which means that they are two weeks early this year. Tomorrow, they will be covered in snow. I had planted them two years ago to have something to look forward to through the long days of late winter. I admire their courage and resilience – the smallest of flowers, they always come out the first, into a barren and unwelcoming world, they bloom bravely through the night frosts, tardy snowstorms and icy rains. They are undeterred. Thank you, little flowers.

This morning I recognised the insistent tchiu tchiu tchiu of the cardinal and heard the goldfinch for the first time. My favourite song so far is that of the song sparrow. This world makes sense, even if the rest of it doesn’t.

There are stories from Ukrainian war that still haunt me, now there are the stories of the Gaza genocide that will haunt me. I can’t write the down, I can’t share them, I can’t forget them, they are mine to remember, even as they are not mine to tell. I wonder how many of stories like these my grandparents carried. The ones they never dared to share with me and I never asked.