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.

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.