Two and a half years ago

I was suffocating

In a toxic job

In an endless war that was only just beginning

In self-doubt

In August

I found out that the bike path a street away from my home

Led into forest.

I do not know how

I managed not to know it before

But once I knew

The bike lane became a way out

It became a way to better things

It became the way.

The forest became a place of all possibility

Although I shouldn’t say became

Because it always was.

The forest remained himself

And the bike lane that suffered a lot of damage

From predatory urban development

Still leads into the forest.

It took me two and a half years

To understand how the hiking paths intersect

Still, I get lost sometimes

Especially at the change of seasons.

I want to thank

All the creatures that have met me there

All the powerful strangers

That made me stand in awe

And worship their beauty and their sheer aliveness.

The pilleated woodpecker that once soundlessly flew past me

On a soggy and solitary lunchtime walk,

The grey barn owl that must have taken a fancy on me

Because I met her at least twice,

And the meadow vole who has joined me on the walk

Through the fresh-fallen snow

Who ran silently alongside me

Then decidedly crossed my path

And climbed onto my boot, shaking her tiny whiskers.

Thank you.

The question I am sitting with in this end of the year is: If I no longer believe in what I was taught to believe (the duality of heaven and earth, the afterlife as a separate realm of eternity, the linearity of time, that all spiritual and mystic traditions outside of Christianity are bad or evil, the idea of sin, the original Eden, the final judgment) than what do I believe? Or, to put it in my therapist’s language, what do I know that I know. The one thing that I intuitively strongly know is the idea of inseparability. It is more than interconnection – separate beings can be connected in many ways. Inseparability is about not being able to draw a clear border where the others end and I begin. Yesterday, I was looking at the map of Earth with my children, where the five oceans were numbered. I said, do you notice anything? My son said, it’s imperfect. I believe he was referring to the jagged contours and strange shapes of the continents. I envy him, envy his privilege to be seeing things for the first time and having no answers, only questions. I said, look at the oceans, where does one end and the other begin? It’s all one ocean. We all come from this ocean through the long line of ancestors of all shapes, forms and abilities. We’ve adapted to life on land with its bizarre contours, we’ve adapted so well that we decided to draw more contours, more straight and jagged lines: city limits, roads, railways, borders. We even drew lines in the ocean to separate it to manageable proportions. But they are what they are – just lines. They are illusionary. 

Why do we teach our children that there are five oceans? The turtle knows there is just one and only ocean. So do salmon, so do migratory birds. I believe that our fundamental ancestral knowledge, the one we share with all creatures, including those who can fly, swim, grow roots, eat light and digest Earth’s minerals turning them into growth and weather, is that we are inseparable. In a great, magnificent but also simple and intuitive way we are all one. This knowledge is the mother of all our senses. It guides the turtles and migratory birds alongside magnetic lines from one place to another. It guides seeds towards the light and hyphae towards the plant roots. We, humans, may be the only ones wandering and poking randomly in all directions. 

This is the first Saturday morning when I have nothing to do. No books to read, no research papers to write, no projects to finish. Still, I come to La Tasse Verte with a thick beautiful book borrowed from the local library. Reading for pleasure.

The central library in Montreal has a months-long waiting list for this book. In my local library, I just took it off the shelf, no one else wanted it. You gotta love living in the suburbs.

At this hour of this day, when most school-year activities are already paused, there are only women in the cafe. All of them are a generation or two older than me. The coffee is good, but the place is not hipstery like the ones I frequent in Montreal. Often they play good music, but this morning it’s just Christmas songs. I snap myself out of my journey to Makatea back to Sant-Bruno and try to tune in into the energy of here and now. I haven’t forgotten that Saint-Bruno, a little Canadian town on the outskirts of Montreal, sleepy and covered in snow, is just as exotic as any tropical island. It all depends on where you come from.

Older ladies drink their coffee.

I marvel at the simplicity of it. Older ladies drink their coffee. That’s all they do. to an outside observer, this may be a perfect example of nothing happening. But once you decide to participate, you understand how much is going on: the silence, the stillness, the space where memories are remembered, thoughts are thought, glances are exchanged and invisible connections are created and recreated in an endless dance of life.

When a spider weaves her web the web becomes her and she becomes it. When you choose to feel the web of endless energy flowing between the interconnected beings, entanglement becomes the only logical choice.

My days are a blur punctuated by too little sleep. But morning sun is glorious over the grey waters of Saint-Lawrence and the evening brought a flurry of early-winter snow that is in equal parts magic and desire. My heart is so full that being tired hardly matters. I feel alive, connected, vulnerable, tender in all places, invincible. I feel like I know everything about living and dying. I feel like I’m in love and I don’t even need someone to be in love with. Although that would be okay too. Black Pumas’ Oct 33 is on an endless playback loop in my head, even when there is no music.

I got your number

I do

I’m sending love where you’re at

I do

I love foggy mornings. Unexpected things emerge from the fog, shapes shift. Fog is the trickster, the space of possibility, play and wonder. I love the soft translucent grey of it and the feeling that I can touch and caress the air. I love that it beckons, invites me to come closer, to step into it, but at the last moment, when I am already at the threshold, it recedes: the objects around me become clear and another space of murky possibility appears, daring me to try again, lulling me off my path.

Griffin is letting their blond hair grow long like on the decade-old photo I saw once. They wears earrings with a stone of exact same blue colour as their eyes and looks beautiful. This is the first thing I say after five months of separation: You look beautiful. We couldn’t find a table to sit face to face, so we sat side by side, facing outside, and turned our heads to look at each other. I used to not be able to look at Griffin directly. I used to not be able to look at people I care about directly, because looking at them meant opening myself to the kind of intimacy that was too much to bear. I used to talk too much just to fill the silence, because silence is another kind of intimacy. So, we sat and we talked, pausing, as necessary, and we looked at each other. What did you do this morning, asked Griffin, and I told them about meeting the common acquaintance who’d harmed me in a bad way. I still hate her, I said, and I hated seeing her, but was also strangely excited to see her. I guess, I’m addicted to the drama and the chaos of complex trauma. To which Griffin laughed because aren’t we all. They showed me the pictures of the makeup they wore for a burlesque show. I told them I still hadn’t had the courage to buy the red lipstick I wanted to buy since spring 2023. I will buy it next week, I promised, and I’ll send you the picture. It will be my accountability.

I resent the idea of winter and winter commutes, of the long meandering days that start and end in darkness. But tonight, stepping into the cold rain and being greeted by the warm yellow ocean of Christmas lights and by female voice singing Wicked Games somewhere on the corner near the Hudson Bay Company flagship store, the tired and light-dependent creature that I am, I felt touched by grace.

By the time I got home, the rain turned into timid snow that melted before it touched the ground, as if it hadn’t quite decided what it wanted to be. As if turning water into snow was a miracle this new winter hasn’t yet mastered. Still, I stopped in the middle of the empty street, right beneath a street light, lifted my face and looked at the snow. A few hundred meters further, some wet naked tree branches formed a kind of halo around another street light and I stood for some time, amazed, staring at this perfect spiral shape and wondering if it was always there, hidden in plain sight, or was conjured on this very night out of darkness, electric light, end-of-year sadness and first snow.

Juniper has the sweetest way of winking with her both eyes that makes her look a little like a kind owl and makes me feel safe and accepted when she winks at me across the table. She told me today something she had learned from her Buddhist teacher: that miracles are simply a way of noticing what other people miss. Amen to that.

There are two women who meet every morning on my bus. They always look happy to see each other. One looks like she’s about fifty, handsome and rather plain looking. The other one could be anywhere between sixty and seventy, she has a snow-white hair and wears funky clothes, the kind I hope I will be wearing when I am her age. They ride a few stops together, then the younger one gets off and the older one stays to ride all the way to the REM station and to Montreal. I am witnessing the daily meeting of these women with a kind of quiet gratitude one feels seeing the rising of the sun. I read that ancient Mayas were quite suspicious of the sun, believing him to be a cruel and capricious god (something to do with living in an earthquake-prone area). So, they made sacrifices to make sure the sun keeps rising. There is a tiny Mayan part in me, always anxious about the sunrise, always grateful at being granted another day. I see these women on the bus and remember that in Ohenton Karihwatehkwa, The words before all else, we thank first for the people.

Winter is coming and I feel like it will be long. I want to huddle with people and feel their bodies, their warmth, their solid form. At times like these, when everything is volatile and covered in darkness, our bodies, their textures, our smells of skin and sweat and perfume, our sheer physicality may be the best antidote to despair.

This morning I woke up again with the weight of the world on my chest and my eyes were wet with actual tears. Isn’t it ironic how the only matter that makes it from the dream world to the other side are tears? Our ancestors were right, November is the time when the boundary between the worlds is at its thinnest and most fragile, when every separation, every crack in the universe is felt with particular acuteness. November is a long process of falling apart. The sequence of days and dates: first, the shift to the winter time – the early darkness, the elections, the 1000 days of war, the anniversary of two revolutions (and a long forgotten anniversary of another one), finally the Holodomor remembrance have ended in one long heartbreaking dream. I also notice that dreams, the ones that feel like another kind of reality, more immediate and uninhibited than my waking reality, often come at the end of the three-week cycle, just before my next therapy appointment.

In my dream, I was having a very big party. Not just any party, but some kind of reconciliatory fest meant to bring together family and community after a rift or some sort of tragedy, meant to make things right. There were many people and the walls of the room were warm chestnut brown, the windows were big and there was grey autumn lights outside – it looked nothing like my house, but I knew it was my home. There were many children, most of them dark-haired, loud and rambunctious. There was loud music. I was waiting for someone, anxiously. Other people at the party told me they wouldn’t come, that I should just enjoy myself, but I was posted on the sofa in the middle of the room, playing with children and keeping an eye on the door. At some point, they came. The party went on, but it stopped for me. There were three of them: a man and two dark-haired, sad-looking women. The man looked nothing like anyone I know. To be honest, he looked like Frank Gallager from Shameless, which may be explained by the fact that I’ve been binge-watching Shameless for the past three months. The women looked a little bit like the Turkish woman from my previous dream, but I didn’t recognize them. Their presence shook me. I got up from the couch and came up to the man and clung to him and started crying with the kind of cry that fills all your chest and makes it difficult to breathe. I woke up slowly, as if emerging from the depth, with my chest still aching and my eyes wet.

Something else I remember from this night is half-waking from another dream, while it was still dark, and telling myself “They need to learn how to live in darkness. This is the way we’re heading. We know how to do it, we’ve learned, they need to learn from us.” I think by “we” I referred to the Eastern Europe and to all we’ve been through during my lifespan and before. Who are “they”?

I had a breakdown. It was one of those weeks when I feel like I am walking around with no skin on. Every thing, good and bad, rips through my tissue right to my heart. It wasn’t just this week, but the one before and the one before that. Creative fever, difficult conversations, trump, soul-shattering argument with an old friend, another old friend mourning the one year anniversary of her son passing away, her son was the same age as my daughter, a joy from an unexpected Friday email from someone I am afraid to care too much about, feeling totally and completely held by people I trust, having hard time getting up in the morning, falling asleep in the evening bus, feeling various degrees of loneliness, sadness, love, feeling so much, all the time that the feeling itself wears you down, yet being afraid to let go of that feeling because if I no longer feel how will I know I exist?

Saturday morning didn’t bring peace. In a short time between getting out of bed and rushing to children’s extracurriculars, my son cried because he absolute wanted to draw a picture with a black marker and didn’t have a black marker. When we found a black marker and he drew his picture, he started crying because it was all black. Isn’t this art imitating life? Then he cried because he didn’t want to go to karate. Then my daughter cried because I saw that she still didn’t brush her teeth and said « are you kidding me? » She thought I was screaming. Maybe, I was. Then we walked through beautiful sunny morning, sulking and keeping distance from each other. Just before separating in different directions, we held hands and said we loved each other.

After I dropped off my kids, I went to the coffee place where I read my Indigenous Spirituality course book every Saturday morning and ordered coffee. I just settled at a small table in the corner, when the young girl who works there on weekends came up with a big earthenware mug of latte snd said « here » putting it in front of me. This is what broke me. This simple gesture of care. The girl walked away and busied herself putting out Christmas decorations. Coldplay’s Hymn for the Weekend was playing. I was staring at the dusty pink earthenware coffee mug in front of me, my eyes burning and tears streaming down my face. I felt so full, so whole, so grateful, so surrounded by love, so heartbroken for the loveless world. The Hymn for the Weekend ended and The Fugees’ Killing me Softly came up and I cried again, because I love this song so much and because it always matters what music plays. I wish we payed more attention.

There is a squirrel outside of my window right now at the very tip of a very thin branch of an almost naked maple tree. She is diligently picking every last remaining grain and fruit and stuffing them in her cheeks. The squirrel knows the winter is coming. Squirrel has no idea about the genocide or American elections. She has no language for either of those.

When I was young and part of the evangelical movement, our favourite joke was about the Sunday school teacher who asks children “who is little, gray, has a big furry tail and eats acorns and hazelnuts?” A little boy raises his hand and answers: “I do know that Jesus is the answer to everything, but this sounds awfully like a squirrel.”

Now, being much older, I wonder if squirrel was the right answer to everything all along.