When I was younger, I lived in the binaries. I moved from joy to despair, losing myself in every emotion completely and with abandon. I remember this one episode, I must have been about fifteen and had a falling out with my good friends – they were a newlywed couple, slightly older than me. Or, maybe they told me they had marital issues – they ended up divorcing eventually. I must add here that both me and my friends were evangelicals, so marital issues leading to a divorce did seem like the end of the world. And after this falling out I decided I would never be happy again. Never smile, never laugh and avoid talking as much as possible. I was so devastated, even worse, I was angry either the world for continuing as usual, blissfully unaware of my devastation. I think I lasted half a day, but it was an intense half a day.

Now all I see are spectrums and shades of gray. I had a huge argument with a friend yesterday over Trump election. He was angry with me for being upset about the result, while one or another made no difference in the genocide. I wanted to tell him to f*** off, but instead I said I am sorry for triggering you and I love you. And he said I love you too. Today I got an email from someone I have only met twice. Someone wonderful and young and doing amazing work in the world, who shared that they had an amazing week working with environmental justice activists in Mexico. What I realised is I like living in the world full of spectrums and shades. I like that we can cry and be angry and celebrate and despair and fuck and break things and laugh till our bellies hurt and all of this at the same time. I’ll take this world over binaries. But I have conditions: I will not pretend that I am well when I’m not, I will not hide my feelings from people I love, i will not show them to people I don’t trust, I will accept whatever people I love want to show me and set my boundaries with others and I will not be afraid to tell people I love them. Because love and unconditional acceptance is the most revolutionary, incendiary and counter cultural thing right now.

Get up before 6am. There is no way to not know what you already know.

Coffee. Food. Write something, anything, just not be silent.

Notice the unreasonable warmth for this late in autumn, notice the strong southern wind pregnant with rain.

Meet a neighbour on my morning commute and talk all the way about love and motherhood and future. Not mention the election once. It’s incredible how much I know about this woman and how much she knows about me just from these few shared commutes.

Change the planters for our office plants first thing in the morning. Feel earth and water and permanence of the good things.

Eat lunch at ten in the morning. Try to write emails and fail. Try to write something else and almost succeed. Text people who I love that I love them.

Go to therapy. Cry for the first time on my way there. Cry almost all the way through my session.

On my way home, see through the bus window that through small openings in heavy inky clouds shows the beautiful orange of sunset. Cry the rest of the way.

Go for a walk at night, wishing I’d thought of putting on my running gear. Try to write a course paper on Indigenous spirituality and fail. Instead, spend an hour on YouTube listening over and over and over to one song. L’Amérique pleure.

Sometimes I feel like I live on a fault line about to open. Like I can physically feel every crack in the universe. Usually, it happens around full moon, in the spring, when the ice cracks, in the autumn with shedding of leaves and all the migrations, visible and otherwise. At every tipping point: light turning into darkness, darkness into light. Speaking of which, I hate the hour change.

I love people who stop to look at something. In Ukrainian, the verb look and the noun miracle have the same root – it is anything but coincidence. In my evening walk in sad November twilight I met a woman with an old German shepherd who stopped to watch a lonely goose flying over our heads with sad sad cries. Then I saw a young man, standing next to his bike looking at the trees wrapped in pink of the dying light, reflected on the surface of the water reservoir. Then I stopped myself, as a flock of geese – relatives? – was flying low under our heads. From that short distance I could hear not only their plaintive cries, but the whoosh-whoosh of their wings. The most beautiful sound.

Thank you to everyone who’s not writing to me these days. I am doing ok. I could be doing better. There is always possibility to be doing better. As I acknowledge this possibility, I wonder if the possibility itself limits my agency in the present moment and state. I could be doing better, but I am not. And maybe I am not doing at all, but being, breathing, listening, yawning, feeling very very tired, feeling my skin lose its summer glow, my eyes losing their shine as they adjust to a bleaker backdrop of late autumn.

Anyway, thank you to everyone who is not writing me. I experience your silence not as abandonment, but as space. I know we don’t need words. I wonder… if with some of you we’ve come to wordless understanding. In the wordless understanding, there is no guilt, no expectation, no public to perform for, no eloquence, no need to prove oneself, no spellcheck, no self-censorship, no ego. The wordless understanding is defined by what it is not. What it is will be left unsaid, undefined, unspoken.

The woman in the seat in front of me is learning some language that looks like Japanese on some app. What are the chances?

I went for a jog in the forest and saw that the birch trees have lost all their leaves. On Wednesday, last time i’d been there, they still had some. I thought i’d be sad, I was prepared to be sad. Instead, in a sudden burst of enlightenment, or a moment of awareness, I felt at peace. The birch trees, naked as they were, didn’t look frail or miserable or desolate, they looked ready for what was coming. The trees were giving me a lesson about letting go. They were not holding on neither to the vitality of summer, nor to the the wild beauty of the autumn. And at the same time as I was resisting winter with all my strength, with every fiber of my being, they simply embraced the change.

The two maple trees on my backyard have also let go of their leaves, as have the big poplar tree just outside of the fence. My backyard is full of their gifts. When I lay on the ground, I can disappear in them. I can feel the small animal part of me, weary and cozy and grateful. Maybe, I am ready.

Last time I saw them in concert was in Kyiv. It must have been 2005, so almost 20 years ago, a year after the Orange revolution. It was a big concert, they must have been celebrating their ten years. I remember being so young and the crowd around me was so very young, the frontman still had long hair, he used to tie a scarf to the microphone stand back then. I think that we had no idea what we were doing or were going to do. We just managed to topple the government. It felt like everything was going to miraculously get better from then on. Which of course it didn’t.

The frontman is older now, I am older, the crowd around me is older too. If someone’d told me back then in Kyiv that my next Okean Elzy concert would be twenty years later in Montreal, I wouldn’t believe it. Firstly, because no one believes at that age that they’d be twenty years older one day. Secondly, because Montreal or most places for that matter felt like an unattainable dream. Now it doesn’t feel like such an achievement.

I still know the words to almost every song. Sometimes, singing these songs is the closest thing to feeling home. It is both heartbreak and medicine. I feel so young again, so naive, I can almost remember what it was like not knowing. It is strange how we are all hurting, yet there is also palpable joy in the air, almost a bliss. We know the words to every song and he knows that we know them. He chose the songs carefully – every one is a new memory and a new heartbreak. Isn’t it strange, how twenty years, an ocean and a war later I find myself in the same crowd. And people around me are essentially strangers, except they aren’t. They know the words to my favourite songs. They understand things about me that neither my family, nor my colleagues, nor my new friends could ever understand.

I tell myself I can’t wait another twenty years for something to happen.

What is it about flame-clad autumn trees

that makes them look bigger than they were in summer

What is it about the particular thinness of air

that makes me rub my eyes

What is it about the light and all this transparency

that squeezes my heart

I would rather

love the living world in its dying

I would rather

hold it close to my chest with its comforting warmth

Breathe its particular odour of gentle decomposition

I would rather

stay in the homely mess of here and now

I would rather care

than win

I would rather falter

than triumph

I would rather crumble

than outlive everything that loves me

I would rather accept the goodness of now

Than hope for the future at the expense of the present.

I have believed in the afterlife for way too long

In my youth, I stood by the entrance of the subway station

handing out brochures and telling strangers about heaven

While avoiding their eyes

Stifling my own doubts

And artfully ignoring the hell around me

I may have lost that faith

I may be losing the hope I have left

But with every falling leave

With every full moon

With every departing flock of geese

My love of dying things grows stronger.

I had a nightmare tonight, the kind that wake you up all breathless, scared and grateful that it was just a dream. My daughter has those. In my nightmare there was a crowd of children and some adults, it looked like a kids party. Then the evil came, and I started shepherding the children away, taking them out of evil’s way. I remember dreaming about picking them up, one by one, putting them on a couch, giving them toys, asking them to stay quiet, to stay put. When I finally huddled all children together, I turned around and realized that all other adults were gone, just disappeared. I was alone, standing between children and the evil that was staring at me with glee. That’s when I woke up.

During my Saturday morning coffee and catching up on the school reading the chapter was about Windigo, the cannibal spirit of the Anishinaabe stories. At the table next to me a man was talking very loudly about this great time management software his company was selling. Not only this software creates timesheets for employees, it “helps” them account for every minute task. Imagine, the man was saying, you’re working on a project and your phone rings, some personal call. Our software stops the timer, so that your call doesn’t count towards your working time, then restarts it again when your call is over. Imagine how much easier it is, than trying to remember every little thing you did when filing your time sheet on Friday. How much easier it becomes to control a factory with 500 employees. We just count everything. I looked up from my Windigo page, incredulous. Life imitating art.

I started listening to an audiobook Imagination. A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin and learned the term long-termism. Long-termism is a philosophy that allows very rich and spoiled Silicon Valley brats not to give an f about the crisis that is happening here and now, as long as they can invest their money and their brains in some far away technocratic future where their legacy will be carried on by “digital descendants.” The idea of it was so dystopian that it made me laugh out loud. Wow, so the Silicon Valley dudes stole the basic technique of the original colonizers, aka Christian missionaries – focus attention on the uncertain, vague and imaginary afterlife, so that you can ignore, destroy and plunder the tangible and beautiful world you have in front of you. This made me think back to the conversation I had earlier this week, the one about the love of the dying things. I would rather love the fragile, dying and undervalued present world than hope for some future one where only the fittest survive.

The two moments that stopped me on my tracks today: this swing in its gold and lemon shiny surroundings and a giant, impossibly yellow hunter moon calmly looking over a brightly lit football field.

Today I had to force myself to go for a lunchtime walk. It was a beautiful autumn day, the “so beautiful it’s almost sad” kind and I couldn’t unglue myself from my computer screen. I realize that I am getting into an obsessive phase when I live and breathe my work. I’ve been there before. I stop eating. I think about my work while walking, sleeping, playing with my kids, I just can’t stop. The work starts consuming me. This week, there were several times when I forgot to eat or simply decided not to. There was a morning when I got up and ruched to write up an application form. This is not healthy. I love my work. I am passionate about creating new worlds, following the threads of thinking into the unknown, I love feeling how clarity emerges through the fog of complexity. I love feeling bold and creative, “determined and afraid of nothing.” Maybe, because I never feel this way about myself or in relationships. But I have to admit that this is another way I avoid being present.

I was looking at the sunset over reservoir today and thinking of something I said in a conversation not so long ago (funny, how every advice we give is actually the advice for ourselves): it is hard to let go of a good thing. My work is a good thing. It is good for me and for people around me, but I have to let it go in order to be present in my life. I don’t want to quit, I am not quitting, but I have to put a loving boundary between the thing I love and myself. I don’t want to miss another brilliant autumn day because I was obsessing over difference between community mobilizing and organizing. I don’t want to walk through life without noticing life. The cries of the departing geese. The purplish red of wild sumac leaves. The changing colour of the sky: from pinkish to turquoise to dark blue. I want to be present.