The forecast promised thunderstorm, hail and a possibility of tornado, so we cancelled evening activities and honestly, it was a blessing. The thunderstorm did come, but much later in the evening. Before, there was a warm sticky evening with rain that started, stopped and started again. I like walking in this uncertain weather. If you time it right, you can walk almost to the forest and back through the neighbourhood in an almost perfect solitude. Tonight my solitude was rewarded by spotting a red cardinal and a goldfinch.

Today, I went to therapy, saw an owl and a sunset. It was such a beautiful day.

I wonder if there is a word in any language that describes the longing that humans feel around sunset. I say humans and not just me, because a longing so deep and intense cannot possibly be individual experience. I say humans because I have seen it and recognised it in multiple spaces and on multiple locations. Longing so deep, it almost feels like remembering. Longing so intense it feels like magic. Many years ago someone asked me what is magic. I wrote a long article on it, but didn’t answer the question. Now I have the answer. Magic is remembering what it is to be human in all our glory and fragility.

We are past summer solstice, which means the days are imperceptibly getting shorter. For me, summer is always a time of heartache. (I recently had a reflection that I usually experience joy as heartache. Good things make me cry.) I fear summer’s swiftness, its impermanence. The peonies are gone, the pink echinaceas and yellow heliopsis are showing their faces. Adding to this heartache are the songbirds. Today, a robin sitting on the neighbours chimney serenaded me (not me), as I was sitting on the porch, trying to wrap my head around all the things I have to pack. On my evening walk, I saw a turtle come up for air, I saw a kingfisher dove for some small fish, I saw black dragonflies and an orange butterfly. The more time I spend getting to know this place, the less I feel like I want to be somewhere else.

Let me try something…

I am writing this standing, leaning onto a warm wall of pink-painted brick on the corner between Prince-Arthur and Jeanne-Mance streets in Tiohtià:ke, at 6:15pm on the longest day of this year. It is summer solstice, it is the third day of a rare June heatwave and it is still hot, but the air is becoming a little more breathable. Just now there is a gentle breeze. The city is noisy and full of tourists, but also strangely leisurely, its French soul protecting it from succumbing to capitalist frenzy. I feel well, slow, tired, generous and I am writing this because one, I have time and two, I want to see how it feels to write from a place of presence (not emotion, imagination or memory). It feels ok.

All things considered, it wasn’t a bad day, maybe even a good one. I feel lost, tired and bereft, but there are many reasonable reasons why one may feel so. For one, I am not dealing well with heat. I don’t like the city in the summer. I have not slept well. I am three days short of my vacation and the fatigue of these six months is becoming unbearable. In addition, there were other, totally avoidable reasons, like spending too much time on LinkedIn.

An interesting thought: when I am low on adrenaline, serotonin and oxytocin, I don’t feel myself. I define myself by hight sensitivity, emotivity, intelligence and antagonism and have a hard time accepting a calmer, more sedate version of myself. I wonder why this may be.

Today I spent five-and-half hours, almost an entire working day, except an unpleasant meeting, writing nine emails. Presented out of context, this may seem like a summum of inefficiency, borderline cheating my employer out of their money. But here is the catch: in the end of this day I feel happy, fulfilled, energised and productive. I have spent five hours writing to the organizations what we loved about them, suggesting what they could do to improve future funding applications and outlining our future relationship. I feel that I have invested my time and effort into building a supportive and transparent relationship. Something that I would call love. I freak people out when I speak about love in professional context and I love doing it. « Tu t’es vraiment donnée, » said Solveille, seeing the result. I love this expression. In English, you’d say « you gave it your all », but in French it’s « you gave yourself ». Sometimes (not this time, I don’t think) people say it to me implying that I am too much (I admit I am), that some distance would be healthy (they are probably right). But the thing is, something I wouldn’t admit for the fear of sounding hedonistic and hedonistic would be considered unprofessional, the thing is that giving myself gives me pleasure.

Having come to this conclusion, I start wondering why I am so much bolder, stronger and so much more empowered to seek this kind of pleasure in my work, as opposed to my personal relationships, friendly or intimate. Is it part of my religious trauma? Is it the echoes of the conditioning I received at my first job at the Christian organization, the saviourism from which I never healed? And what would it feel like to apply this kind of focus, boldness, intelligence and expansive thinking to pursuing love, commitment, intimacy and personal fulfilment?

How do we make a home for desire?

Jenny Odell. Saving Time

Today was another spacious day, a succession of summery, light, unproductive activities that one could do only on a summer weekend. Walking through buzzing Chinatown, thick with the smells of frying fish and sounds of a very good street violin performance. Sipping iced matcha smoothie with sweet tapioca bubbles. Visiting my backyard wild strawberry patch – astonished and grateful for its abundance. While my garden strawberry varieties are struggling with lack of sun and too much attention from our wild neighbours, their wild sisters are slowly conquering the garden. Their only competition are goldenrods that now grow tall and in dense. Most of the season they look like weeds and my garden, quite honestly, looks half-abandoned, but I can’t bring myself to “weeding out” the goldenrods, nor the chamomiles, nor the wild roses. Then, after everyone has settled for an evening, a walk in the forest. I went to the Lac du Moulin today – something I haven’t done in a long time. As I was circling the lake, I stopped to listen to an unfamiliar bord song, took out my phone with the Merlin app – and then, right there a miracle happened – a chorus of sounds and calls I have not heard before, coming from the birds I never saw before and didn’t see then. They were all around me, hidden in the foliage: black-throated green warbler, scarlet tanager, eastern wood pewee, american redstart, brown creeper, blackburbian warbler and my old acquaintances, red-eyed vireos and black-capped chikadees. Ever since I started listening to the birds, sounds excite me. I hear now the calls of the tree frogs, the buzz of insects, the angry cries of two rambuctious baby-racoons chasing each other up the tree, while their mother is surveying something in the direction of the lake. I am hearing the whisper of the leaves. I have just learned that there is a word in Anishinabeemowin (a verb, to be sure) that means “the leaves make a pleasant sound in the wind” – minwewebagaasin. I also say a chipmunk, two juvenile deer and a giant millipede.

Today was a spacious day. I managed whole two walks (it only counts as a walk if it has no productive or consumptive purpose – everything else is a trip). On my first walk at lunchtime I managed to reach the forest. I had a good podcast on, but kept putting it on pause and circling back to the yesterday’s therapy session. As I ruminate on it, more questions emerge, more understanding on how angry I am about things that happened to me. And maybe I am even angrier about the things that didn’t happen. I kept thinking back about the lonely lonely lonely me in my late teens and early twenties. This girl, so desperate for love and companionship, so afraid to be seen or notice any sign of affection, even less return it. This girl who wants to be kissed and touched, but wouldn’t ask for it, because she was taught that it is sin. The girl who doesn’t go on dates, who is afraid of intimacy, the girl who lives in her head, doing her best to ignore what is happening in her body.

Her body, in the meanwhile, is a battlefield. It carries the weight of fat-shaming when she was a child. It is subdued by the expectations of purity culture. When her big love ends in rejection, she puts the blame on her body. She condemns it, because it’s too fat, because it is not lean or elegant. So she decides to transform it, not through love and attention, but through relentless discipline and judgment. It starts innocuously enough with regular jogging. Who’d be against that? Then she discovers the gym, she starts eating less, she starts cutting out fats, then carbs, then practically everything, until her diet consists of quartered apples, low-calorie bread (who invented this abomination?!), low-calorie cheese and/or luncheon meat, sugar-free chewy candies and abominable amounts of diet drinks loaded with aspartame. She loses weight, she thinks about food, food, food all the time. And the thinner she gets, the more she fat-shames herself.

What scares me, when I look back at her, is that no one comes to her aid. No one asks what is going on, as she melts away physically. No one, except her parents, confronts her, and their intervention brings no results. No one even tries to advice her or offer help. Why, I ask myself. Maybe, because people around her are just as deluded as she is. They too believe that what is happening to her body doesn’t matter. In their eyes, she is a picture of success. She is top of her class, outperforming everyone academically. She also out-prays, out-bible-studies and out-christians everyone around. Her version of Christianity, the evangelicalism, is highly performative. She is even planning to go back to her country and join the evangelical ministry (my mother was shocked by this decision, but ultimately relented – how I wish now that she didn’t).

I have a picture of me around my early “missionary” period. On the picture, there are bunch of Irish teenagers, the “missionaries”, and a few staff of the local evangelical student ministry – barely out of adolescence themselves. I am one of the staff. I am twenty-three, I have short boyish hair, dyed jet-black with a red streak à la Run, Lola, Run. I am not just thin, but emanciated. I don’t look confident, or happy, or having the slightest understanding what the hell I am doing. If anything, I look part-scared, part-aloof. If I could find some way to go back in time and talk to that girl, I think all I’d say would be “Don’t fuck up your life.”

On my second walk, at sunset, there was just so much of sweet, simple, calm goodness distilled in a short quarter or an hour. First, the sunset itself and the pink bellies of the clouds in the sky fading from dark blue to light blue to orange over the water reservoir. The branches of the trees, alight with the last sun-rays. The joy of walking. The podcast: Ross Gay speaking of sorrow, wilderness and joy. The gardens, all abloom. The particular freedom of Friday evening multiplied by the freedom of summer quickly approaching solstice. The aliveness of it all.