I am truly grateful for these lazy winter holidays when nothing happens. Although, truly significant things do happen, of course, like Sunday morning crêpes. I started making them in the fall, for those special days when my kids didn’t have their swimming classes. This year swimming starts an hour later, so I can make crêpes every Sunday. I serve them with homemade chia jam – just whatever frozen berries that were on sale the previous week, boiled with a spoonful of sugar and some chia. It is delicious and, I want to believe healthy. I also want to believe that when my children meet up with adults, they will reminisce the time mom was making crêpes. Maybe, Élise will say “ I don’t think you remember, you were too little.” And Julien will reply “Of course I remember!”

In an attempt to remove myself even further from emotional turmoil, I started reading Thomson Highway’s Permanent Astonishment. So far, it consists mostly of descriptions of endless wintery sub-Arctic landscapes, with interjections of surrealism and some Cree humour. It is wonderful. When I was a teenager, I used to love Jack London’s northern stories. Highway’s writing is just as good, minus the greed, colonialism and toxic masculinity that permeated London’s life and art. I now want to buy Permanent Astonishment as an audiobook, to enjoy Highway’s description as a grounding tool, just as I do with Robian Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

Today my mom told me that she’d been waiting for the results of a lung cancer test. Thankfully, they are negative. She only told me after she received the official clearance, and I feel so grateful that she hid it from me, because frankly, I don’t think I could have carried it.

My daughter has been suffering from stomach ache for a few days and my little son is now carrying the bag with the library books all by himself. The sight of him, so small, with canvas bag over his shoulder, makes my heart swell with pride.

On the drive home after dropping off kids at school and daycare Sia’s Unstoppable played in the car, so I put the sound all the way up and hollered the words with her. It didn’t feel enough, so I found the same song on my phone, put on the headphones and made a brisk walk around the block.

As I was walking around the block, I got a text from Monique, my old boss and mentor, my safe person, my unfailing support system. We haven’t talked for many months, almost a year, entirely by my fault. When I get overwhelmed, tired or depressed, I withdraw, even from the people who I trust. I stop communicating. I stop writing and answering texts. Afterwards, I feel guilty and agonize about contacting them thinking that surely they would not want to hear from me again. I cried a little, when I got Monique’s text, from the sheer momentary bliss of knowing that someone loves me and never stopped thinking about me. From knowing that all this time she was there for me.

When I came home I got a text from Rosie “Just sent loving kindness blessings after my meditation, have a blessed day Vira, you are loved”

I’ve been feeling it for some time, but today it crystallized: I feel at peace. Something in me finally shifted and although I still feel every crack and fault line in the surrounding universe, I no longer fall through the cracks into the abyss. For the past several day I felt the peace growing in me, like a moon grows on a night sky, until today I felt finally at peace. I felt like I knew my place in the world, knew what connects me to my human and more than human kin. I just knew.

The energy was different too. I felt this calm awareness that allowed me to do things I’ve been putting aside for far too long. As usual, the hardest part of human-ing for me is communication: connecting with people and soliciting their attention. Today it felt easy and efortless.

Then, as I was running my evening errands, I realized something. All my life I’ve been craving people’s love and attention, but when some people gave it to me, it always scared and overwhelmed me. I shunned away from romantic advances, just as I did from deep friendship. Deep down, I wondered what people who loved and admired me saw in me. Today, I finally felt being able to give myself the same loving kindness I’ve been given by my generous friends all the time.

I have learned how to be a good ally to others, how to show them my admiration and support. Now I am learning how to be my own ally. And I can’t wait to see where it will take me.

Today I celebrated le redoux by walking to the edge of the forest (Wikipedia helpfully suggested that the English word for it is thaw, or January thaw, which seems fitting since we’re still in January, other synonym may be a warm spell). I keep wondering if there is a word in Kanyenké’ha or Anishnabemowin for this short reprieve between wintery chill and what it may sound like. I hope that if there is such word, it was not lost, that there are people who remember it and pass it on.

I realize now that I do not have a favourite season, probably never had one. I have many favourite periods, intersections of time and space: le redoux in the middle of cold Canadian winter, the time in the early spring when the snow crusts over and the sap is running in the trees, the short three days in may when crab apple trees suddenly cover themselves in pink petals, the sunset of a very hot day on the Almanare beach, the time of chestnuts blooming in Kyiv, autumn between late September and the end of October.

What I love about the winter forest is how very few people are there. It seems empty at the first sight, but of course it is not empty. Nor is it silent. The trees groan, screech and whisper with the wind. I hugged a tall and slender tree and I felt if shudder and move and for a moment I thought I heard something similar to a heartbeat.

The last thing I dreamt before waking up this morning was being at some kind of conference of a gathering by the sea. It is something I recognize as a recurring dream: being with a group of people in a far-away place. Once it was a warm and futuristic city that looked like Singapore of my imagination, with slender white sky-scrappers and light-rail bridges everywhere. Once or twice it was Kyiv – every time I see it in my dreams, it is filled with golden lights and looks achingly familiar and futuristic at the same time. I remember that in that dream I was running around, trying to get the best view from above on the old city and its golden domes. Every time I dream about Kyiv, even now when I write about dreaming about Kyiv, it fills me with ache. Tonight I was at the seaside and the sea was warm and welcoming and although my days were filled with some agenda, I could rise up very early each morning and walk by the sea. I just made up my mind that the next morning I would take a towel with me and start the day with a dip, when I woke up, feeling happy and light.

The day then didn’t proceed as I expected it – it wasn’t bad or good, just an ordinary mixed day with moments of tenderness and laughter and periods of annoyance, with kids being alternately sweet and stubborn. But then we read a funny story before the bed and I nested myself next to my son to cuddle his feet and read to myself until he fell asleep. As I came to see my daughter, she was already asleep and looking at her peaceful still childlike face made me gasp with a familiar mix of love, tenderness and sadness.

This January I’ve been reading and listening and thinking about the two dimensions of time: chronos and Kairos. For me, Kairos happens every evening – it’s this moment when my kids’ breathing slows down and their little faces relax, their eyelids flutter then close and they drift to sleep. People often joke that we never love our kids as much as when they sleep, but it’s true on a deeper level. It is at that moment that time stops and we see their innocence so clearly and we are desperate to protect them from the world and from growing up and from million other things. It is pure Kairos: crisis, hope and opportunity all in one.

This morning, as I was sitting in the dentist’s office, my phone randomly showed me a collection of photos I took while walking through the Mont Bruno park in August or early September last year. I remember being quite fascinated by different mushrooms and seeing a garter snake. I remember that the trees were still green, but the ground was orange, brown and yellow with the fallen leaves, as it always is in the forest, even in spring. I remember the day being long and generous, in the shadow of the trees, between the lakes, in the luxury of the solitude.

As I was looking through the photos, I thought “so much beauty happened to me that day.” And then I paused, delighted by the fact that I was able to think for a moment in Mohawk way. See, in the Mohawk language, everything exists in the relationship to something and in order to say something, anything at all, one must establish that relationship. There are 86 pronouns, most of them can only be used in a connection with the verb. One of these pronouns, wake- shows that “I” am the object and something is the subject – something happens to me. Wakatshennò:ni means I am happy, or, if one wants to be precise, that happinness happens to me. I do not know the root word for being beautiful or even if such word exists, but I thought it would be so right to use it with a pronoun wake- “the beauty happens to me.”

Maybe, in a similar fashion, hope, inspiration, creativity, insight are the things that happen to us, so we can know ourselves as parts of a much bigger story.

Now that I have to go to the office twice a week (I do not mind the going part, but ah, how do I hate the being in the office part!), I start seeing my time in the bus as a thing of beauty and mystery – a time when time itself is suspended, when I exist outside of my daily routine (this time is neither work, nor play, nor family nor a personal time in its strict sense), yet I very much exist. A lot of my thinking, wondering and dreaming happens on this morning bus ride (I do not feel the same way about evening buses that tend to be crowded and uncomfortable). I secretly like the feeling of moving through space, yet being outside of time. Sometimes I read. That is, I oblige myself to read, so as not to waste valuable 30 minutes, but in reality my reading never progresses more than half a page – the rest of the journey I let my gaze and my thoughts wander.

The trip itself starts among the low-rises of middle-class residential suburb, continues to the highway, passes one sprawling mall, then more highway, ligned on both sides by industrial buildings, a second mall and ends in front of a brand new station of a brand new electric rail. On an alternate route, it goes: suburb, highway, mall, more highway that runs along CN railway, then a very ugly part of a bigger suburb that consists mostly of car repair shops, questionable bars and cheap fast-foods, a somewhat fancier part of the suburb, an urban university campus and finally a metro.

Regardless of the route, it is on the first short portion of the highway that one sees a bit of the land. First, it is just a large field with few spindly trees and a large sturdy farmhouse in the middle. Then, as the highway makes a gentle turn left, towards the mall, one can see the blue shape of Mont Bruno and a second smaller hill on the horizon. Then everything disappears, replaced by concrete and metal shapes of the windowless shopping containers.

It is a brief and not particularly beautiful view, but I came to love it. I think it tought me how much of the land was taken, misused, altered and appropriated, yet even in its subjugated form the land remains alive and beautiful. Even through the dirty window of the bus, even as a parenthesis between urban sprawl and commercial zones, the land offers everything: a vast open space, a view of the horizon and blue shapes of the hills covered with forest. The land appeals to the wild and authentic part of me – the one that hates every minute spent in the office and the very proximity of Sainte-Catherine, but loves the high ceilings of the National Library, the hush of bookstores, the friendly rush of the cafés, being out and about – as far out and as much about as I possibly can.

The “lake”, actually the reservoir, froze over and the geeze are now sitting in neat little groups in the ice. I hope they are ok.

Next week will be my work anniversary.

Most of the people I knew a year ago have moved on to other things, but I still feel like I am drifting in between. This morning, looking at the black shape of the newly build sky-scrapper outside of my dirty office window, I thought about the phrase from Mina Salami’s Sensuous Knowledge that I heard a few days ago: some of us may be locked in golden cages, but even though the bars of the prison are gold, it is still a cage. I feel this way about the whole corporate capitalist system – even though the bars of my cage are not quite golden, they are gilded – yet, it feels more and more like prison. I don’t know if it’s burn-out, a mid-life crisis or a menopause.

I am reading Sandra Newman’s Julia, a feminist retelling of Orwell’s 1984 – I believe I have not been this enthralled in a book since reading Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land in the beginning of 2022. A strange thing is happening – I realize that I read this book through the lens of the inter-generational trauma that I carry in me. I know the truth of it through the mirrored experience of my ancestors – great-grandparents generation that lived and died in purges, forced displacements and artificial famine. Chapter 12 is particularly horrifying – it describes the famine organized by the party regime in Semi-Autonomous Zones – one doesn’t need to know all the facts to feel it resonate through one’s bones and flesh. Somatic knowledge is a powerful thing.

One of the reasons I started journaling this year is to understand the way my trauma, especially intergenerational trauma, shapes me and the ways I may heal from it. My goal this year is to gain deep knowledge, the one that will help me to understand myself and relate to others from a place of intentional kinship. I hope that with time writing will become a reflex and this reflex will bring forth a deeper truth.