thoughts on five

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(polaroid sun 660 / impossible px 680 color shade ff)

‎1. last night as i was planting, a big fat juicy bee landed on my arm and just stayed there for a moment, her soft furry body tickling me and then she hovered above me and headed for the lilac buds above my head. it felt sacred and true.

2. i love the clearing away that comes in may. my yard and garden continue to teach me. all the leaves decomposed like death covering the tiny sprouting plants, protecting them from our harsh spring. and i clear away to reveal the new growth, the possibility even as i plant new seeds, new plants and watch and wait and see how it all transpires.

3. hard swim at the pool after hours spent playing in the dirt. this time of year is a blessing.

4. anniversary of the wildfires that consumed my town last year and as the town celebrates it resiliance, new fires burn all around the province. hot and dry.

5. i continually marvel at the breadth and range of our climate and the 80 degree difference that takes place in the course of a year. i wouldn’t have it any other way. this is my paradise and every year, the idea of blooming where you grow, feels so right to me even as i recognize the ways that these extreme seasons have shaped the person that i have become, the person that i am becoming.

Posted in little lists

wait five minutes

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so yes, it snowed for all of 5 minutes. i didn’t imagine it. or maybe i did. regardless, i am reminded of another truth about this environment that i call home. “wait five minutes and the weather will change” are the words of the elders, grizzled old men chomping on tobacco and spitting … in cans; pink lipsticked ladies in flowered house dresses, hair carefully put in curlers every night, “wait five minutes and the weather will change”. and it does. all day long, the hot sun blue sky over run by puffy white clouds turned to a mass of blue hued nostalgia and i can see the streams off in the distance – rain turned to snow back to rain as the sun pushes through again and then the thunder rumbles and lightning streaks the grey black anger of the gods and buckets run from the sky as hail pelts the back of sunburn legs revealing a double rainbow as the sky turns pink before night stars flail about against the green spark of a northern light. and it all is a mirror for the emotions that dance around the thoughts in my head.
 
 
Posted in scraps of paper, weather

my first cleanse

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It is true.  I have never done a foodie cleanse before.  I have always wanted to but somehow always resisted the urge.  I eat pretty clean.  mostly.  I was vegetarian for well over a decade, vegan for almost two years and I am not a big sugar junkie though I do have a weakness for really good dark chocolate and those super cheap chocolate cherries.  oh.  and licorice.  I do like me some licorice.

So, when a friend introduced me to Get Fresh – A Spring Cleanse, I was all over it.  It didn’t seem overly extreme like ‘eat nothing but lemonade water for a month’ or drink only juice for 10 days.  I admire those who can do the extreme cleanse but my body likes to eat and there was that little problem with anorexia in my teens and cough cough early twenties so I don’t like to spin the wheel on starvation.  Seems simple, cut out sugar, alcohol, gluten, dairy and meat (seafood is okay, whew).  Easy peasy.  Oh yeah.  Caffiene.  Um.  What??!!  I am not a big coffee drinker but I do have one rather large cup with a dab of cream every single day.  I will admit to you that I miss the coffee.  Oh how I miss the coffee. 

So, my food looked something like this,

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Stephanie provided us with some super yummy tasty recipes that were shockingly easy and fast to prepare.  I need easy and fast especially during the work week when dinner hour starts off something like this, “what do you want for dinner?”  “i don’t know, what do you want?”  “i have no clue, so tired.  what do you think?”  “shrug, no idea”.  Well, you get the idea.  Hello pizza or chicken potpie’s from the deli counter.

So cooking was a breeze and it was all tasty and delicious and easy.  So easy.  But outside of the actual meal prep and cooking, was it easy?

Day 1:  Started off with a yummy new to me smoothie, hello peach almond bliss.  I do green smoothies a lot but I had sort of fallen out of the habit over the past few weeks and am happy to have been kickstarted again.  They really do start the day off right.  By the end of day 1, I had a pretty kick ass headache going on.  I went to bed early, hoping it would go away.  I suspected it was the lack of caffiene. 

Day 2:  I woke up to a raging headache.  Not good.  Wanted coffee.  Didn’t have any.  Moved slowly through my day, thankful that it was Sunday.  By Sunday afternoon, the headache was gone replaced with a burning ache in my lower back that radiated down my thighs.  I have no idea if it was the caffiene withdrawel or the gluten withdrawel but it was nasty.  So nasty that I woke in the night in pain and couldn’t sleep for hours.

Day 3:  Without being too graphic, I was in the washroom.  A LOT.  and I do mean A LOT.  pass the pooper scooper please.

Day 4:  I woke up gingerly assessing my condition and realized that I had no more pain, no headaches and I actually felt pretty good.  Clear even.  Sort of like when I was vegan.  Hmmmmm.  and I have been good ever since.

Today is Day 10.  The last day of the cleanse and I am feeling good, a little bit on the tired side but it’s Monday and I am always tired on Monday so no surprise there.  When I look over the last week, I see that I have been a bit emotional and some tender feelings have surfaced but overall I feel amazing.  And I have lost a good inch of bloat in my stomach.  Nice. 

And now I am faced with some decisions.  I have to slowly reintroduce food, no more than one a day I think so I can figure out what feels good and what doesn’t.  Did I mention that I miss coffee, the taste and the swirl.  But that would be coffee and dairy since I use cream in my coffee.  Which means I have to introduce dairy before coffee.  I don’t really miss dairy and in fact am wondering if dairy might be a problem for me with regards to the bloated feelings I had been having prior to this cleanse.  And then there is the fact that I have been putting maca powder in my smoothie for the past few days and am really feeling energized and I suspect the maca is better for me than the coffee.  and then there is the gluten.  My husband and I often joke about wheat belly but I do miss toast and gluten free bread is just not the same. 

I will take it slow because these days I prefer moderation over extreme.  I don’t want to permanently cut anything out of my diet because that would feel extreme to me.  but.  I want to keep eating as clean as I can and for me that means staying away from processed foods, eating organic, local and preferably out of my backyard.  Soon, very soon.  This year’s garden is pretty much mapped out and in a couple of weeks it will be safe to plant everything. 

My first cleanse feels like a raging success. 

*I clearly needed the detox. 
*I have a swack of new recipes at my fingertips which is good because the same old same old song and dance in the kitchen gets old. 
*I might limit my coffee consumption to the occasional weekend.  I might limit my dairy to my occasional coffee consumption. 
*I have been drinking coconut water for a while now but it never occured to me to use it in my smoothies. um. hello!! yum!
*juicing more than once a week is a good thing and I am reminded how easy it is to clean my juicer.
*it really is not THAT much extra work to bring lunch to work every day and it not only saves me from the eating out bloat and afternoon slump but it saves loads of money too.
*chocolate avocado pudding. two of my favourite things together ’nuff said.
*the realization that I haven’t gone this long without coffee since I was pregnant and scarfing down chocolate in an attempt to get my caffiene on. hmmmm. Do I really want to go back to what feels like an addiction? Hells yes and Hell no. Still haven’t reached a decision on this one. I have time.

 

Posted in health and wellness

watching for words

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A blank white page doesn’t tell the story.  There are volumes piled up, crumpled into each other with peanut butter stains and crayon chalk drawings; swollen with the wet rain of tears and smeared with the joy that comes from kicking a soccer ball and running with a kite. 

In a month’s time, I will watch him walk across a stage in a cap and gown.  I will likely cry because I tear up just typing those words.  He will graduate and then we will spend the last bits of the summer together before he packs up and leaves me with an empty room of sunshine filled with boy cave reminders.  It is all changing.  It has already all changed.  It will continue to change. 

I’ve been watching One Tree Hill (OTH)  Don’t judge.  Or do judge.  I don’t really care.  I am the girl who wrote an English paper in grade 11 defending so called romantic paperback trash novels (not the romantic era of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Coolridge not to mention my favourite Byron) as valid reading material.  I can high brow it and low brow it with the best of them, thank you very much.  My boys laugh at me and my OTH addiction but I enjoyed watching the highschool antics move into grown up realities and the music and the quotes and bits of literature.  My favourite quote,

  “happiness is a mood, not a destination” (Julian, OTH)

Yeah.  So simple and I know it deep down but it still blew my mind just a little bit.  truth has a way of doing that.  word.

I remember when I graduated high school.  Well, to be honest, I went through the ceremony and did the graduation thing and partied hard enough to end up on crutches for weeks afterwards, but it was years later that I graduated because I sort of gave up and quit.  Yes it is true, a person can quit high school and still end up going to university and acquiring more than one degree, with honours even.  Don’t judge.  Or do judge.  I don’t really care.  Anyway, I remember the feeling of standing on the edge of something and not knowing what was going to happen next.   I felt that way that first night in a strange city in a new mostly empty apartment, that night that I slept on the kitchen floor because it was the only room that had any furnishings in it and so felt safe.  I felt that way when I was pregnant too.  There I was newly married and halfway through my first degree and newly pregnant and standing on the edge of something and not knowing what was going to happen next.  I felt that way when I got divorced too.  There I was newly separated having barely finished graduating from my second degree with no job and a five year old son, standing on the edge of something and not knowing what was going to happen next.  I didn’t really feel this again until I found myself, standing in the living room of our newly purchased house, marrying the man who helped me birth our twins and held me tight through nicu and death.  And that was six years ago. 

And here I am … standing on the edge of something and I have no idea what is going to happen next.  There are these moments that we can trace backwards and forwards.  These pivotal moments that sometimes stretch out for hours, days, weeks, months and that linger like markers in our memories.  I am in one of those moments.  And I stare at the blank page and wait and watch for the words to reveal themselves to me. 

And.  I am happy.  It is the mood that I am most familiar with these days.

 

Posted in then and now

expanse

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(polaroid spectra / polaroid image softtone)

 i often wonder if i am so attracted to photography because of the ways it brings out the expansiveness of words that line the landscape of my bones, filling in the ridges with their floundering curvatures.  if you were sitting across from me, watching me fumble, words jutting and thrashing about in a clumsy attempt at communication, you would wonder how i ever manage to let them free on the page.  i bite my lip and purse my lips and look up and to the right and back down with furrowed brow.  and then i cross my eyes and say something funny and somewhat self-deprecating and the poetry stays contained, clinging to the familiar crook of my arm.

but then.  in a moment.  in a sigh.  in a release.  i see it all in the curve of the sky, the lonely layer of a story sitting in the distance and emotions flood through me and wash waves against those crackling bones.  and the words flood out of my fingertips in such a rush that i wonder how long they have been holding tight, buried beneath my skin.  waiting for their release.

this spring/summer i want to let my emotions follow the images, printed off and strung out across my writing room walls.  they will whisper in my ears, the stories.  the words.  the picture painted with the sweep of straight black line curves across a blank white screen.  and i will lose myself in the worlds that whisper at me in the night.

Posted in consuming art

the scent of remembering

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every spring, there is the remembering. 

the body remembers
wakes up
bleeds out
soaks the earth with
the lingering scent of the dead.

the mass of leaves
once let to melt
from the frozen sleep of winter
reek of decay
wet moist early
decay
waiting
for the fresh scent
of new life.

and the earth cycles.  and holds up a mirror to my memory.  and i can smell her, the scent of hospital turned sheets.  death has a scent and the body about to drop down into the last breath takes on that scent and it overwhelms all other scents. 

it is the scent of leaves defrosting, still wet.  pungent before the crackle dryness returns like dust to the earth.  and i can smell them.  still rooted in the scent of my spring body that holds death and life together.   i wonder if i will some year die in april also.  and if those that i love will recognize the scent before i leave and if they will fling open their windows every year and watch the last of the snow melt and they will breathe in the scent of death rising up from the earth.

and i sit here, bleeding out the smell of dead babies. and i twirl my braided up hair still wet from the shower and i remembering the dampness of her hair against white sheets, her braid tucked away in a box for safe keeping. and i wait for may and the sweet scent of lilacs, lily of the valley, pink plum cherry blossoms and the fluttering of white. the promise of fruit and sweet life.

Posted in grief

not like the other

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one of these things is not like the other,

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one is a photo of the ocean waves and one is a photo of the lake of my growth.  one is evening’s fall and one is midday relax.  they are the same but different and hold different secrets and different notations on my heart but bring me back to the same place inside of me.

and as spring smiles.  i find myself longing a dusty open road.  a body of water.  a large rock of mountain.  the windsong of the prairies.  i want to wander in the trees and listen to the earth and dig in the dirt and hold the womb of the mother in my scarred and paper dry hands, childlike in their ragged nails and ancient in their holding of death, life and all the messes in between.  i want to sit and watch the waves catch themselves in an endless splash towards a shoreline that is littered with the rocky weeds and tiny shards of glass like sand.  i want to remember where i came from, who i am so that i can remember where i am going. 

and i bite into a soft juicy orange that traveled too many miles to find its way to my hands.  and i long to sit by his side, my little fingers reaching into the ice cream pail filled with juicy blueberries picked by the worn bulk of his knowing that he will tease me about it even as he breathes his last breath.  worn and old heading off to find his little woman long since gone from this earth.

and i find myself crying.  for no reason at all.  and for all the best reasons that exist in this world.

Posted in grief, hope

wild child

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what can i say.  i’ve been the darkness and the wild and have run headlong into uncertainty and laid myself bare more times than i can even remember.  and then.  i made the choice towards the stable and here i am sitting in the light of that and wondering why i still crave the dark.

i have been told i am brave and i think really?! and then i remember that i am but that this, this doesn’t make me brave.  i have conquered fear and faced it like a gun aimed at my head and wondered why the tears only come later in the memory of all that living.

i want to marry the light and the dark, stitch it all together in a crooked lined smile, a tooth shattered from the gnawing.  and i remember walking the streets and looking in at brightly coloured walls through windows flung open with laughter and imagined how perfect i would feel if only i had that.  that.  even as i cursed and swore up and down about the evils of consumerism and the trap of fitting into a cubicle box designed by someone who played with rats for a living.  and here i sit.  wondering.  if this is really it.  the happiness i was looking for and i know that it isn’t even as it is.  it is the yes and the no.  roots pulled down so deep that i can feel the blood binding me to the earth even as i snip it all in a breath and fly to the sky burning my skin on the sun.

my mother used to say that i walked too close to the edge of things and that i needed to learn balance.  i have learned it so well that i find myself stuck squarely in the middle and i was never a middle sort of girl.  and so now i sidestep over two ties of the track and remember that my grandfather was made strong by the sweat of his arms pounding over and over again, the steel track that goes on forever to somewhere else.

and i look hopeful down that dirt road and i pull a black garbage bag behind me and the dust rises up like gold glitter in the sunlight.

Posted in scraps of paper

heart

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for as much as there is pain and loss and anger there is heart enough to encompass it all. 

i want to come from a place of love. always.  but i don’t always succeed and sometimes it feels like i come from a place of anger and fear and stomp the earth with my pain fist in the air, eyes blackened ready for the fight of a sullen middle aged woman who still feels like an angry child.  and sometimes, it is all so easy and smiles light up faces and the simple light washed over already yellowed with age walls and i love every single person in the world, every single buzzing insect and all the spaces of molecules that drift around until the monsters come out and nip at me with their talons.

it is complicated right?  this living.  it is as complicated as it is simple and somedays i can wrap my head around that and somedays it just makes me weary.  and so i come here with my run on sentences and lack of good punctuation and i scribble on the blank walls and forget to capitalize wOrDs drifting through the wind spoke places of my mind.

and i look for my heart in the sullen sway of curves, the faithful clicking of this keyboard and images pour through my body written in the smoke drift of a thought that i cannot quiet or quite convey.

do you know that i have been watching for mice.  waiting for them to sneak into the walls and leave shit in the vents and scurry around chewing on flickering lights.  i have been watching for those little fuckers even as i hope that this year they will find somewhere else to gnaw their bones crunched beneath the sturdy traps you can buy for cheap at the hardware store.  the snow continues to melt even as i can see the beginnings of dandelions making their way up through the strawlike grass outside my window and i notice that the window frames need a lick of paint and maybe this will be the year that we find enough pennies to have new doors put in, doors that won’t rattle and gasp open letting in the furry night of death. 

and i am just writing.  rambling.  shaking my bones. waiting for something to illuminate the spaces left untouched by sunlight.  this is a draft destined for nothing more than the taking up of space.

and somedays.  that is enough.

Posted in scraps of paper

welcoming spring

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(polaroid spectra / impossible pz 600 silver shade film)

Every spring I am made poignantly aware that Spring in my part of the world is very different from what I see when I visit my friends’ instagram feeds, facebook photos and blogs.  Very different.  And for the longest time, it really bothered me, like somehow got under my skin and itched me from below bothered me.  After a fairly mild winter for these parts and an early spring (not withstanding the storm warning about to hit us with up to 25 cm (about 10 inches) of a last gasp of winter, spring snow storm), I was determined to figure out what the heck was bothering me anyway (notwithstanding the curse of april’s death anniversaries that keep my emotions pretty close to the surface of said skin).

On Saturday, the sun was shining and the snow had pretty much melted (though it would snow again the next day rendering that point moot) and I noticed the way the sun turned all the brown to a golden glow and I had this image of me in a playground field boots squishing through the soggy bits until the dry strawlike grass was found.  I loved pulling it up and forming tiny little nests out of it and i would leave them scattered about dreaming that the robin’s would lay speckled eggs in them.  I was always pretty much a romantic at heart.  On Saturday, tears filled my eyes and I blessed the snow melt, the longer blaze of the sun that turned my world golden and all that brown grass carrying tiny seeds of green waiting for their right time to crack open.  I looked at the bare branches of the trees and the knew that in their own time they would sprout tiny buds of spring green and the lilacs would eventually burst free and the double blossoming plum tree that we planted for the twins would have their day to blow pink into the air.  In its own time.

In its own time. 

I breathe in deeply and remember that seasons all over the world have their own agenda, their own distinct timelines based on their situation to the equator, the weather fluctuations, the surrounding elements.  This is where I have always lived and I was always charmed by spring before I realized how different it was from somewhere else.  I am ready to be charmed again.  In fact, I would say that I am already downright charmed by it all (even that pesky spring snowstorm that will sweep through and melt in no time at all).

And so I packed up exactly one camera and hopped in my car and headed out to explore somewhere I had never been.  I headed out to an industrial section of the city, a maze of roadways and wreckers and powerlines and construction.  It felt strangely comforting to wander on new ground and to notice that in amongst all the industry and the rubble, there are vast fields of golden brown and a big sky that goes on forever. 

And I made a nest under the watchful eye of a couple of truckers and I planted some seedling dreams out there in an empty field of field mice and scurrying beetles and the vibration of dust blowing activity. 

I am giddy with the warming air of spring and I think it will be pretty easy to hold gratitude in my heart for the unique beauty that is spring in my world.

Posted in gratitude