(canon 5d mark ii / sunshine coast, british columbia)

i left my words hiding underneath the moss covered green of the home of my heart.  and now i am relaxed into my self so fully that i would be giddy if it didn’t take up so much energy.  i had a lot of words to use up and i left them in the wet rain dripped air of soft ears and kind eyes and even my journal mocks me from my bag, begging me to open up a crisp fresh page and string lines across blue ink waste.  but those words are playing out somewhere on the sunshine coast, stolen by those pesky fairies who slide up and down seuss like trees on a rain forest path that leads somewhere over crook and craigy dale.

and so i find myself quiet.  even more quieter than usual.  i am watching the fog sink deep over the heart of the city, the river rushing down a swath of melt hugged on either side by thick crusty ice topped with vanilla snow.

and i want to remind myself that doing nothing is in fact the very thing that i need sometimes.  doing nothing is actually a healing balm for my soul.  and the soil will unfreeze and the snow will melt in its own time and green will pour out of the quiet fertile wait.  and words will spring from my fingertips and find themselves on a blank page.  eventually.

(polaroid spectra / polaroid image softtone film)

on saturday, it snowed. and it snowed.  and it snowed some more.  we got more snow in one weekend than we have had all winter.  of course, this happens mere weeks before i am due to hit the highway for a good 13 hour drive through rocky mountains and hills and valleys and more mountains.  in a fit of insecurity, i looked up the price of plane tickets and hyperventilated as i tried to convince myself that it would be five hundred dollars well spent.

and then i watched the way the snow softened the sun and i pulled out my big bowl of yarn and knitting and crochet needles and fell into a rhythm that can only be defined as grace. 

five hundred dollars can better be spent elsewhere and i have done this particular drive many times, in the dead of winter even.  and i reminded myself that i have driven through blizzards in january and in march and yes even that one time in july deep in the rockies for a harrowing 5 hours of slow crawl between jasper and banff with a 4 year old in the back seat.  and i am made of sturdy stuff even as i grow older and my eyesight grows weaker and i have gotten mighty used to letting my big strong husband handle the highways.

and i chopped vegetables and boiled quinoa and sliced an avocado and peeled big thick kale leaves off their bark like stems and the light joined me in a song that can only be defined as grace.

i am faced, daily, with a series of choices just as i have always been.  i move one way, fall down and skin my knee and adjust my course.  i grow cocky until i bruise myself on the fall down and then i have a good cry and begin again with a bit of humble pie strapped to my back.  i have been reading about a lot of fatal car accidents in the news lately and i start wondering if that is a sign to slow down and then i realize that i slowed down a long time ago when my belly was full of him.  and then i gave birth to death and i stopped trusting that my body was a safe haven for even myself.  but i am stronger than i look and more practical than i seem in between the lines of my life.  a fresh oil change and my snow tires and a trunk full of snow pants and quilts along with some sweetgrass for a ceremony by the ocean as i smell the green that won’t arrive here until sometime in april if we are lucky. 

i will fold my stones in between the spaces of light and i will plug in my music and i will not need to search for grace in the tired drive of a highway because i know that the light will converge over the yellow lines of my thoughts in a way that can only be defined as grace.

(polaroid spectra / impossible pz 600 silver shade film)

as i slow down more and more,

sinking into the cycles and rhythms of the earth, of the bones and blood and bits of dust that come together and create me, i find myself,
again and again, more often than not
whole.

little griefs as a good day ends, little joys of celebrations as i wander through and find myself whole at the end of a particularly hard day. slowing down has made my days longer, stretched out, one life time after another even as they all somehow flow together, waves of the ocean, flowing from the source.

as the weeks go by, i find there is less and less that i need from the world and i find that i spend less money, i seek less validation finding it instead in the hollowed out spaces of my self and the ache, the deep ache that i can’t define feels more like a companion on a journey that is starting to make sense in quiet conversations with friends, words passed back and forth in an offering of love, and the beautiful scratchy sound my pen makes as it flows over the lines of my journal.

as i slow down more and more,
there is an ease that feels deep and ancient
an ease of knowing
that slowly, in my own ways, i am living the life that i choose.

peace.

(polaroid spectra / softtone edgecut expired film)

the darkness has always held a constant in my life even as i sugar coated her ways with bright pink sunshine layers of orange melted thick and candy coated sweet across my body.  when the darkness is so strong that all i have to fight her with is the too bright colours of the rainbow.  and so i lived this way for years, ruffles and socks bright hiding the pain that swathed me like a pindrop in a too quiet room.

2010 was the year that held me in a grip of fear, one foot in front of the other as my world shattered in every direction.  last year around this time, i woke up  to who i had become while asleep in my grief and i entered 2011 craving the simplicity of my life, my life viewed by me and i succeeded.  i released so much this year that when i look back, i am astounded.  i held onto my guide, my intention for the year and i let integrity guide my actions, i aligned the person i was inside with the person that i am on the outside.  it is an ongoing struggle and i don’t always succeed but i do more often than not.  2011 was a really really good year. 

and so I flex my fingers and look in the mirror and see a woman that i like, a woman that i want to get to know more.  i see where the pain has brushed across my eyes and i see light and shadow embraced as one.  the darkness.  i have made peace with her yet again.  i embrace the ways she holds me and reminds that the dark is also a place of comfort and ease that prepares me for the energy that comes with the light.  the more i shed, the more i release, the more i find myself enjoying the simple lines of muted tones and when i look around my home, i see myself again in the bright walls adorned with artwork, dark complex subjects replacing the cute and pretty filling my line of sight with beauty and freedom of spirit.  i notice that i reach for books that are a well of depth instead of the ones that are filled with light laughter and i notice that there are more calm moments where i breathe in the sheer bliss of being alive.  my dreams pulsate and my intentions are filled with the rich energy that comes from loving my life and longing for more.  i can see my breathe hover in the dark light of myself and i feel the power of it radiate through me like a fire that has burned and left behind the new buds of growth. 

i am learning to navigate through my eyes, my heart, the power of my experiences, taking what i need and discarding what i don’t.  i am learning to trust that all the answers to my life are inside of me.  i am becoming all knowing when it comes to what i need, what i desire and what i want to do with the time that i have before me. 

tonight i celebrate the darkness and the slow return of the light.  7 hours and 27 minutes of sunlight today which means 17 hours and 33 minutes of darkness. and i am embracing the dark, embracing the fire, embracing the curl of a candle flame and the flicker of a thought that i can’t contain and a heart that spills light out of dark eyes

and a poem that i love, that speaks to my heart and though it is not mine, it also speaks from my heart in that way that the best poetry does,

“Winter Solstice

Thinking only makes the heart sore. – I Ching

when you startle awake in the dark morning
… heart pounding breathing fast
sitting bolt upright staring into
dark whirlpool black hole
feeling its suction
get out of bed
knock at the door of your nearest friend
ask to lie down beside ask to be held
listen while whispered words
turn the hole into deep night sky
stars close together
winter moon rising over white fields
nearby a wren rustling dry leaves
distant owl echoing
two people walking up the road laughing
let your soul laugh
let your heart sigh out
that long held breath so hollow in your stomach
so swollen in your throat
already light is returning pairs of wings
lift softly off your eyelids one by one
each feathered edge clearer between you
and the pearl veil of day
you have nothing to do but live

by Jody Aliesan
Grief Sweat, Broken Moon Press 1991″

(polaroid spectra / polaroid softtone edgecut film)

There is a space where time stands still and afterwards you run to catch up to yourself or perhaps you find yourself sitting in the still until the world rushes madly in and then you spin in a circle looking for the tear in space. and even though you know you are going to be okay, the possibility of something dark crawls along the lining of your stomach reminding you that you are human. and the dust swirls up and a magpie drops in front of you swinging her blue tail cutting through the dust before she looks back at you with a coyness you can’t yet interpret. Or something like that.

she sways beneath the sun burn smile of a summer cold

and wanders in her mind until the questions become muddled and the answers are lost

and realizes it doesn’t matter

at all.

so she sways some more and clears her mind of everything except the bee buzz balm of a bird song tree sway.

(polaroid spectra / softtone edge cut film)

I feel like I have fallen behind on everything except living and perhaps that is how it should be.  I am tired of sharing. I am tired of being misunderstood. I am tired of being understood.  Mostly, I am just bone weary tired.

I took this photo a week ago.  I was still in shock because wildfires had ravaged my home town of Slave Lake, Alberta, the town where generations of my family were born and raised and the town that my parents have since been evacuated from.  I could tell you what it feels like to watch news reports, to see photos that look like they are from a war zone, to not know if your childhood home is still standing, to watch your parents move through the motions of being displaced alongside the feelings that you can never really go home because as soon as you leave, it is changed forever.  I could tell you what it feels like to move through a week and have it feel like a month.

We don’t really know when residents will be able to go home but we do know that my parents house is still standing and that is a relief for them, for us.  It could be weeks but it will more likely be months.  Humans are mostly resiliant and this I know.  The town will rebuild and life will go on and the hardest is the stuff in the middle, the waiting.  That part is always the hardest.

Life can change in an instant.  In an instant.  Blink.

My mother was born in Joplin, Missouri and a week after she was evacuated from Slave Lake, we watched in horror at the devastation that happened there with tornado instead of wildfires.  I don’t even know how to wrap my head around the strangeness of this life.  What I do know is that I am going to continue paying attention to what is right in front of me even when I feel like I am lost in the middle of what has come before and what has yet to happen.