Gratitude
I am grateful for family, the light that casts beauty across shadows, music that lifts emotions, a little house and garden filled with colour and love, friends and inspirations, the beauty of nature, the ocean’s cold spray, the soft barnacle skin of the grey whale and the possibilities that exist in life.
Category Archives: travel and stories
santa ines mission, california
The Santa Ines Mission was stunning and I dubbed her ‘formal’ as thus far it was the most formal mission I had visited.
(polaroid sx-70 / tz artistic film)
Gosh, it seems like a lifetime ago now since I was in California back in March but I really want to get up all the photos I took from that trip. I am having a little staycation this week and one of the things I would like to accomplish is to document my California trip.
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I have taken down all my archives for public consumption for the moment while I sort out in my head what exactly I am doing with this blog. I have been feeling weighed down by it for some time now but I have almost a decade’s worth of posts, photographs, poetry, lists, thoughts and memories amassed here and it has become a sort of digital album for me so I don’t know that I want to annhilate it. I also don’t know if I want a record of my life out there in the public sphere because it feels weird to me suddenly. The shifts that have been happening this year, 2011 have been huge and I need to sort it out in the immediate real of my life so in the mean time I am trying this little experiment for myself. Every time I post a new blogpost, I am archiving the old one so that I only ever have one post up at a time. I am giving myself until September 30 to see how this works for me in this space in time. I suppose I am feeling out whether I want to even continue blogging, to continue even having a presence online. I don’t have any answers right now, am just exploring.
love and peace.
this post will self-destruct in hours, days or weeks. i have no idea.
Feb 29, 2012 update. i have sorted it all out for now and in the process have moved everything to wordpress and am slowly incorporating all the blog incarnations i have had since 2003. i have realized that my blog doesn’t define me which is nice and that living more and more in the world is also nice. i have also realized that i like the idea of having it all together in one place, this space that changes and grows and is an archive of what i have chosen to share over the years and consequently, i reminder of how i have traveled.
sisters
(polaroid colorpack iii / polaroid 664 film / kristen)
there are those moments
that we can’t escape from in life, those moments
where we hover in that place, where we wait and we do what we can
knowing there is really nothing we can do
even as we crack and lose ourselves in the pain of it all.
i spent 4 months watching my sister die, holding a space inside of myself that was sometimes like a cold wind blowing in the open spaces and was sometimes like a brick wall of knuckle scraped comfort that no one could penetrate. sometimes i laughed until my sides hurt and sometimes i cried until the salt swollen skin felt unnatural and burned into the broken spaces. i ate badly and my skin took on a loose pallor that seemed tinged with green. i drank like a fish and i forgot i needed water. i hated my family. i loved my family. no one understood and everyone understood. it was such a space of immediate contradictions filled with more pain and more love than i thought i had the capacity to hold inside of me. i was numb even as the slightest breeze caused me to slink from the needle like pain of my emotions.
what can i say. death sucks.
no matter how many times i watch someone i love die, i never get used to it and i never understand it. i remember people looking to me to guide them through what i needed but what the hell does anyone really need when they are the ones living, when they are the ones in the middle of it, bearing witness to it all. i didn’t know what i needed and there wasn’t really anything anyone could do for me but i remember hating being alone and even when people were irritating me, i liked that better than the dark spaces of empty.
during the long months of watching my sister weaken, watching my family collapse, tubes and blood and sunken flesh, i had a lover who sat beside me as i watched every single episode of buffy the vampire slayer over and over and over again. it didn’t prevent my sister from dying and it didn’t take away the pain but sometimes a distraction is like a warm blanket.
i am grateful that it worked out that i was able to be a bit of a distraction for a short time during my recent travels and hopefully somewhat of a warm blanket. i know there is nothing i can really do but give my love to a friend who is living in those filled and hollow spaces of love and pain.
Also posted in health and wellness, love and friendship, then and now
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snapshots from the road
Also posted in film is not dead, love and friendship
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dreams
Recently I was posed the question. You know the question or a variation of the question. Tell my about your dreams for yourself. What would you do if you weren’t held back by money, by time, by fear. What would you do if you didn’t have to balance work, motherhood and all the spaces in between. Tell me, whisper in my ear … what are your wildest dreams and goals?
At the time, THE question sort of sent me down a road in my head that wound around in circles and back again. I am embarrassed to say that I came up empty. Completely empty.
I had this idea that so many of my big dreams have come true in the past but a) they came with a huge unexpected price; or b) they followed a great loss; or c) they were not at all what i wanted once they were realized. It sort of made me wonder about everything. And perhaps it wasn’t about dreaming anymore but about just finding the beauty in exactly where I am, in the groundedness of what is around me.
But still I grappled because since I was wee tiny, I have always thundered with dreams, beating out at my chest. I wanted so much that I could feel the energy crackling outwards. My dreams were my escape from a life I didn’t want. My dreams were what have carried me to this life which is so different than the life path that had been laid out before me. I think I found myself in an awkward place of … not knowing.
Not knowing.
That was exactly the place I was in when I received an email from Meghan which included an invitation to a retreat with a group of women that were strangers to me. She was inspired by a group of creative lovely women who call themselves the lovebombers. I was in a place of pulling back from the internet, commitments, dreams and yes even friends because I was intent on doing the hard work that I had been running from, the work that included being fully present in the now, in my life, in pulling the focus towards what was in front of me. I was leaning fully into practicing integrity and sorting out what was important to me and my life. So no one was more surprised than myself that I immediately responded back with a YES! And when I say immediately, I am not even exaggerating. I think I mulled it over for an hour or so but the pull of my heart was so strong that even writing this now sparks tears behind my eyes.
Intuition? Longing? An unnamed dream? I don’t really know. What I do know is that within hours of being in the presence of these women, it felt like I had known them forever in that deep trusting heart filled way.
(photo by meghan)
I am in the process of putting together a little photoshow which I will share in the coming days because I feel like the photos convey it all so much better than I can in these early days of being back home. But I will say that I felt understood and witnessed and I felt comfortable and awed and filled with so much expansive emotion and understanding. In this moment. Grateful.
(photo by celina)
Last night in the drowsy state of the moon’s descention, I had a realization. My dreams have always been fueled by the need to escape. They have been beautiful dreams that were planted and rooted in the soil created by fear. I am in transition made stronger by all those dreams realized. I am stronger and more powerful because of them. Laying in a soft bed with the open windowed breeze of the pounding surf pouring through my body, I found the sliver of a dream growing upwards through the open air planted in the expansive nature of my joy. I can grow my dreams both new and ancient forgotten sighs but they don’t need to be planted in that same stale soil. As I have pushed the dirt and into the sunshine so too have my dreams and now they are free to not only grow upwards but also through the expansive air of the world.
(group photo by rebecca)
Thank you to the women of the Tribe: Sophia, Melissa, Emily, Rebecca, Sarah, Elizabeth, Celina and Meghan. I am already looking forward to next year when Lindsey and Stefanie will join us on the wide open expansiveness of white sand truth and big sky heart.
Also posted in love and friendship
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manzanita
How can I describe the indescribable?
Over the past two weeks, my heart has been healed. My tears have swollen into laughter and I have begun to sense the power of the changes I have been going through this past year.
time is swollen and thick meandering tides
and fills me up with space
to swim in this year.
Also posted in notes to self
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la purisima mission
The La Purisima Mission immediately spoke to me, even before I really walked through it. It was Pastoral. Beautifully pastoral. The herb garden captured my imagination and the wind in the willows spoke secrets to my soul as a tiny lizard danced at my feet.
It was also here that a lesson was reinforced as I was reminded that first impressions can be misleading and it is always worth digging deep inside to see all the richness that waits to be discovered. And so, it was in La Purisima that I started shooting my one polaroid after I had completely explored and thus began my tradition of shooting off a polaroid from the back of the mission instead of the front.
(polaroid sx-70 / tz artistic film)
*thanks to the lovely kristen for letting me tag along for her inspired project to shoot all the california missions.
San Luis Obispo
The word that most summed up the San Luis Obispo Mission for me was Religious. Of all the missions I visited, overall, it had the most religious overtones. It was also situated right in the heart of the city and was really quite lovely.
I have searched through all my polaroids looking for the San Luis Obispo and it seems to have been misplaced. Perhaps I will find it eventually tucked in between the pages of my notebook, buried deep in the pages washed out in chemicals with bits of words scraped together and lost in indentation. But in this moment, it is gone.
Perhaps I didn’t take one. My mind is foggy on this point because I was sure that I had taken one. I did, however, take a polaroid in the city of San Obispo just a couple of blocks from the Mission and I am a bit in love with it and I really love that the theatre was playing The Big Lebowski, one of my favourite films of all time. Perhaps, this was the photo I choose to take rather than use a polaroid at the Mission … I can no longer remember my thoughts around this but I think it was a good choice nonetheless.
(polaroid sx-70 / tz artistic film)
And, of course, a little video because I did little moving picture videos at all the missions we visited.
*thanks to the lovely kristen for letting me tag along for her inspired project to shoot all the california missions.
Mission San Antonio De Padua
(polaroid sx-70 / tz artistic film)
Like I said on my last post, I was completely on board for her mission project.
But when we came to the gates of the military base training facility, I have to admit that I was suddenly a bit freaked out. There was a big sign that stated that they could search you if you entered through the gate and it was so in the middle of nowhere, so quiet and still that all I could think of was the x-files and alien invasions and hey man, look at this hippy girl from canada, she must be packing dope and I would be anal probed and who the hell wants to be anal probed. I broke out into a sweat and reached for my passport. Okay, clearly I watch far too much sci fi and I needed to get a grip on reality. In hindsight, I am sure that they were listening to us because they can do that sort of thing can’t they? Whoever they are … I am sure they were laughing their asses off at me. I know I would have been.
But then we came upon the mission. And suddenly the silence felt incredible. Powerful. Beautiful.
Sacred. It felt sacred to me immediately and that was the name I carefully wrote in my notebook to describe this mission. I ended up writing descripter names for all the missions we visited.
We arrived late in the day, as the mission was closing so we didn’t actually get to spend a lot of time there but I was immediately drawn to sit down on the platform and I asked Kristen to please take a photo of me because intuitively I was drawn to having something tangible to remind me of the way this place made me feel. Almost as soon as I sat down, this beautiful black cat ran seemingly out of nowwhere and gazed at me. We stared at each other for what seemed like forever as I lost myself in the beauty of her yellow green eyes. They were so big and wide and I was drowning in the best possible way. There was a hush and then Kristen brought me over my camera and this beautiful creature crawled up onto me and bared some pretty serious looking claws as she tippy tappied her paws into my stomach, gently but firmly and then curled up and purred away.
Kristen went off shooting and there I stayed happily pinned down. She returned and was surprised to find the cat still there and made a comment about the poor one-eyed cat. I laughed and said, no she has the most beautiful eyes and there are two of them so Kristen crouched down on one side of me to see and Rosario turned her head to the other side so Kristen walked around me and again Rosario turned her head away from her. It was the strangest thing. Even stranger was the fact when the lovely lady from the mission came out, Rosario immediately jumped off my lap and disappeared. That is when we learned that the beautiful black cat was named Rosario and that the mission had two cats.
I believe in magic. And I believe that Rosario gave me a gift that day, she visited me for a reason. Black cats are associated with witches, intuitive dreams and magick. In general,”the cat lives totally in the moment with a deep sychic and spiritual awareness. As the cat’s energy field flows opposite that of humans, it has the healing ability to neutralize your negative energies. The healing energy cannot be taken from the cat, it is only given as a gift. The cat teaches that the physical and spiritual worlds are not separate, but one” (from spiritwalkministry). I think I needed to meet Rosario so I could fully be open to what I was experiencing on this journey, my first journey to California and to myself.
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