Look at the bottom of this canoe. Sometimes it got too close to the rocks just under the water. Sometimes it got dragged up on the beach too roughly. It was green. Then white. For a while it was a bright Indian red, the name of a type of red in watercolour paint. It has been places. On journeys. Probably just short journeys but who knows. We can tell it has been around for a while. I saw it on the beach at Southey Point and the collage of colours and scraping reminded me first of what Michela Sorrentino had said about her paintings when I was interviewing her and then about how an observer would never know the places that this canoe had been from looking at it. All we can do is surmise.
It's a bit like meeting people as they grow older. Layer upon layer. Incidents. Emotion. Sadness. Memories. Layer upon layer as if every year and each new meeting introduces a stranger to ourselves.
The other night I was talking to a friend. She said, "I think I"m in a transition. I don't know what to do next." Welcome to the cusp of 50, I thought. I thought moving to Salt Spring was my transition and it was I suppose. But now I realize that the moving here was really just the easiest step. It represented wanting to create a life that was more flexible and allowed my creativity to be at the forefront. What I didn't anticipate is that there's no such thing as just one step in a transition. The first part of my transition seemed like the easiest transition I've ever made. Now, coming up to the finale of the second year I've simply stepped closer to a whole bunch of new questions and wondering what the next step is and how I"m going to push through the colours that have been created in the past two years to move to a smoother consistency of yellow?