What I'm about to tell you is the type of interaction that happens all the time on Salt Spring. Or, perhaps I should just speak for myself. Although, from anecdotes, I know this type of serendipitous interaction occurs regularly.
My day began with a drive to the South End. I passed Drummond Park, and took the right hand fork up Musgrave on my way to
Sacred Mountain Lavender because I wanted to get a glimpse of the sumptuous
purple in bloom, blooming, about to bloom. English. Spanish. French buds
tinted the green landscape mauve. My visit was not going to coincide with the annual Sacred Mountain Lavender Festival which will take place this Sunday, July 14th. I was one week early.
After my wander around the lavender fields, I went into the
small store on the property. Lavender coffee, tea, pepper, lavender wands, spritzers,
white cotton night gowns embroidered with lavender, massage oil, salves, bunches of the purple buds. A quick trip to lavender heaven.
I spoke with a woman working there. Her name was Diana. She asked me where I was from which launched me into the story of
my former residency on island. She asked me why I'd left. “Didn't think I could handle another winter. Couldn't make enough money. Wanted to be closer
to my 92 year old father." I told her he'd died a month after I returned to the city in November 2011.
She asked me what I did. I said I was a writer, about to
start a new writing job but when it came to writing, what was really consuming me, was the completion of the first
draft of a non-fiction manuscript I'd been working on. I told her that I was having trouble pulling my thoughts
together to create an ending that would deposit readers to a more insightful
place about Salt Spring, about themselves, about mid-life journeys and jumping
off points. I'm not sure why I felt I could tell her this.
“I think you need to incorporate your father into that
ending.”
I was silent. My father? Why was she saying that?
“I feel somehow that your father has something to do with
helping you find that ending,” she said.
I barely mentioned my father. Why was she saying this?
I said that I didn't see how that could be and I didn't
really want to write about my father but I would think about it.
I told her that Ruckle Provincial Park was my touchstone, the
place I had camped at when I first came to the island in the late 1980's, a
place that had not changed in the 20 or so years
since I’d been coming to visit. I told her I was writing about Ruckle trying to explain how a physical place can become as important as the relationship we have with another person. It takes on the persona of an individual and our relationship with them.
She
told me her touchstone was Mount Douglas in Victoria and all the Garry Oak
there. "I go back there and I’m nine
again," she said. We decided that everyone probably has a geographical place that is, for them, that kind of place and if they don't, they should.
After having left, I notice that when I return to the island, I always feel a little
fragile. It’s hard to explain. As a
visitor, I don't belong. I feel wistful and regrets arise about not having made it work better - financially - so that I could have stayed, knowing that it's a place that holds such a significant place in my life, yet knowing that I have a lot of company in both regards and knowing, as well, that I wasn't meant to stay any longer or I would have.
She told me that her sister was a writer and on their father’s 80th
birthday, they had given him a list of everything about him that mattered to them as his children. He loved it, she said. He loved being written about.
She seemed so convinced that my father has something to do
with the ending of the manuscript and as she said this and we talked a bit more, we both began to have a wavering in our voices as we spoke and our eyes became glassy and she admitted that
just thinking about it was making her cry and I told her to stop because she
was about to make me cry. We shared a moment of being disarmed by each
other’s openness and we hastened to hold
back, to stop what might come, but there was a raw feeling there; a chord struck. Emotion as intuitive messenger.
Now, having lived on the island, I know to pay attention when these
types of interactions occur. I know they are not a coincidence. I know this
because it was a similar type of recognition that helped me move here in the first place. These types of interactions are a gift, a message from the other side or from
the future that’s being formulated for us.
So, I will consider Diana's suggestion seriously, not because I'm convinced that it is the right one. It may not be. But, I will consider it because when we spoke, emotion rose quickly,
connected us, brought our humanity to the forefront and that’s the kind of
emotion that makes a story worth telling; the kind of story we can all learn
something from.
And besides, purple is the colour of the crown chakra. It's the colour of peace, and wisdom, of the quest for fulfillment and personal identification with the infinite and that's good enough for me.