Finding your archetypal person and/or place

Sunday excursion: Rathtrevor Beach. Qualicum Beach. Cedar, and the Crow N Gate Pub.

This collage (above) is not Salt Spring Island. It's Qualicum Beach. On Sunday at 4pm, it's much like "downtown" Ganges by 8 pm. Deadsville except for the line up in front of Mr. Freezie ice cream which Gwen and I contributed to by imitating the crowd. The emptiness didn't make a lot of sense since just a few streets back the entire town is exploding with suburbia in the form of cookie cutter housing a.k.a my idea of hell.

We did however come across this really nice garden/home decor shop called Smithfords that had beautiful art and funky carved cats including a catfish or a cat with a fish tail that was swimming after a mouse.

I wonder what it is that makes us feel that a particular place feels like home. We could live there. And, then, others, leave us cold and it's different, thankfully, for just about everyone.  Is it some dream we hold inside from childhood and the place either matches our dream or not? Is that what happens in choice of partners as well? Do they simply match some archetype we carry around? What about those of us whose archetype seems broken when it comes to finding a partner, not because there aren't people out there but because we have always been so disappointed by those who we initially thought were the archetype?

Saying that makes me realize how, that is in fact, the test. Can we get past the archetype we carry around and just be open to what comes our way instead of measuring everything against some internal fantasy that long ago has proven to be unattainable? How I digress? 

After the ghost town that was Qualicum we stopped in at Little Qualicum Cheeseworks which is a really cute place. It's a working farm with a few old red tractors. You can watch them milking the cows and pet the goats and rabbits and see the baby pigs. There's a cheese farm and the Mooberry (fruit wine) winery is attached as part of the little country store. Fruit wine isn't my favorite thing but I bought Apple, Gwen bought Raspberry and they were quite tasty in a summer-only kind of way.

We headed from there in search of the Crow and Gate Pub which Gwen wanted to introduce me to. That took a lot of convoluted twists and turns. If you can find Cedar, B.C. outside Nanaimo then you can eventually find the pub which is the oldest neighborhood pub in the province. At least I think that's what it said.

When you think of a place in the province, in Canada, in some other part of the world that just really fits you - the dream you have about where you best see yourself living - where do you think that place is for you and why is that?

Worth a Thousand Words

Let's pretend this photo is a New Yorker cartoon. It requires a caption. No ands, ifs or ....well, maybe a but and a butt.  I know you're out there. Comments can be anonymous ya know? Don't be so shy!

Transitions: A smoother consistency of yellow

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?