Love and Hate and Geography

I left Salt Spring a little more than a year ago. I packed up my stuff and left behind the panic that was rising inside me as another winter of being in a 450 sq. ft. cabin, alone, as the rain dropped ceaselessly, and the quiet closed in even more densely than the grey-white fog, descended.

I appreciated all that I'd learned from negotiating being on my own. But then again, I was always pretty good at that, I thought, until I reached the limit on Salt Spring, last year, at the end of October. I couldn't wait to get off the island. It wouldn't have mattered one bit to me if someone had screamed, "Don't let the ferry guardrail bump your bum on the way off" when I left more than ready.

If you live on an island, you probably have your own experience of how a confined geography can shape psychological space as well.

So, now, a little more than a year later, as I think about a friend who feels the same way and can't wait to leave an island that is her home, I can't help but think about how that's the way life is: cyclical. What attracts, repels, sometimes creeping up on us by surprise. And, when it strikes, somehow we're both surprised and have been expecting it.  If we listen to our feelings, regardless of how ugly they may be, we will eventually find our way back to what attracted us if we were truly in love in the first place.

I'm about to visit Salt Spring for a week-long visit next week, and now, I can't wait to return for a short visit.

I will visit Ruckle Park to make sure that I get the feelings right about that place as I'm about to write about it. That park is the reason I fell in love with the island so many years ago. I fell in love with the forest, the beach, the owls in the trees, the ewes and the turkeys, the light that bathes everything golden on an August morning, the auburn tree bark, the Ruckle Barn and heritage houses and the stillness of a full moon glimmering across the blue-black waves.

And, when I say that I think, well, isn't life just like that. The things we love, we can sometimes no longer bear. We do love our partner, really we do, but sometimes we can't bear them even one more minute, being in their presence, watching them chew their food.

We do love our job but we are sick to death of having to get up every morning and have to go to it and be around people that we have to because that's why they call it work, it comes with confines.

We do love our kids but sometimes, there's no way around it, they are a pain in the butt.

We do love our friends but sometimes we must keep them at arms-length for a while until the magic that first happened can, hopefully, be found again. Abracadabra.

And, when I find myself in that space, I always hear one of my favourite sayings: When the boat reaches the pier, everything will go straight.

Do you have a place that you consider your touchstone? If so, why?

C'mon Vancouver: A Zucchini shouldn't be your Best Friend

Poor Vancouver. I often find myself walking down the street, well, okay, it’s not Vancouver, it’s New Westminster. Same diff. The Lower Mainland all feels the same to me now. Cars. Malls. People in a hurry who aren’t smiling.  

Often, let’s just take a stab at it and say at least once a day, I’ll pass some poor waif who has lost his or her humanity. They've forgotten to acknowledge other human beings, even when one has passed within a shoulder’s length, even when I’m the only one on the sidewalk for blocks. Sometimes I say "Hi" to try and force them to acknowledge me but if they seem like a lost cause, like I can tell that someone or some thing snatched their soul a few years back, then I just bore my eyes into the side of their head and hope that some seed of collective consciousness might sense my animosity and awaken; come to their defense.

People can’t connect in Vancouver. SFU is hosting a forum called Alone Together: Connecting in the City.  The Vancouver Foundation has discovered through research that people are alone more than they want to be. But, c’mon people, take some responsibility. Don’t pretend it’s the “city”.  Are you saying the concrete buildings downtown are causing this state of mass anomie? What about Vancouverites taking responsibility for themselves, one isolated little lost E.T. lookalike at a time, and changing their own behaviour on a daily basis with just one stranger. I'm not saying acting like Steve Martin as Rupricht in that old movie, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels but the occasional friendly acknowledgement surely isn't asking too much is it?

Here’s a brilliant idea. Wonder if anybody has tried it? Look at one person. Look them in the face. Smile. Say Hi. Take off your personal technological isolation device a.k.a. your iPod or whatever your lonely brain cells are currently wired on and just look at someone, up a bit if you're a certain type of guy, that's right, into their eyes. Try it just once a day. Their face isn’t a camera. It won’t break.

PS: I can’t be held accountable for my hostility towards the lonely city. I just returned from the Fall Fair on Salt Spring, which during the Fall Fair weekend wouldn't know isolation if it jumped out of a hay-filled stall and layed a big fat slobbering calf's tongue on the side of its cheek.

Walking Back to the Love of a Beautiful Place

Have you ever experienced the way the light dissects leaves, noticed how a yellow daisy turns slightly green at its petal tips, or how earth shades become stronger under sunlight, strong enough to overwhelm by a bittersweet purity that feels like your past, present and future in a single glance?

Yesterday was like that. In spite of the brilliant fall sunshine,  I'm hyper aware of the proximity of the rains. They're coming. And, that means no time now to spare inside, better get outside, on day's like yesterday, this couple, caught napping in solidarity would surely agree.

So I drove to Stanley Park. First time there, since I returned to the Lower Mainland 10 months ago and that surprised me.

The route I took to get there was unusual for me.  Over the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, up the upper levels, down Capilano road hardly any traffic mid afternoon, no slowing down across the Lion's Gate Bridge which once across, a quick right hand exit deposits into lushness, stops quickly and delivers Prospect Point. A freighter slides below, glides so wide and tall, might as well be a toy boat taking up the whole bathtub; float planes trade places with ravens.

I parked the car near that pool. Is it Second or Third Beach? I should know that by now.  I set off on a walk that I've done countless times before, when I lived on the park's rim, and as I began to walk it didn't take long before I began to feel fantastic. I was smiling, really smiling, inside even, and I realized how few people really smile because I was looking at them, directly into their faces, even when they were avoiding my gaze, which was mostly. Feeling that good exaggerated the contrast of how I've been feeling lately and how hard my body has been trying to catch my attention; to communicate what's missing.

Here, I must drive for miles to find a place to wander where the trees and the grass and the flowers feel like company. Too much inside, alone, just me and my computer screen, without daily wandering in beauty, observing how the shadows dance across a tree trunk, the wind tickles the surface of the ocean or how waves bursts throwing up silent explosions of beaded gauntlets. No stopping to pick up a shell or a black rock on a beach, and really examining them before gently placing them back down again or absentmindedly tossing it, contented.

You and I are not the only living things capable of changing each other. Natural surroundings can do that as deeply; and the loss of that affects the heart every bit as much as any other lost love now gone.

That's some of what I was thinking yesterday as I walked.