every step that you take could be your biggest mistake...

Things cannot always stay as they are.

I hate that. I hate dealing with that. I love change, but I want change when I am ready for it. When I am eager for it. When it fits into my schedule, my plan.
But things cannot always stay as they are.

I want my friends to stay close to me. I don't want them to move away for school or spouses or careers. And I don't want to move away from their homes and gardens and mornings full of crepes and strawberries. I want them to be a 20 minute drive across town for tea.

I want to finish everyday with my hands dirty with the earth. I want to be tanned and strong and spend more time with the wind and sky and grass than with four walls and a ceiling.

I want to always be doing what I love. I never want to agree to take money in return for making myself do something I don't enjoy doing. I want to have pride in my work and know that it will benefit someone else too.

I want to live three lives. I want to drink wine in the late afternoon on my farmhouse porch in Edmonton, to walk to the Sugarbowl and sit on the High Level bridge to watch the sun go down. I want to be able to lift off and explore the world on a moment's whim, to see Germany and Borneo and Argentina . I want to dig my toes into the soil between rows of green wheat crops and listen to the gravel crunch beneath my feet as I walk down the driveway in Burdett.

I want to have enough of everything I need to sustain me. I want enough money and enough time and enough love and passion to know what to do with them and to use them well.

or the story goes...

I haven't been blogging lately. I've been working lots. But it is July now - probably my second favourite month of the year - and it deserves a post.

My mind has been running in overdrive lately. Never stopping long enough on one thought to let myself even realize what I'm processing. When I think about what I want to blog about, I can't find one cohesive thought to speak on. Instead, maybe snippets of moments from the past few weeks will suffice. I've been all over the map lately with moments of beauty and pain, and excitement and of bitter boredom and disappointment. The days have been blurring together lately, but there are a few sketches in time that stand out to me from the past weeks...

- Drinking beer with my friends until late in the evening and wandering into the fields behind my house, laying in the unbelievably soft green, young wheat and staring into the night sky.

- Stepping out of my work truck to see another park turn brown and crisp...watching the grass I take care of slowly shrivel and dry out.

- Standing in the quiet livingroom of a friend's house holding a Carol Sheilds book in my hands feeling an overwhelming compulsion to sit down and read it rather than join the voices I hear in the backyard enjoying a Canada Day bbq.

- Listening to fireworks ricochet between downtown buildings and river valley and watching the ash and smoke float between tree branches.

- Watching someone learn to back Karen's work truck and trailer into it's spot in preparation for her leaving for two weeks on Friday.

- Feeling my arms and back turning brown with heat and dirt and sweat and sun.

- Watching one of my friends learn to adjust to a new stage of life and fight against the pull to let freedom and independence become loneliness.

- Breathing in the smell of summer heat, sitting my porch, listening to Bon Iver, watching black birds against pink/blue evening sky.




from Carol Sheild's "Swann"...


"Some days Virginia Woolf is the only person in the universe I want to talk to; but she's dead, of course, and couldn't like me anyway."