I came home from work a little early tonight because I am working it alone all day tomorrow. The past few days have been crazy sunny and beautiful...today was different. The sky has been pretty cold, flat grey all day. Not that flat white grey of winter, but that flat blue-black grey where every moment feels on the verge of rain. Its stayed that way all day without a drop falling. Tonight I'm sitting at my dining room table, supper on the stove, screen door open, windows open music loud...and there's a serious breeze coming through the main floor. I rarely experience indoor wind. Its a strange idea, but as I sit here watching the pots on the stove and sipping my wine, I like the way the air is cool and humid and I my hair keeps rising and falling against my neck as the wind moves it.
For the first time last night, I noticed the tree was completely full of buds. I laid in the hammock and stared up at it and thought about how the branches look so bare and have looked so black and empty for so long. Its hard to remember the tree so full of leaves that it covers the corner of our roof and reaches way out over the fence. I honestly can't really remember it. Well, that's not true. I can remember it but in a way that is distant. The kind of way that you remember your childhood. The kind of way that you remember the light as the sun dipped down along the horizon on your favourite holiday. The kind of way that makes it impossible to imagine it could happen again. But there's the tree, just outside my window, full of buds ready to burst.
The whole idea of being a part of something that I cannot even imagine at this moment in time has been following me around lately. Yesterday I was going through quotes I love from authors I should really reread in the near future. This one is from CS Lewis:
"If we let him – for we can prevent him if we choose – he will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine."
I also happened to open up an old journal I had laying around as well and came across this verse from Habakkuk 1:5 "Look at the nation and watch- and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told."
Friday, April 17, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
you've gone a million miles, how far did ya get....
I've been through the full gamut of weather in the past 24 hours.
2:15pm Monday: I was napping on a sunny hillside in Stirling Ontario.
3:30am Tuesday: packing up and leaving Stirling in darkness to make my early flight out of Toronto
8:00am Tuesday: flying back across the country over fields of yellow and green and brown, watching spring from the air
9:05am Tuesday: a collective groan through the sold out plane when we broke through the low cloud cover to descend into a snow/sleet covered edmonton
10:21am Tuesday: making it to work just barely late with wet socks and shoes from navigating my way through a slushy alley way while being blinded by sleet coming down sideways at me
1:25pm Tuesday: sitting at work watching the snow slow down and the wind pick up, whipping around the tops of the evergreens in the river valley
3:15pm Tuesday: venture out of the shop for lunch to find it much warmer than when i arrived
4:21pm Tuesday: wind slows down while the clouds break from dull, flat winter white into puffy chunks that glimmer white/gold at the edges and hang heavy black grey in the middles.
5:00pm Tuesday: between the wind and the sun, all that slush and snow melts and dries to reveal a no longer brown edmonton.
6:15pm Tuesday: the brown/yellow grass I left in my backyard on wednesday is suddenly all green and shines almost neon as the sun sets against it.
This country is really beautiful. I need to see more of it.
2:15pm Monday: I was napping on a sunny hillside in Stirling Ontario.
3:30am Tuesday: packing up and leaving Stirling in darkness to make my early flight out of Toronto
8:00am Tuesday: flying back across the country over fields of yellow and green and brown, watching spring from the air
9:05am Tuesday: a collective groan through the sold out plane when we broke through the low cloud cover to descend into a snow/sleet covered edmonton
10:21am Tuesday: making it to work just barely late with wet socks and shoes from navigating my way through a slushy alley way while being blinded by sleet coming down sideways at me
1:25pm Tuesday: sitting at work watching the snow slow down and the wind pick up, whipping around the tops of the evergreens in the river valley
3:15pm Tuesday: venture out of the shop for lunch to find it much warmer than when i arrived
4:21pm Tuesday: wind slows down while the clouds break from dull, flat winter white into puffy chunks that glimmer white/gold at the edges and hang heavy black grey in the middles.
5:00pm Tuesday: between the wind and the sun, all that slush and snow melts and dries to reveal a no longer brown edmonton.
6:15pm Tuesday: the brown/yellow grass I left in my backyard on wednesday is suddenly all green and shines almost neon as the sun sets against it.
This country is really beautiful. I need to see more of it.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
where the windows are breathing in the light...
I'm writing this while I sit in my bedroom windowsill... legs dangling out on the roof, feet soaking up the last of the warmth from the shingles, leaning against the window frame watching the sun sink lower and listening to the Cinematic Orchestra.
--------
I love the smell of earth thawing. Almost every spring, I can recall the first moment that I walk outside and for the first time that year year, smell the earth thaw. My very first memory of this moment was when I was about 8 or 9 maybe and on a break from school and we were in the middle of a good Chinook look it up here. My mom and I went through the pasture and ditches along our farm in sweaters and rubber boots and stomped through the thin layer of ice covering all the puddles. I think it was one of my favourite days ever. I remember though, there was this moment. In the ditch at the end of driveway on our way back to the house. My mom had climbed up onto the driveway and I was standing in front of the last puddle left to crack. When I lifted up my boot to step on the ice, I smelled it. That scent that is impossible to describe...that earth thaw.
Last year, I was unemployed and though locked in for another year of landscaping, had yet to begin. It was early in the afternoon and I was walking behind the Saville Sports Center...actually more like slipping over the ice in the field behind the Saville. I was on no particular mission, no real agenda, just filling up time and soaking in the sun on a beautiful almost spring day. As I slid down a hill of yet to be melted snow at the back of the parking lot, I smelled it. That moment, that second where everything whips around you while you stand still and just feel....connected to everything, to the change in nature to the wind on your face and the dirt under your feet and the sun in your hair.
It's no secret that I love summer. The heat and the long days and the physical labour that I tend to associate with it makes me wish it would never end. But there is also something about the transition seasons...I don't really consider Spring and Autumn to be full seasons because I've never lived in a place where they seem to last for more than a week or two. But there is an energy about them. An energy in spring that, for me, is caught up in that smell of thaw. As with everything in nature, I associate everything with wind.
This afternoon, I was biking through some rather large puddles on the farm and getting absolutely soaked. There was enough wind that I was starting to get a little chilled and so turned my bike around for home and in that moment, that second when I turned my tires back to the house, I could smell it. And not just smell it, but feel it and taste it...earth thawing. And I know with the spring weather we've been having that it has been thawing for a week or so now, but I'm talking about that definitive moment, that breach in reality where everything is at once only existing as energy and light and you are not a single observer of it but lost within it...a million pieces fragmented into the wind and sun and soil.
---------
That Home
Where the doors are moaning all day long,
Where the stairs are leaning dusk 'till dawn,
Where the windows are breathing in the light,
Where the rooms are a collection of our lives,
This is a place where I don't feel alone
This is a place that I call my home...
- The Cinematic Orchestra
listen to it here
--------
I love the smell of earth thawing. Almost every spring, I can recall the first moment that I walk outside and for the first time that year year, smell the earth thaw. My very first memory of this moment was when I was about 8 or 9 maybe and on a break from school and we were in the middle of a good Chinook look it up here. My mom and I went through the pasture and ditches along our farm in sweaters and rubber boots and stomped through the thin layer of ice covering all the puddles. I think it was one of my favourite days ever. I remember though, there was this moment. In the ditch at the end of driveway on our way back to the house. My mom had climbed up onto the driveway and I was standing in front of the last puddle left to crack. When I lifted up my boot to step on the ice, I smelled it. That scent that is impossible to describe...that earth thaw.
Last year, I was unemployed and though locked in for another year of landscaping, had yet to begin. It was early in the afternoon and I was walking behind the Saville Sports Center...actually more like slipping over the ice in the field behind the Saville. I was on no particular mission, no real agenda, just filling up time and soaking in the sun on a beautiful almost spring day. As I slid down a hill of yet to be melted snow at the back of the parking lot, I smelled it. That moment, that second where everything whips around you while you stand still and just feel....connected to everything, to the change in nature to the wind on your face and the dirt under your feet and the sun in your hair.
It's no secret that I love summer. The heat and the long days and the physical labour that I tend to associate with it makes me wish it would never end. But there is also something about the transition seasons...I don't really consider Spring and Autumn to be full seasons because I've never lived in a place where they seem to last for more than a week or two. But there is an energy about them. An energy in spring that, for me, is caught up in that smell of thaw. As with everything in nature, I associate everything with wind.
This afternoon, I was biking through some rather large puddles on the farm and getting absolutely soaked. There was enough wind that I was starting to get a little chilled and so turned my bike around for home and in that moment, that second when I turned my tires back to the house, I could smell it. And not just smell it, but feel it and taste it...earth thawing. And I know with the spring weather we've been having that it has been thawing for a week or so now, but I'm talking about that definitive moment, that breach in reality where everything is at once only existing as energy and light and you are not a single observer of it but lost within it...a million pieces fragmented into the wind and sun and soil.
---------
That Home
Where the doors are moaning all day long,
Where the stairs are leaning dusk 'till dawn,
Where the windows are breathing in the light,
Where the rooms are a collection of our lives,
This is a place where I don't feel alone
This is a place that I call my home...
- The Cinematic Orchestra
listen to it here
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