this life...

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willow and i picked up a couple of hitch-hikers on our way back from gimli yesterday. they stayed with me until this afternoon and it was so nice to return the favour for all the people who were so good to me when i was hitch-hiking (or travelling by any means for that matter).

it's hard to know where to begin really. it would be hard to know where to stop as well. so i guess i will just say that life carries people along in such a gracious way sometimes. we had such a great time the three of us. red was coming from tree planting and going to chicago and detroit and other places you should never consider hitching and he will be in my thoughts while he attempts it. francois was coming from whitehorse and going back to quebec city. what else do i say? they were unexpected in my day and i in theirs and we made lunch together and dinner together in my home and hung out on the porch together, went to the windsor and were blown away by the drummer in the blues band that played. i love the moment when you all realise that what you are hearing has just surpassed extraordinary and we all make noise at the same time. every moment was as it should be. and then some.

this is what i love about life. red coming in this morning after a walk to say "looks like it's gonna be another hot one out today!" in his immensely innocent way of speaking which is so lovely and funny at the same time. francois being as sweet as he is in his french accent and the way he sings while he cooks.

there is something beautiful about two strangers being in your home, one cooking food and singing in your kitchen while the other lights candles and loves life enough for everyone. i am blessed to have people like this stand on a road inviting their way into my life for a day.

my previous post has magically disapeared after clicking delete. it was rubbish. good to write some rubbish sometimes just to see it in plain text to know what it is. there were grains of those words which are true and fair. i am better to look at the reasons i would go. i would go because it is a place i love. because travolta was a good friend to me and a gentleman and because he showed me orcas. i would go because life is too precious to let little things stop us. i would go because i haven't seen the ocean in years now. i would go because the first time i saw the ocean i was in a cab with travolta and suddenly the ocean was there and i asked the cab driver to let us out there not knowing where we were and we both got out and ran in. i would go because i have not gone in a long time. because good people are rare and i love smiling at an old friend.

orcas

travolta called. zacharia p. leck. from orcas island. it is the best place i have ever been. i dont' know if i can describe it. it's a small horseshaped island off the coast of washington. i arrived on a boat and had to switch boats at another small island on my way. on the island before orcas, travolta showed up to meet me unexpected. i had met him on the train the year earlier. him and matt and i became fast friends and travelled from toronto to vancouver together. matt went up vancouver island fly-fishing. travolta was going to seattle to an underwater welding school. i wandered around out west. and the next time i was out there i contacted him and he said, let's meet on orcas. so i went.

back to the island before orcas. he found me and we must have just smiled. i made friends with a dog and we got on the boat and the water was the bluest i had seen. on my way over, i felt how good the place i was going to was and i was completely at peace. he had an old 67 truck and we drove around the island. we stopped in at people's houses who we didn't know and made dinner and drank wine. we camped at one end of the island. on easter morning zach hid an easter egg in his touque for me.

i won't get into the intensity with which i felt that peace because i don't think it can be described. strange and wonderful things happened and the whole thing was like a dream sequence. even the photo's i have look like someone climbed into my mind while i slept and took pictures.

four years ago travolta called and left me a message that he was passing through winnipeg and said when his train would be in. i got to the station late or the train was early and i couldnt' find him. i asked everyone where he was, all the other people on their one hour stop. i made friends with a group of people who all met travelling and for that hour i was away. the people at the train station were paging him and trying to help me find him. they could see it. i found him just in time. he came up and hugged me and picked me up right off the ground, over and over. everyone around was smiling that we found each other. i said, stay. he said, come. we both wanted both. one of the train staff told him to go get his bag off the train and stay with me. they let me past the gate with him and we got on the train together and sat on the train with each other and it was amazing. we sat there and wanted more time. he went and i stayed and i have not talked to him since.

until today. i had tried a few months ago to reach him but it was an old number and he has always been all over the place. sometimes he's in a jungle somewhere, sometimes he's in other countries. sometimes he's on orcas where he was born.

he has a daughter now. she is 3 and a half and he lives next door to the mother on orcas. they are not together, but it's nice that they live right next to each other and their daughter gets to have them both near.

but now i want to see his daughter and i want to see him and i want to see orcas again. so i will go. i got off the phone and looked up flights. i want to be away. i want to be on orcas. so i will go.

i should go soon.

life is beautiful sometimes.. i decided at 10:30 last nite to drive out to gimli. i drove in darkness with lightning as my landscape. no rain, just lightning in a dark sky stretched out before me. all around me. i arrived to a note on the door "we're at the beach". and so willow and i went to the beach and the waves were big and we all swam. instantly we were all away from everything usual swimming in the midnite with the waves and the stars and lightening. and we'd laugh..

it was a night with good friends and summer and funny things. i woke up and did not rush back for work. instead rob and susie and i went to indio's while sean slept. we ate on the patio. we read the paper. we were just there. happy.

back to sean's, we all napped and then went back to the beach. i felt work leave my body and my body relax. we all went for dinner and there was a dragon fly on the fireplace on the patio. i came back a couple of hours ago and one side of the sky was rain in the distance like slow motion, on the other side a rainbow. behind me the sky was the kind of dark i love. pthaloe. ahead it was a blue sky. i passed mustard fields after rain. it hurt and i smiled. i faltered and tried to stop stopping.

i came home and spoke to the australian on skype. i have avoided skype for every day since we ended because we fell in love in those days. but he wanted to test his new mic. and just as i suspected, we fall again. we both won't say it, but we just can't help it. we try not to say such nice things to each other. we try not to fall in love with the words on the page and the voice on the other end. i said, i hear your accent when you type. he said, pretty laugh. we tried our best, but we can't help it.

so far my holidays have been stunning..

if i could go, if i could stand before you just one more time, i'd want to bring with me talents i don't have. i'd want to bring landscapes we've never seen. i'd want to bring a rain storm and strike it up at just the right moment. i would be the conductor of an orchestra. i'd watch your eyes look out from under eyelashes and i would smile and you would smile and our soundtrack would play and we'd fall down happy.

it would be just like last time.

i just realized that i don't equal faith to him. i represent a betrayal to his faith and i don't know quite what to do with that yet. he said: "I know I can't get what I want or need by talking to you, but I'm doing it anyway". it occured to me a moment ago how absurd it is in my world (and i acknowledge that it is just my world i speak of) that two people can be in love and bring life to each other the way we do and a difference in religion is a wall (!) even though when it comes down to it we live by the same moral cloth basically. i thought that faith is blind. it doesn't matter what you call it. you do your best to live a good life, do right by others and not cause harm and not judge. does it matter what you call it? do you have to call it anything? if there is a force that drives you, something larger than yourself, does it matter if you can't name it? why does he keep contacting me if he can't get what he wants or needs? what is it he wants? why does he need me to worship the same way he does? what if i want to do it in fields and rain storms quietly on my own? am i wrong for that? does it have to be organized? the answer for me is no. i am most content to find my spirituality in the life around me without naming it. what perplexes me right now is that the spirituality that he has chosen is not welcoming of me however i find it in my life. what i have found - and i am never done learning - but what i have found so far is that spirituality represents non-judgement among all the other things it represents. it is one of the big ones. and yet, judgement has been set. i don't make the grade. so why keep talking to me? i dont' mind - i'll accept whatever presence he offers in my life, this is just a thread of thought in my mind. i don't even mind that i dont' make the grade, i just feel like pondering the situation for a bit. holding it in my hand and turning it over curiously wondering at it. it seemed that he was not happy. that he missed me. that he was confused. "just that I know I can get language from you" he said. when he asked if i felt the conversation leading down the path of desire he followed with - ( will she answer truthfully and how will i know? ) i love that. i love the way we speak. the way we backspace. the way we can't help it. but that's messy and he likes clean.

even if he came around. decided it didn't matter, i would know that would change. i would know that it does matter to him and i would not attempt to ignore that. but regardless of the fact that i would not be with him again, i don't want anything else. how do you top that? how do you even come close? i do not say that i will never be with anyone again, just that i don't want it now. and i don't want it soon. i fell in love. with someone who made me a better person. with someone who i always thought i must have imagined. i thought maybe the sun dipped behind a mountain and cast the right shadows and we must have said the perfect things to each other and we must have both been far enough from home to feel such peace. but i will always feel that peace with him, mountains or no mountains, home or far away, young or old. i wanted to see him age. he will be beautiful old.

i want to backspace most of this. there will be heavy editing in the days to come.

though his goodbye was neither harsh nor cold, it felt definite, and he must have known because while i slept he softened it with a kind word and softer goodbye.

i just talked to the australian on messenger and it was fantastic. we started up slow for a moment and then abruptly fell into pace again. he said he wanted language so we fell into language for a bit. we know each others language so well and i will always welcome it though i know it will be rare. we admitted to missing each other and the way he said good bye felt like he meant forever. but i've learned to never know. he had to say good bye because he loves me and i love him. and that is beautiful. i'm glad he is willing to look at our words dancing before each other again, if only for a moment.

i'm tired and feeling a little burnt out but i love life. i can't complain about working all the time because i love what i do. i can't complain about the heat because i love having my windows open and it's worth keeping the air off for. i can't think of anything that would justify complaint. i dont' believe complaint is much justified any of the time actually and i have been trying to eliminate it from my life. what i have found in doing this is that it is difficult but gets easier and easier. we get attached to our complaints. we call it venting and say it makes us feel better but really we just feel better because we have justified negative thoughts and no longer feel as bad about having them. and like a habit that is hard to get rid of it starts out difficult and slowly new habits start to take hold.

it's so challenging eliminating negative elements from our lives and i love the challenge. i'm up for it. i mess up so much every day and it's great just knowing. learning to be patient with myself and with others. learning to get a proper balance. not take anything so far that it becomes negative. learning not to take life too seriously or too lightly. learning that living life is an art. it will take a lifetime to master and i look forward to being old and grey.

the australian emailed again. i thought he wouldn't. i would wonder if he still struggles with his choice but it is not for me to wonder. i had strong thoughts of him right before i got his email and if i am accurate the way i tend to be about his sentiments when i feel them across distances, his simple email held more than it said.

colleen's back

colleen's back from churchill and she got her house. i have been secretly very stressed for the past couple of days as there were some stumbling blocks with her being away before the finance deadline. it all came together today while some socially inept movers moved some beautiful furniture given to my roomate by her dad and step mom into my living room, while colleen's train was rolling into the winnipeg station, while willow whined in the basement because she couldn't come upstairs and while the recycle truck had to go around the moving truck. jack called and said the approval letter was on it's way and i stood on my front lawn and felt the world lift off of my shoulders. because sometimes a house is just a house but sometimes it's a home and this time it was a home. colleen is my best friend and my partner in crime and her heart would have broken if she came home to find that she'd lost the house. and then mine would have subsequently broken too. and i miss her having her own place. i miss going over there and climbing up on her big bed while she gets ready for work or going over in the morning on a day off and making omeletts and common ground and jokes. we make good jokes her and i. if one of us has a messy house and the other one has a messy fridge one of us might open the fridge and say "your house, my fridge", we tell each other that we can't wait to put a face to the name when one of us is on our way to pick up the other, we used to call stephane's extension at work and if he wouldn't pick up we'd turn the volume way up and put it on speaker phone so that he could hear his own voice mail from across the room. i feel like i've got her back. now we live in the same neighborhood. now we live on each end of the same street. it's perfect.

the train

my friend just called me from the train. she was moving along tracks somewhere in northern manitoba and i was on my porch on solid ground. i know what sounds she is hearing and how the train will move back and forth while she sleeps. i know how in the morning they will start announcing calls for breakfast and the peace that comes with sitting in the dining car eating overpriced eggs while looking out over the prairies. i know the tired smile that creeps up because the person across from you is a stranger you have made friends with while travelling. she is working so i know it's not the same for her, but i can't help but think of it. the day i took these photos i wrote john and told him that i had found train tracks next to a rising moon and a setting sun and that a passenger train went by and i realized i wasn't on it.




i listened to damian rice today while drinking a latte with a small amount of chocolate in it. it hurt a little. and i love that it did.

i think i will only work a half day today. not even. i will do only what i need to do and then i will stop. i think work will improve more than suffer with a bit of time off. i think i will take friday off as well as i'm working through folk fest weekend.

i don't mind to miss folk fest. i thought i would go this year and i am partly relieved not to. it's tough going back to a place that was "the best". it was the best four days of my year every year. it was what i looked forward to the most and missed the most when it was over. for years. it's tough to go back. it's got a tall order to live up to.

as i try to take today off the work day keeps grinding its gears into motion and i have to laugh. these three paragraphs have taken over an hour to type. i should go work some so i can try and finish up early.

an unexpected day off

my clients had car troubles and cannot make it into the city. now i want to do everything with this new found day off. i want to go to the dog park and i want to visit bonnie and i want to see my roommate as she's been gone all weekend and i want to eat a proper meal and i want to sit on the porch with pen and paper and i want to clean my house which should but won't happen..

dog park

colleen and i took our dogs to the dog park down st. mary's yesterday, near the perimeter. much better than the usual dog park i take willow to. i had not yet discovered this place and it was great. it's like being out in the country. there is a steep cliff down to the river and willow chased down like nothing. no sooner do you wonder how she'll ever make it back up the steep bank does she come racing up effortlessly dripping wet from the river.

summer is filled with so much work that it's nice to take an evening with the dogs and hang out at the dog park. we hung out near the entrance once we had made our rounds and the dogs would come and lie with us until a new dog would enter and then they would go say hello and come back with stories to tell. i told willow she was like a wal-mart greeter. i told her to make sure to ask if anyone wanted a cart. we made a few jokes about rolling back prices and then the sun started to set and we moved on.

back to work tomorrow so i will sleep now. willow is probably still dreaming of samoyes and huskies and river banks. we'll go back soon.