Hillside Park and Lexington Rd, November 6, 2011

This morning I had an extra hour before going to the Dharma Centre because Daylight Savings Time ended last night. It was a bright, cool morning. My mind was placid, not excited for or inclined towards any particular direction, so I decided to see where I ended up. I followed Willow Street to the Peppler and down the path along the stream, through Moses Spring Park and up University, onto the path running from University into Hillside Park. The entrance to this path was blocked and there was a sign that reminded me that sewer line construction and creek improvements were planned for the month of October until the spring of 2012. Uneasily curious, I went around the barrier and followed the leafy gravel path that jogs alongside the tumbling stream, and as I came around the corner, where the path turns east, the sky ahead looked a little bigger beyond the trees than I remember. An uncomfortable feeling arose within my body as I came up to a wide fence blocking the path, and saw behind it that the sky got even bigger, and massive contructions machines towered against it. As I snuck around the fence, I saw that those machines stood Alone against the sky - all of the trees on the south east side of the bridge, and the east side of the path, were gone.

How it hurts even to write this and recall it. The bridge was there - I was so afraid it would be gone! - looking naked and metallic against the bright stream and the almost white sky. The earth was churned up everywhere and hardened, and massive piles of cedar shreds were steaming whitely in the morning air. Everything was still but for a couple walking down the dirt rubble a hundred yards ahead. I stood on the bridge and remembered.

One year someone put a bird feeder up in a tree beside the bridge and at least 20 different kinds of birds, of all colours, fluttered around it. I used to sit on the bridge and stare east down the river. I could see no buildings anywhere and during those days, Hillside Park was far enough out of my routine and my zone that I felt like I was in a wild, remote place, on a wilderness adventure. I would gaze down the river and imagine a future self, traveling through rugged, remote Northern parks, and feel I was already there, somehow. One day, sitting on the bridge, looking east, I was feeling sad about something, and then I realized how fortunate I was to be finished school and free to loaf idly on a warm summer evening in the woods. I drew this picture, and now I am so grateful to have this record of what was.



Now it was like standing in a clearcut. I stepped over a dirty wooden beam strewn across the dirt at the edge of the bridge, and as I lifted my foot over it, I gazed at it almost numbly, the dirt, the abandonment, the indifference - while not everything is lost, things are being lost all the time. One simply stares at the too white sky, feeling that everything is still very stark and real and beautiful, but desolate, and new, and messy. The past is warmth and light and summer, green leaves and the clock in my grandmother's spare room. The past is a place that seemed wild and yours and eternal, but was really somebody else's to change, unexpectedly, so that you are left with a gaping heart, a solemn gaze, a steady witness, a great love.

I followed the rough dirty path for a little while, looking at the devastation of trees and animal homes and magical nooks, where I once saw a wild turkey and imagined that if I chased it, I would find a Wonderland within the cedars. What was once a curved path was now a straight blast through the forest, unsettling my sense of geography and even my memory of what used to live where now there was only the unestablished air. I stopped to speak with the couple who were walking, and they were explained to me that this was happening not to improve the park (because how could it?) but because there was flooding at the other end of the park, because the sewage pipes weren't big enough, and the city was growing. It is difficult to argue with the desire not to have sewage flooding.

The dirt path became rougher and I simply didn't want to see anymore, I wanted to get out of this wide, gaping space among the far off trees, so I returned to the bridge, crept around the fence blocking it from the north side, and followed the northeast path through the old Revival grounds, where everything was still blissfully ancient and still. This magical, sleepy valley of long grass, ancient oaks and bubbling streams, where once were held tent Revivals, how relieving to see it still dreaming in autumn quiet. At the smaller bridge, I made eye contact with a young woman with short brown hair who looked up from gazing into the stream.

I felt I wanted to leave the woods, although they are the place of such happiness for me. I was shaken by the clearcut and knew that only time would settle me, and it didn't much matter where I spent that time, and I wanted to keep moving. I decided to see how far I could go down Lexington. As I followed this busy road over the highway, past churches and retirment homes and ball diamonds and suburban houses, my mind began to drift peacefully, my body almost empty. Glimmers of fear arose and I watched them, curious, touched, affected, but detached. I felt strong and calm and light and clear. I could see a dark green shadow of pines up ahead, and I knew this meant the entrance to Kiwanis Park. I realized in that moment that it was the next place I most yearned to go, my next Shangri-La. Realizing this, I decided to turn around. I felt good, and I wanted to remember and associate this feeling with this place.

Shortly after turning back, I cycled past a rabbit that had been hit and was dead and bloody by the side of the road. As with all animals that have been killed on the road, I was touched and saddened, and offered a prayer. In feeling for this rabbit, I realized that I felt more for this dead being on the road then I did for the cars, the buildings, the power lines. The little body had become separated from the little soul, but the fur and flesh were still vividly organic, vividly real. I share a commonality with this little lifeless body, and in life, am closer to it in death than to the electric, speeding metals and flashing lights. Commonality - sympathy - that which is shared - space, composition, mind - is love, if one can define love.

Passing the baseball diamond park again, I thought about my best friend, who I haven't spoken with in months, because I hurt her and she hurt me, although all we both wanted was to care for each other and be cared for. I remembered during the first week of University, my second week living in Waterloo, over ten years ago, she had gone off with our new friends and I was supposed to meet them at one of the houses on Lexington road. But when I got there, no one was around, so I went and sat in the ball diamond park and cried and wondered if I would ever feel anything but alone, and how I would survive this strange town. And I realized I already loved this land, and that I would never be completely alone if I could spend time on the earth here. I knew that wherever I went, the land would always be a beloved companion. After a time, I came back to our little basement apartment and found my friend watching Oprah and looking teary. She'd somehow missed meeting up with the crew and thought I was with them and she too was feeling afraid and alone. We laughed and smiled and sniffed and watched Oprah together.

I miss her, like a white, open, too big sky.

Dodds Lane, November 2, 2011

On Wednesday night I went to get my haircut at Voila Uptown. At 8 pm I was finished, and came out of the bright lights, warmth and music into the cool dark night. I planned to go over to the Bridgeport Shoppers, buy some chapstick and ear plugs, and then continue on into Moses Springer Park to admire the moon.

As I came along the lane behind Voila towards John St, a very large raccoon ran across the road and into a yard to my right. I stopped to watch him run along the top of a fence, pause, look at me, and then leap into a tree. He disapeared into the darkness, and then, as I continued to watch, his masked face poppped up between a fork in the tree. His eyes reflected the streetlight as he watched me, and I watched him. Above him and to the right, through the bare branches, a very bright star shone like a beauty mark in the sky. The raccoon was nearly invisible and only because I had stopped and was looking for him was I able to see him in the darkness. He disapeared again and then re-appeared, even more dimly, and higher up in the tree. Again we watched each other in the the dark, until he disapeared again, and then I went on my way.

Roosevelt & Waterloo Park, October 30, 2011

B. invited me to a Halloween party at her house this past Friday night. When she asked me I knew right away I would probably not make it. She lives on Roosevelt Ave, outside of my zone. I have been to her house before, mostly in the day time, and I'm always a little nervous.

And I really wanted to go, mostly to thank her for throwing the party and because she is a good friend to me. I knew I would be going out biking on Friday no matter what, so I decided to go over towards her place, and then decide how I felt once I got there. The weather was mild and I had a certain amount of energy, although I had moments in which my entire body would relax, while in motion, into tiredness.

I took William to Roslin. As I turned onto the wider street, the dark sky opened up all around me and I gazed into the blue-black silhouettes of the trees lining the street as they faded into the sky. I found comfort in these silhouettes, dark empty spaces that smell like living damp, cold and sublime on first glance, gentle and warm after some time spent with them.

I turned onto Dawson and then on to Westmount, where the car lights shone electrically as they blasted past, and then the street was empty, strangely empty, and I crosssed among drifting dy leaves. As I neared the farther side, a car rushed up behind me in the darknes and I moved quickly in the leaves and lights.

At the top of Westmount and Erb, I sent Brenda a text to say that I was not going to come to her party. I felt sad about this but I remembered the promise that I made to my body that I would never make it do anything it didn't want to do. I could feel myself wanting to do this thing for my friend, and show her my love, and at the same time, my body's tiredness, my mind's tiredness.

And, still, my body didn't want to turn around, so I continued to bicycle towards her house, and all the way to her driveway, where I stood looking into the window at her friends, wondering if I might just go to the door, give her a hug, and then leave. I thought this might be disruptive and pointless, there she was with all her friends around her, enjoying her party, and that was good. I felt sad, not sad from being left out, but sad from not being able to show my love with presence.

I felt at peace with my decision to leave so I turned and returned via Karen Walk, my old street. As I bicycled past the identical suburban houses, I realized I could no longer remember which I'd lived in - there were two that were a possibility. The only identifying trait was a long line of tall pines heading east away from the house's backyard, which I remembered looking at from my bedroom, so by lining up the house with the trees, I might be able to discover which house had been mine, for 4 months, in my third year of university.

I went around through the Keats Way school yard and up to Waterloo Park. Coming into the park on the west side, I looked up into a forest of tall trees in which the leaves were quivering blackly against the night sky. Through my muffled hearing under my hat and helmet, I heard strange shrieks and rough calls - there was a sudden movement, and hundreds of crowss flew up off the trees in a shimmering, black, rasping body. Crows were everywhere, circling, glimmering, shrieking, against the sky in the dark and moonlight. I stood to watch as they settled again, lifted off, murmured, conversed. It was so lovely and cold and clear in the park.

I carried on through the moonlit dark of the west field, through a clump of trees, nervously, keeping my sense alert for people moving in the darkness, but everywhere was empty. I came down over the bridge in the centre of the park, through the pitchy woods where the crows normally congregate, empty now, bare branches against the sky. As I came out of the woods, a train was coming south on the tracks the cut through the park.

It was an old train, and lit up from inside, one car only, filled with people in black and feathered costumes. I could see woman with bobbed hair, a feather elegantly rising from it, and a little black mask. As I came towards the train, I watched her, framed in the bright lighted square window of the pitching and rumbling train, and then as I came alongside the train in the parking lot I raced it, watching the people laughing and shimmering in the car. I raced it all the way down the dark path, where the Japanese trees had lost their leaves in little yellow piles, and the lights from the little light poles winked in the night. Before the bridge, I decided not to follow to see them come off the train, although I longed to, more than I have for any human in a long time.

Instead I turned east and bicycled down the board walk. I sat down in the middle part, where I could gaze out over the black, still lake.

To my right there were two girls sitting under the gazebo, taking pictures of themselves. They were posed against the water, back to back, with their knees up, facing the camera, like a perfect reflection of each other, a set of twins. Two ducks drifted by on the lake's stillness, and a couple passed by behind me, holding hands. I remembered that this was Lover's Lane, where everything happens in twos. The lake was so still that I wanted to lie flat across it, while my limbs drifted in different directions, staying connected by finer and finer threads.

Bodies around me reflect each other, mirror to create twins, while I dissolve, flatly, a prairie plain.

I started to become actually cold so I left the park via the dark path along the easts side of the lake, coming up onto the busy streets. I went to the grocery store, where two giggling university girls moved in an irritating, irrational dance around the produce section, as I tried to get directly through it. One said to the other "Do you want to get corns?" and this ridiculous moment of childish bad grammar, making a plural out of a singular, repeated itself again and again in my head, as I tramped resolutely through the store, like a crow collecting berries before rising into the vast night sky.

Bridgeport

It was very cold this morning - there was dull white frost turning the grass blue grey, and the air was sharp - but the sun was shining, for the first time in days. At the end of the driveway, I decided to go to the town of Bridgeport, and to see a big sky, and heaps of colourful trees piled up against it.

At the roundabout, where Lancaster meets Bridge, I felt a push not to go South, like a sharp yellow tightness in my chest. I felt myself being drawn north, up Bridge into the suburbs, llike a gentle blue plain in my heart. But what new beauty would I find in suburbia, when the sun lay to the south and splashed and sang in the muddy Grand River? I'm sensitive these days to my intuition, and it's always telling me not to do what I want to do. I crossed onto the bridge, carried along by my vision of the tumbling, rushing river. At the end of the bridge I turned into the parking lot at Joe Thompson Park, as the tightness and resistance continued in my chest. Then - "fuck it, fine!" - I turned around. My strange intuition - but I promised to listen to it. It occurred to me that my mind simply didn't want to do anything new today, so I convinced myself that going east further into the town of Bridgeport would keep me on the soft blue plain, because it was a familiar route from years past, unlike the eastern direction. This seemed to convince my heart enough to loosen a little, and I went east on Tyson St. I felt pangs of agoraphobia, and settled into them comfortably, knowing that those feelings meant I was on familiar ground emotionally, and experiencing nothing novel.

Tyson St stands in my mind as the name representing one of my dreams, to live in a very small house on the outside of town by myself, in a house with a lot of wood furniture and cast iron and exposed beams, or wood shingles, wearing dresses with wool sweaters and rainboots and carrying things with chapped hands on cold days. Since going to the Maritimes to live out this life of an LM Montgomery inspired eccentric seems far-fetched, given my current realities, I settle (in fantasy) on the town of Bridgeport. Being realistic in a fantasy makes it all the more vivid and real and delicioius.

As I bicycled down the street, and then turned on to Market St, I looked carefully at all the little houses, strange and irregular and sublime, wondering if I would discover one that would delight me in particular.

Some of the little homes came right up to the road, close together, with wild flowers growing in front of thick paned windows. Others had European inspired top floor additions, with wide glass windows, through which I could see comfortable lounge chairs. Some were tiny clapboard houses, romantic in their dullness, homey yet strange.

At then end of Market I turned and came back and found an elevated, fine gravel path running along the Grand River. I climbed on to it next to a little house, where a low foundation wall ran strangely on a diagonal, cutting through the path, so that on one side (the side I was on) it was wide and gravelly, and the other, going along beside the little house, it was narrow and made by footsteps. I could see it widening again later on when it met up with Schaefer Park to the east.

I took this path back west to the main bridge. Up on the path, my heart released like a bird rising from the river. Only sky, and woods, and water. Only this. And sun, and cold. Only. O.

A time passed. I write this as a marker of time that passed free from everything.

I swooped under the bridge, on a path I had never seen before, next to the wild river on its grassy banks, and came up back in Joe Thompson park, where I was once again touched with yellow tension. I left again to circle back to the bridge but then released my heart by tying this new space to the old one I'd just left, so that any new discovery might flow from the stillness of the old.

Although I was gripped by the strangest sharp sense of newness, I had been on this path before, 12 years ago, after a long day of biking, with my friend Emilia. We later sat on the field and ate sandwiches. I had forgotten about that meal until now. It doesn't seem like 12 years - it always feels like no time at all.

Below the path, there were great willows spreading over wild grasses and smaller trees, creating little rooms of green light beside the river. Clear ponds, islands of water caught in the low areas near the river after days of rain, reflected the light whitely and captivated me, inseparable in their gentle magic from the deep green grasses that surrounded them. It is the time of year where I say - next year, I may come to know and love this place, on the very edge of this year's beloved circle.

In order to avoid a man walking his dog, I turned around and returned to Bridge St. I followed Bridge past Schweitzer, where the big trucks are parked, where it becomes an open country road. A gravel road travelling alongside the paved is protected to the west by the high grassy banks of the elevated path. From the gravel road, I couldn't see the other side of the bank - just grass waving against sky. I was thrilling to imagine the river opening up on the other side. I climbed up into the light and wind on the embankment and looked beyond to see fields and trees, the river far off and hidden. Charming, but not thrilling. I knew the man with his dog must be coming around the bend shortly, so I came down again, feeling a little tired, and went back to Lancaster.

I pedaled slowly and happily up Lancaster, thinking of not much, in no hurry, warm in the sun, looking at the signs in shop windows, wondering how my day would unfold when this trip was over. Wondering if I should go to sit in the woods at Moses Springer Park, wondering if I could stay warm if I stopped moving. I turned right onto Lang to avoid the traffic and followed it back to Springdale and then Bridgeport.

There is a patch of woods between Brideport and Highway 8 where it curves. I locked my bike at the edge of the woods and swished through tall plants into the wet and yellow brown cathedral. Climbing a leafy, soft path, I saw movement ahead. A large, grey deer bounded into view for a moment and then disapeared. My heart beating, I followed the path up the hill, watching the woods to my right, and now there were two grey deer, leaping and bounding through the trees, th. To say that a deer leaps is to begin to understand a deer as more bird than a mammal - a deer lives half in the trees and in the air.

I didn't see the deer again, and I didn't follow anymore - I didn't want to scare them any further, especially because they were between myself and highway. I imagined them in the sunshine of the meadow beyond the woods, near the highway, two lost, gentle, leaping siblings. For, if they weren't lost, then surely this was an enchanted wood, much vaster and more capable of sustaining the wild of life than it looked from the outside.

As I came to the east edge of the forest, before turning north to go back to my bicycle, I realized a man with long hair and beard was watching me, while smoking a cigarette, from the balcony of a house touching on to the woods. I felt like an intruder, and strange in my leather jacket, helmet and white running shoes. I wondered if the man had been watching the deer. I wondered if he felt that in some way, they were his deer. He puffed with equanimity and watchfulness, like a wizard, his thoughts obscure. I moved off.

I walked slowly along the outside of the woods until they met the highway in a chain link fence. I could see the sunny meadows beyond. A little further, on the other side of the highway, I slowed my pace in the sunshine and looked back at the forest, and realized how actually large it was. I wondered where the deer were. I felt sad and worried, enchanted and touched.

I walked for the better part of the road home, in no hurry to get anywhere.

Victoria and Fischer Hallman, October 15, 2011

Rain was falling steadily and in gusts this morning. I wore my warm jacket and clipped my rain pauncho to my bike rack in case it came to that.

It wasn't very cold, just blustery and raining steadily. I put on my pauncho right away. The cemetery was dull and shining at the same time, in parts, with russets and burnished yellows and damp greens, the comfortable brooding dark blue green of spruces in a line. Looking into the spruces, between their wide boughs, at the wet brown trunks where their limbs met their bodies, I thought of all the thousands of things I can look at during the days of my life, and how looking at those things makes up my mind, and how I look at so many, many things, when I could just look at a few, a few things like this wet tree trunk, a little damp cavern in the boughs, safe for being real, not for being comfortable. I could look only a things that grow from the ground, things that stand in the weather, and make my mind this way.

I pedaled up to the hospital and then down Glasgow as the cars rushed past me in the spray. South on Belmont, west on Gage, past a garden of wildflowers interspersed with stones outside a monolithic warehouse. Goldenroad, purple asters, little white flowers. It was raining harder and I was becoming damp in my pauncho. When I saw these wildflowers in the rain, I thought to myself, this is something meaningful I won't forget - but I forget now why. Yet the rain does now seem very important, - not the rain, exactly, but the way the light shone through it, dull and subtle and wild.

The wind was coming out of the west down Gage and it became tiring. I felt set on my goal for the day, the height of Victoria St just past Fischer Hallman. Rain, wind, tiredness and growing dampness were my environment, my skin, my surroundings, not something to fight against.

On Westmount I turned south again and jogged up to Chopin Dr. I began to wonder what the best way to get up to Fischer Hallman was - through the woods (possibly quite muddy) or up Victoria (possibly quite a tiring uphill struggle in the rain). I felt uncharacteristically uninclined to go into the woods - it was as though my ability to withstand the wind and rain was somehow reliant on my having a specific goal (top of the hill) rather than enjoyment of surroundings (through the woods). I felt somehow that only pavement could sustain me. And yet I dreaded an uphill battle. I began to feel uncertain of my goal and then I began to feel irritated and uncomfortable with the weather. I rolled around the mall and into the entry to the woods, feeling more and more uncomfortable.

I made the quick decision to stick with my goal and turned left down the path that leads to Victoria St. My calm returned, and then my joy. It felt to me in that moment that my calm was related to my commitment to a goal - that as soon as I'd focused specifically on enjoying myself, I began to enjoy myself much less.

It felt good and right to be on the path heading south. It followed a steam that had been paved many years ago to form a downward sloping aquaduct, and, in the rain, the muddy water was rushing and swishing along uniformly, like the water in a splash park ride, taking the slight bends and twists of the duct in a body, up the sides and then back down again, in a race to the south. I flew along the path at what felt like the exact speed of the water, feeling myself move with it, slide with it, rush with it, curve along with it, race with it in the rain and the wind, with the colourful hedgerow whipping along the side of my vision, and the big park sky opening up ahead, high and grey.

Turning west on Victoria, I discovered the hill was not so big as I'd imagined, and began to climb. I needed to put in a steady effort and a firm mental concentration, as the wind was strong, I was becoming cold and more wet, and was about to leave my zone. Crossing Fischer Hallman, the ground leveled out, the wind dropped, and everything became still, as if I had arrived where I wanted to be, and could now quietly, carefully, slowly inspect every part of it.

I followed Victoria until the road curved and dipped down to Eastforest Park. At this point I stopped, having come nearly to my goal. If it had been sunny and cool, I would have tried to go further, but I had no more motivation in the rain. I enjoyed the view, the swoop of the road into the hilly distance.



Once I turned around, I began to look around carefully at the trees, signs and my own mind. I turned north down Fischer Hallman and into Monach Woods. I stood on the bridge, watching the stream flow beneath, bubbling rising and floating on the dusky surface, water dripping from the high trees all around, wet pale green everywhere. I was feeling colder. I walked for a while in the woods, watching the water, until I realized I was waiting to feel uncomfortably cold before I could leave. I decided to leave before that happened, and pedaled comfortably down the trail back to the mall. At the mall, I readjusted my pauncho until I felt as cozy as possible, given how wet I had become, and then made my way back to Gzowski Park, on Chopin Dr.

In the park, I got off my bike and walked slowly. The rain seemed to fall more softly, and the pale morning light settled onto the branches of young trees. I smelled fresh air and damp ground. Birds were calling out in the trees, and far away across the park, a massive turkey vulture was swooping against the clouds. As I watched, he came closer and closer, tilting left and right on the air currents, until he soared directly above me, and I tilted my head back to see his dark profile against the grey and white sky. A blue jay, a flit of blue and white in the trees, screamed. The green lawns fell away down the hill to the south, under a wide open sky of thick clouds. My face and my mittens were damp.


I started pedaling again back at Gage. In Timm Park, a very tall popular was shaking yellow in the grey light, tossing up high in the wind. Dark boughs danced next to it on great, tall pines, and the park was a quiet, empty place of green and shimmer. I took Gage all the way around the church, on the little swooping corner road, which, if I kept going straight at the curve, would take me to Tom's house (I remembered that warm, golden, late summer day, and my heart made itself known to me). Looking right off the curve, I saw the lovely lost corner by the stream where I starting reading Remembrance of Things Past on the early days of my holiday, when Autumn still felt like a dreamy summer.

I went home through Cherry Park, growing more enamored of being cold and damp, feeling more alive by the moment, speculating that I was made for such climates as this, imagining Scottish moors, comparing this moment to July, feeling like a foreigner in a land where those who love the cold thrive, but popular opinion suggests that loving the heat is more sane. Ah well! It is something to feel a spark of damp, wild, joy on these blustery days when other people tell each other, "The weather is terrible! I guess fall is finally here! Oh well ..."

Laurel Creek to Sugar Bush Park, October 11, 2011

The next day I was still thinking about Erbsville and decided to see how far I could get towards it. I wasn't thinking of it as a distance challenge, so much as I knew that every point further would reacquaint me with once familiar scenes, even more enjoyable in the light of autumn sunshine.

I went directly to Columbia Lake, enjoying every turn of my wheels. My mind was steady, and if it was a little distracted, it was distracted by and into emptiness, which is a form of being settled, although not the deepest form. As I came through the narrow hedgerow entrance to the back fields, past the lake, I remembered that during my first trip through here at the beginning of this season (a fast dash in a new territory), I had seen a board swing on a tree overlooking a stream just to the west of this very path. I had meant to stop and explore this spot all summer, but the time hadn't yet been right.

It was a brilliant day, a slow and quiet one, and suddenly I discovered that it might not be a day for exploration so much as for contemplation, and that seemed right. I pulled onto the narrow dirt path surrounded by thick tufts of wild green grass, and left my bike there. I followed the little loamy, hilly path along the side of the stream bed and came to an open space under a spreading willow. The little swing was tied to a branch running along side the stream, and I sat down and watched the bubbling water. The banks on the opposite side were high with grass, and beyond them I could see the pale blue of the lower sky. After a while I climbed into the many low limbs of the willow and looked out of over cornfields, a colourful woodlot dividing them, protecting the little stream all the way to Laurel Creek Conservation Area. The slight mistiness or dustiness of the horizon, the yellow of the fields, the hum of the morning. Freedom is somewhere out there, in the dust or mist. Freedom is sitting here, looking for itself, finding itself, quietly. I listened to birds warbling softly, and the tingle of leaves falling, and the hum of the powerlines nearby.


I took a picture and sent it to my mother, because I knew she would appreciate the charm of this spot. I read for a little while down at the bank of the stream, and watched a Shepherd dog come down and wade in the water near by, then shake off and return to the path. I began to wonder what effect it might have on me to sit under the humming electric lines for so long, and suddenly this charming spot felt a little strange, as though occupied by a mysterious or dangerous or uncertain force, like a beautiful old sunny apartment next to a clinking factory sending out strange odours. I decided to carry on with my trip.

I came up onto the main path again and followed it a little further to the edge of a cedar wood alongside the stream. Crouching down and entering into this dim and burnished space, I was delighted to see another swing. The woods are filled with lovely human surprises, artifacts of beings and doings. I read a little while, and explored a little, admiring bright green moss on an eye level fallen tree branch, and then carried on my way.

I decided to scrap the plan of trying to get any further west and just come up around Bearinger. I felt happy that this had always been the further point of my journeys, a dangerous ground, and now it was familiar and comfortable. I decided to enjoy that feeling today, instead of trying to go further. I stopped in the shade of an old tree halfway up the hill, between the road and the cornfields, and had some water, and looked at my map and felt burstingly happy and filled with bright light. I turned north east and ventured into the unexplored suburbs via Toll Gate Blvd, feeling that familiar thrill of fear in my body at an unknown path. I slowed my mind, became ordinary, and trusted the map. Coming out onto Glen Forest, I experienced a moment of disorientation, knowing that I knew where I was, and yet not recognizing. And again, everything shifted and it was familiar again. I was still holding on to trust, the reliability of roads to return to their usual places after the surreal dances they would do in my mind.

I took the bikepath east through the school yard, past the mysterious yellow woods, and turned at the last minute northeast on Parkside, inspired in a flash of cool wind and sun to see if I could make it out to Benjamin Rd. I pushed with strength and comfort, steady willingness of body and mind, out to and then north on Weber, all the way to the lights at the top of the small hill from the top of which you can look down at see the confields peeking out around the corner of the bush to the east, the Best Western and the outlet mall to the west.

Just to look at these fields, slightly blue and misty, filled with light and space instead of concrete and movement, like what follows when the world as you know it comes to an end, and you realize it is just something so completely different and wonderful as to be incomparable with what you currently experience. Just to look at these fields, in the distance, to be freedom recognizing freedom, to feel something disapear from your mind, to feel nothing replace it, to feel the health return to your bones, to feel air return to your lungs, to feel silence return to your ears and yet within that silence, the natural and obscured answers to simple questions, which you could never hear in the din of the city. Just to look and then I turned around, feeling that it was enough, that fear kept me at this line, and that I was committed, since Riverbend Drive, to never push against fear, but rather, delight in experience.

I came back down Weber all the way to Sugar Bush Park. I was feeling a little tired from sun and exposure, and I also wanted to really sit and read for a while, and this dimly, greenly, sunlit woods was the perfect place arriving at the perfect time. The trees in Sugar Bush Park are magnificently high, so that you find yourself in a great green hall, tiny maple trees covering the floor with a gentle, whispering green carpet, with deep rich brown paths weaving through it. I found a comfortable spot at the base of a tree and settled myself.

I looked at my phone and my mother had sent me a reply to the picture I sent her.

"I should have named you Joy :D"

it read, and I cried, and realized that I was Joy, and always had been, but only now could see it, in this golden green moment under the trees.

My identity is re-written, by my mother, by the trees, by the sunlight, by autumn, by bicycles, by books, by breath. Now I am, can be, in this green space, that which I have loved and dreamed of for so long.

I will return to the city, attend a Thanksgiving dinner, experience anxiety, experience tiredness, go to the house of someone I care for and feel invisible to him, wonder if love makes sense, enjoy a quiet moment with a friend while she eats turkey at 10 pm and I lie on the couch, and then fall asleep, and things will return almost but not quite to ordinary.

Ira Needles, Keats Way and Clair Lake Park, October 9, 2011

On Saturday morning I went directly up Erb St to Ira Needles Blvd. I hadn't been that direction since last year. The hill was as difficult as I remember, but I didn't remember how far I could see from the top of the hill. I could see all the way to Bearinger Rd. This felt so strange to me.

Things had changed at Ira Needles and Erb. New condos were being built on the south east corner, and a new box store was fully grown on the south west. Past it, the high, wide hill leading to the dump was a free and open as always. To the north, past the stores, the rising fields of corn still lay open against a background of red and yellow trees and big sky.

Inhale. At the end of the universe, where the city stops, where I can breathe, where wild thoughts have room to fly without crashing, wheren fear empties into freedom and then returns again, fills and empties. I turned north up Ira Needles and followed the wide, curving bikepath. I had decided to go all the way around to Keats Way. I wasn't able to do this last year - I was only able to go part of the way down Ira Needles, and then turn around.

It was longer than I expected. I asked an older woman, walking towards me along the path, if Keats Way was ahead, even though that I knew that it was. She told me it was at the next lights. I feel safe when I ask for directions. They are even safer than a map. This is someone's most ordinary space, their intimate neighborhood.

As the path curved and the lights didn't appear, I began to tighten and then to repeat the woman's words: "Keats Way is at the lights". I was coming up to a pond on my left and everything felt much more open and rural than I remember from my travels up here years ago. I couldn't locate the co-op which I had used to visit. In a moment everything was strange and I felt disoriented, afraid. I continued to repeat "Keats Way is at the next lights", knowing the lights must appear. I was on the very edge of the turn, looking into a colourful forest, the road going right through it, amazed at the abundance of leaves and sky, the feeling of being so far from the city, afraid to be so far, grateful to be among trees, filled with tension.

I thought to myself, imagine you are on the train, and the world in colour is slipping past, while you watch, your mind has let go, you have given over to movement towards your destination. No will, just waiting, watching. My mind emptied into the circles my legs were making, the quality of the air, and the colours of the big gathering of trees ahead.

The tension in my body hummed under the emptiness of mind, building as the scenery became more unfamiliar to me, particularly so because I expected to recognize it. As it sharpened, in my belly, my shoulders and then spiking into my brain, I made hasty plans to retreat back down Old Erbsville Rd, and then scared myself thinking I would find it also too unfamiliar. I told myself that I must continue to empty my mind and move forward, that this mind and body motion were my salvation and my sanity, my peace of mind, my reality. And then I recognized where I was, as it sometimes happens, when a landscape re-arranges itself to fit a memory - at the joining between the Erbsville Road and Ira Needles. Then I knew I must be close to Keats Way, and then, up ahead through the trees, I saw the lights.

I knew I wouldn't go further west or north today, although my imagination was delighting at what lay within and beyond the colourful west woods, and my memory took me north down Erbsville Road to the town of Erbsville, to Conservation Drive, to the farmer's fields and little woodlots beyond, golden in my memories of late summer evenings of over 10 years ago. Instead, I pedaled more slowly and breathed in the expanded moment.

Turning down onto Keats Way, I swiveled my head to watch the big tree lot rear up high against the sky, and then I let go and flew down the hill, stopping once to admire the view down a narrow path to the north, following under the power lines for miles, imagining where it came out on Columbia, in that little park where I'd enjoyed the wildflowers after my trip around Bearinger. I turned off Keats Way into Mary Johnston Park, following the bikepath down through the woods where the dirt hills under the trees have been built up into waves for bike tricks. I remembered a day last year, or maybe the year before, where I'd been biking down this path, out in the open section of it, under a wild blue sky, and a very low flying bi-plane had come up so suddenly and violently I was thrilled to my bones, afraid and joyful all at once. I smiled with this sparking memory, feeling that same blast echoing today in my body, the smile a living ritual of remembrance.

Coming out onto Fischer Hallman, I made my way through the suburbs to Clair Lake Park. Instead of going around to the main section of the park, I came down the hill by the school, on the south side, into a little clump of sumacs, buckthorn bushes and old willow trees about 5 metres thick by the lake's edge. In this very quiet and solitary world of small yellow leaves against the sky, trailing grape vines, water like a rippled mirror, ducks, and deep sun on grass,I spent the rest of my morning reading, grieving, meditating, exploring, dreaming, eating and finally, finally, being. The sun was atoning in gentle gold for summer's fire, and prolonging summer dreams more real than those dreamed in July. You can live a lifetime, remembering something that you loved and that loved you, and not quite catching it, and then right before the end, it flashes for a time, that golden moment where you have always existed, and here it is today, a perfect summer day in October. I closed my eyes and faced into the sun, under the lattice of sumac and the grapevines bobbing in the wind.



The week having caught up with me, I left the woods at 12:30 and went to the grocery store, and then home, to put away my groceries and prepare my home for another week.

University

1.

This Saturday morning was the first day of my week long holiday from work. It was also 4 days after I heard from my father that my grandmother, who had been sick, was now palliative and had only a month to live.

I woke up feeling very tired - tired from work, from expectations, from having to smile, from pain and sadness, from having stayed up too late the night before talking. It was hard to get going and I went out much later than usual.

Outside, the wind was soft and fresh, cool, and the sky was autumn blue. I took Union all the way to the golf course, slowly, because my heart was weighted. My heart was heavy, but my body was light and strong, hollow, with a steady current of electricity animating it, like the sunlight in autumn, golden, cool, subtle and powerful. It had come to me on leaving the house that even though I felt so tired that the idea of travelling outside of my zone should be impossible, I wanted to go up to University and Fischer Hallman and then down University, on the road through the trees. An empty place full of colour. It should have felt impossible, but it didn't. I wanted to do it so I did it.

The steep hill up Glasgow, past the luxurious but too new houses didn't break me to walking as it has in the past. I went right up it, slowly but directly. It is always bright at the top of Glasgow and Fischer Hallman, bright white like the high altitude of a moutain peak, dizzying from the effort of ascent, the sudden light in your eyes, the amazement of being there, the viewing of all directions before the victorious journey back down.

As I turned north and coasted down University, though the wildness that borders the road, hiding houses, making me feel, as it always does, that I've somehow escaped the bounds of agoraphobia and reality and at last found my moving place in the wilderness I dream about, I let my mind empty into the day, into being away, into the air. A passing jogger smiled at me and I thought about how animals don't feel the need to smile at each other, acknowledge each other, when passing - they just go about their business of food gathering and shelter building, and how this felt like a world I would feel so relieved to in - no expectations, no busyness of the mind, no symbols and rituals. On further thought, I realized that of course animals must have some way of acknowledging each other, although perhaps very different than human ways. Maybe what makes their world less mentally taxing is that they don't cringe in anxious anticipation before every encounter - not knowing, as we do, that an encounter is coming. It is anticipaton that makes ritual possible.

At the end of the natural part of University, where it collides abruptedly with Erb St, I enjoyed a strong moment of victory in the sunshine and then enjoyed a leisurely roll back up University, but this time, on the other side of the stream that runs down the west side of the road, on a path in a tangle of trees. For many minutes I bumped over roots and up little hills, through the sparkling dapple of morning sun on leaves, feeling free and unburdened. I came up to one of the exits of the path in a cul de sac, turned east again, and took a concrete path into a park behind the senior's home.

I sat down on a bench in the still damp shade next to the play structure, where it smelled slightly of animal urine, moss, sun and wood, and began to read The Remembrance of Things Past.

After a time, I put down my book. I looked at small leaves turning red on the tree nearby, and a man and woman walking a dog down the path. Now came an orange cat from the green lawn beyond me; he came up to my knees and rubbed, and then climbed onto the bench and put his damp paws on my thigh and kisssed. He crawled up my shoulder and leapt off the bench into the trees. He swam under the bench and noticed things on the ground. I clicked and he came back and rubbed on my legs, leaving white and orange hairs on my black tights. Around and around he wove in this delighting dance, while I took pictures with my phone. It is very hard to take the perfect posed picture of a cat.



Some children who had been playing nearby came into view and the cat ran towards them. They squealed with excitement - four boys and a little girl - and began to crouch down and approach the cat. The cat ran into the woods and they followed him, standing in a little row, crouching, peering, seeing the cat in the obscurity. They looked like a little group of English schoolchildren in an etching. I found myself surprised at their gentleness. Still, I worried for the cat. To not appear to be staring at children from a damp park bench in a deserted park, I took out my cell phone and check my email.

A new email had arrived and it read that my cousin had told my mother that my Grandma now only had 2 weeks to live. I watched the children chasing the cat through the woods now, worried and wondered how the cat was feeling, my stomach heavy with the possible cruelties of life. And yet the park was quiet and the cat was winning, avoiding the children. Who knows what would happen?

I stood for a while, my mind thinking. It was cold under the golden autumn light, a little, and the air felt tighter. I watched the children rustle in the bushes. I wondered if my cousin was exaggerating. She must be. I called my mother and no answer. I sent her a text. The children were moving in and out of the bushes, and no sign of the cat. My heart clenched, my brow wrinkled. I put my phone away and took it back out again.

Suddently the cat burst from the bushes, an orange streak running full speed across the lawn. The children ran after it, and they all crashed into the bushes beyond. I wondered if the cat knew the children, belonged to them. I considered that the cat came here often and was aware of the ways of children, that this was just another morning for an outdoor cat.

I have to trust that the cat knows what it is doing. I put my phone in my pocket and picked up my bicycle to leave the park. I took my phone out and checked to see if my mother had texted and no, she hadn't. My heart was already nostalgic for the time of the bench, the rub, the climb, the jump, the swim, my book, Combray, M LeGrandin. I felt I was leaving a trail behind me as I left the park, wanting to stay and continue the stillness of holidays.

Now I was on the road again. My cellphone fell out of my pocket and crashed on the pavement, the perfect glass screen chipping a little. I picked it up, sighed. My body felt energy returning, light in my muscles, time to ride it out. I took Erb up almost to Fischer Hallman but stopped short of it and coasted down a side road, to find a little path behind some houses near Churchill St. I followed this path to a woods familiar from my university days, with little paths going up and down hills between Keats Way and Churchill and the new subdivision I'd come through.

I sat on a log and checked my phone. No call. I called again. I sat some more, my thoughts bubbling, jutting, bumping. I heard a man singing, so I started moving again. He came up the path after me, a student, dressed in black, with headphones, no longer singing. I found a glade of logs and ferns and sunlight, so faerie and perfect, that it seemed almost shamefully beautiful compared with my morbid thoughts. I sat on a log and realized that it was time now for neither the stillness of holiday, the beauty of meditation, nor the rumble of planning, but for the sitting with pain.

I rested my mind deep in my stomach and let the feelings rise and fall in the quiet wood, with the cars in the distance. Rise and fall, ferns and light, sighing. Writing this now, I don't remember what the feelings were, although I still feel the trouble in my heart. There, now I do. Dropping, heavy, falling, darkness, tightness, pushing ... sit, sit. Feeling shoulders release, the mind become a prairie, the tongue soften. I sat until I felt the lightness come up again, my body holding less weight and the air seeming fresh and warm again, instead of brusque and cold, my hair settling on my head instead of flying about in the wind. Less urgency now, more summer.

My feet sunk into the deep loamy dirt of the path out of the woods as I made my way care-fully back to Keats Way. There is really no where to go. How relieving! I just want to be, and I am, here. Where else?


2.

Now I don't want to write or describe, I want to sit here, very still, and exist. To write feels like to move, to move the mind as the body moves when travelling. To grasp at the next turn, the next landmark, to thrill at an expression or a landscape. To feel the wheel of the heart revolving and revolving, generating, building, spinning into the future. To describe feels like capturing energy in a jar, the perfect stillness of the glass animated deliciously by the spark of a firefly. Now I don't want any animation - I want the jar empty, I want the emptiness in the jar. Impossible to write that, when any word is a step towards fullness. If only there was a way to write backwards, then that might begin to soothe my heart space, release my limbs. If there was a way to write that took away the reader's admiration for my skill, undid the snap of appreciation and recognition, made nothing of me.

3.

I have aired out my tent, in the backyard, read, done some dishes, eaten a sandwich, and read some more, and now I am ready to write again.

4.

After leaving the park, I went, filled with bright sun and good pain, up Amos St to where it turns at the Beechwood Club, and then took a path I discovered last summer over the hill, through the gaudy suburbs, and down through Resurrection College to the University. It was a good and optimistic feeling to be on top of the hill, to be not quite certain that this path did in fact take me down to where I wanted to go, and to feel willing to continue on and find out.

My reason for going to the University was to see a pow wow at St Paul's College. I came to the bottom of the hill where the pow wow was happening and sat under a wide willow tree, watching the dancers prepaare through a curtain of willow limbs in the wind. When the opening ceremonies began, I stood under the tree and watched the dancers come in, of all ages, and form a circle around the main tent, where the singers were chanting and the drummers were beating the drums. I listened to a high wail and responding wails, as the dances and protocols went on. The leader had a gentle, slightly accented voice, the rhythmic rural cadence of the Native English speaker. I felt the rhythm of the chanting come in and flow out of me, from the sunlight, into the sunlight.

After an hour, when the opening ceremonies ended, I came home to rest and feel the stillness of the afternoon come to rest gently on my quietly electric body.

Bearinger Road, September 17, 2011

Saturday morning was cool, clear and sunny. I had spent the night before biking around in the cold darkness, settling into the weekend, reading The Remembrance of Things Past in the streetlight at the edge of a deep dark park, making up new constellations in the clear dark sky, admiring the outlines of trees and the bright flashes of flowers in the night. I didn't speak at all between leaving work at 4:30 on Friday until after the ride I am now going to describe. So, although the past week had been very busy and full of talking and moving, and was so tiring that I fell asleep reading the Tale of Genji on the couch after work on Friday, I woke up on this fine clear late summer day, the dark autumn night and the tired electricity of the week behind me, ready for adventure. It is not every day that my body feels as fine as this, the light coursing through it unbroken, glowing clear and strong.

Before heading for bed the night before,in the darkness of the park, I pulled out my map into the streetlight because, inspired by my success on the River Road, I had an idea that I could try to do the Bearinger Road loop. Older or perhaps birthed in the same dawn as the River Road loop (that one August day two years ago where I left work at the end of the day, during a light rain, heartbroken and empty, and biked north, stopping at Columbia Lake on the dock to shout into the water and sky "This is the beginning!", that day when I began to re-learn my geography and re-write my history), the Bearinger loop has daunted me time and again. A brilliant success it was that first day in August to make it round the corner from Westmount to University - burst of sun through clouds, golden rods exploding in sunshine by the road side, big blue cloudy sky - freedom! - a thrill it was to arrive at Fischer Hallman and University, feeling myself on the cold hard edge of the world - a delicious thrill to pedal a short ways down Bearinger, savouring every revolution, loving the open fields, feeling wild under the big sky, - knowing I'd have to turn around shortly. I could not go any further. Bearinger stretched away vastly in an eastern curve of green and fields, looking endless and inviting and terrifying. I longed to return to that once familiar path along the lake, that country road in the middle of the city, where I had spent many a golden evening in the my first year of university. But, not on this or many other days.

This morning I came from the East, up the Iron Horse Trail through the University and into North Campus. Summer morning, quiet. I am comfortable in the North Campus: it's empty post-apocalyptic fields still feel as wild and thrilling as they did 2 years go when they were my first discovery after re-discovering Columbia Lake. Pushing through, steadily, with confidence, ready to meet my goal, I felt myself steady, calm, focused, like an athlete before a race. Up the hill to Bearinger, then down Bearinger, watching the north west end of Waterloo open before me, fields, trees, powerlines, distant developments, fresh winds from the North, imaginings of the country beyond. Picking up speed, I began to repeat to myself, without words, with ideas, that I could do this. I come to the lights at the intersection of Bearinger and Hagey Blvd: the farthest reaches of my present universe. I was not turning down Hagey on this day, although even that takes courage. I sped through the lights and found myself heading without hesitation down the country road.

There was a man walking down the road, on the left side, heading in the same direction as myself. I told myself two times that if a man was walking all the way down the road (because where would he go if not to the end of it?) than surely this is a safe and ordinary place, a place where people take walks and the walking is the most ordinary thing in the world. The road was very busy, frighteningly busy, with narrow shoulders and overhanging trees. I was mildly anxious for the man's safety, and my own. I stopped at the shoulder to remove my hat and gloves, and my sweaters fell off the back of my bike and I had to reorganize myself and still I was not afraid. Because, moments before, this had happened:

I realized very suddenly, only a hundred yards past the interaction, that I could SEE the end of the road. I look carefully, many times, as I traveled along, to see if it was a trick of the angle, but no, the road was amazingly short and I was traveling through it in what I can only describe as an strangely disappointingly short amount of time. The trees alongside the road lost their luster and the day became a little dull and flat, although still so objectively beautiful. I smiled with the joy of success, and the success felt a little hollow. I simply felt that I had missed some part of the challenge, that a piece was missing, some vital energy, of anxiety, of fear, or even just of effort. It felt so effortless. I tried to appreciate the beauty of the day and felt very little but ordinary, which was not an unpleasant feeling, just unexpected. This feeling continued up around the corner, and then I got distracted looking at the new Library and YMCA building. By the time I came out in the hard and shining end of the universe of Fischer Hallman and University, I felt mildly glorious again, with the feeling of accomplishment and freedom and the enjoyment of the sun on this cool morning - and yet tinged with a certain dullness and disappointment or maybe just surprise, of the kind you get when you slay a dragon and then wonder if you'll ever again feel the sublime thrill of it's mystery and terror. It makes you wonder if the beauty was in the fear, or rather, the fear came from the beauty. When the world feels so beautiful that all you can do is shake and shiver, and you can only look on it for a few moments. And this felt like the opposite of that, where the world is so ordinary that you wonder what all the fuss of getting there was about. I remembered suddenly that near by to here was the trail I'd written one of my first blog posts about.

Although the dullness was there, I was still pretty pleased to have made it this far and to feel the confidence to go further. I was not unaware that although at this moment I felt a little let down, the success of this ride was opening doors in my mind to further adventures and many possible freedoms. I went further down University, but found the loud and fast-moving traffic to make it an unenjoyable ride, not worth the physical and emotional effort. So I stopped in a wild suburban park and admired the colours of goldenrod, purple aster and a small white flower against the tangled and abundant dark green of later summer foliage.


My phone rang and I didn't answer it, not recognizing the number, and then I became anxious, feeling at the end of the invisible energy thread I'd spun out this far. I felt this was completely reasonable given the success of the day, so I returned to University and took Fischer Hallman down to Clair Lake Park. There, I sat and enjoyed the conversation of ducks, the weight and lightness of willows, and the memory of reading Dharma Bums in this very spot one year ago. Later on I went to the Medieval Faire, where a palm reader told me I had a strong heart line, and thus a strong feeling, but that my emotions were in balance, and that I knew my own mind.

Belmont and the Iron Horse Trail Rail Road Tracks, September 13, 2011

Tonight I went running. I ran through the graveyard and some Kitchener neighborhoods, and finished my run on the Iron Horse trail where it passes under the rail road tracks. I climbed up the slippery rocky path to the tracks. Up on top of the tracks, I can look west and east as the tracks fade into blue. I like to imagine London - I've never been in that direction. I like to imagine the day when I take the train west. I imagine that on that day I'll get the train going west and stay on it for a long time, keep traveling into an open future.

Tonight I walked east down the tracks for a while, alone in a quiet urban wilderness, goldenrod and long grasses bobbing between the tracks and the factory and the small industrial shacks. I imagined myself walking all the way to Toronto, quiet, steady, ordinary. Then I turned around and went west for a while, crossed Belmont as the sun started to go down.

I walked for long time after that in the quiet side streets, as the trees and the sky darkened, as the still late summer night came slowly down.

Breithaupt Park, September 12, 2011

There were flashes of lightning throughout the early evening, and some very long rumbles of thunder. I planned to take a walk to the library, and then in the rain. A few blocks from my house, I realized that the sky was clear in parts and that there was no reason to be walking around, carrying an umbrella, going to busy Uptown when my day had already been filled with people, when I could be going back home, getting my bicycle and going to Breithaupt Park.

I circled the block and returned to the apartment. A few minutes later I left again, this time heading east. I cycled through the park on the road, and stopped on the north east side of the ball diamond. Several short pine trees were grouped on a bed of grass, and I lay down under them facing towards the diamond and the woods. I read my book and occasionally glanced up to let the purple grey sky and the growing wind seep into me. The sky turned a grey blue and the trees became black, and I lay my book down on the pine needles, shifted over to the base of a tree, and entered into the half lotus position. While I meditated, it became darker, and occasionally lightening flashed. A few drops of rain fell. The air became cooler.

I felt a perverse sense that it would be acceptable to die by lightning strike. Not that I would want to, but that if I had to, I could accept it, more than say, dying by being shot or poisoned. I imagined the lightening as a concentration of life's energy coming out of the sky, entering my body and joining me to the earth in an electric moment. An innocent death, a death without meaning, a death by life. Death by nature, like being eaten by an animal or crushed by a tree. Life merging with life.

I then imagined what it would feel like to survive lightning strike. Would I have brain damage? Would I experience more or less anxiety than I do now? Would I have a streak of a scar?

With two minutes left in my practice, there was an intense flash of lightning to the west and I began to wonder if I was tempting fate out here in this field. I chanted my closing mantras:

Om Mane Padme Hung

Ta ya ta
Om
Bekanze bekanze maha bekanze
Radza sumud gate soha

wishing healing for three beloved women in my life, my mother, my grandmother and my dear friend Jean. During this chant to the Medicine Buddha, I visualize myself as the gentle and loving blue deity, and feel his healing energy pouring out of me and into me, into my loved ones. I feel my heart expand with joy.

And then a final

Amen

and hands in namaste, and I leapt up and walked my bike across the dark field, into and through the woods, and back home, where I called my mother and talked excitedly with her, sitting on my balcony, while watching little clouds pass over the full moon.

Riverbend Drive, September 11, 2011

Cold and damp morning, pale sunlight. I woke up in the tent in the yard to the sound of chickens and the damp coming through my mattress. It felt already like a lovely morning - a morning of cedar and pine and blue sky. I quickly took care of the necessities of starting a good day - eat, feed and pet cat, put on socks and shoes.

Even before I started to consciously plan my trip, I became aware of the possibility of completing the Riverbend Drive loop on this day. Riverbend Drive and it's emotional impenetrability have been a source of tension and an obstruction to my travels for 2 years. Completing the Riverbend Drive loop had become a sort of benchmark of my progress. This road was like a wall which I beat against every so often in my slow yet persistent quest to travel all roads leading into, out of and through this city.

Two years ago, once damp morning in August, when the sun was still pale and the wind still fresh before a day of heat to come, I bravely pushed my way up the Guelph St hill just past the underpass, re-breaking new ground that had once been a familiar starting point to adventures in the world beyond - Bloomingdale, Mary Hill, East Kitchener, Breslau, Guelph proper. Alas, no more - this was all emotionally foreign territory again, a significant loss of freedom now forgotten by the terrific sense of accomplishment I experienced as I crested the enormous hill, pushing with all my might, satisfied and tired. Dogs in the runs at the Humane Society, which is located where Guelph St meets River Rd, barked their celebration of my victory, my quest to re-discover the Old World.

Standing with the posture of an explorer who'd just planted a flag in the earth (or the moon) I smiled at the wildflowers bobbing their encouragement in the windy ditch. I had traveled many little roads that summer two years ago and penetrated persistently into many new little worlds. Now, standing at the top of this one, seeing River Road stretch out northwards before me, a long gentle slope into a sea of trees, office buildings and industrial centre peeking out like little islands, and a wide sky over me, hearing the dogs barking in the morning air, it seemed as though the most natural thing to do would be to sweep down that hill, feeling the blast of wind in my face and in my heart, the growing excitement of the road taken.

And - I found I couldn't. I couldn't let go of the brakes and set sail down this hill. I spent quite a while at the top of it, alternately bolstering my confidence by remembering how satisfied I was to be where I was to begin with, and shaken by the feeling that I couldn't go any further. The wildflowers were so beautiful and the wind so fresh and fragrant. Life really wasn't so bad, despite it's difficulties. I had been progressing well. A life of small things, of moving in small circles, of slow progress, could be and was a blessed life. I was happy.

And a little heart-broken. Eventually I went home.

For two years, I occasionally returned to this corner, stood at the top of the hill, gazed down Riverbend Drive, and could not make myself let go of the brakes. One time I biked up from the Lancaster direction for some ways, and then turned around anxiously. Eventually, I began to avoid coming in this direction at all. I favoured other directions, northwest of the city, where I could break through and find new roads. I knew I could travel a little ways south east on River Road, but that held no joy, for I felt I could only go so far in this direction and then turn back. Travelling the neighborhoods leading up to Riverbend Drive began to feel futile and repetitive, like walking in circles in a wall garden. I began to realize how much of the mystery and charm one finds in a place is due to what lies beyond it.

I remained undecided, as I left the house this morning, two years later, whether I should attempt this often demoralizing test again. Since I started this writing last year, I have developed a new perspective on the conquering of roads. I now believe the only reason to explore is curiousity and joy, rather than the belief that if I fear something, I must do it to prove that I can, or to conquer the fear. I refuse to travel any road just because I feel like I can't. If I feel like I can't, then I don't. If I want to try, I try. I do what I want, and this summer has been a summer of light and sunshine and cool forest breezes and quiet gentle roads.

Since I felt curious to try again, I thought, I will, but I'll make sure that wherever I am if I fail is a beautiful place I can explore with a feeling of relaxation and pleasure. I would not like to stand again on top of that hill with only the wildflowers in the ditch and the wind and the wall as my destination. When I aimed this morning, I aimed for something delightful. I decided to go from the other direction, from Lancaster, because then if I failed I could at best work on getting further along the Grand River towards Bloomingdale, and at least enjoy the path along the river behind the office buildings.

As I came down Lancaster and it turned into River, I'd almost decided I wouldn't do it at all. There were whisperings in me saying,"You have not been able to do this, and so you must! If you do not do this, then you are a failure!" I thought, I haven't woken up on this delightful morning in late summer, free for a few hours to roam and delight in sun and wind and shade, to do anything other than for pleasure. I will just turn left into the wooded path and then see what I feel like doing.

And yet - my feet kept pedaling, my body falling naturally into the arc of the road, the arrow of my movement pulling me further along the Road, further and further, enjoying the trees on either side, enjoying the sky, landmarking myself, figuring out where I was, in the sunlight, until I was past the mid-point, that point in every road where you are about to be farther in than out, and you must commit, commit to the road and to your breath, commit to holding the fear if it overtakes you, commit to yourself that you will travel this road no matter what happens. A group of joggers suddenly coming off the trail to the east ahead comforted me. They were people doing things here and I was a person doing things here and this was a place people could just simply do things and nothing more, no stories or dangers or hidden meanings. As the road opened up I saw the trail head park and remembered, suddenly, it's existence and it's beauty and my memories, completely forgotten, of being there, of this being a place to play and be and explore. I smiled with shining delight at finding this forgotten place, of this forgotten part of myself.

I was in deep now, and I felt gentle rush of energy. It was now an uphill road. My legs pumped along with my heart, pushing up the road. I was again Columbus at the head of the ship, heart and mind and limbs totally focused on the new world ahead, body strained and tense, so much pressure on the body to push to survive in this forward motion, but the strength is here, the mind is here, the clarity and stillness is here. Everything I need is here.

I could see the Humane Society up ahead. The road became steeper. I got off and walked, and that was fine. After all, my challenge was time, not energy. Walking might have been a cop-out on muscle strength, but, adding as it did to my time in the uncertain, it was actually an indication of deeper capacity. Many steps, patience, steady focus. I crested the hill and there were the wildflowers and the wind and my corner which was now a lovely home-coming. The trees on the corner whispered, "We always knew you would come here and meet us like this!"

Tom's House, September 10, 2011

I visited my friend Tom at 9:00 in the morning. He usually goes to bed at 4:00 or 5:00 am on Friday nights and sleeps in on Saturday, but today, I sent him a text at 8:00 and woke him up. He was happy to see me. We sat on his porch, he opened the birthday present that I had brought him, and then we talked. The rhythm of my voice went up and down, quiet and loud. I talked loudly when I became excited about something and then I quieted myself as I remembered how early it was and how I kept interrupting him, and how lovely it was to sit back and listen to his voice again after so long. His voice, like his hair, golden and deep and slowly flowing, like the essence of honey in bees rumbling through sunlight on cool green leaves.

Later on we went into his backyard where he showed me his pile of industrial scraps from his renovations and his pile of apple scraps from his cider-making. He pulled a white plastic chair into the sun and I lay down on the grass in the shade. We talked about things.

Tom doesn't often see the light at this angle, the light at this time of the day. He found that it had a completely different quality from the light of mid-day or evening. Later on, as the day went by, he felt that the light was staying the same, and that maybe in this season of autumn, when the embers of the year glow before dying into darkness, the golden light of early morning suffuses the entire day.

We have seen three autumns together, and this was the first time that we became aware of this quality of the light.