When the Cows Come Home (part 1)
It’s funny. Looking back, everything fits on two pages. The bullet agenda, not the journal. Colours, tasks, tiny drawings.
It’s funny, sitting here still in this sanctuary of an attic room, already reflecting. Noticing the changes of tree tops, the birdsongs, the accumulation of gifts and cards on my table. Practicing remembrance because we have the privilege of the inner space and inner time to do so.
Week 1. 5/29 9:27AM pick up. 5/30 pizza dinner @Shipwright. 5/31 outreach concert @Bridgewater; 7:30PM “talking trees” @Mahone Bay. 6/1 farmers market, icecream, kombucha. 6/2 adjudication, Bar Salvador. 6/3 rain, soup. 6/4 “asian collision” feast. Week 2. 6/5 pouring brunch @Savvy Sailor. 6/6 school outreach, tea and cake @Catherine’s. 6/7 “A little light music” happy birthday Lunenburg, mussels @Knot. 6/8 farmers market, talk with Veryan. 6/9 morning @Chicory Blue. 6/10 “Oceans Day”, “Women Folk” @Herman’s Island. 6/11 Schumann Quintet, Backharbour Trail, DP Summer Cocktail. Week 3. 6/12 Hirtle’s Beach & Gaff Point soundwalk. 6/13 dress, tree. 6/14 pancakes, “Wanting to Start Again”. 6/15 ferry fried rice, Point Prim, North Rustico, Dune’s Gallery, dinner @Blue Mussel Cafe, beach walk. 6/16 lobster benny @ Chez Yvonne, Anne’s House and Haunted Woods, Jem’s Books, Laura’s Honey Wine, cow friends, lunch @Ta-Ke Sushi, icecream @Cow’s, microwave steak. 6/16 Subway and Starbucks, dinner @Ellen’s KBBQ. 6/17 Bass Clarinets concert, reception party. Week 4. 6/19 feast prep. 6/20 LaHave, Risser’s Beach, “When the Cows Come Home”, dinner feast ratatouille lasagna chocolate tarte. 6/21 lobster beer @Barn, Verona premiers, Bachmann’s Beach summer solstice bonfire. 6/22 farmers market. Shelbourne Benefit Concert. 6/23 Blue Rocks run, Eastern Star sailing, dinner @Knot, Now premiers. 6/24 Now premiers.
And then there are all the moments in between that didn’t make it into the agenda or journal. The tastes and smells and images and ancient languages that we can feel but not speak, that we can only remember, almost, barely, when we hear it, notice it, in between fracturing colliding realities, universes, dimensions.
Hopefully the heart will carry some of them forward.
For now, some scratches and scribbles…
May 28, 2023
8:48AM Airdrie
May 29, 2023
3:15AM Airdrie 6:15AM Halifax
What’s behind the green door?
Lake Agnes. Mirror. Waterfall. Trekking side by side. Flushed rosy cheeks, panting for breath, heart pounding only when you stop to listen.
The smell of pine.
Retrace our steps back - we’ve done well, so well. In the same repeats I’m confident we discovered some new light. I’m proud of all of us, each of us. We all put in courageous efforts despite ourselves, our flaws, defences, our conditioned attitudes, responses to one anotherr.
There was picnic, BBQ, cards, a whole house transformed piece by piece, volleyball, walks, a new pork ribs recipe, a fabulous dinner party, a 2 hour drive blasting anime OPs and revisiting the cat Levan Polka.
And so much rage, screaming every day. The battles, the angers, the hopelessness.
All of this, existing side by side.
I love each of you so much. I know each of you love me, love each other so much. We all have fucked up relationships to our concept of love. Or expression of love. Of controlling, manipulating, imposing what is supposedly ‘good’ for someone else.
“In the name of love.” We do so much shit.
Loneliness and fear that festers to anger. Resentment. A desperation to control when everything else is out of control.
How do we reconcile what we know and what we feel.
Thank you all. It’s a privilege to be your daughter. Your sister. To share this strange humbling mess of a silly life.
Remember the now. Now is the time to take care of softness.
Remember you still have the honour now, of treasuring love.“In this lifetime”
you laughed and said.You wish someone was listening.
Few things make me as happy as seeing you smile.
“A dreamer has mutual trust with time.”
May 30, 2023
9:34AM Luneburg NS
“Back here again.”
How many times have we said that?
4:45PM
What a thing can mean.
How much, a thing can speak. Show. Tell. Images, colours black and white. Silent screams. The rage. The loneliness.
The hope. That traps. That kills worse than killing.
Paint.
Words. To whom?
NEVER
COME
BACK.
Run. Get the fuck out.
And then, there at our feet in the grass, the stroller. That broken stroller, alone, tossed, beaten, crumbled in front of the cabin. Nothing else.
What is that?
What is that story, multitude of stories that now are activated, remembered if only through having nightmare flashes - the tender joyful moments scribbled with madness of red blue black paint, the blood the tears the clawing. Rotting. The innocence. The life that battles death. The child, who?
Coursing through our veins, these bursting bottled emotions, injustices, loneliness, pain, rage rage rage, sadness, devastation. Love. Jumble of time…
May 31, 2023
9:01AM Lunenburg NS
I’m proud and grateful to be me.
Tong-ing.
Even when I’m not a verb, I am a verb. And noun and adjective and title in relation to his world.
My blood is red, like yours. Like the sky burns.
My house is red, like yours. Painted over in some attempt, at what.
Movement, we crave. We can go for a run, stretch, do yoga. We get to play music in a beautiful hall, eat pizza drink beer talk psychology on the waterfront. We have ideas we have dreams we see the smoke and feel the pebbles and we are still dreamers, blessed with a near invisible responsibility to our joy and capacity to feel and process this wild collective memory.
We laugh when we tell stories.
And it feels better after we tell them. They become less horrifying, in a way. They become stories. That we can close the cover on, archive, share with others before, after.
None of us live in a vacuum.
”Everything is a bridge.”
We laugh so much. we need to learn sign language. We count rings in tree trunks to calm down, and we stare at lichen.
We’re in good company.
Dear dear, go and breathe the air.
June 2, 2023
8:53AM Lunenburg
A day we will remember.
Beauty tucked in so many nooks.
Nooks. You like nooks.
The breeze squeezing through the crack as we sat in our tiny chairs hacking out our hearts. Laughing at the moments of silliness, of being stuck. Then, the sweep of awe, gratitude, amazement finding that impossible point of division, arrival and departure simultaneously, continuity.
The making of. That lifeline.
The moments of feeling overwhelmed by the 360 degree energy, thoughts ideas tangents excitement bouncing into the air at a tempo just hovering above bearable chaos.
But I flow along your side.
We find our sync, tune in.
I allow to be uplifted.
Hey, I adore that book too. Wow, these flavours. Yes, I will eat that. Yes, it smells like home. Yes, absolutely, we dance in the kitchen, we cry for a shadow, we eat melted ice-cream and wander while we dream and work.
It’s always been a privilege. In the little moments. I want to say thank you. Constantly. Just sitting across the coffee table, our laptops lined, kombucha diagonal. Stickers, etc.
I remember the blessings of this company.
Anything. And everything we feel, want, allow. Everywhere. All the time. That’s us.
This privilege. The duty, the honouring. We will respect that. We promise to carry it forwards, which is all the same, backwards, to ourselves, to each other.
Everything is really just everything else. As we always say.
”Here we go again.” Da capo.
June 3, 2023
8:43AM Lunenburg NS
Thunder and lightening.
A kind of life. Galleries, tapas, a stroll along the harbour. Rehearsing. Chatting. Smelling the fresh sigh of the earth fed by the rain.
Hands frozen or hands overheating.
Back straight in the adjudicator’s chair. Chin up, head held high. Pencil scratching. The eager anticipation. The clapping. The announcement of results.
What does power do?
What does taking up space do.
As our roles morph, transition, change. To remember where we came from - those seats we sat too. To act, as in - not “pretend”, but fulfill the changes in the system that we could begin to affect. By acting with attention, kindness, a place of joy. Not fear. As necessary as you are, fear, you serve your role so others can activate theirs.
We laugh, we play, we continue on our little paths in the dark. Listening to the rain, the sirens.
And we still have a delicious cold breakfast.
We still have blanket and pen and paper.
We’re here planning a birthday party and a consolation or lament. Whatever. To facilitate, bring people together. Eatt, drink, be merry. Make music.
Remember the infinite ways we are living.
Cold? Build heat from within.
“We are all in this alone
Holding - listening into abscence”
June 4, 2023
8:21AM Lunenburg NS
The fog. Blurring lines, softening edges. Mirroring the haze within our minds, to express some kind of calm fuzziness. It’s chibi-ing. Just being a blob. Dim colours, lower resolution, hiding, slowing, quieting.
Pitter patter, drizzling mist with sharp bird calls - the perfect rhythm. A swoosh of the wind, collecting different textures from sectionals of grass or leaves. The water, waves never constant, so constantly reliably unpredictable. The smell of damp.
Head heavy, also fuzzy.
To spend the afternoon napping and tucked in bed.
To have company.
To see the cemetery and the Academy and the tree tops from my bedroom window.
To slurp umami soup and sip cider and laugh about a fairy-tale anime.
This kind of quietude. Roaring whistling wind.
Do you want to run and soar with the wind again? This itch in the body to move, for heart to race, breath to quicken, muscles to clench. All so we could lie there and be nothing. Enjoy nothing.
Our limitations are part of the game.
There is a game because of the rules, limits, framework. How many times have we forgotten what we wanted to write down.
Today, another opportunity to bake a cake, cook a meal, share in company. And so we keep playing.
June 5, 2023
8:39AM Lunenburg NS
To be able to articulate our story.
How was your week?
“Wonderful. Fulfilling. Relaxing, filled with peaceful or intense or magical moments of connections.”
or, “A blur.”
Practice the remembrance. Using tools. Pinning tiny roadmarks. A keyboard, market haul, cafe and harbour, books on little stools, rehearsing till midnight, anime at our little dining table or tucked in bed. Choreography, seamless transitions in this two part fugue of the tiny kitchen.
This kind of teamwork.
The curiosity of time, what ends up ‘mattering’. What repetition can offer in long term memory. A coastline that you remember so well. A certain smell - fishy seaweed, a certain emptiness. A wash of whatever emotion that is at the recognition of something familiar.
I know. I was here. I loved. I act. I make.
Start again. Knowing desire. Knowing want.
What is the recipe? What do you want to make?
Let’s see. Let’s test it, measure, experiment.
“DP’s Old-Fashioned Wanting to Start Again Recipe”
1 cup of hope
2 cups of courage
and a pinch of magic:
(no matter how brief - a suspension of disbelief)
(aka trust.)
Today is another day I will remember. Thank you
The softening of memory. By memory.
Happenings. Aways happening.
Giving attention to what grounds and elevates us.
Even on a cloudy day there is so much light here.
Every morning we smile and say hello.
”Even on a day like this” we can
Go on a treasure hunt:
Find 3 tiny objects in nature to entrust your secrets to.
Leave them there.
June 7, 2023
7:46AM Lunenburg NS
“Love.
Recognizing that yourself as you know it is inextricably linked to another self.”
The humbling, mysterious, paradoxical connection.
”In relation”
All our relations.
It’s all a love poem. The one poem.
A humbling of the self in face of another self, or many selves.
Remembering the now.
What’s first? To notice or to care. Or to remember. Before any hope or trust or courage. Simply name, recognize. Recognizing what? That things don’t move you?
So was it again, being needed? By whom? Or even yourself?
I am (sometimes).
a moody sour patch kid.
How it’s alright, love,
that we don’t love living
Listening to what the land needs.
Being in discomfort.Letting, letting silence.
Letting each other know how we’d like to be received. We have to first know ourselves, supposedly. Great. And taking a leap of faith to choose some truth, commit to some truth, even if it doesn’t turn out to be our truths. That’s a step towards starting.
June 9, 2023
7:48AM Lunenburg
Burning to restore.
Burning to create resilience.
Manic derpy laughter late into the night rehearsal.
This kind of life.
That’s all.
June 10, 2023
7:24AM Lunenburg NS
Feeling before understanding.
Knowing without believing.
Disconnect between head heart spirit. The truth, or whatever.
You can really forget, momentarily. That’s a kind of freedom, or thrill. Released. Solitary, as in not alone, but your own.
You don’t need a reason to shower me with gifts.
“Thank you for being someone I (always?) want to share with.”
Forever always.
Not sometimes always?
Juen 11, 2023
7:09AM Lunenburg
Sunday, ray of light. You want to run again. Not away. Just into. Leap, soar, sprinting through air, birds, green. Increase through spending.
What is this so-called ‘being moved’ anyways.
To not take ourselves too seriously.
To perceive things as they are, not less, not more. Not to belittle what we do, and not to exaggerate either out of proportion.
And briefly, that wild energy. Passes through.
People are so fragile.
Everyone is the same. A mother daughter song. A story of starting again, pausing again, standing tall, overcoming whatever. Cold winter winds. Simply the best.
Haunted fog. Winding roads.
