My garden is likely full of chocolate geraniums in bloom, peony buds with ants working away at their green caps, irises bearding, roses starting to flush, and the dangling white earrings of solomon’s seal.
I haven’t been there for some of the magnificent micro changes that happen in May and I wonder if my poppies are taking this season.
While travelling I worried I would miss Lily of the Valley, but I didn’t. It was popping up in front yards all over Toronto and Hamilton. My partner’s mom had a patch growing in her yard. I harvested a bundle and placed them in her bathroom.
I want this to be a short post. Mainly because I’m on a mini-vacation, visiting my sister in Ottawa now and trying to stay away from a computer screen or anything else that beckons. My sister turned 31 on this visit and though we couldn’t go out dancing or frequent art galleries, we’ve found our own way of celebrating through ordinary moments like cooking together, walking through the city, or scootering like we did yesterday, getting coffee to-go, reading and writing side-by-side. My sister is also a poet and writer. One of my favourite poems written by her is titled home and hangs in my room above my dresser. She’s a wordsmith, deep thinker and extremely sentient like the flowers, very in touch with trees, emotions, the silken soul stuff. As a girl I was always in awe of the way she tended to her surroundings, artfully nesting in her space, another world created by things she loved and cherished. I’ve learned this art of atmospheric aesthetics from her, curious to be let into her space growing up, what magic seemed to sprout from it.
When we were small I couldn’t imagine a future where we’d become best friends, the gap in age seemed impossible back then, eight and four so different. I was a mean child at times and pushed her away in the years when she may have needed a friend in me. I wish I could go back to those moments and look around with all I know now and see what she was up to then. I wish I’d paid more attention to that spirited girl in love with beauty. In our thirties the gap doesn’t feel so far. We often get asked if we’re twins or people mistake her for being the older one. We go along with it, laughing to ourselves.
My time here has been spent witnessing her life. I’ve enjoyed seeing her take up space in a city that so suits her. We’ve mostly been outside under willow trees, tearing off pieces of baguette and dipping it into the softest cheese from France (something like a Reblochon but to be honest I was too busy spooning it into my mouth to take notice of its name). It was a raw-cow’s milk cheese, washed-rind and smear-ripened and we sat next to Patterson’s Creek lapping it up in the sunshine.
The night I arrived there was a super-flower-blood-moon-lunar-eclipse, which is almost too much to write out. We went for a walk along the canal together and found it hanging low in the sky, tucked behind old homes with cloud wisps floating in its path, the pinkish glow didn’t appear until the early hours the next day but it was a large face looking back at us, the first lunar eclipse since 2019.
Eclipses are said to mark a crossroad of a new beginning and there have been many of those lately. My sister started her own private practice, my partner submitted his script to Sundance, I finished the first draft of this book I’m writing. A messy, shitty first draft at that, but it’s hefty and bound and so beautiful to hold. I wrote into the heartwood, a Betsy Warland term as my mentor pointed out. Wrote down the bones and gave it shape. I couldn’t be more proud of this raw rough and beating thing I’ve made. Betsy warland writes that “between the writer and the page is a magnetism more compelling than any other relationship” and I can say I felt this pull and bond as I returned to the manuscript over and over this year. Still do, as there’s much more to be revised and rewritten. I’ll need tenacity though. This first draft was accomplished because of the parameter of protection I put around my concentrated writing time. Yet, I often found myself writing into the fractured hours and slits of time, gathering the bits to make sense of what I’d written.
I let my sister flip through it on this visit and she was stopping in parts, laughing and then in the next welling up. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s my sister, that’s likely, and not necessarily a judge of the writing objectively, but since it’s a sort of love letter to my family, it was warming to experience.
As my partner and I make plans to move back to Ontario, I can’t help but feel it’s appropriate to have such beautiful glowing signifier from above. During a full-moon such as this one you’re supposed to let go of limitations, self-imposed restrictions or anything else keeping you small, in order to welcome more expansive possibilities for life. My sister and I stood there, staring at the golden reflection ripple on the river, talking to the moon as if it were god, “I’m afraid of—“ and we spoke out our fears and let them roll off our tongues into the night.
I don’t know if the moon heard but it felt good to let some shit go after such a challenging and at times debilitating year.
One of my fears was around my writing. I’ve come this far, how will I keep going? The truth is the writing life always depends on ourselves. No one will do the time management for you. No one else will take care of putting the words on paper or know how they need to be shifted about on the page to sing. Writing is a solitary art form and being away in isolation gave me permission to hide away in my green cave. I will need this permission as I return to the bustle of a large city and the world begins to open-up again.
In a poetry of self-compassion course I took with David Whyte this month he said, “you can be better at the way you travel but you can’t travel in the way that someone else travels.” This has stayed with me, not only as a traveller but also as a person who’s had to find her own way in life and make peace that it doesn’t often look like those around me. I’ve come to listen closer now and notice the thoughts in my mind, you are living like a teenager in your thirties. You don’t own property. You have no children. What are you doing? Who do you think you are to call yourself a writer? A poet? An artist? And then I listen to someone like David Whyte speak about when he began referring to himself as a poet and his aunt said to him, “well you must think highly of yourself” followed by that insidious Irish shame, “the likes of you.”
We all have a version of this, a judgemental voice leering over our shoulder. Who is that voice in your life? I don’t think my situation is unique, but I am aware of what my gremlins say and then I try to smile at those thoughts wryly and with a bit of humour. Often with a dose of honesty, affirming their half-truths, as all good lies twist up the truth. While I was making my way through this draft I found myself faced with all my failures and mishaps, disappearing into the dark pit as writing friend calls it and many days I didn’t know how I’d climb out. I stopped trying to climb and gave myself a tender look, the way I would one of my dearests. Then I looked around at my surroundings, at the memories and mistakes and wrote from the pit, from my old failures and somehow as I did this, the bees were making white combs and sweet honey from them and it was no longer the dream of a book but a book.
We’ve been renting this big old house by the sea this year and spent most hours in a day within its walls. It’s the place I’ve called home though it’s felt like an extended writer’s retreat the entire time. From the first day when we arrived, I knew we’d only be visitors here. So I’ve lived in the liminal space, waiting out the pandemic, uncertain of when or where we’d go next, or if we’d even be going together. If there’s anything I’ve taken from this year it’s how very tenuous and unpredictable life can be, but this has only made me more fervently devoted to my loved ones and compassionate towards my way of existing in the world.
Before I left for this trip, I sat in my office, the room that will always be the place I wrote my first book, and I began structuring the chapters. It was overwhelming at first, so many pages, vignettes, stories and questions but I moved with the work in an intuitive way, leaving some things out and putting in pieces I didn’t expect. A skill I honed as a floral designer was suddenly useful for the book structuring process. The book’s form is entirely different from the way it began and yet, it has a narrative arc now and the pieces I’ve chosen seem fitting for how it’s all unspooling.
It’s absurd to me that the current ending will likely not be the true end. It’s close, but as my sister and I sat in her living room, going over the draft together, I realized that a thread running through the tapestry is leading me somewhere I couldn’t have anticipated. This is the beauty and surprise of memoir writing. How does a writer know where to end? Where to begin even?
Once I know I will write more about that. For now the words are rearranged and as I revise and craft, I see the work come alive, a heart of its own really and I’m trying to trust it.
I’ll miss the friends I’ve met in Halifax dearly and of course the ocean with its sandy beaches, slippery seaweed and stoney shoreline. I will miss the freshness of salt air and dipping my feet into muddy water. I will miss this old house with its big windows, radiators and hardwood floors; the sconces, chandeliers and wood fireplace. I will miss watching the sunset on the long side porch and the cry of gulls just beyond the neighbour’s yard, but I am going home, to the place where I was born, to write out the truest ending.
Things I’ve watched or read (or am reading) this month and recommend:
Girlhood by Melissa Febos (this is by far the most brilliant book I’ve read all year. It’s a triumphant, tender self-reckoning and I can’t put it down.)
Bo Burnham: Inside by Bo Burnham (It’s a vulnerable expressive masterpiece with social commentary through electro-pop that experiments with forms. I laughed and cried and didn’t know what it was, a total trip. It’s extraordinary.)
Shithouse by Cooper Raiff (a heartfelt coming of age film that’s so well written and gives all the awkward warm fuzzies.)
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (I’ve only just begun but I already feel very invested in the narrator’s voice. Moshfegh uses her protagonist to show how necessary alienation can be and I’m sure there will be resonance after living in a pandemic.)
Mare of Easttown by Craig Zobel (I will not spoil anything, but if you like a dark mystery and a mother-daughter complex to provide levity, watch it.)
A Stone You Never Put Down: The Secret Languages of Grief by Carol Smith
Last Night As I Was Sleeping by Antonio Machado, translated by David Whyte & Robert Bly (See translation below.)
Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt –blessed illusion!– that there was a spring breaking out in my heart. I said: Along what secret aqueduct are you coming to me, Oh water, water of a new life that I have never drunk?
Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt –blessed illusion!– that there was a beehive here in my heart.
And the golden bees were making white combs
and sweet honey from my old failures.
Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt –blessed illusion!– that there was a fiery sun here in my heart.
It was fiery because it gave warmth as if from a hearth, and it was sun because it gave light and brought tears to my eyes.
Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt–blessed illusion!– that there was god here in my heart.