Morning on the balcony the other day, and the first thing I noticed was that a fellow had gone through the break in the fence and was digging around in the scrabbly dirt.
For a couple of summers now, as the site sits empty, we’ve fantasized about and throwing sunflower seeds or wildflower seeds in there to get a field of colour rather than the bleak dust of it, but I think the truth of the matter is there’s more pebble than soil, as even the weeds that have started to grow here and there around the edges only get so far.
So I wondered what exactly was he up to in there? I imagined a scientist taking soil samples to measure quality, or toxicity levels, something…
And then he stood and went towards a pile of random junk against the fence, and a bunny rabbit shot out from somewhere inside the stacked stuff, and froze.
If I don’t move, you can’t see me.
He’s a tiny dot there, to the right of the man, by the first bend in the fence. I went inside to get my DSLR, but alas all batteries were dead, so I was stuck with only the phone camera, waiting to see what would happen next.
Well, not so much, it turned out.
After some moments of observing the bunny from where he stood, the man slowly went back to scrabbling around in the dirt, and the bunny stayed frozen in his spot. They each did their thing without interfering with the other.
The day began with breakfast for two at the famous dumpling place on Spadina, and the fortune in my cookie said something stern about <<mettre de l’eau dans son vin>> and as we pushed through the doors and out into the street we debated the meaning of this, the translation, but also the intention of the saying, was it about making concessions, adjustments, or was it about making do with less?
Wandering through Kensington Market, my friend started telling me about a new practice she’s exploring called “Access Consciousness” and how she’s been given a series of questions to ask herself throughout the day – questions like “who does this belong to?” which you ask slowly, repeatedly about emotions, reactions that come up, but then also the question “how does it get any better than this?” which you ask yourself again and again and again, relaxing into all of the truth of the moment and wondering if it possibly could…
HOW does it get any better than this?
How does it get ANY BETTER than this?
How does it get any better than THIS?
This wonderful, meditative question reminded me of the way I feel when working on the 100 Day Challenge I’ve been doing for a couple of months now – it’s purposely not too ambitious, only about the joy of the thing, focused on the simple pleasures of paper, maybe pencil, maybe some watercolours, but who knows, maybe some charcoal depending on the day, depending on the creature, the image.
Seated Hare – charcoal, white charcoal, and watercolour on paper
This week, I am writing about noticing. About paying attention. About exploring what the Universe is telling us. This journey can be both arduous and joyful. It is certainly worthwhile.
Begin here
Paying attention is key to any artistic or life pursuit. It’s how we use all our senses. When we pay attention, we see patterns we otherwise would miss. We hear the chimes of the Universe, taste more intensely, let smell spark memory.
Touch
The most elemental of the senses for artists, even more than sight or hearing, is touch. It is how we relate to our materials. We touch the keyboard, the pens, the yarn, the paint, the fabric, the fragile silk of an emerging flower. Touch the sensitive place behind the ear, the pulse point of understanding.
~ Fran Gardner for The 100 Day Project
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Many blocks further up into Little Italy on such a beautiful sunny day and we sat in the park for what seemed like days, catching up on so many things, but here and there remembering that beautiful question, until it was time to pee so we headed out through a little pathway that had been beaten out amongst some trees and oooo’d and aaaa’d over the little fields of bluebells giving a colourful shape to the path.
How does it get any better?
Up at my friend’s beloved familiar home, we ended up on the back porch as is always the case on a gorgeous spring day, and it was still too cool for the cherry blossoms to have started on the huge cherry tree that dominates the back yard, but I noticed all the textures in little corners of collected objects, of aging wood against cut glass and burnished metal and porous ceramics.
Oh how I miss these kinds of textures that we had everywhere back in the days when we lived in a funny little house with a splendid back yard and a pond and an orange cat and a crumbling wooden fence and moss covered bricks.
After a trundle down Parliament in a busy crowded bus it was getting dark by the time I got to my brand spanking new neighbourhood of concrete and steel and glass, with no gardens, no aging wood or porous ceramics, but lo and behold, there are still moments of magic when the fog from the lake creeps up at dusk and the skies simply couldn’t get any better…
We’ve had some cold snaps here, creating a bit of ice on the lake, but today the temperature truly drops with the arrival of the much hyped polar vortex.
I keep thinking about the swans – this winter is the first time I’ve seen swans here in our harbour.
While kayaking in the summer, I’d noticed a little island full of them over by The Spit – not quite in the harbour but adjacent, over in the wildland park area.
It looks lovely in their spot over there – sandy and green and very few signs of humans, so I’m not sure why this one pair has come to take up residence in the noise and grit of the harbour proper – it doesn’t look very hospitable.
When I first learned or noticed that swans stick around all winter, was back in the days when I was going up to Georgian Bay on the regular, getting out of the city and into nature, and getting to know my first digital camera.
Up there I saw that even as the temperatures plummeted and the water became filled with huge chunks of ice, the swans endured, floating quietly through the cold winter months. What impenetrable layers they must have, I thought, thinking of the thick layers of fat on a duck and imagining something like that underneath all the pretty white feathers.
The sense of this kind of obdurate toughness has been coming up repeatedly in the ongoing saga of my dad’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.
Over the holidays his partner of the last twenty-five years died. It had been coming for a long time and yet in the end happened very quickly, I think catching my dad off guard as he himself has had such a rough year health-wise and is the elder of the two.
Sad times.
Since my dad has been living for some months in a retirement home, we have begun the process of packing up the condo where they lived, and are in and out with boxes and bags, figuring out how to deal with all the stuff of a life.
The other day my brother and I got deep into it with the doorman of their condo building, discussing their dealings with the ongoing issues with the plumbing and renovations, and he said to us, “If I had to go to war, I would want those two with me – they were so stubborn…”. And there was something about the way he said it and what he didn’t quite say that implied a kind of “Okay, sure they’re gay, but… those two homosexuals are some tough motherf***ers.”
follow your nose 