There is a strange cat in the basement, like a cat that has been painted a dark burgundy.
I am nudging the cat up the stairs towards the back door, and as we pass through the kitchen, Dad is there, hunched and skeletal, getting himself a snack. He makes noises of annoyance at the cat, at the audiobook I am listening to… I promise everything is being taken care of, everything will be alright in just a minute.
***
When I awake I remember of course Dad left us on Wednesday.
He was 90 – a life very well lived.
His departure had been coming for a while, coming for a year and a half and then coming on all at once, coming so clearly and pointedly in the last week that we contacted palliative care and they came and laid out what they could offer – the painkillers, the sedatives.
During the summer I was out in BC for a couple of months, and often feared we might lose him while I was away and it would be something I’d have to live with.
There was an evening where I’d come back from dinner with some new friends and was on the couch in the house where I was staying, messing around with my phone, and I looked up and saw an owl, just there on the balcony, staring at me.
The next day I thought for sure I would get the call that Dad had gone. The owl was so spooky, his sunken black eyes glaring at me I was convinced he was a messenger of death.
For days I drew him over and over, in pencil, in watercolour, on the iPad…
But no, the summer carried on without incident after the owl’s visit, and many evenings were spent in various local bays enjoying the sunsets and watching the seals come out, their little round heads bobbing in the water looking for evening snacks.
Word of the summer : crepuscular.
1 : of, relating to, or resembling twilight
2 : occurring or active during twilight
Back home and into the final weeks of care, soon enough it was clear where things were going, and the spirit of loss and melancholy began to haunt all events.
A friend had a film premiering at TIFF, so I went and tried to be distracted by the bustle, the crowds… but alas, Dad was such a huge aficionado, a devotee of the festival every year until these last few, so my thoughts were with him at every turn.
In recent nights another critter made it’s way into my world – I’d been leaving the balcony door open at night to get some fresh air in as the apartment was full of strange smells.
A moth got trapped inside and would get fluttery in the evenings, knocking against windows and ceilings, clumsy futile movements, harassed, looking for a way out.
Wednesday morning I found the moth dead in the kitchen. And I wondered…
Early in the summer I was with friends at their cottage, and we’d been talking about the element of EARTH.
It’s the element I’m supposed to be engaging with this year, in the round the wheel / elements & directions / shamanic cycle work I’ve been doing, one year at a time. The first year was the basic foundation, the next year was the direction of the East / the element of Fire / and the Joy Child. This year is the year of the West / of Earth / of Stone People / and of the Nurturing Parent.
And frankly, it’s been a bit of a challenge. Like, Fire, I get it, am totally fascinated by if somewhat afraid of…
Water I love love love and could be in all day long …
But Earth? What the heck is Earth about??? How do you immerse yourself in / fall in love with / be fascinated by Earth? It seems so… kind of… inert.
One of the other shamanic teachers I used to have focused a lot on the direction of the West as the place of Dreams and the place of Death. And this year of connecting with the West and the Earth started with the death of the cat, so that felt rather on-brand.
But I figured surely there must be a whole bunch more positive stuff to pay attention to, and presumably learn from, I just don’t really get it yet…
The earth builds us, cell by cell. Earth is the ground beneath our feet and the soil into which we plunge our hands. This is our physicality and our grounding.
~ Manda Scott
Anyways, there up at the cottage early in the summer, my friend, a Virgo (an Earth sign) wanted me to see the local Mother Tree – the massive old source tree in the forest system near their place –
Mother trees are the biggest, oldest trees in the forest. They are the glue that holds the forest together. Through their huge photosynthetic capacity, they provide food for the whole soil web of life. They keep carbon in the soil and aboveground, and they keep the water flowing.
Thinking about Mother Trees reminded me that the other concept bundled into our project of connecting to the West, and to Earth, is the concept of the Nurturing Parent. And I started thinking about Earth – the planet and the soil and the capacity for everything to grow, as being a place of nourishment, of nurturance.
Earth represents the gift of life. Earth refers to the body of the planet Earth, the human body and Nature herself. It refers to what we make of it: our health, wealth, security, grounding, solidity, and stability.
~ The Four Winds
Later in the summer I was out in BC where nature is just off the charts, and we were in this place called Cathedral Grove, where they helpfully point out for you things like “nurse logs”.
When a tree falls to the ground, we may see only its death, but this death is the beginning of new life and the natural cycle of a forest…”
Further West, out in Tofino, as far West as you can go, where you sit and stare at the vast power of the Pacific Ocean, one of my BC friends gave me a little Earth gift to help me along my voyage…
On the back of the card, it says:
Earth Spirit represents the all-encompassing circles of life, the end of one journey is the beginning of the next. Life is a series of many infinite circular experiences – before, during, and after your existence.
~ Roy Henry Vickers & Lizzie Snow
Bit by bit the whole thing was starting to come together for me – the sense of death as being within the cycle of life in a very organic way, and of the element of Earth as being the rich and nourishing container for the movement through these cycles.
Still later in the summer I was up near Owen Sound (yes, I did make a point of jumping on every chance that appeared to get out of town and enjoy summertime and nature and friends I don’t see often enough…) and I was staying in a little cabin by the river. Each morning I’d get up early with the sunrise and walk down to river, my bare feet delighting in the cold dewy grass of early morning and the soft tender nurturing feeling of grass and earth underneath my feet.
Where I live is all concrete with flourishes of steel, so neither earth nor grass nor even natural stones are easily found, and the more organic rhythms of growth and decay are hard to remember amongst the domineering rhythm of a city ever hungry to keep building infrastructure …
How vivid a contrast between the lives of all these trees in different soils, different environments, different levels / qualities of nourishment. The hard scrabble tree barely surviving versus the towering giants of BC, or even a massive Mother Tree in a proper forest in rural Québec. What a strong image of what Nurturing is and does.
Thank goodness for the friends who enabled the many summer adventures out in these variations on Canadian natural splendour, where it was a whole lot easier to really connect with Earth, and with this concept of Nurturance while being out exploring nature, and talking to my really very knowledgeable and, ahem, very very nurturing friends…
…the Earth element symbolizes the link to our collective past, our connection to the planet, and our inescapable bond with every life form. The Earth element nurtures, it protects. The Earth element is the womb from which all life comes. From plants, to plankton, to eagles, to grasshoppers, all life began in the Earth and in caves, where life was protected from the sun’s radiation and life forms began to evolve and emerge.
Over the holidays some dear friends who have moved out to BC were here at mine for a couple of days, and we did a thing which is becoming tradition for us – an “unravel your year” exercise, where you look at the past year and do your best to remember deeply what each month was about, to better envision what you would like to achieve or experience in the year ahead.
For all three of us, one of the big highlights was the visit I made out to their new home on Vancouver Island. For me, the one doing the traveling, it started with a gorgeous flight out over the Rockies –
The flight began in the dark of early morning, but as we flew west the sun rose in the east faster than we flew, giving the sensation of being chased across the earth by the sun.
Perhaps I was feeling especially aware of the turning of the earth as I’d done an exercise for my shamanic “course” some weeks earlier. The course itself is really a yearly engagement with the directions – east, west, south, north. This summer I moved from doing a year in the east – the place of fire, sunrise, and new beginnings – to the west. The west is about sunset, earth, stones, dreaming and death. And as part of engaging with the west, one exercise is to try and spend an entire night out sitting on the earth, seeing the sun go down and then come up again in the morning, sensing the turning of the planet.
Where I live is very urban, so I figured I could sit in our local park, amongst the trees by the beach. But then as the evening played out, groups of guys with cases of beers and boomboxes blaring reggaeton started to show up – it was after all a beautiful Friday evening in summertime – and by the time the sun went down I was too distracted and went home and sat instead on my balcony, heading back to the beach before sunrise to see how much I could feel into the experience.
As the sun rose, I sat by this tree who seems to reach down into the earth apparently getting just enough nutrients to make a life.
So all of this leaning into feeling close to the earth was still with me while flying west – thinking of the west and the earth while flying west over the earth…
And then being in BC for a week, well… BC is just one of the most gorgeous places on the planet.
So very gorgeous that my friends attempts to try to convince me to move out there stayed with me quite powerfully upon my return to my neighbourhood of condo towers and the never-ending construction of more and more condo towers.
But there are things here that keep me here.
There is the ongoing graffiti art project I’ve got happening here which is still a lot of fun, even in the ways that it engages with the worst of this area in all of its hideous highway underpasses and traffic jams –
And then, in the most bizarre juxtaposition, just meters away from the ugliness of the traffic, are all the pleasures of life by the lake –
And part of life by the lake for the last few years has been the delightful convenience of the New Year’s fireworks being set off from a barge on the water, meaning all we need to do is stumble down our stairwell a few minutes before midnight to revel in not only the spectacular flashes and bangs, but also the throngs of the young people of this city.
follow your nose 