There’s a house – it seems to be an inheritance perhaps, something passed down in the family – but it is an odd shape of a house on an odd street.
Because there is a view of the water here – prime real estate, really – but the street is full of stodgy red brick things, not open airy homes appropriate for life by the water.
I look at the floor plan – really this cramped and crowded house could totally be built out, opened up, a complete overhaul within what the footprint, the property lines allow – there are enormous possibilities…
But as we were getting ready for this next round, for the year ahead, I found myself reflecting back on what the previous year had involved – or was it two years? I’ve kind of lost track and it seemed like a long time… Perhaps part of the nature of the direction, which was South, and the element of Water.
And yes, there has been a lot of water in this past year.
Cause first up, this is where I often take my morning coffee –
Toronto Harbour. Lake Ontario. A coupla flights of stairs down from my place.
Lake Ontario, older than Canada itself, derived it’s name from the Iroquoian root meaning “beautiful lake” or “lake of shining waters,” historians at the Canadian Encyclopedia believe…
Or sometimes I’ll bike over to the new river park they’ve opened up around the corner and hang out with the egrets and herons who have been coming back in groves to the new wetlands, and watch the sun rise over the old remnants of an industrial past…
But last summer was some intensive water – spent it almost entirely in and along the Strait of Georgia, beach days as often as possible, and even a moment from the tip of Saturna Island, a couple of days after seeing a few orcas upon arrival, facing South towards the U.S., and glimpsing in the distance a pod of porpoises on the move, making their way through the water heedless of boundaries and names and human constructions around nationhood… they seemed so storybook, a magical creature out there in the wild.
You might not see them tiny in the distance with a phone photo.
It was a summer of always looking out into those vast waters to see who you might see passing by.
And there was something about those many afternoons in the Strait of Georgia, facing the mountains on the mainland, and being in this narrow stretch of salt water that felt somehow like the Origins of Life…
I don’t know why, but it always felt like that, all the darting crabs, those liminal land / water creatures, their sideways inefficiency… it just felt like the rawness of life in its more primitive forms coming forth, the surging impulse of life as it must have begun, long before things like humans developed.
One of the things I’ve loved about being brought into more awareness of the elements, is how essential they are in our lives. Like teach was saying to us: “if the sun were to suddenly disappear, how long would it be before the necessities for ongoing life disappear?” As in, for food to grow, for heat to keep us warm. And then you do the same exercise with earth – if suddenly the earth could no longer grow food, how long would we last? And then if there was no more water – well now you’re starting to look at a matter of maybe not even weeks, maybe just days that we could survive. And then when you get to Air in the North, well, then it’s no joking matter at all, how intrinsic these elements are to our lives.
And then, on another level what we learn with each of these “directions” and “elements” that we do – East, then West, then South and North – is there is always a kind of emotional component, a layer of the exploration that is somewhere in a kind of psychic understanding of a parent or child dynamic.
The East was the Joy Child of Initiation and Beginnings, the West was the Nurturing Parent, and the South is the Trust Child.
Some of the notes I’ve gathered from the teachings on this are –
South is the place of the Trust Child, also known as the Wisdom Child, in our culture sometimes spoken of as the Wounded Child. But as we immerse ourselves in the element of water, we let go of the boundaries that restrict and confine us. So that, as we step out of the water we can gather to ourselves boundaries that support us, that are appropriate to where we are now.
For myself this past year has been an enormous experiment in trust and boundaries and learning and shifting on these fronts, but the funnier part of the story is…
That after we spent our weekend workshop learning all about the next direction, the North, teach told us we hadn’t quite nailed it, that we all needed to spend still MORE time in the South learning those lessons of the South deeper and better.
So back down the snake or the ladder we slide, to stay with the South and the leaning of the Trust and the boundaries and whatever else it was we missed the first time around…
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.
follow your nose 