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.
Happy New Year !!!
follow your nose 