gone til november.

So I've been away for awhile. This has been a fast fall, in more ways than one.

September flew by in a blur. I lost a friend and in the process also lost any shred of perspective I may have once possessed. I unwittingly put my heart on the line, forgetting that nine times out of ten, this is a really really bad idea. Then I ran away to Haliburton County for a few days. If you find yourself in a position to run away, I'd recommend it as your destination. It's a place of plenty and I always leave there several pounds heavier and with a heart three times its usual size. My mother and I rented a cottage for the weekend to celebrate my best friend's mother's wedding. My mom basically told me to pull my head out of my ass, in the kind, compassionate, generally perfect way she always does. I sang songs for the kids at the ceremony, songs I'd never sung on my own before. As the notes came out of me I could hear my dad's voice in my head, letting me harmonize along. My mother did all the driving and I got back home ready to shift gears, although that didn't really work out the way I'd thought it might. As bpNichol once wrote, "We drove West but the poems I'd planned to write barely occurred."

I fell silent, I guess. I couldn't quite articulate how I was feeling, and it just seemed easier to give it a rest. I remember writing a paper on literary silence, a long, long time ago. It was about Dennis Lee and how for awhile he just couldn't write, couldn't find the words to describe what begged for description. I felt like I knew what he'd been going through. So I kept to myself for a bit. I ran away again (two runaways in one month, oh what a lucky gal am I), this time to a yoga retreat on Wolfe Island, which afforded me a few days back in Kingston, the town I love, the town that's still so far under my skin it's almost too much to even go back. I saw most of my people, checked in on all the pieces I still have buried there. I spent three days fasting and practicing yoga in a yurt. This is the right place to be, I thought to myself, even as I felt scared and empty and uncertain. One night I sat by a bonfire built by a karma yogi with a very cute beard, island farmers' fields behind me and the lights of the city across the water before me. It's a good feeling, to be both close to and far from civilization at the same time.

At the end of that weekend I resisted the almost primal urge to veer north on Division and head out toward Westport. It's like resisting the pull of gravity sometimes, ignoring the deepest needs of your poor old sentimental heart. But I did it, knowing (or maybe just feigning the knowledge) that some past treasures are better left buried. I drove back home to the Hammer, listening to Hey Rosetta and the National and marveling at the fact that the leaves seemed to have turned just in those few days I'd been away. I resolved to just sit back and be ready. For what, I'm not quite sure yet, but I'm open to it.



It brings me back to bp again:

"You have plans but so many of them don't work out. You have dreams, tho you do not mean the dreams you wake from, troubled or happy, but visions rather, glimpses of some future possibility everything in you wishes to make real."

(I wrote a paper on him once, too. In pulling my copy of 15 Canadian Poets X3 off the shelf to double-check that quote, a 12-year-old scribbled note about word play and the human condition fell from its spine, a reminder of my onetime debilitating sincerity about CanLit. Oh, were we ever so young?)

The last time I read those words was a long time ago. I had a pretty firm vision of what I wanted, and I thought I was on the path toward it. I wanted something so particular, and I wanted it with every fiber of my being. Many years on, those words still ring so true, even though the things I dreamed of haven't quite materialized the way I thought they might. Along the way, though, things have softened. My dreams have become less precise. The things I need to feel happy aren't as specific. I think that's a pretty great gift of age and wisdom, the way our desires become protracted and abstracted to the point where nearly everything that comes to us can satisfy us on some level.

October was a quick one too, but those are ramblings for another day.