home sweet new home
If you have begun to wonder where I have been —
I return to you today. My winter has been scattered with work and
play, both of these have required a certain type of brain energy that
leaves me very tired by midday. My November was twenty days away from
home as I embarked on a songwriter tour from Alberta to British Columbia
and back through. I saw the mountainside before and after an avalanche,
I listened to the prairie wind howl, the sky-like space that rolls
between each ocean wave, I sang for my supper, I sang for strangers,
some of whom became friends. I visited nightly the notes between my
lungs and guitar as if every broken moment was meant to lead me here.
If you asked me of the hardest hill to climb in doing such a thing, I
would speak of how I missed the early morning coffees at home and the
way thoughts have time to gather and conclude when you're not on the
road. As you ride the highway, you think often, but you don't have the
hours free to make much sense. You know as the wheels roll, you are on
your way to a new town with new faces but you don't yet know what they
will think of you and what you will be thinking when you fall to your pillow at night.
You
go on singing into the shining lights in a room you've never stood in
before and it gives rise to both an uneasy and beautiful feeling like
nothing else I have ever known. When I was young, I only dreamed but it
seems lately these dreams have come true and I am required to pinch
myself in order to believe this reality of mine. Sometimes, I feel like I
am just singing into a jewelry box and one day when the lights go dim,
somebody will jump out at me and say "wake up, you're still only
dreaming.."
the squirrel highway and autumn.
I stood in Griffith Woods as a storm was blowing in from the mountains. The living trees shook and the dead ones crackled as squirrels hurried across the broken down log, their own highway of sorts. I thought about the imagery of a tree being knocked from its roots and falling down in front of me. I shuttered at the way a tree stands so tall, then quite suddenly, something like the weather roars and rattles, swallowing whole what once stood so tall and it made me begin to wonder about the very strangeness that is my own life.
These woods. This wind. The cutting down of our snapdragon crop. Never knowing if it is too early or too late to pull the flowers from the ground and making dried bouquets. I take what is left of the tomatoes and watch them ripen on the kitchen windowsill. Dreaming, always dreaming of berries cooked in pies and the way sunlight bends through these spaces we have come to know as ours.
my life in photographs
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