The pathway is still and quiet. I find a spot in the sun and toss my shoes and things aside. I sneak through the gardens, flowers and tree-leaves crisp and chill in the late october wind. There is sun, in patches, but it moves through the garden like a flashlight beam as it falls in its mid afternoon way.

There are advantages to being lonely. No one bothers you, and if they do they are a stranger asking for a light. They never ask for anything more.

The papers I am editing flutter and fold in the wind. I hold them down with my feet, sitting like a duck with my legs folded under me. I stuff my fists into my neck, elbows on my kneews, and concentrate on the words.

But, the sun. The light moves over me like a white sheet flying like a flag whipping. I am caught in a storm of leaves and blue-white sky and bubbling clouds. A strange quiet follows each gust, as if the wind is carrying away all sounds.

I am distracted-but, distracted from what? From nothing.

a sinking feeing...as if the world is collapsing and I am left standing, without protection

alienation... I lay on our giant driftwood bed. I am devestated, but no one knows. No one can know. The jet flying over our heads...she calls it progress. I am terrified. My insides are bleeding, yet I am as dry as a stone.

What I had said...in the darkness. "We are walking on jewels." In the dark, I could feel their smoothness..onyx glowing by the moonlight. A carpet of jewels..of smooth stones...black and white and green.

Now that I am lonely, I am looking forward, looking back. I don't miss the place, I miss the past. Coming down from nostalgia. What is left to come? I see ahead two months - but the rest is blackness. What then? What now? What are we left with? We are not in control anymore.

I am left to walk alone on a carpet of jewels and rub the smooth stones in my palms...to meditate..

We walked through an old growth forest and climbed gullys and rivers, watched dragonflies dance on the surface of small pools..smoked joints...we found a field of apple trees and daisies and we spun in the dandelion fluff and blue sky, lay down in the daisies..then we climbed a mountain and watched the sun fall towards the city. We saw the mountains out over the ocean...

We went to Saltspring Island, hitched with two halarious dudes and a man with a blue truck (rode in the back), rolled joints on the beach under arbutus trees, drank beer and tequila at a mexican cafe, pawed goods at the market: chutneys, jams, goat cheese, jewelry, hemp clothing, musical instruments made from old trees.

We came home and ate mushrooms with tea then went on yet another adventure...walked through the city of arbutus, oak, birch, maple, fir, palm, bushes, shrubs, hundreds of flowers; lay on a beach of smooth polished stones under a sky of blurry bursts of fire..you could see Washington...the yellow lights of the U.S.A....the ocean and sky were like giant navy and onyx carpets and the moon was smooth and polished like the stones..I could see stars for days..We balanced on giant dirftwood logs and climbed through tunnels of flowers, we saw a tree larger than I have ever before seen...in the dark you couldn't guess the top..it loomed. We found a medieval castle and massaged its walls with our hands, poked through archways and guessed at lives lived there before electric white spotlights made it glow...

Victoria is a church, it is a playground, it is an oceanside paradise....
I can never get enough of those smoooth stones.....

damn. i mean HOT-damnity-damn. I have never before known a person who exceeds, let alone meets, my expectations. I've never known someone who is able to catch me off guard, surprise me over and over, hold my interest, make me so proud...make me so happy. It's wonderful. I could not give this up no matter how little sense it makes. I'm gushing (i could easily go on, but i will spare you), but I honestly cannot help it.

I take back that comment about being anti-social now. It's just that I was hypersocial in Halifax and I'm not used to this.....

why won't my characters behave as they are supposed to?! I sit here, on a Saturday night, struggling with people who only exist in my mind. (really, I'm not crazy). This takes so much work..so much discipline. All I want to do is smoke a huge joint and stand outside inhaling wood smoke and damp leaves.

I am so anti-social now, but content with that.

I haven't been really drunk in a while...not since Nova Scotia. When I drink now, I lose inhibitions in my thoughts. It has taken months to build up this strength of mind. When I drink, it breaks down. My body cries to go home to you, and it tears me apart. I just fall into a sad state of mind. This is why I've turned to drugs. ha.

I'm trying to think of the most honest person I know, someone who will read my story and tell me which parts stink. I have someone in mind...

As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.

When wind and hawk encounter,
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter
Then turn, then fall to sleep.

As many nights endure
Without a moon or star
So will we endure
When one is gone and far.

From The Spice-Box of Earth by Leonard Cohen

I prop open the screen door with a piece of scrap wood, turn over a milk crate and sit. I light a smoke. The rain pelts on the roof of the greenhouse, it clatters and echoes in the small room. I sit in the doorframe and take long drags. The red tip burns slowly down the straight white smoke. This moment offers a bit of perspective. I think about my story. I think about calling Jeff. I want to go over and smoke on his porch, ask him what he thinks about when he writes his stories. But, I decide that I really do know what I'm writing about. I'm just afraid that no one will care. I want so badly to show others the beauty that I see in the world; elegance in an overturned milkcrate, the clatter of rain and a solitary smoke. I see the world as a series of images, beautiful ones. Sometimes beautiful in a terrible way. Beauty is defined (by my Canadian Oxford dictionary) not as something inherently good and wonderful but as "a combination of qualities such as shape, colour, etc., that pleases the aesthetic senses" and "a combination of qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense." I would have say these images that I take so much pleasure in, and try so very hard to convey, appeal not to my sense of what is good, but to my aesthetic sense of what is true and beautiful.

it is raining...and I mean really raining. Water has been falling from the sky all night long and all day. I was awake half the night, listening to the rain fall on the fiberglass roof of our greenhouse. It falls in sheets; steady, beating. I love being awake in the night when it is raining. I am the only one awake in the world, it is such a private moment. It is beautiful. I am tired, but poetry gets priority over sleep. The rain falls today like a long poem...and it falls still. Tonight, I am writing all night. I am stealing poetry from the rain...
It is going to rain all week. I am told this is the beginning of winter and we will see the world through rain drops until january. It is no wonder that Victoria has two springs, one in January and another in April...two springs. twice reborn...how beautiful.

It strikes me how the narrative structure mirrors such a natural pattern...rising action, climax, falling action. There are so many examples of this in nauture:::rainstorms, sex, a wave... This is probably why the structure works so well, come so naturally, and is so appealing. When it is done well I am left with a feeling of such deep satisfaction, of euphoria. Reading a perfectly executed short story or even a novel is almost more satisfying that good sex, because you can revisit it over and over again. ;)

I love my friends because they will call me up, from across the country, drunk at a bar at 1 a.m., to ask me if I can remember Leonard Cohen lyrics....also because they will say (although they won't remember the next day) that I made their night...it also makes me miss them. I can't read the things you spell in peanuts from here...I miss you...

I love my roomate Meg. We're both having a below average week, and we've been moping around our apartment all evening. So, I suggest we light some candles, play some cards and get blitzed on a bottle of red wine. "Meg, let's get drunk" She doesn't even look at me to see ifi'm serious. "Sure!". What could be more appropriate on a rainy wednesday evening when I have an 8:30 class the next day? I wish there were more Meg's in my life. (interestingly, my roomate last year, another Meg, could always be counted on for random drunken evenings/afternoons). I'm off to the "Spirits" shop...

here I am dipping my toes in the Pacific Ocean for the first time....at Willows Beach, Victoria BC.

This has to be the longest weekend of my life...The most exciting event of my day has been watching the tall wooden stake in the garden blow over, taking a large bean plant down with it. I haven't been motivated enough to go out to the garden and prop it up...I actually haven't set foot outside once today. I sat in the doorway of the greenhouse to have a smoke, and the rain blew in...that is the closest I have come.

It has been raining for the last two days straight...but...just now, as I look out my bedroom window, the sun is poking its rays through the clouds. It is enticing....I must say...The sun is an all too unfamiliar sight here. "What is that insanely bright light outside!?"

Victoria isn't much different from Halifax, although it rains more. The sky here often resembles a movie segment in which the sky is filmed for an entire day and then sped up. The clouds move insanely fast "Ooh sun! aww..wait, rain..oh, there's the sun again! Blast, it's gone.." Victoria shares the same philosophy as Halifax: "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes." Although, the locals don't preach this the way Maritimers do. Here, these phrases are only printed on menus in touristy retsaurants and repeated to visitors, accomanied by a chuckle. Here, people don't stop you on the street just to say "Some weather we're havin', eh?"

Victorians are not unfriendly-I would say this is the second most friendly city in Canada that I've been to. Coastal living has a casual vibe... However, Victorians are by no stretch of the imagination anything like Nova Scotians....
They don't know how to drink beer either..i mean..really drink. They don't even have pints! Their version is the sl-ee-ve.....(!?), and, of course, sleeves are smaller..

*sigh*

well...I suppose there is nothing left to do now (aside from the pile of school work looming at me from my bedroom floor..i'll just push that under the bed..*kick* ah there we go) but spark up some joy and bike to the video store....

I climbed into bed last night at 8pm to read Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, and was sound asleep by 9:30...when my eyes began to flutter, and my mini tub of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia started to melt, I had to make a decision. Should I wake myself up, put the ice-cream away, brush my teeth and make a civilized entrance into my bed? Or, should I pretend I am eight years old, curled up reading 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' let the ice cream melt and fall indulgently into an accidental slumber. Before I could make this decision, my mind went from stage one: fluttering eyes, to stage two: paralysis. Then, I was awake and it was 7am and my computer was still on, my cherry-chocolate ice cream in the freezer and I had slept the most deep, sound, peaceful sleep that I had in weeks.

I think I am going to start updating my blog again...now that I am out West and trying to stay in touch with so many people, it makes more sense. Also, I have more free time right now than I have had in years! keep an eye out for new layout and frequent updates. Ned, I'll have to persuade you to bump me up your links list ;)