Markers

Midnight brought the first real Spring rain to my corner of the world. This seems utterly fitting: rain that means new growing things, melting of the last snows, the washing clean of everything to start over. This is new, and old at once. Old in the way that each wheel’s turn reminds us that it has been this way for a very long time – and we are a part of that (if we choose to pay attention). New in the shape and character of this particular rain: its nature contradicts experience of this place, raises questions, reminds of other times and places.

Prairie born and raised – and now marking my first half-century on this day – I know what Spring Rain is in this place (or should be): coming out of nowhere, cloudburst, pummelling and drenching everything … and gone before I had time to get out the rain gear, leaving everything chilled and soaked to the bone and wondering what just happened.

But this rain isn’t like that.

This rain is steady, softly insistent and insidious. The stuff of coastal climes, oceanside, northern rain forest. The kind of rain that would have me hunting massive beds of moss in Goldstream Park on Vancouver Island, or walking the shore of Point Pleasant Park or the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. Such a rain should make me wistful – nostalgic even – for these places that I love so much, that are part of the beating in my blood. But today … for some reason, today this rain makes me feel forward not back: quiet anticipation, the slow building of excitement for what will come, in every way.

Already, the shift has begun – the first marker of change: the buds on the May tree outside my house have burst open overnight to reveal the crisp green points of leaves. This first hesitant dusting will open over the next few days, proclaiming colour and promising scent from blossoms still latent, not yet formed.

Building things, growing things, changing: it feels as though these states, the active modes of being, are the shape of my life and work. What has lead to this moment in time … and what will shape the days to come.

And so much coming into being, and so soon:

The Catalysts Launch is this Sunday, April 15… and the books are coming by courier to my door today! Can’t wait to see them, and share that moment with my friend and collaborator Catherine, and then send the work out into the world with her.

The Poetry Festival is coming soon, and with it the Sketching with Words workshop – which will be great fun to facilitate with Shawna Lemay.

Then Toronto, to Launch Catalysts there May 1 & 2.

I’m working on a little sculptural installation for the Fast & Dirty Collective too, for their show Curiosities, which will travel to various places in Edmonton on the weekend of May 11- 13.

And in between times, the work on NEST continues, as does work for on a particular aspect of the project in advance of the Harcourt House Open Studio event on June 21st.

It looks like a to-do list … but what I am really doing is counting blessings today, for all that I am doing, and for all of the magnificent people in my life that inspire me and make it all possible. A remarkable, humbling thing, this life.