Wonder Water

There is nothing more precious, beautiful, enchanting and wonderful on the face of this earth than water. It is everywhere, it is everything. We drink it, breath it, bath in it, wash with it, play in it. It falls as rain, fills in waterfalls, oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, freezes into ice, condenses into steam. We absolutely need water, and there is no way around it. Our bodies are made up of mostly water and it is one of the three things that every living creature cannot live without. But, as much as it is a necessity it is also completely fascinating. There is nothing more soothing than watching rugged ocean waves crash across an open beach, pulling the rocks back in it's wake with a beautiful rolling sound. I have seen these rugged waves on beaches, on the Queen Charlotte Islands, and in Cape Breton, as well as Botanical Beach a few hours from where I live. In these places I was staring straight into open ocean, open Pacific, with nothing between me and Japan, and open Atlantic with nothing between me and France. It's an incredible thing, to see, just this wild, crashing, powerful water. It's just water, it runs through your fingers, it gets everything wet, it creates mud where we don't want it, and it's absolutely powerful. I have also seen Niagara Falls, the world's 50th largest waterfall (from the Canadian side which everyone knows is the better of the two) and the enormity of what comes crashing down there every minute, not to mention who's gone over the falls and lived through it is truly something to marvel at. Many people in the world don't share our novelty of instant water from several places around the house. Some have to walk a long way to get to a pump or a well and often times it is dirty or infected and makes them sick. We are so fortunate here to have this instant, clean, wonder water at the turn of a tap. Water: clear, beautiful, delicious, wonderful. Waste it not.

Happy Monday!!!

I called this "Happy Monday" but it really didn't start out that way. I've learned over the past few years that being late first period on Monday morning is really not a good way to start a week. I had to play soccer (something I hate) in gym class and I didn't have my extra shoes, so mine got drenched out there!! I killed a frog after lunch in sewing (not a real one! I'm not an amphibeon murderer!!) I'm sewing a little frog, one that you fill with rice, and I was instructed that I had to sew very slowly and carefully and if my stitches weren't straight it would end up as a roadkill frog. I honestly tried, but even at the slowest speed the machine seemed to be going too fast, and I was constantly going over the lines, and my stitches were all coming out choppy and uneven, going zig-zaggy where it should have been straight and pointy where it should have been round and it was just awful!!! I killed it! I picked out my sewing and I'll try again tomorrow. The teacher wasn't kidding about it being a long, hard process!!!

More bad news later didn't do much to make my day happier. But over the past year I've come to understand that sometimes in life, bad things happen, things you didn't expect. These things are hard, often unfair and they can hurt. But they do happen and the thing to do is to feel sad and sorry for a little bit, but eventually to accept that it happened, and you just have to move on with your life. We just have to say to ourselves "Okay this happened, and it sucked. What am I going to do about it? How am I going to react? What is the best thing to do right now?" Once we can ask ourselves that, and deal in a calm manner, we can handle anything. Take for example, the boat in the above picture. It is the bow of an ancient ship that was sunk on a beach on the Queen Charlotte Islands a few hundred years ago. That was unfair, a lot of people died, and it was hard. But it happened a lot, and people kept sailing and with time they improved safety measures until they got to what we have at present time. And that's what we have to do in life. Just keep moving, and things will generally look up when the sun comes out and it stops raining.

Time

Time is a fascinating thing. It is untamable, unstoppable and always, very much so in existence. We have tried over the centuries to control and understand it, and we have achieved it, to a certain extent. We have split what we call a year into twelve months, and those months have been split into weeks, which have been split into days. Each day in turn, is split into 24 hours, each hour split into 60 minutes and each minute is 60 seconds. We say it is morning when the sun is up, but our clocks say that it is morning around five or six am, regardless or whether or not the sun is out yet. We cannot stop time, we cannot reverse it. No matter how often we want to or try to (not necesarily in real life. Sci-fi, for example) we can't.

People grow. We are born and we die, and we live in between. We make mistakes, we say and do things we regret and we can never get them back again. Once it's out there it's out there for good because we can't go back and undo it. We can't stop time. We are incapable of freezing hours, days, years when we think we need a little extra time before moving on with our lives. Like it or not, it always keeps moving. Morning will always come, things we dread about for ages come, we get through them and we move on. As much as we can't move time backwards, we can't move it forward either. We can't go forward and see where we will end up. For the most part I think that's good. We as humans shouldn't have the power to see into our futurs. We can make our plans, but things beyond our control will always happen. I think it makes us better creatures over all to deal with these things as they come, not to predict them, not to prepare for them, just to on the spot deal with them.

Time as we've set it out, will always move forward at the same speed it always has. Yet, as we get older and busier time can seem to move slower or faster. Often times it's faster. You wake up one morning and realize a whole year's practically passed without you hardly noticing. A lot happens in a year. A lot changes. And it's meant to. Because time is healing. We think thing through we over come our roadblocks and we move along. It's the way it should be. It is the way the world was created to be.

Resiliant leaves

No matter what the season, I always have to marvel at the resiliance of tree leaves. They are, after all one of the symb0ls of the season. They bud in the spring, these tiny, new, green, tender frawns that over the course of the season grow into their own unique shapes. Oak, cedar, maple, birch, they're all different, they're all unique and they're all special.

During the summer they continue to grow, darkening in colour to deep greens, and they toughen up so they are harder to rip and very hard to crumple in your hand. On hot summer afternoons they provide shelter, whether in the back yard, or by a pond or creek or river, and they provide a beautiful, music as the summer wind rustles through them. It is within these dark, leafy canopies that baby birds are born, grow, feed and return to when they have matured enough to take the leap and embark on their first flight.

With the arrival of autumn the leaves begin to lose the strength that has bound them to the tree branches all summer. As they stop the photosynthesis process they stop being green and turn a multitude of bright fall colours; reds, yellows, golds, browns. They give into the prying of nature and go dancing from the tree where they were first created down to the ground, blustering together along sidewalk curbs and covering grass in back yards. All across the world the natural wonder of these fall leaves paints the ground in a thick, warm, protective layer of colour.

Winter is the hard season. The bare, cold trees stretch their empty branches skywards, whipping easily in the bitter winds, dripping water and snow to the ground below, there being, of course, no leaves to stop it. But the old leaves aren't ready to go yet. They stay, many monthes after they've fallen, mashed into the sidewalk curbs, sodden, falling apart, destroyed by rain and wind, by people walking on them, and cars driving over them. But despite all of that, they remain on the earth, staining concrete orange where the rain pulled the colour out of them until spring returns and the new leaves take their place on the trees.

So yes, I see leaves as resilient plant life. But that's what nature does. It creates, and when the time comes, the things it has created end and take on a new form or are replaced by what is next to come. Eggs become baby animals, buds become flowers, sapplings become trees and the leaves fall and return in their own cycle, year after year. Almost as a way of marking seasons in a way humans are not able to do themselves.

The Rainy Season

Fall on the west coast of BC is the beginning of our 'rainy season', a period of time where it rains almost constantly from October to about April when warm spring weather really sets in. True, we do have one of the better Canadian winter climats (we don't, for example, have snow on the ground on Halloween and Mother's Day) but the rain can become really depressing after several months. Waking up at 7:30 in the morning to a still dark sky and a sheet of rain pouring from the sky, which will stay grey through the day until it gets dark at around 4:00 pm. That's not to say it always rains here. We're quite sheltered where we are on Vancouver Island, surrounded by the mountains in Washington and Vancouver and we can actually have some really beautiful weather sometimes. In late September and early October the leaves turn brown and crispy and the first few days when the frost covers the ground is really pretty. It's so cool to look out at the lake out in front of our house and see a sheet of fog hanging over it on cold winter mornings. I don't so much mind the days when it is freezing cold. It's the rain that I really can't stand after too long, and the terrible lack of sunshine. Sometimes in March or April when spring returns it's as if the sun is this forgotten object, lost forever in the oblivion and mysteriously returned. Spring can come quite early here (sometimes there are snowdrops in February!) but it's generally just winter playing with us. This year from January through to May we had a few weeks of warm-ish weather (as warm as you can get for January anyway) and then the cold gross rain returned for a few weeks, then it would be nice and sunny again. It did that for months, as if teasing us before the warm spring weather turned into the gorgeous warm summer (that turned into scorching hot later on) that we just finished enjoying. Really, I have no right to complain about winter weather. We don't have to run jumper cables five blocks from our houses to strat our cars in the morning, and we do get snowdrops in February and crocuses in March and then daffodils and tulips all before the middle of April. And we don't get as much rain as Seattle or Prince Rupert, we get a lot less by a long shot. Everybody can find flaws in the weather where they live. Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too sunny, too dark etc. But the fact is, we have to adapt to the environmental changes that our planet is going through. So what I'm going to try to do this winter, is suffer through the rainy days, and thrive on the odd sunny one. It's a much better way to live don't you think?

Invisible friends

Every kid has imaginary friends, and if they don't they should. I, being an only child, had lots. The first one was intended to replace the dolls I had been dragging around forever. Not replace them exactly, but imaginary friends could go everywhere with me and not take up any space and get themselves dressed in the morning, which I thought would make my parents happy. So, the first 'friend' came along when I was in kindergarten. I was five years old and I named her Y-la. She was a giant (or the same size as I was which really wasn't all that big) letter Y (hense her name) She came everywhere with me for years. She had an adopted sister named Triangle, who was a life sized, orphaned, fuscia coloured triangle. Later, Y-la's parents and brother and sister came into the picture too. The 'Y's' as they came to be known as lived in the blackberry bush across the street from my house.

The next family was the Mice. They were, if you can believe it, real mice (but invisible ones of course!) The main one was called Dot, and she had like twenty siblings and the whole family lived in our wood pile. For that reason my mom was somewhat relieved they weren't real. They had a little car that they drove everywhere we went. They had to go like four times faster than we did so they could keep up because they were so tiny.

I also had invisible friends who were people. There was Sally and Sasparilla and a couple of boys, but I can't remember their names. I remember there was also Uncle Platypus and Grandma Platypus (I have no idea where the platypus part came from) and Zuki the cat who had been found in a zucini patch. I put an imaginary door in the wall of the hallway right beside the bathroom door and up that door was a staircase and going up were about five doors on either side of the stairs which were rooms (kitchen, TV room, bedrooms, bathroom etc.) which is where my invisible family lived. I used to pretend that the water from their bathtub ran down invisible pipes to our bathtub and there were little plugs I had to open to let the imaginary water go down the drain.

Otter was around for a long time too. She and her sister Little Otter were, big surprise, otters. I can't remember where I got the idea for them, but I did a lot with them. When we had fish and chips I 'd have the chips and they'd eat the fish. I don't know why my mom went along with that, but she did.

I had invisible friends for probably six years before I outgrew them for good. I had a really good imagination and had a lot of fun with my "friends." It's cute now to look at little kids who make up these elaborately detailed worlds that surround them and their invisible friends, but really it's an essential part of childhood. That total immersion in make believe fun is a healthy part in becoming a good person. And it also makes cute memories that parents like to bring up at embarrasing moments when you get older ;)

Music: The Universal Language

I don't know how many times and in how many different ways I have heard this, but music is the world's universal language. Every culture in the world has music in some form or another; from classical to religious, sombre to celebratory, music is everywhere. It has helped keep people going when it seems as though all hope is lost. People sing or play music at weddings, births, funerals, during wartime. Whether it be happy or sad, bring smiles or tears it makes us strong and builds a bond that goes beyond language, to a deeper place of togetherness. We may not be able to understand the words of songs, but the notes of the music are unmistakable. The soaring flutes, deep, strong brass, the filling of the reed instruments, and the drums, keeping beat for everyone. Music is everywhere, in all of us. It is the one gift that we can all share, and treasure.