It Starts With Deep Breaths

Noa asked me on the evening before I left Montreal if I was going to forget her, in it that sweet and earnest way that children do. Hearing her ask it was so unexpected, as if it would be possible for me to forget her that my heart broke as we descended the stairs from my new apartment and made me want to take a drink of cold water and squeeze her tight and take a deep breath of the crisp autumn air that is finally filling this area, wanting to not leave and also leave at the same time, feeling the love of all my surroundings, wanting to come back to this good life before I had even left. I wanted to pause the summer-autumn season and these millenial times in this energetic age, surrounded by a community of family and friends and fellows and laughs and trees and projects and girls, scared that it will be gone or different when I come back but of course it will be different.

Now the sun sets on this bus passing fields of maturing and brown fields of corn then soy beans then corn and corn again then soy and occasionally a field of hay or green winter rye coming up in straight rows oriented North-South. GO trains and busses and planes are aligned heading west towards the setting sun in all it's purple and orange warmth morphing colours and shapes. I don't take my eyes off the horizon for fear that I'll miss the action, wishing for an impossible-bottle that would finally capture the expansiveness of a sunset and the way it swallows everything and reminds you how big the sky is, knowing that the passing of time is and has always been moments beginning and ending with no beginning or end. The late evening now morphs slowly, highlighted clouds drifting over and under each other, the pitch-by-pitch darkening of tree shadows, birch, spruce and pine lining the highway, lights on cars white and red racing towards and away from Montreal into the rest of the night and tomorrow.

It is an absolute privilege to travel, to be loved, to have had the upbringing I've had and to be where I am and able to do the things I do. I want to recognise and honour my good fortune, pour this gratitude into the actions of my hands and feet and eyes and mouth and ears.