more from the walk

Wellington is always game for the outdoors. This dog is my muse. He is so effortlessly beautiful. Such elegance and grace in all that he does. He's taken to running over and greeting my neighbour when she gets home from work everyday and the other night he just staid over there and had tea or whatever he does with her and I forgot about him and eventually went to bed. Then at 11pm I hear this barking and it's him huddled on the porch wanting in.

Juniper was awake for most of the 3 hour jaunt. She stays silent in the chariot unless I stop for too long. She looks sleepy because she decided to wake up every 1.5 hours for some miowks ALL NIGHT LONG.

Which is why I look so ghastly tired. Sometimes I think I see a glimmer of Grace Under Fire in my photos. Strange. 

I went barefoot on the way back. Just had the urge. I spent an entire week barefoot during frosh week in my fourth year at Trent. Helped kids move bar fridges into their dorms and brought them on tours of downtown Peterborough. What a fucking hippie I am sometimes. Anyway, the path from the cabin through the fields to the river is basically sand and it had warmed in the sun. Walking with such awareness of the texture and the temperature of the earth, how  utterly Buddhist of me. haha. I hope the farmer finds my prints and gets a thrill from the thought of Pocahontas meandering through his back forty. Are toe rings really relics of the 90s? I think maybe I've had that one on since then haha. 

Obligatory mountain shot.

(Shizzzzop talk: I figured out how to make my photos stretch to fit the page perfectly thanks to a blog called My Girl Thursday here! This is so exciting because I was never happy with how puny my photos looked and making them bigger just made them bleed into the sidebar. Yes, I am a techno weenie who doesn't know anything knows a bit about html.)

fog in the morning

These cravens were clattering around on top of the hangar this morning and the noise drew me outside and I immediately went back in to grab the camera. I tucked Juniper in the chariot with a few blankets and Wellington followed along as I took what I thought would be a few photos. A few hours later we had meandered our way through the fog and the fields of oats all the way to the Yukon River which is about 2kms from our cabin, snapping photos all the while.

 Such a crude, industrial looking building but so beautiful. 

Sasquanch would know. Raven or Crow. Either way they drew me out with all the cawcawcawing and flailing around on the tin roof. Of course I thought they were greeting me. That's what we humans do. We assume things about nature. Things that include us. What we forget is that nature has simpler intentions, more basic, yet infinitely more important than us. They were probably using sound to help them get around in the fog. (Or they were just whooping it up because the fog was so beautiful, tehe).

I found this child in the oats...

how she came to be - (Lil'Ian)

In the cabin where she grew up hangs a picture her mother painted before she left. Lillian always felt there was a message in this painting, some kind of signal to explain what went wrong. She’d study it with her eyes and follow the ridges with her fingers, feeling for a language like brail. The painting is of a leveled landscape, gnarled with trees and brush. The greens and browns and yellows and blues all come together in intricate, frenzied knots. The only thing that makes sense about the painting are the little vertical strokes of green you can see jutting out of the rubble in lines swaying up and down over the undulating land in a tight grid across the canvas. “Baby trees,” Lil’s father said when she asked him what they were. She was eleven years old. Like me, Lil thought. And she was right. For out of a complicated mess, out of the destruction of the forest before, Lil took root, and in the sunshine that bears down on emptiness, grew up strong.

Arden

If she didn’t know better she would think he planned his life cinematographicly. That first time in the car when he reached over and touched her face and then ran away. And then that time he pressed her up against the map of Canada and kissed her under the naked light bulb in the back hallway of the B and B, leaving her astonished - fixed, like a wild animal caught in a trap in that moment right before frantic thrashing when surprise holds more than the trap itself.