Create

This is a first draft. I’ve been away for too long - the “break” wasn’t a planned one. 2024 became so much about managing, keeping my head above the water. We had plans, checklists, calendars, work-back timelines. So much coordination, logistics, parenting (both of children and worse, adults). I simply had no time in between just checkboxes. I love a good list and the inherent joy that comes from a job-well-done.

The gap last year - and the thing that I missed the most - was messy creation. I stopped making things. I didn’t spend time writing anything but work (and even that was minimal). I didn’t make music. I mostly held crayons to draw all manner of rudimentary vehicle (how does one draw a motorcycle anyway?). I felt mostly like I was ingesting and spitting outputs.

Sometimes the season we’re in necessitates that we focus our energies on particular things. I have always been proud of my ability to manage a lot of things and people, but it doesn’t fill my bucket in the same way as cringey drawings and bad poetry did when I was younger. Which is why, this year, my Word is Create.

I’m taking my cue from nature - she creates everything every year in the spring. She’s intentional about it. She doesn’t worry about perfection or opinion. She simply does her thing and lets us enjoy the fruits (literal and metaphorical). No judgment.

I’m not expecting perfection (we’re working on that), but I want more presence. I might be here more often this year. Or I might not. In between all of the spreadsheets and the calendaring, there needs to be room to create. So much of it is just showing up and seeing what shows up with you. So, 2025 and I will show up together.

Grace Notes

I recently had a few hours to myself one evening. The boys were up to their own devices and so I had the privilege of spending the rare leisure time how I wanted. I ended up watching a Netflix documentary called “Count Me In.” It focused on drummers from different famous bands talking about their craft, how they came to it and the human connection music provides for them and their audiences. At one point, things got a little technical and one of the interviewees mentioned grace notes.

For those unfamiliar, grace notes are embellishment notes that are annotated above the line of music. They are there simply to add interest to the music without interrupting the rhythm and the final destination that the music is headed toward. Grace notes can be sung or played and sometimes, as with drumming, simply a way to help mark the music. They don’t significantly change anything but add a little flourish so that things don’t become too monotonous.

So of course, the idea of grace notes stuck with me and percolated while I washed dishes and took my shower. How do grace notes materialize in our lives? Or rather, can we use the concept to illustrate the significance of our lives in some way?

Our lives have a rhythm of their own. We mark the passage of time, like today, with the new year. We have milestones and goals we like to meet. Our days take on the brush-teeth-eat-breakfast type of thrum. For the most part, even when no day is the same, every day is the same. It is truly the grace notes - the conversations we have, the funny thing that happened, the bit of gossip or a thought we had - that make life interesting. And so I’ve decided that this year with its oodles of time and time not enough, would be ideal to start capturing some of these grace notes. Mostly, they might be thoughts I have or questions that I’m working through. I hope to use it as an exercise to help me write, but also to help us all think a little deeper. When everyday becomes the same, we start missing the embellishments that make our lives interesting. Like I said, I have the time now, even though, I really don’t.

I’ll capture the grace notes as often as I can in a separate section here. I hope you’ll read. And perhaps you might try to write your own.

In the meantime, this quote spoke to me the other day and I think it perfectly sums up this idea:

“To be a good storyteller, one must be gloriously alive. It is not possible to kindle fresh fires from burned-out embers. The best of the traditional storytellers are those who live close to the heart of things0to the earth, sea, wind and weather. They have known solitude, silence. They have given unbroken time in which to feed deeply, to reach constantly for understanding.”

— Ruth Sawyer

If you want to learn more about the Netflix documentary, you’ll find a trailer here.

Cut Fruit

Around the world, people have been locked down for a solid two months. Many of us (barring those who are keeping the world running) have had the time to nest, reflect, reorganize and reimagine what life looks like now and what we’ll want it to look like after. The rituals of our days have changed with many more people in one spot. And many of us have had to opportunity to rekindle or perhaps, go deep in exploring the relationships in our lives.

Of course, this lockdown has given way to thousands of memes. People find ways to be funny when they discover new things about their spouses, parents, siblings and friends. Humour has in so many ways kept the world ticking, too.

My favourite memes of course, are the ones that come out of the shared experience of Asian cultures. And my favourite of all of them have been the “cut fruit” jokes. Things like, “are you even an immigrant if your mom doesn’t interrupt your Zoom meeting to bring you cut fruit”

Mostly, cut fruit has been the purview of mothers. My own would bring a big platter of orange slices, apples, peaches, grapes, plums or whatever else was on hand for a snack in the evening. And if it was the summer, chili and lemon usually accompanied it (try it, if you haven’t - it’ll change your life). Or perhaps a gigantic bowl full of cubed watermelon. Or mangoes, where we would fight over who got to suck all the juice off the pit. All three of us would crowd on a couch to watch terrible shows on TLC or gossiping and sometimes even just silently eating.

Cut fruit is the ultimate demonstration of love. Our parents cut our food up for us when we’re young, long before we have the manual dexterity. It shows that they don’t want us to suffer through the tough pits and peels, the seeds and the “icky bits” like the butt end of a banana, to get to the good stuff. It says, “I took the time to peel, slice (or dice), pit and arrange this for you so you wouldn’t have to work hard.” For anyone who has tried it, it is intensely laborious. Wrestling with slippery mangoes, projectile grapes across the kitchen floor. Cut fruit is a warrior’s battlefield full of frustration and seeds.

Then it’s no wonder that those who care about us most are willing to go to such lengths so we can literally enjoy the fruits of their labour. Just the other day, as we visited my grandmother-in-law, as we left the house, she handed us a bag of cut pears - for after the fast because we’ll be hungry. You’re never too old for cut fruit. And you’ll never say no.

As we approach the end of the holy month of Ramadan, our home has been extra quiet. No sports, not many meals during the day (except for me, always eating cashews for whatever reason). And lots of time to think about things. I’ve also - though I’m not a mother, only graced with the title of Big Sister - started cutting fruit. So we have something quick to grab between Zoom meetings. And so my husband has something he can eat with his breakfast when he rises at 5:00 to eat before his fast begins.

Though none of us know how much longer we might have to be in our homes and how slow the creep back with normalcy will be, I for one, will continue to reflect on everything in my life. And when we finally surface at the end of the tunnel, I plan on asking myself the one question that I ought to have asked about all the decisions and people and labour in my life so far: Is this worth cutting fruit for?

Slow

I remember when I was young, one day, my mother made dinner out of two potatoes. My father was away - we don’t know exactly where - and she was left to take care of two children on her own. I don’t remember much about the days or moments, but I do remember it involved two potatoes. We ate that evening because my mother always knew how to make do.

For anyone who has grown up in impoverished circumstances, or as new immigrants to a foreign land, survivors of natural and man-made disasters, or war-stricken environments, you’ll recognize the feeling of constantly being in the hurricane, buffeted from here to there as you tried to live with a sense of normalcy. For better or worse, you’ve learned to live in a world that is not always on your side.

We’re facing this today. A global pandemic of unprecedented (in our lifetimes) proportions has all but brought society to its knees. The directive is stay inside. Avoid contact. Only get what you need. Help others while you can. We are not used to having our freedoms limited. In a sense, the march of time has stopped and maybe even reversed.

I can see the discomfort of some in this situation. The sense of utter panic and the feeling that the excess we live with is, in fact, not enough. How will we manage? Do I need one package of turkey bacon or should I grab 17 just in case?

There is a creeping realization that, perhaps, we’ve gone too far. We’re using too much, we’re doing too much and we’re burning up. The forced rest, the deliberate conversation, the inability to escape from the things that are bothering us have now been foisted upon us. So many people are taking pause. Instead of simply staying inside, so many of us are being forced to go inside. To actually take some stock.

The beauty of it is, our survival also depends on the goodness in others. For every person trying to mark up prices on necessities, there are scores more knocking door-to-door and making sure elders have enough to eat. So many of my friends and family are working in areas that put them in direct contact with the general public. People are the essential service.

Survival is just that. It makes your question the necessity and the utility of so many things we take for granted. It knocks on your door to take away things you think you needed, but that turn out to be mere luxuries.

You need less. You can do better. You should do with less.

Some of us continue to live like we are in the eye of the storm. The survival instinct that I inherited from my childhood never left me. It’s a deep and ingrained part of me. It doesn’t serve me well many a time (does everything have to seem like it’s on fire every day?) But it has given me a confident sense of calm in my world, especially when we face a global pandemic, head on. I know how to read and clean and write and walk my days away. I, too, can conjure up dinner from two potatoes.

This week is the first week in a long time that I heard birds chirping in the morning. I’m sure they do everyday, but I don’t hear them. I’m too busy stuffing a Tupperware into my bag, while putting on my shoes and yelling at my husband about the traffic report on the freeway. This week is not that. My hair isn’t on fire. Survival instincts are never far and the eye of the storm is a surprisingly quiet place to be.

We’ll be fine. We’ve done so much more with so little.

Ritual

I remember reading “Around the World in 80 Days” when I was a child. Phileas Fogg, the protagonist is an exacting man, who does things with such economy and precision that not a moment is wasted. He’s described as “repose in action.” When I was nine, I didn’t know what that meant. All I knew is, that this was a character after my own heart.

As a child, I sought out habit and ritual more than I did adventure. I was timid, nervous, thoughtful and, for all intents and purposes, well-spoken. While other children chased each other about on the playground (of the many schools I attended), I spent many hours reading in the library.

Reading grounded me and it was the first real ritual I made mine. I enjoyed it so immensely and I still do.

While I’ve allowed more adventure into my life now, I’m a creature of habit. I love ritual. My mornings are timed, unwittingly, to such exactitude that it’s alarming even to me sometimes. I’ve been using the same cup for my morning beverage since I was 13 years old. It makes exactly the right amount of coffee that I can drink by 6 AM, when I head to the gym.

Since I got married a few months ago, rituals have become collective. My partner, who is much more fluid in the way he conducts his business, has embraced some of my idiosyncrasies, with an understanding that I need them for my day to feel like it fit right. In turn, we’ve come up with rituals together that bind our collective time. We do crosswords on Sunday mornings and make big breakfasts, we watch Family Feud on weekday evenings.

While people might find ritual constrictive, there is a grace and elegance to being able to do the same actions over and over with precision. It creates a respect for the time you have been given. Most of all, I think it connects us with the world in a way that is individually and collectively constructive.

As human beings, we’ve always been drawn to the North Star of habit. We seek it out in prayer and how we collectively organize ourselves in the world. After all, hopping on public transit has an almost ritualistic quality to it. Were someone to go and lie on the floor of the bus, no doubt, glances would be exchanged (and the requisite authorities called upon).

We like to think of ourselves as adventuresome and pioneering. But we come back to the comforts always of the things we know. They enable us to understand and be in the world on our own terms and connect us to the notion that we are, in fact, just how we want to be.

Anchoring myself in ritual allows me to move gracefully though a world that is, at best, unpredictable. It is the fulcrum of my living every day. As I get older, it also happens to be the thing that lets me deviate when I need to, with the full knowledge that I can come back when I want.

As wild as it is, life necessitates anchor points. It is only when we’ve fully understood the beauty, necessity and elegance of ritual, that we fully start to understand ourselves and the world around us. It is what enriches those experiences outside of our ordinary lives, so that, the one day that you drink your coffee from a different cup, you notice.

Purpose

Decades are funny things. While absolutely nothing changes outside of a couple of numbers, we are bound to stare into an existential abyss or to take stock of our lives in some way. 2020 is upon us now and it feels heavy with meaning in so many ways.

How life has changed in some absolutely remarkable ways this last few years. From deaths to marriages to moves to career leaps. At the same time, it’s also nothing remarkable. The passage of time forces change on us in many ways. The world around us changes, and as creatures of nature, we are bound to adapt to stay alive. So in some ways, all of our progress is the march of time, no matter how many CEOs tell you otherwise.

As I get older, some of the things that have meant the most to me over my life have amplified, while others have fallen away. After a challenging year (both good and difficult), I’ve started to think about the meaningfulness of my actions. Last year has tested my patience, has made me ineffably happy, and has angered me to the point of physical reaction. And it has also taught me of the absolute fragility of time and how, now more than ever, it’s important to be purposeful in thought and action.

There are lots of people who are much wiser than I am in this world, so I will not profess to know anything more or less than my own experience. However, I can’t deny that middle age is not so far away now. So this year, the idea of purpose is top of mind for me.

I’ve decided this year to make that my choice as well. Here are a few ways that I’m going to show up with purpose:

Switch off - I love staying in touch, but I find now more than ever, that the phone is an absolute distraction. There is truly nothing going on that needs my attention that badly. So this year, I’m choosing to spend more time switching it off, or putting it away while I do more things I want to do.

Buy less - After Thanksgiving, I was completely turned off by the feeding frenzy that is holiday shopping. I’ve never liked having a lot of things and the fact that we buy and never have enough is starting to impact the damage we’re doing to our world. So this year, I’m choosing only to buy necessities. I have enough things and I don’t want to pass on the message that stuff equals purpose.

Get out - For the short length of my relationship, my partner and I have always gone on a New Years Day walk together. I always come back with more clarity. I think it’s the combination of being outside and being with him that gives me that. So this year, I’m getting outside more (allergies be damned).

Show up - Between work, wedding planning, family things and the business of living, I’ve become terrible at seeing and spending time with the people i love. So this year, I’m committed to revitalizing those relationships. I look forward to moving together through the next decade with them.

Engage - I’m definitely going to spend more time writing and reading than I did in the last few years. It’s so vital both to my craft and my sanity. I’ve recognized that there are serious gaps in spirit when I don’t get to do those things, and the whole thing makes me less interested in everything else.

Connect - Part of living with purpose for me, is going to be how connected I can be with my inner thoughts and emotions. Feelings have never been easy for me, but I’m learning that when we approach our inner states with a sense of curiosity, rather than judgment, we get a whole lot more information. And learning to trust that gut is critical. It is after all, the first sign that we need to mind the gap.

This is a long list. And I know I’m going to stumble over it this year. I’ll likely lose my temper or spend too much time on Instagram or not enough time reading. And I’ll have to learn to forgive myself and hop back on when that happens. It’s not going to be perfect. But it’ll be a lot closer to living a life that has meaning for me.

At the end of the day, we are deeply responsible for ourselves and our actions in this world. I’d like to spend that short time building meaning. How are you planning to show up in the new decade?

A few things to think about:

Life on the Edge by Akiko Busch

My Year of No Shopping by Anne Patchett

Art, Work and Life with Lisa Congdon on The Good Life Project

Hummingbird

Vancouver winters are characterized by long bouts of rain, starting in October. Like any of the cities along the Pacific Northwest, we start to see life shrink into the muddy depths of soil, going into hibernation until the spring (which is coincidentally also characterized by long bouts of rain). It’s not uncommon to see angles of geese flying south, honking like so many cars stuck in traffic. The birds and bees quite literally go elsewhere. Bear sightings increase and then slowly decrease. Coyotes lope back into the urban swathes of wilderness.

Our home is in a sparsely populated urban area in a suburb that is desperately trying to become more urban. We have hardware stores and lots of parks nearby. I like it most because of the flowers that line our walkway in the summer and the cascading skyline of mountains behind tall fir trees. And the Starbucks that is also conveniently a block away.

It’s fairly normal for bugs to fly into our home. The ideal mix of nature and uncharted territory that is the tall apartment building makes it so bees are fairly (and frighteningly) at home here during the summer. They sometimes die a valiant death trying to get out of the apartment. This is generally not a problem in the winter, and no other creatures have ever made their way in.

This winter day, my husband and I were getting ready to go out to one of the many holiday festivities that seem to start earlier and earlier each year. As I was waiting for him to finish getting ready, I heard a very loud buzzing sound. I turned around to where the windows are, and spotted a hummingbird. A hummingbird! Twelve stories above ground level. In late, rainy (frankly depressing) fall, a fully grown hummingbird had made its way into the home.

Thereby, started an adventure of trying to get it out of the house. We opened all (two) of the living room windows. We switched off the light, figuring the artificial glow was going to attract it. It fluttered overhead as it flew the full length of the living space. I screamed - you would too.

The bird kept hitting the glass windows. It had spotted the horizon and couldn’t get out, regardless of our best efforts to usher it outward. We tried to shoo it to no avail. Finally, exhausted, it settled on the strings that we pull to raise the blinds. It seemed all of us were exhausted by this entire ordeal that had already gone on for the last 15 minutes.

A short while later, it finally - and with no lack of effort - made its way out. We quickly shut the doors and windows before it had any other bright ideas.

As a writer, I’m prone to seeing the symbolism in the unusual. And so I think, it’s the perfect little lesson in unusual things that feed into the mundane. So here goes.

We all, at times, find ourselves in unusual situations, in unfamiliar territory. We are going along in life, when suddenly, we end up somewhere different from where we thought we would be, at a time we didn’t expect to be there. Despite all the best efforts of those around us to open windows and usher us out loudly, we keep hitting our heads against the same obstacles. We can see exactly where we need to be, but can’t seem to find the opening to get there (even though it’s utterly obvious to others).

And when we get tired, it’s okay to stop for a moment and re-evaluate. I’d like to think that Hummingbird needed a second after frantically expending all that energy in one go. Soon enough, those openings become more clear to us as we slowly gather our wits about us again. And then we’re off to where we might need to be next.

I hate to belabour a point, which may have simply been a freak moment of nature. But I can’t help but think some things come to us exactly when we need them, as unwelcome or unwanted as they might be at the time.

So this is a good last thought for 2019. We’re rounding off the decade (if that means anything to you). For those seeking clarity or those facing the unfamiliar (I think we all are), there is always a way. It’s not always totally clear. It helps to listen to those whispering or yelling that way out for you.

For this next year, I hope that clarity becomes more apparent. And that you rest when you need to, before you journey forward.

The Beauty of the Slash

There is an ideal for writers. Most of us have fallen victim to it. It’s the burning desire to be left alone, to our own devices to create. Ideally, we’d like to get locked away in a cabin where we can have endless amounts of time and cups of tea to write the Next Great Novel.

I’ve tried it on a micro-level. I think we all have. It generally goes like this: If I have all of Sunday free, I’ll spend it writing/painting/practicing music/going to the dance studio/working on my presentation. Inevitably the gremlin of discipline comes through. Somebody calls or you’ve somehow managed to do everything but the thing you set out to do. And so begins the process of berating yourself for wasting the one precious day when you could have finally, finally mastered Italian, if only you hadn’t washed all the pillows.

I’m this person. I think on some level, anyone who likes to create - and not just in the purview of arts - is this person. Flow is such a good and lovely thing when it happens. If it happens. The stage gate is getting past the big “if” that often makes us feel inadequately prepared to add meaning to our creative lives.

Over time though, I’ve come to realize that we’ve had the process of creating hopefully wrong. To say nothing terrible of the people with the discipline and - perhaps dependence on the paycheque - to create at a moment’s notice. Unless you’ve got a patron (whether you’re coupled or not), creating doesn’t seem to happen when we’ve got a vast vista of time and space to do it. Rather, that open space becomes suffocating. It’s a lot like singing in a concrete room. You expect an echo but the sound simply drops to the ground with a gross thud.

Creativity - the desire and urge of it - needs constraints. We need to be, as human beings, bound to some commitment, in order to make it happen. It’s part of the reason that the slash exists. Many creators are many things all at once, breaking their titles up with slashes. Artist/chemist; Musician/Manager; Chef/Writer. Some of these might be out of necessity, but some of them are simply because we must create conditions for ourselves where creating becomes a need, rather than a desire or whim. Whims tend to be fanciful, needs, much more forceful.

In an interview, Tania Katan (theatre trained evangelist who has made some very creative leaps in her career), mentions that she used to write in the mornings before she went to her 9-5 job. One day, in an effort to complete a play, she quit that job and took on writing full time. What she discovered that her plays virtually relied on her day job for source material. That is, the characters were based in real life situations that occurred while she was busy working. Essentially, her creativity relied on constraint, which in turned fuelled it. She’s not the only one who has done it. Lots of creative people, have used time as their own personal constraint. Knowing there is not much of it in a day, it becomes necessary to rearrange it to meet your creative purpose.

In the real world, creativity relies on it just the same. Whether you’re creating a product or working within the parameters of a physical space, you’re faced by constraints, which necessitate you make connections or turn ideas on their heads. What we use then can sometimes become secondary to how we use it.

And it’s utterly thrilling.

Immersion and boredom have their place and are really important for ideas to form and coagulate. But vast amounts of time to stare at a blank page is frankly horrifying.

I recently started carrying a notebook again. Something that I used to do in high school and stopped doing when my purse became heavy, and so did life. These days, I can only find snatches of time to read and write. As life changes, and priorities shift, my sprawling Sunday afternoons have given way to a noisy chaos of living more fully. So those precious moments are even more so. The practice of capitalizing on them is still something that I’m working on.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then creativity is its long-lost sister. The creative impulse is a funny thing. It’s often a blip of an idea or a quick “I wonder” and then it fades away. Capturing it within a constraint seems all but necessary to realizing whatever it is you’re trying to achieve. In the end, where you put the slash is up to you, where it’s on your own person/ in what you do.

In creating, give yourself the time. But not too much.

Things to think about and read:

Tania Katan’s interview on the Good Life Project

Anne Lammott on Creativity - Brainpickings

Yo Yo Ma on Successful Creative Collaboration - HBR

In Reverence of Silence

“Silence is the language of god,
all else is poor translation.”

— Rumi

On New Year’s Day, my partner and I decided to go for a walk at a park near my house. The day was a cool one but much warmer than many other winters we’ve had recently. The park is a local city park with many trails that weave in and out, meeting at different junctures. We took the perimeter route around the park, which leads you on a gravel path through groves of trees. Water ran in small rivulets throughout the walk, with the overhead greying winter trees spiking upwards toward the sky, some barren and others evergreen.

We talked and laughed and played games along the way. But we also walked in silence, only hearing the crunch of the ground under our feet and the distant call of winter birds (mostly the crows stick around).

The silence, even in nature is striking. Devoid of man’s artificial sounds, your senses are only filled with the quiet that weaves itself through the trees.

I’ve been thinking a lot about silence lately. Coming off of a busy holiday season, which was filled with sounds of joy and laughter from family and friends, silence has become a bit of a stranger.

I recently discovered a podcast on BBC Radio 3 called “Slow Radio.” The 15-minute excerpts are meant to take you away from your normal existence and put you in places where slow and silence and solitude are the order of the day. You can walk along the British countryside, wander through winter forests and listen to sounds of bygone eras.

My favourite one is a five-part series in which Benedictine monks talk about life in the monastery. They talk about the importance of silence in their practice. There is one part of the episode where the monk describing silence references St. Benedict’s idea of the “silence for a purpose.” This is the type of silence that is necessary for us to create, pray, remember, read or even just think. It is my favourite passage because of the sheer delight that this order takes in reveling in the silence that brings them close to their creator.

We have become afraid of silence. In his book, “Solitude” Michael Harris describes in detail the fear of silence and solitude that is now the course of everyone’s lives. Technology, though sometimes the catch-all culprit, has a job that specifically promises connection and distraction. In this way, we are never alone. We are never silent. And even if we are, we aren’t for very long. It’s too uncomfortable. We fidget and fret when left alone with ourselves. The inevitable buzz of the phone will call us urgently back.

Yet we crave the silence that we are unwilling to observe. From slow food movements to yoga to silent retreats, we want it so badly, we create entire movements in its honour, only then to fear our own creation. A multi-million dollar industry will have you sitting on the floor trying to silence the clanging of your dear brain, followed by a vegan lunch.

Part of the problem, I think, is that we see silence as a removal, a negative space that is lacking. If we are not doing or talking, we are simply giving into the vacuum that threatens to consume us. In a noisy world, silence has become an enemy because it offers us nothing. And we will choose anything but that.

But silence is a necessary friend. It is the wellspring of the creation of the world. Everything in fact, comes from nothing.

Musicians will know that the balance of silence and sound are both equally important in the creation of music. As a performer myself, there is a moment, mostly right after a piece ends, when the conductor’s arms are still up and the sound is reverberating in the space as it comes to an end. That short silence is filled with everything that came before it - breath, meaning, harmony - before it’s released into the world. It’s my favourite part of the piece, almost always.

We are trying to make meaning of our worlds. But we layer sounds and narratives on each other, hoping that the more there is to sift through, the more we’ll have to figure out what that meaning really is. But like many of the most prolific creators in the world, silence is a necessary ingredient to creating meaning. Thoreau, Dickens, Rowling all revere the silence of being with your thoughts and I’m happy to take their word (hah!) for it.

It’s still early in the new year and we aren’t completely encompassed by the hum-drum buzz of our everyday lives. As Maria Popova said on her ultra-popular, super nerdy blog “build pockets of stillness into your life.” I plan on enjoying moments of stillness in my day - whether it’s my early morning coffee or writing or reading or simply stepping into an empty yoga studio on the weekends. You don’t have to believe in a higher power or even live in solitude to benefit from silence. You simply have to take a minute every day to step into silence, let it envelope you like fragrance, and breathe it in.

A few things to help you meditate on the meaning of silence:

The Origin and Cultural Evolution of Silence on brainpickings

Slow Radio on BBC 3

Paul Goodman on the Nine Kinds of Silence on brainpickings

Solitude: A singular life in a crowded world by Michael Harris

This is your brain on silence on Nautilus

The Year of Nurture (Part 2)

Very recently, I read a book called "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry" by Neil dGrasse Tyson. In it, he explores the formation of the universe - how just the right conditions create what we now have. Through abundance and lack, the universe struck a perfect balance so that our little planet could harbour life. 

At the end of that book, I marveled really at the ability of the universe to just course correct and right itself through a slow process that takes more time than we can even fathom in our heads. Millions of years to perfect and fine-tune.

I have been trying to apply this concept of taking time to nurture this year. I recently found myself in for a community garden plot just down the way from where I am. It's a lovely little hub that's hidden in the woods, close to the inlet.

I have never really thought of gardening as a hobby. Allergies and a general desire to be indoors mostly kept me away from it. But this year, I decided that I could use a little more zen in my life. I've always been good with plants. Things grow when I'm around. Credit to the things of course - they survive in spite of my best efforts to ignore them and how little I actually know about gardening. In a way, we are all made for inhospitable environments.

Back to gardening. I thought I would use my hidden green thumb to grow a few things. In the shockingly calm early morning, I generally make my way down to the plot. I spend most of my time weeding and turning over soil. I check on the few plants I have right now - mostly I'm focusing on herbs and keeping things alive. (The lavender bush disappeared last week - it may have gotten up and walked off.) Then I wander around and admire other people's gardens. There are all manner of happy, healthy fauna from bright blooming marigolds (good for pest control) to early summer strawberries, just starting to turn red to that hardy strongman of verdant plants we call kale.

I'm learning things too. Tending a garden requires patience. Your peppers don't sprout in a week. And not all things will grow. Some aren't simply meant to. And others, you haven't learned to take care of properly. You can't compare your work to the work of others. Different environments just breed different products. A little more sun, and you have bright early tomatoes. A little less sun and they'll need some coaxing.

It helps to be generous too. People who cultivate these plots share with each other. We are all tending to the same earth after all and there are only so many chives you can consume in one week. There is also, only so much you can do to control the environment around you. If the squirrels get to your zucchini first, then you'll have to concede.

Right now, going down to the garden on the weekend is a small joy. Between the butterflies that roam around, the distant sound of water lapping at the shores, and the ever-evolving surprises on my small plot of land, I've found some peace. It's not perfect. But it's peace nonetheless.

That's really what nurturing seems to be about. It's a slow cultivation and a balance of states that allows us to create life. Or coax it out. Some things will survive the harsh winters. Others, despite your best efforts will inevitably fail. We ourselves, grow in the same way, at the mercy of those who tend to us, and the whims of the world around us. But at the end of the day, the universe that's contained in this garden and within us finds a way to right itself.