A little grace.

Between the perspective that a new city, new friends, and new family provides I am a little overwhelmed with the hyper saturation going on in my life. It is the presence that seeing almost everything for the first time provides and is something that I have long needed in my life. Also it is humbling. I am not one for homesickness or someone who balks at being in new spaces, or just a face in the crowd but this is different. This is a big city. My parents are a two day trip away and my friends, nearly a thousand dollar flight. This isolation, this break from my life of less than a month ago, is both liberating and a little disconcerting but living alone, for the most part, and in a new community has given me back more than it has taken away. I am gaining a little compassion that I feel I may have left on the prairies when I moved West all those months ago.

It pains me to say that I have been a little jealous over the past few years of those who are following paths that make use of all their wonderful gifts, gifts that I feel I posses but have put on the back burner. I have been reading Brené Brown's most recent book, in pieces and snippets i might add, but I recently realized that these feelings I've had come from vulnerability and in my case being at odds with it. It takes immense grace to pursue what you love, especially when the financial rewards may be less, considerably so in some cases, and you may fear what others might say about you, about your job and the validity of it as a life long career.  It takes balls to go out on your own, to hustle, and to pick yourself up after you fail in pursuit of something bigger than yourself. So now, when I feel any resentment or judgement rising up in me I am committed to reaching out and supporting others. In part because they truly deserve it, in part because it is the right thing to do, and a little bit because right now, I desperately need that support too. Unemployment isn't as flattering as one may hope. 

Big City. Big Love.

Sigh, I have a new love in my life. Like any budding romance it is full of long walks and sweet dates. Everything has a glow about it. Things that were once mundane and ordinary have a brilliance about them. The everyday is filled with beauty.

Moving somewhere that I had once only responded to with 'NEVER' seemed like a surprise to many in my life. Prairie Girl, Mountain Girl, Ocean Girl...in the big city? It seemed impossible if not something out of myth. Who would have ever guessed? Like much in my life in the past 2 years it came from an openness, a giving up of what I thought my life would be like and a pursuit of all that 'feels right'. This has made all the difference.

So Toronto. I am sorry that I am not sorry to say it fills my heart. The light pulls at me like it did on a sunny winter prairie afternoon. The people are friendlier, more open, more polite, and generally easier to be around than their best-coast counterparts. The snowy roads and tiny cafes fill the places where community had been missing for the past 2 years. Even my body is physically reacting to the better fit. Maybe it's the kilometres I've been walking in double digits, maybe the vitamin D I'm getting from someplace other than a capsule, maybe it's having the energy to put love into what I cook, and it probably has to do with living closer to the person who makes it easy to be happy.

I also feel inspired and motivated for the first time in what feels like forever, the numbness melting away, out of my damp bones, healed by the sun and vibrancy of the city. I want to take pictures, I want to write, I want to pursue what I have been putting off.

All this is not to say I will ever forget where I am from. I will never. I am a creature put together with shale and black, rich soil, with ocean smoothed stone and salt spray. I am of the west and will always have a soul that is pulled with the pacific tides, that aches when the avalanches tumble down the Rockies, that knows the sweet smell of a chinook wind across wheat fields. It is history of this place and the communities and the way I just seem to fit here that will keep me rooted east for a while. Maybe it's the contrast that sharpens my love for this place.

So to new beginnings, to new loves.