clearbluecup

hello!

still here
not writing
writing about not writing
boring

touring
hiking
soaking in sulphur-hot steam baths
shopping
catching up on a year gone

rain
wind
leaves turning
schedules settling
baby walking
talking
signing
willful

hardly a baby anymore, really

lots of ideas lately
they fruit
and are gone
like mushrooms after the first frost
i need to carry a pen and notebook
to capture
spore prints
in the moment

On the weekends, Tom and I love to go hiking in the forests around the city. We tramp up and down hills in rain or shine, wearing full hiking gear or totally inappropriate city clothes depending on when the urge strikes. And almost everywhere we hike we see massive stumps in various stages of decay supporting entire cities of fungus, moss and smaller trees. These stumps always have telltale notches cut into them from where the lumberjacks who felled them stood as they pulled the saw back and forth. Most are more than a meter in diameter; they are the old growth trees that were the original inhabitants of the area.

When I picked up the Georgia Straight this week and read about a couple who totally renovated a Queen Anne style house in a nearby East Van neighbourhood, using mainly salvaged materials from other old houses, I had one of those "of course" lightbulb moments. "If you take a wood-frame building prior to the 1920s, generally it's going to be built out of first-growth forest." The timber that was created by felling those massive trees went to build the growing city, building houses like the one we live in, which was built sometime around 1910. The very bones of the house, all the beams that hold the walls and ceilings up, the wood trim around the windows, doors and the entirety of the dining room, all grew once upon a time in the silent cathedral of forest that is Lynn Valley.

When we go hiking in the forest now, I will look at each stump and think, "Did my house once grow here? Did you give your life for my wainscoting, for the door jambs and windowsills I arrange my knick knacks on today?" This is the history of Canada - the hundreds of years those trees spent growing in the mists and rain.

I'm writing at www.dailymantra.com too these days.

How cool - I just found a Dream Registry, which is basically a blog that anyone can join and record their dreams online.

It's got fascinating potential as a tool for dream research and analysis. Currently one of the ways it is being used is to record instances of psi, or precognitive, dreams coming true. It doesn't look like it's got thousands of bloggers recording their dreams, well, not yet anyway. But what a great idea!

Thanks for being patient while the site was being upgraded. It doesn't look at all different, does it? Apparently it took a lot of gnashing of teeth and tedious fiddling around to make it this way. :) Big thanks to my resident computer tech Tom for sorting it all out for me. We're still sorting out a few of the details in the sidebar there, but I promise it will be much tidier soon, especially for those of you out there who still use internet explorer.

We have been well into the spirit of Halloween this year, heading out to the Parade of the Lost Souls on Saturday night, and hosting a pumpkin carving party at our house on Sunday afternoon. Both were great fun.

I'm slowly beginning to use flickr for photos (after everyone else on the planet is on board, but whatever) but I'm being slightly stingier with the privacy settings than I usually am. So if you know me and think you should have friends and family access to our photos, send me an email and I will sort it out.