WestCoast Whirlwind Lovecapades

Two weeks ago I landed in Vancouver and breathed that salty warm but not too hot coastal air and exhaled something I seem to hold whenever I’m away. So generously I was welcomed and fed as I flitted about, a different home each night, reconnecting with people, saying all the things that don’t get said on FB and skype- things that get said only when it’s 4am and you’re eating salad in the living room, only when you’re walking along a rugged beach after a quiet breakfast, only an hour into a pitcher of good brew on the patio half-baked in sunshine.

Mebrat treated me to my first Vancouver breakfast at Main & Broadway. The waitress poured me a coffee and asked, “Milk, cream or almond milk?” I started to wail a sort of laugh-cry and fought back the urge to hug her. In another place later that day I found a bathroom labeled  “This room has a toilet in it” and the same sound came out of me. I know this starts to veer into a west coast caricature, but inside of that stereotype, something signals a truth that I feel home.

After a quick visit with Rachel, walking along False Creek, I took the Langdale ferry up to the Sunshine Coast, where time is warped somehow, so it felt like a week. I invited myself to Amanda & Denise’s mini-farm and they invited me to come to a small dinner party at some friends’ house. Slightly depleted from the travel but fueled by the reserves of energy that present on a sabbatical, I went along and found myself in a most bizarrely magical table.

Serendipity's Table: bringing people together since forever...

To my left sat one of my most favorite people, Amanda, and her partner Denise, esteemed as Mr.Robert’s Creek 2012. To my right sat DonnaBalma, a famous artist in her seventies still painting and living her dream. Across from me our hosts, Randeesh who is originally from Belize and enlivensthe coast with his reggae, and his partner Jan who took a thousand pictures and led us around the fairie trails of their forested & river-running-through property before feasting us on local vegetables and fresh fish. And then Darcy,who was quietly sitting on a volume of activism and research on community-basedforestry that I want to learn more about.

Rounding the crowd out was a 15 year old, whose parents were away. Darcy explained that the young woman’s  parents met while the mother and Darcy were studying edible worms in Africa. With a witty intelligence beyond her years gleaming in her eye, the young woman turned to me at the end of this introduction and said, “Thank god for worms!”

On my last morning in Vancouver serendipity delivered me again into a glorious state of affairs. I was sitting in a new café in Strathcona, just off Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. I was having breakfast with Raven discussing the on-going difficulties of addressing domestic violence within queer/activist communities. In the back of my mind I was also wondering where I would stay that night, when an old acquaintance Christyn passed by. I ran out to say hello and she invited me to share her space that night, which is a tiny apartment full of paintings taller than me of fierce feminine sacred warrior images that watched over me and I think blessed me while I slept.

The next day I rendezvoused with my parents, we stopped by Loutet Farms in North Vancouver to see what Gavin's been up to. This fully operational suburban farm with drive-by farmers market twice a week is a brilliant project, and the peas popped with sun warmed green perfection in my mouth. Since then I’ve been home in Victoria, which is awholenother story, but before I can tell that chapter I’m going with dad into the mountains to hike the Bedwell Lakes trail and hopefully summit Mt. Tom Taylor.

So, I will leave you with this ditty that came to me in the whirlwinds, about the little souvenirs that are accumulating in my little cloth bag of found souvenirs.

~sab

like old time homework, at mom & dad’s kitchen counter

Victoria, BC

angel crumbs

Here, let me show you the metal medallion painted with an genderfree winged knight, long trumpet in hand that stowed away in my breast pocket when I abandoned the nest.

Let me tell you a story of this red feather that fell between the step I took

 and where my next foot followed its lead.

See these three little silver stars, invisibly joined; I found them on the stairs of the ferry as I climbed up to the outer deck to watch the mountains be spectacular.