WHERE: Aberdeen, Scotland
WHEN: February, 2016 WHY: Returning home, albeit briefly. Looking through some old photos on my computer and feeling nostalgic, not for places necessarily, but the feelings that accompany them.
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WHERE: The Banff Centre
WHEN: March 12 - 14, 2017 WHY: Conference It's 7 a.m. and I'm physically wired but mentally exhausted. I find reflective practices and continuous conversation with strangers draining, but these feelings subside when I look out the window or find time to myself. I'm supposed to be journaling - and I suppose that I am doing that now - but I'm distracted and disconnected. Yesterday, I volunteered at a session on "Resilience as a Path to Transformation". As with all sessions at conferences like this, I'm more interested in the facilitation strategies than the content. Delegates were led through a guided visualization exercise that asked them to imagine themselves the way they want to perceived, and finding strength in their values and within themselves. I don't recognize these buildings now,
nor the faces of the people who stare dolefully out the windows. There's no sense of belonging, here - just the dissociated millennial three floors up, and the distant stare of the boy who's lost his mother. I'm a creature of habit. Of habitat. And I'm here. I feel at home anywhere, it's my gift. To sink into the soft grass in a park halfway 'round the world, and lull myself to sleep with the syncopation of a foreign language. Your mother tongue whispers sweet nothings through my ears, and I run my fingers through blades of grass and over vowels like velvet, every bit aware of the sensations that arouse when words wrap so effortlessly: there is an eroticism in familiar words spoken miles from my address. I don't have a backstory, but I see the world through hardcovers and bookmarks; I can balance on my tropes. I use books like maps, to ground me in reality to locate the truth to navigate my own story. I wake up next to strangers in the golden hour in tangles of cotton and glass. I feel at home anywhere, it's my curse. This is not my story: there is no beginning, no middle. I've come into the plot at the end - I'm not familiar with the characters. I'm under the impression that this is where I ought to be, though it feels wrong. These hands are not my hands. These fingers curled around the arms of a stranger can't be mine. I'm a creature of habit. Of habitat. Of habit. I recognize the reflection in the windows, but not these buildings. This is not my story. This is not my story. WHERE: Crossfield, AB
WHEN: March 1, 2017 Lately I have been looking for validation in all of the wrong places. |
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