I grew up in Canada's prairie breadbasket, where I learned to love
nature and appreciate beauty. I spent hours upon silent hours in the
company of livestock, pets, and wild animals, finding the individuality
and personality within each creature. I trekked across the native
prairie and grain fields that my family's farm offered. I reclined under
the dappled light of aspen groves, listening to birdsong and watching
nature unfold and come alive. In the spring, I shed my heavy boots and
darted along the shelterbelts over the half-melted snow, pink-orange in
the slanting sunset light. I gloried in the feeling of being drowned by
the sound of warm-edged spring zephyrs filling the entire prairie sky
with that matchless sound of pure moving air, fully replacing the
world's audio track. I can close my eyes and still feel that wind, as
though the impossibly huge sky is supporting your weight just as much as
the ground is. I listened for the rolling calls of migrating sandhill
cranes, and watched colonies of Canada geese fill some high plane of the
troposphere with their long angled lines, pushing north just as winter
broke into life-giving spring. All this and more I absorbed and still
hold.
At the turn of 2007, I moved to the west coast where I remain today. It
was one of those changes that life brings, that you're not sure will be
for the better or worse. But life is always good, if it is anything at
all—so I guess the uncertainty is moot.
Like everybody else, my life is more complicated from the inside. I'm
passionate about things that matter most to me, and unopinioned on
things that don't. I'm a firm believer in subjectivity and the
legitimacy of opposing tastes, and resent sweepingly objective claims. I
work at a great job, but it isn't what you'd call a passion; I'm more
of a dilettante, with a broad range of interests that don't package
themselves neatly into a career.
Everyone is different things at different times. These days, I am
learning a lot. I don't know where my life is headed, but I am busy
full-time with enjoying the present.
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