Saturday, April 15, 2006

Untitled



Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Settling in

So I've had the last 6 days off - it has been a sort of luxury in the sense that I have felt here and now puffing up all around me - becoming tangible one might say. A relief to be honest. I was wondering if it would ever happen. I continue to be surprised at how resistant I am to being home. It hasn't been difficult, but then again, not easy either. I have been escaping from here, from my history, from any sort of continuing future for such a long time now. Yet, it was really for those reasons that I came back here too. A sense of having arrived at a point where I would be able to come back to my history and see it with new eyes - confront certain things I'm afraid of, understand parts of myself I had left behind. And I guess this is the process - somehow I thought I would blithely skip through everything - never falter, bask in some golden era of self understanding...and maybe thats finally approaching - though its taken nearly a year of being back in Canada for me to reach the edges of that phase.
I went to Victoria on the weekend - visited grandma, Murray and Blair's aunt Anthea. It was good being back there because ( well apart from the obvious enjoyment of seeing people) it did bring back a lot of feelings - mostly a love for the natural surroundings and a dislike of the community. I find Victoria oppressively comfortable. I always felt like second class citizen there. We rented scooters one day and drove all around the town. The best part was going through Oak Bay - over the dry scrubby hills, the ocean a muted pastel blue against the yellow gorse bushes. We passed the old house on King George terrace - the one we lived in when I was 12 - where the Vassilis stayed with us for a while, the neighbourhood that offered the best halloween take of any place any time. I used to walk She-ra on the little peninsula just off the bay - with our faces square into the wind we would stare out at the pacific ocean - stretching out to everywhere... the landscape filled in little patches of me that had peeled away with time and weather.

But back in Vancouver the last few days - Blair has been working and I've had time to just be around here. I feel like I always need to face into the wind - I mean move in the direction of what I need to tackle next. and then find a way to unravel the complexities of why I'm afraid or uncertain about it. But I also have to make sure its the right thing to tackle. That its something worth my energy - not a diversion I have created for myself. I find it crazy how difficult it is to understand ourselves. I mean, people even hire other people to help them figure out themselves. I guess thats only when they can't talk about it with anyone else - I know thats how I figure myself out - by talking to other people. But isn't that ridiculous. I wish I could get to the point of understanding myself without requiring constant interpretation. Then again, sometimes I think we all know ourselves, we just choose to confuse ourselves because we don't like the conclusions we arrive at.

But surely forward motion will happen soon. The flailing has to stop eventually right? Summer is coming and I hope I will let it arrive...