2.
I found out about a death. A very specific death of someone I knew obliquely who was nonetheless important. He supported me in ways I didn’t know I needed and didn’t understand the value of. I would like to find motivation in this subtle regret. Somehow use this as a catalyst for courage. How many years can I lie fallow instead of tossing a few seeds to see what happens?

3.
I sometimes think I don’t challenge myself enough. Don’t surround myself with people who push my limits. It’s leading to a strange mix of fear and complacency. Too much self-satisfaction is bad for the soul.

4.
I was feeling chatty before I sat down to write. If you were here, you’d know what I mean. I miss you. In every sense of the word.

Surrealism may be my favourite artistic movement. The subversion of it. Reinvention and reordering. Disorder and absurdity that isn’t nonsense. It turns sense on its elbow and I like that. Although I’ve tried out cultivating order, rationality, and logic in my daily interactions, they aren’t my native tongues. I feel at home in the images of Surrealist works. Bizarre and unsettling and chaotic as they sometimes seem, they remind me that not everything is understood scientific or rational terms.

That’s where it all began to resonate; the Surrealists movement was a reaction to the rationality and scientific emphasis they had been raised with in the context of dealing with World War I. These concepts were (to them) inadequate tools for deciphering the psychological aftermath of the war. So they pushed into myth and subconscious and attempted to recreate understanding by reassembling the known and unknown outside of reason.

In listening to the talk, I realized I often place too much emphasis on making sense of the world using tools that are mostly foreign to me. Like handing a mitre box to a weaver and expecting a brilliant charcoal sketch. I try to use reason to process and communicate my world; I don’t intend to dismiss reason and logic, but I need to recognize that I don’t live in those spaces. I live in the soaring rustle of crows’ wings, the crunch of gravel under bicycle tires. In rain falling through the trees outside my front window. In the sweep of colour against a stranger’s skin. A laugh, a phrase, a perfectly timed exchange passing through my hearing. Goldfish in all the wrong-but-right places.

I knew this. But I had forgotten. I will likely forget again. And this is ultimately what art is for: to come inside and kick around the furniture we thought we had placed so perfectly. Remind us of all the cubby holes where we tucked ourselves away.

And in answer to this day, the evening resolves in the smallest consolation: washing up the supper dishes. Despite chaotic emotions and interrupted projects and incessant calls for help, I can — competently, completely — move dirty dishes from one side of the sink, through mere soap and water, and rest them shiny and dripping dry on the other side.

So forget the other hours. Inconsequential demands of time compared to these 5 minutes and this return to order and peace. I make myself a cup of chamomile tea to the rhythm of playoff hockey commentators.

This intersection is busy. Sodium streetlights almost irrelevant in the steady pulse of traffic. North-south, then east-west. Right angles of the compass. Pushing past and past. And in this whoosh and murmur of traffic, the song of this city pulls at my toes, and each mouthful of morning lingers on my tongue.

The bus is half dim. All lit up at the back where blue-collar boys lurch in and out of sleep to the rhythm of new passengers. I’m the stranger in this seat. They’ve all taken this route before, and the slow exhale of a work-week condenses into chatter. We’re all on our way to a Friday morning, for whatever it means, whatever it’s worth. My hearing sidles into the next conversation and curls with a cozy grin against a stranger’s voice.

Meditation, following meandering paths, seems appropriate now. Escaping the weight of city life and people. Finding a place for myself among silences and snowflakes. I wrap myself in solitude. Slip past midnight into this new year.

We fight against the gravity of small bodies. And leave the corners blank.

I am delighted.

Delighted doesn’t quite capture it.

I am gleeful. Elated. Kid-on-Christmas-morning out of my mind.

I’ve driven on the roads that have yet to be cleared. I’ve had to be pushed onto the road by a stranger. I’ve had to forward-reverse-forward-upshift-reverse-forward on several occasions times. Getting anywhere takes that tiny bit longer that seems to make other people cranky. None of that touches this vibration of excitement. This is how all Decembers should be.