Where I live now…
More than one hundred years ago a wood dwelling stood on a short bluff above the ocean, and the fisher people climbed up the rocks from their boats to the small hut where they kept and repaired their nets. Perhaps when a sudden storm blew in it would also provide shelter. This hut is on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, north of the Lower Mainland where all the big cities reside; Vancouver, east and west, Burnaby, New Westminster, Coquitlam, and many more. And all the cement, and the density of the buildings built on that, and the hurtling and rushing of traffic that never stops, and the people going to and fro, to and fro, makes this place feel like another world away.
Before there was a road, there were the fisher people and their hut. And then it became a modest little cottage and now a road runs past only a feet from it’s backside. The only door faces out to the ocean. I sit at my table in the window, a skylight above, looking west where the large Texada Island lies long in profile in the Malaspina Strait, and the sunsets above are faithful in their beauty. I live in a fully self-contained little house; a bedroom with a door and a skylight above the bed, a bathroom, a living/kitchen area with beauty out every window, and outside my door the wood porch is surrounded by a trellis fence covered with ivy. Right beside the ocean.
My daughter-in-law Zuzana found me this place online, “This is perfect for you! This is you!” And I also found me this place. I brought it into focus, because I asked for it. Before every move I make a vision board. When I lived in Vancouver and the pandemic descended upon the world, and I knew I had to get out of that housing complex before it imploded, or I imploded, my vision board was all about sky. I prayed, please let me see the sky again. My small suite in False Creek had given me safety and security to weather the storms of ill-health for five years, but it was time to go. It was dark, and noisy above, and I noticed that I was starting to walk hunched over, as if I was in a cave. I had been carrying a heavy burden.
My vision board then had wide open spaces. Sky. And birds. Always birds flying across the big sky. I found a beautiful studio on the fourth floor of a quiet building on Vancouver Island, in Victoria, where I knew no one. I moved. Stepping from the hallway into my new home was like stepping into the light. This is where I would wait out the pandemic. Bubble of one. Table in the window. View of sky. The weeks went by, the months, then two years had passed. I walked and walked the streets of Victoria, through all the neighbourhoods, looking at the different architecture, the different vegetation. All the strangers were masked.
I had touchstones. A small church with a stained glass window above the door and the words, Bidden or Unbidden, the Great Spirit is Present. Nothing was open. There were no open doors but I could be outside, and I found myself in the right place at the right time. I landed in a neighbourhood I could relate to, Fernwood, with its shabby charm, and pop up art of whimsy and beauty. The small treasured gardens luxuriant with flowers; the profusion of California poppies sprinkled everywhere with their deep orange hues. I walked for miles to find the Little Free Libraries; a few weather resistant shelves housing books, free to take and able to take swaps or donations. Quiet streets with random telephone poles decorated; my favourite was a faded out black and white image and the words, Never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans. Touch it. Turn around and go home.
And then it was over. I had found surprising beauty and a safe home in Victoria but it was time to move on. I contacted Dale, the great connector, and she introduced me to the grand keepers of my next home, Colleen and Barrie. I rented their trailer in an up for sale trailer park in Fort Langley, a place I had never thought I would live again. It became a place to reset after the pandemic, renew friendships with old friends, hope to get to know my grandchildren, so much older now. Bubble of one had more and more become a way of life. How to enter the stream of life again?
Time is different now. A year feels like the calendar turning over to a new month. Two more years passed and the traffic got louder and louder outside my door, and the things my spirit longed for kept rising up into the surface of my days and could not be denied if I was to be true to myself. I longed for quiet. I longed for a lack of man made noise. If I was to be in my solitude still, then I needed it to be somewhere beautiful. I yearned for beauty and peace, and the healing of the natural world.
Out came the Bristol board, the glue stick and the file folder of images. I love, I absolutely love the vision board I made over the space of a few days on my table in the trailer. Adding to it, humming, dreaming. I couldn’t stop smiling. I felt so happy. My heart got lighter and lighter. I have had zebras on my vision boards. Yurts! Not because I want a zebra as a pet. Not because my dream home is a yurt. But it’s the feeling I get from these images that call to me: curiosity, delight, enthusiasm. Wild horses running free, manes flying…birds in flight…the majesty of clouds…beautiful trees standing together, rising up. Whatever one calls joy.
You do not question the images that end up on your vision board, but later you may recognize that it was all foreshadowing. Today, on the wall of this little cottage, is my most beautiful creation. I did not know it then but I am living it now, as everything I had envisioned has come true. On my board are long grasses with deer grazing. There are two images of bears; one is a cub walking along an ocean shore, the other is a bear sleeping, one paw covering his eyes while he lays curled in a sheltered glade in the forest. There are so many gorgeous flowers, glimpses of houses tucked amongst the serenity of trees, flowering shrubs, sky above, ocean waves, a bluff, rocks. That came as a surprise. I did not know that I was wanting the ocean. I knew that I craved to be immersed in water. But not just any water. Not chlorinated, not polluted. Clean water. There are words on my vision board, interspersed with the images; Air. Land. & Water. It’s such a beautiful space to be in. The Light From Within. Spirit. Forest. Seek Beauty In All Things. Thank you!
So here I am. This is where I’ve found myself. I am still a bubble of one but my world is populated by the animals that continue to live as best they can while we encroach upon their natural habitat. I shouldn’t give the impression that I am living far from the modern world and all its amenities. Far from it. The shoreline is dotted with mansions and the roads with fast cars. And I am definitely cozy in this nest. But all my life as I’ve moved from one place to the next, it has come with the realization that I am catching the tail end of a way of life rapidly changing by development. I enjoy a year or two of a neighbourhood with a distinct personality and unique qualities, and then the speed and escalation begins to ‘pave paradise and put up a parking lot.’
As a renter I know I will move on again. Sooner, later. I don’t know when. I will give myself one more summer to plunge into the cold, clear waters of the ocean below my window. The healing began immediately upon moving here. Living here is all the holidays I never had for fifteen years.
I have found my self in breathing in the clean air. I have found my self in resting my eyes on the colours blue and green and brown. I have found my self in the sound of the tides moving in and out. The winter storms were mesmerizing; the waves in whitecaps shattering against rocks that never broke. There are deer everywhere. At night when I am in my bed I hear them go by the window on their way to the feast of ivy on the trellis fence. All these little things are my big things.
There is always a letting go from one place to the next. I miss my two blue jays that visited me at the trailer in Fort Langley. But they gave me their own feathers that now sit in a tiny jar on my windowsill, the iridescent glimmer of their blue catching the light. I miss the crows that came for peanuts. That sat on poles above the bus stop while I waited. That followed me across the village to the post office and back and were never disappointed. They knew I kept peanuts in my pockets.
I could not bring my beloved hummingbird feeder to this new place. The bears would be attracted to the sugar. And it was a thrilling evening last Fall when a bear walked past my kitchen window. Moments before I had been at the side of the cottage rinsing off my water shoes after my dip in the ocean. I’d come in and was sizzling up a delicious aroma of garlic, onion and celery when I glanced to my right and saw the biggest black dog I’d ever seen. My thought process was instant; whose dog was it and was it safe unleashed so close to the road? And then it turned it’s head and there was the unmistakeable profile of the black bear. Oh! I was stunned and thrilled all at once! Was it coming for my dinner or was the memory of food drawing it to the tree on the bluff laden with apples?
I am not fearless. In three quick steps I ran to the door and slammed it shut. The next day the landlady and her gardener stripped the tree of every single apple. For the next two days the scat left on the road out front showed that the bear came back and kept checking. But the bears here have a lot to eat. The blackberries grow thick and wild and plentiful.
When I begin to miss the people who have left me, or whom I’ve left behind, or if I foolishly imagine that I can still live the life I no longer have, I have to remind myself that I am here for a reason. What I don’t have causes me much unhappiness and grief; what I do have calls me to live in this present moment. There’s that double meaning again; the present is the gift, and I certainly have been given what I asked for. There is beauty in each moment, and thereby comes my peace.
What I have now…
Above my head as I walk, whomp whomp whomp, the powerful sound of eagles’ wings, of ravens’ wings.
The early morning sightings of a mink, recognizable by such a distinctive, rich coppery brown colour, skipping along the shoreline.
The harem of California sea lions that stayed in the bay here for two weeks, mighty fine fishing going on! I had read about their bark only in books. To hear it was amazing! So harsh. So loud. So dissonant; it carried right through the walls of the cottage.
The last time I saw a whale was in 1982. I had driven myself and my children from Niagara Falls to Vancouver to start a new life. An old friend of mine from Niagara Falls, Bob Lundy, was the junior lighthouse keeper on Quadra Island. The children and I visited him there and were eating Cheerios one morning at the table in the picture window that all lighthouse keepers have in their little white houses with the white picket fences. Suddenly Joseph, four years old, jumped up, knocking the table, spilling his bowl, and yelled, Sharks! It was a pod of whales breaching, travelling up the Discovery Passage. And now in 2025, this past November, my heart was in my throat when I looked out at the ocean and saw a large disturbance on the surface of the water and hundreds of seabirds milling about. And then it breached. And I saw it, the distinctive tail of the humpback whale.
What a gift! The whale stayed in Lee Bay for the whole day; circling, breaching. I stood on the bluff and could recognize the spout way off in the distance as it swam alongside Pearson Island. I’d think, this is it, it’s leaving now to go north or south of Texada, Goodbye! Goodbye! but then it began another sweep of the bay. I stood on land. I watched. The whale rose out of the sea below the bluff where I stood. So close I reached inside myself and felt the whale. This mysterious, powerful creature that lives mostly out of sight, that only becomes visible to take our breath away, changed places with me. I felt myself as small and humbled. And then transfigured; ancient, and powerful.
The hummingbirds drink the nectar from the flowers of the arbutus trees. And from the gift from me to them of the bright crimson flowers in pots that line the wood porch railing. This is where I am now, and I too am drinking from a fuller cup. My glass half full is overflowing. There is sweetness.
Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. – Rainer Maria Rilke.
I try to live in grace. I try and fail. I try and succeed. I try.
Good Life
diane
With gratitude to Zuzana, Dale, Colleen and Barrie. I thank you.
