I wanna go home – On quitting a vacation

Originally posted on Provocative Penguin, in an issue about Religion and Atheism

For the first time in my life, I have ended a vacation early to come home because I was homesick.  I’m not sure I even knew what ‘homesick’ meant before because I had never been away long enough to experience it.  I had booked two almost back-to-back vacations a week after ending a career and turning 30. The first was a hectic, new-state-each-day road trip and the second a visit to the East Coast where I had intended on going on some serious soul-searching bike trips in the outskirts of Halifax. For some bizarre reason though, the only biking gear I packed was a pair of yoga pants and a long-sleeve coolmax shirt. I didn’t bring a sweatshirt or a layer that would be warm on the windy passes. I had told myself that this was a ‘bike-venture’ vacation, but then filled the tiniest suitcase I own with the kind of outfits I would wear on a windy walk down boardwalks in like, California or Spain.  Still, I looked adorable, minus the shivering and the wind-burnt cheeks.

I only shortened my second trip by 4 days, but it feels like a monumental decision… almost as if I’ve let down the part of myself that adventures and is capable of doing things solo.

I managed to do many things with other people:  soaking up afternoon sun with Dal students, drinking in all but one of the local breweries, experiencing the (maybe) first patio day, teaching a little (big) boy how to pedal his bike for the first time, seeing Peggy’s cove through a foggy and sunny day, and taking awesome pictures along the way. And I shouldn’t be too hard on myself, I did manage to do many things on my own… a morning run on streets I didn’t know, finding and capturing awesome street art, touring the waterfront, eating at small restaurants, visiting the shipyard, two farmers markets, a craft fair, Point Pleasant park and… well, mostly I tried to get lost, but I found my way easily.

There came a point where I realized I was seeking out ‘notice what you notice’ moments and visions, instead of letting them come to me naturally. I was experiencing incredibly gorgeous sights and I was trying really hard to be moved by them, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore.

I wanted home.

Click HERE (or skip ahead ^ to 1:26) to watch White Horse – Emerald Isle with only these lyrics:

I’ve been on the road one day too long / Can’t hear the record for another sad song / Look at all these faces can’t all be wrong / That’s a lot of my heart out there.

So do we keep running through the motions baby / Knowing that one day`s gonna come maybe / When you can’t keep your pretty mouth from saying / I wanna go home.

I wanted my bed with my 9 ridiculous pillows. I wanted my living room, in all its weird-art-glory. I wanted my backyard, with its mismatched chairs and leaning, vine-weed-covered fence and big orange dumpster within view. I wanted to use my low-lit shower, cook in my horridly purple basement-kitchen, and drink coffee at the cafe with the tilted benches and the broken brick path…

I wanted home.

I had never before felt such a desire to be surrounded by my things.  I also missed the people in Toronto, but we’re all so busy lately that I’m used to missing them.  I was newly surprised in my homesickness by how much I had grown to require being around familiar ‘stuff’. This was especially remarkable after a recent desire to purge so many of my belongings… but I guess what I hadn’t weeded out had become part of my being? Feeling safe and within my own space has always allowed me the freedom and confidence to explore out of my comfort zone, so that I feel like seeing and doing ‘all the things’.  I had left my home base for long enough that I had lost my desire and capacity to seek out new experiences.  In order for me to get that back, I knew I needed to seek out the least new experience…

I needed home.

So I told myself if I changed my flight I’d come back and be super productive. I’d update my website, attend art openings and panel talks, go on a bunch of runs, and get caught up on all the news.  But what I’ve done is burrow.  I’ve slept in and made tea and done chores and taken naps before having visits with some of my closest.  I’ve turned down invites to late night benders and I’ve gotten super insulted and hurt when I wasn’t invited to others. I’ve sat in my backyard and just silently reflected on some thoughts that, for some reason I wasn’t able to think when I was away like,

Maybe it’s okay that I just experienced ‘The Big 30’ and it hasn’t changed a goddamn thing.

Maybe it’s okay for me to need people and to want to travel with others sometimes, because we don’t need another shot of my feet in a new location.

Maybe it’s okay that my soul-searching vacations ended in me finding that my soul is most accessible and solaced when not being sought out.

Maybe it’s okay that even though I’ve come home early, it still doesn’t quite feel right because I haven’t figured my home-shit out yet, but it feels better anyway because I’m doing so AT home.

Since getting back to Toronto I’ve asked a lot of people whether they’ve ever ‘quit’ a vacation before.  Mostly people have said no and a few have said they wanted to but couldn’t afford to or make the logistics work.  A few have said that there was a bravery in choosing to do so – that even though the earliness of my arrival here hasn’t allowed much time for productivity, it has certainly created an opportunity for examining my existence.  It’s helped to validate that the life I’ve been creating for myself for the last few years has been an authentic, worthwhile project, and one that I feel confident in continuing to develop in whatever way arises and feels best. And I know now that I can trust myself to quit if it feels appropriate, because having the freedom to be able to up and leave most often leads to a desire to stay and persist.

We all hold dear the idea that we’re the captain of our own soul, and we’re in charge, and it’s a very scary feeling when we’re not. In fact, that’s what psychosis is-the feeling of detachment from reality and that you’re not in control and that’s a very frightening feeling for anyone.” John Bargh

Announcement: Allotting time for excitement…

“You’re the only person I know who gets so excited about things that they actually have to allocate their allotments of excitement.” – one of my friends, about me, at some point in the last few months…

I’m officially allocating more time and energy for noticing, observing, participating and excitement as of this Friday.

After 3+ years of scheduling and financing I’ll be leaving the admin world and, after a month of some travel and visits with friends from New York to Halifax, I’ll be acquiring a whole new set of skills in the production side of the CBC Radio News world.

As I approach my 30th birthday (gasp), ‘what I will be when I grow up’ is becoming marginally clearer. My ultimate goal is to be deeply involved in content creation, and ideally I’d love to be paid millions to be covering local/street art and Toronto culture.  Alas… Little Bites doesn’t quite have that kind of readership yet, so I am excited about diversifying my capacity to capture moments in many different mediums.

So, dear readers, I want to thank you.

You’re a small, exclusive group, but you’ve been incredibly supportive and you’ve fueled me for six years now (!!). You can expect some changes on this site relatively soon. I intend to give you (and me) more in the next chapter of my life, and hope you’ll welcome and encourage some new fellow followers.

Let’s get excited!

NWYN – A Saturday of infuriatingly unpredictable weather

The morning began with plans to longboard to some breakfast benny at Starving Artist for the first time this season, but opening my blinds to some falling snow led to a minor temper tantrum and an alternate plan.  I literally cursed myself for my stubborn insistence on biking there, spitting out the persistent snowflakes along the way. But I made it:

Though the waffle-based brunch was delicious, and we were sort of delightfully over-caffeinated, our mood matched the weather for even longer, and then we were surprised by that infamous, bright yellow beacon on the windshield.  A sign that, on almost every other similar location in the city says no parking between 12:01AM and 7:00AM, in THIS particular instance had a sticker over the second time to say ‘PM.’  How is one to notice such a thing before consuming coffee??

A  message from another lovely lady led to a conversation about how the weather was making her miserable. I wanted to know if that misery wanted company. She insisted that we were only allowed to visit if we, too, were planning on being pouty and upset.  We agreed.

Tea, cat cuddles, twisty stretches, book exchanges and salad consumption improved our moods slightly and we parted ways in the sun that was desperately struggling to get out from behind the persistent clouds.

I biked home.

Furrowed brow still fully formed, I decided that Saturday would be the day that I would start a running regime again. I took to the alleys of my neighbourhood, which never fail to provide me with a new perspective, and some opportunity for optimism:

Sarah Clifford-Rashotte
“Your longest conversation’ 2013
SARAHC-R.COM

FOMO to SOLO – Turning Fear into Acceptance of Missing Out

I do a lot of things.  In a normal week, I will work my full-time 9ish to 5ish job, and in the evenings, I will participate in at least one social event per night.  Sometimes these will be small-scale, and this week in particular, each night was spent with one or a few lovelies, making and/or consuming food of some kind before or after enjoying some form of art.

Except last night. Last night was the night when a good portion of the city was outside frolicking in the multiple feet of freshly fallen snow.  A group of my friends in particular were toboozaning at Riverdale park, throwing themselves down the side of a ridiculously huge hill over and over again, while I stayed home with my candles and my incense and my tea and my thoughts.

I missed out on a good time. I know this because I woke up in the morning to the post-party text about how it was ‘sooooo good.’  My immediate reaction was not to feel a sense of joy for him; to be happy that he got to indulge in some well-deserved fun with buddies. My instant impulse, at 745 in the morning, was to pout at my phone, and roll over to try to sleep some more.  I, an almost 30 year old woman, who stuffs her life full of activities, couldn’t just feel empathic towards someone else’s experience of such fun, I had the sense that I needed to have been part of it also.

Force of Destiny

Last week I met my Mom in the distillery district to share a bite before indulging ourselves in some seriously intense theater   En route, I came across one the many beautiful heritage buildings that line the streets of that neighbourhood.

“This former industrial building was constructed in phases over two decades as STandard Woolen Mills expande d its operations. the earliest portion, constructed in 1882 and distinguised by its buff and blackened brick detailing was deisgned by E. J. Lennox, one of Toronto’s most celebrated architects” …

This is the Canadian Opera Company building, but the title above sounds much cooler, and plus, according to the COC website, “The Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre is actually a group of buildings, each with a fascinating history. The buildings were initially commercial plants, housing a gas company and a textile mill in Old Toronto.”

Despite the old(e!?) brick and the incredible architecture, it wasn’t the outside that attracted me to this building.  It was that, as I walked by, I noticed this through the big glass doors, out of the corner of my eye:

Creating vessels as containers for ideas

Ontario Craft Council Gallery is currently exhibiting a number of works by glass artist Jeff Goodman.
This was my favourite:

Seconded only by the words said about him on the wall beside his pieces:

 

instagrammed it:

Notice What You Notice – Winter Sun

There’s just something about the crispness of late afternoon Winter sunshine and the shadows it causes…

But it is so very fleeting…

 

Resolutions are Bunk: Psychology Says So

This was originally posted on Provocative Penguin on Jan 9, 2013.

Pic via XKCD – Click to open in new tab

The beginning of each calendar year inspires (or propels? forces?) many of us to think farther into the future (at least a few months) than we are normally accustomed to (at least a few minutes). This delving into the parts of us that we can’t possibly know about yet, usually involves some form of resolving to better ourselves in a quantifiable manner such as weight loss, vice-reduction, money-saving, career-change, house-organization, or anything else one might desire to change.

We feel all hopeful, optimistic and happy but we are also (sorry to burst your bubble) delusional.

Superorganism by Yshia Wallace

I walked home tonight. It took me along Queen Street, into Bluebird Shop where I fell in love with Nga Waiata’s incredible wood and quartz rings, along with all of the other treasures that are shockingly still on boxing week sale right now.

What lured me into Bluebird was an incredible, delicate, hanging installation in the window. I don’t know why I didn’t take a photo, but it reminded me of some sort of snowfall made from huge doilies fashioned out of of felted lambs wool. It’s worth checking out.

So then, walking up Ossington, I’m stopped dead in my tracks by another incredible, delicate, hanging installation in the window of o’born contemporary:

 

Wow.

Boxing Day – An experiment in shadows

Tonight was this year’s first real snow in Toronto.

I promised myself I’d stay home tonight, but the intent was to practice some level of solitude, not necessarily to be a hermit. So I believe the walk around my neighborhood was just what I needed.

As is probably pretty clear, these were all taken on a camera phone (Nexus Galaxy), so they’re capturing the nuance more than what I could actually see.

For you to see it as I did (and I do recommend it), you’ll have to go on your own evening wanderings…

Sometimes you have to be the person to make the first footprints,

so that you can get to the cutest things,

the prettiest shadows,