Things I love. (27)

I love silence.

Or, more specifically, human silence.

While in Val Marie, I could sit outside of my house and hear nothing for hours of human existence. I could see it - the town, the bright lights of distant farms. But I could hear nothing. There were no cars running the distance, no air-conditioner motors whirling in somebody's backyard. The mechanical world of never-ending noise did not exist. And it was beautiful.

Coyotes would howl. You would hear them. Slowly the reeds of grass would bend and crackle as their veins snapped under the pressure of an animal stalking its prey. Bugs, bugs, bugs - buzzing and screeching their melodies of life and death. A badger would be digging up a hole in the darkness, its eyesight so much better than ours in the dark, and you knew to avoid them rather than to investigate. The wind, calmed with the coolness of night, whispering through the night.

It wasn't completely silent, but it was beautiful.

Because there was no noise - just sound. No motors or sounds of gravel being crushed under the weight of man. Everything was absorbed into creation - and creation was absorbed into the noiselessness of nature. Nearly silent, but alive with energy.

It is a thing I have missed in the city - where there is always a human doing something and intruding on that instant of focus of thought, of reading, of nothing. And yet we mostly sleep through it, never realizing what silence is - never appreciating it and how it can cleanse our mind as water does our body.

Things I love. (26)

I love backpacking. Not in the classics, hitch-hiking across Europe kind of 1960s hippie mumbo jumbo (though I have no opposition to an experience of that sort at all). But in the wandering mountain, backcountry, distant and forgotten land kind of approach. Where you saddle up 50 pounds on your back, including your food, shelter, clothing and a few luxuries for a week, descend into the barren prairie and to the heights of a mountain or the mysteries of a forest, with no intention of returning until you've achieved your goal. Which is both based on distant, renewal, and discovery.

This is an activity I love in Winter, Summer, Spring and Fall. With snowshoes or hiking boots, naked while wading through a river (to keep your clothes from getting wet) or fully clothed to keep the cold from stealing your soul. It doesn't matter the temperature, challenge or weather, so long as my back is strong enough and my friends are willing, I shall tackle nature and be tackled in return. I rarely come home winning in this battle of human and earth, but I never come home without a smile - and without feeling as though the city, the enormous swarm of people, is foreign in a new way. Cars are alien products that I cannot and do not know how to drive, phones are communicative tools that connect very little and reveal even less.

I love backpacking, because it connects me with nature, makes me more Canadian, human and animal, and unites me with my friends. It is an experience that I will love for as long as my body will let me.

(and I most sincerely hope that whoever it is that I end up loving completely and totally in this life will love it as well...)

Things I love. (25)

I love art galleries. I find them inspiring. When I travel abroad I make sure that I go to one, two, three local galleries displaying local work. Or National Galleries, displaying local work from a vast array of history. I love watching time change with the styles and techniques - the adoption of breezy paint-strokes in the impressionists and the precise darkness of baroque religious art. The use of computers in modern-day sculture, precision and anti-precision. The works of Michelangelo and Matisse.

Art galleries allow you to see the despair of man, mixed with the joy of humanity - the perfect place to gander, be inspired, and imagine what made the artist make what you see and how it is possibly making you feel what it is you are feeling.

I love art galleries because you never leave one thinking the same way as you did when you walk in. Instead you come out and start seeing the world in the lines and details of the artist that most impressed you - trying to view the world as they do, hoping that maybe you could make something so incredible in your mind as you saw inside those four walls.

Things I love. (24)

I love cinnamon buns. In a way that can only possibly be unhealthy. I can't describe my love of how soft the dough it, or how the filling ripples out of the coiled goodness in melted rivers of sweet. But I can tell you that I once had a rule - that, for several years, whenever I saw a cinnamon bun at a coffee shop or other diner of sorts, I was required to buy it. I had to have it and try it.

And then my metabolism shifted.

And then I realized how many places sell cinnamon buns just so that people fooled by their love for them would purchase them.

And then, momentarily, I felt like a fool in love.

But I can tell you that I was (and continue to be) so rarely disappointed by buns involving cinnamon. Because I love them. And always will.

And, just for clarification, baking is a fine, fine activity. I've not been able to make a truly phenomenal batch of cinnamon buns yet, but I'm gettin' there...

Things I love. (23)

I love senior citizens. Those one's who are just looking for somebody to brighten their day, so they will sit around and wait for somebody to talk to them on a park bench - not really doing anything but looking. Walking for a bit, maybe. I love how, even though their skin sags and the wrinkles remove every hint of emotion other than a presumed longing, the moment that they are wakened into joy (of any degree) every single pore of skin, including those hiding from the sun in the darkness of the wrinkles, is bright and dancing and beaming and joyful in an absolutely beautiful way. The laugh that accompanies this is either silent or so hearty that one cannot help but to smile - and you do. Because senior citizens, our sources of wisdom and love and curmudgeonry (on the off days), are things worth loving, appreciating.

And my grandma is one of the best.

Things I love. (22)

Stars. Glowing orbs in the sky, contorting into shapes that don't really resemble anything but our imaginations. And doing this with absolute and total beauty. The milky way racing across the sky as though being dragged by the great horses of Apollo, crashing into the terran absolute on both sides into the great invisible that is the other side. Galaxies, distant and hazy and almost impossible make out with the naked eye - worlds to discover and explore.

I love the night sky. Everything that it contains. The darkness - the brightness - the darkness. Orion's belt (in winter) and the wings of Cygnus (in summer).

It makes you feel small. And young. And child-like. So much to see and explore and see again because you aren't sure you've seen it before. And just as it all starts to make sense you get the sensation that you may be on a large ship in the middle of the ocean, star chart in hand, baffled - trying to make it line up to figure out where on this god-forsaken planet you are. And where you need to be.

It is as though the stars contain all the wonders and dangers of life while also being the metaphor for it.

Things I love. (21)

I love dancing. I have a theory that dancing is complete freedom, something that people always say when tearing up on "So You Think You Can Dance" about how dancing defines them. Oh! how I believe them. Ever since Leanne Womack's "I Hope You Dance" came out, I wanted to dance and dance and dance.

While dancing, I love the feeling of rhythm, the feeling of exhaustion, the refusal to leave the dance floor because the song being played is so fantastic. And then refusing with the next song because it is equally fantastic. I love the way your body collapses once you leave the dance-floor, tired beyond tired and wanting nothing more than rest - all the while knowing that in another 5 minutes you'll be back on the dance floor for more - where, just as before, you will mouth along to all the songs you know and dance to the one's you don't (mostly those from Europe) until you've figured out the words.

I hate how the morning after your ears are not quite right. They ringringringringring. But this is a case of when the means totally justify the ends.

Also, ballroom dancing is a total joy.