Dear future home.

Dear future home.

You may not have been informed yet, but you and I will be together in only a matter of months. I hope you're ready for me, and I hope that I am ready for you.

I hope you can provide me with all the academic opportunities that I am seeking, and all of the social ones as well. I hope you can take me hiking up mountains occasionally (I am bringing my tent and backpack), or down to beaches (I am buying a new swimsuit). I hope you can make me love the rain as much as I love the snow. I hope you can give me a space where I will feel completely safe and yet always on my toes in the 'big city', and that maybe - just maybe - you'll be able to place somebody special in my life. I hope your library is large and vast, and I hope your archives will provide me with knowledge that I want to know.



Simon Fraser University. Vancouver, Vancouver. I'll see you soon.

Things I love. (28)

I love being gay.

And I love being more than gay.

I love how being gay has granted me an opportunity to discover parts about me that I wouldn't have otherwise done. The coming-out process of tackling one's own self-hatred and winning means that you have confidence to try new things out. I no longer feel bound by the ideals of manliness or gayness, or by any ideals other than being myself.

But being gay has given me an opportunity to dance with people, to laugh with people, to cry and hold and nourish the soul. It has given me confidence, torn it down, given it back. It has made me a martyr and a saint and a golden child and a black sheep. It has allowed me to sing with passion, to teach with personal experience about pain and healing, and it has made me cherish those moments of loneliness that so rarely puncture our hectic lives.

And so I will dance, I will sing, I will teach, I will climb mountains, I will free fall, and I will get back up and try again. Because I am gay. And because I am more than gay.

This is how I wanted to spend my February. As a single man I had no hands to hold or eyes to stare into on the 14th, but I had 28 days to remember what it is that I love about the world that I live in - and, by proxy, what it is that makes me feel complete. And my list just kept on growing through the month, as I had moments that I loved and wanted to add to the list but couldn't because I already had 28 items. It was a month-long reminder that there are reasons to live - reasons other than being gay or straight (though these are also reasons in and of themselves). And these reasons abound so long as you will look at the world with eyes prepared to see, ears prepared to hear, hands prepared to touch.

Loving. Learning. Living. And never ceasing.

I love being gay.

And I love being more than gay.

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.