A little story about a girl I know...

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a girl from small town Canada found herself far from home in a strange land where people did things very differently.  At first, she couldn't understand a word of what they were saying to her, but gradually she learned to string a few words together and could start to put together sentences and grasp little nuances here and there of what conversations were about.  Gestures and pointing proved very helpful ... and of course, smiling.  She was lucky enough to find herself in a family with a big brother who took her to interesting places and introduced her to his friends that spoke English and could read her stories like Winnie the Pooh, and who took her on road trips out of Tokyo to the forests that she missed so much from home.  And she was lucky to have a Mom who was kind of wacky, who worked from home and was always busy and who cared for her just like her real mother did.  She loved that living in another country made her hyper aware of her surroundings - everything was so fascinating.  She missed her family (and her dog, Fred) terribly.  She wrote many, many letters home (well, especially at first.  They did unfortunately dwindle off as she got more used to the place).  (These letters would be kept in a safe place for many, many years until she was home visiting one summer and had to go through them to decide which ones to keep.  Those then went into a box that went onto a ship that transported them to her new home.  Oh, but now I am getting way ahead of myself.)

When this girl was finally able to go back "home" she realised that she had left part of herself behind (and we aren't just talking about the boyfriend!).  For now in her heart, she carried two countries and life would never be the same.  When she went off to university, she found herself back learning more about that part of the world that she had visited and when she graduated, two kind gentlemen came from Japan and offered her a job teaching English at their company.  (It should probably be mentioned at this point that the local office of this company took her and the other new English-teaching employee from her university town out to dinner and this was the first time she ever heard of - and actually tried! - blowfish.  For those of you who still remain in the dark about this expensive delicacy, fugu or blowfish is a poisonous fish which can cause paralysis or death if not prepared in the right way.  The secret is in the liver where it keeps all the poison, but this knowledge will come later).

The second time she visited the strange land, it didn't seem so strange anymore.  She was reunited with the family that had looked after her (after 6 years!!), and she could go to Harajuku shopping again, anytime she wanted to (although this time she felt too old).  This was something she had dreamed about in those intervening years in high school.  Many things were natsukashii (happy memories from her past), but she was also able to be more adventurous now that she was older.  This time she travelled and learned to cook some Japanese food and how to sing lovely Japanese songs at karaoke bars with her students.  She bought a stereo by haggling in Akihabara and spent many a light night in Roppongi, occasionally missing the last train home.  She did crazy things on the train while drunk.  In sum, while she learned a lot more about Japanese culture and could speak more of the language (with 4 years of university Japanese under her belt), she was still far from being Japanese.

After a year, the girl returned home again.  This time, she was ready for a little adventure.  Having lived all of her life on the very, very Western edge of Canada (right at the water's edge, almost ready to fall off!), she realised that if she truly wanted to call herself Canadian, she should really experience a Canadian winter.  After all, most of the world seems to have an image of Canada as a snow-locked, cold northern country, so being from the west coast where it hardly ever snows or gets cold (although it does rain sometimes), it was time for a bit of exploration.  Her boyfriend at the time was going to school in Toronto, and that seemed like a good place to start.  So she moved halfway across the country and ended up in a small basement suite in Parkdale, just south of the King Street tramline and a short walk away from one of Canada's Great Lakes (which she kept forgetting wasn't the sea, having always lived with the ocean close by.  Really, this lake was so big, it was deceiving.  It really could have been the sea!).

She worked for a while, and then quit in a very traumatic manner.  She wandered for a while, lost, then found some odd jobs and decided to go back to school.  Well, it turned out that this school had an exchange programme with several other schools.  Not only with a university in Japan, which she wasn't really interested in, having been there and done that (and figuring she could probably figure out a way to do it again on her own), she applied to go to the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.  And thus it was that in the fall of her second year at the school, she found herself in Copenhagen Airport, with a 10-day Eurail pass in hand, looking for a youth hostel to spend the night at.  If you can believe it, the information desk sent her to one with a bowl of condoms at the registration desk that turned out to be a gym with little partitions around sets of 2 bunk beds with huge gym style toilets for showering and washing up in the morning.  Suffice it to say that that was a bit too much for this small town girl (who was carrying all of her Most Important Possessions for the next two months in two rather large suitcases!) and she hightailed it to a hotel.  The next 10 days were spent wandering around discovering the world by herself and included several train rides, a meeting with the head of the Japan Socialist Party at the top of a mountain in Norway, a boat ride on a fjord, and an overnight sleep on a cruise ship where she met the lovelist retired couple from Florida.  It also involved a brief stop in Hell (Norway) where there was just enough time to get off the train and take a picture at the little station.  In Oslo, she saw a very old wooden Viking ship that had been very carefully dredged up from the harbour and preserved, and she visited the Munch Museum!  It was all very exciting and those 10 days of adventure may just be the very moment in time when she caught the travel bug.  Something that would likely affect her for the rest of her days.

*okay, now this is getting long, so I think I will stop here and continue another day*
*I don't want to bore you, dear Reader!*

 

*to be continued*

 

(oh, I have always wanted to do that!)

The Perfect Day

This has been on my list of things to do for literally weeks.  I had the perfect day and I really wanted to tell you all about it....

I take a flower arranging class on the third Tuesday of every month with my best friend, Yuri.  We have known each other since our kids were babies and can talk to each other about anything.  She is my Fountain of Youth.  We laugh and share and are reminded of those days of innocence when our kids were little together. 

The top two photos are of Yuri's arrangement, the bottom photo is of mine.)

 

After the class, we set off from Yuri's house in search of lunch, taking photos of people's gardens along the way...

And we found the most awesome restaurant... The menu features Chinese herbal medicine used in healthy dishes according to what your body is in need of that day, and everything comes with the most amazing oolong tea prepared just the right way.  The restaurant is light and airy with concrete floors and lots of windows and there is a clinic and gym on the second and third floors.  Not the sort of place that I would have gone to purely based on a description of the food, but I loved it!  And the presentation was beautiful, especially the dishes and the trays.  So Japan...  We felt like we had made an amazing discovery...

And to top it off, I had mentioned that we were hoping to create a little mossy corner in our garden, so Yuri took me to her neighbour's and we harvested a whole boxful from her garden for me to take home!  What a perfect day!!

#everydaybliss

A day of rest ...or the rainy, rainy day

I have a terrible habit of waking up before my alarm goes off.  (I think it might be old age!)  So this morning, I was up at 4:30 and then again at 6:30.  Not convinced that I really wanted to be up yet, I decided to start my day with a little stretch or two that could be done while lying around... just to test things out.

I have been wanting to start a yoga practice at home, so, typical of me, have been asking everyone for ideas instead of just getting started.  Well, the best idea I heard and the most practical by far, was to simply start with a Sun Salutation and gradually add in new poses that you like as you go.  Right, then.  We don't have to plan out an hour routine to get started, we just have to get started and a Sun Salutation seems like as good a place as any.  (If you have ever done one, you will know that it has an uncanny - and pretty much unshakeable - ability to  put you in a fabulous mood, ready to tackle the day!)  So that's what I did.   And wouldn't you know that it started raining almost as soon as I finished?

Now I am from the west coast of Canada (sometimes known as the wet coast!) and it rains *a lot*.  But this sunny place where I have transplanted myself gets rain so seldom that I actually love it when it comes.  Those first sounds of the rain hitting the roof...  It started slowly today, but within half an hour had turned into a lovely downpour.  The kind that makes you lower your expectations (guess I won't be going for my walk this morning), put your indoor plants outside to gather the rain, and relax into a good bout of letter-writing, photo-organising, poetry-reading or painting.  And what a happy coincidence that it just happens to be Sunday!

This week was our local festival.  The school kids get the afternoon off of school to go.  It celebrates a god of the sea for all the fishermen and there are booths with food and gardening tools and dried sea creatures (for eating).  There are little games and lotteries that gather in all the poor little kids' allowances and there are even three nurseries from the island of Shikoku that visit every year.  Last year, I bought two raspberry plants (and the lady remembered me this year and asked about them!).  One of them survived, the other didn't.  So this year, I bought another raspberry plant (very rare in Japan!), a hibiscus with pretty, deep pink flowers and a white blooming tree.  I knew the rain was coming, so yesterday I planted them all in the garden.  The white blooming tree involved digging up an existing bush that wasn't doing very well and that I wasn't really sure that I liked in that spot in the garden after all.  We have a patch of grass (and weeds!) to the right of our front door that is very hard to mow, so I am thinking that it may soon turn into a flower bed, with this pretty little white flowery tree in behind.  There could be some big changes afoot.  But I am not making any promises.  Because today is a rainy, rainy day and we might just spend it being creative and right-brained and living in the moment,and abandon all of our productive, left-brained aspirations and lists of things to do for another day.

Hope you are having a wonderful day whatever the weather!

A little everyday bliss

You know how sometimes you are doing the most normal of things (cleaning the house, looking at the sun shining in the windows, being somewhere out and about in nature, watching a child sleeping or playing), and you suddenly get this overwhelming feeling of sheer happiness?  The very rightness of that moment and how lucky you are to be there in it?  Well, it occured to me yesterday that maybe that could be my next photo project...

I am currently heading into the last week of my third self-portraiture course with Vivienne McMaster (more on that later - watch this space!), and it has really transformed my life, the way I see myself and the way I appreciate my surroundings.  It is such a rewarding process to turn the camera on your life and be able to really look at it with non-judgemental eyes.  (Of course, it helps to have a fabulous community of co-conspirators who are also out taking photos to inspire you and leaving the loveliest comments on your Flickr photostream everyday, but I diverge...)  I so love the gentle prompts that Vivienne sends into my mailbox everyday.  She has such a soft and caring way with words.  So even though I still have one week left, I am already missing the experience.  It's like saying good-bye after 3 months of camp to complete strangers who became your closest confidantes through shared experiences and stories told sometimes in hushed tones with the lights off...

I am also inspired by 365 projects that encourage you to take a photo (or a 1 second of video a day) to remember your year with.  Now before anyone goes and gets their expectations up too high, I just want to say that I am not good at keeping up with things every single day and that I really don't want to put that much pressure on myself, so I am not sure how often I will be able to do this, or how long I will be able to keep it up.  But doesn't the idea of taking photos of the little everyday moments that make you happy - or even blissful - inspire you, too?

I might not be able to post all of the photos here as I am hoping that my family will feature in a lot of them, and I'm not sure that many of them will even be interesting to anyone but me...  In fact, there will likely be a lot of repeats.  (You know on those terribly down days, I may just end up taking a photo of the sun coming in the window, or my feet moving forward one step at a time...) 

But I think it is a great idea to try it and see what comes up. 

I really like the idea of focusing on my little everyday bliss.

Alison
#everydayblissproject

a whole box of party dresses from ModCloth - here comes summer!

hanging out the laundry on a beautiful, sunny spring day (and colourful laundry clips!)

 

 

and especially taking chocolate breaks (got lots of cleaning done yesterday!)

 

And then there was light...

Okay, so here is where we start... with the first step. I have been getting more and more frustrated with the "sound bite" quality of Facebook lately and all the ads coming into my newsfeed... I joined Facebook as a way to keep in touch with friends who live far away and find out what is going on in their lives. Not just the big news, the "I-need-to-write-you-a-letter-about-this!" news, but the little day-to-day things of what life is really like. You know they say that when you are sick or when your life flashes before your eyes, it is the little everyday things that you want to have back. Getting up in the sunshine, saying good morning, sitting down to a regular breakfast together, even washing the dishes and putting some love in the house by cleaning, vaccuuming and tidying up. I know that that is what I would miss the most.

So these days, I am trying every day to get closer to living in each moment. To seeing the beauty around me, to being thankful, to noticing. I am taking some photography courses and these have been a big influence in helping me to change my mind and to see how wonderful this everyday life of mine really is.

This blog is a way to go deeper. To think about things in a new way. To keep track of my thoughts and to journal about those little everyday events that I want to keep an image of in my memory. I hope you will find it interesting. I hope I manage to find enough stimulus to keep posting and keep you reading.

Lao Tzu said that "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". Well, it's time to get moving!

And interestingly enough, when I went to search the origins of the quote, I found this:

"The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one's feet." Rather than emphasizing the first step, Lau Tzu regarded action as something that arises naturally from stillness.
from www.quotationspage.com

I have a tendency to overthink things. I spend too much time researching and thinking about the best way to get started instead of just getting started. But maybe there is meaning in the last few months of contemplation?