Red Cedar

On my way home from the cabin outside of Princeton, I encountered these elk on the side of Mine Hill, also known as Elk Ridge. I have driven this highway dozens of times and never encountered a single elk – but today there was a whole herd there, thundering beside the road. When I got out of my car to take pictures, they ran up the hill – which means I didn’t get very close shots. But still! They were mesmerising, and majestic. I cried from the beauty of them as I continued on my drive in the early fall morning. If you look closely at the photo you can see the bull, of which there is only one per herd. He is surrounded by his “harem” – who he will spend August to December with in order to mate with and protect them. In my photos, I count 24 cow elks, which means that this bull is at peak breeding age – between the ages of 4-8.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen or heard elk – but the I’ve never gotten photos before, nor have I seen a herd this size in such detail!

I posted the other day that my time is not my own right now and that’s just not the truth, nor is it how time works. I’ve been turning this one over for the last few days and in my meditations – the notion of the time being, or of being time – and I hope to write more about this shortly. In the meanwhile, I am at the cabin, awash in the turning from fall to winter (which comes early in these mountains) – taking lots of long walks and photographs.

A lot of my time these days is on the road. I have to say, I’m enjoying it more than I thought I would, but my time is very much not my own at the moment. I took this photo earlier this week on the way to Vancouver, looking down over Gabriola Island.

A friend of mine just posted this Sufi saying on FB “Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.” (Attributed to Hafiz, a 14th century Persian poet)…. Which reminded me of a podcast I was listening to last night on my way home where Cheryl Strayed (quoting her mother) said “There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it. Put yourself in the way of beauty.”…. which reminded me of a conversation that Brian and I were having earlier this week about the move.

Work has been a bit boring lately. Not overly stressful, not overwhelming – but boring. I’m categorizing information and all the creative part of that is done and now I mostly just have shuffle things together in spreadsheets and it’s pretty blah. And as a result of a particularly blah day I said to Brian, that I wasn’t sure if our move to Gabriola was really the right thing to do because I had drastically shrank my job prospects for the last third of my career. There are almost no jobs in my field of Communications on central Vancouver Island, and while I could choose to split my time between Vancouver and Gabriola in order to compete for city jobs, I was pretty clear with myself (and B.) that I wasn’t interested in doing that when we made the decision to move.

Remember, we’ve only lived here four months, and so I’m still in the phase of testing whether this was the right choice or not. My commentary was not an actual misgiving, but more of a question to myself about what my career/job is going to look like for the next ten years given how much my parameters have changed.

In response to this Brian said – “Just remember that when we decided to move here, we made a choice to prioritize life over work.” Which was exactly what I needed to hear because it’s actually the truth. When we did this move out of the city we decided that we wanted a whole lot more nature, quiet, small community, space, meditation, ocean – and a whole lot less hectic pace and busy/noisy city life – and so I did make a very conscious choice: I will not go much higher in my particular career/job but instead I will get all these other things that I love (including studio space and working from home most of the time). That is, we chose beauty over career. We chose to get closer to the things that make us glad to be us. And we are privileged to be able to do so in a way that doesn’t require giving it all up (despite my kvetching I am always aware of the luck in having a well paid professional job that I can mostly do from home).

So yeah. These quotes are resonating this week. And I’m reminded of what a privilege it is to even be able to stay close to what makes us glad to be alive, or to be able to choose beauty.