This week, my life involves the following: biking on side streets full of brick houses under the full moon, and something called a haiku deathmatch, which is every bit as awesome as it sounds. And, also, tonight I had a five-minute conversation with Brendan McLeod of the Fugitives, and I adore the Fugitives, and Brendan McLeod is a poet and writer I admire hugely and so this was very, very cool for me. 

I moved the maple leaf to the windowsill--and the cataloguing books, too. This windowsill is one of the things that makes me the happiest lately, and maybe that's weird, but I've never had a real windowsill before and it makes me feel like the curator of my own tiny museum. 

Speaking of the cataloguing books, I have gone from being ambivalent about the whole cataloguing thing to being fairly certain that if I die young, it will be a direct result of the Dewey Decimal System. 

I wish I had more to say, or that it wasn't 3:00 in the morning so I could say more and not risk writing into the sunrise (which wouldn't be awful, but tomorrow involves things I need to be awake for).

The short version is that it took a while, but I am settling into this life and it's all bikes and poems and library school and I'm very glad to be here. 

h. 

All week I've been coming here and leaving without hitting the publish button. After months of only posting the occasional set of photos, I started feeling like I'd better hurry up and get a point. Since then I've done a lot of typing and a lot of deleting and a lot of staring into space, but no good writing. 

And I still don't have a point. But I had a misguided cup of tea earlier tonight and now I'm wide awake at 3 a.m. - so this particular bundle of text is brought to you less by my desire to tell a good story than by my need to entertain myself until I get tired. I'm probably sorry about that, but I suppose we'll see. 

On my desk are three gigantic textbooks that contain guides to various systems of cataloguing books. I think I enjoy cataloguing, although it's too early to tell, because I'm only three weeks into the semester and also because my professor is an enormous, sweaty man with a chihuahua that he takes to yoga. Dog yoga. Yoga for dogs.  

So it's a bit of a wild card situation. 

In between the pages of my Sears List of Subject Headings is a maple leaf that I found while walking home one afternoon. It's red like my cheeks when I'm uncomfortable. I don't know what I'll do with it. When I first noticed it on the sidewalk, I kept walking - and then after thinking about it for a block, I turned around and went back to pick it up. I stuck it in Sears, on the page that lists the subject headings for God. That last part was an accident, but I like it. 

One of my responsibilities, where I live, is to altar serve at Catholic mass every Friday. Until I moved here, I hadn’t altar served since I was ten, and when I was ten I would tremble in my white gown at the altar every Sunday, begging God to help me remember when to pass Fr. Stanley the wine. But, twelve years later, I like it. I like it the way that I like everything that feels properly ancient and serious and poetic. Among other things, it's sort of a break from belonging to 2011 - and I can never have too many of those.

Two Friday's ago it was pouring rain. I went into the chapel to find that somehow we had acquired a choir of nuns. Things like that happen often here, nuns appearing out of nowhere. They rehearsed and I lit candles. The rain hit the windows of the sacristy like haphazard percussion.

There is normally no music at daily mass, but this time, when mass begins, the nuns sing.

The wind is howling outside. The stone walls of the chapel shake, and behind me, these women's voices rise like the sun over a mountain range and I think I am going to cry, because of the raindrops on the stained glass and the goosebumps on my arms from songs thrown to eternity with a force that makes you think they’re going to get there.

And this time I'm shaking not because I’m nervous but because beauty like this exists and here I am in the middle of it. 

Or it's pressed in the middle of my textbook.

Lately I walk around deeply preoccupied by these things - surprise nuns and red leaves and flowers growing between iron gates and monarch butterflies with wingspans like small birds. 

But if there is a point - and I think that there is - I suspect this is it.  

h.

How do you find words to explain blue like that? 
 

h. 

More photographs, because I don't really know what to say. I didn't think that I would grow attached enough to this corner of the world to miss it, not really - but I did. I do. Because you can't wake up to this every day for three months without it growing in your heart enough to stretch it and leave spaces shaped like mountain ranges when you leave.

I don't have photos of Toronto yet. I will eventually. Library school is an interesting and strange endeavour and when I'm not trying to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to be doing, I take a lot of walks. The walks have become something of an obsession. In addition, I am obsessed with the following: graffiti, Flannery O'Connor, drawing poppies on everything, slam poetry, and acquiring a working bicycle. 

Life is nice.  

h. 

I didn't intend to let this space dissolve into a dumping ground for photographs, but it appears that's what I've done. It isn't because I don't have things to say - I am full of things to say, but the idea of wrapping my thoughts up neatly (or as neatly as I can manage) and placing them here doesn't make sense to me just now. 

I love this town - these lakes and mountains and fields full of wildflowers - in a way that is surprising. I'm not sure if I know how to explain what I mean, but it's sort of like this: I am a girl of quiet habits and suddenly my habits have rocky ledges off of which to dangle. Sometimes they rest there and think and stay safe, but other times they leap off and tumble down a mountainside. The freedom makes me happy, either way. 

I work a lot and when I'm not working I climb things. Mountains, mainly. There are moments where it seems almost criminal that at the end of the summer I am leaving all of this for a gigantic city. 

But only moments. 

h.

h. 

h. 

Moving out was so very strange and difficult but when I got home, this happened.
It was one of those moments where you need a sign that things will be okay, and then you get one. 

h.

I have finished my degree, officially. I wrote my last final this morning. Since then, I’ve spent time having very long chats—I sort of accidentally found myself around a lot of my favourite people today. In the afternoon, my mom and brother came and, in an hour, moved half of my stuff out of the apartment. The other half goes tomorrow, and so do I.

I’m trying not to be too sentimental. It’s nearly impossible, because I am sentimental about everything. I can’t help but think of lasts. This is the last night I’ll spend in this apartment, the last night I’ll spend in this city, probably (at least for a very long time). This is the last time I will sit on my bed in the middle of the night and look out the window at all the lights sprawled out below. But I have no idea what my next bedroom window will look out onto, and that's about as exciting as leaving here is sad. I am so ready for the things that come next—it’s all completely new and I’m so pleased with how it’s shaping up—but I’ve loved it here, too.

All along, it only half occurred to me that it might be hard to finally go.
But it’s hard to finally go.

h.

I spent my Easter Sunday drinking coffee, watching terrible television with my mom (who is still more or less out of commission), driving with my dad and embroidering. Sort of. Not on fabric, on paper.

I'm in the middle of hatching some sort of project. School is practically finished and I miss making stuff. I've been obsessed with a few different things. First, Jillian Tamaki's embroidered covers for Penguin Classics, and second, these travel journals I found while surfing flickr one day. And then also writing and photography and all the usual things I am always thinking about, only extra now because it's summer and I'm free.

I don't know how to explain what it is I am trying to do--I'm not even sure if I know what I'm trying to do--but it involves creating some sort of interesting documentation of my summer, along the lines of the travel journals but hopefully with more text, and for now that means embroidering on paper. Well, card stock. It's turning out well so far (despite the raised eyebrows I am getting from my family and the fact that I don't actually know how to embroider anything for real), but if it wasn't I don't think I'd care. 

I love doing these kinds of things. I love it so much. 

I remember, months and months ago, trying to talk through these thoughts I was having about art and writing and poetry and whether or not there had to be a point. And mostly I was thinking about poetry and mostly it was my own self-consciousness talking, feeling like although I admired people who sent their work (good or bad or in between) out into the world with confidence I couldn't imagine imposing on people that way: how could I expect anyone to try to make sense of what I put to paper? As if I have some sort of responsibility to the world to make sure they enjoy or understand the things I do. The whole line of thinking is total crap. 

It was right after I had found the first chapbook left in the drawer. I was thrilled at discovering that people--people I probably saw every day, even though I had no idea who they were--were creating these really lovely things and just leaving them to be found. But then I read through the book and some of it was kind of... you know, hipster trite. Deer and owls and ships and sea foam. And I was kind of annoyed that such a beautiful thing ended up disappointing me with its bad poetry but at the same time I kept thinking about how I wanted to put my own bad poetry into a book and leave it for someone to find and in the end I got all freaked out and decided that unless I was in the running for the Nobel Prize I should just keep it all stuffed in a box under my bed. 

It was not the first time in my life I had concluded this. 

But whether its easy trendy nature imagery or a crude copycat of a beautiful book cover, it's something. And maybe the only point is that it makes me or someone else happy, and that's enough. That is more than enough. This is my New Rule of Making Stuff: if it makes you happy, do it. 

It took me an appallingly long time to get here. Sometimes I need to tell myself the same thing a hundred times before it sinks in. Either way, I'm just glad not to worry so much. It doesn't matter. I like making pictures out of coloured thread. I like writing. I like finding ways to remember things. I'm going to make a book. It might be a disaster. I don't know yet. 

Obvious error aside, it turned out okay. (I got so excited I momentarily forgot what year it was.
And I was too scared to mess around with taking out stitches, because paper is flimsy.) 

I'll keep you posted, I guess. 

h.