ON BECOMING WIDE OPEN, ON BEING MADE WHOLE (2020 IN REVIEW)

I didn’t organize 2020 into any particular chunks. It did that all by itself. I rang in the New Year in a way I won’t soon forget. I piled in the car late one night with three dear ones, circling in an airport parking lot to arrive on New Year’s Eve in Quebec City. We ate and danced and spoke more French than I had since two of my dear ones moved away, ringing in the new year in the early hours of the morning amidst the snow and champagne, welcoming a year that had more in store than any of us really needed to know at that point. I went to bed having written a letter that took deep courage and woke up to discover that my first article in a national newspaper had been published.

The Quiet Months:

We drove home from New Years and I uncharacteristically took the first few days off to be still and slow at home. I’m so glad that I did. It was nice to wander about the house, candles lit, fresh laundry in hand in our cozy treehouse. I reviewed the year, changed over agendas, set intentions, caught up on emails, called friends, sorted papers and cards, hung artwork, cooked and talked while continually re-putting the kettle on. I had told M I wanted to make good on what I had been saying to her about wanting to be more rooted and sitting still at home. I vowed to take the first quarter of the year at home in its entirety. To sit still. And so I did. I spent the first three snowy months of the year ensconced in our treehouse. I didn’t know it then but I was also preparing my space for a long hibernation that was to come. Those months felt like the narrowing of focus, like an invitation to delve a little deeper into the interior life, to revel in the intimacy of home, to celebrate the home team, and to do the deep work of dreaming and healing.

My time at home wasn’t exactly filled with the stillness I had initially envisioned. To begin with, I was never quite good at that - the whole stillness thing. I also blame this lack of stillness on my race to turn in grad school applications. I spent much of my mornings by candlelight, propped up in bed with my coffee and yet another essay to write. I wrote in the margins, en route, and in the shoulder hours of the day. I was happy. I was chasing a dream. I went to Matthew House to cook and chop and stir. A came to stay with us and I think even I cried when she left. I got sick and friends dropped off hot soup, croissants, and juice. I got trapped in Ottawa because of a protest on the train tracks, missing my last chance to see E for months, though I didn’t know it then. I joined a Jane Austen book club, eagerly appearing at the door of the house of a total stranger, treats in hand, leaving star-eyed at the prospect of getting to know these conversation partners better. I began to work on the book again. We babysat my favourite dog. I found myself back around the table and in the dish line at the LLC. A space that held the first ingredients for the life I now live. I think, even then, I could sense that something was changing and gratefulness looked like nostalgic memories and a lump in my throat. We bundled up and walked the block to admire the full moon. Because sometimes life is too short to not choose awe and wonder even if just for 5 minutes. 

One of our best girls returned to us from Australia, flying in with her Egyptian groom to choose each other forever in the country that first gifted them to one another. And nearly the whole room cried - especially yours truly - as we remembered how dear she is to us, how fast time flies, how she first became a part of our lives and how extraordinary it is to choose love in front of a crowd of witnesses. I danced into the early hours of the morning and left with tears of happiness in my eyes. We hosted Galentines and I will always remember us writing Valentines for each other, eating up chocolate cake after savoury treat, and H walking in with armfuls of flowers for us to make bouquets to bring home. Here again people stayed until the early hours of the morning, talking their way back into love and belonging. We celebrated International Women’s Day, more ladies than I can count gathered around the table to celebrate existing and belonging alongside one another. We marked Shrove Tuesday with a pancake dinner in the newly opened church hall. Pancakes post-work, utter chaos. Our Cannon and Curate with aprons on and people in from the street, regular attendees, total strangers, friends of friends all crowded around the massive teapot and at tables eating before the coming of Lent. I hope I never forget this season with this church that has taught me that the best way to love people is in all of our ordinariness but steadily, in the same direction. I had my final wisdom tooth taken out. I’m pretty sure Patrick, the dental assistant who I had by that time fallen in love with, held my hand the whole time. I spoke at my first church women’s breakfast. 

It felt like something was shifting, even in these more rooted months and I remember doing a lot of reflecting. The line from the film ‘About Time,’ which says “[f]or me, it was always going to be about love,” rang over and over in my head. I thought about all the forms of love in my life that we don’t necessarily have words for. During this time, one of my favourite rabbis told me ”Sometimes it’s not about getting to the table; sometimes it’s about an honest life” and I thought a lot about that too. I sent dreams out into the world and had some arrive back to my very own doorstep, as if to shock this Eeyore of a woman out of her unbelief. More than ever, I am learning that the act of hope, regardless of outcome, is essential to tasting what it means to truly be alive. I reflected on longing. The thing is, you are a dreamer and I am just learning how,” I said softly into the phone as I walked one night. And so, I began to learn to dream too. 

COVID-19:

And then COVID struck. One day I was at work and the next I wasn’t, sent home with my things one evening (which I almost didn’t bring with me). I stocked up on groceries for “just in case” on my way to what turned out to be my last dinner out. Y was the last person I had over for a meal - I remember it still, him calling me the “Challah Queen'' as I proudly served up the steaming hot bread to go with our soup. At first, it was beautiful - the breath I didn’t know I needed to take. I revelled not having anywhere to go. I sunk into those candlelit evenings with my two dear ones at home. I gave thanks for the extra space. It was novel. We were in it together. Amidst the fear and worry in this unprecedented time, I felt we were learning how to enact a consciousness for people we should have all year round - the old, sick, single, and lonely. We were sharing what we have, delivering groceries, being contemplative, telling people we love them, having slow meals, and organizing walking clubs. I saw people released to be honest in their fears and asking for help. 

These months were quiet, but they were so full too - of revelation and goodness and new things being birthed - sometimes visibly but often invisibly. I will remember buying tulips like they were going out of style. The novelty of my first spaced out line, how standing in a grocery store line was the outing of the week, and how much I needed the exhale. I fell back in love with our home. We fell in love with J from upstairs. V and R became my walking club that helped demarcate the day. Months later, I know now that we were each “walking each other home” in different ways. I will remember the elaborate meals, the weekly family zoom calls for almost three months that gave me more Facetime with my family - even across the sea - than I had ever had in all the time I’ve lived away. I will remember the countless beautiful porch-side conversation and working on the book in the evenings while the two other girls cuddled up there too. I spent this season walking my way into a state of courage. The city shut the street right next to the canal and I walked it for hours in the cool dark evening on the phone to one or the other of my dear ones, the empty evenings stretching out to allow for countless more honest and beautiful conversations. I wrestled through whether or not to go to grad school. I worked my guts out. I burnt out slightly. I wrote letters and asked questions and prayed hard. I read lots of books and slept deeply. I marked Easter like I never had before that year. I caught up on so many things I wanted to say, read, think, and write. I thought deeply about the me that I wanted to be. I shed a lot of tears. I had a lot of stomach aches. I experienced a lot of provision, grace, and divine moments. I sweated through countless stifling hot evenings at my desk with B on the phone, doing a final edit on the book manuscript. 

I became an aunty for the first time. How I love him so, our child of the trees.I tumbled onto the porch lots of Wednesdays to bang my pots and pans in celebration of those brave healthcare workers on the front lines. I interviewed K for the release of her new book. I read Middlemarch with E and M. I got a new desk, hauled from the side of the street into the room by my two saintly roommates. I got brave and started counselling. We celebrated M and E being done the first year of their masters. I did wine and whiskey tasting classes by distance. I called D, S, and A every week too. I laughed a hell of a lot. We reflected and tried to learn from Black Lives Matter and what it means to face up to injustice and wrestle with both our complicity and the task of repair before us. I’m still learning this every day. We celebrated M’s 30th birthday with an elaborate scavenger hunt, meal, and a day devoted to reminding her how dear she is to so many. On a week’s notice, we raced to the seamstress to get ready to celebrate D and R’s wedding, just squeaking in to be able to join as the numbers changed. Y and I got to be neighbours thanks to COVID and as he trundled in and out of our yard to borrow my bike, I gave thanks for unexpected blessings just like this one. 

Preparing to Fly:

As COVID-19 continued to stretch on, the likelihood of going to grad school at all seemed improbable. “I’ll believe it for you, when you can’t,” Me and so many others told me. It was a thin and deep time all at once. I began finding holy and discovering pieces that were hiding deep down. An intermingling between the restoring of old things, the stewarding of what I held, and the midwifing of things entirely new. And then, at the end of June, it seemed as though something came loose and life began to operate at warp speed. In the span of 24 hours right at the end of June, we submitted the book manuscript, decided to open a new shelter with Matthew House, and I signed my Cambridge offer. Flowers streamed in from near and far, reminding me of how much love I am the recipient of and that I do not walk alone. P showed up on my front porch with mimosas, B and B & L, and my other friend (also B) and so many others served as the collective bridge, helping me translate a dream and a hell of a lot of fear into reality. A lot of miracles happened in short order.

We had one last beautiful dinner that stretched on into the night at the B family home. We said goodbye to C and D, Colin and H too. I cleaned out H’s apartment with her on the final night she was in Ottawa and cried my eyes out to Ben Rector. “Start together. End together,” she told me. And she was right. In the span of five weeks, five of us left Ottawa, P and J’s tent sheltering us too many times to count as we said hello and goodbye. 

I went home one final time before leaving for England, COVID-19 making a normally routine trip difficult. I met my nephew. He was even more beautiful than I could have imagined. So was my sister - a mother, all tenderness and strength at once. I saw my coziest and most heart-home people. I remember crying a lot - at the beginning and ending of things. It was the overwhelm of love mostly - the kind both visible and invisible that I struggled to have words for and to leave. COVID-19 didn’t stop life either. Friends announced they were pregnant. Others announced cancer. My favourite elderly rabbi called to make a date to treat me to ice cream at Baskin Robbins. We talked through all the important things - love, faith, fear, family, and the future. “Loving you forward,” he said as we said goodbye. And I emerged determined to remember the way that this wonderful man has taught me to listen and love with particularity and my whole self. The custodian at my work made another date to take me for Ethiopian food. “God be with you,” he said solemnly standing before me the last time he saw me, speaking those words with the weight of a benediction. And I thanked God that he was part of that witness too.

C and I went to see L and M in Quebec City. “Can you come before the baby arrives?” they wrote. And so we did. I revelled in my time with these ones who startle me by how particular they are in their love and how unselfconscious they make me feel. I filled up on love and that previous gift - quality time - in that treehouse of theirs. All slow mornings in pyjamas with morning hair, French and English tumbling out from my heart. Coffee made just the way I’ve always liked it, afternoons of laughter and experiments in the kitchen. One unfolding years-long conversation. I said too many goodbyes to count. I think I cried the equivalent of whole buckets. I gave away more things than I can count. I stored evidence of the last five years in a shockingly small amount of boxes. I asked for a lot of help. I used up a lot of courage. I slept at B and J’s house, P and J’s house, and in E’s bed. V came for a final goodbye. B from childhood came into town to say hello after years just in time. There were too many “just in time” moments to count, full circle ones too. I cried in the park at the prospect of saying goodbye to K, the woman who first told me I was a real writer. My visa came 40 hours before my plane took off. Talk about learning about the power of prayer and fighting for what you need.

England:

I spent the last quarter of the year in England. I did my 14 days of isolation in Harpenden. Imagine my delight to discover a house in the country filled with all the best things. Most importantly, two kindred spirits, a sense of humour, atlases and maps in very regular use, a garden with secrets to share with me. BBC classical radio too, books galore, and endless cups of tea accompanied by marmite toast. Love and belonging were in every crook and cranny, peels of laughter and heaps of honesty too, a buoying up of spirits in these shifting times. Who knew that it would take a global pandemic to slow you down?” my mother wrote in equal parts awe and glee. “Isn’t it interesting that God can plan even for what we didn’t know we needed?” I wrote back. I celebrated my birthday with them - in the rain with candles and the accounting assistant singing in lieu of a crowd. I began to pack up my suitcases and a few borrowed boxes for the move to Cambridge. It was a family event with trips to the garage, down the garden, and into hidden closets. 

Five years to the day that I moved from B.C. to Ottawa, I moved to Cambridge. And I couldn’t help but feel some sort of holy symmetry in that realization. That we are guided, bit by bit into a life that is being shaped by each step of boldness, obedience, deep love, and tender-hearted adventure. In those first few weeks, I met a dizzying array of spirits - they were filled with kindness and light. I bought flowers, became acquainted with “the backs,” punted, and cycled with glee. I bought Fitzbilly buns like generations before me. I matriculated - joining a Cambridge college for life. I encountered the most wonderful cohort - the kind of people who have fires in their soul and kindness in their heart. I spent the term learning, more than ever before, that I can do hard things. I can do new things. I can expand my imagination, most especially in relation to myself. I could begin again. I could grow new muscles. I revelled in the wind and the mud. I began to work out my relationship to England. It was like I had found myself somewhere entirely new, a world completely separate from the one I’ve just inhabited. And in the same breath, it so often felt like this is a space and place I’ve always known, completely familiar and tenderly unremarkable. As though I had always been hers and she mine. 

I cycled to Granchester. We experienced a second lockdown. Our house made tacos and spaghetti more times than I can count. My laugh carried for many stories or so I’m told. We set off the fire alarm. I fell in love with many of the porters. Our flat was full of spirits who surprised and enfolded me. So few of us were from this country, no two of us studying the same thing, very few of us sharing a mother tongue. But as someone helped me carry things up the stairs and someone wandered into the kitchen in their cozy clothes and another celebrated a win across the counter, I gave thanks that this space and these spirits are mine and I am theirs. People dear to me got COVID-19. I revelled in my learning. I struggled with my learning. I cried. I was given a hot water bottle. I met many kindred spirits. Gentle became the word of this season. Gentle with self, others, space, and time. Gentle in the form of honesty, chocolate biscuits, tea, naps, hot water bottles, and long walks at a slower pace than normal. COVID-19 shifted many things. I grew eyes to see small mercies and kindnesses. I spent time with K & B and the kids. They put me back together again. I slept under a beautiful Welsh blanket. I learned what a Muntjac deer was. “I speak the truth back to you when you can’t see it. I believe in you,” friends said in so many ways to me over the phone. Our class chose to belong to one another, to leave no one behind. Friends sent love by mail and reminded me that I do not walk alone. 

I made it to my cousin’s house to mark Christmas just in time for another lockdown to start. It was, nevertheless, magical. All champagne and goose and Christmas cake and love. I navigated a brutal exam season. I rang in the new year tucked up in bed with a journal and hot water bottle. At the end of 2016 I wrote, “This is the year that cracked me right open and made me whole all over again.” And as I look back over the past year, I can’t think of any other words to say except those ones. Isn’t it funny how the past comes with us and fit us even better in the here and now?