Snow falling on morning

When I went to bed late last night it had started snowing steadily, the streets quickly being blanketed in a soft layer of wet snow. I woke up this morning quite early, came downstairs to let the dog out, and when I opened the curtains to let in the morning light what I saw was so beautiful it stopped my breath. Every edge, every branch, every step and eave and sill were outlined with light fluffy ice crystals, and snow still fell soft and gentle over the already rounded edges of the world. In the uppermost branches of the snow illuminated trees, a few crows were perched, as if in a painting. The snowploughs had not been through, and everyone was still in bed, so the neighbourhood was intensely quiet. There is something gentle and soothing about this kind of snow...the kind not accompanied by howling winds and freezing temperatures. It feels like the sky is somehow caressing the earth, trees, rooftops, fences and wings of the birds as they dart from perch to perch.

I went back upstairs and got my camera, came back down to the kitchen and took some photos of the view. As I was shooting I noticed a flash of light coming from the neighbour's door across the way. I looked over at his door to see him also capturing the brilliance of the day behind the shutter of his camera. It made me smile at how human both recognizing beauty and wanting to capture it in some way is.

I have to find a way to get my photos off of my camera as I forgot my USB connector in California, but am hoping to find a way to transfer photos soon, and will be sure to share my morning shots with you, friends!

Courage looks like this

I read a blog entry this evening by Jennifer Pastiloff entitled "What does courage mean to you?" It was a great article, and it made me stop and reflect on the last few weeks of my life, and how many people have told me how courageously I am living.

It is interesting to me that I rarely recognize as courageous behaviour that those around me consider to be so. Isn't it always like that in life though? Our most powerful, inspired, strong, empowered, or courageous moments are ones in which we are so immersed in whatever we are doing that we do not actually stop and take a step back from what is happening and see it for what it is -- truly miraculous!

On December 28th I caught a plane back to Prince Edward Island. I had a two-week ticket, which I was secretly praying I would never have to use the return portion of. Since arriving so many things have happened, and so much is STILL HAPPENING that it is quite clear to me that there has been considerable amounts of divine intervention on my behalf being dispersed into the universe over the last six weeks. Here are some of the incredible things that have happened:

1. My computer stopped working (as in it was completely, utterly dead, friends) and then after ten days of not working miraculously (not) started again one fine day.

2. My incredibly generous, patient and encouraging friends have welcomed me into their homes, given me a bed, fed me (I have done some of the cooking!!) and let me use their washing machines, showers, and internet connections for over six weeks. For free. And despite a few minor miscommunications, we all still love each other. Doesn't scream divine intervention in capital letters? You tell me.

3. Someone is willing to hire me and help me apply for a full-time work visa (fingers crossed....so far so good).

4. Two acquaintances have offered to have me move in with them (and their husbands and kids...I'm telling you....I am surrounded by guardian angels) if I have to find a room and still do not have full time work when this happens.

5. I was at the farmer's market two weeks ago at the end of the day when everyone was packing up and going home and someone gave me a freshly cooked meal for free because they had leftovers, another person gave me two home-baked cookies and two scones for free (again, too many left over), and a third person gave me two bags of organic bean sprouts. Add that to the farm-fresh eggs that Ricky, my former boss's brother gave me ON THE FARM where they were laid, the organic beef that my former boss gave me last week, and the organic pumpkin that my former boss's mother gave me that I used to make pumpkin mushroom risotto for friends a few weeks ago.

6. I may have just scored an absolutely AWESOME social media job for a local coffee shop that sells tea and coffee from local businesses..... I offered to do it for free until I get my work visa, but the manager has offered me free tea from the company I used to write for in exchange for my work. SWEET!

7. I am currently house and dog-sitting for my dear friends Ann and Stephen. They live in a gorgeous home in one of the cutest neighbourhoods in town with a fake fireplace (fire currently burning to my left as I type), and the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in. AND they left me their car too. I cannot tell you how blessed I was feeling driving home from a study circle that I was facilitating tonight, instead of walking in the cold, sitting on a seat that actually heats up at the push of a button. As if having wheels were not enough, the seats heat up. I mean, really friends :-)

8. My dear friend Louise, who has put up with having me as a house guest longer than anyone else since I arrived, bought me a box of dried figs that she gave to me when I left to move over to Ann and Stephen's house today. Figs + fireplace + time to blog in the late quiet hours of the night = heaven, pure and simple.

9.  Whenever I start running low on funds, someone steps up and asks me to pet-sit, clean their kitchen, babysit, or take notes at a meeting.

10. I am meeting one of my best friends for breakfast tomorrow morning.

There is more I could list here, but I think you get the picture. The universe is smiling down on me.

But to get back to courage....

Coming back here has required a lot of courage on my part. I rarely stop to recognize it as such, but it is true. A lot of people have questioned this decision. I was after all living in California--the land of opportunity. And I DID leave Prince Edward Island two years ago after much prayer and soul-searching to follow my heart. But it is the very same heart that has led me back here, and I am learning to trust it despite the doubt and confusion being expressed by family and friends. Why am I back in a country where I have no legal right to work and where I cannot actually afford rent until I find full time work and obtain a work visa when my priority is finding stable work? Why am I back in the North Atlantic where the temperature drops below zero and usually remains there for many months before rising above freezing again in the (very) late spring when I could be living in the land of sun and warmth? And why am I returning to a place with so few single men my age when one of my reasons for leaving was to meet someone to share my life with? Good questions, and ones that I do not have very good answers to. But for the first time in a long time I am not questioning where I am or why. I am not wishing I were elsewhere doing something other than what I am doing. Sure it is tough to have to walk everywhere in the cold, and staying with friends non-stop has meant that I have had to learn to be more flexible and adaptable, and trying to live on random jobs here and there is far from ideal, but I am surrounded by people whose company I adore, land that I love and feels like home, and non-stop opportunities to be of service to my community. Things just feel right. Even when they are tough.

I am not sure, of course, that I will be able to stay here. But I will be here until the end of April, and I am incredibly grateful for the extra two months to work on trying to build a life for myself here again. Sometimes you have to leave a place to be able to come back and call it home. And sometimes you have you trust that a foothold will be set in front of you even though you cannot actually see where you are headed.

People tell me all the time that it must be really stressful to be in my situation, but to be honest, it isn't. I have not felt much stress at all since arriving here. I feel some deep-rooted certainty that everything is going to work out somehow. I call that faith, but I guess another word for that would be courage.

Finding joy in uncertainty

It has been a little while since I last wrote, and I have been missing writing and hearing your responses by email, in the comments section, or on my Facebook page. Thank you for being such faithful readers, and for all the encouragement to keep up my blog despite having limited time to devote to it during this period. I will be getting more regular again within the next month, so you can expect to see more from me soon!

It is Wednesday evening. I have spent the last week and a half visiting every media business I know in Charlottetown looking for marketing work. As those of you who have been reading this blog for a while now know, there are two things I am most passionate about: writing and islands. So the idea of using my writing skills to help island businesses market themselves is my idea of heaven. I have been doing social media work for two companies now since December, so I am heading into my third month of my first official exploration of the social media world for clients, and I am absolutely loving it! Being a poet, I love finding creative ways to say a lot with as few words possible. It is a challenge, and one I thoroughly enjoy. Social media is therefore perfect for me as ideally the shorter the post, the better.

Being an American citizen, I am an immigrant here on Prince Edward Island. I am, as they say, "from away." I am perfectly comfortable with that tag -- I lived with it for the six years that I lived here full time, and am happy to re-embrace the "from away" title if it means I can stay. The only part of being from away that I do not appreciate is the inability to work unless I can find an employer willing to jump through the loops required to get me a work visa. It is hard to know that I have the skills and the drive to be able to make a difference in this community, yet be prevented from offering my services to islanders because I do not have a full-time work visa, and thus far have been unable to find anyone willing to hire me full time and help me get a work visa. It is an issue I have been confronting my whole life, having grown up in Cyprus, and one I am truly tired banging up against. I have decided that if I can find a full time position here I will stay put and get residency, putting this legal "from awayness" to an end.

I have been on Prince Edward Island now since the end of December, and every day has been an adventure. Last night for example I attended a gathering at the Culinary Institute here on the subject of newcomers and farmers. The purpose of the event was to connect farmers with ethnic restaurant owners looking for locally grown vegetables, fruits and meat/fish. The presentations were interesting, and the dialogue between audience and speakers/panelists was engaging. It is encouraging to see this important dialogue starting, and to be able to see the implications of it for the future of the food industry on Prince Edward Island. As more immigrants come to the island, and its population becomes more culturally diverse, its tastes also change and diversify, creating a far more interesting culinary landscape to sample for visitors and islanders alike. The more the island has to offer, the more attractive it becomes, and the more linkages that can be made between those from the island and those "from away," the more successful this (and other) initiatives will become.

It is hard to believe that I have only been back for six weeks, and at the same time amazing that six weeks have already gone by. It feels--to me and my friends alike--like I never left, and at the same time I am finding myself having a very hard time imagining what will happen in the months and weeks ahead if I do not find work and a means of staying. When i first arrived on Prince Edward Island, it was a foreign landscape and culture--one isolated from everything and everyone I knew. But being back here and noticing my body relax and reinhabit this landscape, I am realizing that while I will never be considered an islander, this island has become home. I have roots here, and they are deep--not easily pulled up from the bright red soil.

I am back at my dear friend Louise's home this evening. I decided to stay in for a change and write a blog entry and speak with my parents on the phone. There is a plane flying overhead. I can hear its engines roaring as it climbs up into the sky. I wonder if I will be on one of those soon, or if I will still be here next week and the week after -- sipping hot tea, taking in the brilliance of sun reflected on snow crystals, and enjoying being a part of a community that has become like family to me. Life is a mystery. Why one door opens and many others do not will undoubtedly make sense some day, looking back on this period of my life. Now, in the midst of this period of uncertainty, I am just staying present, enjoying the company of my friends and colleagues, enjoying snowfall and the full moon and thousands of stars in the crisp, clear sky, the smell of wood burning in fireplaces, and the raw call of hundreds of crows that migrate in dark clouds from the treetops to the blueish surface of the frozen harbour at dusk. I am, in short, immersing myself in home and in winter for as long as I am able to remain on the island.

Wherever you are on this winter day, I hope you are enjoying the details of the moment: the sensation of the air against your face, the feeling of winter sunshine on your cheeks, the sound of the wind rattling through bare branches, and hopefully the sound of laughter as you share stories with good friends over steaming hot cups of tea!

Walking in my chosen highway

Friday morning the morning air was full of ice crystals--a million tiny crystals floating haphazardly in all directions like a frenzy of insects, wings sparks of sunlight in motion. The blue shadows of trees arced their long, willowy blue arms across a bed of freshly fallen snow. Outside the wind's percussion played through the branches of bare trees. Snow slowly melted, dripped, re-froze--a tiny drumbeat of ice to water to ice.

Later in the afternoon as shadows began to pull chunks of heavy hues between buildings, I made my way downtown to my favourite German bakery, Leonhard's for a hot drink and some time to write in my journal. Leonhard's is all fairy lights and birch trees. I settled in a corner seat and watched as the soft flakes that had been wet against my cheeks a moment earlier on the pavement began to fall heavier and more steadily. I was thinking about joy. About how to hold it close in my mind and heart most especially when things are not going how I think I would like them to go.

I came across this story recently that described some advice that Abdu'l-Baha, the son of Baha'u'llah, Founder of the Baha'i Faith, gave to Lua Getsinger, an early North American Baha'i during one of her visits to the Middle East. He told her: "Thou must be firm and unshakable in thy purpose, and never, never let any outward circumstances worry thee. I am sending thee to India to accomplish certain definite results. Thou must enter that country with a never-failing spirituality, a radiant faith, an eternal enthusiasm, an inextinguishable fire, a solid conviction, in order that thou mayest achieve those services for which I am sending thee. Let not thy heart be troubled. If thou goest away with this unchanging condition of invariability of inner state, thou shalt see the doors of confirmation open before thy face, thy life will be a crown of heavenly roses, and thou shalt find thyself in the highest station of triumph.

Strive day and night to attain to this exalted state. Look at me! Thou dost not know a thousandth part of the difficulties and seemingly insurmountable passes that rise daily before my eyes. I do not heed them: I am walking in my chosen highway."

I love this quote because it is quite clear from it that Abdu'l-Baha was very definitely walking his chosen highway both during the tough times and the joyful times. He was walking in his CHOSEN highway during the tough times. It is hard to recognize that we are always walking in our chosen highway whether times are happy or sad, stressful or relaxing, easy or hard. It is easier to believe that when we are walking through tough times we are not on our chosen highway -- that somehow God or fate or some other power is dragging us, kicking and screaming down a highway that we most certainly DID NOT choose--a highway that is NOT our will. What I realize in reading the quote above is that Abdu'l-Baha can honestly say that he is always walking in his chosen highway because he has recognized and fully accepted a truth that I will be working on for the rest of my life: that the only way to know with absolute certainty that one is walking one's chosen highway is to bring one's will completely into line with the will of God so that there is no separation, no distinction between what we want in our lives and what God wants. All that is left for us to do then is to find and share the joy that is always within us with those around us irrespective of the circumstances we are living through. I am not saying that is easy--it is hard as hell. But there is something beautiful about being able to align one's will with a larger will, and step back from what is happening around you and see it for what it is: a passing state that need not influence your inner joy or peace.

I have been working on all of this the past couple of weeks. I arrived on Prince Edward Island in Atlantic Canada on December 28th hoping to find a way to stay. It may happen yet. I am praying it does. But in the meantime I have a departure ticket for February 14th and a great deal of uncertainty about what comes after that date. In the past this reality would have caused me a great deal of anxiety. But in the light of this quote above, which I have been reading multiple times throughout the day over the last week, whenever I notice myself starting to get anxious about all of the uncertainty in my life right now I am able to consciously focus on letting it go....focus instead on the only thing I really do have control over: how I respond. It is an interesting process, but what I am finding is that being more conscious to remain joyful even through the uncertainty is helping me to realize how ridiculous worrying about whether I manage to stay or not is, because no matter how hard I work on finding work here, ultimately the outcome of this adventure I am on is completely and utterly out of my hands, and no amount of worry is going to put my fate in my hands. Fortunately (for me and everyone else!) I am not in control of the fates. That is for a power much larger than me to take care of.

I am sitting here by the fire typing this. My hosts have gone to bed. The house is quiet. The streets in this part of town are also quiet at this time of night. The silence of a cold winter night has settled upon the street. Soon I will head up to bed and lie in the stillness listening to the wind outside. Being here is like being enveloped in a very long, very good dream. For however long it lasts -- a few more weeks or longer--I feel incredibly blessed to be here on this beautiful island surrounded by so many people I love. What a gift this winter journey has been. What a blessing it continues to be with every new day!

Have a superb week, friends!

Snowy Friday

Last night I attended a junior youth gathering at the home of a good friend of mine. The Baha'i junior youth program is open to youth between the age of 12 and 15, and is intended to give this special age group the space and opportunity to develop their power of expression and articulation in a supportive environment. There is an emphasis on social justice and community service, and the participants often take part in activities that are of service to the community.

The group that I joined last night begin every Friday session by cooking supper and then enjoying a meal together. Last night we made a big pot of apple and vegetable soup and sandwiches. The group is composed of two islanders islanders, a young woman from Yemen, three from Taiwan, one from The Philippines, one from South Korea, one from Kuwait and one from Vietnam. All together in the kitchen, some of us chopping, some of us washing vegetables, some of us stirring at the stove, some of us setting the table, we are a rainbow of cultures and backgrounds--a miracle really that we are all working together with joy and laughter and few disagreements or misunderstandings. Sitting around the table enjoying our steaming bowls of soup, the room filled with jokes and laughter. With so much in the news about disunity and prejudice, watching how seamlessly the youth melted into a single group impressed me.

After supper we divided into two groups, the older youth joining me in one room, and the younger group joining Sara, the youth from Kuwait in another room. The group I was facilitating last night made collages inspired by a quote that likened a mirror to the human soul, explaining that if clean and free from dust, a mirror can easily radiate the brilliant light of the sun, but if allowed to collect dirt and dust, its innate ability to reflect light is diminished. We discussed the ways in which we can keep our "mirrors" clean and able to reflect light, and then attacked the pile of magazines in the middle of the room and started creating a visual representation of how we can nurture the qualities and actions in our lives that keep our lives full of light.

It had started snowing in the afternoon, and by the evening it was snowing steadily, the streets of Charlottetown blanketed in a thick, soft layer of ice crystals. Sitting in our little circle with scissors and magazines chatting away as we worked, I felt deeply content and happy to be with this group of young people--to be learning with them and from them. Before the end of the night we shared our collages, each person explaining the significance of every image they had chosen, and how the image would remind us to keep our mirrors polished and reflecting light brilliantly.

At the end of the night we swept the layer of snow off of the car roof and windows and bundled in. It was my first time to drive in snow in a two years, and I took it slow. There is something otherworldly about driving down white streets at night. Everything seems dreamlike and surreal. After I had dropped everyone off and made it home and into bed I lay awake for a long time reflecting on what a great night it had been, and how much joy it is to spend my Friday nights with such a diverse group of people creating together, sharing conversation about social and spiritual transformation, cooking and enjoying food together and enjoying the white light flooding in the big windows from the snowy night outside.

Happy days

It has been ages since I last wrote. The main reason is that my computer got rather chilled in the transfer between houses that I have been staying at and appeared to have died a sudden and rather final death about two weeks ago. After two weeks of not starting despite daily efforts to bring it back to life last night it started up again as if it had never had a problem. I was so happy that I did a little dance around my room! :-)

I am not sure how long this second life will last, but for now I am back online and will be updating my blog regularly again unless it kicks the bucket again. Here's hoping for a prolonged second life!

The past few weeks have been insanely busy, but also amazingly joyful. I have been completely immersed in winter life on an island in the north Atlantic. This past Thursday I got a ride out to the farm I used to work on to visit with my boss's mother, Joyce. She and I had tea in the living room by the wood-burning stove. We got caught up about the last year of our lives, talked about the farm and changes on it, and discussed the year ahead and what our hopes and dreams for it are. Joyce is an incredible cook and baker, so we also enjoyed a lovely hot lunch made entirely from ingredients grown on the farm, and gluten-free pumpkin pie that was made using pumpkin grown just outside the farmhouse.

That evening my former boss's daughter Bridget had gotten tickets to go to a professional basketball game in another town, so the three of us drove there and entered the surreal world of professional basketball on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Let me be clear: Prince Edward Island is not known for its basketball team. In fact most people do not even know that there IS a professional basketball team located on the island. Hockey is the main sport here, and so it amused me to no end that the basketball court had been constructed in the middle of an ice-rink. What amused me even more was that the score boards, made for ice-hockey games, only allowed for scores of up to 99, so when the first team scored 100 the score displayed on the board was 00. I had to smile at the fact that in the two years in California I did not attend one basketball game, but that somehow in the two weeks on Prince Edward Island I found myself at a professional basketball game.

When we emerged from the flashing lights and cheering crowds of the arena we found the parking lot we had parked in only a couple of hours earlier completely transformed. Heavy snow was falling outside, turning the parking lot into a landscape of glistening white objects. We set out in search of the car, and Bridget and I sat in the car trying to warm up while Raymond cleaned swept the snow off of the windows and roof of the car.

The drive back to Raymond's house was slow. Snow blew directly at the windshield at top speed the entire way. When illuminated by headlights snow flying directly at a windshield creates a kind of optical illusion that makes you feel that you are stuck in place, not moving forward at all. It is very tiring on the eyes. Couple that with snow drifts that were building up on the road and the zero visibility on either side of the road and I found myself feeling incredibly grateful that Raymond was doing the driving and not me. Eventually Raymond's hawk vision got us back to his house, but he let me know that I was going to have to spend the night out there as the road conditions were just not good enough to drive all the way back into town. We bundled into his kitchen and he lit the wood stove and we enjoyed cups of hot tea around the fire before heading off to bed. My bed was in a tiny add-on that is used by volunteers during the summer months. The room has no heating, which is fine during the summer months, but translates to a room that closely resembles a refrigerator at this time of year. I put on all my clothes, including my wool hat and climbed into bed. Outside the wind howled and howled. The walls shook. Snow pelted the thin panes of glass in the frames above my head. I lay in bed listening to the storm outside, loving every minute of it.

In the morning Raymond equipped me with eggs from the farm and bacon from his pigs, and I fried us up a tasty meal accompanied by piping hot tea with milk and honey. Bellies full, we headed to the farm. Raymond headed out on the tractor to feed the cows and I headed out to the warehouse to help Raymond's son Blake bag potatoes for the Saturday farmer's market the next morning. The warehouse is a wooden structure with a clay floor. It is like a large refrigerator only it has no need for chilling given the freezing temperatures outside. I labeled 3, 5 and 10 pound bags with the various variety names --"russet," "satina," and then Blake and I filled them up and loaded them into trays that would be stacked up in the van later. While we worked we talked about our job search, what we enjoyed most about farming and how his house renovations were going. When we finished I headed inside to wait for Raymond.

On Friday evening, back in town, I headed over to my friend Alanna's house for her junior youth group. A great group of youth gather at her house every Friday for discussion on social justice, community service and the power of expression. Once all the youth had arrived we settled down around the table and shared stories while we ate. The group is very diverse, with participants from Yemen, PEI, Taiwan, mainland China, Kuwait and the US. Our meal was filled with lots of laughter. After supper we divided into two groups, the younger group heading into the living room for their session, and the older youth joining me in the den for Ruhi Book 1. Ruhi Book 1 is one in a series of books created for the purpose of training people to acquire the skills to be able to serve their communities in various capacities. The materials all have a spiritual foundation. This past Friday my group was discussing the ways in which the human soul is like a mirror, which if turned toward the sun and polished diligently will reflect the brilliance of the sun's light, but if allowed to collect dust and turned to face us, or to face a source of darkness, will be dull and uninteresting. My friend Alanna decided to light a fire in the wood stove while we shared, and got to work lighting the kindling and then adding bigger logs to the fire. Content that she had the fire going well enough, she left the room, only to return a little while later to find that the big logs had not caught properly, and the fire was dying. One of the women in my group, seeing this, shared with the group how important it is to make sure that we are constantly diligent about keeping the fire of our hearts burning brightly, and that this requires regular and consistent effort in our daily lives and how we choose to live through every day. It was a lovely evening, and when I got home that night I drifted into a deep and contented sleep.

On Saturday my friends and I headed over the bridge to New Brunswick to attend a meeting with the National Spiritual Assembly (NSA) of the Baha'is of Canada (the national administrative body of the Baha'i community of Canada). It is rare that the entire NSA will come meet with a community. Usually they send one or two representatives to a region at a time. So we were all excited to be able to see all nine of members of the NSA together in one place.

We headed out of town and took the rural highway that runs along the southern shore of PEI. Gently sloping agricultural fields dusted with snow stretched out to our right and the coastline got closer and closer on our left, the water a deep red colour from winter churning and the lack of ice--rare for this time of year. In the distance we caught sight of the Confederation Bridge--a graceful chain of consecutive arches that stretch 13km from the southern shore of PEI to the shore of New Brunswick to the west. As the car slid up over the water we all took a deep inhalation at the beauty of the bridge. I was driving over with two women who were born and raised on PEI, but they both commented on how despite seeing the bridge over and over, year after year, they are still always blown away by the sight of it against the sharp colour of the water and the clear blue sky.

Our meeting went well. It was attended by Baha'is from all over Atlantic Canada, and I got to see many dear friends who I had not seen in a couple of years. It was lovely to see them all and catch up. Seeing the entire NSA was deeply moving. There is something about having the entire group--all nine of them--lined up in front of us giving us their fullest attention and wanting to hear what we have been learning as we serve our communities...what the successes have been and what challenges we are facing as we try to improve life in our larger communities. I felt deeply touched, and left with an even greater degree of respect for the NSA than I had had before.

Yesterday a friend of mine came over for lunch and then we sat by the fire and had tea, said some prayers and chatted. It was a good visit, and the perfect way to spend my Sunday. In the afternoon we headed over to the university to attend the World Religion Day commemoration at the chaplaincy centre at UPEI. Our friend Sara was giving a talk about the Baha'i Faith, and we wanted to support her presentation. It was an afternoon of celebrating the unity of the world's religious traditions -- an afternoon characterized by joy, acceptance and encouragement.

Last night after catching up on work (after my computer came back to life!!) I nestled into my comfy bed and sunk into a deep and restful sleep. I woke this morning feeling well-rested and excited about the day ahead. Down in the kitchen sunlight shone brilliant in through the windows across the floor. A bowl of homemade granola sat out on the counter for me alongside a bowl of blueberries. I settled down in the winter sunlight to enjoy the delicious breakfast that my host, Stephen, had prepared for me, feeling immensely grateful. I love this little island, and the simple beauty of moving through my days here: the light, the hot cups of tea, the time by the fireplace, and even getting bundled up in my down coat, scarf, wool hat and mittens to head out into the sub-zero temperatures! Happy gratitude Monday, friends!

Island girl

As I sit and write this entry, the wind is howling around the house outside. I arrived on Prince Edward Island last night a little after midnight. You know when you were so excited about something as a child that you could not *wait* to get to whatever it was that you were so revved up about? That would have been me when I climbed down the stairs from the plane out onto the island last night, and made like a mad woman for the doors into the arrival area. My dear friends Paul and Alanna were there waiting for me...they had stayed up to come get me from the airport. We bundled into their car and came back to their home for hot tea and a long chat that kept us up into the early hours of the morning.

Last night I lay in bed and watched the sky through the windows--lit up by the brightness of winter. The wind blew and blew, and I lay awake for a long time thinking to myself how good it was to hear the power of the winter wind again.

Eventually I fell asleep, and woke this morning, got ready, and headed out with my dear friend Alanna to get breakfast at a local greasy spoon that was jam-packed with islanders. It was the perfect way to start the day. Alanna is one of those friends who I can talk to for hours and hours, and we somehow never run out of things to share. We share stories, thoughts, ideas, fears, dreams, and most of all lots and lots of laughter. I have been laughing all day long. Our breakfast lasted three hours. When we finally dragged ourselves out of the booth we had taken up residence in, we decided to head out to the house she recently bought in the country to have tea. It was a migrating conversation if you will! We bundled up and headed outside into the icy wind, hobbling across the icy patches of the parking lot and jumping into the car, all giggles and joy. There is something about truly freezing weather that you just have to laugh about. Today it was -18 windchill, which, if you live in California, is bloody cold, but not nearly as cold as it can get here in the middle of winter.

We headed out to her home in the country. The road had ice and snow all along it, so we drove slowly, giddy with the excitement of the day and with our little escape from the reality of the world for a full day. We finally reached the turning for the house, turned in past the little mailbox, and drove up the dirt driveway to the house. The home she and her husband just bought is a rather old house, and has all the charm of a small, storybook house out in the country. It has a barn and a few tiny cottage-like buildings on the property, wood floors, lots of windows that look out across the fields to the west, and a wood-burning stove. Alanna immediately got to work stoking the stove, and got a fire going while I made tea. We brought two chairs in front of the stove and sat down to our steaming mugs of sweet almond tea. The sky through the windows that stretched along the whole western wall stretched out in bands of rose and violet. The earth was dark with shadow and dampness. Reeds outside the window rustled hollowly against the panes of glass. It was so peaceful. Alanna and I talked and laughed, sipped our tea, and warmed our hands by the heat of the fire. It was such a magical evening. As the last light was fading we decided it was time to head back to town to get some groceries and then go back to her house where I had promised to cook Alanna and Paul a hot, belly-filling supper.

I cooked pasta with mushroom red sauce sprinkled with cheese, and salad. It was a simple but hearty meal-- the kind of meal that is perfect on a cold night in December. The company was excellent. The wind howled outside. After supper I made tea, and we sat around the table getting caught up on work that each of us needed to get done. Now I am sitting here alone. Alanna and Paul have headed to bed. The wind is still howling. I find it calming in a familiar sort of way. The sound of an old friend whispering a poem I have heard many times--one that slows my heartbeat and assures me that everything--everything is exactly as it should be in this moment. Such is the song of the PEI wind.

I never thought I would say that I am happy to be home about this island, but that is how I feel. The muscle-relaxing peacefulness even in frigid temperatures, the laughter that has been playing upon my lips all day, and the sense that some sense of rightness has been restored in my world. I am home, and whether it is for an extended stay or a short visit, it feels really, really good, friends!

Wherever you are, I hope you are having a night rich with dreams, wrapped with the sounds of winter, and that joy is bubbling up plentiful in your chest!