Salmon Run

Once every year, around November, the salmon swims up through the streams in British Columbia to spawn. Julia enjoys watching them. Here are her colorful paintings of these beautiful fishes. (I cut it out for her to paste in the collage).

Here is a link to an artist who paints birds.

Soot Sprites

Hayao Miyazaki is one of my favorite animators. I particularly love his latest movies - Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle (I haven't seen Ponyo yet). In Spirited Away, we see the small round black creatures in the boiler room which I later found from his older movie (My neighbor Totoro), to be soot sprites or "travelling soot". Wikipedia describes them as shy, slightly frightful creatures that live in abandoned buildings such as old houses. Julia is fascinated with them and I'm glad I found a convenient make believe substitute for her to play with. Here below the "soot sprites" in our new house are "flying" and hiding in Julia's closet. (They don't like too much noise so we need to be quiet..shhhh.) The hanging cat is her version of "Totoro" as well". Children's imagination never cease to amaze me.

Tea Table

Chris found a board in the basement the other month and made it into a nice low tea table for me. Now, Julia and I have a place to draw and write among other things. It's very nice. :)

Small Balls of Learning

At the office, our staff meetings always end by going around and having each one talk about a thing they learned for the past weeks. I thought that would be good for me to do here. I call it "Balls of Learning" as I see it similar to the small balls that Julia makes with her clay and which she then gathers and squeeze to make her figures. I feel those little details, mental notes I make and stuff I see or seem to feel that is like a "rule" or pattern by which our lives operate, do somehow shape me.

Things I Knew More About (or suspect is true):

1. The more uncomfortable situations I got into, the more learning I got going out of it.

2. Waking up an hour earlier everyday, to spend time alone with oneself, makes a lot of
difference.

3. When one suddenly finds that one's monetary resources are now limited (because of a mortgage loan for example), one then begins to stop "acquiring" and starts "being".

4. My books will find me at their right time.
It used to surprise me how I would tend to find the books that I need for the mood/yearning I had, at the exact moment I need it. Now I take it for granted. I always find the book (or they would find me) that I need at the time that it would make a difference in my life. All it needs is for me to be sensitive to the signal. I found one last Friday, lying face up (or more like staring at me and calling out - pick me up. pick me up!) on a shelf when all the rest of the books were "standing".

5. Like the camera, people can choose to see the world at different focal lengths. We can see it at it's tiniest detail or at the broadest view. Some prefer one over the other. I find nowadays that I tend to look for the greatest things in the tiniest details, which I find ironic.. but the "Book of Tea" seems to agree with me.

6. Speaking about tea - I learned that "Teasism" is the worship of imperfection. (A similar way of thinking is behind why in ancient Japan, when their bowls or cups are cracked, they bring it to an artisan who fixes it by highligthing the crack lines - not hiding them- with some metal filling as these crack lines now make the cup unique and beautiful.)
This gave me a big relief. And so I told an old friend, now that I knew about such a thing as "imperfection" being good, I can stop my endless (and tiring) quest for perfection and be at peace with myself at last. And my old friend, like a sage, calmly says, " Now, that Emilie, makes you perfect"...There is no getting away from the yin and yang of things I suppose then.

7. Halloween is like Christmas back home. It's the rare time we can go around knocking our neighbor's doors and being given treats.