Written on the Plane, Monday Aug 1st...

The aeroplane taking me home, not to a home but to the city that I call home, the city that has enveloped me most of my life, rumbles through the sky. Today Vancouver was a vision of ocean and beach and city and mountains in brilliant sunlight as we rose spectacularly into the sky. With my camera in a bag in the overhead compartment, I wasn’t able to take a picture. The only photograph is the one I carry in memory now.

Will I ever forget those white lines appearing and disappearing as we flew over the waves and up through the scattered clouds? White lines of seafoam writing on the ocean like a calligraphy, signifying the creativity I found there.

Yet it was a city of much difficulty for me. My children not adjusting even after 2 years. I began to feel I just didn’t belong there; but, in the ways of the energies of the world, before I left I found not only a job in a wonderful company, but a possible community through a newfound friend. I left feeling much better about my time there for these simple reasons. And I know I will be back, if only for a holiday.

The uncertainty ahead unfolds with the unrelenting wings of the strange bird I fly on, the drone of a metallic butterfly swooping across the landscape, crossing mountains, prairies, lakes.

In the balance, Toronto weighed in heavier, with a number of different communities, family and probably a university I know well; I never felt like a Vancouverite, but like someone who alighted from another world, that my energies didn’t suit the city, or that Vancouver, as beautiful and fertile as it is, wasn’t my city.

Yet I return with 3 books that I’ve written in the last 2 years, and while they need much editing, they might never have been written had I stayed in Toronto. The natural fertility of the city, its abundant greenery, inspiring creativity perhaps. The creative energy of that part of the world is extraordinary. Surely it has something to do with the beauty of the surroundings.

Creativity on the West Coast is in tune with the flow of the natural energy of the land; in a city like Toronto creativity erupts despite the pollution, traffic, crowding of an intensely built city of brick and concrete and manicured parks. The one an effortless extension; the other a determined statement in the midst of an artificial world, a city where beauty is not a paramount reason for being. In comparison to the casualness of Vancouver, Toronto is a business-oriented city with multiply positioned goals to achieve, to succeed. The natural landscape is a human one, one created by people for people and it is about people. Is that what I missed?

I like the energy of the people of Toronto. It’s a big city energy, even if it only approaches the truly large megalopolises of cities like New York or Tokyo or London or Rome.

It’s a city on the edge of a lake that it has cut itself off from by putting a highway between itself and the expanse of water.

That highway is where millions of people stream, driving in, out, working, loving, living their lives; it’s fast, the expanse of Lake Ontario to one side, the city risen from the flat landscape on the other.

Where I am going, into that core. Where the buildings are high, where the crowds move like large packs, herds, where the beat pounds.

And what will I find in this latest re-entry, this my third time heading back downtown to live in the busy core? The first time I was there in my 20s, I stayed 18 months; the second time, I stayed 20 years. I leave, and am always pulled back...

The plane takes me steadily across the country, my dog and cat in the hold below, during the passage between cities.
The landscape below me is veined with roads, mapping pathways, blanketed by fields in a patchwork of warm earth tones, grain yellow to dark green to dusty oranges to dirt-coloured to pale green, until we come to the vortexes of towns and cities where knots of community energies coagulate.

I feel a sureness of trust that this return is good, that the city will envelope me again, that I will find myself inspired by the wild and crazy and gentle and brilliant and ordinary and beautiful and loving people around me.

In 2 hours the plane will land in Toronto.

I follow my heart and return home.