What a horrific problem it is to have too many! <– I realize it’s difficult to tell if I wrote this sentence sarcastically or not and while I started it that way, it ended up in a very sincere place.

Being that we are on the threshold of spring (speaking as I do from the northern hemisphere) it feels like the time to decide where this year will take me. I’ve long subscribed to that ancient roman notion that the beginning of the year starts in April. It used to stem from a decidedly more egocentric place (my birthday is in April, so when I discovered that the new year had been stolen by january, for reasons that still elude me, I decided to secretly celebrate onset of the year when it made more sense to me) and perhaps that has some bearing still, but now it’s more physical and emotional. It’s a time when everything comes back to life, the plans that were schemed in the dark of winter seem feasible now, achievable. Everything old is new again, etc.

At this point in my life, there are three things I’d like to do. Three that appeal more than any other I can think of right this second. That are reasonable and likely to be able to implement without any miraculous cash windfalls or winning some contest I didn’t even know that I had entered. Because of course, there are waaaaay more than three things I’d like to do.

-go dancing in Iceland
-have tea on the giant’s causeway
-tango in buenos aires
-see the sunrise over istanbul
-be a chanteuse in a paris nightclub
-sailing across a warm pirateless sea and swimming in darkness where there is no land to be seen and not being eaten by a shark
-learning to sail
-eating a mango/avocado ripe from a tree
-surfing every day without a wetsuit because it’s warm enough, not because I”m crazy and trying to kill myself with hypothermia
and on and on and on….

But for now, until Gala and I have a stronger relationship (we can travel together without her being infected by border collie crazy eyes to the extent that nothing, especially not the sound of my voice will bring her back to being aware of what’s happening beyond that squirrel that she is determined to bark at for the afternoon, in case you aren’t sure, yes, she is a dog) I’m mostly here and that’s not terrible. There are far worse places to be.

When I was younger, I couldn’t wait until the day I could leave here and see all the exotic and beautiful places waiting for me. I would pore over pictoral atlases (atlas’s? atlasi?) dreaming of being an intrepid traveller and getting to know the planet in the way that only national geographic writers and photographers could. Unfortunately, I never formulated any plan that would allow me to do that. I think perhaps this is the crux of many of my troubles with regard to achieving my goals. I set those goals (I’m going to go to Australia!) but I don’t actually consider HOW to get myself there. It’s as though I (somewhat arrogantly?) expect that at some point, since I’m so obviously meant to go, it will magically happen.

Fortunately at some point, it kind of magically did. When I say magically, I mean a friend was moving to Paris, asked if I wanted to come and I said yes, after convincing my dad to put my plane ticket on his credit card (I still didn’t have one at age 29, thanks dad.) And I set off on an adventure which was wonderful and illuminating and humbling and many other -ing words that may or may not encapsulate the experience accurately. One recurring event of this adventure was a general excitement on the part of people, when discovering that I was a resident of British Columbia, sharing with me their adventures in the wilds of the province I had been born in. I cannot count on both hands together the amount of times I was told about the beauty of locales in my home territory that I had never been to.
I had spent so much time trying to get away, to see the world at large, I never gave any thought or effort to seeing the world at small. A world that people I was meeting and thinking of as cosmopolitan and experienced as to the ways of culture and general amazingness thought of as a most rewarding and worthwhile place to be. Their surprise that I had never seen these places so close in proximity to my home was surpassed only by my surprise that anyone could think that where I came from could be as beautiful and exciting as someplace like Paris. Or at least as sought out, because the excitement of Paris is incomparable to the excitement of a place where bears roam freely.

So recently, I’ve been finding myself at odds with what will happen next.  I have three, as far as I consider them viable and rational and fun and intriguing to me, options for sustainable ideas that could contribute not only culturally and financially to my well-being, but instrumental to my ever imaginative progress as a human doing her thing on a floating greeny-blue space orb. One of those things I feel calls me towards a long awaited (6 years removed) exploration of this province I call home. A girl (me), a dog (Gala), a truck (Nina), an accordion (Marchesa) on a mission to explore and know the wilds of BC, a beautiful place to get to know better.  Who knows what the adventure will bring?

But then I think, ‘oh look, I’m doing that thing I do..yet again…where I have this need to explore the world (BC, north of Vernon, which to be fair is most of it) I don’t know, regardless of the fact that there are places within a 30 minute drive of where I live right this second that I’ve never seen and are worthy of visiting many times over. I don’t understand why I have this inability to see the beauty of where I am until I am so far removed from it that I spend an insane amount of time trying to get back there and check it out and know it the way people who aren’t even from here see it for what it is. An amazing place to call home.