Haze
The summer weather has been so perfect in Calgary this year. Everything has that dusty golden haze and the air is thick and glowing, like an over-exposed photograph. I’ve been spending so much time just wandering around downtown, going for epic walks and listening to electronic music, letting my thoughts weave and wind through streets and alleys, parks and vacant lots.
There is something so lazy and dreamy about this summer heat, I feel like I’m moving through the city in slow motion. It’s almost like I’m permanently fixed in that dopey limbo state between sleep and wakefulness - where sounds and smells of the real world start seeping into my dreams, and the colours and sensations of dreaming are surfacing in reality. It’s like the facade of the city is coated with a strange membrane, a surreal skin that has become a lens for my heightened-awareness of our surroundings.
I admit, some of this dreamy dopiness may be a result of all the late nights, extra sleep, and typical summer recreational antics. But I almost feel like I have special x-ray vision or something when I look at the things around me while I’m walking around the city. Suddenly there are so many little secret oddities in this place that only I can see - secret angles, secret corners, secret river benches, secret art, and secret selves.
Another City
How well do you know the city you live in? Growing up in mainly one place my whole life, I thought I had a very intimate relationship with my home, my neighbourhood, my city. The sounds of the birds and squirrels… the smell of the air in each season… the graffiti on the train station wall… the same guy who collects bottles in the alley every Tuesday. I thought I knew Calgary, I thought I had it all figured out. Like the freckles and scars on my skin, the paths of my day-to-day through this city and its suburbs are imbedded so deeply in my consciousness, I take them completely for granted.
A few months ago, I moved into my own apartment. My own. I have never lived alone before, but now I have my own place, right downtown, in an old, bustling, pedestrian-friendly neighbourhood. This part of town is not strange to me, and in fact I went to high school for three years just a block and a half away from the building I live in now. But it’s different. This is a different place. I feel like I’ve somehow crossed dimensions, into a parallel reality that has been here the whole time, but that I was unable to access until right now, just at this precise moment.
The colours are brighter, I run into people I know all the time, the street art is beautiful and little black bats fly around in the old trees at dusk. Even the sky and the clouds seem unprecedentedly vivid and epic, as if I’m seeing sunset in Calgary for the first time, the way I did in Iceland. How did this happen? Can there really be that much difference between living in the suburbs and living in the city? I thought I hated Calgary, I wanted to get out of here as soon as I could. And now, when I am finally at a point where I am totally independent, where I am completely free to leave any time… I suddenly want to stay.
I feel like my veins have grown fast and long in this thick summer air. Like they’re starting to get tangled into the cracks in the pavement, the roots of old trees, and strange memories from another place.
Intuition
When I was a kid, I never thought I would grow up to be an artist. It never even occurred to me. It’s not really the kind of thing that North American adults encourage as a legitimate career, and they don’t really write children’s books or after-school specials about career artists. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to be all the usual things, like a teacher or a veterinarian - and some not-so-usual things, like an NHL hockey player or an archeologist. It didn’t really occur to me that I wanted to seriously pursue art until I was maybe 18 or 19, and at that point my conceptualization of what it meant to be a professional artist was pretty romantic and hopelessly unrealistic.
Even now, when people ask me what I do, I usually say “I work in an art gallery” or “I run a non-profit arts centre” or something like that. When you say to someone “I’m an artist” they usually respond along the lines of “Oh that’s neat. But what do you do?” This can be discouraging at times, and I doubt that many engineers or accountants have to answer that question (even though I really have no idea what engineers or accountants actually do in their jobs - I imagine they mostly sit in cubicles doing long-division all day.)
In Iceland, for the first time in my adult life, when I told people that I’m an artist they didn’t follow with the requisite “Yes, but what do you do?” line. Being an artist is actually a legitimate thing in Iceland. It’s a job. Before I left for my trip, I was nervous and worried that I wouldn’t actually get anything done while I was gone. What if I got there and wasn’t inspired? What if I got bored of drawing all day? I have never, not even when I was in university, treated making art like a full-time job. But once I got there, it came so naturally and I’ve never felt as excited or fulfilled by my work as I was during my residency. I think I am actually an artist.
I want to maintain that excitement and fulfilment that I felt while I was staying in Iceland. I felt like everything I did was meaningful, like I was working towards something important. I want art-making to be a full-time part of my life in Calgary, too. I want to live artfully, not just when I’m drawing, but also when I’m cooking, and typing, and riding the bus, and grocery shopping.
I’ve been trying to think of a reason to keep up this blog, of something interesting I can write about here in Calgary. I think this might be it.
The Saturation Point
I can’t believe that, in exactly one week from right now, I will be on a plane flying back to Calgary. Well, first to Seattle of course, and then a 5 hour layover, and then home. In this bizarre way, I sort of feel like I did at home right before I left for Iceland - conflicted about leaving, not sure what to expect, a little bit scared but excited.
Despite my reluctance to return home, part of me misses it - I miss my friends, I miss the trees, I miss going out to bars and cafes and restaurants. I miss Starbucks and Netflix. But somehow, in my last week here and despite the inherent familiarity, I feel like I’m seeing everything here for the first time. The mountains, and the ocean, and the sky. Everything around me has that sparkling magic and mystical power that I was so constantly aware of in my first few weeks here. It’s like someone peeled back a dead layer of skin that was covering everything, and suddenly exposed the clean and shining viscera underneath. I guess I am just trying to squeeze out every last bit of the experience while I am still here, trying to etch the feeling of this place into my body and mind so I never forget it.
It’s amazing how quickly I adapted to living here, it feels so much like home after only a month. I’m so accustomed to my life Skagastrond - I wake up at the same time every day, I recognize nearly everyone in town, I can tell the two ravens apart, and I know, just by the creaking and groaning sounds my house makes, whether it’s the south-west or north-west wind that is blowing. Calgary seems so strange and faraway, so full of uncertainty and unknown futures.
My thoughts and emotions are knotted up so tight with conflicting feelings about going home, I feel like I’ve been wandering around in a numb fog all weekend. I keep thinking about this random concept I learned in junior high school chemistry, the “saturation point” - when a liquid reaches a point where it is so concentrated with dissolved particles, like salt or sugar, that no matter how much more of the substance you add the liquid cannot become any more saturated. The added particles won’t dissolve past the saturation point, and the extra sediment just accumulates.
Pulse
Yesterday at 5:25pm, when it was low tide, I decided to go for a beach walk. I had promised myself (and my half-finished drawing) that I would stay at the studio and work until 6:00pm, but by the time 5:20 rolled around the sun was radiating gold, and the grey water was sparkling like a sea of glitter. The North Atlantic was whispering my name in its breathy, lulling voice, and I couldn’t help myself from wandering out of the art-bunker and climbing down onto the black, rocky beach.
My ravens were following closely above my head, landing every once and a while on the rocks to chew on some seaweed or to investigate some litter. The sky was clear ice-blue and the weather was beautiful, cold but not too windy, and for once it wasn’t storming. I felt so calm and content and relaxed, my mind was clear for the first time that day - for the first time all week, maybe. All that I was conscious of was the cold, salty air and the rhythmic in-and-out, ebb-and-flow of the grey waves. The mystical ocean had cast its spell on me, and I stood there motionless and silent, mesmerized and giving in to to its hypnotic power.
I wanted that feeling to last, to lie down in the shallow water, letting the ocean flow between my fingers, trickling through my hair and into my ears. I wanted my brain to swim out into the depths like a sea urchin, for my skin to turn into stringy, gelatinous seaweed, and for all the vertebrae in my spine to slowly separate into angular volcanic rocks that would sit on that beach in the cold wind forever. I wanted my entire body to slowly erode into the grey water until all that was left of me was my steady pulse.
In-and-out, ebb-and-flow.
