Dear Reader, 

If you’ve subscribed, I’m going to guess it was through my appearance on the SickBoy podcast. Hello! I’m Genevieve, and I do a lot of things when I’m not talking about my pelvic injury on a CBC podcast. This newsletter is Narrativity Scene. Sometimes I talk about media and art, sometimes I talk about endurance sports, sometimes I just talk about Joni Mitchell’s 1976 album Hejira. 

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I just got back from walking the Camino Portugues, from Porto to Santiago de Compostela, and then on to Fisterra and Muxía. It was a lot of walking, a lot of thinking, a lot of meaning-making. By the time I got to Madrid to catch my flight back to Canada, I was exhausted and ready to return to the life I had left behind 3 weeks prior. I felt, in that moment, that this was a sign that I had perhaps finally settled into a more domestic routine. I was maybe even ready, post-pilgrimage, to give up the Hejira framework that had guided my path for the past two years. I even gave the song to a fellow pilgrim (via a shared playlist), because I felt that she needed it more than me. 

Of course, the world finds new and unexpected ways to shake the spirit. I came back to find out that my work was doing a round of layoffs, and that the person I’d been seeing for the past six months had decided that they preferred to not have a girlfriend. My position at my company survived the layoffs - after a few nail-biting days spent trying to catch up on work while dreading a Teams call, I found out that I still have a job. I feel grateful about that, while also feeling guilty for being happy when I have colleagues who have now gone through “employee departures”. 

After the past few weeks, I’m feeling bruised by the uncertainty of life. How does one make any plans when said plans are at least partially dependent on factors you can’t fully control? Jobs, boyfriends, health, the weather. Being dependent on anything feels precarious when everything can change in a second. The lack of control feels like a humiliation ritual. I should have seen this coming, I should always have a resume prepared and always be looking for the next career option. There’s a voice in the back of my head which says that settling into routine and seeking comfort is dangerous. Falling in love and believing when someone tells you that they love you is foolish. If I let my guard down and get caught unaware, I’m the one to blame. I blame myself, because it’s under my control. This isn’t a mindset I’m condoning, it’s not a mindset that I like very much, but it’s one that I’m working through at the moment. 

A few years ago, I had a conversation with my friend about love. This is a friend I admire deeply, and have known for over a decade now. To them at the time, love was a verb. To love. Love was an action, something that one does. One performs loving actions to or for someone, and those actions form the body of work of your love for them. I remember responding that I saw love as a force outside of the verb-action of loving someone. Love was an energy capable of pulling things together and pushing them apart. Love was a force acted upon me, and I went were it beckoned. Or it was a force I wielded against or towards the world, against or towards a person. I’m writing this at Room’s coffee, a Japanese vinyl cafe in downtown Toronto. The furniture is tasteful, a blend of cozy 70s wood furniture and modern Japanese design. The music is probably highly fidelious - if I knew more about that, I could say more. I’m drinking an espresso served alongside a ceramic cup of icy sparkling water. In Spain, they called that agua con gas. If the water was still, it was agua sin gas. Genevieve con Love, Genevieve sin love. 

When I was in yoga teacher training, we had a few sessions of yogic philosophy. It was taught by a woman I admired on sight. She seemed like she was guided by her own impulses. She had unbrushed grey hair and wore leggings and t-shirts. She instructed us to set up our mats in a circle. The room was always too cold. I could feel my toes going numb and bluish as we talked about the sutras, the chakras, the proper way to pronounce the letter “c” in sanskrit. We spent a snowy afternoon talking about yogic notions of reincarnation. Consciousness-as-energy is never truly lost. We are built of it, and when we die, it’s transformed and returned to the vast collective. I thought that maybe the grains of our consciousness would turn up as a frog, or an arbutus tree. I thought about how a grain of sand that ended up in my shoe as a child could somehow return to the ocean and make its way into the mouth of an oyster's shell, where it could turn into a pearl. Maybe my hair, swept from my living room floor and thrown away, could make its way to a garbage dump, where a bird would peck around in a torn garbage bag and use my hair to build its nest. Everything dies, but everything returns to life eventually. 

Bodies are left behind after souls leave to wherever it is souls go. My grandmother was cremated. The ash and water released entered the atmosphere over Vancouver. That water joined the rain, that carbon went somewhere to form something new. No energy is ever wasted. Can I extend that to love? The energy we extend to people as love-action and love-verbs, it’s never lost or wasted. Love is given and love is received. Love is a state of being, being in love. After we leave that eternal millisecond of being in love, it feels useless. All that energy and time and effort for nothing. To be honest, that’s how I feel right now. I see that the love has evaporated. It’s in the clouds. It’s hanging over my head. But just how the water vapour in the clouds will turn to rain and fall again, I too will fall again. It’s all the same water. It’s all the same love. My love is mine. I felt love on the Camino, I felt love in Toronto, I’ll give and receive love and drift and wander lonely as a cloud and cry and sing and dance and grieve and a lot of other verbs too. I’m still squarely on Hejira, I’m still finding Refuge in the Roads and listening to the same album on repeat. 

A notion that I heard today that struck me was that people approach love in the same way that they approach art. Our relationship to creativity is closely linked to our relationship to other people. That’s my suggestion for a journal prompt, if you’re interested - how does your relationship to creativity compare to your relationship with love? What narratives shape these notions?

Much to think about! 

Genevieve