I am standing in a stream of sunlight that warms me to my bones, despite the cold air. The sun is low in the sky during this season, this month, my least favourite. I’m walking the dogs, both of whom have cancer, both of whom still seem to enjoy being alive. My youngest and I are waiting at the corner where he meets a friend for the walk to school. We are early. He says, Let’s talk about something!

*

The wish to be writing is deeply on my mind. The messages I send to myself through my cartoons give me a hit of confidence I can’t access otherwise. How much I want to finish writing this book, but more, how much I long for it to be a beautiful creation, beautifully written. Do I still know how? The fear of my own brain and its lack is profound.

I am in the kitchen, making a salad for supper. No one else is home; they’ve all gone to a soccer game. I am leading a workshop in less than hour and I’ve turned on the radio in a form of panic that is slowing my every move to a crawl. I could hardly turn off the computer and stop writing—editing—the scene I worked on earlier today. Already, it is very dark outside. I pick away at the plastic box of greens, bought on special, most of the leaves covered in slime, viscous and clingy, while the news tells me about Justin Trudeau’s exchange with President Duterte of the Philippines. Trudeau’s version is rosy, while in his Duterte swears and says Bullshit! Trudeau seems quintessentially Canadian in the way that I suspect I can be—Pollyanna-ish. Chirping about the possibility: not about what is, but what might be, what we wish it to be. Like this salad. I wash the grossest leaves and put them into the bowl. I chop an avocado. Do you have time for this? Yet I am calm and deliberate. Add the word meditation after any activity and you will find your approach changes. You sink into the greens, their individual peculiarities invite you to notice—red veins, stems, the smallest leaves are toughest and least affected by the slime.

*

I bike past two men walking in the park. As I pass, I hear one say to the other: “So this woman is really into baking cakes …” Whatever I was expecting to hear, it was not this.

I am standing in a stream of sunlight, wishing every hour of every day were spent standing in a stream of sunlight. I crave warmth. I crave comfort in all forms. I am writing a scene in which my character, an older woman, cannot look at the world without seeing its potential for danger, risk, misery, grief. Everywhere she looks. I think the woman is me, today. It is not that I am sad, exactly, only that I see how limited we are in the span of our lifetimes to alter the direction toward which human experience leans. I admire the human spirit. We make beauty out of grief, song from sorrow, we find ways to cope, to share our joys; but we seem also to be wired to damage and destroy so much of what we create, either by accident or design. I seem to walk around in a constant state of grief and outrage. I yell at the Style section of the Globe: you shouldn’t be allowed to sell pants for $3000! It’s immoral, it should be illegal! Why do the rich seek to enrich themselves further? Why is greed a fundamental operating principle? Why are those with the least blamed and shamed for what they do not have? Why do I have so much when so many have so little, not even security, not even a home?

I am standing in the sunlight. Let’s talk about something, my youngest says. Okay, I say, what do you want to talk about? I hope it is about moose or elk or eagles. I hope it is about the way bears and frogs hibernate. I hope it is about how high he can climb the dead apple tree in our backyard and what he sees when he’s at the top.

xo, Carrie