Nature Journal - Beauty, Presence, and the Healing Power of the Natural World

 Three Walks. Three Continents. One Body Learning to Listen.

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I grew up in Northern Ontario in the mid 1970's to the early 1990's, a child of the outdoors pre-technology. I'd leave the house in the morning and didn't come home until night.  Sometimes, I'd sleep over at friends and I didn't tell my mom where I was.  She knew I'd be home eventually.  Every summer I'd set up my tent in the farthest corner of my huge backyard, so I couldn't see the house. I'd live in that tent for 4 months every year, only going inside to sneak food or to have the occasional bath... I swam so much in the fresh lakes I was clean enough. Times were different then and parenting was not like it is now. My earliest memories are of being outside riding my bike through every street and trail I could find, going swimming alone or finding new friends to spend the day with. Then later on in my teens, when the bike became uncool, I walked everywhere, from my house to my friends, the lakes or the little strip mall in town, taking short cuts through the bush trails, moving in my small world as a matter of necessity rather than intention. I'd walk for miles every day. I did not yet know that walking could be its own destination and I did not yet understand that being in nature, truly being in it and not just passing through, was something one could choose deliberately, as an act of self-renewal.

That understanding came later, in my forties, through an invitation that changed the direction of my life. I was asked to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise awareness of ovarian cancer, a disease I have survived since the age of ten. I said yes before I fully understood what I had agreed to. What followed was months of training, a transformation of my body, and the discovery of a relationship with challenging, multiday wilderness hiking up steep New Zealand hills and mountains that I did not know I was capable of. Standing at the summit of Africa's highest peak, I was reminded that I really could do anything I put my mind to.

That conviction carried me to the famous Milford Track, one of New Zealand's Great Walks, undertaken with my friend Chad in the stunning Fjordland of the South Island. It was a hike of quiet awe with brilliant blue skies, glacier-carved peaks, waterfalls cascading into pools of crystalline water, and the extraordinary birds of Fiordland calling through the ancient forest. I did not know at the time that I was carrying kidney cancer inside me. My energy was not what it had been. But the beauty of that place held me up.

Then came diagnosis, and a reluctant but necessary move back to Canada for cancer treatment that wasn't available for me in New Zealand. My service dog, Blue and I moved in with my elderly mother, saying good-bye to a life we absolutely loved and thrived in. Then came a slower, quieter life, walking the Klaus Wehrenberg Trail in Sheppard's Bush Conservation Area just five minutes from my mom's apartment in Aurora, Ontario. With Blue, a now ten-year-old New Zealand Huntaway with brand new knees (he had deteriorating ligament disease in both knees diagnosed shortly after we arrived in Canada), moving just ahead of me through the undergrowth, his nose to the ground and his tail sweeping the air we just walk and breathe, in this moment.

These three walks: Kilimanjaro, the Milford Track, and the Klaus Wehrenberg Trail which are the subject of the journal entries that follow. They span years, continents, and radically different moments in my life. But they share something essential; each one asked me to be present, to use my senses, to surrender to what was there rather than what I feared or wished for. In this, they align with what Garcia and Miralles (2020) describe as shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing which is an immersive, sensory engagement with the natural environment that research has shown to reduce stress hormones, lower blood pressure, and restore psychological equilibrium. Shinrin-yoku does not require a summit or a trail rating. It requires only attention.

Denis Dutton (2009), in his chapter "Landscape and Longing," argues that the human response to natural beauty is not culturally learned but evolutionarily embedded, that we carry an ancient, aesthetic preference for landscapes that promised our ancestors safety and sustenance: open ground with scattered trees, proximity to water, elevated vantage points. Reading his argument, I recognized every trail I have ever loved. And Gaard (2018) pushes this further, arguing for an ecofeminist aesthetic of reconnection and the idea that beauty in nature is not something we observe from a distance but something we belong to, and that healing comes in part from remembering that belonging.

These journals are written from inside that belonging. They are records of what I heard, smelled, felt, and saw. They are records of a body in motion and a body at rest. Perhaps most preciously, they are records of what nature has given me, again and again, even when I had very little left to offer back.

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Journal Entry One

The Rongai Route, Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania — Six Days

I am standing at the base of the highest freestanding mountain on Earth, and I am terrified. Not the clean, clarifying fear that sharpens you but the low-frequency dread of someone who has just realized the full scale of what she has agreed to. I trained for months. I ran, I hiked, I carried weight in a backpack up a small mountain (in comparison). My body is fit but the feeling of altitude is an unknown I cannot prepare for in a New Zealand suburb, and that unknowing sits in my chest like a stone.

I remind myself why I am here, I had Ovarian cancer at age ten and nearly four decades of survivorship. I got an invitation to climb in solidarity with other women who have faced the same disease and others who knew women who didn't survive it.  I came to Africa alone. There is meaning in this and I feel it, even as the mountain disappears into cloud above me and the air already feels slightly thin. I do not put pressure on myself to reach the summit. I tell myself this firmly. I am here to walk as far as I can walk, because not everyone makes it and this is a reality I understand.

We begin in the African rainforest, and the beauty of it catches me off guard. The canopy is dense, layered in shades of green so saturated they seem artificial. The smell is extraordinary, rich, loamy, alive with decomposition and growth in equal measure. Garcia and Miralles (2020) describe the forest atmosphere as literally medicinal, charged with phytoncides which are the organic compounds released by trees that strengthen the human immune system when inhaled. Moving through that low forest on the Rongai Route's first day, I breathe as deeply as I can knowing that soon I may not be able to.

Slowly, over 6 days, the world changes. The rainforest gives way to moorland, heather and giant groundsels which are strange evolutionary forms that look like something from another planet. Then the alpine desert which is a spare, lunar landscape of volcanic rock and thin air where almost nothing grows. The beauty here is starker. It is the beauty Luccarelli (2018) identifies in the picturesque tradition, rugged, asymmetrical and overwhelming in scale. The kind of landscape that reminds you that nature was never designed for human comfort.

We walk slowly, pole, pole which means "slowly, slowly" in Swahili.  This becomes both the instruction and the philosophy of our high-altitude trekking. I fall naturally to the back of the group, keeping pace with another cancer survivor, a woman in her sixties whose calm, quiet steadiness I find deeply reassuring. There is no reason to hurry. We will all arrive at camp at the same time as everyone else. I use the slowness to look: at the rock formations, at the sky, at the way the light changes across the mountain's vast flanks. I take photographs. Probably most importantly, I breathe.

As we reach Kibo Camp, a blizzard descends out of nowhere. It's pandemonium and the guides are yelling at each other in Swahili as they frantically set up camp, pounding tent pegs with rocks using their frozen bare hands. So many of them don't have adequate clothing or footwear.  Very few have gloves.  I want to help but I am disoriented and useless from the altitude and cold.  Our tents are wet, everything is muddy. We need to sleep after lunch because the summit begins at 11:30 pm. I lie in a damp sleeping bag and feel the wind shake the tent and think: I don't have to do this. But I sleep, and at 9:00 pm I pull on every layer I have brought with great difficulty because my hands don't work, and step out into the minus twenty-two degree dark night to find the food tent where everyone is gathered for a hearty meal of soup and freshly made bread.  How they fed us so well, I still can't figure out. It's snowing, fat, fluffy snowflakes falling through the beam of my headtorch, landing on my eyelashes.  I can only see what the headtorch illuminates just a few feet in front of me and what I see is magical.

There are no words adequate to the summit climb. I am grateful, in a way I could never have anticipated, that it is pitch black. You cannot see how far you have to go. You cannot see how far you might fall. You can see only the boots of the person directly ahead of you, shuffling upward through the dark.

This narrow field of vision becomes a kind of mercy. Dutton (2009) writes that our aesthetic responses to landscape are partly about what we can survey and control - the elevated viewpoint, the long sightline that signals safety. In the dark of Kilimanjaro's summit night, all of that is taken away. What remains is something more primal: the simple imperative of the next step. When people stop, you are met with both frustration and gratitude - because it breaks the rhythm but it's also nice to have a break!

The altitude does something strange to the mind. There are moments when I simply stop caring whether I continue or not. Apathy settles over me like fog, a physiological flattening of the will that altitude induces. It is, in retrospect, one of the most frightening things I have ever experienced: to feel indifferent to one's own (and other's) survival. My porter, a jovial Tanzanian man whose warmth and energy seem impervious to altitude, cold, and darkness, keeps me moving. He talks to me. He encourages me. He makes me laugh when laughing seems impossible.

As the sun begins to rise, I know we must be close to the top.  The guide points to some enormous boulders that we have to climb over.  Once again I want to stop to argue with myself over why I've signed up for this, but there is no place to sit. Every movement is deliberate and slow because the altitude makes the body clumsy and my fingers are numb from cold. And then, when I am certain I cannot go further or climb one more damn rock, I see open blue sky and think that we reached the summit, only to realize that there is still another two hours across the ridge to the summit. I start crying. I am convinced I can't do it so I sit down. My porter sits with me until I get too cold and have no choice but to keep moving.

The snow stopped a while ago and we have the most stunning clear sky for the summit. I can hardly speak. My words are slurred with cold, exhaustion and altitude. But I am standing at 5,895 metres above sea level, and say to myself, I DID IT!  I found an energy reserve I had no idea I had.  I am in a daze.  I want to sit down to rest but the air is so thin, I need to move down the mountain to breathe.  

As I walk away from my token photo at the summit sign, I see two cheerful familiar faces walking over.  They are a couple I met on the bus in Kenya traveling around Africa a few days earlier, who happened to also be from the same small town in New Zealand as I was.  You realize how small this world is when you travel.  I told them that I was in Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and they looked at each other and said, "let's do that."  I was thinking, "YEAH RIGHT.  I trained for months."  Yet here they were.  I was gobsmacked.  Maybe they were a mirage?  Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me.  Actually, nope.  I have a photo with them somewhere... I'll try to find it.  And you know what?  I never saw them again, even though we all lived in that same small town for years afterwards. I never got their names either.  So if they ever read my blog, please please get in touch.

Now for the descent... nobody talks about the descent... and I understand why. The scree is treacherous, shifting underfoot like loose gravel on a steep roof. I am so afraid of slipping and breaking my neck that fear temporarily replaces exhaustion. It's a slow, painful (and scary) climb down to Kibo Camp where I can rest my weary legs and feet before continuing the descent down to the last camp and the final night on Kilimanjaro. And in the hours and days that follow, something settles in me that has never quite left: the knowledge that I can endure more than I believe I can. That my body, pushed past every limit it thought it had, sometimes finds something on the other side of that limit. Not triumph, exactly. Something quieter. Gratitude. Astonishment. A deep, cellular sense of being alive, once again reminding myself that I am capable of so much more than I give myself credit for.  Why do I continually doubt myself?  It's an annoying but endearing quality I must live with.  

What was most beautiful?  The snow during the summit climb, falling through my headtorch. The laughter of my porter at four in the morning on a freezing mountain. The moment the sky began to lighten and Africa spread out below us, vast and silent and gold.

 

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Journal Entry Two

The Milford Track, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand — Five Days

I am nervous, and the nervousness feels unfamiliar after everything I faced on Kilimanjaro. But this is a different kind of fear, it's quieter and more personal. I have had very little time to train so I feel out of shape even though I practice yoga daily. My energy has been low in ways I cannot fully explain, I have this fatigue that doesn't lift the way it used to. My friend Chad has asked if I'd like to take his wife's place as she was not up to doing it; these Great Walks are booked more than a year in advance. I am grateful beyond measure, and also quietly afraid that I will slow him down, that I will not have what this trail asks of me.

He is easy-going about it. He always has been. I tell myself: just walk and enjoy the scenery... and pray for good weather.  The Milford Track is notorious for rain, often non-stop. And I mustn't forget to just breathe.

I prefer, when I hike, to walk in silence. Something in me settles when I am alone with the sound of a trail, the crunch of my footfall, the rustle of wind through canopy and the distant percussion of water. On the Milford Track, I often fall a little behind Chad, not because I am struggling, though sometimes I am, but because I want to stop, look and mostly listen. I notice the different varieties of mushrooms clustered at the base of a silver beech tree and the intricate geometry of a silver fern. I take in the heavenly way the light breaks through the canopy in long, slanted shafts that make the forest floor look cathedral-lit. I listen to the silence, between bird song.

The birds are extraordinary. The Tui fills the forest with a sound that is part bell, part breath, part something entirely its own, kind of like a liquid, complex call that seems almost too musical to be real. The Kea, the alpine parrot, wheels overhead with a raucous intelligence that is almost comic; Chad stops to watch them, and I hear him laugh from somewhere up the trail. The Kaka moves through the canopy in flashes of rust and olive. And then there is the the small, bold Fantail or Piwakawaka in Maori, who appears and dances around you as you walk, hovering and darting within arm's reach, as if the hike is a game it invented for your joint amusement. The Weka, flightless and determined, appears whenever food comes out of a pack, the rustling of plastic calls to them like Pavlov's dog; it regards you with the frank, calculating gaze of something that has never needed to develop a fear of humans.

Garcia and Miralles (2020) write that shinrin-yoku is not a passive experience but an active engagement of all the senses; sight, sound, smell, touch, even taste of the air. The Milford Track offers all of these simultaneously. The air itself is remarkable: cool and clean and carrying the faint mineral scent of glacier and stone. It is not hot. It is not cold. It is exactly what air should be. Gaard (2018) argues that this kind of sensory immersion in nature restores something in us that modern life systematically depletes — a felt sense of belonging to the world, not merely moving through it.

The sand flies are a particular challenge. They are relentless and vicious, a reminder that Fiordland's beauty comes without modification for human comfort. We cannot stop for long in any one place without being swarmed. But we find ways: we pull off our boots at the edge of glacial streams and submerge our feet in water so cold it makes you gasp, and the cold clears everything. The clarity of that water is unlike anything I have seen. It is not transparent, it is invisible. The streambed is visible from a metre of depth as if through glass, every pebble precise.  The fish appear to be gliding along the river bed as though they are a species from another planet.

What stands out most is colour. Colour that seems calibrated beyond what I thought possible in nature. The sky is a blue so saturated it seems to press down on the mountains. The beeches are a green so deep and particular it almost has weight. And the water, stream and lake and waterfall alike, is a luminous, crystalline blue that seems to generate its own light. Luccarelli (2018) traces the long history of the picturesque, the aesthetic tradition that taught Western eyes to read wild, dramatic landscapes as beautiful rather than threatening. Standing at the top of Mackinnon Pass, looking down into the valley below, I understand that tradition completely. This is the landscape that painting taught us to love, and then revealed was real.

The descent, always the descent, is where the trail gives its greatest gifts and extracts its greatest cost. The knees and feet take everything. Why doesn't anybody talk about this part? Between the brutality of the downhill kilometres are the waterfalls, hundreds of them including Sutherland Falls, one of the highest in the world, visible from the valley as a thin white line dropped from an impossible height. Closer up, the falls are a roar and a mist and a cold spray that reaches twenty metres into the surrounding air. I stand as near as I dare and feel the sound in my sternum.

In the evenings at the huts, Chad and I eat our freeze-dried meals and talk. I am too tired to do more than sit and be grateful for his company and his quiet competence as he handles the cooking and the kit without fuss and asks nothing of me except to show up the next morning. This is a particular kind of friendship, the kind that holds space without filling it.  Everyone needs to experience this kind of kindness, at least once in their life.  I feel pretty lucky to have a friend like him on speed dial.

I did not know, on the Milford Track, that I was already sick, carrying a 7cm tumor inside my right kidney. I'd been dealing with uncontrollable blood pressure for many years and faint blood in my urine that the doctors dismissed. My body was telling me something I had not yet learned to hear. But what I remember is not the fatigue. What I remember is the colour of the water, and the Fantail dancing at my shoulder, and the air, clean and cold and still, pouring into me like something I had been missing for years.

 

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Journal Entry Three

The Klaus Wehrenberg Trail, Sheppard's Bush Conservation Area, Aurora, Ontario — Late May

It is late May in Aurora, and the world has gone green almost overnight. It was the longest winter I can remember but surprisingly, Blue and I really loved it. I have been on cancer treatment for almost a year, a combination of Immunotherapy and Targeted Therapy that they call chemo but it's nothing like the chemo I had when I was ten. My energy is rationed now, a finite daily reserve that I spend carefully, choosing what matters. I've been experiencing side effects from the treatment, brain and nerve swelling, brain fog and issues with memory, rashes, body numbness, swelling, migraines and fatigue that makes me want to just sleep until this is over. What matters most days is this: Blue's leash coming off its hook, the click of the clasp, the way he turns to look at me at the door as if checking that I am really coming. I am always really coming. The search for my keys and one last quick trip to the loo.

Before I was diagnosed with kidney cancer, I walked to get somewhere. Then I walked because I loved the grand, demanding trails that tested me. Now I walk because walking is what I can do, and because Blue needs it, and because the Klaus Wehrenberg Trail is five minutes from my front door and somehow, impossibly, given everything, it is enough.

Blue is a New Zealand Huntaway, ten years old, black and tan and built for moving through country. He walks without his leash wherever I can, walking ahead by a few metres before stopping to wait. He always stops to wait. He does not run ahead and disappear; he moves to a good vantage point, turns back to check my position, and holds there until I catch up. I have never trained him to do this. It is simply how he is.  The leash laws were not as strict in New Zealand as they are here in Canada.  In fact, lately, he trails behind and I wait for him!  His new knees make a big difference in the way he walks.  He's more sure footed but he gets achy.

I let him set the pace, which means we stop frequently. He sniffs with an intensity that suggests each scent is a complete narrative, telling him the story of who passed here last night, what they ate, how long ago they stood in this particular spot. While he reads the trail this way, I look up. Garcia and Miralles (2020) describe this as one of the simplest and most powerful practices of shinrin-yoku: to slow down until the senses can actually receive what is there, rather than filtering it into background. Blue has been teaching me this for years without knowing it.

The trail in late May is in full surge. The canopy has closed over the path in the last two weeks, you can almost see it happening day by day. The undergrowth is thick with trillium going to seed and new fern unfurling, and the path is soft underfoot with leaf litter still damp from spring rain. The smell is layered: earth and wet bark and something faintly sweet from the hawthorn flowering in the gaps where light breaks through. DeFrantz (2005), writing about the aesthetics of African American dance, argues that beauty need not be universal to be potent and that it is most powerfully experienced within a specific, culturally and sensorially particular frame. My frame this morning is this trail, this dog, this body that is working harder than it looks to simply be here. The beauty I find in it is entirely mine.

We find a bench,  always the same bench, at the start of the trail, where you can call a loved one who is no longer on this earth, and I sit down to talk to my dad. Blue circles once and folds himself into the leaves beside me, his chin on his paws, his amber eyes scanning the treeline with the relaxed alertness of a dog who has nowhere else to be. We sit like this for ten or fifteen minutes, sometimes longer if we aren't disturbed by other walkers and their dogs.

The birds in late May are extraordinary: a red-winged blackbird making its territorial claim from a branch overhead, the see-sawing two-note call of a black-capped chickadee, the conversational chatter of a house wren somewhere in the undergrowth. A squirrel launches itself from one branch to another with an acrobatic confidence that briefly startles us both. Blue lifts his head, then puts it down again.

Dutton (2009) argues that human beings have an evolved, deep aesthetic preference for landscapes that offer what our ancestors needed: open ground with scattered trees, proximity to water, an elevated viewpoint. The Klaus Wehrenberg Trail offers a version of all of this — the stream below the path, the clearings where the light comes through and the gentle rise that gives you a long view through the beech and maple. 

I do not need Kilimanjaro to experience the aesthetic pull of landscape. It is here just minutes from my house, available every day.

We pass other dogs and their people on the way back. This is one of the quiet pleasures of the trail, the easy community of dog walkers, who are, as a group, more open and friendlier than almost anyone else you encounter in public space. The dogs greet each other with the frank enthusiasm of creatures who have not learned to be guarded (unless their owners are or they have met dogs who have not been trained). Blue wags. I wave. Sometimes we stop and talk about nothing in particular like the weather, the trail conditions or whose dog has discovered the stream this morning, and the smallness of it is exactly right.

Back at the car, I open the hatch and Blue puts his paws up on the bumper waiting for me to give him a boost. He immediately curls up in his bed as I get into the driver's seat. I sit for a moment before starting the engine. Gaard (2018) writes of the ecofeminist aesthetic as one of reconnection, the recognition that the boundary between self and nature is not fixed, that health and beauty are partly a matter of remembering our place within a larger living system. 

After Kilimanjaro I felt that as triumph, after the Milford Track, I felt it as awe. This morning, on this beautiful trail just five minutes from home, with my old dog snoring in the back seat, I feel it as something more ordinary and more sustaining: gratitude. Simple, daily, renewable gratitude.

What was most beautiful?  The way the light came through the canopy onto the wet path. The sound of the stream over stones. Blue folding himself into the leaves beside my bench and looking up at me, as if to confirm we are both still here and doing this together.

~ ~ ~

Three walks. Three continents. Three entirely different relationships between my body and the natural world.

On Kilimanjaro the beauty was elemental and extreme and found in snowfall at 5,895 metres, in the voice of a porter cutting through altitude-induced apathy, in the astonishing fact of survival. On the Milford Track, it was sensory and saturated with colour beyond what colour usually is, water of impossible clarity, birds that seemed to exist purely to make a tramper stop and listen. On the Klaus Wehrenberg Trail, it is quiet, local, and daily beauty of a familiar path made new each day by the light and the season and the company of a good dog who waits.

What connects them is presence. Each trail demanded, in its own register that I stop filtering the world through anxiety or ambition and simply receive what was there. This is the core practice of shinrin-yoku as Garcia and Miralles (2020) describe it as an immersive, sensory attention to the natural environment that restores us physiologically and psychologically. It is also what Gaard (2018) means by an ecofeminist aesthetic of reconnection: the healing recognition that we are not separate from the natural world, observing it from a safe remove, but embedded within it, subject to its beauty and its weather alike.

Dutton's (2009) evolutionary aesthetics helps explain why these landscapes move us so reliably and so deeply, why the long view from a mountain ridge, or the sound of water over stone, or the filtered light of a forest canopy produces an almost involuntary response of pleasure and meaning. These preferences are ancient. They are in the body before they are in the mind. And DeFrantz (2005) reminds us that beauty need not be universal to be powerful because it is most alive within a specific, embodied, particular frame of experience.

My frame has changed. The epic walks that once defined my relationship with the natural world are, for now, not available to me. Cancer treatment has redrawn the boundaries of what my body can do but the Klaus Wehrenberg Trail is only five minutes away, Blue is always waiting at the door and the red-winged blackbird is staking out his branch in the Canadian canopy. Beauty, it turns out, does not require a summit. It requires only attention, and a willingness to sit on a bench or a log or in the leaves and let the world be exactly what it is.

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References

DeFrantz, T. F. (2005). African American dance: Philosophy, aesthetics, and "beauty." Topoi, 24, 93–102. http://web.mit.edu/bpt/readings/DeFrantzBeauty.pdf

Dutton, D. (2009). The art instinct: Beauty, pleasure, and human evolution. Bloomsbury Press.

Gaard, G. (2018). Toward an ecofeminist aesthetic of reconnection. In P. Quigley & S. Slovic (Eds.), Ecocritical aesthetics: Language, beauty and the environment (pp. 97–). Indiana University Press. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=nlebk&AN=1739048&site=eds-live&custid=s7439054&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_97

Garcia, H., & Miralles, F. (2020). Forest bathing: The rejuvenating practice of shinrin yoku. Tuttle Publishing. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=nlebk&AN=2371601&site=eds-live&custid=s7439054&ebv=EK&ppid=Page-__-1

Luccarelli, M. (2018). Renaissance aesthetics, picturesque beauty, the natural landscape: An essay examining the rise and fall of the impulse toward beauty. In P. Quigley & S. Slovic (Eds.), Ecocritical aesthetics: Language, beauty and the environment (pp. 77–). Indiana University Press. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=nlebk&AN=1739048&site=eds-live&custid=s7439054&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_77

My Dad - Roger Gagnon

This was originally posted on May 11, 2011.

My dad passed away on the 11th month on the 22nd day at the young age of 66.

I'm still in shock as I post this in loving memory of a truly wonderful man.

Today is my dad's birthday - (well it is in Canada) I'm a day ahead in New Zealand. He was born on May 11th. I thought I'd celebrate his birthday by writing some of the things I love so much about him.

My dad and I have a unique father-daughter relationship. He wasn't around much when I was growing up but I adored him nonetheless. My dad was a kind, happy, quiet guy who was a bit of a drifter. He used to just "turn up" at our house unexpectedly once or twice a year.

When I would come home from school and see his truck parked in the driveway, my heart would race. It was the best feeling on earth - even better than Christmas! I'd barrel through the door and there he'd be, sitting in the kitchen having a coffee with my Mom with a great big smile on his face, "surprise honey!" Those are my favorite words. I'd perch myself on his lap and that's where I'd stay hugging him until he was off again... even when I got too big to sit on his lap, I did it anyway. I can remember it like it was yesterday.

I didn't know what it was like to have a dad who stayed longer than a few hours a couple of times a year so it was no big deal to me. I absolutely loved that man. He was my hero. I was so proud to show him off.  I'd invite all of my friends over just so I could prove that I had the coolest dad on earth - and they all agreed.

In summertime, he would buy a big box of popcicles for me to share with my friends.  He'd take us to the beach in the back of his pick up truck (when you did that sort of stuff and it wasn't illegal).  He taught me to drive that truck when I was 15 on a country road.  When I was little, he let me sit on his lap and steer. He was so much fun.

I loved the fact that my dad had a great big heart. He never said a bad thing about anyone.  He was a hard worker.  He was always helping others, building decks, fixing their roof, fixing horse floats... he was called Roger the 'Tin Man' because he was a craftsman with aluminium siding.  He often worked for his friends for a case of beer. 

Everyone loved him. Anyone who knows my dad would describe him as "a really great guy". You just can't fault him for anything.

He loved my mother, even though they couldn't be together, he always made that clear to me. I knew that he adored me beyond words. He was and is incredibly proud of his only daughter.

My mom and dad met in the early 70's. They met while my mom was racing Austin Minis. My dad described my mom as "extraordinary", there just wasn't another woman on this planet like my mother. She was beautiful but didn't know it, she could fix a car better than most men and she would do anything for anyone and she loved her kids. My dad admired her for her strength and her heart. He was 8 years her junior, only 19 when they met and he was prepared to take on her 4 kids. It wasn't easy, I give my dad a lot of credit for trying.

My parents both tell me that I was conceived from pure love. I like that. I was a love child. It's very fitting. My dad chose my name as I was his first child (and only daughter). I looked a lot like him and as the years go on, I am more and more like him too. It proves the theory of nature vs. nurture. I am my father's daughter.  

My mom and dad split up when I was 3 and he came and went in and out of my life ever since. But despite the fact that I rarely saw him, you couldn't fault him for being who he was. He wasn't a bad man or an absentee father (though he never did pay child support, he didn't believe in it) and it upset my mother.  In fact, when I was older, my dad told me that the reason he stayed away was because he genuinely believed I was better off without seeing him much.  Confrontation made my dad really uncomfortable and my mother was a confrontational, acusatory person when she was hurting.  That's why they just couldn't make it work.  Love wasn't enough.

Having a dad like mine was kinda like living with a time traveller - just like the movie. He would just turn up and then he'd be off again. I learned to love not knowing when I'd see him next. Every time I saw him though, he was so full of love. How could I get upset with that?  I understood him. This was who he was, love it or leave it.  I didn't always love it but I accepted it.

I still only see my dad once every year or two (now that I'm the drifter). Our relationship is strong but to most people probably very odd because we don't ring up to talk to each other. I wish I could say I call him once a month - but I don't. He rarely calls me - rarely has.  When we did spend time together,  we would sit listening to his old vinyls, crying as the words spoke the things our hearts needed to say.  He's not one to send birthday cards or Christmas presents. We have one of those telepathic relationships - I love him and he loves me.

Our bond is unconditional and pretty rare.  It's simple, it's a beautiful thing.

Sometimes he would just call me out of the blue saying, "Hi Honey, I was just thinking of you and I didn't want a perfectly good thought to go to waste."

I'm thinking of you Dad. I think about you and send love out to you every single day. I know you feel it because I feel you doing the very same thing. 

We're two peas in a pod. Happy Birthday Dad! I adore you and I always will.

*** 2019 - In recent years my dad and I started talking more frequently and he even learned the basic art of texting (his spelling was atrocious which is why he hated writing). This was the last text conversation we had...

It brought me so much joy when I'd get a random text from him telling me how much he loved me, how proud he was of me, that a day didn't go by that he didnt think about me and he felt my love for him in his heart every day too.

You have no idea how much comfort that brings me.  I could never convince him to learn to Skype.  I wish I'd known more of his friends who could've done that for him.  I missed his voice and his face.

He's been gone a week and I've been utterly helpless, stuck in Australia until I return home to New Zealand to make arrangements to get home to take care of my dad's finsl wishes.

It is not going to be easy but I know he's going to be there to give me strength through his ever present, never changing love. I'm going to need it.  ***

Peanut Butter and Jam on Toast = FREEDOM

THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT ME

I’m passionate

I give more than I take

I’m honest

I can't stand liars

I’m not common

I hate being ignored

I’m authentic

I can feel others emotions with my heart

I’m eating peanut butter and jam on toast, still my favourite at 44 years old, in my lovely quiet home which costs me $400/week plus expenses.  I'm feeling all nostalgic and romantic so I'll tell you a story.

I would’ve never thought I could afford living like this on my own.  I just rent.  I gave up trying to save for a deposit to own a house a long time ago.  I'm content with renting.  I don't have kids.  I'm not married.  What do I need to own a house for?  I like the fact that I can move anytime I want and if something happens, I can call the landlord to fix it.

When I was in my early 20's, I sacrificed my freedom, my happiness, my independence and ruined good relationships which might have actually lasted.  I jumped into living together too fast because I thought I needed someone to live with in order to live somewhere nice.  It never occurred to me to get a flatmate.  It was easy to find a guy who wanted to live together, we became an instant "couple". It seemed practical but I hadn't considered what I'd be giving up to get into this instant committed contract.  I was so young and naive.  I thought that's what people did.

My aunt once asked me when I told her about a young man I met who wanted me to move to Oklahoma to live with him, "He might want that but what do you want?"  The truth was, I had no idea. I loved the adventure and I was never afraid of trying something new.  He said he loved me but I wasn't sure I loved him, I thought I'd figure it out after I moved in.  This is never a good start to any relationship.

My relationships failed, not because I wasn't meeting nice guys.  I believe they failed because the energy I was putting into the relationship was a bit of curiosity, boredom, excitement,  desperation and fear of being alone.  The relationships weren't based on unconditional love.  They moved too fast.  The "love" was imbalanced, either I loved them too much or they loved me too much.  But either way, it wasn't actually love at all.  It became dependency.  They were afraid of losing me or I was afraid of losing them. Dependent love is a trap and it eventually fades, fear takes over and someone starts panicking because they are about to lose the security they have grown accustomed to in the relationship.

I hated that feeling so much, I stopped living with anyone.  It was a paradox, I ran from love in fear of losing it.  Eventually, by the time I reached my early 30's, I became emotionally unavailable to anyone.

I needed to know what it feels like to be 100% alone in this world.  It took me a long time to figure it out.

***I want to make note here that I am writing this from the perspective of a childless, unmarried, middle aged woman who still can't grasp that she's in her mid 40's.***

The message I am sharing is that we are all capable of looking after ourselves.  There are so many ways to survive and thrive when you are willing to think and search for opportunities.  You don't have to live like me, renting a house alone. House sitting is a great way to see the world. Tiny homes on wheels or  on a small lot. Live-in care giving. Renting a room in another person's home, feeling good knowing you are helping them pay off debt.  (It's healthy to think about helping others and not just ourselves.)

These are all options I’ve considered or tried in the past and would explore if I had to in the future. Would it be easy to let go of my favourite “things”? Nope, not at all. I cry every time I lose a sofa I really like (my solution - I stopped buying sofas). I would probably even store a few precious things until I was ready to let them go.  That’s okay.  I purposely try to never buy anything I don't need and I up-cycle furniture buying things second hand or free and giving it new life with some paint.  So there's truly nothing of value in my house, apart from the love I gave it.  I have nothing that I don't really enjoy looking at or using.  My house is lovely, it's exactly how I like it.  It's not cluttered and the things I have match together perfectly.  I can achieve this anywhere with any unwanted furniture.  It's all about my style and nothing at all to do with the stuff I own.

Would I have to figure out what I’d do with my dog? Yep. It would be really hard if I had to give him up and I'd do my best to keep him. But if I couldn’t, then I would give him to someone who would absolutely adore him (which wouldn't be hard because everyone loves him and I have a list of people who want him).  I would cry for days about it, but I know I’d get over it and so would he. I love him and I just want him to be happy, even if it's not with me.  That's unconditional true love.



The aim is to be FREE.  Nothing is forever.  Don’t become attached to your things or to your surroundings or to the people in your life.  People change.  Pets die.  Jobs get made redundant.  I'm being practical, not fatalistic.  You can get cancer or have an accident.  Anything can happen unexpectedly.  It's important that we can let go of everything in order to adapt to changes quickly.  I'm somewhat of an expert on this, I speak from experience.

You can live a life of freedom and not necessarily lose your connection to the people, places and things you love (well maybe children... because children are officially an 18 year commitment... but after that please let your children be free too.  You aren't doing them any favours by teaching them to remain dependent.)

"Things" tend to accumulate no matter where you go. In fact, by remaining in the same place, around the same people, doing the same things you are actually denying yourself (and others... especially your adult children) the opportunity to connect to even more amazing people, places and things. Get it? We are only limited by what we don’t allow ourselves to experience.

I'm not saying relationships are bad and that you should stay single and never live with a partner.  No, that's not what I'm implying.  I'm simply speaking for myself, saying that until I learnt to be alone, I was truly unable to enter into a healthy relationship where I wasn't DEPENDING on the other person.  It wasn't something I was taught as a child.  My parents separated when I was a toddler.  I never saw how a healthy relationship worked.  My mother was an alcoholic so I raised myself and I left home when I was 16 years old.  I lived alone most of my childhood.  So to me, love was something I latched onto and smothered the crap out of because I was so afraid it would leave.

Now that I'm in my mid-40's I am waiting for the right partner, so we both enter into a relationship for all the right reasons, interdependently.  I've done the dependent thing and I've done the independent thing.  Now it's time to meet in the middle.  I'm ready, if and when it comes.

My point is that we all need to feel we can make it on our own first.  I think we owe that to ourselves, because otherwise we live fearfully, afraid of life alone.  All we have in this world is ourselves. If we give up our personal freedom to make other people happy or to live life on other people’s terms or to live in constant fear of the future and dying… well then we’ve missed the entire point of living.

Life is about enjoying, being totally present and trying different things so you can truly say you experienced everything life offered you.  Whether it's with the person you love the most in this world or on your own in the comfort of your own space... 100% enjoying the moment for what it is... now.

I still love peanut butter and jam on toast. I have eaten it in just about every country I have travelled to. It tastes different everywhere. The bread is different, the butter is different (sometimes I sacrificed butter to just have straight peanut butter on toast).  The peanut butter and jam is ALWAYS different.

When I was younger, I ate it for the sake of eating it.  It made me happy but it never satisfied my cravings.  I didn't think about what I was eating or the quality of the product I was blindly consuming.  When I wanted a snack, I made toast and I could eat half a loaf of bread!

As I've gotten older, my choice of peanut butter and jam has changed.  I will not lower my standards. Nowadays, I like healthy bread - sour dough or a brown bread with nuts and seeds. I don't like the toast thick. I only eat real peanut butter these days, freshly made if possible, chunky is best. I aim to eat homemade jams, with less sugar.  REAL and HEALTHY is what I'm aiming for.

It's so important to not compare one thing to the next, especially when you're young and trying to figure out what you like.  Learn to enjoy each one as though they are your favourite snack in the world, different but delicious.  Each time you taste something new, you are fine-tuning your perfect combo.   It's perfectly okay to like variety, in fact it's wise to try different things.  Not all of us are born knowing exactly what we like.  We might have been eating the cheap, processed "fake" peanut butter and jam on white bread.  It can take a half a lifetime to realize that sweet things rot our teeth and processed "fake" things have no nutritional value whatsoever.  When you explore and try other ways of enjoying the thing you love the most, you may just discover that the healthy version is really the best.

I know what I like and how I like it now.  I won't just have any old PB&J anymore.  It has to match my taste and measure up to my standards.  And I don't need to eat it often, just when I feel nostalgic and romantic.

When the right partner comes along, it won't be a difficult decison to want to share space again.  The aim is to just be happy whatever you choose together, and keep your heart open to the perfect love combo for you.

*** True love is Freedom ***