Life As Performance Art 63

This morning feels like the calm after the storm. It seems that the rock star who likes to brag about his loud stereo has been located and warned by my building managers (it turns out that he lives in my building, and not in the building next door, after all. Who knew?) Though I am still waxing vigilant. Summer is drawing near, but these days of early June are refreshingly cool with a little bit of rain and some cloud. This is an incredibly lovely time of year. It is no longer exactly spring, but not yet summer. Everything is fresh, green, and a little bit cool. Even on a cloudy day there is a sensuous pleasure to these kinds of days, as one calmly roams and wanders the street, the sidewalk, and the soothing balm of green inundates our eyes and our senses. You instinctively slow your pace, and you want to take everything in. Even if you do not notice the birdsong and the flowers they pervade and invade your unconscious with their own music and loveliness. This is a soothing time. A healing time, if we allow ourselves this. And the light is everywhere, because now we have sixteen hours of sunlight. For many of us, it is still light when we shut our eyes to sleep, and already light when we open our eyes to the new day. June is the month I often wish would last forever, and in some parts of the world, June is forever. I am thinking of Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia. Oh, but many Colombians complain bitterly about how cold it is in Bogotá. That city has an elevation of more than eight thousand feet above sea level, which makes for a cool and springlike climate year round. Every month there is rain, and so it is always intensely and vividly green. The temperatures are like late May and early June in Vancouver. For us, soothing, for your average Colombian, chilly. But you can't please everyone. Here in Vancouver, there is no other time of year when everything is so fresh, new, and exuberantly green, vibrant and vital. This is my day off. I will soon be having breakfast, then getting my clothes out of the dryer, then I will enjoy a long leisurely walk, underneath tree boughs heavy and laden with fresh leaves and foliage, every bit as green as in the early days of Eden. I will arrive early in the French cafe to meet my friend with whom I share the same birthday. While I am working on yet another tropical hummingbird drawing, he will arrive and we will enjoy a visit over coffee and croissant, before I embark on my next walk, elsewhere in the city, underneath the incredibly green trees of June. Oh, I know this all sounds so very twee and escapist and cloyingly lovely, but can't we say that we deserve this, that we have earned this? After all the troubles we hear and witness and experience, in the world and in our own tangled and interconnected lives? Can we not, at times, switch narratives, just long enough to give ourselves a rest, and enjoy a pleasant escape from the ugly realities that our news media shoves down our throats day after day after day? I don't believe that it is fake news. I simply will not accept that all the anguish and doom and gloom that holds us all hostage, and has so many of us wringing our hands over the future of our planet has to be the only valid narrative. There is joy and there is beauty in our lives, in our world and in this universe and we cannot afford to let the ugliness of our times eclipse our vision from what is truly meaningful and beautiful.