Birds are a big theme in my life.
Once a bird flew into my bedroom in Victoria—somehow slipped through the two-inch opening and then panted itself into a frenzy against the glass. I felt horrible seeing its tiny exhales fogging the window. I was huge and terrifying as I wrapped a tea towel around its tiny red body as gently as I could and nudged it back towards the open sky.
I’m not sure about the memory span of birds; I assume it’s forgotten me and my strange enclosed nest. Me, on the other hand—I think about him pretty often. He arrived as an answer to a question I spoke into existence while sitting at my kitchen table only a few days before:
Show me a red bird if I’m on the right path.
And there he was. I called something in from the sky and into my room, something alive with a beating heart and soft minuscule feathers. It was like a precursor to everything else I could manifest, if only I asked with enough conviction.
Please.
At this point in my life, asking and listening are the two most important things I do.
My days are full of work that I love and setting up an apartment. They begin early, when I used to think I needed to sleep in. They’re spent sober—not just the Cali variety—when I used to live in a constant haze. I’m with people who have gone through the fire with me, and through fires of their own. We’re tempered by heat and water; a little pod of survivors who are already forgetting the things that cut them open with surgical precision.
Good days, in short.
But I never do anything more important than talking to whoever is keeping an eye on all this. I guess I use the word God most: a holdover from dusty Sundays spent at a small Ukrainian church on Parr Street in Winnipeg. I say God, but there’s always an invisible clause: God *or the big thing that I come from that also comes from me in a never ending infinity loop of life and growth and light.
A lot can change very fast, and when it does—in that perfect and unpredictable way—I know it’s because I got still and quiet and let things unfold in front of me. Almost seven months ago, I decided to leave Victoria. There was a lot of doing involved: packing, selling, driving. But there was also a lot of nothingness required in that choice. Go here, do this—you’ll find out why later.
What a way to live. But it’s the only way to let this bigger-than-me force work its magic in my life. Those last minute victories, those unexpected plot twists, possible only because this universe is intricately choreographed and all we need to do is move to the music.
I’ve always been a pretty good listener. Too good. I’ve kept a rolodex of real and imagined opinions close at hand and ran my life through their (almost always) oppositional viewpoints. I could hear them urging me to be bolder, or to get a grip. Who do you think you are, they ask. It’s too late for that. We know best. We know everything, for some reason.
But you can’t listen to everyone to get at the answers. You could scroll the options forever like Netflix while the takeout is getting cold on the coffee table. Life was simpler when something half-decent was on cable.
The peanut gallery of ambient noise has been reduced to a whisper. I set my profiles to private and drew my circle of confidantes in close. I might pour out my heart here, but I no longer wonder which faded ghost is watching my Instagram story.
I’m making a home in Montreal. I’ve been here six months and my free trial has been upgraded to premium: a winter spent with a fireplace and poutine and hot air blowing in my face when I slip out of the cold and into the metro station. I would have laughed if you tried to tell me where I was going six months ago. But I also would have sat up a little straighter: that sounds right.
How did this happen? Only by some kind of divinity that I never could have come up with myself. Deus ex machina.
Answered prayers: ones I didn’t even know how to formulate.
It’s a comforting realization that you don’t always have to know what’s best for you, which is to say that you don’t always need the specs. I didn’t know I would love walking down Jarry as the sun goes down, but that’s okay: some part of me did. That big God part.
I don’t believe that we always just know, or that gut instinct is always going to lead us right. Maybe if we didn’t live in a world that projected so much misery and obligation on us, it would be easier.
But I do know that if you have a question, you can always ask.
And if you mean it, the answer will come. Just hold it out for the universe to take from your hands, or slip it under your pillow.