https://books2read.com/BelleCanadienne
https://bookpublishers.ab.ca/titles/belle-canadienne/
Fly Away
Snow Goose
What can I say in these harrowing times? I love Canada, though my visits there have been short, and now, very, very long ago. The images of the fires, and the unimaginable losses that accompany them are heart-breaking.
The words I speak in sympathy are hackneyed; they ring hollow. Without action, words are nothing but breath. Forests, creatures, people, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians, however distantly, I hear your cries.
In Europe too, the world burns. Perhaps this present is why I have imagined the past so continuously all my life, wanting to step back into a time when the world, except for Nature, was silent, broken only by the speech of birds and animals, by the sounds of wind and waterfall. A time when the human creature knew only fire and the right stone to flake, when we were just one among many, a time when we believed we are all kin, that each is a necessary link in the great chain of being, and that the notion of "other" is false.
The plain fact is that Life as we know it today could never be without everything else, beginning with Sun, Earth, Moon, I still dream of endless tundra and forests that stretch ocean to ocean, of seas of fresh water, of seasonal surges of migration-- wing and hoof--of the once Millennial snow packs, now melting.
In reality, my small ignorant self wouldn't last a week among the tooth and claw of that world. Nevertheless, it would be a glory to witness, for what time do we humans truly have? Only the instants in which we are aware: Here, Now.
~~Juliet Waldron
