I lower my paddle in the water and push the canoe into pre-dawn stillness. The boat glides effortlessly across the lake, cutting a sharp triangle in its mirror-like surface. Each paddle stroke sends circles through the water – ever-expanding, widening – until they reach the forest along the shore and Killarney’s white cliffs towering above. I listen to them breathe softly under the spell of the night. As I drift through the upside-down skies, suspended between two identical worlds, at the meeting point of the past and the future, along the convergence lines of darkness and light, my own boundaries expand and widen, they become porous. The clenched fist of my small, isolated self slowly unfurls until I hold the lake, the trees, the towering quartzite cliffs in the palm of my being. Or is it the other way around? Are the mountains, the lake, the forest holding me, folding in my essence into theirs?
As I drift through the upside-down skies, suspended between two identical worlds, at the meeting point of the past and the future, along the convergence lines of darkness and light, my own boundaries expand and widen, become porous.
Where would you start your story?
I could begin with the moment I was born on a July morning at a maternity hospital in Ukraine. By my mother’s account, the hospital was packed so her bed was placed in the hall where the windows didn’t have blinds and air-conditioning wasn’t a thing. I took my time emerging from my mother’s uterus. Hesitating, no doubt, pondering if leaving the only home I’d ever known was such a good idea. Decisions never came easy to me.
Or maybe I should go back to my parents’ wedding on another day in July, a year before I entered the world. My father smitten with my beautiful mother; my mother reeling from a bad breakup resigned to the idea that this was as good a marriage as any. Their unlikely union birthing dreams of my brother and me, their pain becoming ours. Or maybe it goes back to my grandparents, great grandparents and many generations before them, braiding their stories together so that one day they can become a part of me.
My story started the day my parents moved to Chernivtsi, a picturesque city by the Prut River, a restless and unruly stream born on the slopes of the Carpathian Mountains. The mountains that would become a site of many teenage hikes. A place of enchantment, a realm of striking sunrises over the jagged peaks to the exultant accompaniment of nightingales.
My story started the day my maternal grandfather laid the cornerstone for their house in a small village by the forest. My future adventure playground, a symbol of barefoot freedom and safety, a land of wandering and wondering. That’s where I took my first steps holding onto the fence lined with my grandmother’s favourite marigolds. That’s where dreams of future travels were born under the soothing gaze of whispering pines. To this day, every encounter with the land is a return to the forest of my childhood.
My story started when the pines behind my grandparents’ house sprouted spindly shoots and pushed them toward the sky. It started when the white quartzite cliffs towering above me on this July morning were quartz sandstone – soft, malleable, ready to be compressed by colliding cratons into mountains, taller than the present-day Rockies. It started in the nebulas of the first supernovas that provided building materials for all known matter in the Universe.
It began the day I met a handsome man in my English-as-a-foreign-language class – soon to become my partner on the winding trails and wild waters of everyday life. It began the day we arrived in Toronto, six moving bags between us packed with essentials and memories. It began when my children split away from me — seven years apart on different sides of the ocean — each one carrying a universe in their tiny bodies.
Pieces of my story have been scattered around, dissolved in lakes and streams, caught between tree branches and etched into rocks, given to other people for safekeeping. So I roam the world trying to collect them all.
My story has many beginnings. It will have multiple endings. Because there is no single story, no epic novel with a clearcut start, an epiphany and a final resolution. Instead, it is a collection of random paragraphs and snippets, an accidental assortment of loose ends and unanswered questions, an anthology of tales spun by many generations, an ever-changing compilation of verses and songs – born at the margins, along the collision lines with other beings, human and non-human alike. I carry these disjointed fragments inside – they exist side by side, touching, merging, growing new roots and sprouting new shoots.
My story has many beginnings. It will have multiple endings.
My story started long before I took my first breath at a maternity hospital in Ukraine on a hot day in July. It will continue long after my borrowed stardust is returned to the Universe. Pieces of my story have been scattered around, dissolved in lakes and streams, caught between tree branches and etched into rocks, given to other people for safekeeping. So I roam the world trying to collect them all. I stash these pieces in the pockets of my being for later so I can string them into necklaces of joy and sorrow, stitch them together into a tapestry of meaning, weave them into incantations that can call hope into being. And as I do, I also leave pieces of me behind. Threads of my story unspool, entwine with other threads along the way. They become part of new tapestries, creating an eternal cycle of entanglement with my surroundings until I no longer know where I end and the world begins.
Welcome to the Stories of Entangled Life…
