Dream-time Meanderings into Reality...

So…the majestic trees, lakes and autumnal colours of Ontario gave way to the flatter, sparser plains of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and now Alberta and here I have come to rest for the time being…WOW…never before have I felt the contrast between travelling by land and air so sharply as the last few days…we travelled 4 full days by car to arrive here – the journey seeming to almost take on a life of its own, carving out its own rhythm and patterns into our lives as I looked on, feeling rather like a surprised participant...it amazes me to think that if I had travelled by plane rather than by land, I could have hopped from one side of this continent to the other (or even further) in just a few hours…yet we came by land and the experience was much longer and, in many ways, felt a lot more ‘real’…I have seen and experienced most of the breadth of this land now…and it seems, as a result, more ingrained/solid in my experience than before…more so than it seems it would have been if I’d jumped in a plane and flown over it…I have often thought too in the past days of the people who have made this journey before me – some of them by wagon, others by horse, some by foot, with perhaps no shelter, no supplies…certainly no ‘directions’ from Mapquest to follow ;) Their journeys took weeks or months longer than ours…and here I have sat for 4 days, speeding through time and space, suspended in a metal structure, feeling often like I’m partially in dream-space, as this journey dances its magical path through our lives and then deposits me now, gently yet indifferently, in a sweet house with lovely raw beings, in a little town in the Canadian countryside, where I will cease to move again for a while, pick up the threads of a reality it feels like I left behind many days ago, back in Ontario and get on with writing…it’s certainly been an interesting adventure… ;)

on September the 17th I had:

1.2 litres water
2 persimmons
200ml kombucha
sunflower greens, hemp seeds, flax oil, nori rolls, tomato, spirulina crackers
1 litre water
an impeccable mango
2 apples, handful of mulberries/almonds
600ml kombucha
1 litre water

The last few nights we’ve been staying in hotel rooms as we crossed country…this is something else I’m quite unaccustomed to – I’ve been on the move for about a decade now, yet almost always in private abodes…hotels, like hospitals, feel rather peculiar to me…like bizarre little bubbles of ‘reality’, extracted from standard society, where intimate pieces of peoples’ lives seem to glide past each other and interlock briefly – for a few hours or days, then it all falls into separate pieces again and they go on with their individual stories…how many other people have slept in this bed? Used this towel? Done their morning yoga on this floor…? It seems strange that there is no discernible trace of them…they are, after all, to me, all brothers and sisters, whoever they are…and they were here…yet it’s like they never existed…the maid has come and rearranged the space again…clinical, clean, functional…and so the illusion that no-one was here is recreated, again and again…in the past, if I found myself in hotel rooms, I would write messages on the backs of the framed pictures hanging on the walls…messages to those who, like me, might be curious enough to know who else had shared this space…so…next time you’re sitting in a 'characterless' hotel room, perhaps you might take a look behind that picture of a cattle farm or tulip bed on the wall and discover the loving traces of those who have been there before you… ;)

on September the 18th I had:

1 litre water
900ml green juice with carrot
ball of spirulina/mesquite/lucuma mixed with water
bowl of chia soaked in water with dried mulberries, spirulina, lucuma and banana
1 litre water
½ box of prune plums
chocolate covered figs
nori rolls, spinach, sprouts, hemp seed butter and flax crackers
1 litre water

The last hotel we stayed at prior to arriving here in Alberta had a towel policy I found very pleasing ;) It was not a hotel that was marketing itself as ‘eco-friendly’ or any such angle…and yet the towel racks were fitted with signs asking the reader to consider the number of towels that are ‘needlessly’ washed all over the world daily in hotels and setting out some clear, simple rules for where to place used towels, so that only those were taken for washing…NICE…they also had another very sweet little system wherein, in each bathroom was placed a piece of ‘rag’ towel, with a laminated card explaining that it would be very much appreciated if this clean rag was used to clean surfaces etc, rather than any of the towels…CLEVER…I love this…Mr Monarch and I make juice wherever we are and hotel rooms are no exception…they often end up splattered with juice however, with little mounds of pulp littering surfaces…this ‘rag’ was therefore a very welcome find, for clearing up our customary juicy explosions…I thanked the woman at the desk as we left and told her I appreciated their policies…imagine the impact those 2 simple changes could have worldwide if implemented by all hotels and hospitals…yeeeeeee-HAH ;)

One love,
Angela. xxx