Summer Solstice in Banff

Dearest Adele,

I have just arrived at the Banff Centre for the Arts! I'm here for a whole month! 
I can hardly believe it. 
It's a residency about Social Innovation and the participants will be coming from a lot of different sectors, health care, environmentalism, government...
It's wonderful and scary to step out of the familiar arts education structures. 

I am thinking of you and carrying with me a tiny piece of your optimism and resilience in my heart. Come with me.

The air tastes different here. 

Perhaps its all those scrubby tipped coniferous trees are painting the air sweet and clean. Where are the gophers? I adore gophers. What about the elk, the deer, the grizzly bears? (Don't tell my mom there are grizzly bears here.) Will I meet some of these brave creatures? 

The sun tickles the mountain. It smiles back at me. 

I itch to climb. 

I wait alone.

All awkward angles like a kid on the first day of school. I will meet my class in just a few minutes. I stare in the bathroom mirror.  Will I fit in? Will I make friends? I hide my zit. I put sparkles under my weighted eyes. I didn't sleep last night. Not because I was nervous but because there was just so much to do - packing, cleaning, homework. But now I am nervous. I have not finished my homework. Have they judged me already for this as I have judged myself? I put on my favourite red shoes and pretend they go with a red cape so I can fly off superhero style to meet my destiny. 

We gather. 

Oh what a santa's village of wishes and hopes and dreams in this room. Oh the ambition so thick you could lick it from the air. But its the heart I feel most. The passion song here resonates my heart into acrobatics of harmonics. These are the change-makers, the visionaries, the courageous ones. And they picked me to be among their number. Tears tingle the corner of my eyes. 

I meet friends who will climb mountains with me. 

We light a fire and tell stories. 

The fire reminds us of our alchemy, our ability to transform.

The stories remind us to be humble, to honour our intuition, to listen to the messages of our grandmothers and the earth.

"Tell your partner a story of an early memory where you experienced awe and beauty."

When I was very small my father took me into forest almost every week. He taught me how to make a fire with pine gum and birch bark and how to rub cedar leaves between my fingers to breathe in their ancient perfume. I would beg to stay until the stars came out. I loved that quiet time of blue sky to indigo to black to silver. In the night the forest changed, became alive with spirit presence. This both frightened and delighted me as a girl. I then would beg for my dad to carry me along the forest path on our way home. Oh the safety of his arms. He wrote a song about these forest walks. He called it Oceans of Light. But what is an ocean of light? Is it the sky full of stars? Yes in part. But it is also love. The love that we swim through on magical nights like that.

We dance through smoke

 to clean ourselves to prepare ourselves for this journey. 

The knowledge keeper holds his drum high above the smudge and says, 

"You have four weeks to change the way the world thinks. You have four weeks to change the world.

 Are you ready?"

Ready or not here I come.