Living Morganism

I seem to find I have this faith in the words ‘I love you’ as if said at the right time or under the right conditions, in truth and with pure intention, that some key will turn and a door will unlock. Freedom will be itself set free from the restraints of misunderstanding, mistrust and heartbreak. Love will be set loose upon us to make us not into slaves but willing bearers of such a message, of the truth that I can only in this place have faith in, that love is all. And I love you, I say it to you in my heart and sometimes even it reaches my lips whether you are present to hear it or not. I love you and I wish for those conditions when it is the right moment to release my heart. I love you and no physical space or time that I adhere to out of some sense of self guidance can break that. I love you and though I cannot feel your body next to mine you are beside me nevertheless. I love you, and I have faith that my heart does not give itself up for anything less than the chance of love re...

The last road trip I took of any great length was in relocating back to Boulder, CO from Ontario after a summer of living in my tent following graduate school. I don't recommend moving into a tent after finishing grad school, it doesn't make you feel great about your choices. Unless you want to live in a tent. I drove out of Canada, picked up my friend Lionel in Kalamazoo, MI  -of all places to find him- and then we proceeded to cross the plains during a terrible drought that had rendered all the miles of cornfields dead and damned apocalyptic in appearance.  I've been in Boulder since trying to roll with the flow while the flow has been whipped into a frenzy by the wild gales of life and learning. It has been a year of transition.  It's been a year and change since that trip and the universe in all its conspiracies has propelled me onto the road once again. This time rather then a homecoming, it's a departure for Lionel, off into the wild blue southern Colorado y...

It rains, a rare enough occurrence in arid Colorado. This morning though, looking up out the back door, the sky above is blue with only a few small clouds and still it rains right through the sunshine. The rain is magical here. Sitting at the kitchen table with my french press full of coffee I am enjoying the sound of rain immensely as it quenches the garden, bounces off the now shimmering leaves of the intoxicating mock orange tree and pours here and there out of downspouts onto such surfaces as the brick patio, the questionably legal water barrel and our struggling lawn. Now my rather romantic rainy reverie is broken by the alarm I set for the loaf of rye bread I popped in the oven an hour ago. The rain is too ephemeral. It’s already done and small white butterflies flit about the mock orange to the tune of an occasional soft drip. The garden here is wild and in desperate need of weeding to the eye of a gardener, but I generally leave it to be as is, not fully sure how much owner...

Dear Facebook [originally published there, republished here for Sarah Osborne], we both know I am too verbose for this to ever work. I would apologize for my selfish ways but I will never curb this habit and so it would be terribly insincere of me to do so. I suppose I could publish this instead on one of my many blogs but I'm pretty sure only Sarah Osborne would see it there. I might post it there just for her anyway. A few days ago I purchased a less than shiny but nonetheless glowing in a new-to-me sort of way cherry red bicycle. I am in love with it. We've had such wonderful times together already in our still fresh and short affair. I was just riding it home from my favourite coffee shop in downtown Boulder which was beginning to wind down for the night anyway and I was beginning to develop a fierce and insistent hunger for the avocado I'd been meaning to eat these past few days. Perhaps in part due to the feeling of joy I experience riding this bicycle, perhaps i...

It has been some time since I published anything to this blog. It has become rather random and eclectic and something about that bothers me, probably it reminds me of how I too have become seemingly quite random and eclectic... but that is another story. The story I want to tell today is true, it is the true story of today. To set the stage, you will need a little bit of background. At this time in my life I am attempting (frustratingly slowly at the moment) to write my Master's thesis. My topic is landscape and pilgrimage. In September and October of 2011, I walked for 37 days covering a distance of nearly 900km from St. Jean Pied-de-Port, France to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The distance between these two places is more commonly referred to as the Camino de Santiago , a Medieval, Catholic pilgrimage. What I am doing with this is writing an autoethnography exploring how the landscapes of the pilgrimage impact the experiences of the pilgrim, in this case, myself. An au...

Reuters Station, Andromeda - The inhabitants of the planet LS7498 in the galaxy NGC3690 have filed a class action lawsuit against the Primary Landowners of the planet and the owners of a nearby asteroid, the Quantum Minerals Corporation in an effort to block plans for a Merger of the two bodies. The merger would allow mineral extraction to continue on Asteroid NLO476, a rich producer of Dilithium Crystals, at a fraction of the current cost by utilizing the resources available on LS7498. The Inhabitants are seeking an injunction of the merger application citing the case of "Human Kind Vs. Google Mirth" 1 as precedent. 1 "Human Kind Vs. Google Mirth" famously resulted in the near extinguishment of all Human life when Google Earth and Google Moon executed a plan to merge their two bodies into a single object. The merger had promised shorter commutes and was acting acting upon the advise of advertising executives to re-new their companies image.

Earth Orbit- The last Man and Woman of Planet Earth were convicted Tuesday on charges of 'Failure to Ensure the Survival of the Human Race". The conviction did not come as a surprise to followers of this unprecedented case. The last human pair has cited 'irreconcilable differences' throughout their defense, but in a dramatic turn their arguments had been thrown out when the testimony of expert witnesses revealed that humanity did not meet the qualifications for status as 'Beings of Average Intelligence'. From then on the pair were no longer allowed to speak in their own defense under Intergalactic Law IQ101D. In previous dealings with the human race, the Intergalactic Judges Panel had been known to frequently make use of irony in their sentencing, in this case execution was ruled out due to impracticality. The pair, now being affectionately referred to as "Atom" and "Evil" (See also 'Notable Achievements of Humanity') were reclas...

Wedding Take 2:

My dear friends Dave and Josephine embarked on a journey of their own on July 10 when they tied the knot! I was happpily able to attend the two ceremonies in Los Angeles and happier still and honoured as well to bake and decorate the wedding cake. There were actually two ceremonies, a smaller more intimate one in the morning for close friends and immediate family and a much larger one in the evening for all the family and friends. The cake here, the tiered one, was for the first ceremony. I made another one tier cake for a toppper to a massive tray of cupcakes also that I'll post separately. The cakes were a vegan base with tulsi and rose flowers in the batter and a lemon "buttercream" frosting. I also made little marzipan woodland creatures and put them in a forest made of willow twigs on the cake. SO FUN!

(Written July 1, 2009) It began with a parade not celebrating the independence of a country, but the independence of eccentric locals with musical instruments. Roughly 16 hours ago I awoke. I roused myself much too early on a Saturday with coffee (more to follow later) and a promise to be the first ever resident belly dancer in the Cheltenham Day festivities. The weather: a cool, sea-like, breeze and a cloudless sky. Roughly 16 years ago, I was growing up here in Cheltenham , Ontario . I used to walk with my cousins through the corn fields into town for Freezies. Town, here, being defined as a grouping of houses and a general store and differing from the country in the density of said houses and lack (although not entirely) of barns and tractors. I used to play t-ball here next to the fire house with my Kindergarten mates and swim in the Credit river. Today I am reestablishing myself here, 30 days in, to the country in this Country. I shall call myself a Canadian re-patri...

We had an exercise in one of my classes to think about ourselves as 7-9 year old's and try to express the experience of place we had at that age. The idea was to understand where we come from as designers and where our relationship to place came from. Studies, evidentially, say that largely it comes from this time in our development (7-9 years old). I have previously written, though without explicitly stating, about this exact time in my life. My fondest memories date from then (I now know I am not remotely singular in that) and indeed my enduring desire to relate to the landscape on ever deeper levels stems from this time and the place that most inspired it in me. I was living in an ant infested house (I loved it still) in Hockley Valley, Ontario at that point in my life and it's the only house I lived in for any amount of time (4-5 years) that I can remember (technically I lived in Caledon, Ontario in Robinson Hall for closer to 7 years but I was born there and I don't re...

It's just after Christmas, I've just finished the first semester of the Guelph Master's of Landscape Architecture program and I did very well for myself. I made A's in all my classes and though I normally don't find grades to be very good markers of standing or understanding, I am at least a little proud because this program nearly destroyed me. It kicked my ass like nothing else I have ever been asked to do. In hindsight I can't even really say definitively why, but that I don't believe I have ever been more stressed out more frequently and had so little "time" outside of a project, ever. They say hindsight is 20/20 but I must respectfully disagree completely, I rather find hindsight to be quite blind. I find that experiences which seemed like hell in the present, that you would never get through sanity intact, always pass and are remembered fondly. My foresight (which is also regrettably terrible lately, but I think may be right in this) is telli...

Chapter 1: The Journey Home It is a difficult endeavor to find a good Chai latte on the road. Over the 1600 mile or so space from Boulder, Colorado to Guelph, Ontario there seems to be a void covering most of the Interstate between Chicago and Buffalo where you cannot even find a Starbucks. And let me just say right off, that Starbucks doesn’t even qualify as decent chai, but it is often all you can come across in a pinch. Starting at the beginning; I have lived the last 12 some odd years of my life in a lovely little bubble called Boulder, Colorado. I am 25 now so I arrived in Boulder at a ripe age for impression. A complete book I could perhaps write on the many interesting ways Boulder has changed me, real or perceived, but this is not about all of that, this is about chai. At least the latter 10 years of these 12 I have become increasingly enamored of the elixir of happiness commonly known as the chai latte, soy latte in my case. The affair began in Boulder and has taken a number...

My last post here was some time ago and relating to Canada, my much romanticized homeland. Though I in fact resided in Boulder, Colorado between the ages of 12 and 25, Canada, oh Canada was always home... *soft sigh* Anyway, exciting news, I have now firmly declared Canada home and relocated there. Interestingly enough, a post on this very blog took on a life of its own and propelled me onto an entirely new life path. Ironic (?) that a love letter to Canada would begin a chain of events ending in my moving to Canada. In brief: the post largely concerning the particular landscape of my love spurred a thought in my uncle -John F. (Jack) Crowley III, ASLA, professor and former dean with the College of Environment and Design at the University of Georgia, and founder and president of Urbantech in Athens, Georgia - that I might find interest in the field of Landscape Architecture. I did in fact upon looking into this find great interest and applied to the Master of Landscape Architecture pro...

Since I'm already (recently anyway) on the subject of Canada, here's a poem I wrote a while back about my childhood there... Back there, I walked barefoot through broken down barns where moss grew in blankets across cracked cement floors. I was told to wear shoes should rusty nails sprout instead of muddy water between my toes, but all I ever got was dirty. I never cared much for shoes and my feet will never fit into slender glass slippers now, but any prince who hopes to win me will not care for such trivialities. You had to feel the earth under your feet to keep your head out of the clouds that your heart reached for. Back there, lucky horseshoes grew on toppled brick walls and cinder blocks held secret treasures to humble shipwrecks. Back there, the brightest colours I've ever seen were lights that danced in the sky on a cold night. I lay on the roof of a great hall and watched as my heaven turned to stained glass. Back there, all it took to be a hero was to battle demon...

So what if I'm not travelling?! It's all still a journey in the end and anyway this is my blog and I'll write what I want! On that note here are some thoughts... 10.19.2008 The radical organization is often ineffectual because they adhere to a simple principle; no compromise. I too am idealistic and wish anyway that they would sometimes quit being so stubborn and actually try to accomplish something by means of the dreaded compromise. However, I applaud their refusals. It is my view that the corporation (evil machine if you will) is as evil as they seem to become because all these people running the show, with no one person in charge, are constantly making small compromises. This behavior, over time, whittles away all integrity with no one person ever having to assume the responsability. Sad.

Sunsets normally give me the feeling of being in slow motion so it strikes me as odd to watch one flashing by through the window out one side of a speeding airplane. A pretty stunning one as sunsets go even, somehow oddly like a pastry. A warm glowing red center sandwiched by the darkened and muted shades of earth and blue-black silhouettes of thin, swiftly shifting clouds. Out the other side, the day old full moon is giving an entirely different feel to the cloudscape. Instead of an intense and defiant setting sun, we have a softly glowing countryside of cotton hills. So much more the subtle and yielding, is the moon, and yet as dependable and powerful as the sun. Tonight it is the silent companion to this otherwise unseen landscape of clouds. If I sound overly romantic and dreamy, I am. I am in love... I am in love with the countryside where I was born, from which I am sadly returning as I write. So much would I rather be going there. It may be that all it needs to be is hom...

Once I dreamed of the Sea in Springtime and the dream filled my soul with music and beauty, with impulse and desire and yearning for a different way. Though the Sea in Springtime was often unpredictable I loved it, too, for that. It could be rough and tempestuous at times, but it was all part of the spell. The depth and hue of the Spring Sea was so enchanting and captivating, none who dreamed the dream wanted to wake only to find themselves again on on hard, dry land. Those, like me, who dreamed this dream, found all they wanted to do from then was float in the Spring Sea again. She was always obliging, inviting. Anyone who dared enter Her domain were welcome to stay, to flow along as long as they could, or would. Welcome to shine brightly under the sun, glow under the moon, welcome to keep mystical secrets with Her, to speak Her language. The dreamers were welcome to surrounded by Her beauty if they were willing to taste also Her salt. I dreamed this dream, once, of the Sea in Springt...

...and that was it. after three months of cartwheels and landslides, three months of laying on our backs exhausted in all different sorts of dirt, three months of crushed flowers and foreign garbage, popcorn and coca leaves, eggs and tea - a hurried goodbye, girlish shouting in the airport, and a promise to see each other again in the cave, still decorated with all the samples of our affection for pachamama. morgan and i met in nicaragua, thousands of kilometeres north of where i am now, thousands of kilometers south of where she is. i remember being so confused, tired, and so happy to see her, throwing the pack which has since been lost to the ether on the ground and embracing her while i lit my triumphant cigarette of arrival. waterfalls, desserts, newfamilies, new words, jokes and joints, flashing the passport at everyborder and turnign that magic key to crawl into new lands, again and again. all those millions of hours like a bug with too many leggs spent turning into the weird bus...

This can happen to you!!! If you spend 4 straight days and nights on a bus. BEWARE THE BUS FEVER! Then I took a flight to Miami and thus concluded the adventures in South America with Aviv.