Day 55

I am writing again from Tofino; this is day two, and tomorrow I'll be home again. Like most students at UVic, I've done nearly none of the "getting ahead" homework I intended to do over this reading break. But that is okay. After all, it is called a break. 

But then, it is also for reading. Perhaps UVic has accidentally given this week a paradoxical title. 

At any rate, school goes back into session monday morning. It is the final stretch for graduating students such as myself. I am honestly a little bit worried; this is by far the most work I've ever signed up for in a single semester, and while I am certain none of it is beyond my abilities either in quantity or quality, I am not certain that it isn't beyond my particular proclivity to procrastinate. It is one of these circumstances in which I am finally forced to follow the same advice I give to everybody else: just get it done, and get it done right! 

The rain is pouring down. Yesterday we had glimpses of sunlight, but the rain started around bedtime last night and has not stopped since. I hiked two short trails in the rain today, one through a rainforest area and another through a bog. The bog is a fascinating place; the trees are all short, knotty, stunted. The acidic marshy soil lacks proper nutrients, so trees half a millennium old are scarcely taller than you or I. 

I suppose the traditional symbolic power of rain is as a cleanser. Rain pours down and rid the world and the soul of their dirty coats, of layers and lies, to uncover either the truth about the self, or a self renewed. Rain is also a life-bringer. Greenery follows rain; creatures come out into the open, and through the clouds breaks the mighty sun. 

But not today. The rain has stopped, but the clouds are still hanging. The clouds give me the sense that the world is existing, for a short while, in the "mean time"; that is, rain is movement, and the sun creates movement within the worlds living habitants and in the shadows themselves. But the grey sky does neither. It is a time of waiting. Perhaps this is why on a grey day we like to relax, read, stay in, and otherwise remove ourselves from moving about all that much. In spite of ourselves, we seem to behave very much like some of our animal counterparts. 

Tomorrow I am hoping to post some photos from this weekend's little vacation. 


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