Sometimes the best map will not guide you,
You can’t see what’s round the bend.
Sometimes the road leads though dark places,
Sometimes the darkness is your friend.
— Bruce Cockburn, Pacing The Cage
This is part of the boardwalk along the Nuu-Chah-Nulth trail in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve near Tofino. The trail winds in and out of shadowy and windswept Sitka spruce and shorepine. All along you are within earshot of the roaring white noise of the breakers rolling in off the North Pacific. Every time the trail ducks into the forest a cathedral of space opens up, and when it emerges again into bog, one feels enclosed by the surrounding forest and walls of salmonberries, salal and Nootka rose. To walk the trail as a meditation is to breath between these two paradoxes.
Sometimes the darkness has more openness than the light.
Days like this, feeling the wind and rain in waves off the Pacific slow me down to see what wants to come through. Things slowly revealed like the importance of the interior life to a world in which we can know everything about someone except what it is like to be them. And reflecting on the poverty of intimacy that brings to spaces in which we need to be with one another deeply – spaces I citizenship contribution and creativity. Spaces of friendship and alliance. Spaces of coming and going.
Location:Tofino,Canada
Ensconced in a cabin near Tofino for a couple of days with the family. It is a day of short cycles, waves coming and going, squalls of snow alternating with sunny spells, sleeping and walking, warm and cold.
All good rest
- Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
- Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
- Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
- Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
- Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
- Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
- Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
- Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
- Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student