Wonderings and Wanderings...: December 2007

When I began this letter a month ago today, my intention was to mail it to all of you along with some Christmas cards, though I kept getting lost in other thoughts and did not finish it in time. It is still not really done, but I think it may never be, and I've decided to post it here for you all now. Especially today, Christmas Day, I need to feel that I still have some connection with all of you over there on the other side of the Atlantic, and in sending this wondering thoughts out into the world I feel just a little bit more like I am not an island in this vast sea.

November 25, 2007

Greetings dear friends and family!
As I begin this letter, I am staring out through a slightly foggy window at a stand of pine trees heavy with November snow. The forest floor in which they find root is a clean white blanket sprinkled only with pine needles, the soft footprints of birds, and the occasional heavier trail of a person who has ventured to spend time with these trees. Between here and the forest grow a variety of now leafless trees with which I am unfamiliar, though have come to be my favourite for the eternally-ripe red berries that decorate their bows like ornaments on a Christmas tree, regardless of the layer of snow and ice that now cover each cluster. While the sky is overcast now, last night it was lit brightly by the full moon. As we moved from the retreat centre to the shashlik (shishkabob) fire to the banya and back again, the Big Dipper--or Medvyeditsa (she-bear) as its called in Russian--seemed to travel almost half the sky. Though the nights are long and the winter consetellations travel, I am comforted in knowing that I am looking at the same big sky lit by the same full moon as all of you, even if from a different angle.

One of my modest goals for this year was to use my free time to write, though now approaching December I feel as if I have failed miserably in this task. I have written to some of you periodically, to others of you even less, and for myself even less still. I hope to partially remedy this silence with this letter. I remember my parents receiving Christmas Newsletters from various friends in various countries, MCC alumni and relatives, always complete with a family photograph. The letters were usually addressed to "Peter and Cath" and sometimes "and children" or "Christina, Jodie and Steven" in smaller letters and I always found the tradition of receiving a yearly update on the lives of people I'd never met, or knew only in passing, a bit odd. Now sitting here in a forest in the Urals, however, I'm starting to understand this practice, this desire for contact with the familiar, the impulse to share, to let far away friends into my foreign life. And so I write to you, both for you and for me, to fulfill this need to narrate the experiences of this far-away and close-at-hand life, to remain connected to a social sphere now half a world away, and to let you all in, to give you a picture, to perhaps insight you reflection or day-dreams or itchy feet or wonder and gratitude for the by-chance incidents and intentional experiences, the conversations and landscapes and wandering ideas that make up this life. How does one begin to describe the experiences of four months of transitions and new things, the frustrations and revelations that come with this, and the every day particularities of life in between? I'm not really sure, though I am still driven to try, in stories, pictures, anecdotes--with words.

And so I will begin at the beginning. August 13, 2007, Mark and I boarded a plane in the Hamilton Airpot bound for the Doncaster/Sheffield airport in England. After a bizarre encounter with an immigration official, we headed to Manchester, where we spent a few days wandering the city and checking out the university where I have since applied to do a Master's program. From here we headed to Oxford, then on to London. From London we flew to Hamburg, then took a train to Bremen where we spent some time with Kosntantin, the German exchange student who lived with my parents this year. From Bremen we went to Kiel to visit an old high school friend, then took a bus to Strasbourg and a train to Mulhouse where we were met by an old friend of my families and taken to his wonderful farm near the border of Alsace, Franche-Compte and Switzerland. We returned to Bremen, then flew out of Hamburg to Moscow, then caught a train to Yekaterinburg. A whirl-wind tour of Europe, to say the least, and thinking back on it now I am surprised by the peculiar memories and images that have remained in my mind. Memories like falling alseep to the music coming from the jazz club across the street from our Manchester hostel, or watching rowers glide down the river while we enjoyed a dinner of peanuts and avacado from the shore. Or happening upon an international youth orchestra performance in Christchurch Cathedral in Oxford, and enjoying a locally-brewed beer in one of the college pubs with our physicist Philipino doctoral student host. Or being excited by the selling of fresh hazelnuts from the Turkish store under the apartment where we stayed in Dalston (London) with a fellow Canadian friend-of-a-friend. Or taking a rest on the banks of the Thames after wandering the Tate Modern for hours, watching a Muslim man quietly perform his prayers to the backdrop of St. Paul's Cathedral. Or the Kurdish man who we befriended on the airport shuttle in Hamburg, who bought our train ticket to Bremen. Or watching the kites and the wind-surfers against a blue sky on a sandy Baltic beach just north of the Kiel canal. Or the relief of jumping in the water of an over-crowded public French swimming pool, just across the street from the EU Parliament. Or breakfasts of fresh milk and honey with Cephas' uncle Henri in the 150+ year-old farm kitchen. Or wandering a Swiss mountain immune to the turrential rain and cold for the adventure and the company of the moment. Or cooking way too much curry for the street festival outside Konsti's house. Or sharing a coffee in the Hamburg airport before beginning the last let of our journey. Or the feeling of utter frustration and exhaustion born of not being able to find an ATM in Moscow and the complete unhelpfulness of the train ticket sales person. Or the copious amounts of food--bread, cheese, meat, eggs, vegetables from his grandma's garden--shared by our kupe-mate on the train from Moscow. Or the surprise at finding Defri at the train station, sent in Jenny's place after an early morning mugging. Or the ineffably strange feeling of returning to a place that was once home though is still completely foreign...

December 2, 2007

It’s three months to the day since we arrived in this country, and I find myself once again on a train headed east towards Yekaterinburg. We are returning from a weekend in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, with Guzial, a Tatarian friend who sings in the same choral ensemble as I. We’ve just spent two days wandering the clean winter streets of a city where the likes of Lenin and Tolstoy studied, located at the crossroads of the Volga and Kazanka rivers, a city which is also the meeting place of languages and cultures (Russian and Tatarian) at the heart of which is a UNESCO protected kremlin that houses both an Orthodox Cathedral and one of the most stunning recently reconstructed mosques I’ve ever seen. And now, once again, we are east-ward bound, heading home to the Urals, past the same forests, fields and track-side villages as when this adventure began. The scenery has changed—the fileds are not blank white canvases that beckon newness and creativity as this clean page waiting to be villed with words. The trees are heavy under winter’s dress, the conifers fully outfitted while the birch and poplar among them hold snow like floured baking hands, their bare branches upturned fingers asking—or praising—something from above. And it is now, in transition once again, neither here nor there, that I am able to put my thoughts to paper, to document the ups and downs, wonderings and wanderings of the last three months.

And it’s been three months of just that—ups and downs, in every possible sense of these words, and in all areas of life. I will begin with the most obvious "up." I have also found the process of learning a language somewhat akin to that of climbing a seemingly never-ending spiral staircase with very wide platforms between steps. There are long periods of time where it feels as if you are making no progress, as you slowly progress across one plateau, and then steep intervals of upward movement, where upon arriving at a higher level you have the brief privilege of seeing the distance you’ve traveled. This moment is, however, fleeting, as you once again begin to make your way across the next plateau and the only thing visible to you is the long distance yet to be traveled. There are days—many of them—where I feel completely inadequate at expressing myself, lost in a language that I feel I will never understand, frustrated by my lack of ability to speak and understand clearly, inhibited from fully experiencing this country because of my linguistic deficiencies. Yet then there are also days, conversations, moments, when I will be pleasantly aware, satisfactorily conscious of the progress I’ve made—moments like, for example, laughing at the subtle dry humour of our choir director because I actually understand and not just because everyone else is laughing, or understanding the nurse as he instructed me to roll over, inhale and exhale, and puff up my stomach as he did an ultrasound to determine the source of my stomach woes (mayonnaise and cabbage is my own diagnosis…), or suddenly realizing that I now have a passive understanding of the conversations going on around me on a crowded trolleybus making its way through traffic, or here on the train now, or no longer being conscious of switching between languages as I spent time with Mark, Guzial and her cousins this weekend as my thought processes have become integrated, or being able to sit and write a small essay in class on the moral character of Pechorin, Lermantov’s "Hero of our Time." And while there remain days where I do not even have the energy to open my mouth, this language learning continues to be a humbling process, a process that has led me to a fuller appreciation of the potentials of literacy and communication skills, a learning endeavour that daily reminds me of my limitations, a process that continues to deepen my respect for all those people who live daily in foreign languages—either by choice or external circumstance. And, above all, this is a process that continues to deepen my love of language, an infatuation with words, for understanding their relationship to each other, to their environmental surroundings, to their historical and contemporary significance, for the entry they provide into understanding how a people think and live, ….

December 14, 2007

A few more weeks and no more words have passed since I last tried to write this letter, and I've resigned myself to accepting that it will not reach you before the New Year. I'm sitting in the library at school, after a mid-day walk along the misty Iset River that cuts through the downtown. It's been awhile since I've taken the detour to walk along the river, and I was pleasantly surprised by how fresh, clean and new the city looks under a layer of snow. I stopped for a moment to take a full breath of -15 degree winter air and to appreciate the cold beauty and stillness of this small oasis in the middle of a busy city, and was then once again overcome with the urge to write. It seems that the only time I am filled with this impulse is surrounded by the blankness of snow, a newness that calls forth creativity. The result of this is that, as you may have noticed a trend, you are getting a lot of descriptions of snowy landscapes, but little of substance in between. I am currently reading Orhan Pamuk's "My Name is Red," and I just read a passage written in the voice of the colour red, who described the phenomenon of being used by artists in all varieties of purpose, and for the remainder of the day all I could see around me was red. Today, as I think about the creative evocation of snow, it is white--the white of the slightly drawn curtains, the light socket, the inner pages of books lying on their spines on the shelves, the industrial ceiling, or papered signs on the wall. I wonder briefly how long I will be able to keep your attention with these descriptions, though I trust if you've made it this far, you will continuing reading on, and perhaps be able to find some meaning inbetween these lines, in the honesty of my wandering thoughts, in the snow-white of the paper on which they are written.

My plan was to continue on with the stair metaphor as a means of describing this city and my life in it to you. I was going to write that if learning a language is like climbing stairs, then coming to know a city, a country, a people, is like slowly descending a parallel staircase, each step down one step closer to the heart of things, to the cold and comfort and dirty that comes with descending into the earth. I was going to write about the obshezhitiye and the university as the top of the staircase, about my life living with an American, a Korean, a Swede, a Brazilian, and Indonesian, and studying with a host of disillusioned Chinese students. I was going to make poignant comments about how this was perhaps a strange entry into Russia, a slightly foggy window through which to watch this world, and I was probably going to mention how studying in this hopelessly unorganized university has made me fully appreciate the value of my Canadian education. I was then going to say that the next step down included my attempts to break into the not-for-profit world of this city--a trip to an orphanage with a group of Russian students, evenings spent in the bunker-like Yekaterinburg headquarters of "Memorial" flipping through their endless collection of records of victims of Stalinist repression and talking about what significance remembering these victims has for today. And then maybe I would have mentioned my recent entry into the working world, the English-class I'm teaching twice a week or how I'm becoming an expert in Russia's steal industry grace a a job tutoring the head managers of a steal company. I would have maybe peppered this brilliantly written description with word-paintings of the city, mentioning the way the sun that never makes it more than 30 degrees above the horizon glints off of windows of newly constructed sky-scrapers, or the ice-village they are building next to Lenin in 1905 Square, or the little ice-fishing tents that now dot the city pond, the shadows cast by the steeple of the city duma in the red-orange sunset sky every day (at 4:30pm!), or perhaps the the way the hazel of the eyes of the babushka, who sits diligently every day with a cup in her hand on the graffitied wall of the bookstore beside the university, matches her wool boots.

December 14-25, 2007

This is what I was going to write about, and I was going to leave you with a wonderful view of a foreign city that I am making my home. As I sit now in my bedroom, wrapped in three layers of clothes--or, as Guzial likes to say, "dressed like a kapusta" (cabbage)--pondering how I've survived the oppressive wallpaper and cold for this long, I am again lost for a place to begin. The truth of the matter is that I have spent the last week taking a hard look at why it is that I came here in the first place, what it is that I am doing here now, and whether or not I actually want to stay. I would like to say that this room has become my home, yet I cannot. I would like to say that I belong in this city, but I feel as foreign as ever, perhaps even more so the longer I stay here and become more familiarized with the subtle differences of this place, the endlessly frustrating bureaucracy, not to mention the cold (current temperature: -27). But, what can I do but try and make the best of where I am? Am I not the one who brought myself here in the first place? I am living the consequences of my own decisions. Perhaps that is enough, to know that I am writing my life. Yet, like many a Russian literary hero, perhaps my belief that I am in control, that I am the master of my own fate, is both my greatest strength and weakness. And what I need is not resignation to less than ideal situations, but acceptance and welcome of the learning that comes through such challenges. And this I believe has always been there, somewhere in the back of my mind, somewhere in initial impulse to come to this big cold country. What begins with wonder, though this wonder may at times be blackened out, shall, I hope, return to wonder, return to a sense of awe for the beauty in the strangeness that surrounds me. And wonder, awe and gratitute may perhaps mingle once again and I will find joy in both happiness and trial... or, as Rumi says...

THE GUEST HOUSE
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.