The things that brought me comfort this week:

A long message from my old friend Natalya about the absurdity of the war

A poem Arguments for Peace by Ukrainian-American poet Oksana Maksymcuk. It starts with:

“How could there be a war in this city with cobblestone streets, glowing stars in the windows, festive dogs in felt deer antlers?”

The way this poem perfectly overlaps Natalya’s photos of Christmas festivities and charity fairs on the fourth winter of war.

The gratitude upon realising that I am not the only survivor.

Every time someone sent a heart in reply to a message.

I decided I will only be sending hearts from now on. In times like these, there can’t be too many hearts.

An email from Naomi after we had coffee together “I’ve added that book to my library list.” My library waitlist kin.

A man sitting next to me in a crowded coffee shop, typing away some quotes from Hannah Arendt.

I don’t even have to know you to be comforted by you.

Today, for the first time in all the years, I didn’t go back to work on the very first day after Christmas break. I stayed home with kids, just the three of us, doing nothing worth remembering. It was wonderful. Little by little, I am trying to teach myself what is important and what only seems to be. My kids know it better than I do.

Like last year, I start January with a stack of books that I randomly picked in the local library. This year’s selection includes I who never knew men, Le mage de Kremlin, Hamnet and Margaret Atwood’s Book of Lives that I probably won’t read after all.

Also, I am feeling an insatiable desire to draw. For now, I am just copying the photos of different animals from my kids Anthology of nature, but who knows, maybe one day I’ll have an idea of my own. The watercolour pencils I bought on a whim (or intuition?) in December, bring me so much pure and inexplicable joy that I just secretly splurged on two more pencil sets of different brands. I have no artistic ambition besides giving my soul any kind of nourishment it asks for.

January 1 is the year’s equivalent of 5am in the morning. The same dazed stillness and the same feeling of expansive possibility that may or may not be an illusion.

I’ve filled the day with modest firsts. The first page of a new journal, the first walk. The first bird I spotted this year is brown creeper. I’ve decided to keep a journal and a tally of the birds I meet and I have no idea if any of these micro-resolutions will stick, but I find comfort in these small things.

I almost prefer November to October, because now we’ve done the active dying part and can be at peace with death.

A few remaining leaves will detach from their branches and fall quietly, some time in the dark that now takes a bigger part of the day.

After the heartbreak of October comes the slumber. It’s the giving up of something you can no longer hold on to. It is dispossession and liberation.

It is a good time to let go of the expectations, just before the countdown, before an arbitrary frontier between old and new year jerks us back to the wishing/hoping mode.

Rest well.

The neighbourhood is dressed in fog for the second day in a row. I love the fog, its elusiveness, the self-assured way it swallows the street and the forest behind it, the way it gives in as I approach, revealing just enough. What it reveals is that the trees, overnight, became more orange than green. If it were in broad sunlight, I would call it autumn, but through the fog’s thin grey veil all I see is the death of summer. How considerate, I say to myself, to mute the colours and smooth the edges, to slow the time, to accompany the grief and the transition. Long time ago, when I lived by the Mediterranean Sea, I once saw a fog so dense, it looked like stepping inside a white cloud. I remember slowly walking to a particular spot that I knew opened a view on the salt marches and the sea beyond them and saw nothing, only white. And I thought, this would be the nicest end of the world one could imagine. It was in 2012, so we were all thinking about the end of the world anyway.

Since then, every time there is a fog, I am thinking about the end of the world.

By chance, Louise asked this morning about shape of water we are. A loaded question. First, I wanted to answer ice. Cold and brittle, worried, uneasy. But after giving it some thought, I’ll say fog. Sad and hopeful, clinging to the skin of the warm-bodied creatures for comfort.

I took my kids to my favourite spot to watch the sunset yesterday. We arrived just in time and stayed as long as we could, surrendering to the ancient feeling of wonder. I didn’t have my phone with me to avoid the temptation of buying anything, even ice-cream. So, instead of taking the pictures of sunset, I watched the sunset in a pure state of un-consumption.

It was around 9pm local time, 4 am in Kyiv, on the middle of the five or eight hours of relentless air raid sirens and explosions. Was I supposed to know it then? Would it be better if I knew? Grief is a privilege of a survivor or someone who had left long ago, before everything happened, before they knew, and never found their way back.

I didn’t know what to do with my free afternoon, so I went for a walk hoping that the walk will end with a glass of iced latte . Now I am sitting at the edge of the Watermill Lake, staring at the shimmering brown water. At the things beneath the water: the stones covered with soft algae or moss and the fallen branches. I am thinking how these branches used to be creatures of air, used to be addicted to light, homes for the birds, highways for squirrels. Now, after their first death, the live underwater, surrounded by algae, small fish and tadpoles. Some trees reincarnate as soil. Some become water creatures. None disappear. When I started writing this, I had no idea it was about afterlife.

What a morning, hein?

A residential building collapsed

In Kyiv under the relentless attack

Of Iranian-made Shahed drones

Launched by russia, while

In Tehran residential areas burn

Under the israeli attacks, while

In Gaza people get shot reaching for bread, while

In America, the army attacks civilians, while

In Canada we still somehow believe that

We can buy our way out of this by building pipelines, while

We breath in the toxic air from the prairies wildfires.

We are all sitting in our grief,

Our very own separate grief,

If only,

As my favourite writer suggests, we’d joined our grief together

We would make an ocean

We would build an island, a continent, a whole new earth,

We would rebuild the world anew

If only…

I would not be able to describe the scent of a rose, but when I pass by my neighbours’ house, I know their white roses are in bloom before I see them. My body knows more than my head wants to admit or process. I am trying to listen. Why, at a time when I should feel content, when everything is going my way, do I feel so discouraged and withdrawn? Where does this overwhelming need to protect myself coming from? And what do I do with it? One thing is clear: I am looking for an open door somewhere, away from my work and away from my marriage. Where will I find it? And when I do, how will I recognize it and trust enough to go through?