Ontario born and bred

I’m on the road again, this time back to Ontario where I will be working with Jennifer Williams, Cédric Jamet and Troy Maracle in a reboot of our “Reimagining Education” Art of Hosting on the shores of Lake Opinicon in eastern Ontario. Whenever I work out east I build in time to visit family for a few days. I arrived in Toronto on Monday, and stayed with my brother, visited with one of our TSS Rovers women’s players, Maddy Mah, who plays in the fall season for the University of Toronto, and then caught a train to Belleville. Last night I stayed with Troy and Shoo Shoo at their home on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory on the shores of Lake Ontario. We head up to the site later today for some last minute design and set up.

There is no time like the fall to connect my soul with this place. I was born and raised in Ontario – and three years in the UK – and this time of year was always my favourite. If you’ve never been in the hardwood forests of the Great Lakes Basin in autumns, you can scarcely believe the transformation that happens as the sunlight grows weaker and the temperatures ease their way towards winter. The maple forests turn bright red and it is one of the true wonders of the natural world to see a brilliant red forest against a calm lake and a blue sky. There is a reason that the Canadian flag features a red maple leaf I think.

Fall is my favourite Ontario season and it is a very different experience than the west coast where I have lived for the past 30 years. Out there, atmospheric rivers and fierce wind storms are the typical pattern of autumn. The storms hit our coast in a chain of wet and wild weather usually from mid October through to the middle of December, when things grow a little calmer. After the calendar turns, and perhaps a bit of sea level snow falls, the rain continues, but gentler and less energetically powered by the residual heat of the summer sea.

Here in Ontario, this is the time of year the forests turn and November brings heavy and cold rains that wash the leaves off the trees providing the forest floor with a rich mulch to protect it against the killing frosts that are on their way. Already the ground grows a bit frosty at night and there might be a skin of ice on the Lake this week if the wind is calm. November in southern Ontario is a dismal mix of cold rain, wind, decaying leaves and increasing darkness. If you love inclement weather, as I do, it’s glorious. If not, it’s a depressing interregnum between the early fall and the snowy winter.

So this morning I find myself in a deeply familiar land and sound-scape, hosted by my old friends at their home in their territory. Orange trees, blue skies, silver sunlight glinting off Lake Ontario, the calls of Blue Jays and Chickadees in the shrubs. In as much as I have lived more than half my life on the islands and coastal edges of the Salish Sea, these sounds, and smells and sight awaken a deep sense of home in me, what the Welsh might call “cynefin,” a habitat of living, one of the places of belonging that has a claim on my soul.