Flat Light

Snow Lady in Pond Inlet on the day the sun returned.

Yesterday I tried to write, I started writing. Then it occurred to me as I read through what I had written so far that I was deeply displeased with the results. It seemed self-absorbed, boring, dumb. So I stopped. What was spilling out seemed uninspired, flat. I still wanted to write something, but I was not 'feeling it' as they say.

This morning again I am bound and determined to write something, so here I am, starting fresh. However, I am still not in the zone yet. But the word 'flat' reminded me of an email I had sent when I was living and teaching in Pond Inlet in 2000/2001. I had this habit of sending out mass emails to a long list of friends that I loved and missed, little prose and poetry updates on life and it's various curiosities and miseries in the small high Arctic community. My missives were often short, but good I thought; simple, elegant, connected and connecting. It was a way of reaching out to people in my life, feeling connected from my extremely isolated little fly-in access only home. A somewhat self-conscious written form of extroversion within a deeply introverted existence. Here is what I wrote, the subject line of the email was "Flat Light":

"Boring" Teacher Fiooooona
 (as my students used to call me).

School was cancelled today at 10:30, and after an hour and a half of making origami frogs and racing them on the tiled floor at the bottom end of my classroom, the five kids that came to class this morning were whooping with joy to go home. Most of the town, including 8 out of 16 teachers are sick with flus of various sorts. Yeah, I was whooping too. A cloudy day when the sun has just returned is a little anticlimactic, but has it's own flavour. As I look out my bedroom window the world is still and perfectly white (bluish white), If there is a skidoo track cutting the snow, or a change in topography, or a horizon line breaking the world out there I can't see it. It is simply flat. i am afraid when I go outside I will trip and fall, for not having seen the bumps in the world.

This email was sent on February 7th, 2001, 5 days after the sun had returned. On the 73rd parallel in 2001, February 2nd marked the end of a 3 month absence of it. It was a powerful thing living in a world of starlight and twilight. A kind of cocooned suspended animation of a life. Nesting deeper into the covers, books, knitting, painting, glasses of wine and movies. Sometimes just sitting and staring into dimly lit space. Being stillness. In my class I had the kids working with crafts of various sorts, one of which was papier mache masks. I usually participated with my own interpretation of whatever I was asking them to make. The mask I made was a sun-face. When we worked with tissue paper making 'stained glass' I also made a sun and taped it to my living room window. That tissue paper sun travelled with me for years afterwards, taped up in the window of my car or whatever I was calling a home at the time. It held some important meaning, and symbolism to me, reminding me of that day when the sun returned.
The darker winter months had and sometimes have this sense of waiting for me.
Waiting for light to return, waiting to get out on the land again. To un-coccoon and stretch my legs and breathe more fully. Waiting for the sun, for shadows, for contrast.

In 2001, February 2nd was the day the sun returned. There were celebrations in the community, everyone was out, building igloos and carving snow-people, dressed up in seal and caribou, eating seal and caribou. And for a fleeting few minutes the sun rose low, a thin bright colourful line above the horizon.

On February 2nd 2013 my family and many friends and colleagues celebrated my dad's bright and brilliant life, the sun sneaking above the horizon line in memory after his slow decline into darkness.

On February 2nd, 2014 I am starting a ski trip to the snowy Kootenays. To stretch my legs and breathe more fully, to celebrate the comings and goings of light and dark. To see if I can see the thin bright line of the sun returning once more.