Summer 2014 / What can we glean from this summer?

One more day of holiday, as it is the long weekend, and the full fall schedule is going to come down like a hammer.  The weather is paralleling the mood, by featuring grey skies and cool breezes--time to gather up our resources and fling ourselves into a new life of darker evenings and mornings, and fires, different kind of work, and so on.

There are many things that happened this summer I did not write about, but my favorite events are always meeting one on one with a person and having time to converse in depth.  I have met with several new salespeople, this year, someone who sold and installed security systems, our new property insurance people, an Israeli who sold skin care lotion from the Dead Sea, at the mall.  Some have flattered me, no doubt to help with the sales process, and some were genuinely interested, in that salespeople are often extroverts who really do enjoy other people.  On the other hand, I have hosted other women in my garden for tea and talked about life.  These are satisfying encounters.

Living in this part of the world, you are always dealing with individuals from diverse backgrounds.  There are recent immigrants, there are immigrants from various decades representing various waves.  There are people from Eastern Europe, from Japan, from the Philippines, from India, from Saudi Arabia, and there are also the pioneers, the Quebecois, and the indigenous people. It is really quite a melting pot and Canadians as a whole are very much a tolerant people, sometimes one might think to a fault.  It is a wonderful place to live.  If you don't have a chance to go away and travel, you can always meet a new person in the vicinity.  XO

"Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person;  having neither to weigh thoughts nor to measure words but to pour them all out, just as it is, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keeping what is worth keeping, and then, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away."  George Eliot. 

What a beautiful saying.  I didn't know that George Eliot was a women.  It makes some sense.