Welcome to my inaugural blog.My name is Susan.I'm a 45 y.o. single woman,living (for now) in a lovely fifth floor apartment that overlooks the breathtaking Halifax Harbor. I was born and raised in this fair city;it's all I know of the world.I've traveled some in my lifetime, mostly to different parts of Canada and to a few US states.Mostly on vacations. I always seem to find my way home to Halifax,however.That old expression about "saltwater running in my veins" is a truism on my part entirely. I could never live very far from the ocean.To see it in all of its ever-changing beauty is essential to me; as essential as breathing,at least.
The reason I've decided to blog about my life and my life experiences is a simple one:I'd like to share my life's journey with others whom I'd never get a chance to meet.The Net does that for you:it opens up a window on people and places and events that you'd otherwise never get to see.
I debated calling myself NatureGirl or NatureLover online lately.Those names are no doubt taken by now,so I went with a version of my own name and a connection to the sea.It holds me fast.Many years ago, my father was at sixteen years old a Merchant Marine .I'm a lot like my father in many ways,some that I can't even begin to fathom or would care to admit.I think I should have, could have easily been a sailor in another lifetime.
Nature is an integral part of my life- the sea and the land.When you grow up in a beautiful place like this tiny gem of a province called Nova Scotia, nature is all around us.It's in the quiet rain-splattered maple trees that surround us to the mighty Atlantic Ocean that hugs our shores tightly.
I grew up on a quiet street, a backyard full of maple trees.The elementary school I attended with my sibs was just a few hundred yards away.In the winter we built snow forts while my father flooded the front yard to make a hockey rink for the boys and skating for just us girls.Summer nights were spent playing with our Barbie camper van in the same treed backyard,often with my cousins; we were that close back then in the 1970's.We knew it was time to head home for the night when the streetlights came on in the neighborhood.
If my childhood sounds idyllic to readers, then I've been remiss. I don't think the perfect idyllic childhood exists;it certainly didn't in my home. I was(am still) the second youngest daughter in a family of seven siblings of my now-deceased parents. My father, a wonderful but misunderstood man suffered with mental illness most of his adult life.Paranoid schizophrenia was the clinical diagnosis for his condition.My mother tried her best to manage raising all seven of us kids while my father battled his inner demons,regularly losing jobs as a Draughtsperson,often having to be hospitalized each year when school started in September.
I often tell myself I wouldn't be the person I am today if it were not for having such a difficult childhood."Emotional resilience"are words professionals bandy about when describing adults who were raised in catastrophic situations like mine and my siblings.
Its through nature I found solace as a child, even an adolescent.I always kept diaries, endless essays on my own inner life- fights I had with my kid sister,boys I liked but never dared to approach.Typical adolescent dreams, really. Last week I found a diary from the year I was thirteen and I read it in its entirety.I always enjoyed taking pictures as well, little white-bordered snapshots of moments caught in time.I write a lot but its always just fiction,endless thoughts on characters and events I've created in my mind that are ultimately just a diversion.I still take many photographs as well. I'm going to post some of my pics of the natural beauty that surrounds me every day.Of boats, and gravestones and trees that strike something in me.
There's a religious doctrine called "pantheism" that interests me a lot. It's the belief that God exists in everything in nature. In trees, and clouds and mountaintops,and in animals,which I believe wholeheartedly.I instinctively look for the beauty in all that is around me; whether its a flower in bloom or a crimson red fishing boat at rest in the harbor.It's in this beauty that I find hope.
I hope you'll visit my blog occasionally, leave a comment if you have time.It should be interesting...
