Milk in the Creek

We immigrated from the United States to Canada when I was four years old. It was the early 70’s.

Born in Oregon and raised in BC. Not your traditional upbringing, ending up on the Northern tip of Vancouver Island into a very unconventional lifestyle.

Like any child, I dreamed of what living differently would be like, fantasized of the bigger world outside of my own.

Assuming everything was bigger and better out there.. little did I know at that time how true that really was.

My world was small, isolated, rural and limited. I was oblivious to it all as a child. Not feeling its effect until I was older. My teen age years and into adult hood.

In that moment, my little world as a child would be all that is wonder..playing in the forest, floating on the ocean, watching the wild.

It was the forest that gave me a back yard, it was the shoreline that gave me endless treasures to fill my pockets, it was the creek that kept our milk cold.

The skill and responsibility of pioneering , a choice my father made to raise his daughter away from all that was…well, what the rest of the world was.

If you only knew.

Resentment takes shape in the shape of what is me.

Fuck the shell that keeps me safe.

It is here I learn to isolate, it is here I’m becoming socially disabled and alone.

The fault falls on not being shown my wings and how to use them.

Only knowing the limited reach of small efforts, the very basic of efforts to make ends meet , a basic education , followed by a basic life.

There was only one person capable of nurturing this in me, but then again..maybe not.

I know this now. That as a child and especially as a adolescent.. with the lack of exposure, the options, the awareness ..

If I wasn’t given this as a child, how I could teach it to my own.

So there lies the pattern.

No tools, no difference.

No different then small town, small goals, small rewards and even smaller self expectations.

I have to be small to be safe.

If I had been shown there is more and the endless possibilities of my creativity as a child,

I could have been someone more.

I know deep in my heart that if those fears hadn’t developed, I would have ended up maybe in New York or California, a school of the arts.

Film, music and art.

It fills my heart everyday in one form or an other. I absolutely know I would have thrived in any Visual Creative Industry.

What a fucking waste.

I am completely responsible for my own life and choices.

I also put ownership on the adults that selfishly but unknowingly limited me growing up.

“you can be anything you want to be”, they’d say.

Jeez, thanks for the talk. Bullshit !

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