Puzzle

My mission this year is to integrate the rhythm and elements of our family canoe trip into our every day city lives. The quality time in nature, cooking meals on a fire, playing card games with the kids, lying in a hammock, reading a novel! Moving and using our bodies, carrying things over portages, paddling all day, resting on a beach, laughing, playing, washing dishes in the rain, setting up a tarp -- I love setting up tarps, and huddling under as a family, protected, with a fire burning, boiling water, preparing food, feeling the cool water and wind, not being comfortable all the time. The biggest change I noticed was the beautiful impact of having no phones, no screens -- locking my cell phone in the glove box of the car. Taking the screen out. It changes everything. 

So, back in the city, in my real life, I've been bringing elements over to the rhythm of our everyday life. Locking the cell phone away. I even bought a box and found a dead bolt with a timer on it, so I can lock it up, and not be able to get it for 2 hours -- a glove box in our house. We opened a 500 piece puzzle the other day. I hadn't done a puzzle in 20 years. The kids didn't know puzzles. And yet, we were all drawn to it like the pull of a warm fire hearth. I'd see River spending hours looking for the corner pieces. Sikhona and River coming together to separate out the side pieces from the centre pieces. Rowan and Mary-Kate wandering over to work on the cabin area. This beautiful space we have been lured into, a space of wonder and creativity, where time slows, a kind of meditation, and connection, laughter, and random yells of joy, when a piece is found. The kids invited us over to put the last piece in all together, a ritual to close out the experience. 

And onto the next calling -- 1000 pieces!