It’s summer sketchbook roundup time!

1. The view is just around the corner

July 21 marked eight years since my aunt Viv passed so I set out to my favourite lookout down the road. It was just before sunset, which up here at this time was around a quarter to eleven. I wanted to light her a candle but the wind had other ideas. I drew the landscape that evening: a cliffside, grassy spot with wild sage beds overlooking the Takhini river. I couldn’t believe when I stumbled upon this place one February day while I was out walking and chatting on the phone. Like finding a room in your house you didn’t know about. While I was longing for months for a sunset spot to write and draw, this was down the road all along?

The view was just around the corner, as it often is. Sometimes you just need to get out and go look for it!

I am selling this as a limited edition print on my shop website in two sizes. You can purchase here. (Reminder, if you sign up as a paid Snail Tales subscriber you get a print snail mailed to your door once a year!)

2. At the beginning of August I set out on a 10 day canoe trip with 11 women (shout out to my brave mama who joined us).

A mini postcard for each human on the trip. I’ve never spent so many days on a river and on a canoe. By the third day I was up with the sunrise, my circadian rhythm activated. By the fourth day any moment I was lying still on land I felt like a swaying boat. When we’d get back on the water it felt like it was a new version of going home after being away. The land and the tents were just temporary camp; I liked the feeling that the river was the place to return to.

3. Colours of time

Life becomes colourful when we meet it with an undivided, unrestricted heart. The vibrancy of colours surrounding the past, present and future is always there. And It is our ability to see those colours that ripens. It’s not about positive or negative emotions - some of the most vivid moments in our lives are grief, heartbreak, awe, fear. The vivid saturation is presence, not necessarily happiness. I drew this because the colours of time for me this summer have felt increasingly altered.

Fun fact: giant camels originally evolved in the Yukon millions of years ago before migrating to Asia and South America! In the colder months when the elk are crossing the white winter open space they look like camels crossing the desert.

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4. Freelance illustrations

I’ve been working on a project with a youth-focused organization in the Yukon this past month - Many fun spreads have been coming out in the process. We will be launching their new website next month.

5. Interspecies communication

In constant conversation with every living thing around us

Whether we’re aware of it or not

6. Not from the sketchbook, but a little embroidery piece on wool for a friend.

That’s it for the summer roundup - I hope you are out there this month and beyond, trusting in the beauty of your dreams ˙⋆✮⋆˚࿔

This time my sketchbook starts in the air, wanders through family history and reconnection, chance encounters, and leads me to the feeling of seeing some parts of life and ecology differently. There are recordings of invasive plants spreading and of connecting to my dutch roots.

So here we go…

1. Travel sketches

In the spring I took a trip to the Netherlands where I connected with dutch family. I had the kind of flight experience crossing the ocean and continents where life thoughts and perspectives flood in while your nose is smushed against the window, seeing life from a bird. There was an unbelievable part in the middle of the night when we were flying over the arctic - Greenland - the moon and stars were so bright they illuminated the ice sheets below. I couldn’t believe it and I couldn’t sleep much, I felt too alive and awake and I wanted to not miss the beauty out the window. I stared at the moon for probably two hours. It’s such a unique experience to observe the earth and the universe from a plane, to think about what our species has invented and destroyed, where our civilization has gone and continues to go, how many galaxies are out there, beyond our own milky way. Trillions, apparently?! How can we even begin to fathom and wrap our minds around it?

I land in Amsterdam and my mom’s cousin Jolanda picks me up from the Centraal train station canal. Her and her friend Pia arrive in their little electric boat. Jolanda points at me on the dock with my luggage around me and with a big laugh says, “THAT’S HER! THAT’S OUR AVERY!” She tells me she started to cry when she saw me, this woman I met only one time a decade ago. Towards the end of the trip I find the right time to tell her about the dream I had of her two Februaries ago, driving a boat towards me on a canal, beaming as bright as the sun hitting the water around her.

We talk about how strangely familiar we feel to each other. She shares so much of her life and love with me and I learn all sorts of things. She lives alone and has built a village around her, a collection of neighbours and friends. I tell her she is a soul auntie and I feel at home with her. We eat Turkish pastries in her little flat on the canal that first day with Pia and she talks about the laws of attraction, about putting out there what you’d like and letting things come to us. That when we let go and breathe, it suddenly comes. On this trip I think a lot about how I can’t possibly know how life will unfold itself and that is a gorgeous thing. I am playing my part in guiding it as best I can and letting it go where it wants to go.

My other Dutch cousins take me to the village where my grandpa grew up and they show me his childhood home and the monastery where he studied to be a priest. The house has a charming thatched roof and time feels non-linear and branched like a big tree while I am there that day. Like if I stay long enough I could see my grandfather as a child come out of this house to play in the grass with his brothers, and his mother, my great-grandmother, making her cut glass clay pots nearby. It was like stepping into an older branch of time, before his life diverged out into a journey to Canada, changing the entire trajectory of my family’s lives and the lives that followed.

I think about how we are a species that sometimes need to go back and forth between worlds and cultures and people to understand home and our lives more clearly.

I also just have to throw in here… while in Amsterdam I had my first ever meet up with a Snail Tales subscriber! It was really quite surreal. Thaïs is a Brazilian architect / illustrator and the day I booked my flights I got a notification that she subscribed, and I somehow saw that she was based in Amsterdam. She took me around one day and we bonded over illustration, culture challenges, spirituality and having people not take us seriously because we are 33 year old women with baby faces and small statures. She was so open and ready to pour out all kinds of info about her life and dreams.

2. Invasive plants

There was a pretty big theme this month that took over the rest of my sketchbook pages: invasive plants! So many invasive plants. It was mostly because I was working all month on all kinds of illustrated merch for Yukon Invasive Species Council.

I like diving into the worlds of different organizations and learning interesting stuff as I work with them. Invasive plants were a particularly interesting subject matter for reasons I didn’t foresee! I’d not thought too deeply about them before. I kept having these feelings and questions about their place in the ecosystems. I felt their beauty while drawing them and while adding little faces to try to make them look evil, I wondered, are they evil though?

I posted the following sketchbook scan on Substack notes and it led me to some interesting conversations and places, and reminded me why I love this app and how cool the Internet can be. My favourite conversation was with Sydney Kale - a Ph.D. student focusing on plant intelligence and phenomenology. She first commented on my note saying invasive plants are some of her favourite plants. She wrote, “In the words of Richard Mabey in Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants, they’re holding some of the most bruised parts of our planet together. I think where humans see nonnatives outcompeting natives, the ecological reality for many of these landscapes is that invasive plants are cultivating ecosystems that have become or are becoming increasingly inhospitable and unsuitable for native plants. I have an article that will be published in July about restoring the invasive plant narrative so we can make better decisions about how we want to address the ecological and cultural problems their presence makes legible!”

That comment from Sydney led us to chat privately and she taught me about newer sides to the invasive plants conversations out there - that it’s worth learning how we can work with them rather than against them, which in Sydney’s words, requires acknowledging that the ecological reality of invasive plants and the landscapes they inhabit may not be the reality we perceive!

Sydney is mailing me her book The Love Language of Plants and I am mailing her an art print from my shop. I keep thinking… THIS is what the internet is for.

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3. More invasive plants

4. More invasive plants (not including the ravens) ….

Once I had enough material in my sketchbook, I scanned the pages and put together designs for tshirts, tote bags, water bottles, buttons and magnets for Yukon Species Invasive Council!

This design was supposed to look almost like a band or movie poster, but then when you look close it looks more like a sketchbook spread of drawings and notes. Invasive plants are true Overachievers ~ the shirt is “a field guide to plants that are too good at their jobs”.

I also made a WANTED: Dead or Alive design for a tote bag. Reward: Healthy Ecosystems.

Last but not least, buttons and magnets.

To end off this monthly roundup, here are some snaps from the nature drawing walk I hosted a few weeks ago at the Yukon Wildlife Preserve. It is a special thing to get to bring together wildlife and drawing and people, all things that I love.

In the words of Jolanda,

Put out what you’d like

Let things come to you

Let go and breath… it will come

☺

Welcome to my tiny desk, in my small cabin, in a large forest. The Boreal Forest, to be exact! Also known as Taiga. The world’s largest land biome, so they say. I live in the subarctic part, in Whitehorse, Yukon, on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nations and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council. I’ve learned that many international people believe the Yukon is part of Alaska? Preposterous! It’s a northern territory in Canada, just east of Alaska. I had to set that straight before we get into what we are really here to talk about, the important matter at hand: desks.

My kitchen table is my desk while I live in this cabin. There is absolutely no room for a desk. Estee Zales made me laugh during her tiny desk issue when she wrote: “Other people can work from their kitchen table, clearing it each night and resetting it each morning. My friend does this. She seems perfectly content. I would rather quit than do what she does.” Then I almost choked on my tea when I saw Carolyn Yoo has THREE desks in her little studio room. Come on! Incredible. I told myself losing a desk was worth it to live a romantic cabin life in the forest (it was). But sometimes I really miss having a desk.

Acrylic paints, soy sauce, glue bottle, cut up wool fabric, sesame oil, twigs, oatmilk carton fish cut outs, carrot salad. My kitchen table art desk. I snapped this pic in the summer in the middle of a self-proclaimed art retreat at my cabin with one of my close friends. I kept trying to clean it up and she said oh just LEAVE IT. So this is what the table looked like all week. Allison reminds me often that sometimes in life, the mess is part of the masterpiece. And sometimes you just live in the creative chaos.

When the kitchen table isn’t being used for food or making things, sometimes it’s used to pack up shop orders.

It took me months to finally put this tour together after Allie approached me with the idea. I was juggling a lot, but I think mostly I was avoiding it because I’m not a fan of my tiny desk at the moment. But I realized that doesn’t matter, this series is to get a peak into our real work stations and real lives as artists. This is the reality of my studio and desk life right now, and it works.

It’s nice to have a wall of art nearby. Most of the stuff hanging is my own art, which is helpful to glance over at when I’m thinking about colour palettes etc.

I’ve always done my best work at night... It’s probably why I like the dark in the winter. I’m an unfortunate artist cliché. Or maybe fortunate in a place where the sun doesn’t rise until 11am in mid winter. It feels like time doesn’t matter when everything is sleeping in a frozen world. I can go on airplane mode, the outside doesn’t need me. Why would it? It’s frozen and asleep. No external distractions, no obligations, voices, expectations. (Btw, this is only the winter environment, in mid summer it’s the opposite with almost 24 hour daylight).

Some nights I’m Hilma af Klint in the 1800s with the candle burning low, pouring tea after tea. Thoughts wandering, I wake up the next morning feeling like I’ve travelled and come back from another century, and I like that feeling.

Other times I use my “desk” for freelance projects. That kind of work is usually done during the day, sometimes at this table or at the library, often at a coffee shop or the local co-work. People ask me what kind of work I do and it takes me a while to explain. Last month my income came from: web design and illustration for local organizations, video animation for a software company, tours at the local wildlife preserve, teaching English to ESL adult learners, prints in local gift shops and my online shop, and Substack subscribers. This part of my life is as anarchic (or fluid?!) as my kitchen desk.

Now that it’s warm and bright again, I’ve got a third desk: my picnic table in the backyard (or more, backforest)! This is by far, my favourite place to work. My favourite thing about living in this cabin in the summer is it kind of always feels like I’m camping.

Now, I need to introduce you to my desk companion! You might have seen her lurking in her window hammock in the previous picture. You also must be terribly shocked that I have a black cat, after I’ve just disclosed that I spend my nights drawing by candlelight, referencing 1800s mystics. Her name is Lennie, short for Leonora.

I’m thinking I should show you my other tiny “desk” too: the coffee table. The top table part lifts up and out into more of a desk, convenient to store supplies inside, good for upper back strain, which apparently I have plenty of.

Sometimes I put my sketchbook on a laptop stand. I begrudgingly use the stand to draw on, because of ergonomics and such.

These days my main drawing tools fit into three pencil cases that I usually carry around.

This level of organization was forced on me. If I have the pastels mixed with any of the other tools they make everything dirty and smudges get everywhere. The first case is for pastels, the second for pencil crayons, and the last is for markers and pens.

1. Case One: Caran d’Ache wax water soluble pastels and Sennelier mini oil pastels.

2. Case Two: Caran d’Ache pencil crayons (mixed colours), glue stick, pencil sharpener, scissors (not pictured)

3. Case Three: Faber Castell pen brushes, black ink brush pen, 0.38 Muji pen, pencil

My sketchbook journals are usually sitting on my coffee table desk. For the last year I’ve pretty much exclusively used these Moleskine journals as my sketchbook. I started out using them just to write in, and then I discovered I love the off-white colour and texture of the paper. And then I realized how convenient it is to have your journal and sketchbook all in one!?

I love writing on paper without any lines. My writing is tiny and I don’t like being forced into a specific paragraph line-height. I tried to blur out the writing in case I have anything embarrassing written in there 😀

All this talking about my desk, or lack of a desk, has made me think about how I’ve done some of my favourite work in this non-desk-friendly cabin. And I’ve created more consistently than I did when I had a desk in my last apartment. I guess I’m saying, all those famous quotes about artists finding ways to create, that you don’t need a perfect setup… they are onto something. Go forth and make things!

1. Planets, moons, the science of love, and Artemis ii !

After the Artemis ii launched on April 1, I went back and listened to one of my favourite talks between astrophysicist Natalie Batalha (she served as the project scientist for NASA’s Kepler mission from 2011 to 2017) and Krista Tippett.

The big question of the discussions is: What does the science of the universe teach us about love?

Natalie Batalha says:

“Love, this idea, is this moving force. It just permeates our history, our culture. I’ve equated it to this analogy of dark matter — 95 percent of the mass of the universe being something we can’t even see, and yet it moves us. It draws us. It creates galaxies. We’re moving on a current of this gravitational field created by mostly stuff that we can’t see. And science has given me that perspective, but also in very logistical, tangible, practical ways. When you study science, you step out of planet Earth. You look back down at this blue sphere, and you see a world with no borders. You see a tiny mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. You see the expanse of the cosmos, and you realize how small we are and how connected we are and that we are all the same and that what’s good for you has to be good for me.”

She continues…

“We need to be loved and to love to be happy. Studying science, you realize the connectedness of all things. We are stardust, and here I am, this bag of stardust, and it took how many billions of years for the atoms that make up my body to come together and make this being that’s able to take a conscious look at the universe. I am the universe, and I’m taking a look at myself through these senses that I have, and that is an amazing thing.”

She says she doesn’t necessarily mean it in a hippie, flowers-in-my-hair kind of way. (But I think she does, because it’s all saying the same thing, she just says it in a way that sounds more legitimate and less spiritually jargon-y and flattened). She goes on to say, “It’s easy to say all these fluffy philosophical words that make us all warm and fuzzy, but there are really practical connections. There are things that I do see that are real, that are part of what we’re discovering.”

In the last decade, astronomers have come to estimate that the observable universe contains between one and two trillion galaxies… placing our own milky way, with its roughly 100 BILLION stars, as something like a single grain of sand along a vast cosmic shore. ✰ (I am not an astronomer, but this is what the Natalie Batalha’s are saying out there) ✰

I wrote more about the science of love in last April’s Snail Tales issue here. Interesting that it seems to be a pattern in the spring to come out of my hibernation and have the urge to study the universe and astronomy. Also interesting that whenever I deep dive into the science of the universe, I always end up reading about the force of love. Inextricable connected unseen forces.

2. It was snowing in April so I drew flowers in protest:

   

   

3. Animal tree wheel earth moon planet:

   

   Some thoughts that came up while drawing this one:

   It falls on me, and you, to make our lives beautiful, to look past the rigidity of learned culture, to shed the armour of upbringing and rules, to continuously learn new things and seek creativity and authenticity and integrity in our days. To limit the things that go against our own essential spirit. We each have a place in the world and within our own worlds.

   (animals on the wheel inspired by the elk at the wildlife preserve. This day they reminded me of camels making a long journey across a desert)

4. I’ve spent a lot more time with the mother and daughter lynx at the wildlife preserve these last months, giving private tours and feeding them. I think my below sketch of the daughter looks a little human. I walked around the loop with my friend Erin a few weeks ago and she said she finds the lynx’s stare looks more human than the other animals. When I asked her what she meant by that, she said something about how although all the animals are sentient, the lynx feels even more so. I think I know what she means. When the cats stare at you, you get the sense that they are incredibly aware of who you are, or who they are, or what’s going on around us. And I’m certain they are.

5. “Fresh start” is what I called this next one. I’m riding a giant bird over a dark road, in between two homes. It came from a dream I had right before I received an atrocious 14 day eviction notice from my landlord, in the middle of -30 celcius winter. We went into legal battle for two months until we received a seven page letter from the deputy director of housing of the Yukon, indisputably taking my side and rejecting the eviction. I am now looking for a new home. Awaiting the mammoth bird to give me some dream guidance, of course 😌

6. Notes from the documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint:

“In this world we have forgotten how to marvel.”

— Anna Maria Bernitz, Historian

7. Crustose lichen and glacial ice. I can’t remember why I started drawing them. Probably because they are gorgeous and there’s lots of both in the Yukon.

8. This turned into some sort of stained glass window drawing, but I started drawing it after seeing a pattern on a woven basket that I liked. I cut out the shapes around the centre with an exacto knife and placed a red journal behind it in the scanner. I’m not particularly fond of it BUT right after I drew it, I facetime’d with my friend Jacob, who wanted to show me a little sculpture he had just made. He showed it to me through his phone and it was a little person with the same face as my drawing! We laughed and he probably said something about quantum telepathy. (Jacob is a person who can read papers on quantum telepathy and actually understand it.)

9. And last but not least… Lennie, my cat, levitating, holding a wand and casting a spell, as she does. Drawn one morning after waking up from this dream of her. She was encouraging me to go up with her and cast my own spells.

Thank you for reading along, and for all the new subscribers as of late! I hope you find ways to fill your upcoming hours with creativity and things that make you feel utterly alive.

Here’s what I found myself drawing in the last month:

1. A deer-like-caribou-elk:

   

   The caribou (alongside the moose) are the famous, iconic cervids of the Yukon. A cervid is an animal with hooves and often antlers, a member of the deer (cervidae) family. Caribou have been in the Yukon for almost 2 million years and are deeply woven into the cultures of Yukon First Nations. You might know them as reindeer. As I was drawing the caribou, a long elk body and elk antlers came out of my pencil instead of a caribou. Probably because elk antlers are easier to draw from memory. Caribou antlers are very distinct and look more like hands. I also left out a very important caribou feature: their monstrous snowshoes for hooves. This isn’t a very accurate Canadian elk either, because I didn’t include the iconic beautiful ivory rump. So, in the end it’s not realistically either a caribou or an elk, thus I called him “Cervid”.

   

   I also added some plants that most species of deer eat up here: aspen leaves, yarrow, fireweed, lichen.

   

2. Last summer I came across caribou moss for the first time on my backcountry camping trip in Tombstone Territorial Park. I was shocked to discover the shape of the lichen mirrors the shape of the caribou antlers! So the caribou spend all winter eating this stuff, and then grow two massive branches made of bone out of their heads in the shape of what they’ve been eating… A literal you are what you eat situation. I was thinking about it a lot for this winter for some reason, so I drew it.

   

   Caribou have evolved special guts so they can break down and digest lichens! The Yukon is home to hundreds of lichen species and they are one of the few foods available in deep snow. Caribou eat a few dozen of these types, the famous one being the reindeer moss. They literally live off of it during the winters.

   

   *Caribou moss is not a true moss, but rather a type of lichen… despite the misleading name.

   

   

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3. Outdoor toilets. Wilderness washrooms, the ol forest loo’s. Nature’s thrones, one might say:

   

   I’ve been drawn to draw them recently… I think because they are an important object used daily by many Yukoners and rural folks. We don’t have running water in the front cabin at the wildlife preserve so we have to use the outhouses, even in the winter, even in -10, -20, -30 degrees celcius. Although we started making our way to the other side of the fence to the rehab building’s indoor toilet during the recent -30 cold snaps.

   

4. “Questions are telescopes” —Andrea Gibson (“and kaleidscopes!” —me 😀) :

   

   With strangers, questions zip in and out of me like a cloud of midges at dusk. This is not the case with certain relationships where there’s an established tone set already. Like the brain categorizes certain people as “known” and my mind stops generating exploratory questions for them, and them for I. Remembering to ask weird questions completely out of tone/ritual is good!

   

   “You can only ever know another individual if you meet them in open dialogue — if you treat them as unfinished, as capable of surprise.

   If someone seems boring to you, or a bad fit, it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them, that you haven’t seen them react to the context that brings out their full being. You probably don’t know how much beauty lies hidden in the people around you.”

   — Henrik Karlsson

5. Riverside cafe menu art:

A good friend recently opened a coffeeshop in town so I helped him out with their menu designs! I scanned my illustrations as I usually do and then fiddled and tweaked and edited and pixel pushed and formatted until the drawings all fit together around the menu just right.

6. My brother Gabe is going ON TOUR! He is embarking on a Canadian tour with his band this month. He asked me to draw him a poster for this Ottawa show, so I spent an evening collaging and drawing and cutting out things:

   

   Like the moons; they are cut out from tin foil. Then I added textured spots with a pencil. I’m not sure why there are animals carrying candles on their backs but I like how they make me feel. The two circles in the middle were supposed to be spotlights, facing Gabe playing his guitar and singing. The eyeballs all around are the audience watching him perform.

   I’m an extremely excited and proud sister. If anyone on here wants to go check out his incredible live folk music, I’ll list the dates and ticket link below. And I will personally mail you a small print from my shop cause I’ll feel so much love for you! 😌

   Purchase Tickets Here

   VICTORIA, March 13 - The Coda

   NANAIMO, March 14 - The Vault

   VANCOUVER, March 15 - The Heatley

   KAMLOOPS, March 18 - Loophole

   CALGARY, March 19

   SALMON ARM, March 20 - Night Cafe

   MONTREAL, March 25 - Quai des Brumes

   OTTAWA, March 26 -Arthouse Cafe

   TORONTO, March 27 - Monarch Tavern

   GUELPH, March 28, The Albion

7. I went ice fishing on my birthday in mid February:

   

   There were three of us and we caught three Kockanee salmon, three for my 33rd birthday. When I got home I inspected my little fish and when I cut him open to gut him, I realized his body was made up of little lines that look like rivers. The salmon and the river - coexisting systems (chemically & visually)? It’s like the river shapes the salmon, and the salmon carries the river in their bodies.

   That’s it for the winter sketchbook (part two coming next month)! Thank you for being here 🐌

This poster grew out of my collaboration with To Swim and Speak with Salmon, and 30% of proceeds will go back to support their ongoing work. Shipping is calculated separately at checkout.

The poster can be purchased online here.

I recently worked on a project with an Indigenous-led training program focused on empowering the next generation of salmon leaders. The organization is called To Swim and Speak with Salmon. Their name asks something maybe radical in modern culture: What if we speak with an animal instead of about them?

You should know I am not a fish biologist. But I was invited into the world of salmon through my web design and illustration and work, trusted to bring their messaging to life in the digital world. So I’d like to share the canoe of learnings I gained in the project and where my curiosity led me outside of it. I’ve come to see how deeply intertwined salmon are with story, geomagnetic movement, endurance, scent memory, and spiritual knowledge. Nika “Sänchʼīa” Silverfox-Young, Youth Lead at To Swim and Speak with Salmon, says it’s vital that we listen to these animals. I needed no convincing. We should be listening to all the animals.

This project led me to all kinds of questions and research about salmon! An essay came out in the process. I contemplated whether I should publish it, I think because I questioned, in some way, my right to the subject. Maybe simply because in a few short years I’ve transformed my life and career entirely from a brand designer in the corporate tech industry to a wildlife interpreter and artist in subarctic Canada. And when you change your life drastically you can end up worrying about being some sort of fraud, questioning who you are to think you can do these new things that interest you but that you have no real background experience in. Until, well, you do start gaining experience and knowledge in these things, which is where I’m at today. So here is my salmon essay.

One more thing to note before I begin: as I was writing this essay these last few months, I found myself in various conversations not just about salmon, but about fish more broadly. One biologist noted that while so much focus and funding flows toward salmon — for good reason! — other fish, like trout, are accumulating high levels of mercury in their bodies, requiring attention they are not getting. I’m not entirely sure where this observation belongs but it feels important to share. It made me think about focus in conservation, which lives receive our attention and which remain overlooked. Which lives should live on? A question perhaps to dig into another time.

Upstream

I started writing this essay in the fall, a season that marks the end of long days and the return of long nights. It’s also the time when many salmon complete their lives, their newly deep-red bodies having swum thousands of kilometres from the Bering Sea to the upper Yukon River. Some travel over 3,000kms, one of the longest salmon migrations on Earth! Hard to fathom. They swim to return to the gravel beds where they were born. They swim to return to their birthplaces, so they can spawn and die. They swim upstream for months without eating, using up nearly all their stored fat (energy), just so they can get back home. They leave the open sea, the waters they share with the seals, whales, seabirds, commercial fisheries, to respond to an internal clock that is signalling to them: it is time to return. It is time to give your life.

I get a tingle of peculiar envy at the idea of knowing with such ferocity your ultimate life purpose, and that purpose being to swim mightily against all currents, alongside family, only to then gift your body to the trees, the bears, eagles, foxes, and the soil itself. I suspect what I envy is the salmon’s belonging and the way their lives are so clearly woven with the water, land, and kin. That envy makes me wonder if, even as a human, my task is simply to notice where I’m already swimming and whom I’m swimming with. The salmon don’t have to ask why they are here, they are here to experience life as a salmon, as I am here to experience life as a homo sapiens. To be here as we are.

I’ve started to revisit some questions though, after studying the salmon. What do I care enough about to struggle and swim upstream for? What do I want to show up for when it’s hard? What kind of struggle do I accept? What am I willing to fail at? Why don’t we refer to a human death as “completing their life cycle”? (I’ve learned that some indigenous cultures do use these kinds of terms for human life as well. A beautiful thing.)

The salmon led me to think about how I simply am my purpose, by letting my life and experiences unfold as they do. I think when you find enough patience to endure, and you gain more and more trust in what is hard, you can let life take its course. I also borrowed this philosophy from the book I’m currently reading, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. He writes, “Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, whatever happens.”

The return home

Once it’s time to return to their birthplace, the salmon use geomagnetic and chemical cues to leave the open sea and make their way to the enormous mouth of the Yukon River, one of the largest river deltas in North America. This is where their bodies begin to shift from saltwater to freshwater chemistry. A remarkable physiological transformation! Can they feel it like we can feel our skin changing and warming and tingling in the sun, adapting to new conditions? Their sense of smell sharpens dramatically, picking up on tiny differences in pH and minerals to help them navigate. What do they smell? Maybe wet stones, silt, decaying leaves, woody debris. As they move further and further inland, they endure a lot. Strong currents, sustained upstream swimming, no feeding, increased fatigue. But, it is time to return. And return they must! For it is their purpose, and they do not question it. They don’t need to convince themselves or the fish around them to trust their intuition. They simply swim.

So naturally I started wondering… do humans have a magnetic sense, too? It turns out most likely. Studies suggest the human brain can also process magnetic field changes. This means some of us could also detect the Earth’s magnetic field for orientation, we just don’t really know it consciously. I don’t think I’ll be strengthening my magnetic sense with my frequent Google maps usage these days, anyhow. But I like the idea that the sense could live somewhere in me.

The salmon continue on and cross the Alaska–Canada border, but of course, animals know no borders. No ICE agents waiting for this animal species in the current. They swim near Eagle, Alaska, then through past Dawson City. Their bodies visibly change colour by this point, turning a deep pink red. Their jaws begin to hook. The Yukon River is a vast watershed with thousands of spawning sites, and it acts like a memory map. Every returning salmon carries some sort of chemical memory of home. I’ve learned that this is called natal homing. They chemically imprint on the water they are born into, so as adults, they can detect unique blends of dissolved minerals and plants. They can sniff out specific soil, which helps them find their specific tributary, sometimes within meters of their birth site.

I think of my own smell memory. Last summer I was walking down an aisle in the drugstore and I got a whiff of a man’s cologne as we brushed past one another. It was the same kind my classmate Amad wore in eighth grade. I would smell it every day when he stood at his locker next to my locker. That was twenty years ago. I remember that day in the drugstore because I was shocked at the memories that flooded back with the scent. I didn’t even know I remembered where my eighth grade locker was but now I have a visual of the hallway, the exit door to the right, the teal coloured paint. Even now I can conjure up the mere memory of the scent. I can practically smell it without even needing it to be anywhere in my current physical environment. Sharp and synthetic and slightly sweet is what comes to mind. I wasn’t particularly fond of the smell, although I was quite fond of the human. It’s also the case with my mother’s l’air du temp perfume. And my aunt Viv’s. One time I smelled her perfume when I was sitting by the ocean with no one around. The scent memory is stored somewhere, and strong emotional connection has something to do with it too.

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Olfactory memory is “the ability to recognize and recall smells, uniquely capable of triggering vivid, emotional, and long-term autobiographical memories”. Unlike other senses, olfactory apparently connects directly to the brain's limbic system, allowing scents to evoke intense nostalgia and emotional responses. This whole cologne in the drugstore aisle experience is making sense. A professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School says it’s now clear that even though our sense of smell is not as robust as that of a mouse or bloodhound (or salmon!), it is deeply tied to our cognitive centers, our emotional centers, and our memory centers. “We’re dependent on it for a sense of well-being and centeredness in the world.” The nose remembers. The nose, knows.

Spiritual knowledge

I’ve concluded that the salmon are some of the most humbling of teachers, magnifiers of spirit and nobility. Once they lay and fertilize their eggs in the gravel beds, their bodies break down, and death usually comes within a few days or weeks. Their decaying bodies feed the stream with nitrogen and phosphorus, fertilizing the very waters where their young will hatch. Their bodies are brought into soil by bears, their nutrients enter leaves, trees, and the wings and fur of nearby wildlife.

Indigenous knowledge often frames it as the salmon giving itself back to the land and community, continuing its life in another form. If we use this kind of language in western culture, surrounding human death, is it deemed too woo-woo? Too... grandiose? Metaphorical? Naive? Throughout my project with To Swim and Speak with Salmon, it was often brought up that spiritual knowledge is treated as inferior to Western science. We made sure to have an “Indigenous Lens” category and “Western Lens” category on the Resources page. From my outsider perspective, it does at least appear that indigenous and relational knowledge is being re-legitimized in science as ecological necessity. I hope it continues to make its way to mainstream culture.

I was also reading the book Braiding Sweetgrass by indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer at the time of this project. In one chapter she writes of a ceremonial burning of the headland to welcome salmon swimming home, flames racing on the wind until they are stopped by the wet green wall of the forest. She writes that as the people are all standing along the river singing a welcome song of praise as the food swims up river, the humans dressed in their finest garments carefully sewed with dentalia shells, the salmon are allowed to pass. These first salmon guide the other salmon and carry the message to their upriver relatives that the people are grateful and full of respect. There is no doubt in my being that animals make note of when we are grateful and respectful towards them.

“The First Salmon Ceremonies were not conducted for the people. They were for the Salmon themselves, and for all the glittering reals of Creation, for the renewal of the world. People understood when lives are given on their behalf they have received something precious. Ceremonies are a way to give something precious in return.”

“The salmon bones are placed back in the river, their heads facing upstream so that their spirits might follow the others. They are destined to die as we are all destined to die, but first they have bound themselves to life in an ancient agreement to pass it on, to pass it on. In so doing, the world itself is renewed.”

I wonder what our world would be like today if we treated our food and our environment with this level of respect.

To Swim and Speak with Salmon

This project was one of my favourite freelance projects to date. Each salmon drawing, colour palette, illustrated landscape, collection of sentences and drawn maps were crafted with deep care and collaboration. During this project I remembered that the design process itself can be a kind of ceremony, too. It can be a powerful form of honouring life and meaningful information by how we communicate and represent it.

I wanted the big visual decisions (ie colours, font, imagery) to be imbued with meaning and intention:

You can check out the website and learn more about them here.

I feel I was led upstream throughout this writing process, through senses and questions I didn’t know I had! Thank you to the salmon and the To Swim and Speak with Salmon team.

Article Sources:

Connections between smell, memory and health

Do humans have a magnetic sense, too?

An Overview of Pacific Salmon

Wikipedia - Salmon Run

Salmon and Society in Pacific Northwest

+ Local biologists

First: snail sales

I wasn’t sure where or how to announce this so I am throwing it into this month’s newsletter. My online shop is officially live! Yahoo! Cue the confetti canon. I’ve been meaning to get an online shop up for, I don’t know. The last five years or so. Which in creative procrastination years is basically a geological era. I’ve been creating visual art for a long time and selling it about as consistently as a snail on espresso. I do commissions when they come and have sold work at a couple markets. But recently, much to my astonishment, a surprising number of people have asked if they can buy my art. I’m going through a period where it feels like my work is sprouting small, beautiful wings, like it’s been a bird caged up and is getting ready to explore the world. It’s exciting.

You can find the shop here! I am selling prints and in the future, paintings and other products and such. For now, standard $15 shipping no matter where you are in the world. It will be trial and error for me, I’m sure. If you are local and live in the Yukon, you can use the discount code yukonpickup at checkout to bypass shipping and we’ll coordinate pickup/delivery.

Snail mail

If you are a paid subscriber, you will be receiving some snail mail soon! I’ve reached out to all of you for your mailing addresses so if you are reading this and haven’t sent me yours (and are a paid sub), please respond to this email with your info. Thank you to everyone who has become a paid subscriber, especially the kind strangers on the Internet this last month. Your support makes me feel like a snail with a glittering envelope strapped to its shell, embarking on a grand adventure, determined to bring a little magic to your mailbox (the snail metaphors are really rolling off the tongue today, I’m sorry).

November Sketchbook

1. I’ve been reading a lot of Annie Dillard lately. A friend said that my essay about animal souls reminded him of his favourite book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. Then a few weeks later, I received the book This Writing Life by Annie Dillard in the mail sent by another friend, completely unrelated (although, related). I had never even heard of her. So I’ve started reading both at the same time.

   “I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out.”

   — Annie Dillard

   

   

   I’ve been taken aback by how she captures the enchantment of the winter, which is my favourite season since moving to the subarctic. Even with the current 11am sunrise. Today I received these words in a letter from my Uncle John, which captured my feelings about the winter so completely my vision briefly went aquatic:

   In our travels, Viv and I learned that, contrary to our expectations, northern peoples favoured winter over other seasons, not just indigenous people but all long-time northern residents; it is a time to visit and restore friendships or begin new ones, of community, of song and dance and stories, of finding love or saying final goodbyes. If you live on in Whitehorse you will of necessity accept and embrace that view and build your life as the seasons demand. The seasons are the reality, the constant, the people merely sojourners.

   — Uncle John

2. I’ve been working with a local organization on a salmon project that you’ll hear more about next month. I’ve drawn many, many salmon this past year, mostly because I’ve fallen in love with them. They are teachers, magnifiers of spirit and nobility. Their bodies feed everything from trees to bears, eagles, foxes, and the soil itself. And their bodies are just gorgeous.

   

3. Creating my own drawing prompts: Birds, moons, candles.

   

   

4. I drew this the day after I had a first-class northern date that involved a snowy hike across a frozen lake, about 100 sled dogs (no exaggeration, one hundred), oil lanterns, and a cozy dry cabin (a place with no running water, which is more normal up here than you’d think). The Yukon has this uncanny way of tossing you between centuries… one moment you’re ordering something on Amazon, the next you’re in the 1800s, carrying an oil lantern to the outdoor toilet in –25°C while the sled dogs howl like a choir of wolves. It’s cold and real and utterly and endlessly romantic.

   

   

   

5. Drawing what I’m learning (I didn’t expect this one to get hundreds of likes when I posted it in my notes a few weeks back). I don’t want to say too much about this one because I plan to make it into a collection at one point. This was inspired by a chapter in The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer about how trees grow berries (CO2 → leaves → sugar). She says after this process of photosynthesis, the gift of the atmosphere resides in the berry.

   

   

   6. The day I was waiting for my winter tires to get put on, in Midnight Sun, the local coffee shop that is also a bike/board shop.

   

   7. A past client emailed last month asking if I had any music-related illustration they could pay me to use. I didn’t, but I thought, that’s a good drawing prompt. My vinyl records ended up looking like flying saucers, which I really don’t hate.

And that’s it for last month’s sketchbook roundup!

Thank you so much for being here 🐌

Postcards from the Yukon below.

October is a fun month for illustrators or anyone who likes to draw. Every year there are endless drawing challenges happening all over the Internet. I think this started with Inktober many years ago. This year I participated in Peachtober, behind the scenes. I figured if I hadn’t completely given up and had anything to show by the end of the month I’d compile the drawings into one post, so here we are.

I started using my journal as my sketchbook last month mostly out of laziness in carrying too much with me, but also because I like the yellowish tint of the paper. I like what the paper led to. It’s interesting when you change one of your tools and suddenly your hand is doing new things.

1. Oct 1: Acorns

   

   

   

   

2. Oct 3: Slugs

3. Oct 5: Poppies (I also bought a grey sketchbook on my trip to Vancouver Island. Haven’t decided if I regret it yet.)

4. Oct 19 & 20: Trucks and Melon

5. Oct 30: Whiskers

Whiskers was centered around a new creature I recently adopted and is sharing my home with me. Her name is Lennie (short for Leonora) and I’m pretty sure she’s the cuddliest, friendliest, witchiest cat in the Yukon. I am obsessed with her.

I spent two weeks in October visiting family in Victoria and Athabasca (northern Alberta). I always leave Alberta wanting to draw two things: sky and horses. I got to observe my friend Eve’s horse clinic where an expert was teaching both the riders and the horses. So much of it seemed to be focused on communication and helping the horses and humans get some clarity in order to release tension. Coming soon: An interview with Eve, her stories and life lessons gathered from the saddle.

I will leave you with this quote I jotted down from my friend Chance’s little notebook of quotes, found one October evening in his white camper van:

My “monthlyish” newsletter accidentally took a 4 month break. I *did* name this project Snail Tales because I am currently (and maybe, forevermore) taking the slower, scenic road in life. I also do, though, have somewhat of an excuse for my exceptionally long disappearance.

I went on a five day hiking trip in the arctic tundra (Tombstone Territorial Park) in the summer, and one hour in, I lost feeling in my left arm and hand. You know when you sleep weird on your arm and wake up with pins and needles? Or when you are on a plane and your leg falls asleep and you have to tap it on the ground excessively like a tap dancing fool? It was kind of like that, except I also couldn’t move some of my fingers, and it lasted for about a month. I am left handed and as you know, an artist and many things that require my left hand, so it really felt like the month came at me like a mean left hook. (If you are curious, it turns out, after forcing my way into an MRI, that I have a compressed/bulging disk in my upper spine). I am in physio and maybe about 80% healed now!

So, August ended up being a month of a lot of reading, pondering, and collecting quotes to help keep my spirits up. I’ve written down sentences and ideas that speak to the infinite ways our lives can go. What the reality of our lives might be, can be, will be. I think when something so precious to you is taken away, even for just a month, it requires a bit of unselfing to loosen your grip on what you’ve determined your path to be - to remain open and curious to it all. To recognize that your perception of a beautiful life will change, again and again.

I decided in this month of uncertainty that I was not going to wallow in my worries until they came true or didn’t come true. I was reminded that life is constantly and completely unfinished, and there is a wide open unwritten road ahead. The idea of who we are, where our lives are going, and the stories we tell about it all are filled with possibility and mysterious beginnings.

Join my wildlife drawing walk!

Since my drawing arm is back in commission — I am guiding a drawing walk at the Yukon Wildlife Preserve tomorrow, Sunday Sept 28 from 2pm-4pm! There is one spot left! You can grab your ticket here. We will regroup afterwards in the warming tent with a fire, tea, coffee, our art supplies and papers. I’m very excited.

We will walk around the lower loop and will set out to draw the bison, elk, mule deer, moose, sheep, muskox, aspen, mountains, pond, etc etc etc. It will be a session to draw what we feel curious about, connect to the animals, and learn a little about each species. I have lots of stories to share.

Here are some examples of the nature journalling I’ve done this past month:

Until next time! I will try not to wait 4 months to reach out to you again ;)

A few weeks ago, my old Canon DSLR started working again. The video mode had been dead for the last five years and I have no idea how it’s revived itself. I decided I better make use of it while I’ve got it back, so I’ve started bringing it around with me like I used to, documenting parts of my days. I feel so much more creative with it than I do with my phone. The camera turns the act of looking into something artistic again? My phone usually just wants to be fast.

May was a month of telescopes and binoculars and the odd sensation of looking forward and back at once. Spring is quite the event up here in northern Canada and not just because the winters are harsh and the sun has started staying out until midnight then rising a few hours later. It’s also because people in the Yukon seem to be way more tuned into bird migrations! Migration is very dramatic up here. It’s very visible, audible, and undeniable. It’s felt like it’s not just something only the birders care about. Many folks up here are naturalists, biologists, hunters, fishers, land stewards, and I suppose simply spend a lot of time outdoors noticing things.

I’ve wondered this past month if people enjoy birding for the reasons I enjoy drawing. You look until looking becomes something else. They both require you to enter a significant state of attention. Presence, one might call it. I think the joy of these activities is linked to the feeling of reconnecting to all things when we transfix on a part of nature.

The art of spacetime

Now, all this birding and watching nature through magnified lenses has led me to some questions. Each time I go to write one of these newsletters they turn into much deeper pondering and philosophizing than I intended. But I am trying to allow my writing to unfold however it wants to and I’ve been receiving beautiful responses in return. So I’ve let this one naturally take me where it wanted to go, and I tried not to question it.

After all the binocular and telescope usage, I started thinking about how my perception of reality is assembled, moment by moment, by my mind. When I’m drawing an object, I am very connected to that object. When I spend many minutes looking at a bird on the water through a telescope, I feel close to that bird. Perhaps my mind almost feels I am that bird. I wonder if this is what neuroscientist Anil Seth meant when he referred to consciousness as, “the controlled hallucination our brains use to make sense of the world”? Is consciousness the strange awareness at the centre of everything I know? How does it relate to time and space and the universe and intuition? I set out to answer some of these very, ahem, easy to answer questions this month. I suppose this is what happens when you have 21 hours of daylight!

I couldn’t remember what I learned in physics class so I started with the only physicist I could think of: Einstein. Bare with me while I remind you of his general theory of relativity, which showed that time bends around mass. The discovery that mass bends spacetime was a huge deal because it shattered how we thought the universe and reality worked. Spacetime (if you need a reminder like I did) is the weave of space and time into a single, flowing field. Einstein said it isn’t just space and it isn’t just time, it’s both, braided. It slows and bends and ripples and curves around massive things like black holes, stars, and planets. And that bending is what we feel as gravity. The greater the mass (like a planet), the more spacetime curves around it, and the slower time moves near it. So essentially, our experience of time can change depending on where we are, how fast we're moving, and what's around us. I also wrote an essay on clock time vs. evolutionary time and our perception of it as humans here.

I think I feel so moved by the idea of spacetime because it’s as poetic as it is mathematic. It implies that presence, literal physical presence — something being there — shapes the flow of time around it. I heard the poet David Whyte once remark that presence slows time down, a sentiment that first sparked my wondering about presence as a kind of gravity. And I find it interesting that we use the word presence in two ways: to refer to being somewhere in time and space, as well as being fully in the moment. There’s physical presence (the kind you can measure) and then there’s presence as attention (that can’t be measured but can be felt?). Both have a deep gravitational weight. In physics, presence occupies space and exerts gravity. In life, a person or being who is exuding presence also carries a grounded, gravitational energy. In my experience on the earth, presence is what gives depth and meaning to my moments. It’s what I feel fully. So metaphorically, and maybe even more than metaphorically, is presence the soul’s version of mass? Isn’t it what makes time feel richer and denser? When a person is fully present, can their “gravity” be felt? Just like a star warps the spacetime around it? I think of people who hold deep stillness; the monks and meditators and grounded, peaceful people and animals of the world. It’s as if their presence has the capacity to change time for everyone around them, isn’t it?

I’ve had intuitive pulls towards places and people so strong they’ve made me wonder if there’s a kind of physics at play I don’t understand. Plus, the idea that people emit energy or that there are fields of relational force between beings is not just a new age or hippie buzzword. It has roots in physics, indigenous cosmologies, and human experience alike. The trouble is, the language we use to talk about it has been flattened either into parody or spiritual jargon that loses the nuance and legitimacy these ideas deserve.

Have you ever felt wondrous intuition and force fields so strongly that they feel like a kind of gravity? Can you remember any moments where time felt like it expanded or slowed down?

The strongest gravitational force in the universe?

There is a widely circulated letter attributed to Einstein (although the attribute has yet to been proven or disproven). In the letter, he writes: "There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others... This universal force is love." To me, it does feel like love isn’t just a sentiment, but some sort of fundamental force just as real and powerful as gravity.

Sometimes I write letters to myself, a practice I learned a few years ago from the legendary Liz Gilbert. She now has a whole Substack community called Letters from Love that is dedicated to this practice. The voice that comes out when I write from the universe or “love” has an entirely different tone than the one I typically write from in my journal. The voice is much wiser and more direct.

Last week I wrote: Dear universe, what would you have me know today?

Here’s what came out:

Remember that you are a small aspect of a large planet and even larger universe. Allow for new possibilities everyday and make yourself available to these moments. As Mary Oliver puts it, you will be saved by the beauty of the world. As your knowledge of what’s around you increases, the world you observe is larger, more intricate and more alluring. You can root yourself like the aspen and be marked like their bark. Joan Didion said every day is all there is. Or as Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I don’t say this to put pressure on you to live everyday adventurously and utterly blissful. Some days all you’ll do is lie around and eat a sandwich. I don’t remind you of this to motivate you to be so productive everyday that you’ll go achieve great things. The only achievement I hope for you is the achievement of enjoying your life and understanding the improbability of being born a homo sapiens on planet Earth. You can remember that you are a small, temporary creature that is made of the same force Dante called l'amor che move il sole e l'artre selle, “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

After I wrote out the majority of this essay, I finally understood what I was trying to get to the bottom of. I have been feeling that love, consciousness, soul, physics, gravity (the list goes on) are not separate phenomena. They might be interwoven expressions of one underlying principle, one force, whatever you want to call it. I think of the astrophysicist Natalie M. Batalha saying that when we learn that the atoms that make up our cells were manufactured in the cores of stars, empathy grows because you understand the connectiveness not just of all humans, but of all living creatures.

You are made of the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Behind the scenes - creative process

I read recently that animal is derived from the Latin word anima, meaning ‘soul’. I thought of the animals I’ve been encountering lately (human ones included), or rather, the moments of holding their gaze. Eye contact that holds with intention, not politely or incidentally. Have you ever had that feeling after locking eyes with an animal that your soul is being stared into? At the wildlife preserve where I work, visitors often say they get this feeling. They say it feels like the animals are looking straight into them. Or through them. Like when the bison is close enough that you could touch him if you were foolish. He stands steadily and waits with molasses eyes and does not blink. There is no performance or apology or anxiety in his gaze. You can remember how long the earth has been spinning and you remember that you too are an animal.

The other day I was in the rehab centre at the Preserve. I was standing across from a great horned owl. Some call these birds the tigers of the sky. It was a small room, just the owl, Melissa from the animal care team, my coworker Britt (who captured the below video) and me. She hadn’t been there long and was still unsure of us, I imagine. We were watching Melissa feed her. Her eyes didn’t flinch and ours didn’t either. It was an unspoken mutual gaze, not affectionate, and not with recognition. But it was a moment of deep shared conscious exchange, of attention and curiosity. The feeling of staring into the soul of a being so different from ours. Animals often have the confidence and the audacity to stare right into us.

One night last summer while I was living in Vancouver I dreamt of a woman with bold teal eyeliner around her eyes. The next day I arrived at a farm for the weekend and met a woman named Nancy. She was wearing bold teal eyeliner. I thought the timing was funny and by the end of the weekend I decided to tell her about the dream. Her eyes lit up as she told me that her eyeliner is permanently tattoo’d around her eyes, so how peculiar the dream indeed. She told me that day that eyes are windows to the soul. A quote credited to William Shakespeare, although no one can actually find that line in any of his works. Maybe it was just something he said at parties. I thought it was a beautiful sentiment— that maybe what’s sacred and invisible in us peeks out through our pupils and irises, like candlelight behind glass.

It’s pretty context dependent, but locking eyes and keeping a mutual gaze with another being we’ve just met can make us a little uneasy (and I know this is discussed a lot amongst neurodivergent people). It’s rude to stare and it’s uncomfortable if someone is gazing at you for too long. But it’s a powerful way to feel another’s soul, isn’t it? At least, so says William Shakespeare. We welcome other animals to stare at us, and feel honoured even. There’s a lot of discussion about soul out there and whether or not nonhuman life has it. As if we can see it or measure it and determine if beings other than ourselves have it. To me, it feels like animals often bare their souls immediately upon meeting, in a way that is refreshing. What happens when we bare our souls to each other right away? As humans we have to strip away quite a lot in order to do it. Self-consciousness, hesitation, social norms, the masks we wear for the world. To bare our souls we also have to allow silence when the moment calls for it, listen instead of determining how to respond, express exactly what we feel in the moment, and drop social scripts. It takes a lot to soul-strip in broad daylight.

The Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte often describes the soul as something deeply connected to our truest, most essential self. The part of us that seeks authenticity, depth, and connection with the larger world. I asked myself what soul means and jotted down the first things that came to mind. Here’s what came out:

• soulful connection— seeing one another in our true essence

• the look in someone’s eye when their full attention is on you and they are dying to hear what is inside of you

• beauty and art that shuffles something inside, connecting your inner world to outer reality

• standing outside in the cold late night taking in the aurora above my cabin in silence

• intimate moments with self and others, feeling depth of emotion

• honest moments where nothing feels hidden and masked

• when laughter can’t be contained because the moment is too real and light and beautiful and you feel so alive

• shared meaning and truth

• the totality of a being

• eye contact

• losing “myself” (moreso, my surface understanding of self) in the flow

• telling a story around a fire / writing by candlelight (so romantic)

This list in its entirety represents a few things to me: aliveness, spirit, feeling, and relationship between our inner and outer worlds, with ourselves and other living things.

There’s a book I’ve got on hold at the library that I’ve been dying to read called The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery. (There is also an incredibly moving documentary about an octopus called My Octopus Teacher. If you are in the mood for a visually stunning and emotional unfolding of a friendship between a human and an octopus. I was so moved that I made posters afterwards.) Anyway, Montgomery is known for her books exploring animal intelligence, consciousness, and human-animal relationships. There’s one quote in particular that I saved, where she wonders:

What is the soul? Some say it is the self, the “I” that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is the fingerprint of God.

Others say that soul is our innermost being, the thing that gives us our senses, our intelligence, our emotions, our desires, our will, our personality, and identity. One calls soul “the indwelling consciousness that watches the mind come and go, that watches the world pass.” Perhaps none of these definitions is true. Perhaps all of them are. But I am certain of one thing as I sit in my pew: If I have a soul — and I think I do — an octopus has a soul, too.

Animals seem to have a kind of soulfulness, in fact. I see them as fully inhabiting their existence, unburdened by the self-consciousness that we often face as humans. One of the most healing things about being around animals is that they don’t seem to be able to be anything other than what or who they are. They are not able to hide their themness. I suppose being able to choose to change ourselves as humans can be helpful when we want to grow and evolve in a direction. But I think that’s something different than who we are in our essence. I often find the advice “just be yourself” sounds lovely, but it’s kind of like telling a chameleon to choose a favourite colour (Trevor Noah is with me). Maybe some of you don’t feel you have as many versions of selves as I do. The version of me who frolics alone around the forest talking to moss in the morning is very different from the version who sits on Zoom with clients. Who is the self in a world where we constantly shift to fit different contexts?

One of our strangest skills is our ability to not be ourselves, to morph depending on who we’re with and what’s expected of us. Do other animals do this? The instinct to adapt and to shape oneself to circumstance is not uniquely human. Anthropologists will remind us that we are social primates, hardwired for belonging. Our instinct to adapt and shape-shift remains deeply ingrained. What is uniquely human, perhaps, is our depth of self-awareness and the feeling of dissonance it can cause. How we can completely internalize our roles and existentially perform versions of ourselves.

Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, argues that our deep insecurity as a species may stem from the fact that we climbed to the top of the food chain unnaturally fast. He writes:

Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. [...] In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.

I don’t want to linger too long on analyzing our strange flaws and insecurities as a species (I think we need to strike a good balance, like anything, between critical self-awareness and self-acceptance/love). It might be one of the greatest honours in the universe to get to experience all that comes with being a human creature. But I enjoyed Harari’s comparisons. It’s fun to hang around other animals and notice how they don’t seem to question their authenticity and existence quite as much. They remind me what it means to exist without too much hesitation. I enjoy the moments when I can remember this.

If I have a soul, can a moth have a soul?

I’m not sure if this story will be interesting to anyone else but it is special to me and this is my blog so, I am going to tell it. A couple months ago, a beautiful yellow-green moth appeared in my cabin. When I first saw her I thought, this is the most gorgeous moth I have ever seen. It was about -20 degrees celsius that day so I can’t imagine that she came from outside. But I am not an expert on where moths come from. I can’t remember exactly what I was feeling, but I was having one of those nights where you forget just how wonderful your life is. It had temporarily slipped my mind how many of my dreams had come true as of late. How many of my recent longings had been handed to me like fresh strawberries served on a platter sprinkled with brown sugar. One moment I was sitting in my bed feeling sorry for myself, and the next moment a lovely moth was flying around my face. She intimately landed on my ear and it felt to me that she had a soul and spirit of her own.

For some reason, I thought a lot about my late Aunt Vivian during the moth visit that night. I felt very comforted with whatever the thoughts were. It changed my whole night around. Viv died in 2018 and was someone who meant and means a great deal to me. She was my dad’s little sister and they were so deeply fond of each other. Her laugh and charming ability to switch from serious conversation into a dramatic Jewish American accent in the same breath replays in my mind. On our drive up to the Yukon, my dad said I sometimes remind him of her in my way of being. He said something about my lightness and some of my mannerisms. I told my Uncle John this (Viv’s husband) a few months ago and he said I also remind him of Viv in many ways, but more than anything in our “shared, beautiful, adventurous spirit.” This made me just a little emotional. I read a journal entry today from last year where I wrote, I feel a lot of comfort about my own life when I remember Viv and her life. Did she also have a little voice asking her to take her places and change her life when she left Toronto and moved to the North? I found out some of John and Viv’s friends in their town of Athabasca call me “little Vivian”.

There is an extensive amount of folklore that describes feelings of deceased loved ones appearing in the form of moths, I have since discovered. I notice I feel the need to state here that it’s not really my belief that the moth was my aunt Viv back from the dead. I probably only feel the need to state this out of fear of what the hyperlogical people may think, who I’d prefer not to give a damn about. My coworker recently asked if I believe in afterlife. I said I have a hard time defining what my belief is because what comes before and after my life is a complete mystery. So I’m resistant to have much of an opinion. But I do believe in soul and spirit and that we don’t really know how the universe and consciousness function, independently or collectively. I find life more amusing and beautiful when we flirt with mysticism. Anyway, the point of this story is not really to question afterlife, but to reveal that meaning shows up in ways we can’t always explain.

Back to the moth. The moth stayed perched on my wooden wall right above my pillow all night, and came back every night for the next three nights. I dove deep into moth research and videos that week (if you are going to consume any resource I share today, please watch this video of 7 gorgeous moths flying in slow motion). I learned that moths are one of the oldest known insect groups, with a long evolutionary history. Some fossils have indicated that they’ve been around at least 200 million years, meaning they lived during the time of dinosaurs! I did a drawing of the moth in my sketchbook and wrote out a quote that felt fitting:

I eventually found the moth dead under my side table, so I morbidly taped her to this page in my sketchbook. Now, here’s where the story feels especially special for me. The day that I wrote that quote down in my sketchbook, I texted Eve. Eve is the best friend of my Uncle John, who like I said, is the husband of my late aunt Viv. I was sending my condolences to Eve because I heard that she had to put down her beloved elderly horse Sir, and Sir’s best friend Lizzie the pony. Sir and Lizzie were quite the pair, a kind of soulmate friendship obvious to anyone who spent time with them. I had spent a couple days with the two animals and Eve last summer, and they, along with Uncle John and Aunt Viv, all played a part in my move up to the Yukon. After meeting her horses, I gently stroked my hand on one of their faces, and Eve said to me, “You’ve missed your calling in life, honey.” She said I had the kind of demeanour needed to work with animals. It was three weeks later that I made my way up to the Yukon and learned that the Yukon Wildlife Preserve was hiring.

Eve responded to the condolences text I sent her with a quote. It was a quote that Uncle John had apparently sent her earlier that day. My initial reaction was confusion upon receiving this text, a quote being passed to me through Eve from Uncle John. Confusion because it was the exact Henry Beston quote that I had just written down in my sketchbook page. The page dedicated to the moth who’s spirit made me think of Uncle John’s beloved, beautiful, inspiring, deeply spiritual, now gone wife, Vivian. In that moment and still now, I think about how sometimes coincidence and synchronicities feel like some nonverbal language more meaningful and delicious than our words could ever hope to be. I think Henry Beston was right in that we do need a wiser, more mystical concept of animals. Maybe we need a wiser, more mystical concept of everything.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.

Sticky note animation - behind the scenes

If you are curious how I made the animation for this newsletter, I used a bunch of sticky notes and frame-by-frame illustrations. A very fun process.

Snail Tales is a monthlyish newsletter for stories, art, creative projects, animals and making sense of my (and our) belonging in the natural world. I can also promise there will be many influences, observations, and sightings of Yukon wildlife.

Why is it called Snail Tales? The short answer is because I am embracing some of my slow and unhurried tendencies. I’ve learned there is an art in doing things calmly, without the need to rush. Maybe it’s my way to defend forgive and embrace my grapplings with the pace of the modern world and trying to keep up. I like the word “tales” because a tale is often associated with imaginative narrative. When I think of a tale, I think of a story that has a message to communicate, whether it’s through words, illustrations, or both. That’s the kind of content I’ve been drawn to create recently.

I’ll dedicate an entire issue to my love for snails, their symbolism and watching them go about their lives another time. For now, I’ll leave you with a few quotes…

“Snails are great mascots for idleness, taking your time, and going at your own pace. But there’s also something about snails that I think might be even more profound for artists: They leave a trail behind them of where they’ve been.”

— Austin Kleon

“How ingenious an animal is a snail… When it encounters a bad neighbor it takes up its house and moves away.”

—Philemon (c. 300 B.C.)

I think about how my first few months living in the Yukon feel like the drawn-out, long sunrises and sunsets up here. They are often multicoloured, with bright hues and dark contrasts, and they seem to last ages. This is, apparently, all because of the Earth’s tilt and rotation. I was asking everyone about this my first few weeks here. I needed to understand why the sun seems to take longer to rise, fall and hover at the horizon compared to anywhere I’ve ever been. Turns out when you're farther north, the sun takes a much shallower angle as it rises and sets! Instead of popping straight up and down like it does near the equator, it moves more horizontally across the sky. This makes the transition between night and day stretch out longer. Someone said to me, “Think of it like a ball rolling up and over a hill—if it goes straight up and down, it’s quick, but if it follows a more gradual slope, it takes longer. That’s basically what the sun is doing near the poles.” I’m thinking of making an animation of this to try to make more sense of it physically. This effect gets even more extreme as you go farther north. It’s why there is midnight sun near the summer solstice, and in winter, it gives us the long, drawn-out sunrises and sunsets that I have cherished and gawked at almost every day since I moved up. The territory is a mix of extremes: light and darkness, with a lot of expansive grey and blue sky in between. It’s 10am as I write this and the clouds are pink with sunrise.

Sometimes I feel like time is flying and I can’t seem to muster the energy to chase it. But just as the sun moves differently up here, my sense of time has changed too. The other day I was working a shift at the Yukon Wildlife Preserve and I asked my coworkers what they think about our relationship to time versus other animal’s relationship with it. We got into a discussion about how time in the sense of minutes and hours is an abstract human-constructed concept. We are the only animals that track time like this. Every other animal seems to be deeply connected to their internal clocks and their circadian rhythms. Humans are obsessed with time and trying to name it; we think we can control it, track it, chase it, kill it, steal it, make it and run out of it. The more time I spend with the wildlife in the Yukon, the more absurd and ridiculous these ideas become.

The sun lingering on the horizon up here sometimes gives me the illusion of time stretching. I’ve started to feel that slowness elsewhere, like when I’m alone observing the musk ox. Here’s what I wrote in my journal one morning:

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After the discussion with my coworkers, I ponder this difference between the way we think of time and the relationship the musk ox have with it. Is it a contributor to the illusion of separation we’ve created between us and the wildlife? Between human beings and the natural world? It only took a few shifts working at the Yukon Wildlife Preserve to realize I was sensing something powerful and healing about the places I’ve been spending time in— the preserve, the North, and my cabin in the Boreal forest*. I couldn’t stop thinking about the illusion I had been living under— the idea that we are separate from the animals and the wild. Far away in our cities, being raised to believe that humans are the centre of everything. We’ve elevated ourselves but we are simply part of nature like the rest of these animals. It feels silly to have to even state this and maybe many of you already understand it. But I grew up in a big city and it’s taken me living in a forest, in a territory with one of the lowest population densities in the world to really make some sense of it.

*The boreal forest, also known as the snow forest, is a biome characterized by snowy winters and freezing temperatures. It’s the world's largest land biome. This forest converts carbon dioxide into oxygen on a massive scale (the air is very good up here ☺ ). The snow stays on the ground for many, many months.

I heard a term recently: Ecological Identity. It bears the questions: Who are we in relation to nature? How do we fit with what’s around us? I wrote that the musk ox are considered ice age survivors. When I give my tours to visitors at the preserve, people are often shocked and intrigued by this information. I like to remind them that we as homo sapiens are also ice age survivors! Multiple ice ages* in fact: at least two in the last 200,000 years. Yet our evolutionary paths have remarkably diverged. The lives of the musk ox are still closely attuned to the rhythms of nature, as they were during the ice age. When I’m around them, it feels evident that they are living in harmony with their surroundings. I sense that they are in a deep state of attention. In a way, are they living in the timeless? We’ve created cities and systems that can obscure the natural rhythms of day and night, the seasons, and the ecosystems around us. These differences highlight not just how far we’ve come, but also how much we might still learn from the creatures who remain deeply connected to this earth we share. The only time I’ve been able to feel this kind of harmony for an extended period is when I’m on long camping trips or boat rides where I feel almost lost in the sea. It makes me think that my over-structured, calendar relationship with time is like a surface-level experience of life. Like the restless, choppy waves at the surface of the ocean. The musk ox relationship with time might be more like the water deep below the surface, where things appear calm and more still. In a way, I feel consoled by the lesson of the musk ox on this day. If the Yukon’s light has changed how I see time, the musk ox has helped how I feel it.

*When people say “the last ice age”, they’re usually referring to the last glacial period (that ended around 10,000 years ago), when ice sheets covered much more of the planet. I recently learned from Danial (my preserve coworker and ice age expert!) that if we want to get scientific about it, technically we are still living in an ice age since there is permanent ice at the poles. What we're in now is an interglacial period, meaning a warmer phase within an ongoing ice age. If things followed the natural cycle, we'd eventually head back into a glacial period, but human-driven climate change is disrupting that pattern.

Anywho, that’s all the *time* I have for today. Maybe time isn’t something to track, chase, or control. Maybe, like the musk ox and the Yukon sun, it’s something to settle into.

Remember: there’s no time like the present!

And this is a very good song:

I would love to hear any thoughts that are sparked from reading or tales of your own. There’s a comment section on Substack, or just hit reply right in your inbox!

Thanks for taking the scenic route with me,

Avery