Do you ever have days when you don’t want to be anywhere?  Not at the coffee shop, not home, not at work, not even at the library or the beach or the cabin; you just don’t want to be anywhere where you have a history, a past, maybe even a future.

I’m in a bad mood again. Don’t know why really but it doesn’t much matter. I don’t want to read although I have Versluis with me. I don’t want to have to hear other people’s chatter so the coffee shop and library are out.  I don’t want to drive anywhere so the beach is out, so is just driving, which sometimes is quite therapeutic. I don’t want to think about where I have been or where I am going to. I don’t even want to think about books.  I just want to breathe.

I’m parked on a busy road.  Cars go by fast but apart from that there are no people on the street. On one side there is an apartment complex and a few parked cars. On the other side, across the road, there is an empty field that was once fenced and paved. Now it is scrub trees and wild grass and brambles. On the far side of the field there is a train track with a a few empty cargo cars parked on the track.

I feel comfortable looking at the field.  The noise of the zooming traffic is a bit much but in another hour it will die back until it is just the occasional car. This road is a downtown feeder and other than rush hour doesn’t have that much sustained traffic.

It’s the world of the field that I feel called to and why I chose to park here and not somewhere else.

Partly I think my attraction to the field is its self-renovation.  Whatever it was once, the plants and animals are reclaiming it.  Given that this is Vancouver, it won’t last. At some point a developer will build here, but that inevitability doesn’t bother me because, now, the land is reclaiming itself.

At the corner of the lot there are a pair of one-person metal benches, that mark the street boundary. The seats and backs are carefully shaped green metal slats. They have curved arms that remind me of my grandmother’s armchair. They sit on a bit of pavement facing each other. Part sculpture, part utilitarian social provision, they are empty but still, their position suggests two invisible people speaking. Park ghosts. I like it. The best kind of people, imaginary ones.

There is graffiti on the boulders at the other edge of the field.  I am more mixed about this.  Don’t care about the artwork, for I do take it as art work. It’s just that the echo it leaves is less inviting than the camaraderie suggested by the bench art: most graffiti comes with a taste of “this is mine” instead of “let’s talk.”

Apart from the boundary goods, the field is patches of wild wheat, blackberry bramble, a small fir, a few willow volunteers, dandelions, foxtail, gorse and a sunflower, pebbles randomly piled, lines of grass breaking up through the remaining concrete, mouse pellets, bird droppings and the claw marks and scat sign of what was probably a passing coyote.

The thing is that I know that academically this mix of plants and animal signs isn’t art because there is no intent behind it, yet the feelings I get from it can be read just as easily as I read my response to the bench art and the graffiti.  That is: my response to the field is an aesthetic response. In fact it is one that is more compelling and more complicated than to most other pieces of true art (that is, an object created with the intention of invoking a response).

And post-field, I feel better, less harried, less out-of-my-skin. It has to be really, really good art to make me feel better so quickly. The shapes, textures, smells, patterns of bits of the world are such that they act like a soul-comb: tease out the knots in the psyche. Art can do that as well, but not usually as effectively.

And now I feel that I can face the fact that I do have a future, but not the coffee shop, not today. Home instead, close the door of my room to my cats and dog, light some incense and read.