into the big wide world...

Today I was standing at the back of the Women's Bookshop here in Toronto (actually just around the corner from my house) enjoying the launch of Scott Morgensen's new book Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. The book is an older sibling of mine, in that it is form the same publisher (Minnesota), and is a great contribution to Indigenous Studies. Woohoo yay Scott!

As we celebrating the arrival of the book into the big wide world, I received a txt from Megan, reporting that she and Matiu had arrived in Japan and were on a train heading towards her host family... they had a wonderful time in Sydney yesterday, seeing family and friends (Matiu got to catch up with his dear mate Aliyah who he first met when I was living in Sydney in early 2009), and the boy had slept the whole way to Japan. This is great news, not only because it means Matiu will be able to enjoy his time in Japan without spending a day of being grumpy and tired, but also because it bodes well for the big flight in a week when they fly to Heathrow and then New York City.

Meanwhile, it was a very cold day and I was comfortably schlepping around home in PJ bottoms and a hoodie with the arms cut off (my idea of high fashion when I'm at home and unlikely to see another human), and Sarah rang and talked me into going for a walk to Kensington Market to have a slice of delish pie at Wanda's, a great bakery/ cafe we found there... admittedly it didn't take a lot to convince me!

This evening, after the book launch Nadine and I came back here and made dinner (my new party trick: a yummy shrimp/ prawn rice thingie which is described in the recipe as a 'Greek paella' and which reminds me of very yummy rice rissotto) and toasted our own book success with wine given to us by our dear friend Katherine, who had brought the bottle back for us from Italy. Yum! We had agreed that we would enjoy the wine when both of our books were out into the world... or at least the first stage, off our own laptops!

Finally, I spent a long time this evening fb chatting with my dear friend Ka'imi in Hawai'i - and her lovely son Kikau, who fb chatted with me for a while; we compared the decorations on the Christmas trees in our respective lounges. When Ka'imi and I chatted online, we both had a glass of wine in one hand and a laptop in the other, and covered a massive range of topics (jobs, family, children, love, being Indigenous, the Struggle, education, Christmas, faith, and so on) while we sipped and typed... our words flew and swam back and forth between us as we typed.

It's a huge world we live in, and it's exciting when new things are launched and when links are affirmed... they remind us of the spaces between us that are not the absence but the presence of connection.