During the first lockdown in 2020, I lived in an old tenement building on Easter Road in Edinburgh, Scotland. One day, I looked up the distance between my flat and Lochend Park, the nearest green space. 1.126 kilometres. I could gaze out my kitchen window in its direction while washing dishes or making coffee. Although I couldn’t see the loch itself, nor its abundance of waterfowl, something in my body eased knowing that it was close by. In ten minutes or less, I could arrive at Lochend Butterfly Way and be surrounded, almost as if suddenly, by trees and swans.
I found that number online. I am obsessed with the distance between spaces. By that, I mean not only geographical distances but temporal and inherited distances too. In this context, a number as concrete as 1.126 kilometres can, at times, feel meaningless. When I slide into memory, the distance between my old flat and Lochend Park might as well be infinite. At the loch, I might look over its edge and feel myself transported to the Bow River, the body of water that bisects the city of Calgary. I could lean against the strong trunk of an oak tree, thriving with spring blossoms, and instead find myself under the shade of the half-blossomed crab-apple tree in the backyard of one of my several childhood homes. Simply put, places remind me of other places and I am less bothered – more intrigued – that these remembrances swell between the boundaries of real and unreal.
If I am honest, wild waters did not always mean so much to me. I grew up in Edmonton, a midwestern city, landlocked and far away from the ocean. Even within that city, I lived in the opposite direction from one of its watery landmarks, the North Saskatchewan River. And later, my time living in a small town in rural Alberta, overwhelmed with farmlands and rolling prairies, also instilled within me a craving for busy cities rather than wide open natural spaces. Perhaps every young girl is always looking elsewhere, facing the direction of something she desires, and in that process, turns away from all that she has.
You are hiding something here. You know that in rural Alberta, the natural world, those wide open spaces, did not always feel welcoming. Near the town you lived in, there might have been grasslands and birch trees, neighbouring lakes, mesmeric gardens, and long stretches canola fields, but amidst all that space, there was not even one single mosque.
That spring, during lockdown, I walked to Lochend Park almost every day. I had just completed my PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh – my studies were what had first brought me to Scotland – and my mind was conditioned to analysis, to notetaking. I had amassed fieldnotes upon fieldnotes in my notebooks. The swans are a nostalgic tracing on the water says one section, and it sits next to a quote from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writing about Nishnaabeg pedagogy: ‘“Theory” isn’t just an intellectual pursuit–it is woven with kinetics, spiritual presence and emotion, it is contextual and relational’.
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