A Good Day an October dawn during Indian summer, I stepped out to use the outhouse. My father and uncle were visiting me. I thought I would get the stove lit well before the old gents rose to a cold cabin. The fall colours were half in the trees and half on the ground. The pre dawn light was glowing giving the air a luminous depth. My old outhouse was very crudely built with the door hanging off the hinges. I sat looking out at all the beauty and feeling great peace.
I had spent three years building and building and building. That time had been a constant battle against nature. I had fought the wet and the cold and the bugs to build my place. When I finally achieved the state I call warm and dry, I started to ask myself questions. These questions all boiled down to why was I crazy enough to come out to the woods with no skills and try to escape into solitude. I decided to put my self into therapy.
After a year in Toronto doing Primal Therapy I had found a great deal of peace along with many answers. I made a decision to enjoy my place in the country. I spent the whole summer doing nothing but making art. Art had been a pastime that I had left in my past. Now it became something I could enjoy again.
This was the fall, the October of that decision. I sat thinking of all the images I had created and how rich I felt in their creation. I then heard a couple of crunches to my right. There four feet in front of me appeared a beautiful healthy Fox. He looked up at me and I said, "Hello." He disappeared back the way he had come. I thought that this was special and went back to feeling contentment. This time I heard not one sound as he appeared beside me again. He was on the left side this time and purposefully looked up at me not more than three feet away. I said, "Hello," again. Just at that moment a huge flock of Starlings landed in the trees around the clearing. There must have been close to one thousand birds. They started to play musical chairs in a counter clockwise motion. There was a deep throbbing stop and start rhythm to it. This went on for four or five minutes then they landed one more time before taking off in a roaring upward spiral.
When I looked back down, the Fox was still looking up. I said, "It looks like it's going to be a Good Day." The Fox looked at me and then disappeared without a sound. Overwhelmed I looked towards the cabin. The sun came up at that moment. It shone through the window on the far side of the cabin and then passed through one of the red bottles I had embedded in the chinking on this side of the cabin. The red light splashed into my eyes. At that moment I made peace with mother nature.