Something’s shifted in the last month. The seasons, of course, as they always do in Vancouver. The days are growing even longer, and there are not quite so many rainy days. You start seeing a procession of flowers. First snowdrops under the trees, then crocuses. The first optimistic buds on the tips of bare branches. Ducks and geese begin to pair up, noisily. The park is like a marketplace, full of birdsong and sunlight. Snow comes for a day, but then melts almost immediately. And then, by fits and starts, the weather starts to grow warmer.

I’m feeling the same about my studies. Our clinic is finishing, and I let the first of my clients go this week, not without some regrets, but in the knowledge that our time together made a significant difference in their lives. Perhaps this finishing of a complete cycle of counselling for the first time has given me a new sense of confidence in my abilities: I’m a little further away from that academic who is training to be a counsellor, and a little closer to being a counsellor who used to be an academic, and who still remains a scholar. 

I’ve also re-engaged with the two classes that I have been taking, after a period of feeling that I am marking time. The classes are in many ways a complete contrast. The first, on gender and sexuality in counselling, is very free form, and if I do find attending to three hours of discussion via zoom exhausting, classmates are very willing to explore personal issues, and the readings provided are very current. It’s interesting to come back to a topic that I did a great deal of research on early on in my career, and to find how much the landscape has changed, with the much more open expression of trans and non-binary identities, and a new series of questions to digest and think through. I’m curious now to look back on work that I’ve done, notably my book Autobiography and Decolonization, and to wonder how I might have contextualized my research differently today. And also to revisit my own experiences with sexuality and social conformity, to recall events of forty years ago which I’d forgotten about, and which still make me tear up. The second class, in program development, is something that I instinctively shy away from. It’s very well-organized and structured. The textbook we use, Nancy Calley’s Program Development in the 21st Century:  An Evidence-Based Approach to Design, Implementation, and Evaluation, is quite off-putting in its stress on counselling as a business, but we do cover other, more community-based models, from organizations such as United Way. I do find myself resisting the way in which neoliberal terminology is now so dominant in the way we think about organizational structure, and struggle to find an alternative language of community. I’m probably too old to change here, to put into the effort of learning how to struggle to speak the discourse but not be spoken by it. But it’s nonetheless curious to reflect and look back in a different way, to begin to analyze my time as a university administrator, the insoluble problems and contradictions I faced then, and to think whether I might have done anything differently.

I tell myself not to get too eager to be caught up in this sense of an ending. Not yet. I have six more weeks of classes before the end of my final semester of classes, group projects to write, and then a growing number of commitments from that academic career that I put on hold but never quite stopped: a book chapter to write, a seminar to give and another in which I will serve as a respondent, a manuscript workshop to attend. The semester ends, and then, finally, I’ll make that much delayed return to Singapore. We’re hoping for almost two months there after we serve out our SHN at a hotel. We return to Vancouver in July, hopefully to vaccination, and then an eight-month practicum that begins in September. This time next year, if all goes well, I’ll be finishing up my practicum and looking forward to graduation in May.  

I’m searching for a metaphor as a way of thinking through the changes of the last two years. In the forests in BC, whether in Stanley Park, on the North Shore, or further afield on Vancouver Island or in the interior, you often come across the old stumps of trees that were logged a century or more ago. If they are cedar, they do not rot, or do so very slowly. You can often see the niches that loggers carved into the stump to support the boards they would stand on with their long saws. Cedar wood resists rot, but it is also very fertile: after a time the wood becomes like mulch, a deep red crumbling soil that reminds me of the red laterite you see on plantations in Malaysia. And then, often, a seed from a nearby tree falls and lodges on the stump. It begins to grow. The stump becomes a nursing log. At first the new tree is very small, a tiny bonsai sprouting from a vast, disintegrating plant pot. As it grows taller the stump begins to vanish, to melt away. This seems to be a useful way of thinking about how change draws on and yet inevitably consumes what is past, both within the space of one lifetime and between lifetimes. How what is past disintegrates and provides food for the present, both for me and for others who will take the seeds of what I have done and transform them in very different, unexpected and wonderful ways.