Solstice has passed, and with it the last full moon of 2021. With COVID 19 cases in BC rising sharply, we went back and forth about travelling during the break, and finally decided to continue with our plans. We first took the ferry to Victoria, BC’s capital and second city in terms of size. Victoria’s never quite appealed to me, although I keep coming back and trying to like the city again and again. There’s something disconcerting about the pastiche of Canadiana and Britishness that the city serves up for American tourists, the shops full of Mountie hats, life-size stuffed bears, maple leaves and Union Jacks as you descend Douglas Street to the cliff of the Empress Hotel on the inner harbour and enter the colonial nostalgia of its Bengal Room. James Bay and Beacon Hill are less intense, and you can get away from the city here and breathe, but the sense of an Anglophile simulacrum never leads you. The cliffs as you walk up along the sea out of James Bay, overlooked by new apartment buildings, hint at Bournemouth or Brighton. At Beacon Hill you escape again momentarily, looking out over container ships passing in the Juan de Fuca Strait to the snow-capped mountains of the Olympic Peninsula to the south. But if you crest the hill and return to the city via the park the uneasiness of the simulation returns. You leave the garry oak forest to enter a manicured Victorian park, emerald green lawns on which peacocks stroll, bandstands with wedding-cake woodwork, and rustic ponds stocked full of fat ducks. It’s as if you’re inside a stage set that you can never quite exit, no matter how far you walk, or a maze in which you always, no matter what path you take, return to the centre. 

In Victoria, snow came, and the weather turned much colder than it normally gets in BC. At night, walking back from restaurants, we found the wind chill factor took the temperature below -10C. After three days, we escaped to Malahat, half an hour north of Victoria, up a mountain with the snow falling thickly, covering everything in white. We stayed at a resort high on the mountainside, two walls of our suite made up of floor to ceiling windows with views — when the snow finally stopped falling — of the Saanich Inlet below.

For the first time I felt that I had left my practicum behind. In Victoria, I found myself dreaming of my sessions and the people I work with, much as I used to have recurrent dreams about teaching or even about my doctorate, realizing just before my graduation ceremony that I had neglected to take one vital foundational course.  Up the mountain, the dreams began to change, and the practicum began to fall into perspective, as my supervisor said it would. A note to self for the future: take frequent breaks from the routine of counselling. A rest takes you away from a world that is all-consuming, which sometimes, as you still struggle to find a sense of balance, sucks out from your life those spaces that you should preserve for those you are close to. And the time out also lets things settle. In my last sessions before the break in December, I went back with some of the people I’m working with and reviewed the journey we’d made together: it is only with the distance of the late December break that I will now begin to plot the future three months’ work until my practicum ends.

With the Solstice passing, and the New Year coming, the days are beginning to grow longer, almost imperceptibly at first. January and February are often the coldest months, but as the days begin to lengthen, the daffodils will begin to come out again on English Bay. It’s been a dark winter, with incessant rain, floods, and now unseasonable cold, and with the threat of COVID-19, most recently in its Omicron variant, always present. I realized too that my mood has been affected by the gloom of the seasonal changes in BC more than before, and in particular the absence of light: in the last month I’ve consciously exercised and meditated more frequently, and bought a therapy lamp. I still have a little further to go as winter deepens, and January, with new clients and additional group work, will be particularly intense. Things will be more difficult before they get easier. But one morning above the Saanich Inlet, with the dawn light chasing the crescent moon out of the sky, the distant city lights fading and the mountains, dusted in snow, coming slowly into view, the softness of last night’s snow outside our window, four years since we flew in from Singapore, I felt ready for the last lap of what has proved both a more difficult and yet also a richer learning journey than I had hoped.