Fifth Journey Day 11: Reluctant Emergence

Date: May 19, 2025
Location: Yellowknife, Canada

I walked the Frame Lake Trail today and let the land speak to me. The trail curved between pieces of granite and thin, thin black spruce trees. The rock felt solid but uneven, shaped by time and the weight of winter. In some places, the surface was cracked into thin, messy lines that looked like veins or ancient writing. I traced them absentmindedly with my fingers as I rested.

The water was still and looked like a dull gray mirror, with only a slight ripple where the wind stirred it. It held the weight of the sky so completely that it seemed like it wasn't even there. There was a strange comfort in how this vastness became quiet; the absence of drama felt like a kind of permission to simply observe.

I stopped to draw a group of dwarf birch trees where their branches bent down because they were thin. Their shapes were soft and accepting of their situation. There was no resistance; they simply adapted. The wind lifted and dropped strands of dried grass like soft, unintentional gestures across stone.

What I noticed most was that the colors here don't stand out. They whisper of soft green colors that have been made dull by frost, browns that lean towards grey, and even the yellow of lichen that has been made less bright against the cold rock. At first, my pencil lines felt too sharp. I made them less intense, adding light layers of paint over each other, trying to capture the feeling of something appearing and then disappearing.

As I sat watching the light change, I thought about stillness not as the absence of motion, but as an active state of waiting. Yellowknife feels like that — it's a place where land and sky exist together without one being dominant over the other.

I walked back in the same soft wind, thinking how rarely we allow ourselves to become part of a landscape without trying to claim it.