Montreal Reflections
My journey with Green Dream has intriguingly borough me to Montreal.
I am sitting in a coffee shop and listening to a heart felt conversation about a break up, where one person is speaking in English and the other one in French. A truly bilingual conversation, where I can only understand the half of what is being said.
I am thinking that Canada might be the only country (at least to my knowledge) where a person can get the chance to be an immigrant twice. After years of learning to jive with the English Canadian culture, now I feel like an immigrant again in the French Canadian Culture. But in a way it is a privileged to be a humble learner again.
I am starting to understand that there is a bit of a schizophrenia in the Canadian psyche, where half of the country feels like immigrants in the other half of the country. There is something unique in this dichotomy. It reminds me of the right and left hemisphere of our brains, which process information quite differently but which are both needed for our proper function. And while we tend to be dominant in one hemisphere, a person achieves full balance when they use the right and the left hemisphere.
It seem like in Montreal embracing the two cultures is everyday life occurrence, where conversations flow from French to English to French. And I feel fortunate to be here, even if I am missing the concrete meaning of the French language I understand it in spirit.
Interestingly it feels like coming to Montreal has brought me a full circle. This buildings remind me of the soviet style apartment buildings where my Green Dream story first began. I rent a little desk studio space in the building on the left (picture above)
(This is an interesting article about the previous history of this area, and the plans for its future
http://www.montrealgazette.com/Redefining+Viateur/1346153/story.html )
An alley in the Mile End.
The Church St.Vieteur in my favorite hood.