My friend Topher is a filmmaker and chaos magician. He’s the oldest friend I’m still in regular contact with – we were fourteen when we met – and he’s been urging me to visit him in Vancouver since he moved there.

That was more than ten years ago now. It’s long overdue (I don’t travel well), but I finally went!

I don’t think Topher has ever shown up at my door without a gift – a candle, a bottle of mead, something – so I made something for him before I left. Beard/skin/bath oil with green tea, rosemary, and chamomile.

Vancouver is only a short flight away from my hometown. It’s still Western Canada, but it’s a much larger, more famous city than mine. The film industry is big there, which is why Topher moved.

I don’t do well in cars or on planes, but I do always love exploring a new city once I get there. I walk past fun little architectural details like this at home and don’t always notice them, but in a new place I notice them more easily:

By virtue of being on the ocean, Vancouver also just… doesn’t get snow like the prairies do. In Edmonton, where I live, the first signs of thaw are starting to show, but we’ll have snow and ice until mid-April. Weather-wise, my Ostara time looks more like the Imbolc photos I see from witches in gentler climates.

Vancouver felt a lot more like your average Ostara moodboard. Rainy, cool, but already green. There were crocuses blooming there already, which is a still a while away here:

And Topher has ferrets!!! I used to keep ferrets when I was younger, and love them. Good names, too – Ziggy and Stardust.

This was the first morning in Vancouver, and we absolutely packed that day full of adventures:

• Breakfast
• Walk through the city/by the ocean
• Train ride to Richmond for shopping and dumplings
• Matinee of And Then There Were None at the Metro Theatre
• Stroll through Kitsilano to Banyen Books, where I found too many perfect things and went through almost all my spending money at once (no regrets)
• Bonfire and grilled brie on Jericho Beach with some of Topher’s friends

My bag of books and treasures from Banyen isn’t the only thing I brought home. I kept a piece of driftwood, charred by our bonfire, for my altar. And a curious thing happened at the theatre, too.

My rose quartz tower cleaved in half.

That morning, I drew The Empress and the High Priestess flanking the IV of Cups. It felt immediately clear to me what those cards were referring to – two prominent figures in a journey I’ve been working through recently, which deserves its own post – and I sensed that they affirmed the conclusion I had recently reached. The full story is a long one, and it is unnecessary to write out all the minutiae, but when the tower broke, I felt the omen of the cards was confirmed. Something I’d been treating as one thing, and which that tower had represented in my practice, is two things.

At Jericho Beach, I cleansed and blessed the two halves of that tower in the ocean. I haven’t seen the ocean in many years. Clear night, bright moon.

The next day we met up with Topher’s friend CJ again and went to Stanley Park, which exceeded my (high) expectations. It’s a truly magical place.

We did get a little lost and ended up taking a very long walk along the seawall (during which I tripped over my own feet and got covered in mud), but if you’re going to be lost and walking for a long time, the edge of the ocean’s not a bad place to do it. And eventually we did find our way, and came up near the Teahouse.

The rest of the trip was a little quieter after those two very full days, but all of it was wonderful. The sushi was to die for, the city is beautiful, and I couldn’t have asked for better hosts and tour guides.

I’m home and safe now, with a few lovely parting gifts from CJ including this new guardian for my front door:

And thanks to that trip to Banyen, I have lots of new books to read.