August in Tofino

It is August in Tofino, and the tourists are in a frenzy. The whole town is slightly crazed, as too many people and cars overrun our tiny village. One hears the locals lamenting; one gets messages from former Tofitians saying they miss how Tofino was. I miss how it was too and am so glad I was here during those years, when we stood on the road for the trees - the largest incidence of civil disobedience (at that time) in Canadian history. The event that let the world know how beautiful it is here and began the stampede that has made it hard to live here for everyone except for the very rich.

However, I have always been a glass-half-full kind of person, and everything I love about Tofino is still here: the sweet little village, with its familiar funky buildings; the way fog and clouds play along the slopes of Wah'nah'juss; the pink sky at dawn when the world looks brand new; sunsets at the beach, and those white forever waves rolling in like white-maned horses.

I love the conscious, awakened village folk, too, so aware of the privilege it is to live in this environment, on the Ha-hoolthii of the Tl-o-qui-aht people, in this beautiful Sound, full of some of the last old-growth on the planet, home to wolves and bears and cougar, to the aboriginal guardians of the land - and to us.

The tourists come here for a season, pay thousands of dollars to spend a few days here. A motel room can cost four or five hundred dollars a night here, more for the upscale ones. Yikes. This makes finding housing and hanging on here difficult for we low-income folk. Rents are equivalent to most of our monthly incomes. We cling on like marsupials to a wavering branch.

But how rich in spirit we are, hearts expanding at the beauty we are surrounded by, immersed in, in love with. My eyes bless every beloved, familiar shape. My prayer is a constant one of gratitude: Thank You. Thank You. Thank You for this beauty, and for bringing me home a second time.