Flying into Boise, Idaho last week, a State I'd never been to, I was surprised by the rolling desert--brown, arid, sensual; the kind of terrain I often imagine walking into and never returning. Snap.
Then there are huge rectilinear buildings, low to the ground, windowless. Fields of parking lots surround the crouched structures. Some people have to walk miles from their car just to get to their dark work hidden inside. Snap.
The sky is twilight orange, streaked with clouds curving into the horizon, smudged by a thin veil of forest fire smoke. Snap.
Pictures I would have taken for my father, except that he's not there to receive my email, with brief accompanying text. He's not there anymore, or here, in this space, or is it this time? Or is he? Time and space are on my mind these days, and, as is always the case when something particular is on your mind, time and space now seem to be everywhere (as if they weren't already).
Last week in a Suzuki and Viewpoints theatre workshop with SITI Company, we used the placement, shape and movement of our bodies to talk about time and space. Then, as I was flying home from that Boise workshop, I came across these two quotes from Dany Laferrière, a Haitian-Canadian author, in his book, L'Énigme du Retour (beware: this is my hack translation): "We don't live in the same time as another person, even when we are in the same room with them. The past shapes our understanding of the present, and it has a different density for each of us." And this, "It's not easy to be in the same place as your body. Time and space have to unite." And for a full trifecta, listening to a Thich Nhat Hanh meditation on mindful breathing just a few days later, there again was the idea of my body being present, but my mind in another place, in another time, in the past, in the future.
My father died five months ago and yet he is more present to me now than he has been since my childhood.
I started sending my father photos three years ago, when I was on a trip to Colorado with my youngest brother, shortly before he was diagnosed with melanoma. My father liked getting the photos, so I kept on, sending him snapshots of things I saw along the way in my life--a man's hat on the subway (shot from the hip, so he didn't know), railway girders swooshing by against a night sky from a train window on the way to Boston, the chili pepper light switch at my yoga studio, an unexpected herd of sheep on a mountain bike ride on the Emigrant Trail to Stampede Reservoir, a hard boiled egg in fluted glass ramekin on a patterned mouse pad. 
Once my father said I had a good eye. I stowed that compliment away in my pocket, like a lucky pebble, shining his words between my thumb and forefinger when I was thinking of him. It was the most regular contact I'd had with him for years. I didn't think of him as a constant presence in my life.
So I am surprised, again and again these days by how often I am assailed by thoughts of my father. Pictures I would have taken for him, or even just have thought of taking. How often I see a scene that makes me think of him--a man taking his young daughter for a bicycle ride on a country road. And suddenly I'm rinsed through with sadness all over again.
I didn't know until he died that my father was like breathing for me. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds me to notice my in-breath, notice my out-breath. How often do any of us actually notice that we are breathing? How often are time and space united?
Snap. I took a picture of a sunflower while running on the Camelback trails in Boise. It was for my father, even though he won't see it. Or if he does, he won't have needed me to take a picture of it. I thought about taking a picture of the brilliant royal blue house I passed on the way home from that run on N10th Street. Snap. If I had, I would have sent the photo to him with this message: A possible colour for the next time you paint the house.