Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 13 (2), 200830 Finding Home: A Walk, a Meditation, a Memoir, a Collage

I unabashedly love Toronto, where I’ve lived for more than three decades. Two of those I’ve resided in this apartment on the west side of town—close to the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), to the parks and pathways that connect my living and working sites with those institutions and my other haunts. What thrills me most about this city? Its diverse peoples, half of whom were born outside Canada.1 Its neigh-bourhoods. Its walkability. Its ravines. Leaving OCAD at the end of an afternoon’s teaching, I loved to stroll through the crowds, images, noises and smells of adjacent downtown Chinatown, enjoying the hurly-burly along Dundas Street West, the shapes and colours of the once-unfamiliar fruits and vegetables of the street-side displays, the streetcar’s clang of impatience as it noses through the congested traffic, the sweet, dense smells wafting from the herbalists ’ open doorways. I’m also enamoured of its counterpoint: the hipster urban gloss a few blocks south and west along Queen Street (close to my studio), its trendy storefronts filled wit