When a place turns into a verb and saves you
As usual my iPhone is buzzing, the business line is ringing and my name is being called somewhere from above my home office.
I feel up to here with stimulation. On my best days, this is a ballet of tasks and conversations that lifts me through my day, still doing the work I have loved for two decades as a communicator and designer. But today it all seems a bit much.
I look at the calendar and realize how long it has been since I had a true break from the cacophony and endlessly spooling list of to-dos. My soul seems very far away, despite all my mindfulness practices, which is just another way of saying just do one thing at a time and be present for it. I seem to have forgotten how.
There is a place in the world where I can go every year and remind myself what being in the physical world is like. Where my iPhone becomes only another camera, I can’t be reached except by the wilderness touching my soul.

Tzoonie is my magical place… and now a verb and a state of mind. My friends Art and Aleta have been running it since the late 70’s, tucked away in Narrows Inlet on BC’s Sunshine Coast. It is only one hour by boat from Sechelt, but about halfway along the journey, modern signals are lost, the fjords look wilder — with no terraced hillsides of homes to distract from the timelessness of evergreens meeting the ocean — and I can give myself over to the rhythms of the tides, the moon, the sun, the currents, and the bounty of sea and shore.

The clocks and watches go away, the battery on my iPhone lasts for two entire days since I switched it into camera-only mode. I arise whenever I wake up, and leave my tent-house cabin for my first cup of Art’s super-strong camp coffee, served in the same smokey enamel pot he’s used for years.

A quick and nourishing breakfast and carrying a packed picnic lunch I’ve prepared, I head out in a kayak for a nearby point loaded with August blackberries. I cruise along hoping to see a black bear or river otter. There is no one on the water here in the inlet for a mile in either direction except me. The water is like glass and drips down the paddle into the sea as I glide past the shore. I look up at the glaciers of Whistler beyond the inlet’s end and feel I am in the grip of something much bigger than my own miniscule experience.


I can hear my daughter and her friend, teenagers entering their last year of high school, laughing and talking as they float in the inner bay, surrounded by boomsticks protecting the docks. Seagulls, terns, merganzers, a blue heron named Hank, and Sammy the seal colonize the viewing bleachers the logs provide. I am hoping this escape will ground them for their final year, remind them of what is truly real.

Tonight we will dine on mussels and oysters I have helped harvest and clean, along with Dungeness crab. I’ll pick a can of sparkling water out of the plastic bucket in the creek and drink it by the Oyster Shack on the beach, watching another impossibly gorgeous sunset. My daughter’s friend and I will decide to swim at 9pm in the last of the evening’s light, marvelling at the beauty of the beautiful (and harmless) white jellyfish pulsing by in the currents. I feel like a musical note annotated into the history of the natural world.

My brain is empty, my spirit wide and full. I hear an orca and its baby across the inlet where they have taken up evening residence in the small cove there. I can’t believe that only an hour’s comfortable boat ride from civilization we are the only ones here to witness the stars unveiling in the blanket of dark sky, and later to watch fish and seal in their underwater dances, illuminated by bioluminescence. It feels so big I can’t contain it all.

Tzoonie is now a verb: Do you Tzoonie? and a state of mind I can recall back at my desk just by closing my eyes and listening for the late afternoon wind in the evergreens, the lapping of the ocean on the beach and through the sea asparagus, tasting the salt in the air, being in all of the abundance.

Every person spending time behind a screen needs to have their own private Tzoonie.
Sometimes it’s in the disconnection that the profound connection reappears.

If you would like to Tzoonie, Art & Aleta would love to hear from you.
Laurie McConnell has lived on the Sunshine Coast for 30 years, and has run her own communications and web design businesses — and a regional portal — since 1997. She has traveled the BC Coast up to Haida Gwaii, Europe and parts of Mexico, and Tzoonie Narrows is her top destination of all time.
