Feeling the love?

It’s for you.

There’s a feeling you get when your plane touches down at YVR. That indescribable sensation that comes from somewhere deep inside. It’s the physical manifestation of the feeling, “I’m home.” I knew that feeling even before I lived here.

It was some 30 years ago when I first travelled to this amazing part of our country. I had never really travelled anywhere before. I had no business feeling nostalgic, for this or any other place but where I grew up. And yet, there it was: the knot in my stomach, the pride in my chest, and the grin on my face — a feeling shared by countless others before me, and many to come after. This is a place that dares you not to love it.

Home is where you can be your true self. Maybe that’s why this place immediately feels familiar, flaws and all. Its beauty and its scars are always on display, side by side. This leads to me what I love most about the Lower Mainland: the potential in that paradox.

Photo credit: Kenny Louie https://www.flickr.com/photos/kwl/2397288491/

Some see our natural beauty and say we’re a world-class city, practically perfect in every way. Others only see what pains us: people struggling with vulnerability and exclusion. Look closely though, and you’ll see compassion in the spaces in between, the flashes of local love that prove our true potential — that our people are as beautiful as our geography.

I saw this potential just before dawn on June 16, 2011, when local citizens took to downtown streets to make amends for the riot that came the night before. I see it every year when a team of dedicated North Shore Rescue volunteers head out to find wayward adventurers lost in our backcountry. I’ve seen it recently in the heartwarming ways local residents welcomed an influx of refugees. And this potential is at work quietly every day in neighbourhoods all across the Lower Mainland, whenever a vulnerable child, family or senior makes a life-saving connection in a community program.

When all of us unleash our local love — showing flashes of warmth and compassion and pride — that’s when we see our community’s full potential.

I love you Vancouver, not because of what you are, but because of what you can become.

Brimming with local love,