Not only are the many tasks and challenges of Christmas 2017 accomplished and fulfilled as of today, but I have been gifted further with a head cold. What bliss, this permission! To follow my compass, through this pile of books, then the next, and watch the stash of bookmarks dwindle. To leaf through an article […]
My practice is to wake early, catch my first thoughts in a cup of strong coffee, and pour them out into something written. This morning I find myself in a wide bunk bed that’s been built into the many-windowed, second storey front porch of a student apartment. I look down out of the many-windows at […]
if underneath the obvious thing was always a less obvious slightly disconcerting treasure, if that was a rule of thumb, say. If that treasure was always something like a portal that, when found and claimed turned into a window, then a door. If that door looked like it led to something truly strangely lovely but, […]
There is too much to absorb, digest, translate, re-form into something good and relevant, and far too little time. Someone – Leonard Bernstein? referred to this as one of only two things needed to accomplish Great Things. But when, as my marvellous friend Maria puts it on Wednesday, “every minute of my time is accounted […]
As if I know how to do that. Of course I don’t. As if not knowing how has any bearing whatsoever on the fact that I will do it, regardless. Honestly, what utter nonsense. I’m feeling rumpled. It’s not a comfortable feeling, through not a dangerous one either – I wouldn’t classify this as a mental […]
I seek privacy while I taste these new things. These ideas and thoughts that co-mingle inside my being, each one changing the colour and tone of the one before, sparking new thoughts in marvellous chemical reactivity. More like alchemy, it feels. As though I’m levitated, it feels. All of this internal, so I have few […]
Let’s say in a fit of wild enthusiasm you’ve made a generous statement about the people you play music with: “Anyone can play in this band! Come on over and jam with us!” Word gets out because your music is fun so five new people show up to the next band rehearsal, in this […]
There’s nothing new. But there is a new urgency I can’t ignore or discount – to do so would be futile, and frankly, cowardly. It appears that I’ve come to a place of no return with critical parts of my life that have always been up for negotiation. Like the movement of tectonic plates, a […]
Here’s something. If you slow down a recording of crickets to the speed it would be if their lifespan was equal to humans, it sounds a lot like a human choir (link here). Huh. Another thing. If you look at this global map of the wind, you can see where the wind that just pushed […]
What happens when we don’t take responsibility for healing our own lives, and instead project our buried trauma out onto other people – our children, our families, our friends, our colleagues? What happens when we use all our energy in criticism and complaint, when we use charity and judgement as a way of maintaining privilege […]
Before she went blind at age 42, she read tea leaves for signs of joy and trouble. Through the subsequent five decades I watched, fascinated, when Grandma took her glass eyes out to clean them, as casually as I now clean my glasses. For many of those eye-blind years she lived alone in house […]
There’s no other way to heal, I think. I’ve read this many times. It is lodged in my blood now, where it often sings me awake at night, sometimes until dawn. It is in my belly too, still mostly undigestible. The difficulty lies in the difference between what my heart reads and what my head […]