December 1, 2020
Gleanings
- No matter the disasters and disputes of the day, we were happy together following Bilbo Baggins to the Lonely Mountain, or Jules Verne’s adventurers on their way to the centre of the Earth.
- I wanted him to sleep under symbols of the place that is part of him, even though he doesn’t live here. And when those constellations appear in the sky over his home in Ottawa, he can look at them and imagine them in a slightly different orientation thousands of miles west.
- This leaf feels like my grandmother’s hand. No wonder I can’t stop holding it.
- I try to have a schedule, but I’m extremely bad at keeping schedules. I have watched corporate blog after corporate blog go to crap, because there was a posting schedule where you had to write five posts a day. I think that everybody would rather just write when you have something good to say.
- Now that I’ve discovered the true story, I’m highly motivated and loving the writing process.
- At this time of the year the light at latitude 53 arrives to pool in surprising places in the house.
- Here’s our VERY RETRO Advent Love-to-Do-List for 2020!
- “We are solitary travellers, having crossed paths in the land of stories.”
- If we want to fully reclaim the witch, let’s make sure that we are not ourselves ignorantly engaging in practices that harm others.
- Should dictionaries be trying to present us with a less biased world than the one we currently inhabit—or is their real obligation to reflect the world as it is, and as it shapes our use of words?
- Then I looked at the food mixer and realised that’s at least twenty five years old and suddenly I felt old and had another of those tempus fugit in a flash moments.
- These are cold days. Perhaps not in terms of temperature. No frost, no snow, no thin skittering of ice on the water. But there’s a chill at their centre. A chill of not-knowing.
- Beauty should never be only about pretty flowers and shallow depth of field.
- With November, comes a return to drinking tea.
- I regularly come away from our silent (and often not-so-silent!) book club feeling ready to burst: with book recommendations, with revitalized enthusiasm for my reading (when it has flagged or been kind of muddled in recent months), with sheer joy at connecting and sharing with such an amazing, generous and eclectically inclined group of booklovers.*
- I can’t seem to muster the mental or physical energy to keep up with regular blogging right now (blame an excess of computer time for other purposes plus a spell of back pain – happily now subsided – making it particularly unappealing to spend yet more time at my desk!). But I also can’t stand to watch the pile of read books growing without saying something about them.*
*Last two picks feature Waiting for a Star to Fall!
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