May 6, 2025
Gleanings
- Yesterday, enroute to the opera, we paused on the walkway leading off the ferry to watch 3 seals sunning themselves on rocks. It was a low tide. The ferry was right on time. On the muddy shore, a pair of geese with their goslings dozed at the edge of the water.
- It’s not just about choosing between glass half empty and glass half full perspectives: I think it really matters that we not turn our grimmest anecdata into the dominant narrative.
- My kink is making salad dressing with the last of the mustard in the jar, or a cup of tea in the jar to use up the dregs of the honey. These are small but satisfying actions, that ensure precious resources literally don’t go down the drain.
- The fringe tree and wisteria –– les pièces de résistance –– are the last to awaken, with a spectacle of long white streamers and violet blooms so beautiful that it’s a wonder we’re in Toronto and not Monet’s garden. The only thing now left are the anemones, and they won’t appear until late Summer when the whole garden is so verdant and alive that it’s hard to imagine that all of this beauty was ever underground. I watch it all unfold like a piece of music that gradually thickens and intensifies as instruments enter one by one.
- The digital sphere is horizontal, when what people crave is the vertical or deep engagement. As artists we are all about the vertical. I can’t help but think about how we all keep being fed this stuff we don’t really want.
- I met a friend on the way in (a friend from the outside world, not the pool) who told me that the pool wasn’t too crowded, and her beautiful child told me that water was great, and they were both right.
- This isn’t a story about church. Heaven knows, I’m not the one to tell that story, at least not today. This is a story, maybe, about grief and love. About life, and death, which, I suppose, is really what all stories are about.
- “To what purpose?” It’s probably just a fancy way to say “why??” but it has the advantage of *feeling* new. So when I find myself NOT throwing something away (like instructions for something we no longer own), I ask myself this question. And when the answer is “for collage or another art project” I ask again, for a couple of reasons. First, “interesting” instructions appear with some regularity, so all I have to do is either wait or check the recycle bin. And second, I haven’t made a collage since the pandemic lockdowns.
- While I’m always excited to read Lindsay’s work, I’m especially intrigued by this particular book, as it deals with a dynamic that hits close to home—the challenge of trying to make art while navigating the foggy, panicked, exhausting days of early motherhood. Though my kids are older now, and finding the time and energy to write no longer feels quite so impossible, the difficulties of balancing creative and care work never totally go away
- I only cried once, but it was almost from happiness. Or maybe it was from sadness. Or maybe both. The thing about grief, made visible, is that it’s made up of all the things a human can feel.
- My almost-might-have-been-brilliant career foundered on the dreaded shoals of non-confidence, from within and without. I cannot tell you how many times my manuscripts have apparently gone missing in large Ontario publishing houses. I am the freaking Queen of the Lost Manuscripts. This is not a business for the faint of heart or thin of hide and by then, I possessed both. What, I ask, would Pierre Berton do?
- On this spring morning in Wheatley, with the woods flush with snow-white Trilliums beginning to bloom, the park looked and smelled like hope and joy to me.
- I feel strongly that we can’t solve gendered polarization online. The online world is a tricky place for all of us, on the left or right, because we are unable and unwilling to step into the one another’s spheres, and what we see from the “other side” often entrenches us even further in our beliefs.
- The bear is a bear; the bear is Grendel, embodiment of our oldest and deepest fears; the bear is cancer; the bear is nature. They are all, in their own way, wild – and the wilderness is not somewhere else, separate, held back or “conserved” within inside the arbitrary boundaries of a park.
