March 22, 2022
Gleanings
- If anything, ballet is forcing me to rethink my relationship with my middle-aged body and instead of noticing only the beginnings of older age descending upon me, I now marvel at what my body is capable of and the incremental changes I’ve seen as I’ve learned to stand with more confidence and courage. And as for the imperfections? They’re part of being alive.
- …still one of the finest books of short fiction to appear so far in the 21st century.
- The key for me is that I keep writing, even if what I have to say is as frothy as a cappuccino. Because when the urge does come for me to express something weightier, I’m more likely to have the words.
- I missed the practice of framing the world through my viewfinder. I began wondering what I would find if I photographed my city as I would photograph Rome? If I looked at Edmonton, so often described in terms of ugliness, with love-coloured glasses?
- “In terms of the scope of the war, it’s the Russians who have done badly,” he says. “The ground campaign has been pathetic. And the whole world is watching.”
- The thing about having a practice, is to remember that it’s just that, a practice. It’s not something ever present, but something to continue to work toward. Sometimes there’s joy, sometimes not.
- The greatest gift I can imagine is if you give yourself the gift of a book.
- The rest of the intentions were along the lines of: “Make more time for myself”; “Learn to accept myself more”; “Learn to say no more often.” I wanted to feel empathetic towards the women, but all I could think was: blah…blah…blah…Self-improvement 101 stuff. (Perhaps I needed the retreat more than I thought I did?)
- Recently, I shared a photo of myself on an island beach trail. I looked at the photo and thought this is who I am.
- Somehow, that is, the end of Owen’s life has to become part of the story of my own life: rather than considering it a break, a catastrophic rupture, in that story (the way it feels to me now), I need to learn to see it as belonging to a new, different continuity. (Mrs. Ramsay, though dead, is still very present in “The Lighthouse.”)
- So I decided to keep writing, to let the plot unfold like the textiles in the small museum run by the cousin in Lviv, a city as haunted as any, and even if I can’t return, my character can go for the first time. She can hear an opera, drink coffee on Serbska Street, look at old books at the market by the Fedorov monument, and sit with her cousin, drawing the tree that gathers them both into its root system, families on each spreading branch.
- I began writing poetry and doing contemporary dance around the same time in high school, and they’re definitely connected for me—they’re both non-linear, non-narrative, and imagistic
- How we think we are one independent organism, living, breathing, acting on our own, and how I have so often felt so assured that I could, or even should do it on my own… and yet, there’s no possible way that we can’t not be interdependent. We need and are dependent on one another, and each provide gifts, seen and unseen, spoken and unspoken for the other, and receive what we need and more from others in return.
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