March 28, 2024

Gleanings

• and I realized that my quiet writing has a relevance to those who are willing to listen. And even if it doesn’t, I need to do it.
• A lot of writers, I can only assume, would feel like they can’t write about a thing unless they’re an expert about the topic, but there’s a lot of activity that happens in the act of learning. That’s where the factual stuff in both of our stories feeds the emotional content.
• How do I know so much about these Mills & Boon romances? Because I snuck into my sister’s books of course. Later I also snuck into my father’s bookshelves and read all the juicy bits from his Harold Robbins books (The Carpetbaggers comes to mind) and Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying along with Leon Uris’s Exodus and others. It was my dad who ignited my love for books and stories early, with his bedtime storytelling. He was born a storyteller.
• Contrast isn’t about what’s better or worse, or right or wrong, it’s not about comparing one thing to another — instead, I think about vibrancy, colours, shadow, texture, depth and height, the common structures of my everyday, and how routines and patterns might be shifted to bring even more enjoyment, pleasure, delight to my mind.
• When I told my boyfriend that I wanted to die, he hung up on me. I was seventeen and sitting in my basement, winding a phone cord round and round my fingers.
• But even with words to wrap around it—English, Welsh, and otherwise—I am so often so unsure of what those I love are thinking, seeing, forgetting, remembering. That doesn’t mean they’re disappearing. It means they’re only partially perceptible to me.
• It’s a litmus test for me to know who my people are and it almost always works. For some people it’s astrology. For me, it’s the blind recklessness of youth and how it did or didn’t define us. How we grew ourselves from the filth of our regret. Found purpose from our accidents. Failed and got back out there.
• First customer is looking for a hand puppet for a gift. I show her a giraffe and she says pointedly No Giraffes! and I wonder what happened there.
• There is something special about living on an island. I see it in the faces of strangers when I mention we live on an island. They look at us with astonishment, surprise, and sometimes, envy. They ask a hundred and one questions. Is it expensive to take the ferry? What is health care like? Are there wild animals? Does everyone know each other’s business? Have you been welcomed into the island community? What is there to do on an island?
• It was the flashing bitcoin sign in the window that caught my eye, maybe because I’d heard that crypto is sky-rocketing. I’ve walked past this corner shop over a hundred times, and until last week, I’d never noticed how charming it is.
• For me, this moment was a clear provocation for us to think about Mina’s own project. Is it possible to tell the story of Peter Manuel’s crimes in a way that doesn’t take anything more away from its victims, that doesn’t itself cause fresh harm? Is there a way for us to read about the case that is neither uncaring nor, like the weeping woman, intrusive? It isn’t our loss, after all; it isn’t our daughter. What right do we have to want to know all of this?
• And this is a lot of what my book, Apples on a Windowsill, is about. The details of a life, of still lifes — that intersection. It is also in the category, relationship-lit, and the narrative which can be pieced together in the (un)connected/standalone essays has to do with how the F do women make a creative life for themselves. Like, what is the narrative now, what are the possibilities? And also what are the obstacles in the 21st century…
• We must harness everything we have, everything we do. We must use every part of our books as bridges, leave no margins. We must build belonging.
• “People label our country undeveloped or developing,” a sweet human shared with me last night, “we say yours is developed because there is much material wealth, but what about the people … are the people developed? Developed countries, with many undeveloped people.”
• It’s cooler in Melbourne today, the tail end of Summer has swished out of sight and Autumnal weather is shuffling in. Just one more hot day, perhaps, and then we’re fully Fall. I hope. I woke up very early but stayed snuggled down, making the most of that snug feeling that’s been absent for so many months.

March 6, 2024

Gleanings

• We don’t want to do only the smallest things, but we shouldn’t write them off either. They are not enough, but they are not unworthy. We know that every fraction of a degree, every healthier ecosystem matters. And with a runaway crisis that is so massive and sprawling, feeling like you can contribute, even in the smallest way, is a kind of clean-burning fuel. 
• Joy and wonder. That’s the part that feels unchanged, or when lost, can be recovered. It’s the entering the kingdom like a child. Being four or maybe five or six, the wonder of hearing exquisite music come out of a huge tape player above my head on the table. The wonder of fields and hills we played in, the wonder of “swimming” in a foot of creek water, the wonder of those letters on a page that make up words and can be read, the wonder of God is love.
• “Just be yourself” isn’t advice you can market, and it won’t make much profit. But the truth is, that’s all there is. All we have is our own imperfect selves standing in front of our own imperfect children and admitting that we don’t have a fucking clue, either, but promising them that we’ll figure it out together.
• There are so many alongsides when you are in your mid-40s. It’s special to peel back all the layers for a couple of days and lay down alone in a bed and marvel at it all, admitting that it’s more than you ever could have imagined and sometimes too much and also, always, filthy rich with meaning.
• I’ve been adding blogs to my browser bookmarks, seeking out people who are still using old school WordPress and the like to document their days. Lots of people are still doing it in a no-frills and gentle journal-y way and I love them for it. Most of them are new to me and they’re really inspiring me to just write about the everyday here and stop overthinking the whole blog thing. Like we used to. Who cares if blogging is not really what most people do anymore? I still love it.
• The heart must feel reprieve from time to time, otherwise it might just explode.
• Yes, grocery store tomatoes: If you, like me, buy cherry or grape tomatoes far more often than you use them up, this soup is for you
• And in almost every other case? no, not really, I don’t trust myself. I’m certain about almost nothing. And I wonder if there is a root that I can follow down into this one somewhere. Do other people have this problem?
• Blogging, when it happens, fits into the in-between times. Like this post, written almost entirely on a Friday afternoon, sitting overlooking an indoor soccer field, feet up, travel mug of tea nearby, and my laptop open; but finished the following afternoon, because the previous sentence is where my writing stopped, when I turned to chat with a parent—a dad who was open to talking soccer with a woman, which is not, I must tell you, always the case. So I relished the opening, and went with it.
• It began, as many of my habits did, in East Wawanosh, where I was the only kid on the 10th concession whose TV-less status meant I couldn’t watch Saturday morning cartoons or Sesame Street. Instead, I had opinions about CBC Radio’s annoying “Fresh Air” hosts and I could hum the theme to Peter Gzowski’s “This Country in the Morning,” the program that held the coveted weekday morning spot where we now hear Q with Tom Power.
• Today we’re going by train to a village south of Porto, on the sea, to eat fish for lunch, watch birds in the palms. I finished reading Tom Lake earlier, with my coffee, and am filled with the sense that stories never end.
• I think putting painful memories away in a drawer we never open again does not deal with them. I think that poetry often involves a search for meaning. Perhaps it is the teacher in me that wants to keep learning from all my life experiences—bad and good.

February 22, 2024

Gleanings

• But I also see where this urgency can lead us—myself included—to run roughshod over our own relationships, turning people we love into targets of our wrath.
• This wasn’t one of the better times in my life. That’s not Dar Williams’ fault, but regardless the emotional ups and downs of my final years in that university town came to have Mortal City as their soundtrack.
• I have not been to hell and back/ But maybe that’s not true.
• Socially, I was lukewarm: being known as the 15 year old who square danced with her parents was not likely to turn the temperature down to cool where I longed to be. (Becoming hot was never in the cards).
• A thing I like to do in the car: say “How dare you” out loud with different intonations and degrees of vehemence. My life is not dramatic enough to necessitate saying it for real, but I want to be ready. 
• I am always taken aback by the metaphysics of time and place. That you think of someone perhaps returning from a run along Mill Creek in Edmonton or skating with his children and he is thinking about dinner in the 5th in Paris.
• In these stories we find the extraordinary and the appalling happening all over the place, quite unremarked upon. The casual transfiguration of women into birds, of phantoms into songs. The unflinching brutality of murder and death. The inconsistency of time and geography, which can trap you or hasten you along. Not only airships, but wind that has a voice.
• It’s high summer in Melbourne and the city is absolutely effervescing with the excitement of Taylor Swift being in town.
• I’ve brushed my girl’s hair a thousand times. And braided it just as many. High pony. Low pony. Bows. Barrettes. Headbands with flowers as big as dinner plates. Ballerina bun. Top knot. Backcombed witch’s mane. Lice. Thrice. Graduation. First party. And then today, for the first time ever, Iole did my hair.
• Because here’s the thing about telling stories. We don’t need to know, or understand, or locate meaning. We just need to be open to receive, to see, to listen, to translate, transcribe, hunt down, search out, borrow, collect, connect, tell. 

February 6, 2024

Gleanings

• We are barely allowed joy in this world in these dark times but we are allowed. When you get to your joy don’t feel bad about keeping it as long as you are able. Don’t apologize. You probably didn’t even invite joy. It’s not like a butterfly in a jar. Joy will escape from you no matter how you try and contain it so don’t feel guilty when it arrives. We are barely allowed joy but when you have it you can share it and that helps it remain a few glimmers and sparkles longer. There’s no definitive instruction manual or step-by-step to help you find it or keep it or string it along just a few more minutes. But when you have it, take a minute, drop everything. Drop everything for joy.
• There’s a kind of magic in this wondering, this sending of good wishes to other poets and writers and artists at work in other rooms, other spaces. This connection with others who are drawn to create. This curiosity about what they, and we, will create next. This belief in possibility, and in the value of dreaming “new possibilities,” even though we have “no idea if the ending is a happy one.”
• You might wonder (I did, at first), what the point might be of reading about these views when you can look at them for yourself, albeit by proxy. But there’s something differently but equally magical about Harvey’s descriptions, which convey not just awe or aesthetic appreciation but a profound tenderness for our miraculous, unlikely, impermanent floating home.
• Regular blog readers know that I met my husband when he fixed my fridge. My life might have taken quite a different tack but for the above-board transaction. When I reported to my mother that I’d met someone and how, her first question was “did he charge HST?” He sure did, and I still treasure his invoice from that life-altering day.
• One of the things that I love about lane swimming is that it’s both solitary and communal. I am alone in a giant salty bathtub of friends and strangers.
• Most often when we refer to a treat, our mind immediately goes to food particularly something that may be sweet or decadent (like my homemade dairy-free chocolate & nut covered oatmeal cups). But a treat is also an event or something that gives us pleasure.
• Like a vortex pulling me down, into this moment, my heart began tingling as I arrived back … here. That’s my line. I say it often -“I’ve got nowhere else to be.” But I certainly don’t feel that all the time, with a brain that seems to constantly be asking, “what’s next?” my mind is quite often not where my body is.
• At the start of this new year, which is often the point at which readers and those whose reading has perhaps lapsed make resolutions, we’re cheering everyone on. Whatever the types and numbers of books you read this year or any year, what you’re achieving is excellent. If you need to be reminded of that, hang out with other readers and you’ll feel cheered on, bolstered and encouraged!
• Grandma reminded me that other people are the gold in my life. She reminded me of the gifts within that I had been overlooking—the capacity to listen deeply, for example. The capacity to give my time and attention to others. To create welcoming spaces. To invite response. The joy in that exchange.
• So far, it’s been a grey year…but that’s okay. Grey makes me appreciate the subtle colours of snow, muted bushes, and bare tree branches. After the quiet grey, a blue sky seems garish. Bold. Loud.
• Then there is the actual word ‘retired’. People who dislike the word have come up with alternatives: ‘re-wired’, ‘revived’, ‘renewed’, ‘re-invented’ or ‘re-‘ something or other. But maybe it’s not ‘re’ anything. ‘Re’ in front of a word generally means doing something again. But this is a brand new phase of life. The Spanish word for retirement is ‘jubilación’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?

January 23, 2024

Gleanings

• But once the pianist played our opening and we assumed our positions, then began to move in formation as a real corps de ballet, I stopped thinking about how I might be perceived. Instead, I smiled, breathed in, imagined the top of my head reaching toward the ceiling and let my body present the movements it had been perfecting all week. I stopped judging my every bodily infelicity, quieted any fears and just danced, suspended in time.
• And so yeah, I love my own books, and I want them to be successful but I just…cannot get very fussed about it. Mainly…every now and then I’m still fussed. But really–just what are the odds! If you have seen what I’ve seen–which is actually NOT all the books published in the English-speaking world in a year, but a fair percentage of them–you just can’t get that upset anymore. You still work hard–I still work hard–but like Le Petit Prince on his tiny planet (why are so many things like Le Petit Prince to me?)…it’s an odd perspective
• A middle-aged woman being a life coach is a laughingstock. I know it. We all know it. (I’m Not Sorry About Being a Coach)
• So here I am, feeling a bit shaky like James, falling into your arms. My dad has dementia. It is terrible and often beautiful in totally surprising ways. I’d like to write more about it here. I hope that will be as healing for some of you as I know it probably will be for me.
• I am from the hot desert sand, from where palm trees sway/ Heavy with fresh, golden dates hanging just out of reach./ I am from mudpies, made outside while parents napped./ And the sun beat down on our bare, unprotected brown skin.
• This book of mine pays tribute to poets adults read—Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver—but also to Margaret Wise Brown. You are never too young for the rapture of language—or too old to let it take you somewhere entirely new.
• This is going to sound so trite, so petty, but…I actually feel bad for them. What a sad little world they’ve created, where perfection is the thing that matters. Where the ability to Control your Human-ness is rewarded. To earn your spot here, you must be able to push down your fear, your flaws, your idiosyncrasies, your pain, your personality. Please be a machine, with just the right amount of “musicality.”
• My lobster is out there. Who knows, I may have already met him. But, rest assured, I haven’t waited this long, or done the inner work or, frankly, endured the experiences I have to be disappointed. My person is out there, just waiting for me to make space for them in my life and in my heart.
• You are the original Teflon. You sear meat, reduce a sauce, sweat an onion, and yes, dear cast iron pan, you’ll fry my morning egg.
• In moments like these I start to doubt even “reasonable hope.” I have to admit it. When you see such horror and unjust actions. And, yet, part of me believes that we cannot move forward without some element of hope. What is reasonable hope at the moment? Very difficult to describe. But I communicate with Palestinian and Jewish friends of good will. Notwithstanding the context, they give me hope. Notwithstanding the tears they shed and the sorrow they go through, I can feel hope in their words. I hope I am being reasonable!
• My bridge tales come directly from my heart and my imagination.  I just hope I have the fortitude and competence to get this project across the finish line which, for me, would be taking it to the printer.
• I’m glad to have a place to hang up my hat, both literally and figuratively.
• But what I’m wondering, these days, is how to model the behaviour of reading more? In the summer, I’m going to try and read more in public spaces and on park benches. Maybe until then I’ll read in cafes and in libraries.
• When you’re the one who doesn’t leave … you always wonder – what it would be like if you left? Wonder what it would be like if you were elsewhere. Especially when you were the teenager who couldn’t wait to get outta this place …
• I’m really proud of my day, of the feelings of achievement I have for resting, the creativity seeping through as cracks start to appear in the bed of tight, tense perfectionism.
• i can get really tired of people thinking i’m odd. i’m only as odd as the next guy. and i’m not talking about the naked guy at the beach. It gets old, and being embarassed is not that good a feeling, it seems to ride side-saddle to shame.

January 15, 2024

Gleanings

Special edition of “Gleanings” with pieces from The New Quarterly’s stunning “Dispatches: Writing In/During Crisis.” I’m so grateful to TNQ and all the writers who contributed.

• You don’t need to know the answers. Writing is driven by questions. Readers want to see you stumble toward truth. I give them permission to be uncertain, to search, to fail. Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, I tell them, quoting Rilke. Live the questions now.
• End this war. As the great soul Vivian Silver, murdered so brutally by Hamas, told her beloved Palestinian and Israeli friends: There is no road to peace. Peace is the road.
• With the intensity of the ruination it has created and continues to create in Gaza, Israel seems to have ambitions to destroy our ability to imagine at all. As a writer, I felt particularly attuned to it.
• This language—the power it carries—cleaves me. I think to myself, naively, that if the world understood the beauty of this moment without the blunting, the thinning translation into English for it to be understood, this earth-shattering moment in Arabic, they might care about this girl, and this man who saves her from the death she thinks she’s experiencing. I think about how journalistic language describing Palestinian men and girls like them is rarely this beautiful, this tender, this poetic. Western audiences never see this beauty because not only do we reduce and censor the language we use about Palestinians, we can barely even speak about them at all. 
• Was it possible to be blameless and innocent? What would it mean to create a house with “no more padding between the word and the world”?
• I believe that it is my particular obligation as a Jewish writer and one who has written about persecution and genocide to speak out about this. I know that many in my (Jewish and other) community will be angry and upset with me. That they will be horrified that I don’t centre the hostages and the loss experienced on October 7th. It’s not that I don’t understand the pain or want those humans returned to safety. Or that I support Hamas or don’t wish for a different political leadership and solution in Gaza. It’s that I believe the horrifying events happening there meet the definition of genocide. We’re in the middle of a genocide. Never again.
• To choose to embrace suffering, whether in experiencing or witnessing it, though our fears may tell us we’re unequipped to handle that. To choose not to stay trapped within the suffocating boundaries of comfort, though our fears may tell us they’re the only thing keeping us safe. Perhaps most of all, to embrace our inherent wildness, the endless contradictions and complexities of ourselves and others, though our fears may tell us that will leave us unmoored without the ballast of simpler, easier moralities./ Only then, perhaps, can we say we’re truly alive. The words come unbidden after that.

January 9, 2024

Gleanings

• A good dinner knocks the rough edges off a day, and Melissa’s chicken was better than good, especially with the Vouvray Paul chose for the occasion. Who knew what sherry and sesame oil could do for a No Frills date? Paul poured the last of the wine. “You always were a cheap date,” he said. “A coffee and a Danish at the Alps Riviera.”
• But I only recommend starting a newsletter if you are interested in the newsletter as a project in and of itself. If you are going in expecting your newsletter to translate into major book sales (and you’re not already a household name), it will likely be disappointing.
• I know those things that get me in the flow (painting, reading, writing, walking). But what I want to do is go deeper into it, that flow. And once I’m there, to take it slow. I’m not one for making resolutions, but I do try to set some intentions and make plans, although I don’t hold myself steadfastly to them.
• Law is not the only way to be reborn
• Finally, the thing that really captured me was that The Shamshine Blind tells a story about the ways that grief and hopelessness intersect. As I continue to ache from my own losses in 2023, as I keep watching the news and feeling despair about life and the world, reading Agent Curtida’s emotional processing struck something tender in me.
• I have been writing since I was seven years old. I had a teacher who made empty book templates and she told the class to write a story. I wrote a book called The King which was about a lion who was the king of the jungle and a tiger who tried to take over the kingdom. Coincidentally, I wrote this book before the Disney movie The Lion King came out. My teacher told me that I had a great imagination and I should keep writing, and that’s exactly what I did.
• The company of readers – the people we love and the people with whom we share this love – is a rare, rich and utterly special fellowship.
• In each the role of religion, the way in which images of the enemy are embedded in the holy narratives of each people, cannot be ignored.
• I’ve told my kids for a long time that I think staying soft in a hard world is by far the strongest thing I’ve ever done.

January 3, 2024

New Year’s Gleanings!

• May we delete social media from our phones and become part of real communities that are sometimes underwhelming, because they are not full of the dopamine hits of Silicon Valley’s design, but also surprisingly beautiful. May we keep showing up, week after week, rain or shine, sparkly or dull. That’s it, just keep showing up.
• But it is OK — and good for us all — to acknowledge and celebrate the many moments of banal public cohesion that don’t make it to social media in which Torontonians display their differences, and the sky doesn’t fall.
• I think I feel that way about making a simple moral response to Gaza right now. It would be at worst, near-fetched.
• I feel like for myself, I have to get back to my absolute basics, and to rebuild my compassion and empathy all over again, not to mention so many of the other good things that have been slowly dismantled from just living the last few years.
• Part of travel is also to discover who you are when you’re not in your familiar territory. Who are you out there “in the wild”?
• I decanted onto a plate from the cupboard. It was my parents’ wedding china and for 60 years, turkey was all it held, coming out as it did just on special occasions. Now they’re my everyday plates.
• Emily’s unshakeable conviction that she is a writer is the main highlight for me, every time I reread this novel. She will write even if she doesn’t have paper, even if she is forbidden to write because her aunt believes novels are wicked, even if teachers or classmates or relatives—or friends and mentors—mock her.
• What I was missing more than anything, what I needed, was my creative spark. I didn’t consciously know this till the spark reappeared. 
• Warning: I am going to type some things that will read as being critical of this yoga class, and many readers will think Where The Fuck Does She Get Off. I get off (not literally) (sometimes literally) to my own words in my own head, obviously. I have had a diary-blog for 24 years. I am leaving a review on the Yelp of my mind.
• So this year: no snow, a waxing gibbous moon, seen last night with Jupiter, apparently their final encounter of the year, and one pan of buttercrunch remaining to be made and glazed with dark Belgian chocolate. With any luck, the tin in the box waiting in Ottawa will be fresh enough to eat when it’s delivered on January 5th. I don’t miss the snow. I miss the children, who’ve grown up, and I miss my parents, who are long gone to spirit, and I miss the friends who’ve either died or ghosted themselves into other lives. But when I walk up the stairs on Christmas Eve, when I look out the window into a darkness unpunctuated by any light but our own, the memory of them will be the company I imagine as I wait for the morning.
• I cherish each of those sweet memories because I’ve learned that the Halcyon Days are fleeting and must be savoured.  
• I do still really enjoy settling in to write about a book that really got me thinking (or feeling!), and blogging in general is still the writing I find most intellectually liberating and stimulating, so we’ll see what happens in 2024. People seem to be predicting a blogging renaissance, as social media communities are fragmenting and “the discourse” (which, when it’s genuinely bookish, is to be cherished) is suffering. I’m here for it if you are!
• I’m going to be fifty in June. Not really a big thing, in reality, and i’m happy to be alive and aging. But my mom is 78 and just recovering from a surgery and not feeling well and the combination is bringing mortality and life choices to a much larger screen near you.
• But then we held hands and listened to Fireside Al Maitland reading Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd, and for just a moment my eyes were dry and my heart was full.
• I also felt the impact of that sentence. I have wasted so many years being ashamed of my body, avoiding activities and social events because of my body, dieting, and talking about being overweight.
• I miss walking into the field and seeing your horse raise his head from the grass to look at you. I miss being recognized and the nicker. I miss that warmth in my chest.
• Somehow, in the moment when I start to slip, I must simply… let go. To understand, that contrary to my control-freak nature, the thing to do here is—nothing?!?
• And I thought to myself, of all of the houses, of all the streets, we landed here, next to you.
• “You there, so restless, where are you trying to get to? This is winter,” she said with a sparkle as the sun reflected off her back./ All is well.”

December 5, 2023

Gleanings

• I feel alone in a world that wishes everything to be simple, polarized, that resists nuance and complexity, where only one truth can be held at any given time, where only one people can be grieveable.
• Longing for light. Longing to be light—lighter in spirit, light-hearted, light on the path.
• Thirty-three years is a long time to be mentored by someone. But not long enough —  I wasn’t ready for the news that my work mother died on November 13, 2023.  
• With guardianship comes enormous responsibility and each of us has choices in how we take on the safekeeping and preservation of our Charter’s terms — every day — in our conversations, our social media posts, in schools, neighbourhoods, workplaces, clubs, teams, institutions and in all towns and cities in every province and territory.
• How do we know the correct proportions? I’m the same writer this week that I was last week but last week I couldn’t imagine continuing. And then a group of women asked questions, commented, read aloud their favourite passages, and I realized that I’d lost perspective, that this too mattered. Matters.
• Is there anything more bookishly pleasurable than reading on holiday? And feeling that you brought along the exact correct books for your time away?
• I send love to remember what love truly is. I send love to notice, to slow things down. I send love to do something, anything, in a world that often leaves me feeling uncertain, helpless. I send love because I’m beginning to accept the world, us, it all, as it is. I send love, because I’m learning how to receive love. I send love because it both softens and empowers. I send love, because I’ve tried the alternative, and know the feeling of being closed off in fear and judgment and scarcity. I send love because it’s energy opens me, to see, to feel, to trust, to receive.
• Thank you for the first 17 years of this blog. Thank you for being the backbone of my life and giving me something to tether myself to as life swished and swept by.
• The biggest spoon I’ve ever seen was at a periptero in the suburbs of Athens near the port where my Dad docks his boat.
• Every misadventure has had a silver lining. We would have missed numerous adventures if we had not gotten lost. Nor would we have seen magnificent architecture or met wonderful people. And then there are the hidden bars and cafes we have discovered tucked away down tiny, dark alleys.

November 21, 2023

Gleanings

• I do love to inject a bit of novelty into our Advent. And I’ve loved creating a new Yule Log for ELEVEN out of the past THIRTEEN years I’ve been posting here on SSJ (and, before that, on The Lunchbox Season). That’s a top-ten list and a bonus! But I hereby proclaim, “Eleven yule logs is enough.” My work is done in the tree-like cake department. They’re all my babies and they’re all my favourites. And I don’t need to build my catalogue up to a dozen log-cakes, let alone a baker’s dozen.
• This is one of my favourite things about the novella form: the way that worlds are created with just enough carefully crafted elements and strong imagery to bring them alive and to gain your trust, and the rest is on you. Novellas just don’t have the time or the space to hold your hand. I find myself loving that.
• That what we must do is awaken our own creativity, generosity, and create small islands of sanity when we cannot stop the insanity that is occurring elsewhere.
• My Significant Other tends to get depressed around his birthday. And he’s had a hard year. Last year’s birthday was spent in the hospital and this year is a significant milestone so I decided that we needed to celebrate. Really celebrate.
• I did have a minute of thinking, “hmmm, I never even tried this on before today, it would be terrible if I were allergic to yak hair and found out during a six-hour meeting.” But if the yak hair did give me a terrible rash at least I would be sitting with fifty dermatologists, and maybe some of them have cutting-edge creams in their carry-ons. (The denouement: no issues! Me and yak hair sweaters are best friends.)
• I quilted rivers all over the quilt, trying to echo the routes, the oxbows, the chaotic systems of those days. I listened to the news and quilted, hoping to find a way to see something positive in what had happened.
• I read that Bening trained relentlessly for a year to hone her stroke, and averaged four to eight hours in the water, day and night, in all kinds of weather conditions. She was adamant that she would swim every stroke in the film. Nyad was obsessive and single-minded in her pursuit of her goal, and Bening was obsessive and single minded in pursuit of hers. “We build these cages for ourselves in our brains about what we can and can’t do,” Bening says. “We get so used to that, that we sort of even forget that they’re there.”
• It is poisonous stuff, though, and—to bring Amis back into it—there’s such a sense of gleeful bad boy “look at me” about the whole thing, with all the metafictional cleverness deployed as back-up in case the whole “I’m only joking” excuse isn’t enough.
• There was a sense that the tree itself knew it had become a danger and the space it left was given like a gift, not only to the bee balm and juniper, lilac and witch hazel that have barely survived in its shadow but to me, personally. Its stumps invite me to weave ribbons around them and carve them with Cohen’s words.
• i feel that veil is thin, yes, and it is the grey boundaries between past and future in which i feel myself becoming a flock of birds. the neither here nor there, an inability to be present for it.
• Start with the darkness, the unknown hour. Roll over. Squint to see if the glimmer of light could possibly be the beginning of the sun rise. Notice the well-worn thoughts about not getting enough sleep and the old stories from days gone by that still want to dictate how this day with little sleep will go.