June 30, 2022
Gleanings
- Keep singing and dancing, drawing and planting gardens. This is no insignificant thing in the face of a movement that wants to make everything plain and ugly, cruel and sour. There is radicalism in refusing to judge. There is radicalism in listening. There is radicalism in saying, gently, ‘That’s not how I see it.’
- This doesn’t happen often. I am not a violent person. But right now, with broken families, broken hearts, beautiful cities torn apart by war, the consistent and constant gaslighting by politicians who could take measures but won’t, no authentic dialog, muddled truth, no compromise toward solutions, all leading to a sense of helplessness. it’s just time to break something. And cry.
- How on earth do we grow compassion, understanding, tolerance and acceptance on such stony ground? By welcoming one and all to the table.
- I remember rotary dial phones as a kid, which morphed into touchtones, then to call-display and the magic of voicemail. I remember when everything went through receptionists. If the person you wanted to speak with on the phone wasn’t there, the receptionist would write the message down on a special message paper, roll it up and pop it into a pigeon hole in a box that sat at the front of her desk (I say her, because back then they were never he).
- I think I want to write more about my life when I feel less sure about it. When things are a little dim or grimy or blurry and I turn to a Google Doc like it’s a magnifying glass or a flashlight.
- Minus our group’s cumulative, ongoing commentary and the special alchemy of our interactions and earned trust of each other’s opinions, adding words of criticism or praise here have no fair context. Does that make sense? And doesn’t that confirm that the secret sauce here is the book lists and information coupled with the chemistry of our fellow readers?
- For one, I’ve been highly reactive with the kids lately. My reaction time to kid-squabble-teen-bitchery is unbeatable. There is nothing faster, literally. My mouth and mother-hat are tilting wildly at windmills. At speed, mind you, which does not mesh well with health and wellness.
- I want to be open to the unexpected. Sometimes, opportunities fall into my lap; sometimes I pursue projects that don’t pan out but I’m glad I tried because why not.
- I want to stop worrying about ‘not enough’. My shaking doesn’t make me ‘disabled’ enough for instance, and there’s so many other things like that I feel. I’m fucking 46 years old and I’ve been though a lot. I think I need to stop being quiet and know we’re all enough, more than that. We just are. I might start going deeper, or at least trying to, and that’s kind of exciting.
- If I’m going to survive, I must make warm drinks. I must boil the water, select the mug, and also the tea – the latter two must align with the season and match the moon and whether I wish to feel free or safe.
- Recently a lovely internet friend and photographer wrote something on her blog that I one hundred percent relate to because what she said parallels how I use this space as well. Donna wrote, “This isn’t a portfolio of perfect images or a gallery of my best work. Instead, it is a record of my experiments and efforts.” When I read that, I couldn’t help but exclaim out loud, “Yes, that’s me too!”
- To follow my spirit, to say NO to societal pressures, is to go against the herd. It is to say once again, after fighting so hard my whole life to escape the pain of it—I am all alone.
- I’m more in love with trees every day now that I live with a forest. Am learning how they’re a community and speak to one another and how sometimes what we might call ‘crowding’ they call protection and comfort. Left to its own devices a forest pretty much knows how to be.
- Some days I think, Why bother? Why bother with writing books that get lost in the ebb and flow of the literary conversation, their voices a little quiet and timorous for these times? Or quilts, because honestly does anyone need another one in a world filled with stuff? But my hands need the work, my mind needs what happens when my hands find their way to loop and tie and dip and stitch. The way I find myself weeping when I see the cloth hanging on the clothesline, the books arriving in a courier’s van. See, you did this. It’s not quite what you meant to do (is it ever?) but you did this. On the cover of handiwork, a whole little flock of painted birds, ready to fly.
June 21, 2022
Gleanings
- The practice asks: What’s drawing your attention? The practices reminds me: Follow the energy, write toward that. Trust this time, be in between. Feel, connect. Feel, connect. Be where you are.
- If we can get this right, what else can we get right?
- Walk by peony bushes, now flopped over and spent, their glorious beauty short-lived. Resist the temptation to make comparisons to life and nude seniors playing pickle ball. Some things are better left Uncompared.
- Vacation tastes like the memories of my fifty-five summers, plus the photographs that show fifteen summers prior to that.
- The pleasures of reading silently together as a group all came flooding back, as if the last two years have been some other kind of strange dream.
- I don’t have answers to these questions. I like living in them. I like the possibilities and challenges that the questions represent. I like having different inclinations on different days.
- But what you can’t see is the huge living body of water that holds you up, allows you its currents, its riffles, its history of trout, of kingfishers dipping their beaks, of mergansers and loons in the distance, of crayfish and sticklebacks, of freshwater clams, wild mint in the shallows, the shadows of swallows on the surface as they take insects in flight. Like a river or the ocean, it allows you a place in its living water, and now having entered again, my arms propelling me forward, hands meeting in front of me, then pushing out, a gesture of arrival, in sunlight and rain, I am home in my body within it.
- But the longer I look, the more I understand that he was trying to capture the way the light fell softly over love seat like warm liquid. The whole scene was an attempt to study contrast and light.
June 7, 2022
Gleanings
- It’s peony season, and peony season signals my annual pilgrimage(s) to the corner of Sussex and Brunswick where peonies bloom in abundance.
- What expectations should we be setting aside so that the messages arrive? How can we set aside our fucking reticence and send messages?
- Forget the 10,000 hours. Use whatever hours you have.
- But creativity doesn’t work that way. It likes to take the long drive and visit all of the small towns and historical monuments on the side of the road first. It wants to hang around on the front porch of an old general store and look at the ancient ice machine, or Pepsi sign in detail. It can’t tell you why, it just does.
- It’s only the omnipresence of violence, including its institutionalization in the military, that makes it possible to encounter that one death and think, for a minute, that it’s not much, not that big a deal. In fact, in its singularity, because of its singularity, that one death is everything that matters, as everyone who has lost a loved one knows.
- Not as a resignation, or avoidance, but as an invitation to let be, let go, and to unclench the grasp of should and could and what ifs, the stories or avoidance of how life really goes … of course. It doesn’t mitigate the feelings, but it does pull us back into present moment with what is.
- Possibility –– it’s one of my favourite words. Derived from the Latin, possibilis, “able to be done,” possibility walks hand-in-hand with hope, potential, and the idea that there is always room for something else to emerge, something different, unexpected and exciting.
- Although I was in Ukraine and although I had a Ukrainian grandfather, I didn’t—couldn’t—think of myself as Ukrainian. Could I? My daughter? My husband, born in Yorkshire? A man pounded the table and said, You are married to a Ukrainian woman so you are Ukrainian! He toasted us with the fiery horilka flavoured with mountain ginseng.
- And a general delight in spring, with fresh starts and new beginnings for which I’m always grateful, even as I never forget that those starts and beginnings both build on old knowledge and exist in the context of a difficult world.
May 31, 2022
Gleanings
- But what is this world, life, trying to wake us up to? And how does remembering we are all connected open possibilities for reimagining the world we … you … I want to live in?
- Whether it’s writing a scene, or revising a story, or playing around with a writing prompt, or creating a blog post. I just feel better if I’ve written something.
- This is a post that begins and ends by saying, “trust me.” This is a post written from a place of pure love. This is a post about how an author can change your life, about how books matter, and about how writers are simultaneously magical and utterly real. It’s also a post that references a line from Jane Austen about how if I loved this book less, I could talk about it more.
- My brain tends toward disaster thinking. What is it good for, disaster thinking? I’d love to learn how to prevent it altogether, but my sense is that instead I’ll have to keep noticing my personal tendency to imagine the worst (in vivid detail) and find ways to turn away from indulging that tendency, over and over. (It helps to have a partner who counters my fears with, “Okay, but what if everything works out?”)
- I constantly remind myself there is no there or arrival point to strive to achieve in any aspect of life, but a returning again and again to each moment, me being me as I am, with you as you are.
- That summer of 2007, we were caught in a meander, the current winding and turning back on itself, not measurable as the crow flies, but singular. In another version of the story, the river erodes the banks, turns, finds another route. In river systems, old meanders are sometimes abandoned and become lakes. That summer is a lake in my memory, forgotten by the river’s flow.
- It’s by coming to the coast where land and sea meet that I’ve learned more about the way the Earth tilts than any lesson taught in school. I’m a hands-on learner.
- “The good news is that the solution to a plant problem is rarely complicated –– often the smallest adjustment can make the biggest change.” Human problems are more complicated, although the same applies; one small adjustment leads to another, and then another, and so on.
- The Awakening, though told with lovely prose and offering insights of a very specific perspective, is only really a partial awakening. Edna Pontellier has a ways to go still.
- As a child, I was a daydreamer, living in my own little world, but now that I am older, I spend more time in the present moment. My mind may drift off these days, but I would not call my thoughts daydreams. What about you? Where does your mind go when it wanders? Do you still daydream?
- On my way into Presqu’ile Provincial Park, and as I pulled away from the gatehouse driving along Presqu’ile Parkway, I felt an ethereal reverence for this place that I love so dearly.
May 24, 2022
Gleanings
- I still grieve the loss of those friendships, losses that are almost entirely my own fault. In casting aside those friendships, I discarded love, shared history, a different perspective on me and my life, and the gifts of wisdom, strength, and goodness that those two women gave me.
- But it’s also strangely, a bit perversely, encouraging just knowing there are so many other sad people out there. I don’t imagine that it feels easy to any of them, or that they are “over it” or have “moved on,” but there they all are, carrying on with their lives while also somehow carrying their grief. “How do they do that?” I still wonder, even though I suppose I am now doing the same, however haltingly.
- I liked the idea that I might have been at the forefront of the slow stitching movement! And doesn’t it fit with how I live my life these days? I have so much more time now that I am older; I am no longer running to the finish line. I like walking for the sake of walking, not the destination. I enjoy spending hours cooking in the kitchen with my husband and then savouring a tasty meal with friends as the sun sets and candles burn down. Slow walking, slow food, so why not slow stitching?
- This morning I’ve been thinking about Greece, a place I will probably never travel to again, and I am remembering how I took for granted the long warm days, swimming in a warm ocean, eating ripe tomatoes and cucumbers and salty cheese with glasses of golden retsina at lunch, and lying down in fragrant grass with Agamemnon.
- What better way to dive back into more regular blogging than to start a new series?! The days are so long and short of late, it might feel good to pause and make a wee list of where things are at?
- I firmly believe that the more creative you are, the more creative you are. When you’re a creative person, your default is creativity. Your default is flowering. Your default is fecundity. But. There will be obstacles.
- But I think the most valuable part of women’s friendships is the understanding, the listening, the forgiving, if need be, of lapses in judgment.
- To remember it’s all temporary and fleeting and to still love anyways… to still jump in and risk and engage with it all. To not shut down in anticipation of pending grief, numb or avoid, or for me … live in fear, but to allow and be in relationship with grief , with the sorrows and hardships in and of this world, alongside love and joy … this. This feels sacred, “a holy thing.”
May 17, 2022
Gleanings
- I am eternally searching for murder mysteries that scratch a very specific itch.
- When the Cherry Blossoms at Robarts Library are in full bloom I know that winter is well and truly over.
- I’m glad to have recognized, yet again, that it is possible (necessary) to love the imperfect.
- In Dublin I wondered why I’d ever left that western island but it was the beginning of something else, a key, the life I live now, and Dylan somehow knows that and offers his own strange consolation.
- Words and photos never capture the breathtaking beauty of sunrises and sunsets. They are an experience one has to witness.
- And the flowers open in sunshine and close again in the evening and in cloudy weather, which makes me wonder about the mysteries of nature. How it does this. How it knows.
- But I do know what fear feels like, and looks like, and how it shows up in me, and in our world and so what might be possible if love simply is moving away from, or through fear, to a place of openness and spaciousness and being with… to the myriad of possibilities that lie beyond fear?
- If he’d lived, he would be 96 now. If my mother had lived, she would be 99. That would be improbable, for me to have a 96-year-old father, a 99-year-old mother. Am I old, then?
- What I have learned this past while is that it’s very easy to be a buddhist among buddhists. It’s easy to be a good listener among other good listeners. But in the absence, it can be quite ridiculously difficult! Likewise, it’s very easy to be just and fair and kind among same.
- It’s revelatory and delightful to discover (again and again?) that the self is so sturdy.
May 3, 2022
Gleanings
- Give me ordinary. Give me cups of tea in the backyard and an afternoon so slow I can hear the hummingbirds. Give me time to look at the moon and midday trips to the bookshop. Give me satisfaction with Enough. (via ARB)
- My mother died in 2003, ravaged by Alzheimer’s, which robbed her of memory but not of her spirit. “There was a terrible war, here,” she told me, pointing at bullet holes that still mark the facades of old Wrocław buildings. “Terrible things happened. Terrible.” By then, she did not know she had a daughter, but the memories of the war lingered in her mind.
- There is a suddenness to beauty, a shock to it. I sometimes think I’m quite dulled to the world these days, but then it happens, I’m pulled through, and that reminds me what I’m here for.
- Purple, acid yellow and milky white. I can’t imagine how many seed species there are on earth, and like the urchins, how much variety exists in each one’s appearance, both subtle and dramatic. It blows my mind.
- For I know I can’t make time slow, but I can lean into inhabiting the ever-present nowness, the slices of the day.
- Earlier in the day when we had first pulled out the map book, we looked at the grid the lines that marked the roads and then out at the prairies that surrounded us and wondered if there was anything out there. And the answer is yes, there much to be seen and much more to be imagined.
- It has been extraordinarily hard navigating the tightrope between expressing myself truthfully, and not hurting my mom’s feelings.
- Imagine, I always said, the death of a child. How terrible. How terribly sad.
- All through the 1st year of the pandemic, when we didn’t see anyone apart from masked cashiers in the grocery store and the masked lifeguards at the pool, I was so grateful for the company of jays.
April 26, 2022
Gleanings
- Surrender to knowing what it should look like or where it’s going to show up, how I’m supposed to do it, or who’s supposed to find it or connect to it or show up. Plant and tend to the seed. And surrender the rest.
- My plans are mere sketches, a few chords on which to improvise; they delight me.
- Seasons always reassure us that life in all its forms continues. It shifts, evolves, and readies itself for what is next.
- This poached, cooled asparagus waits patiently until you’re ready for it and when you are… you just dump it on a plate. [“Nobody writes recipes quite like the Smitten Kitchen!” said nobody, today at least.]
- In this part of the world, at this time of year, there is such a dramatic change in the way light fills our days. As winter ends, and we transition through spring towards summer, we are reminded of cycles – days, seasons, lives.
- I continued with the business of daily living. I felt grateful to be able to. And that’s win enough.
- I still have chilli peppers in glass jars in the freezer, but they don’t begin to compare to the fieriness of the ones I hung to dry in the window.
- I carry my past, in ways I wish I did not. I carry the groceries despite having teens. I carry myself in dignity except for when I am swept away .
- What you can’t hear are the fine grits of gravel ticking off the car doors and the wind singing in the barbed wire fences.
- Today, I celebrate the gift of joy, of connection, of relationship. And, I’m so grateful for the reminder to stay open … you truly never know who is going to come your way, cross your path, and through their very being, create invitations and possibilities in your own becoming.
- Like many people, I’ve spent much of my life seeking external validation, permission and approval, especially from my immediate family. I worked hard to make sure that wasn’t part of this process. I wanted to stand in clear ownership of my lived experience and the stories within it, to take responsibility for this being my story, not our story, hence my desire to inform and invite
- What I’m getting at is – creating, exploring with curiosity, learning from the masters at their craft, experimenting and painting over – this is how I want to spend my days.
- What became intolerable to me was devoting my life so fully to my kids becoming themselves, while losing myself so completely in the process. What kind of example was I setting? Who would they become if their mother was nothing more than a reflection of their wants and needs?
April 12, 2022
Gleanings
- In short, we’re not helping anyone by ceasing to create beauty.
- What is it to truly know someone, to expose all, even the dark parts inside?
- I like that it isn’t about achievement, it’s about discovery.
- At some point this spring I need to put the pink fleece housecoat away.
- Now what I’m discovering is that it is hard to keep finding new words in the absence of change. Narrative requires movement, not repetition or stasis. How many times (how many ways) can I say “I am sad”?
- I think there should be a rule, that for every piece of good news we want to post on social media, we must also post AT LEAST 3 pieces of the mundane or depressing AF. That way, we can fully celebrate with you in the good news, because we now understand the subtext: “I was struggling for a while there, but now something really great has happened!!”
- When I make quilts, I am thinking of them as embodiments of usefulness first. I have fabric and batting and I know that a quilt will be used. But I am also driven to make something out of a fierce need to use my hands, my body, my strength.
- When women get old, what do they do? Are they neglected, left to their own devices financially and emotionally? If so, perhaps they end up at a place like the Claremont Hotel, a place for those growing old but not yet ready for a nursing home. A place with one rule: they aren’t allowed to die there.
April 5, 2022
Gleanings
- In some ways, the book feels more like an allegory for moral imagination, one man’s story that begs every person to ask piercing and hard questions of themselves.
- So the grey squares can be signs of success, too, for what that’s worth.
- That sorrow remains, with all of its complications, but as time passes for us but not for him, it’s hard not to feel that now we are the ones leaving him, which we did not choose to do—which we desperately do not want to do, but can’t help or stop.
- I’ve often marveled at the strange, cyclical nature of life and creativity. How the things that I sketched five years ago, with no real thought, have elements that are now a part of my current art practice in ways I never planned for.
- I never expected eleven to come so fast, and to take so long.
- There’s so much I’ve missed, and miss. I meant to learn more about botany, and maybe it’s not too late.
- How do I start having my own life now, at 47, leaving them to grow and become more independent, without feeling a guilt that is tied to loneliness from a fourteen-year-old girl from 33 years ago?
- For it never becomes common place for me to witness, to experience birth, life, the beginning, divinity, mystery.
- Which then leads me to think more about process and practice. About forming a body of work out of the squelch of our own many clicks. About being more deliberate. But then needing the freedom to just make images….(I go back and forth on this obviously).
- When everything shut down two years ago, I was so burnt out and overstretched that my main feeling was relief at not having to do everything all the time for everyone. In the interim, I’ve recalibrated my boundaries, and I feel more capable of saying yes and no with greater understanding of the costs and benefits of each.
- The light, the dark. Within. Without. There’s never really one, without the other.
- Once again, I’m resolving to take back home with me the sense of freedom I experience while on adventure.
