Summer Solstice 2023: Wild Fire
In early May when the smoke was so heavy over Edmonton, the air quality at 10 or 10+ for days, I was weighted by the reality. I stayed inside, used the gym, kept my windows closed. Waited for respite. Rains came but so did high temperatures. And then when wildfires gradually spread across the country […]
Spring Equinox 2023: The Pull
I was out walking on Saturday on the way to the grocery store, lost in thought, when I came alongside a young man (who from the looks of it was homeless), stopped for a smoke. He was excited, watching something above him. “Look at this!” I heard it first, in the poplars. The magpies talking […]
Summer Solstice 2022: Bridging Time, Place and Being
Merriam Webster has two definitions for the word bridge. Bridge as structure and bridge as a time, place or way to connect or transition. Not here or there. Not now or then. In between. A co-worker told me she walks the High Level Bridge home every Friday from the office. It’s her way of marking […]
Spring Equinox 2022: Infectious and Muddy
I have been thinking for weeks, How to speak of spring in the face of war, of death? How to speak of spring in the face of another migration, a mass migration of almost three million Ukrainians and counting. Where the birds themselves are likely changing course? I live in a neighbourhood in Edmonton that […]
Autumn Equinox 2021: Living Tween
I have a friend who is living with a chronic and progressive illness. It is difficult to communicate at times, especially since the pandemic. The illness impairs speech and movement. The last time I phoned, I asked how he was doing. For a moment his words were surprisingly lucid: “It’s like I’m here, but I’m […]
Summer Solstice 2021: Waking Up
The 14th century German mystic Meister Eckhart said that spirituality is waking up. On the brink of this Summer Solstice and National Indigenous Peoples Day, the longest day, this day of light, I want to acknowledge the sorrow of the families of the 215 children whose graves were found in Kelowna in May, and the […]
Summer Solstice 2020: The Fullness
COVID-19. One word with so many contradictions: death, innovation, anger, selflessness, anxiety, adaptation, depression, creativity. The fullness of life! To date, at least 8,457,305 infections; 453,882 deaths. We hear the counts every night like reports from a war zone. We know it is not gone. The financial fall-out we haven’t begun to comprehend. The isolation […]
Winter Solstice 2019: Death and Life
There are always thresholds to cross. And there are always choices to make. Every season opens a door. I don’t think it’s a contradiction that people mark midwinter as a major anniversary of loss as well as a time of gratitude. Winter solstice holds both death and life for us. When I was in Malta […]
Spring Equinox 2019: Mud, Water and Light
Every creation story I know starts with water and mud, spring no different. Slippery footing, sudden ponds, dirt in snow banks, grit in the street and a warm wind. The night freezes and the day thaws. For a couple of months it’s a see-saw, wild ride, back and forth, up and down the thermometer. It’s […]
Summer 2017: Healing Leaves 150
And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. Rev. 22:2 A few weeks ago on a CBC Ideas podcast, How Art Shapes History, the moderator asked a panel of artists: What makes a nation? Christi Belcourt, a Michif (Métis) visual artist, pointed out that this land we call Canada is […]
The Hope of Spring 2017
Coming home on the bus in the middle of February, deep in the last cold snap of winter, I sat beside an elderly woman who swore she could smell the Athabasca Glacier, all the way from the Columbia Icefields. She could smell it on the west wind, that very day. She had been there once. […]
