“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” — Virginia Woolf
Henry & Grizella Donnelly - Margaret Donnelly & Robert Shields - great great grandparents - my paternal grandmother's Irish and English lineage My paternal great great grandmother Margaret Donelly was a mystery to me. At twenty years of age in 1861, she lived with aging parents - her mother Grace or Grizella and father Henry… Continue reading Unsettling Relations: Margaret Donnelly (1841-1896)
by Janice Williamson August 18, 2019 Imagine you sit on a chair, in a car, or you stand leaning against the table. You have been there for an hour, a few days, or you have just arrived. You are home. You are not home. You would like to heal the drift. To this end, you… Continue reading Out of Time
14 August 2019 We know where we are and where we have been together. (Savouring my daughter’s tasty vegetarian frittatta.) The three of us reminisce. I recall Hong Kong then and now. When my mother and I travelled to adopt my daughter, Hong Kong was a favourite city in spite of our brief stopover en… Continue reading We Know Where We Are and Where We Have Been Together
27 July 2019 Today feels very bleak. (A hasty draft journal in time.) Bleakness breeds hasty remedies. Cultish solutions seem tantalizing to thoughtful people. The news of the day is all about the bitter tyrants winning. All over the world. I am caught up in meditating on a death. In the public sphere, the global… Continue reading Give Me Too Much: An Ode to Excess
Mothering between time zones. Letting go.
30 June 2019 When the sky is tangerine in your Edmonton garden and your daughter’s cityscape from Kuala Lumpur is clear, you know you have arrived in the present. When your now adult child wings her way across an ocean, lands in Shanghai and then takes off again for a more distant destination, the concept… Continue reading Only a Guilty Mother Would Admit To These Dreams – letting go #1
