“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
On mourning and melancholia. On the loss of friends and lovers. And the loss of women’s rights to abortion in the U.S. so courageously gained 50 years ago. Melancholia must give way to action. Change via feminist transformation cannot be counted on to remain. Stay engaged! The struggle continues!
What happens during the war to autobiography by those who are neither warmongers nor victims?
Sheena and I (May Day, 2019) Two years after retirement she finds this five-year-old journal entry —Sept 5, 2015: the serendipity of today Such a beautiful first class day. Two courses began - and I returned home to pass out in a deeply pleasurable nap of sheer exhaustion at how intense these initial encounters can… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 11/1/21: a retiree remembers classrooms students hallways colleagues gardens mentors
Summer in the city bricolage: masks and masculinity, two gardens, a nearby beach, a Chinese grocery, a market, and David Suzuki
Two things are happening simultaneously. A propellor whirls. My being is moving in two directions. My body is twinned in two places at once. The present tense and my long ago past collide every morning. I am in 2020 Oaxaca City, Mexico City. And in my great grandmother’s nineteenth-century English home.
Love means to learn to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things. For you are only one thing among many. (A poem by Czeslaw Milosz)
No Gate No Lock 