“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
Sleep Glorious Sleep AKA Temporary Unconsciousness of the COVID-haired Nap Queen With Aged Jowl (the latter autocorrects to “Jewel”, thank you) Snapshot: Beloved Bumblebee en Famille Still Singing Her Praises With Love Uncle Garry’s Sculpture Garden My Almost First Date With Cute Favourite Home Baker (introducing ‘my mother’s spicy muffins’) Then. With Coco Ming Poodle.… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 19/8/22 – Some of my favourite things
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!
Yoga means “to yoke”, to join, to bridge. “Only connect”, wrote novelist E M Forester when I read his famous novel Howard’s End in my first undergraduate English class in 1969. My professor said: Only connect. For me, now more than fifty years later, yoga’s connections expand into a rejuvenation of the body and the mind. Yoga means holding out for more. Not giving up or giving in. It means giving up. Giving in. Yoga means sensual pleasure and the erotic spring. It means contemplative disembodied reflection. Yoga means somewhere between these spaces of opposition - an ease in whatever emerges.
Today the surgeon Dr. Mary Stephens dug with some determination into the sweet spot where the temple arteries run on the right side of my face directly in front of my ear. The arteries were delicate and elusive and it seems to have taken longer than usual to extract a piece of the artery to examine. A delicate specimen that indicated success in her handiwork. During the hour I was wide awake on the pillow, I turned my head on its side. In my ear throughout the procedure I hear a clanging and squishing and the inaudible gestures of a surgeon's blade. I resort to pranayama yoga breathing in my mind and in my mouth and in my lungs. The discipline calms me as a I think how this day surgery is definitely a very good strategy for torture movie scripts. Excruciating begins to encompass it.
Boxing Day 2020 It was a clear day. Warm for a city not too far south of the prairie taiga. The temperature had risen to just below freezing. This walk with Helen wound its way through Riverdale along the river. We stopped to investigate a perfectly round hole in a hollow tree, the work of… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 8/1/2021 – Simone de Bébé
My often privileged life is long enough to have had many ups and downs over almost seventy years including navigating the unevenly distributed challenges of this global pandemic. My daughter is the highlight of my life well-lived. I am grateful for the gifts of adoption, for the lifetime of love that ties us together.
No Gate No Lock 