'Joy is how we fight back. Facts don't go extinct,' is the Joyful Dino motto. We are a progressive activist group in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. We are attending and creating and participating in a number of events connected to Alberta's misguided separatist referendum that includes nine questions - five are racist and four are "stealth separatist questions." We are advocating to vote for Canada and to vote No To the Nine. If you are in the neighbourhood you may want to attend or join in.
Category: Edmonton
Exploring Mill Creek’s Gardens in Bloom
Our new Neighbourhood In Bloom program began in 2025 and was developed when the Edmonton Horticultural Society collaborated with city Community Leagues. Each league is charged with sending out amateur garden enthusiasts to evaluate local gardens. And the signage is provided by the Edmonton Horticultural Society. There is not competion or awards ceremony. Thus along with another neighbour I helped to organize our Strathcona Community League and five kind neighbour volunteers walked the streets on the lookout for gardens that shine..
Pandemonium Journal 17/12/22 — of necropolitical conspiracy theorists, authoritarians, & fascists (things as they are in Alberta and abroad)
The bad guys and gals are winning too close to home.
Pandemic Journal 12/2/22: The Bridge – what yoga means to me
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.
Pandemic Journal 14/1/2022 — when your lover contracts COVID and isolates
At seventy, I ache for you at 3:02 Friday January 14. I will survive. Thrive even. Without you. For a few more days. But my body my being aches for you. The surface of my skin haunts your hands. Your tongue, your teeth. Tender blessings and the muscles under your fingers the arch of my… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 14/1/2022 — when your lover contracts COVID and isolates
Pandemic Journal 16/11/2020 — things I love, lily of the valley, a chronology
2020: Anosmia, the inability to smell, is a symptom of COVID-19. 24 May 2020: Lily of the Valley blankets the woods in the midst of an abandoned pathway through Mill Creek Ravine. On this afternoon’s walk, my neighbour Maarten and I marvel at the growth. It is as though this green carpet seeped through time from the garden of a once-upon-a-time home long torn down in favour of a public park. A week after this photograph was taken, the delicate white cups of blossoms lined upright inside the arched leaves to fill the air with their fragrance. 1902: When the Edmonton, Yukon & Pacific (E. Y. & P.) Railway began to run trains along this watery tributary of the North Saskatchewan River, mid-wild houses scattered family life the length of the ravine. Now only the hollowed-out ruins of basement and root cellar remain of the homes. A trestle bridge structure still spans the creek.
