Category: Walterdale Bridge

Pandemic Journal 12/2/22: The Bridge – what yoga means to me

janice williamson3 Comments

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 12-29/8/2020 — The necessary tedium of writing home improvement uplifted by a visit to a lake, market, garden, river — & bleak news — in short, August

janice williamson1 Comment

I am so very fortunate, I tell myself. Retired and on my own. Not to mention a lifetime of white privilege, class privilege. Location. Location. Settlers have more than a leg up. And now I’m out of the loop of daily care for a young child. I don’t know how I would manage single mothering during COVID. Probably badly. Now I have no one to send to school or not. Home school or not. No classes to prepare. No papers to grade. No schedule to adhere to. The end of summer approaches and I’m writing less, hanging around outside, walking more, leisurely weeding the buckets of thistles and pesky plants that rise up in all this rain and sun.

Pandemic Journal 22/4/2020 — Earth Day Walks

janice williamson1 Comment

What Brings You Down? Alberta's other contagious and deadly disease - the UCP virus.

Our Alberta provincial government is failing. Unsurprisingly.

They are killing people.

Doctors are fleeing the province. Rural clinics are closing leaving the UCP voters high and dry without medical care. All the better to create a vacuum that will be filled by Kenney's plans to privatize healthcare.

‘inside this quietness’

janice williamson2 Comments

Enjoying a visit by a poet so very much. Our conversations prompt me to remember my own formation as a writer and a woman. This is one of those unexpectedly powerful transitional moments that occur when we retire. You find yourself thinking about possible futures and then your past arrives as a lesson to guide you.

A Feminist Flaneure’s Passerelle

janice williamson3 Comments

Wherein a woman walks and muses. The shape of the woods sounds like birds. Writers abound. The stories cross oceans and wave. All this to try to stem the tide in her head of climate catastrophe and the rise of authoritarian regimes here there & everywhere. Keeping a world on self-destruct at bay.