“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
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
By day, I count the inequities now underscored and bathed in broad daylight by pandemic effects. The youth with no future. The aged warehoused in dead zones. The mothers whose workday suddenly expands with childcare, teaching, and at-home paid labour. For instance, in my old haunt - the university, academic women’s publications have fallen off precipitously since COVID-19 appeared. The pandemic operates like a magnifying glass of injustices. ...Once I went for walks in the ravine. Now I listen to the rain from underneath the covers. The monsoon that is late May and sometimes June promises to go on through the summer. My psychic drama.
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)
A nine-course vegetarian feast. A birthday party for the wonderful Jillian Elizabeth. Chef Doreen Prei went above and beyond for this multi-faceted extravaganza for a dozen or so. Splendid dinner at Zinc Restaurant. Plus a brief winter of our discontent political detour to Alberta, Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.
Episodic watery visions. The soothing shores of Astotin Lake come into view as we emerge from time to time on our path through the woods. Imagine bees, berries, bison, beaver, birds and a poodle.
No Gate No Lock 