“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
It started with a new friendship. And a dear friend whose cooking is legendary. What better excuse for a shared feast. With Doreen Prei returned to the Art Gallery of Alberta’s Zinc Restaurant,* the menu lights up. The six-course tasting meal - a good idea, says my friend. And why not wine pairings too? A welcome extravagance.
What days - feasts of friendship, feminism and this. Sunday, 25 August It began with a brunch ...chez Sheena with her loving extended family. Xander grins when we stand back to back: Ha! surpassed the height of this petite doting auntie. After Ajay’s crispy bottomed eggs, (a specialty, observes Shanda,) and other treats, we visit… Continue reading 48 hours in a life unfold – a long read
I'm thinking of a trending metaphor. After half a lifetime of labour, retirement feels like pitching yourself over the sticky glow of the honey-dew event horizon into the oblivion of a black hole. Edging closer, you peer into a black as deep as your own cornea. Up close, you witness your existential erasure in the maw of an absent nothing. What astrophysicists call the "singularity." Then it becomes more complicated and you hear Steven Hawking's hunch that black holes sport an exit.
(Multitasking is a myth. Working mothers simply work more.) My generosity has limits in these first days of retirement.
27 July 2019 Today feels very bleak. (A hasty draft journal in time.) Bleakness breeds hasty remedies. Cultish solutions seem tantalizing to thoughtful people. The news of the day is all about the bitter tyrants winning. All over the world. I am caught up in meditating on a death. In the public sphere, the global… Continue reading Give Me Too Much: An Ode to Excess
30 June 2019 When the sky is tangerine in your Edmonton garden and your daughter’s cityscape from Kuala Lumpur is clear, you know you have arrived in the present. When your now adult child wings her way across an ocean, lands in Shanghai and then takes off again for a more distant destination, the concept… Continue reading Only a Guilty Mother Would Admit To These Dreams – letting go #1
No Gate No Lock 