“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
Architecture, as I see it, is the art of composing spaces in response to existing environmental conditions to answer a client's needs ... the building becomes the resolution between its inner being and the outer conditions. Arthur Erickson Arthur Erickson’s sketch of the Dyde House and landscape, 1960 In mid-October I was fortunate to be… Continue reading Discovering Architect Arthur Erickson’s 1960 Alberta ‘Dyde House’
My co-teacher Veronika and I prepare to teach in our 300-hour Octopus Garden Holistic Yoga Advanced Teacher Training We came full circle. In about 1981, I introduced yoga to Kim Echlin, a fellow PhD student, now accomplished writer of many novels and other works. Kim remains my dear lifelong friend. The late inspiring Esther Myers… Continue reading The Beauty of Yoga
Experience life just as it is… Sweet June. Is she of Summer or of Spring,Of adolescence or of middle-age?A girl first marvelling at touch of loversOr else a woman growing ripely sage?Between the two she delicately hovers,Neither too rakish nor, as yet, mature.She's not a matron yet, not fully sure;Neither too sober nor elaborate;Not come… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 27/6/22 — “Come into my garden” or Asteya, stealing time
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.
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
Why did I want to rid myself of this beautiful piano? Newly retired, I wanted to make the house sparser, less a revelation about the material debris. amassed during 26 years in any house. The boxes of papers. The books in piles and shelves. Collected objects, story prompts, dear debris I've amassed in beloved junk stores where I’ve wandered. The things that make a life. I would call this blogpost a dilation. The lens is turned to admit more of a scene that leads us down linked but discontinuous subjects. All of them find a woman in the frame. A daughter. A writer. A political leader. Her mother. A chef. And a cook, me, writing up a storm. A delicious surprise ending.
No Gate No Lock 