Discover Kim Echlin’s “Tell Others: Storytelling for a World in Turmoil” – and join Kim for May Events in Edmonton

The talented and accomplished Kim Echlin is launching her new nonfiction book Tell Others: Storytelling in a World in Turmoil. Kim visits Edmonton for a reading and interview May 5 & 6. โ€œCensorship, testimony, translation, silencing, and listeningโ€”these five words are the beautiful and timely spine of this story. Taking some of the most difficult historical violences of our times as the incitement to read otherwise, Echlin shows the ways in which fiction provides readers a moment of respite. In these pages, the words, language, and stories of others quietly provide us the possibility of community, of refusal, of renewal and of what is possible when we make ourselves available to other accounts of what it means to live a life. We read the writer reading and we share a certain unity through words that produce liberating sensations for collective possibilities beyond despair.โ€ โ€”Rinaldo Walcott, author ofย The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom

Discovering Architect Arthur Ericksonโ€™s 1960 Alberta โ€˜Dyde Houseโ€™

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 Ericksonโ€™s sketch of the Dyde House and landscape, 1960 In mid-October I was fortunate to be… Continue reading Discovering Architect Arthur Ericksonโ€™s 1960 Alberta โ€˜Dyde Houseโ€™

The Beauty of Yoga

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

Pandemic Journal 27/6/22 โ€” โ€œCome into my gardenโ€ or Asteya, stealing time

Experience life just as it isโ€ฆ 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 โ€” โ€œCome into my gardenโ€ or Asteya, stealing time

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

Yoga means โ€œto yokeโ€, to join, to bridge. โ€œOnly connectโ€, wrote novelist E M Forester when I read his famous novel Howardโ€™s End in my first undergraduate English class in 1969. My professor said: Only connect. For me, now โ€จmore than fifty years later, โ€จyogaโ€™s connections expand into a rejuvenation โ€จof 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 โ€จand the erotic spring. It means contemplative disembodied reflection. Yoga means somewhere between these spacesโ€จof opposition -โ€จan ease in whatever emerges.

Pandemic Journal 8/1/2021 – Simone de Bรฉbรฉ

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 Bรฉbรฉ