Writer’s Block

  A confession: I have writers’ block. I have never had this before and I am unhappy.  I want to blame it on the weird weather. I rarely write in summer (a season that makes me itch), and fall/winter this year simply refuses to arrive. But, is that all? In the past, I’ve told my…

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I Am The Person Your Tax Dollars Helped

A post on my Facebook page recently got me thinking about how our moral beliefs are formed. Someone said, concerning the recent election of Doug Ford as Premier of Ontario:  “Prairie folk, of which I guess I am one, think differently when it comes to business and taking responsibility for one’s self.” What, I asked…

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I Hurt/I Hurt

There is a double meaning to the title of this blog: I hurt, as in I am feeling pain, but also I hurt, as in I have inflicted pain. A few days ago I did something necessary, something I had obsessed about for months, something I had meditated on, prayed over, asked advice about. I…

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Hello, goodbye, hello….

  How difficult it is to walk away …. well, from anything . . . but from social media doubly so. I have met so many people I care about through Facebook or Twitter. Truly, you know whom I mean, don’t you? Yes, you, probably. But then, I think, how much of my time is…

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Cassandra and #MeToo

It’s all over the news. Men behaving badly. As though that was news. It isn’t, of course. Has never been news. Not since the Old Goddess was replaced by a male God and women were pushed aside to occupy secondary roles — mother, daughter, wife — valued perhaps, but never equal. Disposable. Usable. Commodities and…

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A Return to the Beginning

T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding. These lines: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Circles. Wheels. In Indigenous spirituality, in Pagan spirituality worldwide, as well as in mystical forms of all major religions, this form has…

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Accidental Magic/Holiness

I popped into my husband’s office today to bring him something and found that he’d created a stone circle on the top of a small cupboard. I could just picture him talking on the phone to one of his colleagues in New York or Zurich or somewhere, letting his hands make something beautiful and sacred, almost as…

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A Feather for Orlando

This morning, while at prayer in my garden, I found a feather. It’s tiny, surely from either one of the breast feathers of a bird, or perhaps from one of the babies starting to appear. It’s a bluish grey and white. Fragile as a dandelion wisp. I have a long history with feathers turning up…

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Opposing a Rush To Judgment

There is a situation playing out in Canada right now that has me both sad and alarmed.  I won’t go into details, since at present we have almost none of those, and they will come out soon enough. I didn’t want to put my face in this fan, honestly, but as a writer with a…

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Refugee Blues

Time, I have come to believe, is not linear, but cyclical, a spiral not a line. Indigenous people and the Old Testament tell us everything has its season, and after winter comes the spring, the summer, the autumn, and then the winter again, although of course it’s never exactly the same winter. Each day both…

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