Author: gozzter
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Most people are other people
Do I really have a true self? There was a time when it seemed obvious that I, quite apart from being an individual and not a replica of my neighbour, possessed a unique identity; or at least it was something that I would eventually have, because, as the philosopher Sartre wrote, existence precedes essence; I…
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God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.
I’ve never been much on religion; my mother, an immigrant from Britain, was once an Anglican, and my Canadian father a Baptist. The compromise they settled on for my upbringing was the United Church of Canada for some reason. It was a religious choice that, unlike my father’s, allowed dancing, although it still seemed a…
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Bouba-Kiki…?
Now that I’m well into my dotage, and taming my thoughts is harder than trying to herd the ants that live on the porch, I have to wonder why nobody seems to understand why I have taken to calling myself G. It’s a perfectly balanced name, and seems to act as a subtly nuanced, although…
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Not so close, eh?
I have this thing about spaces between stuff for some reason -maybe it’s because my only sibling was ten years older than me, and I hated sharing a bed with him when I was young; he rolled around a lot at night. One of my first comments on personal space in writing, though, was an…
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Morality, like Art, means drawing a line someplace.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about morality for some reason; not that I figure I’ve entered its purview or anything, you understand -I don’t make a habit of climbing a fence where I’m not sure of my welcome now that I’m old and creaky. I suppose that, having only a few leaves left on my branches…
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The poems the earth writes upon the sky
I don’t know… ever since I read Suzanne Simard’s ‘Finding the Mother Tree’ a few years ago, I’ve felt differently about plants -about Nature. Simard, a professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, ‘is known for her work on how trees interact and communicate using below-ground fungal networks, which has led to…
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Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing
Words are important, but sometimes it is silence that is more eloquent; often, to sit in silence takes courage, and yet it sometimes communicates more than sound. It allows the listener to anticipate and you, the speaker, to think; it is not always awkward… And yet, there are norms: whose turn it is to listen,…
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My mind is seldom like the flame of a candle in a windless place…
Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong all these years; maybe I’m not supposed to fall asleep just because my eyes are closed and I’m bored -even if the reason I’m doing it is because I think I’m meditating; or trying to calm down; or maybe because it’s a way to kill time until lunch or…
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With Age comes wisdom; sometimes Age comes alone…
It’s taken me a long time to wade through my years, but now I realize I’ve lost some of my early memories. Of course, I suppose you don’t get to luxuriate in your 80ies without a few pages disappearing -early chapters in the book hastily read in the enthusiastic joy of youth, episodes underlined or…
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