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Regret-me-nots
Sometimes if I awaken during the black of a cloudy moonless night, I am gripped by an uncomfortable feeling I can’t identify, a feeling whose source is almost within reach, yet blurred and formless like a ghost. And then, as silently as it approached, it disappears again into the night leaving only shards like broken…
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And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees
I’ve always felt a part of Nature, but now that I’m in my autumn years, there seems to be a special urgency to it. Still, the continued rebirth of green each Spring gives me hope; the longevity of trees that will continue to stand long after I cannot, inspires me; or perhaps it is simply…
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Troops of friends
“Do you ever have trouble with your friends, G?” We were walking along the Stanley Park seawall at the time, and I hadn’t expected a question like that from Arvid; we’d been good friends since our university days -we’d even roomed together for a few semesters then to save on expenses. We’d both acted as…
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What’s gone and what’s past help
How many of us actually try to clarify in words, what we think we’re feeling? Affect labelling it’s called; apparently, the very act of labelling a negative emotion, can blunt its harmful effects even without a conscious goal in mind. In fact, labelling positive emotions seems to have a similar salutary effect.[i] The mechanism is…
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A touch of Nature
Sometimes I feel a little bit like the famous essayist Michel de Montaigne, when I write. Not with his skill or wisdom, I hasten to add, but more in his ability to readdress the same topics without embarrassment. It’s just that some things impress me again and again, and each time cry out for comment.…
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Deliver me from evil…
We take a lot for granted nowadays, don’t we? Our individual life-spans are short, our collective memories only slightly longer; most of us cannot even imagine how things were before the advent of modern medicine, before the recognition of germs as a cause of infections, before Semmelweis, a 19th century Hungarian doctor, realized that deaths…
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Praising what is lost makes the remembrance dear
I have to admit that I’m not a dedicated library book borrower; books seem far too important to simply surrender after becoming intimately acquainted with them. Just as I wouldn’t borrow a dog to bond with and then return it after a week or two to see if I could find something better, a book…
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A matter of belief
My father grew up a Baptist, my mother an Anglican; they compromised after they married: they joined the United Church of Canada. So for me, growing up in post war Winnipeg, there was no confusion, no need to meld different traditions into an edible stew -I had simply accepted the compromise that they had made;…
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To weep is to make less the depth of grief
To say that emotions are important for us, is a rather trite observation, I suppose -they all seem to have functions although usually so seamlessly woven into the cultural Zeitgeist they defy easy inspection. Happiness seems to serve a fairly obvious purpose, if only as a contrast to its absence; pain (at least when considered…
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What’s done is done
‘Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.’ -remember that poem? It kind of reminds me of my childhood fantasies of things that might be if I could just wish hard enough. Things that could have been, if only I could remember the details. The distant past has always been like that for…
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