There was a day I can remember in the backyard of my childhood home, with my grandmother. She’s sitting on a lounge chair with her feet up. Her bunion-curled toes are sticking out of her tan leather open-toed sandals, second toe slightly crossed over her big toe. It’s warm outside, but not hot. She’s sipping a cool drink, iced tea maybe. It was the spring of 1982.

Grandma, Madge, is crying, a slow awkward cry. The kind that tears slip down your cheeks at quiet intervals. She’s not weeping, not making heaving sounds. Just quietly and shaking her head, muttering…

There are essential playlists, of certain bands, that I seem not to be able to live without. These offer non-vocal music, that's not just background, but rather makes me think. Sometimes I swear it does the writing for me.

My three faves:

1. Explosions in the Sky

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DZ06evO0Poxt6?si=22f351a676ca4433

2. Godspeed You Black Emperor!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DZ06evO2BTXzh?si=6eda23411a4e4c1a

3. Hammock

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DZ06evO0ujy0M?si=0220ae7ae67e4102

It was a particularly cold January afternoon. If it had been sunny, the sun would have been going down. But that is not the way the sky looked this day. It was dark, and grey, and gloomy, much like the rest of my January. Goodbye January.

You can’t hear me from your car (or maybe you can) but I’m singing at the top of my lungs. I love driving with the radio on. Top 40 hits, hits on repeat. I listen to local radio to feel connected to my city, and podcasts for longer drives. …

Groundhog Day is celebrated on February 2, which is 40 days hence Christmas and the exact midpoint between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. On this day, we celebrate the uncanny ability of rodents, around here it’s groundhogs, to tell us when to expect spring. I admire the percipient quality of humans to delegate this task onto a still-slumbering animal, drawn early out of hibernation, to make this most important prediction, as we grumpy Northeasterners continue to endure the darkest and coldest days of winter. What’s not to love about a tradition that celebrates magic, without consumerism?

There are now many…

It’s my own personal belief that the importance of oral stories, from our most ancient history, still define us today. This is why when we sit down to read or watch, or listen to a story we understand — and feel and see — without really being able to articulate why. The system and structures of stories are so deeply woven into our consciousness that they are just there. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious theory explains why this thought is more than just woo-woo.

That means that, on some level, whether or not you have read The Odyssey, the oldest known…

This year I surprised even myself that I was actually awake when the clock struck twelve. My daughter and I were in the kitchen…she decided to make a pancake cake, which, for the uninitiated, is pancake batter, with some extra sugar and vanilla, cooked in a pan, and then stacked one on top of the other. To be fancy, you can add food colouring, and then wrap it all up in a whip cream icing. It’s surprisingly tasty.

As we stood in our kitchen eating this cake, I was awash with some mixed emotions about the coming year. It felt…

At first, going there was only a dream. So that became the story — about imagining being there. And then, that rare thing happened to me. Someone heard that quiet inner voice, the dream that lived deep below the surface, and responded to it. I was invited to actually go there.…to the place I was dreaming of going. Yes, of course I went, even though just getting there was one of the most difficult things I’ve done in my life.

I left with huge ideas, massive ambitions, completely unrealistic timelines of how and when I could finish this next story…

I don’t know how much you know about this last year, but it’s been a doozy…Where do I start….I’m happy to jump on a Zoom call if you want a quick catch-up on all of this.