I outsource memory. I don’t trust mine. So, when I see something that inspires me, I reach reflexively for my phone. Snap. Screenshot. Store. As I offloaded hundreds of images onto my desktop the other day, to de-bloat my phone, I saw how pointless this had been – all these things I’d wanted to … Continue reading Forget freely, remember collectively
Navigating death and aging and injury, the tricky slippery pathways toward having more compassion for our bodies For one summer, the year I turned thirty, there was a deck on the house I lived in. It was torn down by the fall, for being too close to the lot line. We moved out that October, … Continue reading Mortal Shock
Canada’s Godfather of Indigenous Cuisine, David Wolfman, reveals the way food transforms us - not through rigid definitions and diets, but as a path into a great big interconnected web of life and stories. I asked Chef David Wolfman if he thought eating an all-indigenous diet would transform me over time, and he laughed. Wolfman … Continue reading Eat your way home
There’s a little white board in the corner of Emma Gillis’ office, with a wish list scrawled down it in black marker. Most of the items have been steadily crossed off over the five years since Gillis took the helm of the Pemberton & District Public Library and tried to conjure a future-proof facility. The … Continue reading What a future-proof library does to address growth pains: make every square inch count
This was the final column I wrote in the Whistler Question, and it's not lost on me, that this huge revelation to me, of thinking like an ancestor, is something built-in to indigenous ways of thinking. As radical as it is to me, I think it's fundamental to the life approach for many of my … Continue reading Think like an ancestor
I had a setback. Nothing major. Nothing life-critical. Nothing identity-shaking. I showed up for a class and it had been cancelled. And my day’s plans were derailed. It just required a deep breath, a shrug of the shoulders and a quick pivot. But I nearly burst into tears. I felt kind of undone. I thought … Continue reading Making Self-Care A Habit (or Eat Breakfast Every Day)
We’re in the Redwood Forest. “Did they name it after the song?” my four year old asks. We’d borrowed a remix of Woody Guthrie music from the library once and This Land is Your Land evidently made an impression. I come from a country where the indigenous people believe the world was sung into … Continue reading Switching to Airplane Mode
Here is something I heard recently, Junot Diaz in conversation with Krista Tippet, on On Being. There’s nothing about our impoverished political systems, our imagined communities, that is going to be able to hold us together in the face of the coming storm of climate change. We need a lot more than we have. And … Continue reading This is our 2000th post. Thank you for being here.
Epiphanies come when I’m feeding out slack. Don’t tell my climbing partner. Because when he’s leading his way up a strenuous pitch of rock, he likes to know that I am watching with rapt attention, feeding out the rope in perfect increments, absolutely focused on his every micro-move, so that, should he fall, I will … Continue reading Permission to suck is like a Hall Pass to happiness. Here’s one, if you need it.
Katrina Onstad hates brunch. The Toronto-based journalist finds it to be a colossal time-waster, although she phrases it more delicately. “I’m a little ambivalent about it. I have had some really nice brunches. But the culture around it? And lining up? No. I hate it. It pushes you into a consumptive mode, and consumption is … Continue reading You don’t have time to volunteer, so maybe you should
The Wellness Almanac 