September 2013

DOING NOTHING

Leave a Comment / Healing, Inspiration, Nature, Simple Living

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. I’ve just been dipping into Thoreau’s Sounds, and I’ve been stung. As Jon Kabat-Zinn points out in his fine meditation book, …

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Lupine
Lupine Sometimes, as I age, I wonder just how small and slow I can go. As my journey takes me deeper, rather than broader, as I am moved to cast off more things, sometimes my new standard of enough is alarming. Are you sure you won’t need this? Yes, as long-time inspiration E.F. Schumacher insisted […]
Friend-From-Long-Ago
OLD FRIEND FROM LONG AGO How extraordinary. Last winter I received an email from Nancy, a friend I hadn’t talked with since I was nine: I was researching Canadian women nature writers when I came upon your name. It is you, isn’t it? Peri is an unusual name. How to explain very different lifetimes? How […]
Dearness
Dearness There lives the dearest freshness deep down things, Gerard Manly Hopkins This is my world. I am standing in rain, something slightly more than a mist. Behind me, yellow petals fall from the astonishing blaze of forsythias. At long last we have come to the greening of the year. There are the tiniest, sour-green […]
Ken in the Wilderness
Ken in the Wilderness This week, I spent a morning revisiting my artist father, Ken Phillips’, Ruined Orchard series of oil sketches. As I looked, I could see how it was for him then. When he set out that September morning to the dying orchard, my father would have been heading deep into his own […]
A Season of Miracles
A SEASON OF MIRACLES By the standards of an eastern Ontario spring it’s early yet. But even still my land is full of promise. This morning, there is the bliss of rain. Not snow, but a cleansing rain. When I push open my front door, I hear a first robin singing. (In these uncertain times […]