People

Friend-From-Long-Ago

Leave a Comment / Foley Mountain C.A., People

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 …

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A Different Kind of Valor

Leave a Comment / Inspiration, People

A Different Kind of Valor Today I’m thinking of the unspeakable courage of elders. I see it everywhere, and I am in awe watching the everyday bravery of so many. After all, I am one of them, and I am beginning to understand the challenges. There’s none of the glamour we admire watching a ski …

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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 […]
Bolton
Camp Bolton Sometimes the most powerful learning experiences come in the most unexpected ways. More than fifty years ago, I was accepted as a junior volunteer counsellor at what was then called Bolton Camp for Underprivileged Kids. In late June I went for an afternoon’s interview in a downtown Toronto office, where a supervisor sat […]