Finish Strong and Carry On

The end is where we start from. -T.S. Eliot I’ve been out and about reading my fellow Nano Poblano team’s last posts of the month, and for many of us the sentiment is the same: we made it through a month of daily writing to build the writing habit, stretch the writing muscles, in order […]

Getting To The Page

It’s the second to last day of Nano Poblano, the month-long post-a-day writing challenge, and I’m still here. In this penultimate post, I find myself reflecting on how the month has gone. I don’t feel that any of my posts this month have been particularly revolutionary. Most of them have been written in an hour […]

Trees and Their Stories

What does your Christmas tree say about you? Trees that look fashionable with designer bulbs and complementary colour schemes are all well and good, but my favourite trees are the ones decorated with things that have stories to tell. Over the years, I’ve collected enough storied things to decorate a normal-sized tree. It used to […]

How Long Must I Wait?

Today is the first day of the season of Advent, the season of waiting, anticipating, preparing, and longing. As a child, the main understanding I had of advent was the advent calendar, where we opened one door each day to get a chocolate. It was an exciting and delicious tradition, even if it provided a […]

Scotch-urday

Tonight I went to the “Hopscotch” festival in Vancouver, a Scotch-themed tasting event. It was a fun event, although we were a little disappointed that there were more other things than Scotch, such as beers and canned cocktails and other spirits. We did find some great scotches though – BenRiach was one of our favourite […]

Board Game Inspiration

This is the third Friday in a row I’ve had the opportunity to play board games with a group, different groups each time, and I am loving it! To think, over the last couple of years around this time of year, getting together with groups of people indoors — especially different groups of people — […]

Between Seasons

I took these two photos today: Notice anything? The first one is clearly autumn. The second one is trying to be winter. The lights are there, there’s a bit of ice on the water, but the snow’s a little late. The second photo is Whistler Village, which in the winter — on opening day of […]

Imagining Stillness

Being at a desk is distracting, it makes me think of desk things, like emails and unchecked lists and work things and life admin. So I remove myself to the floor. Palms down. I place my hands on the ground to connect to the Earthbut all I feel is carpetthat needs to be vacuumed. This […]

Hands, Unedited

Today I had the opportunity to attend a writing circle. This is one of the things I wrote, and resisted the urge to edit, in response to the prompt “hands.” Hands. Handstands. I can’t do a handstand but sometimes I try anyway. It helps if there’s alcohol involved. In a hostel room in New Zealand […]

Maintain or Create

Today I hit up the East Van Culture Crawl. Each November all throughout Vancouver’s eastside, hundreds of artists and studios open their doors to the public to explore everything from medieval leathercraft to glassblowing to moss art. It is spectacular. I’m always so inspired by other people’s art and creativity. More so than their art […]