Driving home from Port Hope this afternoon offered me an opportunity to hear some compelling programming on CBC Radio 2. Both books mentioned here sound like interesting reading.

Spark rebroadcast an interview with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (full interview and transcript), author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. He writes: " ( Read more... )

You came to the river for wisdom? You're on the wrong track. Old Joe was wrong. The cold, dark river don't know sumpin'.

Unreasoning, unfeeling Eramosa! It keeps on rolling, alright. Keeps leaching winter cold and poison out of these Wellington County hills. Do not superimpose your contemporary human concept of magic onto the inscrutable stream ( Read more... )

The question of human uniqueness keeps surfacing. Edmund Blair Bolles on Babel's Dawn, a blog about the origins of speech, argues it isn't language itself that makes us human, but the ability to perceive ourselves as a group, which in turn "gives us something to talk about." Co-operative behaviour, among hunting apes for example, should not be ( Read more... )

Once in a while a certain image takes residence for a season in my mind. It is always a real image, a place and time, but evolves gradually into a metaphor. Frequently these images come while I'm driving, perhaps because that's one of the few times I'm naked and alone with my thoughts, not distracted by things I give myself to do.

The most recent ( Read more... )

We talk about time management as if it could be managed. Really we can only manage ourselves. Time does what it wants, always the same thing: an inexorable drama drawing us into vortices of life, love and death. Moons and planets revolve. Great lights flicker. People respond like automatons, repeating the same movements over and over. Or they break ( Read more... )

My energy is ragged and unfocused. Brenna seems to feel the same, saying she wants to "just rot". Since we arrived home last night she has been content to work her way through my entire movie collection again, and I'm inclined to let her. I spent the morning answering the backlog of emails because love and community matter, but I feel like being ( Read more... )

Driving into more and more distances, the long, winding highway glitters under passing chariots. It leads to countless doors: blue ones on quiet streets, red ones on stone houses, a thousand sidewalks approaching the park with a fragrant rose at every corner.

At any opportunity one of these drivers could stop paying attention. When I felt the smack ( Read more... )

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I arrived downtown Guelph with an hour to spare before catching the 9:20 bus to Toronto last night. I had been struggling irritably for several hours over getting the chapbook ready to print when I arrive home on Monday.

The December National Geographic contains an article on Buddhism, which offers answers to the problem of struggle. Some ( Read more... )

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