Category — Faith

Image: Mark Tansey, Myth of Depth, from Adbusters Tactical Briefing #19

“For months, tactical briefings from Adbusters have poured into my inbox. The advertisement-free anti-consumerist magazine and foundation at the centre of the Occupy Wall Street movement has one aim: to address global social and economic inequalities and the undue influence of corporations. No small feat.

Since September 17th they have staged an ongoing series of demonstrations, sparking a worldwide sit-in. New York is simply the epicentre of a world-wide movement. Here in Toronto, my adopted city, tents and voices have been raised in the same spirit.

I am not a poster child for radical action. With a newborn at home, my life has not afforded me an opportunity to set up, or even visit, the St. James Park camp. So, why am I an Occupy insider?

Because I believe in jamming culture. Asking the hard questions: like, why does a corporation have the rights of a human individual?

Because I believe in throwing a wrench in things…

…The Occupy movement is important, not because it’s reshaping the institutions that it must, but because they have seized the global conversation. They’ve put the 99% on the table. They’ve got us guessing at their next move. Could the 1% really step up to the plate and start shelling out to meet the needs of the world? Could this shift — straight out of Acts — really take place on a global scale?”

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Read the full post HERE.

“When I asked to tell her story, she said there’s not much there.

She said the same.

And so did she. And she.

But I said, “You’re wrong. There’s so much. So much you’re missing. The thriving career, working with the big-name designer. The kids kept safe, the lives you’re shaping. The Friday night make-stuff-party you host in your loft apartment.

“Don’t you see?”

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Friend, will you join me over at SheLoves magazine for Seeking Eve Monday, today?

[acrylic, foil and paper on canvas]

“All of us are trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and growth, whom God loves unconditionally, anyway.”

- Brother Lawrence

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

― Albert Einstein

“Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence.

Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation…tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.  His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.”

- Jean Arp

“Either we are at the mercy of life, or in the hands of God.”

- Dan MacDonald, Grace Toronto

‎”I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable, beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.”

- Mary Oliver (Starlings in Winter,) by way of Jocelyn Durston. Read my profile on Jocelyn, and her Farm for a Year adventures, here.

The days with a new son are blurring into one.

First, his birth: marvel, a rush, completely bowled me over. His face, an orbit, encircling us with new love. Then, his sister’s midnight scare. Stopped breath. Gasping: “Mommy, help. Mommy, help me.” Me a mess of tears, fears. Nursing to health a child drenched in sweat, her airway betraying her, mere days after her brother’s birth. Me, sitting on the couch nursing newborn as my husband braves the ambulance ride with our first baby. Sobbing for what might have happened had I not heard her: had the air conditioners been on, the doors closed, muffling her cries from bedroom next door. I’d woken to nurse babe and heard the stirrings I’d otherwise miss. This is our miracle.

Now, two children roaming these wooden floors, healthy. And me, sent to rest week after week. The bleeding keeps coming. Cabbing to emergency, waiting in rooms with a woman swallowing needles, man cursing at children. Full moon, they said. Husband at home laying toddler to bed, feeding infant by bottle. Slowly now, it is subsiding, but my world circles round a room, a house, a three block radius. I can’t walk further for the pain of it. And I am tears and laughter and more tears as I struggle to find moments with my sweet girl, my devoted man. And I hold a babe in arm all the day.

And today we had a party in our front yard to celebrate two years of life, of memory, of firsts — steps in the Bowen House, ice cream cone with Grandma, words, airplane rides — and over plates of cupcakes and gummy bears spilling on grass, the pain of it all slips away.

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Joining with Emily, at imperfect prose, today.

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I feel I should explain exactly what happened. Madeleine caught croup and a spiked fever in the middle of the night had her gasping for air. That was the cause of the 9-1-1 call and our midnight scare. I had complications with bleeding after Thomas’ birth and had to be on bed rest for a couple of weeks. In the end everything checked out and I didn’t need any surgery, thank God.

there is a thing that i need to do. a stack of things, really. a stack of pretty 100-page books i had printed and bound from a ramshackle pile of pages i carefully packed around all over vancouver that comprise my book.

the book about the life and mess and thrill and heartbreak of faith, and the wild and courageous and deeply-flawed and beautiful women i know who live it every day. and i need to send these books to publishers. and to agents. and everything in my pregnant, over-heated body tells me to take a nap. but i really need a kick in the pants.

aggressive/encouraging commenting welcome below.

Last year I pitched a story to UPPERCASE magazine — a profile of my creative hero, artist/author Sabrina Ward Harrison. It was a thinly veiled attempt to meet Sabrina, whose work I have followed for close to ten years. As luck/fate (read: GOD) would have it, the pitch turned itself into much more than a phone interview.

I was sent to Prince Edward Island for a three-day sojourn with six other women to create alongside Sabrina at an old waterside hotel called the Highlands. (You may remember I faced a little trepidation as prepared for this trip.) The historic home and adjacent town dance hall, where we did our making, has housed royalty and the likes of Reverend Billy Graham. Each room was brimming with island minutiae and stacks of old LIFE magazines — a writer’s dream. Angela Ritchie, founder of the Whistler-based ACE Camps, and a creative mastermind in her own right, was the organizer of the retreat. I had the good fortune of interviewing her when I was back in Vancouver last week.

The fruit of the trip — Watchful Reverence, in UPPERCASE issue 10 — arrived at stockists and doorsteps days ago.

An excerpt:

“It’s the steady calm of the island air whistling through the birch trees. It’s the burst of plover, finches, and jays that begin their daylight calling at 4:30am, beckoning us to do the milking… I am sitting on the front stairs of the Highlands main house. Here four crooked trees congregate like an outer hearth. The twisting white-worn branches are the sort you’d find in the Haunted Wood of Anne of Green Gables’ imagination. The beaked chirps, caws and whistles blend into a symphony of spring. Behind me seven girls chatter on around the breakfast table: preserves, balkan yogurt, fresh-baked muffins, boiled eggs, brimming between. In the old adjacent dance hall Sabrina, dressed in a vintage polkadot dress, is readying for the day’s making.”

It was an absolute gift to meet Sabrina and a joy to work with Janine Vangool, tireless publisher/editor/designer of the magazine (not to mention mother to an on-the-run toddler.)

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If you are interested in reading the complete article you can order single copies or subscriptions to this beautiful publication at: http://shop.uppercasegallery.ca/collections/uppercase-magazine-1\. It is available in print only.