Author: adminJB

When Place Becomes Parent – A New Kind of Mother’s Day Celebration

Growing up, I heard the worst things said of my birthplace, Windsor, Ontario, and the surrounding county. I remember hearing “the Armpit of Canada” and “Lunch Bucket Town”, the latter referring to the industries that made factory workers solidly middle class because they paid so well. I also remember killer sinus infections because those same industries caused rampant air pollution. I happily moved to Waterloo – for cleaner air, higher ed, and a fresh start after family troubles.

Like so many families in the late 1940s and early 1950s, ours suffered serious trauma. We did not endure unhealed WWII terrors that precipitated alcoholism and domestic violence. Nor were we affected by the systemic racism and poverty of those pre-civil rights times. Medical isolation and divorce led to our family’s dissolution.

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The Anxiety Paradox

It’s a good thing. It’s a crippling thing. It can inspire agency. It can take a life.

Anxiety: the poster child for Paradox

For so many reasons, most obvious our dependence upon constantly updating information that unsettles at best and terrifies at worst, we post-modern humans have created and are perpetuating The Age of Anxiety. Anxiety is why so many streaming services are successful; they are the massive technological equivalent of the memorable late-70s and 80s commercial’s catch phrase:

“Calgon! Take me away!”

A water softener in warm bath water may reduce, at least temporarily, the anxieties generated by family and professional life. Water, the universal solvent, has spiritual and emotional power when we are open to its metaphorical as well as practical cleansing abilities. Unlike technological replacements which often leave a highly activated human nervous system even more charged, a bath, shower, or plunge into an icy pool physically and emotionally lowers sensations of stress if such activities are chosen and feel good to the chooser.

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Ruth Cuthand’s Beaded “Tuberculosis”

In December 2025, I visited the McMichael Canadian Art Collection with my husband, a visual artist. The McMichael holds a special place in our relationship, a place where he, an American, met many of the Indigenous artists who survived colonization and its aftermath to make art exploring the heart of Turtle Island’s beauty, torment, and sources of healing. This art has been important to me for most of my life.

As a white girl born into the racist culture of a US/Canadian border town, I grew up hearing and reading stories of white beneficence toward “backward Natives.” My real education began with a teachers’ college friendship, not with an Indigenous person, but with a friend who during this period identified as a Black woman. Before we had words like settler, and intersectional feminist, and systemic racism, and cultural genocide, we didn’t address the obvious inequities in schooling that led many whites into professions and People of Colour into the less-than positions open to “minorities.”

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On Seeing Hamnet

Maggie O’Farrell’s imagining of Hamlet‘s genesis has been translated into a film of extraordinary passion. Forest witchery so vibrantly portrayed means theatre goers experience the forest’s innumerable life-and-death stories that have imbued Agnes Hathaway’s life with irrefutable power. Shakespeare’s wife, a ghostly presence referred to as Anne in most histories, becomes in O’Farrell’s fiction a match for the Bard in every way. She gathers her healing herbs, tends to her bees, and intuits her falcon’s needs as one who resonates more with the unfolding stories of an ancient forest than with the humans who give her shelter and do their best to “civilize” her. She is an authentic Wild Woman, rich in the ways of the first medicine women, the first growers of food and magic, the first midwives of life and death, the first of those burned and drowned and hanged and tortured to death because of their knowledge and wisdom. With Will, viewers fall under this forest woman’s spell. This, we know, will be a cataclysmic coupling when . . . never if . . . it happens.

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On Creativity

The human journey, on every continent and in every age, presents human beings with the contrasting experiences of pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, kindness and cruelty. It is widely believed that when we are children, we are so pliant and so teachable that many religious and educational practices use these contrasting life and death forces to instil their belief systems, claiming:

“Give me a child until he is seven and I’ll show you the man . . ..”

This saying is sometimes attributed to Aristotle, sometimes to Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and sometimes to self-appointed gurus who claim to be its source because they do not bother to research their materials or even know that they should. In these days of technological glamours, “likes” trump everything, especially the search for truth.

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Aging and Prince Hamlet’s Fifth Act

The bodies are everywhere, well, figuratively speaking. For those of us privileged to experience old age, like pall bearers, we carry our share of losses. We mourn, and . . . we celebrate. For while death is inevitable, so is life in all its wild and willful glory.

Recently, I’ve had to meditate on loss because of a visual impairment that makes unsafe activities I used to relish. After moving to Ontario from Vermont, I discovered a theatre lab that holds readings once a month. These are at night, making it necessary for me to figure out how to attend without my usual sense of independence. This is a safety issue, mine and all those who might be on the road with me when darkness falls.

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Jane Goodall and Eating to Save the Planet

How do we commit to carrying on this remarkably hopeful environmental activist’s work to protect all Earthlings and our Earth Home?

One thing we can do without too much trouble? Reshape our food habits and support our local farmers at farmers’ markets and independent grocery stores carrying local and regional organic farm produce. Goodall speaks eloquently about becoming a vegetarian to save the Rainforests threatened by corporations that clear cut to make room for more pasture land for the “beef” industry. (I put beef in quotes to remind myself that cattle are living beings, not inert blobs of flesh beneath celophane wrappers.)

Her call to become plant eaters mixes with many others, including John Robbins, scion of the Baskin and Robbins ice cream corporation. Early in life, he rejected his family’s millions to pioneer plant-based food awareness. An early spokesperson for a planet healthy died, he sparked awareness that infuriated corporations pushing food that uses up reserves of water, endangers the lives of humans who work in the “meat industry,” and inflicts cruelty beyond description on the emotionally intelligent animals it commodifies. If you doubt animal emotions, read Jeffrey Moussiaeff Masson’s The Pig Who Sang to the Moon for evidence of animal emotional expressions similar to humans’.

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On Leaving Vermont and Returning to Canada

Since the US 2024 election and the current federal government’s growing disregard for constitutional rights, responsibilities, and freedoms, whenever I sat at my computer, I faced the twin spectres of ICE detention and eventual deportation. Although I’d been a Permanent Resident of the US since 2003 and have no criminal record, I felt my Canadian citizenship determined my otherness after Trump suggested Canada become the 51st state and many Canadians made clear we were not having it. That I had been living in Vermont’s green mountains legally and at the same address for 23 years made no difference. As with other Canadians, my position became precarious when those of us living and working in the US joined the growing list of this current authoritarian regime’s targets for revenge.

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Earth Day 2025: Toward Remembering the Rest of Our Family

Reflections on The Overstory / Patty Westerford

The following words form the first trickles of thought and feeling inspired by The Overstory. Richard Powers won a Pulitzer for this novel in 2019. I have no idea why I didn’t hear about it sooner. It, a massive, walking, talking forest of a book that makes reference more than once to Macbeth’s nightmare on-the-move forest, only made it to this Vermont, rural, woodsy cabin this spring. I haven’t finished reading it. I will likely never finish reading The Overstory.

There are writers who love characters and writers who love places and writers who love ideas and writers who love Earth. I suspect Richard Powers loves all of these and so much I can’t conceive of loving because I have not lived his experience of the world. The one experience I share with him, the love of and gratitude and reverence for the greater than human world, is enough to keep me faithful to the story, word after word, line after line, page after page.

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For International Women’s Day 2025: Women, “Hotness,” and Becoming an Earthling

Because I was raised in a border city, being Canadian rather than American was an early, clearly made distinction. This distinction did not suggest Canadian superiority, at least in my family, but pride in British and French traditions and geographic differences. Like a lot of Windsorites, I learned that while most of the US begins south of the Canadian border, in our part of the world the City of Detroit sits on our northern horizon, the American city’s spectacular display of light at night casting diamonds up and down the Detroit River separating our two countries. I don’t know why, but I liked this anomaly and learned to relate to most places through their north-south axis.

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