What would a food journal or time tracking app tell you about your habits of consumption? On Friday, February 16, at 2:30pm, I downloaded the Moment app to my phone. I’d been reading about the rise of addictive technology and thought I should see where I stood. It’s been running in the background of my…
Stucum Wi: Wanosts’a7 Dr. Lorna Williams walks in wisdom, Part 2
My son heads off to kindergarten in September. Game-changer, friends say. You don’t get as much time as you think, say others. I can’t wait to learn to read, he says. What just happened to the past five years? I think. He will catch the school bus, from our driveway, through Mount Currie, to school….
Hope’s Journey
“What are you working on these days?” asked my friend Andrea. “Oh, this thing on happiness.” (I suck at the elevator pitch. Plus, I’m a bit superstitious about over-sharing a work-in-progress – as if you can squander your excitement for a project by communicating it verbally to someone, and then when you sit down at the page,…
A warrior for Wisdom: talking with Wanosts’a7 Lorna Williams, Part 1
When Mt Currie’s Xetólacw Community School was created in 1972, it was only the second Band-run school in all of Canada. Starting a school was literally a groundbreaking move for a First Nations community. Lorna Williams was one of a handful of community members, many of them parents with small children, many of them survivors of…
Don’t Chase Happiness
“Try to swing your arms more vigorously when you walk,” says my husband. I scowl, and curb a desire to inflict violence on him. I hate when he tries to optimize me. He’s read an article that says you can trick your mind into feeling happier by moving your body in happy ways. Like swinging…
Searching for happiness is a con.
I talked to an addictions therapist who is also a clown and a yogi, a fitness instructor and a cancer survivor to find out the secret to happiness. Did not get any of the answers I was expecting. Wrote a long feature now out in Coast Mountain Culture magazine. But at one point, the editor…
Mortal Shock
Navigating death and aging and injury, the tricky slippery pathways toward having more compassion for our bodies For one summer, the year I turned thirty, there was a deck on the house I lived in. It was torn down by the fall, for being too close to the lot line. We moved out that October,…
Eat Your Way Home
Canada’s Godfather of Indigenous Cuisine, David Wolfman, reveals the way food transforms us – not through rigid definitions and diets, but as a path into a great big interconnected web of life and stories. I asked Chef David Wolfman if he thought eating an all-indigenous diet would transform me over time, and he laughed. Wolfman…
Make tenderness your rallying cry
The days after Lisa Korthals died, the weather was crazy. I pulled wood in from the woodshed, and felt as if the erratic moodiness in the air, the sudden graupel, the return of the sun, the swirl of snow, was caused by her raging spirit, unsettled, unwilling to let go, to leave her life, her…
The Life Advice John Long Gave Me Before He Forgot My Name
We were drying off from a quick poached swim in my neighbour’s pool, when my 4 year old eyed their slackline, stretched at about three feet off the ground, between two trees. It’s a rock-climbers’ version of the tight-rope. The boy immediately picked up the ski poles lying beside it, and stepped onto the inch-wide…
Allowing yourself to be seen
Post-cancer, Anastasia Chomlack uses her camera to empower women to land more wholeheartedly in their lives. Almost two years ago, in June, Anastasia Chomlack jumped into the hotel shower, on her way to photograph a wedding in Arizona. The then-39-year-old founder of the Whistler Wedding Collective, Gather Creatives and Anastasia Photography had been shooting destination weddings…
Inside the Carver’s Tent
Ryan Scoular is in the final stretch of creating a six metre totem pole for Whistler home. I had the chance to peek in on his process this February, and wrote about it for the Pique newsmagazine. Photos by Ed Witwicki. Ryan Scoular stomps through the snow and zips the tent closed behind us, against…
