You expected me to cry, I bet. Granted, I nearly lost it when I glanced over and saw my husband tearing up. But I didn’t. I held it together. It was time. Everything was signaling it – from the five year old’s dead-forward focus climbing up the bus steps and heading off to kindergarten, to…
Category: slow the fuck down
Are you ready for the Analogue Travel Challenge?
In praise of the soul lap, the undocumented adventure. Stephen Hui has taken thousands of photos of pristine backcountry vistas. But these days, he’d rather leave his camera behind, especially if he’s hiking a trail he’s been on before. Even though his work, as author of the just-released and already-a-bestseller guidebook, 105 Hikes in and…
The pleasure of not thinking
To the farmers, firefighters, day camp coaches, event workers, frontline service people, road re-pavers, emergency responders, investigative reporters, I need to apologize. I’m sorry. I see how hard you’re working to keep the wheels turning. I’m not pulling my weight. “No thinking in August” is my friend Mike’s mantra, and the moment I heard it,…
Breaking Points
Once, when I was really under pressure, blocked by my own ambition, I plagiarized. I stole an entire paragraph of someone else’s writing and offered it up as my own. The story ran in the newspaper. I was sent a cheque. And cashed it. No one ever found out. Except my mother, who was suspicious…
Grow Your Own: Revolution
Thanks to Feet Banks for asking me to write about seed libraries for the summer issue of Mountain Life, out now. (And also for his always judicious and amazing editing, and gentle suggestion that my original opening about the impending apocalypse might be a bit too much for bummer to keep people reading.) Give peas a chance at…
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…
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…
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…
Lisa Richardson Bylines 