There is a place where you don’t need words to make deep deep sense of the world. Kera Willis’ Mountain Horse School is a gateway to that place. Kera Willis has a secret agenda. In any of her students – whether they’re a child coming under the guise of taking horse-riding lessons or attending a…
Category: the velocity project
Coming down from Treeline
Can a quiet and deeply thoughtful piece of film provoke radical action? Jordan Manley’s Treeline makes the case. This morning, on my way home from the school bus-stop, I detoured via a small patch of Douglas-Fir – the grandfather tree, called Srap7ul, in Ucwalmictws, the language of the Lil’wat Nation, meaning “something standing upright.” I found a…
The Maker’s Medicine
In praise of Slow Booze: drinking more mindfully might be as easy as swapping mass-produced plonk for hand-crafted, small batch beverages. And PS Happy 10thanniversary, Pemberton Distillery. The best drink I had over the festive season was a small plastic glass of port-wine, infused with herbs and hawthorn berries that yoga teacher Natalie Rousseau…
May you find happiness under the tree (or all I want for Christmas is a compliment and the grace to receive it)
This is a repost of a column I wrote for the Question on Christmas Day 2015, because when I wrote last month about getting a compliment and wanting to duck away, I thought, oh god, I just keep going on and on about this. Turns out, it’s more of a four-yearly thing, so I’m a…
Gratitude: attitude or platitude?
Is gratitude the fix-all it’s made out to be? I was invited to start a gratitude practice — by someone I admire immensely, an unlikely pusher of positive psychology. I had resistance to the idea. To the very phrase, actually, and its ubiquity. Despite my squinty-eyed reaction, I agreed to participate in a daily gratitude…
Forget freely, remember collectively
I outsource memory. I don’t trust mine. So, when I see something that inspires me, I reach reflexively for my phone. Snap. Screenshot. Store. As I offloaded hundreds of images onto my desktop the other day, to de-bloat my phone, I saw how pointless this had been – all these things I’d wanted to sit…
The Downside of Deceleration
Most of my life, I’ve been in a hurry to get to the end of the task, the top of the heap, the other side. Then, somewhere approaching the midway point of life, I clued into the fact that racing to get to the end was not smart, and I should start thinking about ways…
Letting Go: on the first day of kindergarten
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…
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,…
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