107 days ago, I started teaching yoga, at the ripe old age of 49 2/3. I had not planned on doing this. In fact, when I was doing yoga teacher training, I was vehement: I’m not doing this to become a teacher. I loved the teacher, and I wanted to do more than a drop-in…
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Community on the Rise: Jen Park’s Bread Warehouse is proof of a new beginning
In Station Eleven, the apocalyptic post-pandemic novel by Canadian writer Emily St Mandel, one of the signs that the survivors were starting to rebuild community was when people started baking bread again. When Jen Park opened the Bread Warehouse in the Pemberton Industrial Park, it, too, signalled a rising sense of optimism. “I don’t feel…
Zero Waste Chef is my jar-hoarding alibi, and she could be your next favourite kitchen accomplice too
I am a jar hoarder. And the Zero Waste Chef is my alibi. I have a weird inability to throw old jars into the recycling bin. Instead, I tuck them in the drawer, for future use. (And every now and then my partner silently stages a protest slash intervention and culls them all. And I start over,…
“What do you want?” is not a trick question
I wasn’t a straight A student (I totally flunked art) but I did pretty well, by which I mean to say that I have always liked being asked questions and getting answers right. Honestly, I’ve realised that my favourite phrase to hear, coming from my husband’s mouth, is: “You’re right.” (It’s rare.) But there’s one…
Rise of the revivers, part 2.
When Lisa Sambo, the Director of the N’Quatqua Child and Family Development Centre, returned last June to her home in D’arcy, she was carrying medicine for her community and a big bundle of overwhelm. The 1000-person conference on indigenous language revitalization knew this was the lot of language champions and revivers – that the mountain…
To be prepared, ask a better question
I’ve been wrestling with the task of getting a 72 hour emergency preparedness kit together for years now. And still have made no real progress on that grab and go bag. On Thursday, as kids headed off back to school, the provincial health officer, Dr Bonnie Henry warned that the fall could be really challenging,…
The Blueprint: Conflict and Revolution in BC’s South Chilcotin Park
via https://craftmtn.com/features/blueprint In 2016, when BC Parks needed a strategy to guide their planning for the South Chilcotin Mountains, Tom Barratt put his hand up. It’s not every award-winning landscape architect’s idea of a dream project, but it was different. The final product would help BC Parks navigate the conflicting passions that were at play…
Nature-lovers, you might not be as alone as you think. What if Nature loves you back?
For the past nine weeks I’d felt a low-level thrum of stress about the winter-mess of my garden. It would spike when I saw other people, in March, as the Prime Minster was giving his briefings in a snowstorm, who were pandemic-proofing their future by getting in loads of soil, going to physically-distanced plant sales,…
Hold Space. Invite Emergence.
I counted up the interviews I did this year – 40 voice memos, some still awaiting transcription, pages of scribbles, Word documents already filed away. What would that look like as a collage of portraits, I wondered? Is there an Instagram Best 9 homage available, to honour the cumulative effect of these conversations on me,…
The Heart is a Drum
Yvonne Wallace gave herself seven days to close her heart and put it back in her chest, having stretched it as wide and thin as a deer hide to allow her story to resound through it, to sing of bone-truths. She had performed her one-woman show, ūtszan, twenty times, from Whistler to Whitehorse, Dawson City…
Lisa Richardson Bylines 