Last week I read a book of personal essays by Ruby McConnell entitled Ground Truth: A Geological Survey of a Life. In science, ground truthing is when you take whatever you’ve measured remotely, whether it’s via satellite imagery or aerial photography or some other technique, and go to the specific place on the ground to see if what’s there matches what you inferred from your remote data. It’s a way of ensuring that the calculations…

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I was scrolling around on Twitter a few months ago when I discovered that Canadian author Theresa Kishkan, who lives on BC’s Sunshine Coast, had published a novella in 2020 with Palimpsest Press: The Weight of the Heart. I’ve never read a novella, but I knew I liked Kishkan’s writing from reading her blog, so I decided to order it. It was a great choice, especially since I’m helping support Canadian literature. Not only that,…

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Last week I read a book about bipolar by Hilary Smith and came across this quote that summed up my predicament succinctly. What is the meaning of life when an illness prevents you from doing many of the things your society values? What is the meaning of life when an…illness makes it hard for you to do the things you yourself value? To what extent is it important to cling to your goals and refuse…

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In the mid-1980s, a British-born Canadian, Chris Czajkowski, built a cabin on a small part of the wilderness homestead of Jack and Trudy Turner, who had homesteaded their plot in the southeastern part of Tweedsmuir Provincial Park, in west-central British Columbia, for 34 years. The Turners gave Czajkowski a section of their property on which to build her cabin, and helped her build using logs cut and milled on site. It was a quiet life,…

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“Pay attention to the weather, to what breaks your heart, to what lifts your heart. Write it down.” –Ellen Meloy The perennial border. In the veggie garden.

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I had a blog post written and ready to post for today, but in light of the protests about George Floyd and systemic police racism south of the border, with similar protests here in Canada, my post seemed trite and trivial. This is the time to think hard about structural racism in our society, and to figure out what we want our society to be and how we can get there. Without tear gas, rubber…

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Tipping points, or thresholds, represent a point at which an environmental system shifts into a new phase, not linearly but in a stepwise fashion. There can be a linear trend up to that point, at which time the system makes a stepwise shift and the resulting change is greater than could have been predicted using linear models. In most of these cases, the system cannot return to its pre-threshold state. For example, gradual ocean warming…

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Every day I take a series of photos of our perennial gardens from set places in the yard. The idea is to turn them into a time lapse of each garden, showing them coming out in full glory over the course of a spring/summer season. As I stand in between the two front gardens, I feel like I’m awash in a lush sea of plants that bound the path on both sides and make little…

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More people are gardening these days as the COVID pandemic keeps them at home with time to kill, and as loss of income due to being laid off leads to food insecurity. It reminds me of the Victory Gardens tended during the two World Wars, designed to keep everyone fed through tough times. Gardening is great therapy for the anxious and/or depressed mind, and it can be a triumph when you’re able to grow vegetables…

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I have been having trouble writing, seized in the grip of a depression that seems to be holding me underwater so that I have to hold my breath and can’t let any words out. When I sit down to write, I am confronted by a completely blank brain, like a two-stroke engine that won’t turn over – it just keeps chugging and chugging until the battery is dead. My psychiatrist says this is a normal…

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