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To know the moment that you're in, and mobilize accordingly: that's where grace and style and eloquence are born. Once there, though, it's work to find where desperation gives way to urgency, urgency to purpose, and purpose to limit. Karaoke's unbecoming when elegance and elegies are called for. There's wrangling now to...

The Orphan Wisdom project is a stout thing to manage. There are a lot of moving parts. People coming and going, life having its way.  It never was a family business though it may have looked like it from time to time. It's certainly not now, with the waters troubled...

To all of you who have lingered, loitered, listed to port or to starboard, given up or given in or gone mental while waiting even for an update as to anything Orphan Wisdom, or are awaiting the starting gun, or a sign that it even exists anymore: Good day to...

I live with someone who loves to augment the air around the place. Her friends know this about her, and so we are on the receiving end of aromatic gifts, candles and incense from the wide world. The math of incense is like the math of life, I suppose: the rumour scent...

An irony of a kind: I make what living I do with words, with speaking, yet my handwriting is a marvel of economy. Or was, before fine motor skills began obeying the passage of time. I'm careful with words, mainly, and careful about them, and for their sakes. We've flown...

Drastic: from Grk. drastikos "effective, active, violent", from drasteon 'a thing done', from drao,' to make, do, act,' which is of uncertain etymology. The sense of 'extreme, severe' is recorded by 1808. Not before. That's something to love about language: the words just obey the rolling in of the mists, the abrasions of time....

We are all of us children of a troubled time. We are surely other things, noble and ignoble things, capable of remarkable goodness, capable of making our ancestors proud. But we moderns do need to decide and decide again what it means that we could have been born in more favoured times...

Night before last, carbon payback for daring this kind of air voyage: after a five hour drive and a five hour connecting flight, a two hour layover, and three immobile hours on the tarmac we're informed something doesn't work, and at 2 a.m. we're off the plane, wandering aimless...

I've been a pulmonary refugee for some time, and have been obliged to join the geese and the butterflies and head to less acute climes when the native cold comes on. It's probably extended my days. I was ongoingly grateful for the respite, and uneasy about the clear disfigurement of the...

There are marvelous things about being on the road. There are the reminders that the world's a big place, that humans are a disparate lot, that life's not long, that you're often older than you think you are, that being right is more a coincidence than a plan, that...

When the end of my thirties loomed my mother play-glared at me on the eve of my birthday and half declared and half prayed as follows: "I don't have a forty year old son!" She did, though. And the current odometer would gall her still: she has a son who's...

If you're in the mood for meme-length considerations, I'd move on if I were you. This is likely to be lengthy. It'll cover some ground. In the lobby after last night's show a man outwaited all the other patrons to offer me dramaturgical advice, to wit: the end of the festivities...

It's called 'a world tour', this thing of ours. Grand-sounding. Over the top for Canadians to say about themselves. And there isn't much agreement about the scale or range that makes up a 'world' jaunt. One thing's more certain than not, though: small places don't usually qualify for world...

Some days stagger to their conclusion. We're far from home, in someone else's land, holding out for a kindly reception for our heart's labours. The morning's day off has been spent not touring the haunts of my Harvard days, but in a hotel foyer, waiting on the repair of...

Torrid Tucson night   The second act of your three act play - if you get one - is there for you to find those with whom you'll live out the reasons for your birth and your persistence up unto the present moment. It's outrageous good fortune just to get one....

I know - or I'm fairly sure, and that's as close to 'know' as the circuitry of being modern and home-seeking and confused by freedom allows - that there are people out beyond my ken who receive, and sometimes read, and sometimes consider these things I compose and send....

It's a delicate business, this boycotting. The best of people wants justice to prevail, starting anytime. Starting last week. Starting now. Good will: we could start there. But good will is a complicating business. Boycotting a country is a bit like taking the hippocratic oath: maybe, if you withhold your...

This life of ours isn't ours. The brevity and happenstance alone shows us that. It isn't a circle, not really. It's not a line from here to there. They're fine enough shapes, but they've no depth, not much room for mystery and consequence. This is surely a time for mystery and...