Arrived! My first photo: the horizon taken from my new living room – a blur of blinking red lights at night.      

Today is definitely a whiteout day. There’s no wind; the snow falls quickly and the sky and the ground blend together into a lump of soft whiteness. Today is also the solstice, the shortest day of the year. We celebrate the return of the sun and each day will grow longer until the arrival of the next solstice in June. Several weeks ago someone told me that after being in Paris, I would find Montreal somewhat ugly. But last Friday, when we walked out of the airport and a taxi driver headed us off into a snowy landscape, perhaps it […]

“(…) to be the wide blue merged with the mother’s breast, sublime emptiness.”  Rumi I am once again thrown out of sleep a bit too early for it to be useful. My solution has always been to heat up some milk, nature’s tranquilizer, so here I am sipping my warm milk. That and a bit to eat is often enough to lull my body back to sleep. Do we ever really grow up? Comfort in the middle of the night – Mama’s warm body inside and out. What other country has devoted themselves so passionately to the development of a […]

It is the darkest time of the year. What little light there is constantly changes. Until one moment late in December, the Earth’s northern hemisphere is moving into its furthest distance from the sun. At the apogee, all begins to move once more towards the sun and a new cycle commences. It is Christmas time, once a pagan festival celebrating the return of the light.  In Paris, ville-Lumière as it is known, the Eiffel Tower shimmers its Klein blue into the night sky and explodes on the hour into brilliant bursts of jumping white starlights -an eiffel version of the Euro […]

What I love about Paris is what also keeps me turning and looking, threading my way through the tiny webs of streets connecting one star centre to another within this maze of “étoiles” d’arraignée. Everywhere a labyrinth of shops full of shiny costly things glistening in what is called the City of lights. I begin only now to venture into the courtyards which I did not know were there – Paris inside, Paris outside. I have been anxious, seeing my own multitude of threads pulled and spun, cast out into my space like the busy spider I am clinging here […]

I never thought of Paris as being the centre of the world, but I have witnessed many references to that idea and heard people talk of Paris and Parisians as if – this is it! History and beauty fetichized ad nausea, there is an odd schizophrenic feeling in the air. With the revolution in the late 1700s, royalty and its abuses of power were thrown away in an abrupt and violent manner, but everywhere I see evidence of an enchantment with the era rejected.  The leaves are almost all off the trees and I can now see Île Saint-Louis and […]

My thoughts are still in Ireland. Paul and I were there last weekend. I brought the last parcel of Audrey’s ashes with me. Most of them had been scattered earlier this summer in a place she loved on Hornby Island, British Columbia. The last was to return to a happy place from her childhood, also along the water near Belfast, Northern Ireland. For us to be here in Europe and living separately, to return to family in Ireland was like a homecoming. Bringing Audrey back to her family was also an embrace for us. Blood is thick and human ashes […]

I suddenly had an image of Paris as a huge Queen Bee. I saw the entire country very busily stuffing her with royal jelly. Beauty, beauty, beauty. Soooo swollen with beauty, she cares not for wings nor even for the rest of her colony. Happily, not all of Paris si so rayal and not all of France cares. How can women embrace motherhood and womanhood and an ever demanding idea of beauty all at the same time? How exhausting. We are still not free. I managed to avoid it for four months, but it finally happened. In search of a photo of […]