A chronicle of reverence, fear and wonder. Inspired by the 2020s.
Dormant Last read · last published · next check
Read 10 days ago and current, but nothing has been published for 5 years.
On the banks of the South Thompson River, in a valley surrounded by semi-arid hillsides, the wind blows unobstructed. Neither crosses nor tombstones impede its journey over the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Beneath the earth, whispers of children, some reportedly as young as three years old, have been calling to be found. They have been calling for years, only to have…
Next to my desk there is a drawing pinned to my corkboard.
I have debated whether to write about a family friend of ours, who in the early hours of Sunday March 7 was found dead on the outskirts of Canada’s capital; his 40-year-old body strewn on a snowmobile trail, off a desolate country road, bloodied and murdered.
Some half a billion kilometres from this earth, deep in the dark expanse, as she neared that celestial crimson sphere, Perseverance must have felt it to be a dream.
IN THE YEAR 430 B.C., a plague emerged from Ethiopia, spilled over the adjacent Persian empire, and soon marched toward the almighty city-state of Athens, a city at the height of its global cultural dominance.
When the pro-Trump protesters left the White House, before they transformed into a mob of insurgents and thugs, when they were nothing but a moving sea of flags prodding past the barren elm trees of Pennsylvania Avenue, with their eyes only barely turned toward the Capitol: I thought of a day not long ago when a car nearly hit my daughter.
In the dark and roiling sea that was 2020, back when we had only barely begun to embark upon her troubled waters, before coronavirus had hit our borders, before racial tensions had exploded in the streets, and before the very foundations of democracy trembled beneath our nation’s feet, there was a foreboding event that tried to warn of the great storm to come.
Leonard Cohen died just hours before the 2016 election.
