The Nook

Living on an island is a pain in the butt. For example, I have a tripod for my camera, and there is one little screw missing that renders the entire contraption useless. It has been this way for more than a year, and its brokenness has caused me multiple complications. Fixing the problem has eluded

The Super “A”

There’s a round-about a block away from my house, and on one side of it, a large parking lot and a small independent grocery story called, “The Super A.” I like the name because it reminds me of Super-8 video technology, so it implies to me something from a by-gone era, a still standing relic.

A moment with megafauna

  The other day I saw a humpback. It arched its back slowly over the surface of the water, rotating like the slowest saw blade in the world. I held my breath and didn’t move, hoping for a resurfacing. Its fluke appeared and stood straight up before slowly sinking and disappearing from sight.  Afterwards, I

The horror of normal

I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. — Upton Sinclair Years ago, I picked up a copy of Upton Sinclair’s famous 1906 novel, The Jungle. I think I was looking for a book on slaughterhouses, but what I got was a book on servitude and capitalism. I’ve since

A wall of creation and co-existence

Joseph Sagaj is Anishinaabe, a residential school survivor, and an artist. A few years ago, he took up gardening as well and joined a group of Indigenous tradespeople and Elders known as the Earth Helpers who made it their mission to bring biodiversity and native species back to Paul Martel Park in Toronto. As Sagaj

History and a highway sign

When you drive north on Vancouver Island’s Highway 19, keep your eye out for a sign marking Ginger Goodwin Way as you approach the town of Cumberland. That road sign has been there since 2019, although the name was originally given to that stretch of road when the highway  opened in 1996. The local MLA

Not a solution, but a crutch

Five, seven, five. Three lines of writing, with a precise number of syllables in each; this is haiku. In sixteenth century Japan, the beginnings of Renga poems, which were hundreds of stanzas long, broke off into their own form. A wandering daydreamer named Basho, would go on to make haiku a widely accepted form of