Sometimes sameness stretches in every direction and the days open and close like readings of the book of your life that you expect, and nothing shifts even if you ache for it. Other times the sheathes of pages of days open at alarming rates and you barely understand what's happening, let alone 'get a reading' on where, what, how, when, or why.

This festive season and as we make our way into another spiralling year, the latter rather than the former predominates in my life. Sorry if I've been absent, a family crisis has created shifting and buckling and reconfigurations... and both of my beautiful children are by their choice now living with me.

Wishing you all a great year ahead, loving, warm, successful, and especially feeling good about mostly everything, yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, work, health, finances, art, the whole marvelous and spinning wonder.

Remember there is nothing, ultimately, but our love for each other.

The very best wishes of the festive season
and a bright and happy New Year~

love Brenda

(embedded image of the sun from SOHO, taken today)

It'll return differently. My inaudible voice. The leaves of the Poinsettia are indistinguishable, except for their colour. Hidden stamens in a red enfolded heart.

Voiceless, I spoke. The unheard words. Deep pressure of language pushing at my throat.

The man who couldn't speak came. I heard words that aren't spoken.

The chords couldn't vibrate in my vocal folds. A laryngitis, inflamed, swollen larynx, a temporary absence of speaking. The air from my breath couldn't sing on my words.

Uttering inaudible, squeaky synechdotes of words, charades, finding sign languages. Or forcing articulated sound through. What shapes into words that string their sentences over the landscape of plants and carpets. I enjoy the silence, resting in soundlessness.

My tongue, lips and mouth pantomime sultry words, my dear, but you can't hear. Listen for resonances. In the silk of the red Poinsettia blouse that I wear. And the tinsel of the season, green and red globes where we are reflected, cherry and gold ribbons tied into bows, sparkling prisms hanging from green pines, strings of lights lit, teasing at what's unsaid.

Hubris, that's it. For boasting that I hadn't been sick in three years. For many people, such a length of time sounds good, even if I had a bad bout of bronchitis back then, in January 2005, and was bedridden for 3 weeks. It was just after the tragic tsunami struck the countries of the Indian Ocean. I wrote a poem during that illness, lying in my bed in Vancouver.

And not a sniffle since then.

Until this week. And how quickly it developed into laryngitis! It's punishment for yelling. Whenever I do, I suppose.

Hubris and Punishment. And they sprayed Lysol around me at work, laughing, after the coughing spell, after I tried to eat my hot chili pepper spiced stew, after which I lost my voice. It's fun losing your voice when you know it's the punishment for the hubris of boasting before the Gods of the Flu.

Can't say I'm enjoying it too much though.

So I slugged codeine-laced cough syrup for the rest of the afternoon and no longer cared.

Taken with the Sony DSC-W55 Digital Camera that I bought for my daughter's birthday recently. Quite different to the cell phone camera's shot. The words of the little poem there I don't think have the quality of being born out of this image...

The bug that's going around caught me, sore throat, coughing a bit, etc., first cold in 3 years, time for sure, so posting a little pic of ma doggie taken on Saturday morning...while I was talking to ma son on the telephone while ma daughter was out getting us something to eat. That was before the blizzard. And before I came out from my shadow, though that's another story. I'm not a good sick person - I don't like getting sick! Grumble grumble. Back ta bed wit' ya! Rest the best medicine. xo

It's heavily snowing, you'd be ice-encrusted in minutes, and blowing, and as the ground rose whitely through the day even thunder and lightning struck from the billowy sky. Not a day to be out, and I went grocery shopping with my little red basket and bought far too much and purchased a luggage rack and was tormented by heaps of snow which dragged my little basket this way and that waiting for buses and walking the short route home after the subway ride; the snow, a light and beautiful cascade from above, became impassable white heaps of resistant solidity on the ground. If you fall into snow, it closes around you fast and becomes like cement, I remember that from an article on avalanches.

A blizzard. Predicted to be the coldest Winter ever having begun. Snow crews out in force tonight.

How many angels on the way home stopped to help me? Such gallantry, men and women. 'Do you need help?' 'Yes... thank you.' Me, who is stubbornly independent had to admit I couldn't carry my load. Why'd I buy more than I could carry? Why didn't I know the snow would render my wheels useless? How could we not chuckle, the helping angels and I. And how many blessings did I give?

Someone set out to film cold, uncaring Torontonians, and found us rather the opposite. We generally go out of our way to help each other.

Toronto friendliness is something I missed when I moved away. It was so good to come home to. With my badly constructed, over-full, precariously swinging basket and its ridiculously attached wheels, oh even the blizzarding snow must have laughed at me, I received much appreciated warmth from the people of this city today.

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Click for larger size. There is so little time for the hours a photopoem takes that surely it's not quite, but then maybe. On the other hand, the next day now, I see the colours are not so good - it was taken with the camera on my phone & maybe should re-do with a better camera. The little poem is also part of a larger stream of thoughts that I recorded during meditation and which drifted into the strangeness of time. The clustering of molecules and why motion and life/birth/death occurs. Oh, and then how our solar system's magnetic field is warped, asymmetrical, which was in the news. And then I thought, maybe time is issued forth from the great burning fields of the sun itself. And I saw photos of sun spots that were so large the entire earth could fall into them. And how close-up images of the sun resemble Van Gogh's last painting, of the wheat fields. That's how the sun's surface looks - like Van Gogh's burning fields of light. And in the movie, Sunshine, how the crew die rapturous deaths in the sun. And how I've always been a worshipper of the light, mystical and real. And it's all intriguing and thus very exciting to me. But to weave it all into a prose poem! Oh, la!

Perhaps words later...