Category: Insight
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Courage
I started a post about courage, featuring this song, a couple or three weeks ago. It’s still sitting in the drafts folder. The Tragically Hip are a favourite Canadian band from the late ’80s and early ’90s, a time when I, and many other Canadians, considered them the best rock band on the planet. Fully…
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Nothing Else Matters when Bif Naked is your muse
Bif Naked came into my life in an odd way, the leading edge of a wave of the odd, the uncanny, the revelatory. This song has a lot of meaning for me, coming as it did amidst upheaval, chaos and — ultimately — awakening. And she came right into the middle of something else. I’ve…
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Trying to figure out this life: I’m with you, Avril Lavigne
Every now and again I’ll find myself humming a tune — I’m usually humming a tune — somewhere in my subconscious, but, suddenly, I’ll become aware that I am, and I’ll know just as suddenly I need to figure out why… Not that I can just right now but this brings up images from other…
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The Tao of Love and Light: Riffing on physics and faith
The following is a comment storm that blew out of a seemingly innocent status message I posted on Facebook. It got a few of us thinking, and I think the thinking in it, on all sides, is interesting. Note that the quote, by Stephen Edwards, is not taken from the book, The Tao of Physics,…
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Peter Gabriel’s “So” — change is coming down like red rain
The text below (with some new edits) was posted as a link on my Facebook profile a week shy of three months ago. I’d just returned from a nearly 3 month-long road trip through the western US, preceded by 2 months in Australia. The story it tells begins to describe the unusual relationship I have…
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To Kill a Mockingbird: the courage of Atticus Finch
It’s the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I’ve got the film paused, just after the scene in which the verdict is handed down. Guilty. Both the film and the book resonate very deeply with me, in all the themes they touch upon. Family, community, love, goodness,…
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Courage is…: Joannie Rochette & Petra Majdič
The greatest achievement of this 2010 Winter Olympic games wasn’t Canada’s first Gold medal, or its last, or any other Gold or Silver medal awarded in the Olympics. The two most courageous performances in the Olympics netted Bronze. One was a battle as much with emotional trauma as with any other competitor. The other was…
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Quotes and notes regarding Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram
A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare. ~ Gregory David Roberts Shantaram
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Black and white, darkness without light: a spiritual journey begins on a Three Dog Night
The joyful melody and playful rhythm will be all too familiar to my mother, and the eldest of my sisters. I was about 12 when this song came into my life, the first 45 rpm record I recall owning. I spun the disc hundreds of times…maybe thousands…playing it again and again until I’m sure everyone…
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Peter Gabriel & Ken Follet: Fear, the mother of violence
A while ago I was reading Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth. Set amidst the brutality of the English middle ages, it’s interesting to see how all Follet’s characters experience fear, and more interesting how they respond to it and how, oftentimes, they are controlled by it, particularly the most violent of them, and…