Exploration

“One of the key things about Blyton, as about any great writer, is to provide you with what in its broadest sense could be termed a secular worldview – that is, a sense of the coexistence of diversity, and of the many forms of life and livelihood and living, and of cultures and ways of thinking and being that are very distant from your own, and overarching them all the feeling that many of these things are exciting and worth exploring and worth absorbing as some part of your own identity.”

-Rukun Advani, writer

No Day At the Beach

"I love women, they love me, fat and all, and my sister always said I would be one. I even gave it the good old college try. Not once, but twice. It would have been so easy if I could have been a lesbian. But no, I had to settle for heterosexuality, which, as some of you know, is no day at the beach." Camryn Manheim

Onwards

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace. My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.
~ from “Body of A Woman”, by Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, first published in Chile, 1924

Why I Blog

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it - Jean-Paul Sartre

Books & People

These days are pages,these years chapters. A plot emerges which is sometimes lost, often revised. Characters come and go, the people I have known, the limited cast of humans that one life can bear. Some I betray, some I love. Some I admire, some I pity. Some I teach, some teach me. Some I lust after, some are naked and I hope to clothe them. So fade to black and white now, roll the movie of my life inside of my head...

Linford Detweiler

National Locomotion

"You get the feeling that God designed the canoe first and then set about creating a country in which it would flourish."

Bill Mason

"The CPR may have bound this nation together, but it is the canoe that first called it into being. The birchbark has been replaced, first by canvas and then by aluminum and fibreglass, but the symbolism remains. Paddling a canoe-why it's as Canadian as grilled cheese sandwhiches."

Will Ferguson

"What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hudnred on a bicycle and you remian basically bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature"

Pierre Trudeau

Interconnectedness

"I cannot be me without you
and we cannot be us without them,
and together we have a future."

Philip Carter, Anglican priest, director of the Julian Centre in Adelaide, Australia.

"Common humanity and universal responsibility link us. But much of the time we act as if this is not the case -- we are in denial as individuals and societies."

Margaret Somerville, The Ethical Imagination, 2006.