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What did you expect?

We have become obligate avoiders, dwellers in the middle of the field well away from boundaries –the just-right-baby-bears of the Goldilocks tale. We seek to protect ourselves from edges, no matter how pervasive, how common, how important they may be. It was for a very good reason that the American folk hero, John Wayne, felt he had to remind us that ‘Courage is being scared to death… and…

Who Wants a Country of Boys?

We mortals seem to be good at assumptions; they are shortcuts that allow us to function without the requirement of constantly checking the validity of beliefs or items in our environment. Part of it is trust; part of it is process, and yet I don’t want to get into a semantic discussion of the manifold vagaries of the word, nor a tedious list of definitions. I just want to concentrate on that very…

The Unfallen Yellow Leaf

‘Age, with his stealing steps, hath clawed me in his clutch,’ as the gravedigger in Hamlet says. I’m not so sure I agree –he was speaking about a skull, after all- but I have to admit there are times when I do feel old, and shipped ‘into the land as if I had never been such’; when I do wonder if whatever I have done has gone as unappreciated as a shadow from the moon, as unnoticed as an owl in…

The Custom that dare not speak its name

The custom that dare not speak its name… Not until recently anyway. Now it seems all the rage to study the practice –expose it, as it were. And while I confess to paraphrasing the famous euphemism used in the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895, I’m talking about something completely different. I’m talking about… well, grooming, as it’s prosaically termed.

Not grooming, you understand, but grooming…

I…

The Grief that does not Speak

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

Like Hamlet, we all recognize this mood: the black dog lying in the noonday sun, the cloud that even hides the moon. It is the tear that defeats the wavering smile –and yet… And yet, there is often something more behind the grief, something that is hidden beneath the first impression. Shakespeare, again, understood…

Biding the Pelting of this Pitiless Storm

Hubris –the extreme arrogance that was so offensive to the old Greek gods that they reacted with punishment and an exile from grace- is that what thisis? I’m not sure anymore… It’s not, perhaps, so obvious as the vaulting ambitions of a Macbeth or the arrogance of a Caesar, nor even the overweening pride of an Oedipus in the Sophoclean plays, and yet… And yet, viewed from a distance, it’s hard…

So, Trump has convinced his country that he should lead. I did not think America had drifted so far; I did not realize it was so out of touch with us -and me… It brought to mind a poem I wrote years ago, not ever believing the impossible could come to pass:

  The Impossible

Is not something

I can understand,

Or even compute

With words.

Like infinity,

It is defined in terms of what

It is not

Or…

Is Beauty really skin deep?

Although love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, as Shakespeare reminds us, there is a redness of the cheek that is not so kind as just a blush. So may the outward shows be least themselves, he also says. The world is still deceived with ornament.

Acne arrives at the wrong time of life; it usually declares itself around the same time a teenager is trying to establish her identity; trying…

I guess the hunt is never over. Just when you think you’re winning, a sleeper cell surfaces, one you hadn’t even suspected, and closets itself somewhere you’d never think to look –an endless game of hide and seek. A Samsara of possibilities.

An yet, what would be the thrill of exploration if you knew all of the findings beforehand? We all need quests -adventures that uncover the hitherto…

Sometimes I feel disconnected. It’s almost as if I have been traveling on a highway all my life, largely unaware of the myriad roads that emanate from it. Unaware of the different coloured horizons that have been hiding out there all along. Or is skulking sometimes a better descriptor? Every so often I come across a concept so… bizarre, that I wonder how it even survived long enough to acquire a…

Women are from Earth

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus –remember that book? It was published in 1992, and although it was really talking about relationship issues between the sexes, it seems to hint at other, more physiological differences that underpin the disparity -differences that have sometimes been overlooked, or perhaps ignored, in many pharmaceutical drug studies. http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/sport-exe…

Statistics, the collation, analysis and ultimately, the interpretation of data, have never been easy – at least for me. They have never reached the level of intuitive and, indeed, have barely climbed past manipulative in my head. And I readily admit to occasional cognitive dissonance even when they are used to support what I already believe. Or, rather, wantto believe… I wonder if the sources…

Bacteria, by and large, have received a bum rap (pardon the pun). Ever since they were discovered, there was a sense they were up to no good. Why were they always hanging around sick people, it was asked? And why did foul smelling things –the miasma (you gotta love these words)- always have bacteria skulking about in the background? There must have been somereason why -since the beginning of…

As I age, it becomes increasingly clear to me that Life is far more complicated than I could ever have suspected. It is like a stew where I keep finding new ingredients –some to my liking, and some… Well, let’s just characterize them as unexpected -mysterious strangers that surface from time to time, wreak havoc, then disappear again like shadows on a moonless night.

Social movements are often…

Barbie in the Mirror

As an Ob/Gyn specialist I have been, I suppose, more than a passive observer of women over the years. But society has not been passive, either. Depending on where you live and in what cultural milieu, issues such as our sizes and shapes have become sources of real anxiety. Unrealistic expectations of morphology no doubt arise from multiple origins, but the end result is often the same -many of us…

Is there really Something in a Name?

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.

So said Shakespeare’s Juliet. And yet even then –especially then- it mattered. Tribes have always mattered; we have always been known by our tribes: we are all either us or themaren’t we?” And little has changed despite the agglutination of the numberless tribes into tightly knit societies; there are still…

The itsy bitsy teenie weenie?

I am no longer simply bemused at the secular paranoia that seems to be growing like Topsy in the Western world; I am becoming irritated; I am becoming annoyed that it is now even conflating fashion with politics and spreading like blight in a deliberately monocultured crop. Pick your battles, folks –this is a demeaning one. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/16/burkini-ban-defended-as-fre…