Category Archives: Uncategorized

My treatment for prostate cancer included forty blasts of radiation at the Cancer Clinic of the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria. I cannot say enough good things about the Clinic and its staff. I felt supported and cared for. Nevertheless, at the end of each radiation episode, I needed to dispel the feeling of beingContinue reading “Healing Places”

Our childhood home in Vancouver BC was on the north flank of Point Grey, a morainal bluff that overlooked the North Arm of the Fraser river. From my bedroom window I could see the river, Sea Island with its dairy farms (now mostly occupied by Vancouver International Airport) and beyond, the Salish Sea and theContinue reading “Fraser River and Grindstone Creek”

In the summer of 1999 we moved from Burlington, Ontario to North Saanich on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We took the long way around, a three-month road trip with a camper trailer, dog, canoe and bicycles, heading east to Newfoundland then west to British Columbia, arriving in early September. I collected many sketches (see above)Continue reading “Shape”

My holy moments are when the moon shines bright in the kitchen window on a winter morning, or when I hold a bowl of water, remember its importance in a dry land, or when I am merged in music made together with my comrades, or solitary, with a brush and colours searching out the beautyContinue reading “My Holy Moments”

Walker Hook is an appurtenance on the east flank of Saltspring Island. Drifting material. trees, logs, sand, plugged the gap between Salt Spring and a small rocky island a few hundred meters offshore. We anchored our sloop on the south side of the hook on a warm summer day and let the day flow throughContinue reading “Enough”

Whitefish and Solstice Spuds speak for themselves. In my working career as a Great Lakes scientist I was often in Windsor, Ontario, at the International Joint Commission offices to meet with  our U.S. colleagues from Ann Arbor, Michigan, or to conduct field work on Lake St. Clair.  These junkets often involved  camping out in inexpensiveContinue reading “Not Just Nourishment”

Moving from boats to boundaries and beyond, it’s hard to choose a sequence that seems to flow.  Night Guitar and Another Door Opens, written at different times, both refer to the edges of the underworld but without the drama that might be appropriate to a younger person. I’d like to develop this more pictorially but for nowContinue reading “Transitioning”

Boats have been a near-continuous presence in my life, rowboats, canoes, kayaks, motorboat and sailboats. I enjoy looking at the hulls of boats  when they are out of the water for storage or repair, trying to imagine how they would respond to waves and currents.  Sailboat Seen through Trees On the slope above the landingContinue reading “Boats”

620 Bus to Tsawassen and Night Paving were written a few years ago before we started looking through the Covid-19 lens.  620 Bus … (a ride familiar to me on my day-trips to Vancouover) talks about a landscape in transition from fertile delta farmland to suburban sprawl and the islands of anonymity represented by theContinue reading “Through the Windows of a Vehicle in Motion”

    The drawing above was made in 1980 at the UBC Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver BC. The museum building was designed by noted architect Arthur Ericson. It is a splendid space built around possibly the best collection of West Coast Indigenous art and artifacts. Splendid space notwithstanding, the roof leaks. The paddle depictedContinue reading “Hands (Making)”