Spring this year was uncharacteristically warm in Nova Scotia. Most years, April and May can feel like a drawn out extension of winter- an annual test of patience as temperatures stubbornly hang below 10°C and greening fields beckon the hesitant temperature gauge to hurry up already, to hear the song of the spring peepers, to…

“She’s on borrowed time,”I heard myself say today.Tonight, I think about how griefplunges meinto the preciousness of it all:every potential last.Then I remember,gleeful and aching,this was(is)always true. This summer, anxiety has followed me around, somehow both subliminally and vehemently all at once. It lurks in the corners, room to room, hangs over me like a…

David Whyte writes a beautiful poem about forging our own way that echoes the often quoted wisdom of Joseph Campbell, “if there is a path, it is someone else’s.” The poem, “Start Close In,” is both meditation and wise council- the kind that turns us back toward ourselves for answers instead of further deluding us…

In my work, on a daily basis, I have the privilege of witnessing our human capacity for humility. Humility shows up in myriad ways, but most often and simply, I witness humility in the people I speak with who are willing to become intimate with reality, an endeavour of bringing one’s truth into focus. Bringing the uncomfortable, capital…

Our need for healthy relationship with others is ubiquitous, inescapable, commonsense to most, and of emphasis through the language of attachment science in the world of mental health and psychology. A trending discussion of our hardwired human need for closeness with others is well-placed, and it excites me to see us broadening ideas of self-care to include our relational lives…

Summer, for me, is the season of feeling that particular sense of the unreachable. It’s a feeling familiar to me anytime of year, across seasons in the quiet stillness of a grey day, in the fleetingness of golden daybreak, or at the brink of a dark purple dusk. But it shows up most intensely here…

Questionsalways seemto lead to another. Some kind of answer,only thenanother question.  I read a Mary Oliver poem and felt it addresseda love letter to my soul.“But there are days I wishthere was less in my head to examine,not to speak of the busy heart…” But what ifthe meanderings of mind-questions upon questions,what ifthere is joy in it all?  For Mary Oliver,and…

I have long hesitated to write about forgiveness because of the difficulty to talk about forgiveness without simultaneously confronting an honest discussion about hatred- a subject that carries taboo and complexity, to say the least. But with polarizing messaging in our wider world that increasingly incapacitates constructive conversation and feeds the illusion of separation rather…

The difference between knowledge and wisdom has been differentiated time and again. We know the former to be an intellectual understanding of something, while the latter is an embodiment of understanding in our hearts and souls rather than just our heads that translates over and into how we live our lives. When our knowledge has…

When we’re working to release old habits that are not conducive to our greater well-being, an acknowledgement of the short-term functionality of our seemingly stuck and entrenched patterns of behaviours can be a good place for us to begin. Often, our unflattering or self-destructive tendencies have played a functional- though, unsustainable- role in our capacity to cope…