ramblings – Page 5

Counting rooms

I used to think “How many rooms is your place?” had an easy answer. But living in Canada, Denmark, and Switzerland has made differing approaches on room calculus abundantly clear. And the lockdown in Switzerland to flatten the COVID-19 curve has changed the equation again.

Women we’re raving about

Black and white photo of three female strikers — 14-year old striker Fola La Follette and activist Rose Livingston in New York City; from the Library of Congress digital collections.

I’m part of the Impromptue Community in Zürich, which is a platform for materialising women’s ideas into projects. To celebrate International Women’s Day 2020, the group nominated a handful of inspirational women. I collected their suggestions and transformed them into the blog post below.

Boycotting the bros

I read a chunk of a review for The Gentlemen to my husband last night. Something along the lines of: Colin Farrell is a scene-stealer, but it’s not quite clear why he’s even in the scenes to begin with.

“I like Colin Farrell. We should go see that,” he said.

“I can’t,” I replied. “There aren’t any women in it.”

In the year ahead

Dense fog a head on a highway — Will forgiveness, kindness, and gentleness lift the fog ahead?

2019 was a rough year for me. I felt out of place, uncertain, overwhelmed—like my life had been uprooted. A plant yanked out of the ground rather than a seedling pre-emptively watered, carefully dug up, padded in burlap, with the root structure lovingly secured for replanting.

Darkness inspires deep relaxation

This coming Saturday I’m teaching a special extra-long yoga class at Younion Yoga to mark the Winter Solstice. It’s the third year I’ve led this seasonally-driven session and I particularly love using yoga to embrace darkness on this longest night of the year. The inspiration for the practice fits perfectly with my teaching style: deliberately slow, purposely restful, mindfully self-centred, well-supported—and with a bonus literary touch.

The season of hygge

An open book in front of a fireplace - it must be hygge

My three winters in Copenhagen taught me the true value of hygge for coping with the long winter nights. A pop culture buzzword a few years ago, the Danish concept of hygge is hard to translate—despite many books valiantly making the attempt. The literal rendering of the word is being cosy, but the Danes embrace hygge as much more than woolly sweaters and an Instagramable wood fire. It’s about creating a sense of happiness and belonging, feeling content and safe and comfortable.

Creative convergence

I started a creative writing course in September and our first assignment was to write a 500-word story with only one primary character and one primary setting—not a heck of a lot of space to develop anything. Thankfully walking the dog (or more accurately standing around while she wanders slowly from sniff to sniff) gives me lots of time to mull over story ideas. That slow-paced dog walking was the genesis of the fictionalised episode I created for the assignment and have included below.