This life can be so mind-boggling, so utterly overwhelming, that language fails. In a sense, language will always be inadequate to express what we deeply feel and surprisingly discover. But today I’ll try to form a few thoughts about this wildly beautiful and at once deeply disturbing life that we live: mind-bogglingly glorious and also …
It’s my privilege and my pleasure to teach some of my favorite authors like J.R.R. Tolkien to university students. More often than not they come to me as ardent Tolkien fans. Sometimes they wonder, “Was he sexist? Maybe racist?” and such questions make for much needed discussion. (Essentially, my position on these two important questions …
Driving on our busy highways, like so much in our world, can be a grim experience. We really weren’t meant to live like this, were we? With the ever-increasing congestion, growing frustration over more (and more) time spent on the road, and sharpening wariness over risk-taking drivers, some outright nasty–or was that me?– this can …
Autumn-tide has begun in earnest, and in between navigating the heavier traffic of the highways of this season, flickering memories of some of the summer byways that I’ve ambled along come to me. One of my favourites is the meadow path veering off the main trail in a nearby nature park. Now, as the busy …
How hard is it, really, to be grateful? How ready are we, to show appreciation, to say “Thank you”—and totally mean it—knowing that without that person, without that experience, we would not be who we are today? October brings Thanksgiving Weekend for Canadians, and helps turn our thoughts to gratitude. The second Monday in October, …
Growing up is really hard to do. And at different stages of our lives, we have a shortlist, maybe a longish shortlist, of what we “must have done,” we imagine, in order to qualify for having “grown up.” As life happens, we adjust the lists. Maybe the “fairy tale dream” gets shelved or just drops …
If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will most likely happen: this weird thing people call “bifocal vision.” When your vision starts going wonky so that your arm isn’t long enough to decipher what’s right in front of you, you need help: you need bifocal glasses. When it happened to me, it seemed to …
In this season of Lent when Christians focus in a particular way on the sufferings of Christ for the salvation of humanity, I was getting ready to write my next blog on our reason for hope. Meanwhile the COVID-19 virus was declared a pandemic and in the escalating response to this crisis, my planned meditation …
“And they all lived happily ever after.” What were they thinking, these recorders and writers of fairy tales, like Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, to imprint such a message on our hearts and minds? And what are we thinking, to still thrill to hear it? Do we dream of being healthy, wealthy, beautiful/ handsome, and …
We all stand on the shoulders of those writers who’ve gone before us, and it’s best to know who these folks are, why they speak to us as powerfully as they do, and applaud them with gratitude and joy. I have many favourite writers and the list keeps growing, but if I had to choose …
Monika Hilder 