Today in my primary music classes we talked about music as a force for peace. In broad, simplified strokes we talked about The Singing Revolution in Estonia and the Prayer of the Mothers associated with the Women Wage Peace movement in the Middle East. We talked about how war is sometimes a function of greed, where one country wants what another country has. And I saw before me a sea of confused and inquisitive faces, posing the most innocent, most poignant questions:
Continue readingAuthor: Natasha Regehr (Page 1 of 12)
Here it is… another year of big and small happinesses, collected in a little book each evening and displayed on Thanksgiving Day in an act of public self-reflection. It is a testimony that life’s sweetest and most precious moments are to be savoured and preserved, and that even the most difficult days harbour cause for hope. Read on.
- Honesty
- It is a bedrock
- Baseball in the back yard
- Ten hits in a row
- And the most encouraging coach
- Sleepovers
- When kids say funny things
- Hallowe’en thrifting
- Naan wraps
- Anniversaries
- Back to the gym
- Meetings that aren’t disasters
- Perfect days
- Perfect evenings
- Band practice in the basement
- Progress on the siding
- A minor injury
- Short waits at ER
- Sleeping in his arms
- Success stories
- Summer weather in October
- Open windows
- When I get a ride home from band
- Those hamburgers are so good
- Rapini
- Normal blood sugar levels
- Pillow talk
- Work buddies
- When I don’t think I’ll make the light, but then I do
- Good therapists
- When little ones learn to listen
- When my purse doesn’t get stolen at the gym
- When students play their first melodies, and it’s magical
There is something fragile about the first days of school. There are butterflies everywhere. Butterflies in backpacks, butterflies in lunch boxes, butterflies in the feet of displaced newcomers, butterflies in the eyes of those scanning the schoolyard for familiar faces on that very first fresh morning in the uncharted terrain of new teachers, new classrooms, and new aspirations.
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Shame on us. Shame.
We consider ourselves superior to our neighbours because we did not elect the madman to the south, but we are no better. We have our own Trump Lite here in Ontario, and he just “cruised” to his third straight majority government. He has decimated the school system and the health care system, choosing instead to fund expensive projects that put money in the hands of his cronies. He says that he will defend Ontario from the threat of tariffs, but the reality is that not too long ago he was extolling the virtues of the man he now claims to be a danger to us. He takes from the poor to give to the rich, and the poor and rich alike have chimed in, saying, “Give us more Doug Ford!”
Here’s a little gem from the archives: 2010 to be exact, when I was supply teaching in Peterborough and getting to know my neighbours on Charlotte Street. Happy Hallowe’en!
Today I scored huge points with my skinhead neighbour’s children.
Every year at the end of October I start to think about how I’m going to evade Hallowe’en. I hate the skeletons, gravestones, witches and, yes, even the spiders. I don’t get why the entire continent gets such a charge out of thinking about icky, dark, evil things for a month every fall. Fall is icky enough without the ghosts and the orange and black. Why make it colder, scarier, crueller?
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This is the tenth Gratitude List that you’ll find on Cosmic Prose, signalling ten years of daily journaling, in which I choose a few bright moments from each day to crystalize in print. Somehow I never run out of entries, and somehow each year’s list has its own special flavour.
This has been an epic year of social and professional blossoming, punctuated by meaningful moments both at home and abroad. Here’s to happiness!
- A job that makes my days feel good
- My car is home!
- 5/5 days
- When Thursday is a second Wednesday
- The breast clinic is looking after me
- The circus is getting a new ringleader
- At least the underground parking lot is always there for me
- A full day
- Not doing schoolwork on weekends
- Double naps
- Getting the chores done
- Soon I will be writing again
- Chauffeurs
- Competent supply teachers
- When I think I’m in tune
- Good health
- A writing group
- A third friend
- Finishing assessments
- Improvements
- Less pain today
- Finishing progress reports
- Kale and bacon pizza
- One day without fruits or vegetables is not a big deal
My first impressions of Rome were not so favourable. It seemed to be a city made of garbage and graffiti. I saw it on the bus from the airport to the train station, and then again on the walk from the train station to the apartment. Garbage and graffiti everywhere.
“You’re going to love Europe,” I told my niece. “Everything here is so pretty. The ornate buildings. The immaculate gardens. The cobblestone streets. Everything.
No, not everything. Definitely not the trajectory from the Termini train station to our humble abode. Rome, I thought, is a dirty, unpalatable city. I’m not so sure I like it here.
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I did not wear a poppy last year on Remembrance Day. It wasn’t a statement: I simply forgot.
But as I learned today on the shores of Dieppe, forgetting is a statement.
Yesterday I visited the famed Flanders Fields of John McCrae’s poem. Rows of crosses, row on row. Thousands and thousands of them. Each representing a boy-child, son, husband, father, lost on the Ypres Salient in World War I, gaining a mere eight kilometres for the Allies through the many months of brutal attacks. Stones marked “A soldier of the Great War, known unto God” because their bodies could not be identified in the carnage. Men lost to the first crippling gas attacks, in the days before gas masks. Men whose body parts could not be sorted from the others and reassembled for a proper burial. Men who died, and died, and died again, not knowing the outcome of the war that was supposed to end all wars.
It was over 15 years ago that I came upon the idea of keeping a gratitude list, and since then I have maintained the habit of taking a few minutes each evening to reflect on the goodness of the day. Some days are naturally radiant, and sometimes it requires some serious excavating to find a glimmer of light. But without fail, I have always found something for which to be thankful.
Nine years ago I began the tradition of posting the year’s list to my blog each Thanksgiving. It’s a way for me to travel through the ups and downs of the year through a lens of positivity and good humour, and to share with others the little sparkles that have sustained me through that time. I’ll warn you — it’s a rather long read; but maybe it will inspire you to find the sparkles in your year as well. Happy Thanksgiving!
- Advice is just advice
- Triage
- When things are calm
- When conversations go well
- When I finish reading OSRs
- When I remember I have pretzels in the car
- When there is no longer a dead squirrel on my driveway
A few months ago I had the super-bright idea that it would be cool to snorkel between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates, having two continents within arms’ reach. Cool, I thought. I’m going to do that. Because I do all the things.
So off I went to Iceland, where I did all sorts of other things. I went zip-lining upside down. I went hiking in the mountains. I bathed in the Blue Lagoon. I paid 35,000 Icelandic króna for a pair of rain pants that I didn’t end up using (that’s okay — it’s just money. Sometimes it goes away like that). I photographed geysers and waterfalls, soaked in hot springs, and ate rye bread that had been baked for 24 hours underground, where the water is at a constant volcanic boil. I wandered the streets of Reykjavik, went to the flea market, and ate an incomparable fish dinner. I bumped my head on the top of a cave and marvelled at the almost-midnight sun. All the things.
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