This is my personal blog through which I share observations about my creative passions — and everything in between.
It was a winter like no other, at least in my lifetime, one year shy of three score and ten. Not since the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918 had the world been in the clutches of such a pernicious pandemic as the coronavirus of late 2019 and 2020. People around the world were sick and dying, medical resources were stretched to the limit, friends and…
I knew of Tony McManus as one of the world’s premier acoustic, fingerstyle guitarists before he moved to Elora, the village that’s also home to Kevin Breit, another world renown guitarist. After interviewing McManus in advance of occasional area concerts, album releases and annual master guitar workshops conducted in his hometown, I discovered how nice the down-to-earth, transplanted Lowland Scots was as a person. I…
I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout. — excerpt from The Song of Wandering Aengus by W….
Fly anglers and writers — not to mention fly angling writers — are fascinated by the evocative relationship between music and rivers. I’m no exception. One of my favourite fly fishing writers, W.D. Wetherell, who is also an accomplished author of novels, short stories and non-angling essays, reflects on the music of rivers in a chapter titled Symphony in Vermont River, the first volume in…
Robertson Davies was a cunning literary prestidigitator whose legerdemain spanned the breadth of his writing. After all, he disguised Fifth Business, his masterwork, as an epistolary novel rather than acknowledge that it is a postmodern fusion of spiritual autobiography and romance quest in the shape of C.G. Jung’s myth of individuation. Similarly, while written as a letter to his headmaster, the novel is actually a…
Once upon a time the Medieval Celtic World was synonymous with the Dark Ages. That perspective began to be challenged, and was eventually modified, with a series of books with titles that made grandiose claims championing Celtic achievement in all its manifold forms. The Celtic stone got rolling at a rapid clip in 1995 with How the Irish Saved Civilization. Subtitled The Untold Story of…
Since joining Church of the Holy Saviour’s community of faith four years ago, I have wrestled with a perplexing question: why do so few parishioners attend Evensong? To me the evening choral service, conducted on the third Sunday of every month from September through May, is the midtown Waterloo, Ontario Anglican church’s best kept liturgical secret. I’m not qualified speak to the liturgical components of…
I entered the miraculous, marvellous, sacred world of Celtic spirituality through the back door. And I haven’t retreated since. I was never a regular churchgoer. Although I was baptized in an Anglican Church, where my mother and her sister went as children and where my mother and father were married, I didn’t attend church regularly growing up. Sometimes I accompanied friends to their churches, but nothing ever…