creative forces

 Blog # 173...January 2026

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Some things that made me happy in 2025:                                                       

Hearing an interview with Sanna Marin who at 34 became leader of the Social  Democrats and Prime Minister oFinland in 2019. She led her country through COVID and their application to NATO, resigning in 2023 to write Hope in Action,  a memoir of her time in office...it's on my reservation list at the TPL.                        

Discovering Patti Smith, a punk rock musician as far as I knew,is actually a fascinating, curious person of substance. She's widely read and travelled from Tokyo to Tangier, Berlin to Broadway. She's sought after to appear in such widely diverse corners  as the Continental Drift Club who honour the work of Alfred Wegener, and Casa Azul, the home of artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. I've read M Train, one of her memoirs and am heading for others.                                                      

Remembering  Oliver Sacks and liking him even more after reading the revealing profile  in the New Yorker.  

Amassing a collection of authors whose work is available on audio books, Colm Toibin, Susan Orlean, Barbara Kingsolver, Jomathan Kellerman. I've grown to love audiobooks, many people like to listen while they drive, work out or run, for me it's replacing my failing eyes. Being read to is also comfortingly regressive and relaxing, no need to hold a book and turn pages.

Reading biographies, which I've mentioned before, lets me in on the lives of people I've never met, but who have caught my interest . Something in their  experiences may resonate with mine, or not. I'm also liking getting to know recurring characters in crime fiction, like Alex Delaware, a psychologist who collaborates with Lieutenant Milo Sturgess solving LA homicides. It's a bit like spending time with old friends in a one-sided way, I can sort of see the appeal of AI connections.   

I'm trying to expand my view of Canada and the world and love thinking of the music going on in Powell River, the BC town that struggles to survive the closing of the paper mill a cou[le of years ago. Luckily there was music established there already, and it was aided byDutch cellist Arthur Arnold who left his position as music director of the Moscow symphony when Russia invaded Ukraine. He's doing great things  in this small vibrant community.

I was thrilled to hear that Dave Bidini, founder and editor of the West End Phoenix. a community newsspaper in Toronto, and  the Rheostatics celebrated the band's 45th anniversary with The Great Lakes Suite. It stakes a claim and honours the huge bodies of water that centre our country. It includes a poem read by the late Gord Downey and a performance by throat singer TanyaTagaq.We began the year with our elbows up and we're keeping them there

So those are some of the things that helped counteract all the  chaos, meanness and inequity that social media delivers so relentlessly news broadcasts too. 

Last time I checked February comes next, see you then.