Hallo all. Fancy meeting you here in (checks notes) 2023.

Much has happened since I last posted nearly nine years ago. I had a baby, uncoincidentally, in the year after that last post. Where has the time gone? (Into the endless churn of motherhood and global crisis.) In that first year of my child’s life, I experienced some pretty severe anxiety. Uncoincidentally again, this correlated with my home country’s (and much of the rest of the world) abruptly open embrace of fascism. I went to live in New Orleans for a year while on parental leave (thank you, Canada, I do not know how any nation can call itself civilized without acknowledging the physical, mental, and social toll of having an infant), ate very well, slept almost never, and probably permanently affected my child’s hearing and flamboyance with the number of parades we went to. We went to live in London for six months during a sabbatical, during which we watched in terror as Trump was elected, and, each day, managed to roll out a new policy horror at about 11 p.m. GMT. We went to a lot of theatre, and slept very little. When my daughter started at full-time daycare and then school, I became more heavily involved in union work. Then: a global pandemic. We got chickens, which we named after Greek goddesses. We got bees, which got eaten by bears in the first year, destroyed by mites the second, and have now swarmed in the third. One of my parents was starkly immune-suppressed. Every time it seemed safe (and possible - we were on different sides of a close international border for a big chunk of the pandemic) to visit, a new variant surge would occur. Finally, just as we felt comfortable visiting with the supports of testing/vaccination/masking, he was diagnosed with cancer. A year later, my father died.

That brings us up to the present moment, and all sounds pretty grim when I put it down on paper, a paragraph of nine years.

But why this homecoming to Sycorax Pine? Well, I’d like to redevelop a practice of public rumination on my reading. (An extension, I suppose, of the fact that I publicly ruminate on my reading in a classroom several times a week.) I’d like a deeper record of what I’m reading and seeing. I’d like a community, though I know that the past nine years have also been transformative for blogging as a community and practice, and not necessarily in a good way. We’ll see how it goes, even if I am just ruminating into the abyss!