Footnotes to a Conversation, April 3, 2023

“What people see as fearlessness is really persistence.” – Wangari Maathai

Greetings from Île de France where I’ll be looking after a friendly wee dog. The skies are cloudy, but there are flowers and trees dressed in fresh spring green. My brain is tired as the homeowners speak only French – I’d forgotten what hard work it was to communicate in a second language. But this is why I’m in France, and I seem to be making myself understood – and understanding in return.

Fashion is Entertaining

There’s an exhibit of women’s fashions over the centuries at the Vancouver Museum. The curator insists that fashion isn’t frivolous – it’s entertaining. Fashion is also an indicator of history. For example, hems tend to be higher in good times, lower in bad times. “Another equally fascinating aspect is how clothing embodies the role of women at different moments in time — confined, freed, objectified and so on. Long before the mini skirt upset the apple cart of society, dress styles like French chemises (robe-sylphide) were deemed obscene, as they gave too much away about the female body.” [CBC 3-minute video, The Tyee article]

From Paint to Crochet

A Nova Scotia woman has crocheted Maud Lewis’ painting of 3 cats onto a sweater – from one art form to another. [CBC]

A Sense of Enchantment

In Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age, Katherine May explains why she believes “awe, wonder, fascination and mystery are crucial to our survival.” She says, “I’d spent my adult life pushing my sense of enchantment away, denying its calling because I saw myself as a rational being who didn’t need such things. Without it, I was unable to make meaning as I aged, to feel any faith in this planet and its inhabitants as everything changed.” She relearned how to experience wonder in the timeless beauty of moonlight and at the sight of a single crocus springing up in a new space. “My sense of enchantment sustained me through difficulty, but it, in turn, was fuelled by the empty, intimate space that opened up in those months. There is an exchange here that I’ve learned to carve: the binding of a small life to a vast universe. The way that the insignificant can speak of the whole.” [The Guardian]

Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I also post occasional articles on other dates, including frequent book reviews and travel tales.

If you share my love of nature, check out EcoFriendly West, an online publication encouraging environmental initiatives in Western Canada, and Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces.