Footnotes to a Conversation, June 16, 2025
“Experience is what you get while looking for something else.” – Federico Fellini
Words & History
“Six thousand years ago, a small group of herders near the Black Sea had a word for ‘excrement’: kakka. They also had a word for ‘filth’: puH, pronounced ‘poo’ with a kind of huff at the end.” Those words are still in use today.
Working together, linguistics, archaeology, and archaic DNA analysis provide us with a glimpse into the world of pre-literate people during the late Stone Age and Bronze Age. We tend to dismiss early civilizations as not being very advanced, and yet they “could mine and smelt copper ore, alloy the copper with arsenic or tin, and forge bronze tools and weapons.” They had herding and wagon-building skills as well, all of which they passed down to their children. [The Tyee]
William Morris Mania
“He has papered our walls and carpeted our floors, enlivened our curtains, coats and cups, and even infiltrated Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet. Almost 130 years after his death, the Victorian arts and crafts designer William Morris has blanketed the world with his unmistakable brand of busy floral patterns, wrapping our lives with tasteful swathes of willow, blackthorn and pimpernel, peppered with cheeky strawberry-eating robins. There’s no escape.” [The Guardian]
The Lost Words – Elektra
Elektra, a women’s choir out of Vancouver, performed The Lost Words in Victoria this past weekend. Elektra commissioned 10 Canadian composers to put The Lost Words to music. The book, by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, pays homage to 20 nature words that were removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary (e.g. dandelion and fern). The performance combined readings of the 20 spells and images from the book alongside the music. It was wonderful to listen to a discussion between a newt and a coot and to hear conkers falling to the ground. [Elektra, House of Anansi]
Mixing Things Up
Ebony Russell uses bakery piping bags to create ceramics in a multitude of colours and textures. [This Is Colossal]
Every Tiny Bit Counts
I enjoyed reading A Brief and Endless Sea by Victoria poet, Barbara Pelman. Here’s one poem I found particularly moving. [Barbara Pelman, Caitlin Press]
Do Not Be Daunted by the Enormity of the World’s Grief
You are not obligated to complete the work,
Neither are you free to abandon it (from the Talmud)
Every tiny bit counts. Choose peace
in your own life. Forgive your own flailing self,
your wrinkled face, your wrecked knees.
Make friends with failure. Praise
the getting up, forgive the falling down.
Buy the electric bike, the solar roof, the heat pump.
Learn to say no quietly and yes exuberantly.
Praise the bent world, offer it
whatever solace you can.
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.