change therapy

if you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. thanks for visiting!at the end of july, it’ll be 26 years that i arrived here in canada. it was just supposed to be a visit, but literally within hours, i was smitten. the beautiful town of oakville was […]

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this week, prime minister stephen harper will issue an official apology about the abuse that happened during canada’s apartheid time, when for decades, first nations (aboriginal) children were taken away from their families and boarded in residential schools where they were to be made into white people. more often than not, on top of […]

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hello friends, and welcome to the march edition of the buddhist carnival.
free tibet
this is written while monks in tibet are asking/fighting/praying/protesting for a tibet that is free from occupation. after all, when we do metta, we say, “may all beings be happy, may all beings be healthy, may all beings be free.”
danny fisher, an […]

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it’s international women’s day week and this is my blog from the misbehaving women event, a fundraiser for the avalon women’s centre, organized by zoey ryan.
5:50 i’m sitting here at the heritage hall with glenda watson-hyatt and her husband darrell. unfortunately, they cannot partake of the wonderful spread here because they’ve been assaulted by […]

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today, the appeal division of the national parole board overturned a board panel’s decision to deny robert latimer day parole. latimer, who has served seven years of a life sentence for killing his severely disabled daughter, will soon be released to a half-way house.
here are a few blog reactions to this.
what are your thoughts?
at the […]

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today is international stand up to bullying day.  students and lots of other people all across canada and the world wear pink to mark the day.

last year, two students in nova scotia (canada’s east coast) donned and distributed pink shirts after a classmate fell victim to homophobic bullying for wearing pink to school.
this became […]

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it’s friday: frozen pea day.
what’s that?
two months ago, susan reynolds found out she had breast cancer, and she started posting about it on twitter. all the twitterers flocked around her in a beautiful show of friendship and support.
what about the peas? susan discovered that frozen peas were ideal in helping keep the post-surgery pain […]

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suspicion is a heavy armour and with its weight it impedes more than it protects
robert burns
the range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. and because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing […]

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there have been times when i’ve pointed out the sometimes not-so-stellar record of our police. this post here about the sad story of frank paul could be another one. frank paul was a first nations man who lived here in vancouver. “lived” not in the sense that most of us do; […]

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ooops! i totally forgot my birthday – i mean, my blog birthday. today, december 19, it’s been two years that i’ve been writing on this blog. so i decided to go back to my 1st birthday post and rewrite it, in the light of the last 366 days.
it’s been an interesting 132,000 […]

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there is a sad mystery in the trial of william pickton, the trial of canada’s most gruesome serial murder. dozens of women disappeared between 1997 and 2002 from vancouver’s downtown eastside, and today william pickton, a pig farmer from coquitlam, a city part of great vancouver, was charged with second degree murder of six […]

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police officer mo cho used to hope paramedics arrived at some scenes before he did.
those were the “M-1s,” the calls involving mentally ill people.
“i had no idea what to do,” cho said.
that’s the beginning of an article by deedee correll “training helps cops deal with mentally ill“.
did the RCMP at vancouver airport have that training […]

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yesterday i promised you a translation of victor jara’s canto libre. here it is (and here is the MP3 version).

my verse is a dove
looking for a place to nest.
and with a roar it opens its wings
to fly, to fly.
 
my song is free
and wants to give itself
to whoever opens his hand
yearning to set the world […]

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don’t know why remembrance day fascinates me so – at any rate, here’s another post about it, following the one last week and this and this last year.
today i’d like to honour some soldiers for peace and democracy who died upholding their convictions.

ephialtes, a fighter for democracy 400 BCE
martin luther king, fighter for racial […]

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a few days from now is remembrance day – november 11 here in canada, when we remember our soldiers in the war. and when we imagine a future without war. i know, it sounds crazy. just this morning i was reading about paul tibbets, the man who threw the atomic bomb on […]

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