the cassandra pages

Coming Up for Air

Almost sunset. Acrylic on sketchbook paper. 10/26/2022.

Well.

It's been quite a stretch of time since March: a house move, caring for my father in four different living situations, a studio move, my father's death and funeral, and a whole new set of responsibilities, all of which has taken place during a pandemic which -- for us -- continues to be a concern and a factor in many of our decisions. We returned from our latest trip to central New York on Sunday night, and for the first time in all of these months, there's no more moving to do: I have a little bit of free time and the chance to consider what I might want to do with myself. 

So much has changed, and I have changed with it; this is not a simple matter of picking up where I left off, either last March, or before the pandemic began in 2020. When I ask myself, "What has not changed? What are you still passionate about?" the answers are easy: the people and creatures I love and care about; art; music; writing and reading; the natural world...and learning. But because of COVID, that "learning" component isn't going to include a lot of foreign travel. We are not ready to start traveling to the kind of destinations we used to, and we aren't going to be participating in large indoor group activities or crowds, or going to restaurants or parties with a lot of unfamiliar people. Pretty much everyone we know who has done these things has eventually gotten sick, and unfortunately we aren't in a position to risk that; even with all the vaccinations and boosters, there's no way to tell how the virus will affect an immuno-compromised person. We're using public transportation again, and going to certain kinds of gatherings; we do have people over here and have gone to friends' homes; and in good weather we did plenty of outdoor socializing -- and, luckily for all of us, that balmy weather stretched well into November.

The height of autumn. Watercolor in sketchbook. 10/9/22.

But last night it snowed in Montreal, and it's been snowing all day today. The stark fact, as I consider winter, is that society has moved on without us; we are like people with a disability, and it is up to us to figure out how to structure our lives in the new reality in which we find ourselves: how to combat isolation, deal with loss, find meaning and connection and purpose within certain limitations.

So the deficit side of the balance sheet includes limited travel; no longer singing in the choir, which was a huge part of my life; and some limitations on gatherings and events. I'm still dealing with grief, loss and change -- and I'm older. I may not feel it very much, but it's a fact.

In an undecided middle area are my publishing company, Phoenicia, and my involvement with social media, with the latter tipping decidedly toward less involvement rather than more, though I'll continue connecting with my creative community on Instagram.

Late fall view from my studio window. Acrylic on sketchbook paper. 10/20/22.

On the positive side is a greatly-improved, integrated living and work situation that's going to work a lot better for us. I have several unfinished projects begging for attention -- two book projects, and the body of drawings about Iceland that I began long ago and which is about 3/4 finished (more on these in a subsequent post.) My piano is finally in my home again, and there's good soundproofing here; I've been playing nearly every day and working on learning some new pieces of music. The piano is out of tune, but that's temporary, and maybe there will be new and different opportunities for making music with other people. The weekly online book group I helped organize back in 2020 is still going strong, and I've actually made a number of wonderful new online friends over the past couple of years, and a couple of new in-person friends too. Access to nature is greatly improved by the fact that I've inherited my father's house in a beautiful rural place, and though it's six hours away, we can go there when we want a change from the city. 

City at night. watercolor and gouache on sketchbook paper. 10/13/22.

Finally, there is this blog, which has endured all sorts of personal, technological, and societal changes since it began in 2003. As a firm believer in owning and controlling one's own online content, I've no intention of letting it go, and instead, have been thinking about how to infuse it with more energy now that I have some time.  Could it be more educational, more helpful? Could it help to launch new projects and bring people together, as it has in the past (quarrtsiluni, Phoenicia Publishing, online groups)? What else is there that I haven't considered? There's nothing wrong with social media functioning as a hub where interested people find content and go to it, but as our disillusionment with these social platforms and their capitalist agendas grow, could blogs regain some of their gravitas and a new sense of purpose? I wonder.

It depends somewhat on our expectations. I do know that I don't care about the number of followers or readers, and we are long since past those heady days where aspiring writers thought they'd become well-known through their blogs -- there's no way that someone steadily writing good but long-form posts would become famous like a seductive Instagram influencer, not in today's world! But careful and engaged readers and writers still do exist: Dave Bonta's weekly poetry blog digest bears witness to that. Blogs like Language Hat, Velveteen Rabbi, Hoarded Ordinaries, and Whiskey River have kept on quietly, steadily, thoughtfully posting for nearly two decades now, and there are many others. If these are not impressive and worthy bodies of creative work, I don't know what qualifies.

We can't tell what's ahead, as we've all found out, but we can certainly think about the present and what to do with it. I wonder how you are feeling right now, and what your insights are -- I'd be happy to hear from you in the comments.

 

19 Years

Today marks nineteen years of continuous blogging here, and I find myself at a loss for words. Partly because it doesn't even make sense to me that I've done this for that long; partly because Cassandra -- like nearly everyone else -- failed to predict the tragedy unfolding in the Ukraine with its huge ramifications for the world's political future; and partly because -- also like nearly everyone else -- I am weary, and unable to package things up into any sort of comforting explanation or pretty picture, either for myself, or for public consumption.

But that's all right. There are times in all of our lives when we simply have to let go of and be still, finding consolation and strength in the simplest things: a raindrop hanging on a branch; a cat playing with a ribbon; the clouds traversing the sky; damp earth emerging from the snow.

Looking Back at Ten Years Ago, and Facing Forward

This afternoon we walked up to our studio; it's about a 25 minute walk through Montreal neighborhoods. Today was chilly, but not freezing, and most of the trees have already lost their leaves. Some of the last to fall are the ginkgos, and now and then we came upon a wet pile of their golden leaves. In front of many houses, people had already bundled their less-hardy shrubs into structures of wood and burlap, or tents of green plastic-impregnated cloth. We had snow flurries a few days ago, and it won't be long before winter actually descends.

I don't like carrying my laptop in my backpack; it's just a little more weight than my back wants to bear these days when I'm on foot. So I had asked J. if he could set up an old computer for me at the studio; I can use my phone for any connectivity or communication needs while I'm there, but if I'm doing artwork and need some photo references, that's when the large computer screen is helpful. After we arrived, he found an old ASUS computer and set it up on my desk, plugged in the power adapter, and clicked the switch. It came on, we both gave a little cheer, and he left me to it.

From the outside I hadn't been sure if this was one of his or one of mine, but certain keys was very worn, as they tend to be on all my keyboards, and I recognized the home screen immediately:  a carved pillar from an English church we had visited. It turned out, though, that this wasn't the computer right before my current one, but two computers ago. As it booted, I remembered how slow it had been. I looked at the programs on the desktop and in the tray; similar to now, but different. The keyboard layout was French, and didn't come back to me right away. Neither did the dated interface. I clicked on the photo archive: what came up were images from 2011. It was a little bit like opening a time capsule from ten years ago -- which, in digital years, represents quite a distance.

One of the first things I saw was a photo of our cat, Manon, on the first day she came to us after having been hit by a car and rescued by someone in our studio building. There were drawings I had done at a concert, in the metro, and in airports; I was just starting to keep sketchbooks and draw seriously again; that was also the year I started making linocut prints.

Olives, watercolor, 2011.

Manon, 2011

There were photographs of trips to Florida to visit Jonathan's elderly uncle, gone now for a number of years; photographs at MOMA seeing the retrospective exhibition of Robert Frank's "The Americans" with dear friends -- one of whom is also gone now, far too young; there are also pictures from the launch of Open City. For that matter, J. and I both look quite a bit younger ourselves - I was still in my fifties then, and taking pictures with a Canon digital point-and-shoot; at the time I was sharing my photos and artwork on Flickr.

On July 14, 2011, I wrote that we bought our first smartphones. Facebook was in the bookmark bar at the top of the screen - I'd joined fairly recently -- and Twitter was there too. That fall, we went to Iceland for the first time, and then on to London to visit dear blogger friends. My excitement and enthusiasm are palpable: in October of that year, I wrote fifteen blog posts, and in early November I started to make a series of huge drawings based on what I'd seen in Iceland.

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This year, 2021, I wrote one post in all of October, and only 2 in September. Counting back to 15 posts ago takes me all the way back to the beginning of June. I've noticed my flagging attention to the blog ever since wrapping up my pandemic diary last March, after we passed the one year mark. I honestly had no idea what to say there anymore, and didn't feel like adding to the cacophony. In our focus on downsizing and re-organizing our lives, I haven't been doing that much artwork either, which has depleted away another major subject area. And of course we haven't seen many people, or gone anywhere to speak of, except to those often-dark interior spaces of the self, where I've certainly reflected and learned a good deal, but much also remains unprocessed -- as I think it will until this period in our lives feels much further away in time. In 2011, who would have predicted the convergence of social, medical, political and environmental challenges the world would be facing in ten years? Who could have predicted how it would affect each of our lives?

I've felt myself becoming more silent. In the past eight months, I've become even less tolerant of social media, both because of what it is, and because of how I feel after spending time there. FB is now gone from my bookmarks. I check it very infrequently, and have stopped interacting there much at all. I'm almost never on Twitter, while Instagram continues to be a quiet but important artistic community for me. But what about the blog? Readership and commenting are greatly diminished from ten years ago, but there are still some faithful readers and correspondents -- maybe that's you. I ask myself: what is the blog's real function? Do I write here for the readers, or for myself? And when I'm not writing, is it because I'm unhappy but don't want to say so, or because it feels pointless or redundant... or what?

The Cassandra Pages was eight years old in March, 2011; it's now 18, going on 19. But for many years before I started the blog, I had kept a written journal. In January, I usually printed out the journal and all my significant correspondence, and bound them in a book. After ending the pandemic journal this past March, I started archiving my correspondence again, adding some diary-like notes, and any blog entries that I did make. Apparently that's my default: to make and keep, in some form, a record of this life, and to try to learn and grow from the process of writing about it. I didn't stop doing that.

Being neither a voyeuristic person nor an exhibitionist, privacy and discretion are important to me, so I carefully weigh what gets included in any public writing, the same as I weigh what I take into myself from the media and from others. And I also try to be aware of my ego, and the way it affects my thinking, my desires and expectations, and gets in the way of real growth and change. In our internet world of influencers, "Likes", viral posts, advertising, and money, so much communication has become shallow, and "success" cheapened to the point of insignificance when it comes to shaping a human life, gaining wisdom, and helping each other. At its best, social media connects us and allows us to encourage and help each other. At its worst, it both preys upon and actually increases people's insecurities, desire to be liked, and endless need for attention. There's a reason why the sages throughout the millennia have retreated to the desert, to mountaintops, and to wooded hermitages in search of silence and solitude, and why they have always recognized and resisted the marketplace, the crowd, and the allure of fame and the glittery but transient material world. The words that do come from them may be few, but they have meaning.

Over my own life, writing these journals (especially the blog) has changed and helped me, and the bonus is that through the blog, I've met you. For although I value and crave solitude and contemplation, I'm not a hermit by nature, but someone who needs and loves other people, and wants to talk, interact, and share. I also have a degree of healthy skepticism about my own thoughts; it's through reading and conversation and argument, as well as reflection, that we're able to sharpen our ideas and come to a greater understanding of what it means to be human, and also how to be a human in this ever-more-complicated world.

Where to find that balance and space is a question for all of us to ask, and the answers will differ. I do see that, for me, a withdrawal has been necessary, partly because too much noise and too many words dissipate my reserves of creative energy and positive thought, and partly because the companies that control those spaces have become increasingly predatory and toxic; I can't continue to participate and hold onto my integrity. That means accepting less interaction in a quantitative sense, but nurturing and being grateful for higher-quality interaction here, or in letters, calls, or in person.

But there's more to it than that. To be honest, this period of time has been one of the hardest in my entire life. I was OK for the first year, and then things started to feel much more difficult -- though they are now feeling less so. At times I've felt despair about both the present and the future, as have most of us -- but I haven't wanted to write about that here, where I know people often come to feel a little better, or to see something beautiful, or to be encouraged. And also, in real life, I've been responsible for other people and groups, and that has taken precedence. I simply haven't had much creative time or energy, or anything extra to give. Is that an apology? Yes...but it's also a statement about the reality in which many of us have been living. Things changed for almost all of us, and they may not be going back to the way they were. Loss, grief, letting go, and acceptance are all part of that, even as the world seems hell-bent on returning to "normalcy".

Looking back ten years into that old computer was instructive, as I consider the next decade. For me, it comes down to this: if I'm fortunate enough to still be here, ten unpredictable years from now, I don't want to look back and realize I wasted whatever precious time I had, either for myself, or for the people and purposes that go beyond me and give life meaning -- of which this blog and its readers have been one. That means making decisions, setting clear priorities, and cleaning out my spaces so that there is room, both figuratively and literally, to grow and change, and -- one hopes -- to have something to say.

 

 

Comment Question

Have any readers had trouble commenting here, such as writing a comment and then the comment not showing up? I would appreciate it if you could send me an email at  cassandra (dot) pages (at) gmail (dot) com if this happens, telling me what happened and which browser you're using. Thanks.

Why the hell are we still blogging?

My good friend Rachel Barenblat of The Velveteen Rabbi wrote recently, saying she was celebrating (like several of us) fifteen years of blogging, and wondering if we might like to do some sort of collaborative observance. She also invited Dave Bonta of Via Negativa, Lorianne DiSabato of Hoarded Ordinaries, Dale Favier of Mole, and Natalie d'Arbeloff of Blaugustine. We all met way back then, and have been good friends and readers and supporters of each other's work ever since -- so of course everybody said "yes." Here are some excerpts from the first installment, which was in answer to the question posed in the subject line of this post.  After you've had a look, I'd like to turn the question around and ask you: Why are you still reading blogs?

Buried Temple, by Natalie D'Arbeloff. Acrylic on paper, 37cm x 37 cm.

Why the hell are we still blogging?

Rachel: Writing is one of the fundamental ways I experience and explore the world, both the external world and my own internal world. I think it was EM Forster who wrote, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Blogging as I’ve come to understand it is living one’s life in the open, with spiritual authenticity and intellectual curiosity, ideally in conversation or relationship with others who are doing the same.

Dave: At some level, it's easier to keep blogging at Via Negativa, the Morning Porch, and Moving Poems than it is to stop. Basically I'm an addict. Writing poetry is fun for me — entering that meditative head-space required for immersion in writing. As for the social aspect, I've been in, or on the periphery of, several distinct blogging communities over the years, and at one time, we all commented on each other's sites, but with the rise of social media, most blog commenting went away — and I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing. Writing and responding to comments did take up a lot of my time ten years ago, and now that I can scratch that conversational itch on Twitter, or in real life with my partner, I'm OK with most interactions on my blogs being limited to pings. But I must immediately qualify that and admit that Via Negativa is a special case, because for well over half its existence now I've enjoyed the virtual companionship of a co-blogger, the brilliant and prolific poet Luisa Igloria, and a small number of occasional guest bloggers as well. I wouldn't say I'm competitive, but Luisa's commitment to a daily poetry practice has definitely forced me to up my game. Then there's Mr. Pepys. My Pepys Diary erasure project grew directly from sociability: my partner and I wanted to read the online version of the diary together, and I worried I might eventually get bored with it if I weren't mining it for blog fodder. 

Lorianne: I am not attached to the medium, but I am attached to the message, and the process of creating/sharing that message.  There has been a lot of hand-wringing among bloggers over the “death of the blog,” with long-time (and former) bloggers worried about attention divides between blogs and social media.  Where do “I” live if I post in multiple places: on blog, in a paper notebook, on social media? For those of us who do all three, the result can be confusing, distracting, and frazzling...or it can be creative, collaborative, and synergistic.

Dale: I didn’t really expect ever to have readers, so in a way, having readership dwindle is a return to the early days... I’ve outlived some of my personas -- I’m no longer recognizeably very Buddhist, and my politics have morphed in some odd ways. I don’t think I’m as salable an item as I used to be :-) But the inertia, as Dave said. When I do have something to say and my censor doesn’t step in, the blog is still where I go. It’s been home for fifteen years: my strand of the web… The community that was established way back when is still important to me, and still a large part of my life. And there’s still a lot of value in having a public space. The act of making something public changes it, changes how I look at. I become the viewers and the potential viewers. It helps me get out of myself. It helps me work through my favorite game of “what if I’m wrong about all these things?”

Natalie: Why the hell still blogging? Not sure I am still blogging. I put something up on Facebook whenever I feel like saying hey, listen, or hey, look at this. Then I copy/paste the post to Blogger where I keep Blaugustine going, mainly out of a sense of imaginary duty. The idea that there are some real people out there who may be actually interested in some of my thoughts and/or artwork is undoubtedly attractive, even necessary. I live a mostly hermit life and don’t get much feedback of any kind. But my interior life is very active, all the time, and having a tiny public platform online where I can put stuff is really helpful. To be perfectly honest I think that’s about it for me and blogging at present. I don’t do any other social media, it would all take too much time which I’d rather devote to artwork.

Beth: I think a lot of it has to do with a sense of place. My blog is like a garden or a living room that I’ve put energy and thought and care into as a place that’s a reflection of myself and is hopefully welcoming for others.. The discipline of gathering work and talking about it coherently has been extremely good for me and for my art practice. And I’ve also really appreciated and been inspired by other people who do the same, whatever their means of expression. There’s something deeply meaningful about following someone’s body of work, and their struggles, over not just months but years. In today’s climate of too-muchness and attention-seeking and short attention spans, I feel so encouraged and supported by the quiet, serious doggedness of other people like me!

So...why are you still reading blogs? Are you a writer or artist who's still blogging yourself?

Fifteen Years

A post 9/11 tile from lower Manhattan, June 2004

Fifteen years ago today, the U.S. invaded Iraq, and I started this blog. I just re-read what I wrote on March 20, 2003 (link here, scroll down to the last entry on the page), under my then-new moniker of "Cassandra," after the Trojan princess and prophetess who was cursed to be always right, but disbelieved. Those words from 2003 still sound like me, and I still think what I wrote then is true: that we're witnessing the death-throes of patriarchy and, especially, white male domination of the world and its systems, and that ultimately we'll see a world with greater justice and equality for all of its people -- though the fate of the natural world is not at all secure. In 2003 I tried to take a long view., and still do. But even I would not have prophesied that things would go from bad to so very much worse in the space of this decade and a half, with so much suffering for so many.

Ice fishing shacks on Lake Champlain, winter 2004, and Canadian cornfields

 

On the personal side, we did make some major decisions: we moved. 40% of my tax dollars are no longer being spent on the military, but on a mix of social services such as universal healthcare, prescription drug coverage, affordable daycare for children. I live further north, in a province which is the most progressive in North America, among many people who have a world view and values similar to my own. But though that may make my everyday life more consonant with my beliefs -- and the tax thing was a major moral issue for me -- I think resistance is imperative no matter where we live. As social media data becomes "harvested" for ill purposes, we are all complicit in these larger systems, unconfined by borders and unregulated by government. As migration due to violence, oppression, and hunger affects more and more of the world, are we really going to allow ourselves to be divided into two warring camps: people who have compassion for their neighbors as for themselves, and are willing to share, and those who will do whatever they can to protect what they have from the undeserving, fearful, and inferior "other?"

At a blogger meet-up in Montreal, in spring 2006l: Tom Montag, Lucy Boyce, and Dave Bonta

But, also on the personal side, my life changed because of this blog. In addition to the extremely valuable practice of near-daily writing, it has given me some of the best friends of my life, and relationships and conversations that continue to this day. In recent years it's given me a forum for sharing not just my thoughts in words and photographs, but my art, and all three of those personal pursuits have improved hugely as a result. In turn, I've been privileged to read your words and see your bodies of work develop and change. Out of those relationships have come several collaborative efforts, including a literary magazine, qarrtsiluni, and my own publishing venture, Phoenicia. And this blog also functions for me like the diaries I kept before: as a personal record of my life and thoughts that would now fill a small shelf of books. So I can't even find words for how significant blogging has been for me, but I'm extremely grateful.

An earlier version of us, in Montreal, 2006

For some of us who've hung in here for a long time, there's another factor that bears consideration. We've seen the rise of social media, and the exodus from blogging as a result -- and I understand why that has happened, both in terms of the ease of communication afforded by social media, and the decline in blog readership and commenting that many of us have found discouraging. I often wonder who is still reading here, beyond those who tell me so. But, just like the demise of the book, the prediction of the death of serious longer-form personal writing on the web seems to have been not only premature but wrong. I see the pendulum swinging back somewhat; for instance, this January, poets Donna Vorreyer and Kelli Russell Agodon suggested that writer-bloggers resolve to post on their blogs once a week, and the list who signed on became huge. My friend Dave Bonta has been making a weekly compendium of some of the best of those posts in his Poet Bloggers Revival Digest. Quite a few of us have gained readers through posting links to our blog from Instagram or Facebook; others use long-form platforms such as Medium.

In my studio, with a young Manon, and art inspired by Iceland, 2008.

But as we see the more nefarious side of social media, questions do (and should) arise about our own participation. I want to own my own content, and I want to control my own presence on the web -- the only way to do that is to maintain my own sites, and limit my use of social media. The incursions into  privacy that have happened over these fifteen years are way beyond anything I would have envisioned, and millions of us have rolled over and done exactly what the mega-corporations have wanted us to do, becoming unwitting pawns for financial gain and political exploitation. I'm going to be looking hard at this, and hope you will too.

 

Hattie

I was sad to learn today of the death of Marianna Schaeffer, author of the blog "Hattie's Web," and a longtime commenter and friend of mine at The Cassandra Pages. Over the past months, she faced her terminal illness as she did everything else: with courage, honesty, and no nonsense. I'll miss her intelligent, straight-forward opinions and comments on contemporary affairs, especially politics, and I'll miss her friendship and companionship online. May she rest in peace.

A Note to You, Dear Readers:

Thank you, always, for your comments. Usually I try to answer longer comments by email, but sometimes I don't manage to get to it, so please check back in the comment thread (such as on the previous post) as I almost always post my replies there. Some of you don't have working email addresses so it's hard for me to reply to you that way, too. Love to you all, and Happy September.

Will we see a return to blogging, and other content-rich internet forms?

Patricia Bralley, a friend who I met through blogging, recently tagged me on Facebook, asking what I thought of a recent article in the International Business Times by Hossein Derakhshan calling Mark Zuckerberg a hypocrite for claiming that Facebook encourages a global, interconnected society. Derakhshan was imprisoned for his own web activism in Iran between 2008 and 2014; the stakes of using the internet were considerably greater for him than for most of us. Let me first quote a few bits of his article; my own reply to Patricia is below.

"While Zuckerberg laments at walls and admires bridges, the fact is that his Facebook algorithms have created billions of these comfort bubbles that are more isolating than walls. Also, he has destroyed the most powerful bridges that perhaps ever existed in the human history, the hyperlinks...Facebook's desire to keep users inside of it all the time is why it can generate so much advertising money. But that means it provides less and less reasons for anyone to leave its environment, in order to read an article or watch a video.

"It is heart-breaking to see how Facebook has changed the internet into little more than a portal for entertainment."

"Blogs were the best thing that had ever happened on the internet. They democratised writing and publishing – at least in many parts of the world. They gave a voice to many silenced groups and minorities. They connected friends, families, communities, and nations around the world. They encouraged discussions and debates...The World Wide Web was founded on the links, and without links, there won't be a web. Without links the experience of being on the internet will become one of a centralised, linear, passive, inward-looking and homogeneous kind. This is happening already, and despite Zuckerberg's sermon, it is largely Facebook and Instagram who are to be blame for the demise of links, and thereby the death of the open web and all its potentials for a more peaceful world."

 

Patricia, I'm on Facebook, basically, under protest. I use it for letting people know what's going on with Phoenicia Publishing, and to keep in touch with family and friends who aren't anywhere else, or those who simply don't use email anymore, but it is no substitute for what our blogs used to be. Facebook, in my opinion, has impoverished content, and impoverished community, thoughtfulness, and connection. I keep my blog going, but often wonder if I'm just doing it for myself. I always post a link on FB to a new blogpost, but question whether many readers even leave FB to go to the blog and actually read it or look at the images before "liking" or commenting below the FB post.

Back in March, when The Cassandra Pages turned 13, there were 13 comments on my blog. On the FB link to the same post, there were 12 comments and 60 "likes." Three years earlier, almost all the comments -- 40 or so -- were on my blog itself. I appreciate those "likes" and comments very much, but these statistics represent a big shift in terms of where people are reading, and what they see as their place of communication.

One of my biggest objections is that FB encourages our natural laziness (my own included, unfortunately) - it's so much easier to just hit "like" than to actually engage when we are all inundated with internet information. It also plays into our anxiety about isolation through the falsity of quantitative reassurance. I think, frankly, it's time to start resisting this and to engage more seriously again with the people we care about - yourself included - even if that means fewer "friends," and dealing with the radical concept of less actually being more.

I'd like to add that while my FB interactions are fairly minimal, I have started posting longer-form content on Instagram in connection with certain images. Other people are doing this as well, and we seem to be forming a loose community that reminds me somewhat of blogging. I don't think social media is necessarily devoid of creativity or content, but it takes time and effort to use it differently.

Thanks for asking.

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Readers, what do you think? Is it worth keeping a blog like this going? What about your own? If you've stopped blogging, why was that, and are you happy with social media as a substitute? Do you think there will be a swing back to longer-form content in other places on the web, and a reaction to social media - as some have predicted - or do you think the die is cast?

 

Birthday Bouquet

This is the thirteenth birthday of The Cassandra Pages, and what better way to celebrate than with some spring flowers (especially when the reality outside the window is snow on the ground, and 4 degrees Celsius.)

This blog began during a grim time, as George Bush Jr. insisted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the nation geared up for war. 2016 feels grim, too, with Trump poised to clinch the Republican nomination, and the only progressive candidate, Bernie Sanders, increasingly unlikely to become the Democratic nominee. Everyone is affected by American politics, and Canadians are watching this election with stunned dismay. I'm glad we moved to Canada, but of course we will vote in the American election: as citizens of both countries, we are able to have two passports, vote in both places, and required to file taxes to both countries.

I can tell you that it feels good, however, to pay most of those taxes to a province and country whose values are largely very similar to Sanders' -- the fight for progressive policies for the benefit of the common people and a sustainable future must continue, no matter where we are.

Looking back, I realize that this blog has been an important way for me to deal with the vicissitudes of these years, and I've tried to make it both a calm, steady place for myself and the readers, where we can concentrate for at least a short time on the things that make life meaningful and often beautiful, not glossing over difficulties, but at least trying to keep them in perspective. I've been immensely grateful for the companionship I've found here, as well as your encouragement about the various endeavors that have been described or illustrated.

Thank you, and onward!

(and thank you to our friends G and M, who brought us this pot of narcissus last weekend - I've enjoyed watching them bloom this week so much!)