year end 2023

The holy days are the oasis of our soul where we ritually recalibrate ourselves - express our full spectrum of expression, our innate being, in worship and devotion. Rejoice! For the Light is birthed once more as we rediscover body and divinity are one and the same. 

There is the breath of the holy passes our lips - a kiss of renewal on every brow, a cry of awareness kindled, the fresh taste of wonder ignites awe - sparking joy within, reborn on this day.

cathedral in Imus, Cavite

Infused with joy and sublime gratitude, our choices and actions made more potent. Rites of celebration and honor open the weave - inviting all the tender ways of the sacred. The unbroken ancestral connection back to ourselves.

National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One and Two

Last October wonder | wander | women took the train up to Scotland for the second time this year to see our good friends the Milligans. They had generously offered to host me when I mentioned coming back to see the tapestries at Stirling Castle.

countryside flooding, seen from train

Of course we didn't expect when we booked the trip that I would arrive in the middle of Storm Babet, a massive rainstorm that battered the North Coast and turned the creeks and pathways of Scotland and Northumbria into rivers. 

the North Sea battering coastal villages

Half the trains running that day had been cancelled. Luckily ours wasn't, but it crept up the countryside delayed by almost an hour, advancing at a cautious pace through icy sheets of rain.

untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play at the Young Vic

One autumn day in the 90s wonder | wander | women visited the US for the first time and saw Miss Saigon  on Broadway. It was a magnificent, stirring romance, but left us feeling betrayed. The white lover saw his Asian marriage as less real than his American one. The Americans were viewed as saviours and Kim's own people as pimps and murderers. And why did Kim have to die so her son could live a better life? How could his life be better knowing his father and "new" mother didn't see him as part of their own future together?

untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play, poster (2023)
Courtesy of Young Vic

That is one of the questions asked by untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play, a time-warping, trope-skewering riot of a play written by Kimber Lee and directed by Roy Alexander Weise. It first appeared at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester for the Manchester International Festival in summer 2023, and migrated to London's Young Vic Theatre in the autumn.

grace & gratitude

A great people traveled from the north and west. For many, many years they moved across the land, leaving settlements in rich river valleys as others moved on. Reaching the eastern edge of the country, some of these people settled on the river later renamed the Delaware. 

Others moved north and settled in the valley of a river where the waters, like those in their original homeland, were never still. They named this river Mahicannituck and called themselves the muh-he-con-neok, the people of the waters that are never still…

Henrik Hudson Entering New York Harbor by Edward Moran

Chronicled by late-1700s Mohican historian Hendrick Aupaumut, tells the story of the people who truly discovered America, including the river valley in which we now live. 

The names of the river and valley were usurped by a man named Hudson, whose people came from the east and nearly obliterated a history that stretches back perhaps 13,000 years.

love locks

On a recent visit to Evans, Georgia wonder | wander | women had the sweet privilege to visit one of its famous nature parks - the Augusta Canal. 

The Augusta Canal

The canal and industrial district were designated a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2018.

The Power of Water by Reginald D. Fraser, NHA