Ruth Conscious

Tribal. Raised in a village. Dancing in Toronto. Unless reblogged, I took these photos.

[ruthconscious]

Gods and Dogs: A Review of André Alexis's Fifteen Dogs

Gods and Dogs: A Review of André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs

I tend to start my judgment of a book on two points: how long it takes to finish reading, and the opening line. I read all 171 pages of Fifteen Dogs in two days, and its opening line is great: “One evening in Toronto, the gods Apollo and Hermes were at the Wheat Sheaf Tavern.” A crisp sentence that puts two of our favourite gods in Toronto’s oldest tavern sets the stage for an engrossing modern…

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Saint Matthew's Angel

Saint Matthew’s Angel

I found a great painting at a thrift store the other day. An older-looking man is giving rapt attention to an angel, who tells a story and plays with their fingers. You can picture the child-like voice saying, “And then… and then…” It’s called Saint Matthew, and the Angel, by Guido Reni.     There are other paintings of Matthew with his muse. This one’s by Caravaggio. He has the angel sensually…

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Monday of all the plans

Monday of all the plans

It’s Monday and I have a couple options. The first is the Garfield plan. This is when I stare at the ceiling, curse the day and the days that will follow, and grumble from one bit of forced labour to the next. Or I could play along with Monday and its list of things to do. Fine, Monday, what do we have this week? Prepare a presentation on Augustine and Caesarius of Arles due Thursday. Write up a…

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I married you when you were 23. At this point we’ve been together for about a third of our lives. That’s kinda wild.

Do you remember when we were first married and people were telling us about how much it was going to suck? Someone, I don’t remember who, said just watch out, because people change. I was scared, I’ll admit. I was rather pleased with the wife I’d found and didn’t like the idea of you changing.

But here’s what people didn’t tell me: Change is good. Our life together has changed the both of us, not just every birthday but every day, every conversation. And I love the ways that you have changed. I love the people you have been over these crazy thirteen years. I am full of excitement thinking about the changes we’ll experience over the next thirteen years and the thirteen years after that.

All this is to say, Happy Birthday, Ruth. I love you more than you know, and I love everything you’ve become and everything you’ll be.

Infant Ruth

Teen Ruth

See you tonight.

x

Ruth! It’s your birthday! I married you when you were 23. At this point we've been together for about a third of our lives.

[ruthconscious]

It’s Dev’s birthday today. He’s four and I don’t have any pictures of him. I mean, Ruth posted some shots at Easter, but he was only three at Easter. I need some four-year-old pictures, Ruth. Get on it.

Meanwhile, here’s some nice scenic shots.

Be back in a jiffy.

Happy Birthday Deva It's Dev's birthday today. He's four and I don't have any pictures of him. I mean, Ruth posted some shots at Easter, but he was only three at Easter. I need some four-year-old pictures, Ruth. Get on it. Meanwhile, here's some nice scenic shots. Be back in a jiffy.

[ruthconscious]

Letting Conditions Go

I’m reading a book called The Poisonwood Bible about a missionary who takes his wife and daughters to the Congo in the late 50s. It gets so familiar that it jars me. I like to think that my missionary philosophy was a direct response to his. He wanted to show Africa the power of American Evangelicalism. I wanted to see some kind of Sindhi Evangelicalism take root. We called it Incarnational…

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Changing Sindh

Construction is real in Sindh. Many of the roads have been completely re-done. Here in Sanghar the main road used to be a bumpy mess of rocks and water that would never completely dry up. Now it’s as smooth as anything you’d drive on in Canada. Once you get out of the city it’s a different story. Mirpur Khas is fifty-seven kilometres away, but it took us two and a half hours to get there. The…

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Picnic

We went for a picnic in Noni’s village. I haven’t seen them for eight years. The children all grew up. The adults haven’t changed much. I was showered with hugs and wet kisses. I didn’t realized how much I’d missed them. Ruth’s Maasi–mother’s sister It’s not the same village they were in when I lived here. Apparently there was a quarrel with the landlord and they had to move. Ruth’s…

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It's been one week since I left my home.

It’s been one week since I left my home.

Took a plane and went to Pakistan alone. My wife and kids must be missing me, and I still haven’t blogged at all about my journey. Don’t blame me, it’s been a whirlwind. I took a day in Karachi to rest and draw up energy. Considering how I feel now, it was a good choice.  Saddar is the only part of Karachi I know well, so I picked a hotel there. But it’s changed. What used to be an eternal…

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Genuine Draft

Sixty-five drafts are in my queue. They’re diverse. Not really posts, but post-like ideas. Everyone once in a while I’ll browse them, try to turn one into something worth showing. Usually I end up adding another draft to the pile. There were sixty-two in queue yesterday. One is about a flashing ambulance and the two paramedics I saw walk calmly out. It sets up some cool images, but doesn’t land…

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An Unmarked Bible

After I lost faith, someone mailed a Bible to me. It was my own Bible, misplaced years ago and given up for lost. It was good to hold it and let it open to worn, weathered pages. Some sections are positively brown from exposure. These days, my projects have sent me looking into the past, at faith and fundamentalism and worship. My Bible is open on my desk, and I often run my eyes over familiar…

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Something to watch with the kids: Kubo and the Two Strings

Something to watch with the kids: Kubo and the Two Strings

I was impressed with the humour and melancholy, and how they both fit so well together in a children’s movie that managed to get both the honest bitterness and sweetness of real life into a myth for our times. Damn, that sounds good. And it should, because it’s a beautiful movie. No, not a movie. I’d go so far as to call it a film. A film that accepts the starkest realities of loss and death,…

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Time Travel and the Grandfather Paradox

Time Travel and the Grandfather Paradox

You can totally go back and kill your grandfather. The universe won’t stop you; it doesn’t care if things don’t make sense. Bang, he’s dead. You’ll never be born. So when you travel forward to the time you came from, you’re out of place. It’s not that you were never born–of course you were born; you’d remember it if your brain had been wired for it back then–but you were never born here. You…

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View from my balcony

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View from my balcony

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A Good Day for Cog Sci

A Good Day for Cog Sci

The rain had ended during my lecture and the sky was warm and blue. I looked north on my way to the library and stopped to let out a worshipful gasp. Behind the old chapel, past the campus and half-finished condos, great low-flying clouds pushed their way across the sky. It was as if the city itself were flooding above the world, a  developing babel basking in the sunlight. I would have stayed to…

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David the Romantic

King Saul found out that his daughter was crushing hard on David. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. The current #1 song was about the plucky shepherd boy, and everyone was singing it. You’d think, since Saul wanted David dead, he would have tried to discourage his daughter. But like any good James Bond villain, Saul smelled opportunity. Saul offered to marry his daughter to David. This was the…

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