By the time I was nine, I’d moved from the boreal forests of Northern Ontario to the prairies that kiss the foothills of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, and back again. My family settled in a small town dot on the highway between Ottawa and Toronto, and here I remain.
At 17, I began a series of adventures: a hitchhike trip across Canada, various hops across Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and Brazil. The romantic inside me said these missions were about finding true love, and in the process I found the love of people. True love found me when I returned home after one of my later trips, and a family followed. The birth of my daughter prompted me to focus my writing by studying journalism, and my first job at a daily newspaper taught me that traditional journalism had no place in my heart.
Other people can write about the terrible things in life. I chose a different route that eventually landed me in a unique newsroom. At Axiom News I discovered a different perspective focused on strengths and possibilities, Appreciative Inquiry, and the gifts of every source’s story.
And I discovered a calling – the Changing Culture of Aging. It surprised me how much my work with Schlegel Villages, an organization with 12 “villages” spread out across Ontario, fulfilled a passion I never knew I had until I began a connection with the organization in early 2011.
The beautiful work of Axiom News continued, but my heart was in following the culture change movement; I feel like in doing so I honour the legacy of my mother, who spent her life as a compassionate caregiver to elders until she passed away in 2010.
In this movement I’m continually struck by beauty of the people I meet, but there is much more that attracts me as a writer: music, art, food and drink, nature and beauty.
There is no shortage of stories to tell in these realms, and I’ve really only just begun . . .
At 17, I began a series of adventures: a hitchhike trip across Canada, various hops across Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and Brazil. The romantic inside me said these missions were about finding true love, and in the process I found the love of people. True love found me when I returned home after one of my later trips, and a family followed. The birth of my daughter prompted me to focus my writing by studying journalism, and my first job at a daily newspaper taught me that traditional journalism had no place in my heart.
Other people can write about the terrible things in life. I chose a different route that eventually landed me in a unique newsroom. At Axiom News I discovered a different perspective focused on strengths and possibilities, Appreciative Inquiry, and the gifts of every source’s story.
And I discovered a calling – the Changing Culture of Aging. It surprised me how much my work with Schlegel Villages, an organization with 12 “villages” spread out across Ontario, fulfilled a passion I never knew I had until I began a connection with the organization in early 2011.
The beautiful work of Axiom News continued, but my heart was in following the culture change movement; I feel like in doing so I honour the legacy of my mother, who spent her life as a compassionate caregiver to elders until she passed away in 2010.
In this movement I’m continually struck by beauty of the people I meet, but there is much more that attracts me as a writer: music, art, food and drink, nature and beauty.
There is no shortage of stories to tell in these realms, and I’ve really only just begun . . .
