Commitment, connection, love, pleasure

Posted on October 15, 2025 by maddyruthwalker

I angle my chair so I can see the hummingbird at the feeder, only a couple of feet away. Coat of metallic green feathers, needle beak, vibrating wings—an Anna’s hummingbird, so close I could touch her. She trembles as she drinks long and hard at the sugar water I prepared. A ping of pleasure as I watch her become nourished, sated.

When we moved into this house, June 2024, I decided not to put up a hummingbird feeder. Too much work, too much anxiety. I remembered that icy winter a few years ago, when I fretted over the birds getting their food. Once you commit to a feeder, you need to keep it going through the cold months. Non-migratory hummingbirds depend on nectar in feeders for sustenance. So, that January, when the temps dropped below freezing and the liquid in the beaker froze into solid chunks, I cut the toes off a pair of old wool socks and pulled them, one over the other, to encase the container of sugar water, trying to keep it liquid. Several times a day, I removed the feeder from its hook, brought it inside, and melted the ice, so the birds had access to food that was precious, rare, and necessary. I felt guilty when I let the liquid freeze for too long. Worried for days, until the cold spell broke.

from *Birds of Victoria*, by Robin Bovey, Wayne Campbell, and Bryan Gates. Illustrated by Ewa Pluciennik

Save yourself the grief, I thought. Don’t put out a feeder again. Too much trouble. Yet, I didn’t get rid of the feeder with its four plastic red flowers. I must have known I would want it again someday. Yesterday, I dug it out from the back of a cupboard and made the nectar, 2 cups water, ½ cup white sugar. I was yearning for connection. I watched the first bird discover it hanging off the balcony rail, drawn by the gaudy red. As he fed hungrily, my body responded as if I were nursing a newborn again. Tiny being of my flesh, cradled close, skin on skin, painful tickle of let-down followed by a strong rush of milk, sustained by baby’s rhythmic sucking.

My body remembers well the flow of oxytocin, the pleasure, the sense of deep, silent connection with my sons. For eight years I breastfed three babies. Cellular memory.

Perhaps the sweet ping I feel when I watch a hummer drink its fill at the feeder can replace the rewards I look for on my smartphone. A few days ago, alarmed by how frequently I pick up the phone (for example, 21 pickups in 3 hours), I found a book I’d read in 2018 when it first came out. Catherine Price wrote How to Break Up With Your Phone (there’s a 2025 edition) because she saw how smartphones were grabbing our attention and changing our brains and our lives. I was concerned then, and I went through her 30 day “break up,” becoming by the end, more conscious and intentional when I used my phone. That worked…for a while. Fast forward to late 2025, and I’m back where I was but even worse.

I know it’s worse because when I attempted a digital “sabbath”—turning off the phone for 24 hours—I woke in the middle of the night, anxiety flooding my body, terrified of being cut off from life, from everybody I know. A great black wall towered between me and the living world. Existential loneliness. I crept out to the kitchen and turned the phone back on. Even though there were no texts, only junk emails, a whoosh of relief. A conduit had been re-opened. The potential for connection.

I know that my brain and body have been altered through smartphone use. Over the years, I notice decreased ability to read complex material for longer than a few minutes. I am highly distractible, grabbing my phone for no particular reason. Life feels fragmented. So, again, I plan to work slowly through Catherine Price’s 30 day break-up. I’ve quit other addictions: alcohol, cigarettes. I can do this.

Maybe when I feel the urge to grab my phone, I’ll head over to the feeder. Sit a while. Watch. Because observing hummingbirds at the feeder soothes me, reminds me of feeding my babies, sustaining them with my bountiful milk. The body’s sagacity. A promise to keep these little birds fed throughout the winter is part of the circle of commitment, connection, love, pleasure.

P.S. I made a weird comic about breastfeeding hummingbirds in 2017; clearly, I’ve been feeling this connection between hummers and nursing for a long time! I published it here: https://maddyruthwalker.com/2017/11/02/sweet-milk-for-the-hummingbirds/

Toronto, Again

Posted on May 26, 2025 by maddyruthwalker

I am in Toronto for a few days. This city was my home from 1965 to 1989.

I have been walking Bloor Street West. First, the Mink Mile, that stretch between Yonge and Avenue Road lined with the tall glass storefronts: Zara, Birks, Lululemon, Holt Renfrew. Rich people shop here. Very few birds fly above these tall, inhospitable stores. Instead, big bird shapes in bright shiny colours line the sidewalks, ghosts of extinct species.

It’s cold in Toronto for late May. I wear a toque, jacket, leather gloves. But now I wish I’d brought a scarf. I admire the scarves in the window of Black Goat Cashmere, next to Ashley’s in what used to be called the Colonnade. This mall was one of my mother’s favourite places; after window shopping Bloor Street arm in arm, we’d drink coffee and eat pastries at the Coffee Mill at the back of the Colonnade.

I enter the store. Two saleswomen are upon me immediately. I ask about the small scarves, lifting one of them up out of the wooden box where they are displayed like confectionary, soft cashmere in artful designs, wool watercolours. “How much are these little ones?” “Oh,” says one of the women, advancing, “the Carre scarves are $385.” I laugh, folding the luxury item back into its box. “Perhaps in another lifetime.”

Pulling my zipper up to my chin and walking into a fierce wind, I take a detour to wander around the grounds of my alma mater, Victoria College. I feel nothing as I gaze over the green lawns, watching two young men kick a soccer ball. Alma mater means “nourishing mother,” but this place was not that for me. Those four years as an undergrad in English Literature are a blur. One thing stuck: a Shakespeare lecture by Northrop Frye when he—already extremely old—told us in his quavery voice that Bach’s Mass in B Minor was the voice of God speaking. All of us bent over our notebooks and wrote that down. It sounded profound.

I was a lonely young woman. Barry Lopez writes that “It is not possible for human beings to outgrow loneliness,” and that seems true to me. Though I’m not as lonely as I was. I admire a pigeon perched in the recessed window of the Victoria University Common Room.

On the way up University back to Bloor Street, I check out the Gardiner Ceramic Museum, where I hope to see the work of contemporary ceramic artists, only to find that the main galleries are closed for renovation. I continue back along Bloor. It’s time for a coffee and I remember a Second Cup in the block before Spadina Avenue. And if that is no longer around, there’s a coffee shop in the old Jewish Community Centre (JCC), where my mother did aquafit for the last decade of her life. Back in the seventies, when it was the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, it was home to SEED, the alternative school my sisters and I went to as wild teens.

Second Cup is gone, and so are many of the other businesses on that block. Everything in life is impermanent, so I am not surprised Second Cup and Noah’s Health Foods have disappeared, and the spaces are vacant. Once upon a time there was a greasy spoon in this block where we drank coffee in thick cups, smoked cigarettes, and ate French fries. We walked over from “school” and stuffed our electric bodies into the vinyl booths, laughing, talking, flirting, mystified and excited by life. Once, for a time, my sister lived above the restaurant with her boyfriend, an apartment with burlap on the walls and plants everywhere. There’s history here.

The wine store remains. This is where we bought bottles for the meal marking my mother‘s death in February 2019. Her house is only a few blocks from this corner, and she died at home. We carried the clanking bottles through the snow. My sister made bouillabaisse and we sat around the teak table, drinking, eating, and telling our Virginia stories, stories filled with love, regret, sadness, and confusion.

I cross the street twice to the southwest corner and pull on the doors of the Jewish Community Centre, but my pull meets resistance. A security guard opens the door from the other side, just a few inches, and peers at me. “I am trying to get into the coffee shop,” I say. “No more coffee shop. Coffee shop no more,” a sort of palindrome of endings. And he closes the door in my face.

I keep walking. Surely, there is a sweet, cool, interesting café somewhere along Bloor. I am Ahab stalking the great flat white, but she’s nowhere to be found. I pass more than one Tim Hortons among the restaurants and bars still closed this cold morning, but no, I won’t go there. Cigarette butts decorate the grey pavement, evidence of parties spilling onto the street last night. Pigeons strut their stuff. I keep walking. Yes, I know Futures Bakery might be considered an interesting coffee shop, but I hold out for something else, some uncertain thing, something new, something not in the algorithm.

I keep walking. The Hungarian restaurant where we ordered dumplings and gravy and goulash soup: gone. The delicatessen and the cheese shop with a cow in the window: both gone. The café that once took up that southeast corner of Bloor and Bathurst: gone. Now there’s a Fancy Burger outlet, where you can add a syringe cheese shot to your beef patty for $1.49. This part of Bloor continues to metamorphize. Ethnic restaurants and record stores turn into cannabis shops and bubble tea counters. Used bookstores become pet pampering salons and tattoo parlours.

I am happy to see Midoco, the office supply shop, a place where you can lose yourself among the art supplies and fountain pens, is still in business. Ditto the Home Hardware.

I keep walking, knowing that somewhere soon, I will come upon something interesting. I pass the small corner grocers, happy to see they still sell bargain produce and hanging pots of flowers. I pass Euclid, cross to the south side, and then, suddenly, there is an A-Frame sandwich board picturing a fox with many tails. I walk into Ninetails Coffee Bar, where two young Japanese women bustle behind a honey-coloured wood counter. White walls, a few small round tables graced by simple folding chairs. A coffee bar decorated with ceramic tiles patterned in grey, blue, and white. A full pastry case. Smiling faces welcome me.

My flat white, delivered in a short glass with a foamy fern on top, is delicious—strong and hot. While I drink my coffee I read about the coffee bar’s philosophy.

In Japanese folklore, Kitsune are foxes with mystical powers that can grow nine tails.

“we embrace the Japanese philosophy of ‘ichi-go ichi-e,’ which translates to ‘one opportunity, one encounter.’ This concept underscores the importance of cherishing every moment and every connection we make with our guests, as each encounter is unique and irreplaceable. Our goal is to provide you with a little window to Japan & Japanese culture within each visit.”

I gaze across Bloor to the north side and see, to my delight, a used bookstore that I’ll visit after I drink this coffee. It’s too easy to get lost in the past during this trip. Wandering through old neighbourhoods, remembering past experiences, feeling traces of old sadness and joy. But Toronto, like Freud’s Rome, is a metaphor for the mind. There is no denying that my personal history, etched through the decades, permeates my experience of Bloor West. I feel these vestiges of the past in my body.

But there is also the present: every moment is unique and irreplaceable.

The sun finally emerges from behind grey clouds on this cold day and streams through the glass over my table. I will never experience this moment again, as I drink this coffee, as I gaze at the people around me, the heavily inked man, the woman with green hair, as I examine the fox on the sandwich board outside, waving her many tails. She reminds me there is only one opportunity, one encounter. This is it.

Becoming intimate with carnations and truth

Posted on December 31, 2024 by maddyruthwalker

In mid-December, I bought a green glass jug in a second-hand store, half price. My aspiration was to make a beautiful winter bouquet for my friend, Lillian. I bought a bunch of silver dollar eucalyptus and two dozen white carnations. I envisioned white wintry bursts among the silvery green, but the more I trimmed and mixed the carnations with the stems of eucalyptus, the sillier and more incoherent it looked. I took basic Ikebana but still haven’t a clue how to make flowers and plants look good.

Finally, I used only the eucalyptus, splayed out in a free-fall arrangement. I attached a few small, red shiny balls to the stems, and the effect, I hope, was Christmassy and charming, if a bit messy. Lillian said she loved it. (But what could she say, really?) I was going to throw out the unused carnations, but it seemed such a waste, so I put them in a white and blue vase and placed it in my study on a low stool covered with a blue-green cloth.

I don’t like carnations, or I didn’t think that I did. I’ve seen too many sad, slender bunches wrapped in cellophane at the mini-mart next to the hospital. They make me think of last-minute purchases for the death bed, cheap flowers that outlive the person you visited. They seem so tight, orthodox, banal. Whorls of perfect, serrated petals, every bloom the same.

But they’ve grown on me. As I spend hours in their presence, they’ve become real. You could say I’ve become intimate with them. I sit here now, the last day of the year, gazing at their fresh ordinariness. The carnation is the sturdy, faithful flower that will see you through. Perhaps they are flower of the year: commonplace as canned milk. Carnations are one-foot-in-front-of-the-other flowers. Quotidian flowers. Bread-and-butter blooms. See you through the hardest times. Last for weeks. Nothing special.

Although 2024 was my first year of so-called retirement, and thus I was given twenty additional hours each week, I wrote less, and I sewed less. (A few felt birds for family and other little felt creations, an apron, a crib quilt start, a fur-lined bag.) I did finish an editing certificate I started in 2020, which is a relief. And I made a lovely new friend and deepened existing friendships. I started a volunteer gig at a non-profit arts and crafts shop in August that has led to meeting many interesting people. Bonus: I get to surround myself with a messy profusion of materials that inspire me.

This year, I listened to probably one hundred dharma talks on Dharma Seed, with a broad aspiration of becoming more intimate with life—accepting whatever’s happening in my heart, whatever’s happening in the world. Making friends with wild mind. Accepting the truth of the way things are.

I read so many books this year. A couple that stick with me are Rebecca Solnit’s memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence and The Age of Loneliness, a book of essays about life during the sixth extinction by Laura Marris.

Solnit writes a lot about being a woman. That’s what her title gestures toward—the peculiar “nonexistence” of being female in a patriarchy (remember mansplaining? She is behind that neologism^[i]). She draws on John Berger’s 1972 Ways of Seeing, which I’ve known about for years and now am determined to read. She quotes words from him that jibe with my experience: “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage with such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two.”

Perhaps that sounds dramatic in the Global North in 2024, but that has been my experience. Perhaps it’s different for lesbians. Perhaps it is different for women of subsequent generations, but Solnit and I were born three years apart (1961/1958), so we grew up at roughly the same time. Berger goes on,

“A woman must continually watch herself. … She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as yourself by another.”

Solnit calls Berger brilliant and generous, to be able to imagine a woman’s experience, and I agree. What he writes here feels just as real as the carnations in front of me. Reading the passage and feeling its truth is freeing. No action needed, just awareness.

Similarly, truth pinged through me when I read Laura Marris writing about the age of loneliness. We become lonelier as we bear witness to the drastic reduction, or “great thinning,” of ordinary animals. Marris draws on the work of naturalist, Michael McCarthy, who writes of our baby boomer age group, “As we come to the end of our time, a different way of categorising us is beginning to manifest itself: we were the generation who, over the long course of our lives, saw the shadow fall across the face of the earth.”

Reading this series of essays, elegies to Earth as the shadow descends and animals disappear, I was gripped by a grief so deep I sat for a time and just cried. Again, the truth is freeing. Let’s not deny that this is happening. It’s really happening. We can still enjoy the beauty that is here.

In keeping with my mood of asceticism, I recently deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Unlike the birds who used to sing outside my window, FB and IG will not be mourned. I feel light as I step through life with a new red pedometer safety-pinned to my leggings (the pedometer frees me from carrying a “smart” phone to count steps). Michael, Marvin, and I amble down to the beach at Thetis Cove to watch the sky change. Rippled water reflects a bank of pink clouds.

Thank you for reading. In the coming year, may you experience moments of lightness in a shadowy world.

Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. Penguin.
Marris, Laura. 2024. The Age of Loneliness: Essays. Greywolf Press.
McCarthy, Michael. 2015. The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy. New York Review Books.
Solnit, Rebecca. 2020. Recollections of My Nonexistence. Viking.

^[i] From Wikipedia: The term mansplaining was inspired by an essay, “Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way”, written by author Rebecca Solnit and published on TomDispatch.com on 13 April 2008. In the essay, Solnit told an anecdote about a man at a party who said he had heard she had written some books. She began to talk about her most recent, on Eadweard Muybridge, whereupon the man cut her off and asked if she had “heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year”—not considering that it might be (as, in fact, it was) Solnit’s book. Solnit did not use the word mansplaining in the essay, but she described the phenomenon as “something every woman knows”.

Books

Posted on September 27, 2024 by maddyruthwalker

Last night in bed I was reading Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, an amusing book by Benjamin Dreyer, a Random House copy editor. I happen to be two weeks into my final six-week course for Simon Fraser University’s Editing Certificate, so my late night reading aligned with the language-focused mood I’m in. I was enjoying Dreyer’s humour when I read this sentence, which made me sit up in bed:

“You might—or might not—be surprised to learn that many copyeditorial man-hours have been expended over the decades as to the correct construction of the common vulgarity—and an enchantingly common vulgarity it is—used to describe an act of fellatio.” After the term “man-hours” was an endnote: “I know I’m supposed to prefer and use ‘person-hours’ or ‘work-hours.’ I can’t, so I don’t. Please forgive me.”

It wasn’t the discussion of whether or not to use a hyphen with blowjob (Dreyer’s preference is no hyphen) that bothered me. I’m no prude (I hope). It was the insistence on “man-hours” without even trying to find an alternative.

What about just writing “many hours have been expended by copy editors over the decades”? Such an easy way out of “man-hours,” a term that makes the labour of fifty percent of the world’s population disappear. I wonder if Dreyer is just paying lip service to the requirement of conscious editing, editing that does not harm or marginalize. Karen Yin created The Conscious Style Guide, such a useful resource. Countless other editors and writers have worked to use language carefully and critically as a force of good in the world. Dreyer has power, privilege, and pull, and he could use these forces for good by making some small adjustments.

So, there I was, lying in bed, irritated by “man-hours.” What about the millions of “man-hours” women spend breastfeeding? And that started me thinking of breastfeeding, women feeding their infants and toddlers with nourishment produced from their own bodies. Once I started to think of breastfeeding, scenes from two novels came into my mind, one from John Updike’s 1968 Couples and the other from John Steinbeck’s 1939 Grapes of Wrath. In both scenes, an adult man is sucking at the breast of a lactating woman. Updike’s scene is highly erotic (or at least, I found it so when I read it in my twenties), whereas in Steinbeck, the character Rose of Sharon is offering her breast to a starving man, an image I find disturbing. I’ve forgotten so much from the thousands of books I’ve read in my life. But those two scenes have stayed with me throughout the years.

In our new house, we have a bookshelf at the top of the stairs, so every time I ascend to the main living space, a patchwork of book spines meets me like an old friend. The elongated blue U on the thick spine of James Joyce’s Ulysses always catches my eye. My mind likes to repeat itself, going back to well-trod memories, and so I return over and over—with nostalgia—to the summer in grad school when I studied that great modernist novel. It was an intense, six-week seminar course. A small, intimate group of students, mostly women, met for three hours, twice weekly. Each student had to present several times on chosen topics. I was working hard. Add to my hard work and yearning for an A, the presence of a provocative, flirtatious professor who created a highly charged atmosphere in the hot seminar room.

I was immersed in the complexity of Joyce’s schema for the novel, based on Homer’s Odyssey, and by turn delighted then confused by his fresh, arcane, mysterious writing. I could slide down rabbit holes every day, trying to parse meaning.

One day, I took the boys to the beach at Thetis Lake and brought the novel with me. We went in for a swim, and as we came up to our beach blanket where I had laid Joyce’s novel, my six-year old son, who was learning to read, said to me, “Why are you reading a book called Useless?” I laughed. I could see how his mind’s eye read useless; so many of the same letters as Ulysses. I reported this to my professor next class, and he couldn’t stop laughing. He thought what my son said was inadvertently profound, the title Useless pointing to the modernist idea of the inutility of art: art for art’s sake.

In the mornings, I’ve been trying to not grab my phone immediately, but instead, to read and write. I’m reading Jessica Dore’s Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance, and Growth. I first discovered Dore when my husband, Michael, told me about her newsletter, Offerings, on Substack. I love the way she thinks about books and tarot and life, so I borrowed her book from the library, and it’s on the coffee table, ready to dip into whenever I sit down for a spell. It’s funny, the actual tarot card she is writing about (and she writes about all 78) doesn’t matter much—each page has some nugget of wisdom, wisdom from her life experience, and from theology, psychology, literature; wisdom drawn from C.G. Jung, D.W. Winnicott, and newer therapists like Marsha Linehan and Steven Hayes. I enjoy the nuggets.

Here’s an example of a Dore nugget—this is from her comments on the Empress:

“The Empress represents nature and is, in my experience, one of the most misunderstood arcana in the tarot. People love her but can’t put a finger on why. I think it’s that we long to be in our bodies but have forgotten how, and she shows us what it would feel like if we could. Many of us think of the wild as something ‘out there,’ and I think that’s sad for us. It shows how cut off we are from the fact that somewhere deep down and old we are still the wild, and the body—with all its cycles and rhythms and ebbs and flows and generation and degeneration—is proof.” (pp. 47–48)

Folk Embroidered Felt Birds: 20 Modern Folk Art Designs to Make & Embellish by Corinne Lapierre. I took this book out of the library and promised myself I’d make two birds before it was due back. I like embroidering at the end of the day, after my mind has been busy with thinking, editing, word stuff. Nice to just sew coloured thread in pretty designs. I met my modest goal—I made a wonky robin and a not-bad pigeon. Then I got a notice the book was due and couldn’t be renewed, as somebody else wanted it. I made a heart for a friend’s birthday, then another heart with a favourite quotation on it, “still, flowing water” from Ajhan Chah, which is to remind me of the paradox that mind is both still and flowing. I don’t entirely understand his talk on this topic, but I still find it inspirational. Then I took out another book by Lapierre, Fabulous Felt, and I made some fish. But I realized what I really want to do is to make all of those twenty birds from her felt birds book, so eighteen more. And it seems that everybody wants the library book, so I ordered a copy and it arrived today. Lots of birds to come!