I AM NOT GREEDY. Unlike those who made these economic times what they are. I am aware and so would feel guilty asking for a lot of objets d’art. Therefore, I do not ask for much. I ask for only what is impossible. What is the point of asking for the possible? I want the [...]

YOU ARE ON THE WESTERN EDGE of the Painted Desert in Northern Arizona, 93,500 acres of colour. The sun is about to set and the light is hitting Roden Crater bringing out hues of red and black. There are over 400 craters in this place, making up the San Francisco Volcanic Field, a natural phenomenon [...]

THE OTHER DAY A MAN who had just been laid off was interviewed on CBC. “I guess I gotta go home and tell the wife and kids we’re not doing Christmas this year,” he said. Without a job, there was no money to buy gifts. No gifts, no Christmas.

WHAT MISERS LACK, I’VE COME TO BELIEVE, IS FAITH IN THEIR OWN GENEROSITY. Faith that if they take the trouble to give, their gift will be welcomed. Faith that a generous impulse will bear some kind of fruit.

IF SOMEONE WERE TO WALK UP TO ME RIGHT NOW and say there are no barriers at all, what do you want for Christmas? I’d ask for a flight to New Mexico and a lift to the Santa Fe Institute, to an adobe-coloured building perched on a tree-shrouded hill where the elusive novelist Cormac McCarthy [...]

FOR SOME, the December holidays are a bleak stretch indeed. Blame the gross shopping spectacle of Christmas if you will, but non-Christian friends assure me it isn’t the commercialization of an ancient pagan-turned-religious-now-material feast that causes gloom. Any convivial ritual bent on promoting community and good will is bound to produce a counter-revolution in the [...]