We watched the documentary Between the Mountain and the Sky last night, and were quite moved by it:

From the Duplass Brothers, Between the Mountain and the Sky follows CNN Hero Maggie Doyne and Top Malla over twenty years as they build a home that becomes a family to more than fifty orphaned children in Nepal. At the height of this journey, an unimaginable loss shatters everything, and the filmmaker steps from behind the camera—deepening the story into a meditation on grief, resilience, and the power of love to heal.

Through a mix of raw home videos and vérité footage captured through a lens of love, the film reaches a rare level of intimacy — resisting staged interviews, makeup, and talking heads to reveal something far more human. It offers an unfiltered look at compassion that runs deeper than headlines and heroism, revealing a raw portrait of motherhood, loss, and the quiet courage to keep going.

The “Duplass Brothers” are Mark (who you might recognize as “Chip” from The Morning Show) and Jay. They are prolific creators; I know them best from Togetherness (recommended).

Maggie Doyne and Top Malla run BlinkNow, and funds from the pay-what-you-can streaming of the documentary support the group’s work.

I have the fortune to be able to join Lisa for morning workouts when my own workout at Kinetic with Cayla isn’t running.

Being able to train with Lisa’s coach Matt Cormier is a great way to mix things up, and working out with Lisa from time to time is lovely (she is fierce).

When Cayla was on vacation a few weeks ago, I ended up doing three workouts with Matt, and, by way of thanking him, I proposed printing him some business cards for his recently-rebranded RISE80 gym.

“Matt’s pretty edgy,” Lisa said, when I suggested this, throwing down a gauntlet.

Here’s what I came up with:

The cards were printed on my Golding Jobber No. 8 in 120 pt. Akzidenz Grotesk on business cards I inherited from Bill and Gertie Campbell when I purchased the press.

You can see me and Lisa working out in this recent Instagram reel from Matt.

From Danny Gregory’s (great) weekly email newsletter:

It’s been over a year since I started using inexpensive tempera sticks to add color to my sketchbooks, and the romance has not faded. Jj laughs at how much I talk about these juicy lipsticks full of colo,r but I think they’re the perfect medium for me. They’re fast, they’re brightly colored, they’re rough, and they keep me feeling loose and spontaneous.

—From A few of my favorite things. - by Danny Gregory

A tool from Buttondown facilitated combining multiple RSS feeds into one:

Lots of things take RSS. Relatively few things do a great job of interleaving multiple RSS feeds. This is a simple tool to do that.

—From rssrssrssrss - Combine Multiple RSS Feeds into One

Here’s a combined feed of news, publications, and public alerts from the Government of PEI, for example.

Jeremy Cherfas has a fascinating story about inmates in Italian prisons cooking their own food:

An extremely unlikely source tipped me off to the existence of Cooking in Maximum Security. In some respects, it is completely ordinary; a book of recipes — Starters, First Courses et cetera — along with handy tips for making the dishes. In others, it is eye-opening, because all the recipes, and the inventions necessary to make them, were contributed by prisoners in Italian maximum security prisons. Not only that, but cooking is an essential and integral part of the prisoners’ everyday lives. Matteo Guidi, an anthropologist and artist who teaches in Italy and Spain, guided the process of compiling the book.

—From Eat This Podcast

My brother found this photo of my father, taken in Venice in 1996. By happenstance, he was then the same age I am now. We share a goofy grin.

In Hoera voor Dead Week/Romjul, Frank points to the Norwegian word romjul:

The period between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve.

Frank points to an article by Helena Fitzgerald in The Atlantic that calls this “dead week,” and begins:

Christmas is over and we have arrived at the most wonderful time of the year—nominally still the holidays, but also the opposite of a holiday, a blank space stretching between Christmas and New Year’s Eve when nothing makes sense and time loses its meaning. For many of us, this is the only time of year when it feels possible, and even encouraged, to do nothing. I look forward to it all year long.

We are now in the midst of that week, and I’m still trying to find that nothing. Having romjul to call the week only helps.

Three years ago, my friend Krista-Lee wrote this:

Some things are just too hard to write about when they are happening. When you are in the midst of chaos, heartbreak, survival, and trying to find some order to life, you just can’t put it all into words.

I’ve written a lot of words about living with Catherine living with cancer for 6 years, words written in the thick of it all; but it’s only in recent years, with the gift of time, that I’ve been to be able to gain any clarity about what really happened, and what really happened next.

This morning, Christmas Eve, I joined Lisa for her regular morning workout, a workout that turned out to be a 12 Days of Christmas-style workout; if you know the song, you can imagine the mechanics of it. Here were the movements:

• 1 Hex Bar Deadlift 205/135
• 2 Push-Ups
• 3 Barbell Front Squats 135/95
• 4 Bent-Over DB Rows
• 5 Dead Bugs
• 6 Romanian Deadlifts (Db or Kb)
• 7 Reverse Lunges (per side, load optional)
• 8 DB Floor Press
• 9 KB Swings
• 10 Plank Shoulder Taps
• 11 Barbell Strict Press
• 12m Farmers Carry Steps

It was hard, by far and away the hardest workout I’ve done in the five months since I broke my elbow. But I did it. We did it, together with Lisa’s coach Matt.

Working out that hard, at this point, was something I never could have imagined when, back in post-operative August, I could barely manage the logistics of peeing, let alone lifting a dumb bell.

How did I get here? Incremental progress, every day, every week. 

Three-times-daily physio, at home, during September and October. Back to the gym, starting scaled, building. Learning how to listen to my body, and being willing to stretch it beyond what seemed possible in the moment. But not too far.

This morning, when I got to “10 Plank Shoulder Taps,” I was absolutely certain that I couldn’t do them, as I’d yet to support my weight with my injured arm. Matt adapted the movement so I could just lift my good arm off the ground, then quickly return it. But then, after 4 reps, I forgot that I couldn’t do it. And off I went.

When Catherine was living with cancer, we knew for almost six years that, at some point, it would kill her; the only question was when. We tried to inject as much levity into those years as we could: we celebrated six sets of birthdays, we travelled, we went to the beach, we celebrated Christmas six times. But, slowly and steadily, an invisible clock was ticking, a progression toward an inevitable sad ending.

Living that way for so long has a way of getting to you. “Hope” is a necessary fuel, but holding space for hope is exhausting, and it gradually eats away at you until it’s more masking than truth. It’s impossible to imagine the future, and so you stop trying. Acceptance is a balm, but it’s also a ceiling.

What I’ve learned, in the six years since, is a different kind of slow and steady, one where there’s forward movement, faith in the every-little-bit, belief in the future, and planning for it. 

Learning to ride horses. Psychotherapy. Working out in the gym. Performing improv. Physiotherapy. Helping Olivia rebuild. Loving, in all its infinite joys and challenges. 

Progress is neither automatic, nor always delightful, but, boy oh boy, do I prefer the kinetic sway of healing, building, and growing to the grinding attempt to keep heads above water.

My wish for all of you is that you find your own slow and steady, that it moves you forward, that you can start to trust the light.

New from Henry Jamison, Third Person, a collab with the great Jacob Collier (introduction).

From Jamison’s Instagram:

“Third Person” featuring the one and only @jacobcollier is out now. I couldn’t finish the song on my own, so I sent it to Jacob and he obliged, sending me files a few days after my wedding. I thought that the lyrics were about feeling poorly equipped for life and needing someone else to help me through, but Jacob’s additions put it all in a new light. The irony is that I did need him to finish it, but his section is all about inner resources and some mystical connection to the world and each other that turned the song on its head in the most beautiful way. I also got him at his most Carole King 😻 I hope you all like it.

What’s interesting about this collaboration is that Third Person is both two-songs-in-one—call it “a song in two acts”—and a sonic mind-meld, with  Jamison’s and Collier’s musical sensibilities overlapping and intermingling. 

It’s also delightful that Collier—confrère of Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, etc.—has collaborated with Vermont’s own Jamison. In PEI terms, this is like Shane Pendergast collaborating with Brian Eno.

My favourite posts on the Confederation Centre of the Arts blog (RSS) are the Faces of the Centre ones, each of which highlights the people at the heart of the operation. They’re light and breezy posts, pleasantly free from “animating Canada’s national conversation” rhetoric.

Today’s face was Jill McRae, the Confederation Centre Art Gallery’s Conservation and Display Technician, who revealed:

A fun fact about the Gallery team is that they keep tabs on Ada’s featured donut flavours. They have been known to take 11 a.m. donut breaks so they do not lose the best options to the lunch rush. 

Ada is Ada, the culinary studio on Kent Street run by Chef Adam Loo. The reference stuck in my head, and so when I needed lunch downtown today, that’s where I headed.

I had a tasty vegetable-on-focaccia sandwich, and learned more about the vaunted donuts.

• There’s a new flavour every week.
• They make about 100 a day.
• They sell-out fast, starting at 11:00 a.m.
• They recommend you pre-order donuts on their website.

Challenge accepted.

Chef Adam, by the way, has just released a book, Let Rise, which is available at Bookmark.