Janice Mason Steeves

I had intended a much more intellectual post today.  Oh well. This is what came out instead. At Christmas I gave my young grandkids a gift certificate to be traded in for a night at a hotel with their Grammie.  Saturday was the day that they cashed them in. We had enough stuff packed to stay a week, including bathing suits,  swim goggles, swim noodles, a beach ball, and an enormous bag of snacks-not all of which their mother would have approved. I had come off a week where my work was not going where I'd hoped. It was one of those weeks where I thought I might ditch it all and apply for a job at Tim Horton's coffee shop where I'd wear a baseball cap at work and serve double doubles. I won't go into it here.  Suffice it to say, I really needed a break. Three weeks ago I did a silent retreat at Loyola House, the Jesuit Centre in Guelph, Ontario.  While it was an extraordinarily nourishing experience in many ways, I realize now that I spent a lot of...

Fragile 5     29x29"  Oil/cold wax on panel © 2014 Janice Mason Steeves This early morning, I'm sitting in front of my wood stove that has been burning non-stop this winter, as I look out onto a fresh blanket of snow in the woods behind my house.  More snow is swirling through the branches and there's the promise of more to come. It brings a profound silence that sound-absorbent layer of snow. I'm thinking about the power of silence and the Silent Retreat I did last weekend at Loyola House , the Jesuit Centre in Guelph, Ontario.  There were nearly 50 others in the retreat.  We had pleasantly cozy single rooms with carpeted floors, a desk,   a sink and a big comfortable chair.  We didn't speak at all for the weekend, not in hallways, by the fireplace in the lounge or at meals.  Having the limitation of silence made time expand. The retreat centre holds a sense of the sacred, and there is something deeply profound about sharin...