😍 There is a skating rink (for kids) in my mall this season! Usually I only see wee set-ups in the fancy malls for December.

Ah, memories. #Canuck in #Colombia

Gosh, I love you folks.

It's not easy, but we *do* try to sit with serious issues together, to stretch in our discomfort, and to hold space for differences in communication style and baseline perspective.

And I appreciate the *heck* out of this over the tempests in teapots that fill my feeds in many other spheres.

It ain't easy to be openly, messily human with one another.

But boy howdy, do we try!

#Gaza

Resilience is an extraordinary thing.

We don't share many videos here of everyday citizens in Gaza. Many of us see them elsewhere, but here there's a deep fear of aiding and abetting simply for the audacity of keeping humans human in war.

It makes this space a bit more siloed than some.

This is a gentle video about urban gardening in wartime Gaza. Its lesson? Wherever we are, whatever hardships exist, there is always good we can do for one another. That is all.
https://youtu.be/dCh1huJCb8w

Offline to get a heck of a lot of focus-intensive work done by end-of-day.

Wishing you all

a) glorious weather,
b) goodness in community,
c) goofy moments, and
d) grace with yourselves, come what may.

🕊️

The saga of the hippos continues. 😅

Now the ecological problem lies with *dead* hippos gumming up the rivers.

#Colombia

😅 Well I feel seen.

*Feminized people. This is why I don't care as much when people use she instead of they / no pronouns. I *never* feel a sense of gender except when I have gender expectations heaped on me by dudes on the street, but that's the real threat in my life.

Earlier this year, I let this get to me & stopped going outside as often, exercising, etc. Gained weight, lost muscle, lived with way more stress in my body overall.

But so help me, self-centred dudes aside, I am not letting this get to me again.

Having a good test of my patience.

Today a park guard asked me for my number, after calling me over I thought for something important. He was with a female guard at the time, so I focused on her & discussed openly how hard it is for women* to exist in public without constantly being approached by men, to which she agreed. *For a second* he seemed to process this too.

But then he jogged over to where I was doing my last set of reps to ask me out again.

I just... 🤦🏻‍♂️

The other animals are great.

Yay! And today I can pay my #CatTax, too!

#CatsOfCoSo
#FreeRangeCatFriends
#AGoodDay

They *do* eat grass, too... but dessert first.

#BoringDystopia

(Cane stalks from a guarapo vendor get dumped at this bin. They're after the sugar.)

#BonusBellyRubs

Did not have enough eyeball left for late-night editing.

But! It's just past 4 on a new day.

All is well. Time for a run. 💪🏻

😅 More admin tasks took over. Eesh. So much for "balancing" my schedule after a week's hiatus from the newsletter.

Let's see if I have eyeball left enough to edit this one last piece before bed. 🤞🏻

Brain buzzing from admin work today.

Going for a walk before newsletter.

One important lesson from teamwork is that everyone has different ways of communicating, and different needs they're trying to meet *while* communicating.

The world is a tougher place to navigate when we don't pay attention to what our communication gaps are telling us.

Some folks are looking for answers.
Some folks want to be heard.
Some folks need to be reassured.

Ego gets in the way of so much learning in our world.

Putting together a review this morn, I keep returning to a definition of love from one of the books:

For Alaya Dawn Johnson, love is radical honesty, radical trust, and radical vulnerability.

Now, "radical" isn't the same as "absolute", even if it shows up as similar. To me, "radical" suggests a deliberate choice to lean into honesty, trust, & vulnerability when alternatives exist.

But this tall order needs a super healthy ecosystem in which to thrive.

Do we do enough to cultivate all three?

Bad pun alert. #Humour

😅 Did you folks know about this?

I was chatting with Colombian friends today and they told me that the word for this hairdo, locally in the 80s, was the "Alf", like the show. Did *we* ever call it that? I feel like two North American cultural items were exported at the same time and got fused in the process. 🙃

The horses who pass through my park in the morning are like big ol' raccoons. They garbage-dive for fruit peels and cane sugar, the giant sucks.

Happy Thursday, CoSo, whatever your dumpster-diving brings you for brekkie!

(Also, be careful when petting your hooved friends in the rain.) #Nature