Moving on...

I have begun to reconnect with my work for my dissertation. I have completely lost touch with it for a few months. Looking back now I realized I was simply burned out from back to back degrees. I started late and then just got totally immersed in building an academic career. I don't think doing a BA, and MPhil and now a PhD all in a row was a mistake just that there is a cost to be paid and these few weeks of vacation have been very restorative.

Now I am re-engaged in my work and ready to get busy again. I will not be working as a T/A this fall so I will be able to concentrate on preparing for my candidacy exams. Once I finish those I am free to leave Calgary and get back to Newfoundland and to start my fieldwork. It will be odd to be coming back here with the thought of putting down roots again. I'm not sure if it will actually take or if I will get the urge to go again. There are so many places I have not been. So many worlds I have not experienced.

On being stressed...

For some reason I woke up this morning feeling incredibly stressed. There it was - that dry feeling at the back of the throat, that darkness at the edge of consciousness. I know what drives it. I understand it is in part a fear of failure or worse the loss of control. It is all rooted in my return to begin working on my field work for my PhD. I have to find a place to live. I have to begin making sense of the ideas that have been bouncing around inside my head. I have to actually start my research.

When I write out those few sparse facts they seem so insignificant but each one of them carries the burden of the possibility of falling apart. It is as if I am a child again trying to build the perfect sand castle. Just as I reach over to complete the highest tower I lose my balance and tumble into my own creation collapsing it into a meaningless, shapeless pile of sand. So I sit here at my computer, in this borrowed apartment overwhelmed not by the actual work but by anticipation of the unknown.

Time and memorials...

I have been back in Newfoundland for about nine days and I have been reconnecting with roots largely by exploring them with my partner Margo. Part of that is individual family connection to World War I. Her maternal grandmother lost her fiance to that war and I lost a great-uncle. I grew up with Uncle Jimmy's portrait hanging at the top of the stairs. Each night as I went off to bed, I looked up at the eternally young face of my mother's uncle who had died age 24 at the Battle of Beaumont Hamel, July 1, 1916. All Newfoundlanders and Labradorians remember this day and while Canadians celebrate the birth of their nations, we must first mourn the loss of ours.

The war memorial in Beaumont Hamel is partly replicated in Bowring Park , with Newfoundland's national symbol the caribou. Yet tonight I learned that there are in fact five such memorials to Newfoundland in Europe. Four, including Beaumont Hamel are in France while the fifth is in Belgium. Each has the caribou and each commemorates the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. They are: Monchy-le-Preux, Guedecourt, Masnieres and Coutrai. It was at Coutrai that 17 year old Private Tommy Ricketts becane the youngest soldier ever to earn the Victoria Cross and it was because of these five battles that the Newfoundland Regiment was the only one to be awarded the designation of "Royal" during World War I.

We are a proud people but we have earned that pride a terrible cost and we must never forget that the price was paid in blood and suffering by some of our best young men.