I’ve never read another author who has spoken to me like Emily Carr. As a newly 30something single woman in search of a mantra, Emily Carr bypasses my eyes and ears and speaks to my heart. To say I envy her clarity is an understatement. I realize that she struggled immensely with in life to create such a masterful, spiritual and truthful body of work, but I often wish that I had an ounce of what she did… … perhaps its best to say that I wish I had her iron resolve. I struggle daily to personally achieve truth and righteousness in my thoughts, my art and my interaction with others. To be able to speak and write plainly would be such a gift, though I have a feeling that such a feat only comes with age.

Emily Carr writes as she painted. As such it has taken me a long time to finish this book. It demands to be taken at her pace as she composes her thoughts, like mixing paint on a palette, and meanders through fluid and lyrical prose, like a brush moving on canvas. Every entry ends with a sigh of repose and an ‘Amen’ as if nothing further should be said or read, but rather contemplated quietly until she is next ready to guide you along her journey… at a time determined by her, not by a hurried reader.

I could fill countless pages with moving quotations and expound at length over her ideas, but that would spoil the fun of getting to know her as I have, so I will leave you with only a few quotations to contemplate;

It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she’s something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of.

Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.

If you’re going to lick the icing off somebody else’s cake you won’t be nourished and it won’t do you any good, – or you might find the cake had caraway seeds, and you hate them.

Don’t take what someone else has made sure of and pretend it’s you yourself that have made sure of it till it’s yours absolutely by conviction. It’s stealing to take it and hypocrisy and you’ll fall into a hole.