This Beauty

“In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind.”

Blaise Pascal

August has arrived in a heat wave, though not the “dome” that brought in July. Wave, dome – both feel pretty damn hot with a bit of wind blowing, deluding one into thinking “ahhh, it’s cooler now.” Cloudless skies continue, but the persistent blue of a month ago has given way to haze with smoke from the still burning forest fires that have disintegrated villages and have others on evacuation notice. Sun glowing red in the morning, redder at night, now later to rise and earlier to set.

Though less now, I’m still attuned to school year rhythms, where notions of work would begin to appear on the horizon, readying for start-up later in the month. It was a few years ago I wrote that August – always for us in the northern hemisphere, the last month of summer – feels to me like one long Sunday night. Today, Sunday, this first day in August – almost a decade since I left full-time employment to free-lance – I still feel that flutter in my belly. A cocktail of anxiety, ambivalence, anticipation, acceptance – the ingredients in this order, though amounts may vary.

I’ve alluded to and explicitly written over the past several weeks, that it’s been a “wobbly” time, difficult even some days. Writ large: the world trying to move beyond a virus that simply will not let us go, mutating faster, and exponentially more contagious. Here and abroad, again a season of relentless burning and unprecedented flooding, evidence that while the world was in retreat for eighteen months, climate change was not. Fractured and collapsed infrastructures. An apocalyptic unveiling of grievous global injustice and racism. Right now to my way of thinking, the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games appear the perfect metaphor. Writ small: me trying to find footing in a “re-opened” community, and province deciding to toss out all covid public health protocols, where I continue to monitor if and who to hug, how close to sit, where and when to wear masks, when to travel to see my parents. Sleep disrupted by the heat and a habit of worrying about unknown “what nexts”? Sensing another turn of the wheel and breaking of the “kitsugi” bowl to allow something – yet defined – room to emerge, then to be mended with gold. Sitting in such threshold space is often difficult for me when it activates old trauma reactions that vacillate between brittle anxiety and a listless, deadening loss of focus – both leaving me wrung out.

“The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling.”

John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, 2004

And so I turn to gazing into the backyard sky and trees, onto the garden beds that are finally reviving. I walk Annie early before it’s too hot, enjoying the silence of our slowly waking streets. I listen to the water falling in the fountain – and while a far cry from my beloved Niagara River – let it soothe. I light the kitchen candle when loss’ grief comes calling. I take pen to page, not as often, and often reluctantly, to write anew or, as below, resurrect a piece hidden on just found, older pages:

This Beauty

So big I missed it.
So messy when my expectations of it are
that it fit a frame of perfect proportion.

When instead, it demands 
spilling out and over in 
delicious, voluptuous abandon.
And all I can do, is be 
- thankfully - 
awed and amazed,
enthralled and embraced.

This Beauty 
that seeps through the cracks
through the shame and hurt and secret places,
to rest in the space between letting go
to fill up the letting come.

This Beauty
that holds and beckons us
to live alive,
again and again.

This Beauty
so big it fills my heart to bursting
a million exquisite pieces 
of dance and song and dream,
of praise and appreciation,
of joy and sorrow,
of life and love,
and yes, 

This Beauty.
imagine a whisper of a breath

“Beauty enchants us, renews us, and conquers death.

Piero Ferrucci, Beauty and the Soul, 2009

Wishing you all that is good and true and beautiful in your lives, dear friends.
Much love and kindest regards.

Give-Away Song

GIVE-AWAY SONG

This is my give-away—
            not because I don’t want
                  it anymore,
            not because it’s out of
                  style or
                broken or
                useless since it lost
                its lid or one of its buttons,
            not because I don’t understand
                the “value” of things.
This is my give-away—
            because I have enough
                  to share with you
            because I have been given
                  so much
                    health love happiness
                    pain sorrow fear
            to share from the heart
            in a world where words can be
            meaningless when they come
            only from the head.
This is my give-way—
            to touch what is good in you
            with words your heart can hear
            like ripples from a pebble
            dropped in water
            moving outward growing
            wider touching others.
            You are strong.
            You are kind.
            You are beautiful.
This is my give-away.
     Wopida ye.   
          Wopida ye.
                Wopida ye.

– Gwen Westerman –


Arriving in my inbox this week from the Academy of American Poet’s “poem a day” feature, this poem needs to be given away, again and again. So I share it here, to “touch what is good in you” and in me, too, during days when I need to remember this, and maybe you do, too.
(Typically I format a poem on the centre of the page, but here, I chose to preserve the author’s original, off centre formatting.)

Intention

Icelandic Morning, 2018

I’ve been thinking about intention – what it means, or more accurately, how I’ve interpreted what it means to have and to hold an intention.  I’m wondering if maybe I have it all wrong. That maybe, contrary to goal-setting parlance (think SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely), when I have been too “smart” as I strive to realize my intentions, I have created suffering for myself and even others in my life. This, taking shape over the past few weeks as I’ve been in conversation with several women older than me – creative, inspiring, bold women who are arriving for me at precisely the right moment when my sense of self has been wobbly. Further, my Dream Maker offered confirmation today, wherein her gift of a predawn dream I see and hear two of my elder “heart sisters” describe their knowing about the current plight of our world and the compassionate actions needed to respond. Too, I am with a younger “sister,” each of them, not coincidentally, published writers. In response I say, whispering for the feeling welling up inside me, that it is not about the “what” or even the “how,” but about who these elder women are, who they have become as they have lived their lives day by day, that has shaped what they now know about the truth of these things, about the wisdom they are and offer us now.

A bit of the back story…

Over the past several months, I’ve stepped into what I have understood is a writer’s world – conferring with my local writer-in-residence, participating in virtual “open mic” nights where I read my poetry, submitting to calls and contests (and learning the requisite skill of rolling with  rejections), attending workshops on the logistics of publishing and-or getting an agent, reading other poets and writers, following a national writers’ group on social media, joining a local writer’s circle (short-lived). A few weeks ago, following a well-meaning suggestion, I made application to an adjudicated, online writer’s retreat. While I had a few misgivings, and a lot of ambivalence, I went ahead, spending time creating the required documents and a bit of money for the admission fee. The boon was having tangible evidence that I had, for the past decade, been making steps – soft and slow and steady – towards this dream of becoming a “Writer.” Then, within days of pressing “send” on the application, I received an invitation to be a “participant-observer-scribe” at a creators’ retreat in the foothills during the same week. Apparently, who I was and how I had “shown up” in an earlier conversation with one of the artist-hosts was enough to be asked. I needed only a breath, a pause, to say “yes” to this sweet, juicy invitation.

A month ago, after submitting my story of aging with grit and grace (one previously invited but rejected by another journal), the editor emailed not only her delighted acceptance of my story, but her intuitive sense that we shared enough of something to engage me in co-visioning the next iteration of her life’s work. We’ve now had our first and second telephone “dates” and like the retreat, I’m sensing something sweet and juicy in this imaginal space of possibility.

Then, in last week’s Zoom call with another older, wise woman, our hellos quickly shifted to her acknowledgement of me as her role model for embracing a creator’s life. This became the last of a curious, totally unanticipated trifecta of affirmation.

I have friends and acquaintances who are “Writers” – published, with agents and royalties, followers and fans, accolades and awards. In my mind, this has been the bar to which I would aspire and intend. I now realize I borrowed a trajectory of “success” that by thinking I would, or should follow, I’ve nearly missed other signs and opportunities, invitations and affirmations – different from what I’d expected. I forgot that now, in this stage of life, I am to discover more how to “move at the pace of guidance,” (Christina Baldwin, The Seven Whispers) and how to trust a different value, that of my being, of who I am.

__________

Last week we finally got to see the “Immersive Van Gogh” exhibition after nearly four months of postponements due to covid. I’d first heard of this show in 2019 when my roommate in Morocco would be seeing it when she visited Paris after our trip. Upon entering the hall, we are reminded of Van Gogh’s story – of being deeply sensitive, impoverished with mental health challenges, and of never having been seen nor valued for his remarkable, innovative creative expression – an expression that tremendously influenced the world of art in later years. As I stood surrounded by huge images of his priceless paintings – paintings that in his time were ignored, even disdained, I was moved to tears by this evidence of his unquestionable brilliance and devotion that, despite a prescience revealed in his letters that he would die unnoticed, persisted to his last days, when he died at his own hand.

(Edit: I just received this link from one of my readers – a short excerpt from an episode of Dr. Who, featuring Vincent Van Gogh. It moved me to tears, and is an answered prayer of sorts, as when I stood last week at the immersive exhibition, I prayed that Van Gogh would know of the impact and influence of his art in the world today. – https://youtu.be/_jjWtUpqV9w)

I thought, too, about local musician Ellen McIlwaine, a pioneer slide guitarist, who with her magnificent voice and masterful, intuitive playing, blew the doors off contemporary music genres. She died last month, within a few weeks of a diagnosis of esophageal cancer, leaving in her wake world-wide accolades and tributes. In her last years, virtually ignored by the music world and unable to get gigs, she drove school bus. Hearing her last interview recorded shortly before her death, I was struck by the stories of her immeasurable brilliance and tenacity, she a woman in a man’s world of music, going unnoticed in her final years.

__________

So perhaps it is about intention, though discovering, or maybe it’s remembering, some vital criteria:
It’s less about “me” (ego), and more about “thee” (creator), and learning to discern the subtle differences.
It’s less about striving, and more about noticing the nuanced and the nameless. It’s less about being “smart,” and more about sensing signs and saying yes to invitations.
It’s about soft and slow and steady…staying the course…surrendering.
It’s about what tastes and feels sweet and juicy.
It’s about following a thread that is often more apparent in retrospect.
It’s about trusting, in however it is to be revealed, that:

“What the world needs more than anything else is for each of us to have the courage to follow our calling, step into our true vocation and share our creative gifts with the world such that we conspire to co-inspire each other (a true conspiracy theory!) to do the same, thereby virally activating the collective genius of our species.”

Paul Levy in Carolyn Baker and Andrew Harvey, Radical Regeneration: Birthing the New Human in the Age of Extinction, 2020.

__________

Essaouira Edges, Morocco, 2019

Lately, I feel quite fluid in what I write in this space. It’s certainly less about what I “definitively” know and more about attempting to describe the edges of something honest and necessary – a “felt sense” of things that matter to me, and might, perhaps, to you. Maybe after all this time wishing “to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding” (John O’Donohue, Fluent), this self named daughter of Niagara might be.

Thanks for reading along, dear friends. Much love and kindest regards.

A Poem Becomes a Poem

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched every
whereby its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

– Mary Oliver –

From poet-theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama, I learned different ways to read and hear a poem. This one below, a re-created, very abridged version from Mary Oliver’s above offering, using the last word of every line. A poem becomes a poem.

light Buddha died
morning begins
clouds first fan
violet
green down trees
anything hour
upward
fields gathered
listen itself
air
every waves
everything life itself
hills fire
needed
turning
value
branches head
crowd

– KW –

A New Moment

“I keep having variations on the same conversation with friends and strangers and colleagues. How extraordinary it feels, for those of us in places of the world that are opening up, to do ordinary things like hug people and walk unmasked into common spaces and even just be at the office. Yet: how strangely, puzzlingly unnerving it all also can feel.”

Krista Tippett, The Pause, July 17, 2021

Yes. Yes. Yes. How extraordinary to hug my friends; to dine out last night inside a favourite restaurant, one buzzing with the energy and enjoyment of patrons at every table. Yet strange, puzzling and unnerving. Yes.

I continue to vacillate between wanting full out engagement (in my introverted, socially anxious way) to remaining cocooned in my backyard. The once ordinary still suspended, not yet settled. Last night we were shown our table, the only one remaining, positioned at the entrance, one I would have typically refused for its situation on the threshold between its comings and goings. However, it had the most space around it, wasn’t as noisy, and oddly enough, provided comfort consistent with my lived experience of the world on a threshold, between its comings and goings.

A lesson in this for me: that what I had previously relied on and looked for – both out there and in here (I type, pointing to my body) – for comfort and confidence, to have capability and competency, for helping me to show up well in my life, is now up for review, reconsideration, and revision. That there’s an invitation in the subtle discomfort arising from being and doing that no longer feels quite right.

“We are, on many levels, in a new chapter — following on the multiple chapters of the past 18 months. This is a time of transition. It’s a liminal space emotionally, psychologically, physically, institutionally, relationally.”

Krista Tippett, The Pause, July 17, 2021

In the past few weeks, since my province “opened up” and relaxed all public health restrictions, I’ve had several anxious filled dreams each with the theme of identity – lost, stolen, awakened – from being confronted on the “conflict of interest” within myself and with community; to having my wallet with my driver’s license and health cards, and my passport stolen; to having my home overtaken by technicians and researchers, there to rewire it and me.  This, as my country awakens, yet again, to its history and horrific impacts of the identity “theft” and “rewiring” of its First Peoples via the Indian Act and residential schools. This, as our world awakens in the aftermath of the life altering pandemic.

“Part of what we need to do now is rest, as we are able. To let ourselves fall apart, perhaps. Throughout the pandemic, it’s been hard to fully articulate what was happening inside us and how that was ricocheting between us. Now, we are in a new moment, called to feel what we need to feel, to find words and new intelligence of practice in all the spaces we inhabit and work in and relate in. To acknowledge what we’ve survived, what we’ve lost, what we’ve begun to learn.”

Krista Tippett, The Pause, July 17, 2021

In the past few days I have been incredibly tired. Perhaps a run of nights of fitful sleep under a “heat dome” is finally taking its toll. Too, I have been filled with sadness beyond plausible attribution. While I have been pretty good at processing throughout the pandemic – here, in my journal, and in conversation – as the once immediate focus on covid is wrestled away by staggering climate catastrophes near and far, and other innumerable violence and tragedies, grief – in all its spaces and places – continues to seek my acknowledgement and its expression.

To help me find the wisdom in this liminal time.
To shape anew myself, my relationships with others, and with my world.
To do so without quite knowing how.

“Grief is not so much a process that we “make it through” and come out the other side fully intact, but a non-linear, purifying midwife of the unknown.”

Matt Licata, personal blog, June 16, 2021

Another one of these posts that pauses to simply notice and somewhat name.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

The Trickster


The Trickster

When I don’t write, I scare myself by thinking
I’ve forgotten how.
Like the first day in a new season back on a bicycle, or snow skis.

I know they say it’s simple, like riding a bicycle – you never forget.
But I forget
that when I simply take
my favourite fine black ink pen to write
on simple white lined paper,
words,
which have been patiently waiting for me,
arrive.

Sure, they might need some dusting off,
some spit and polish.

But words,
carrying and conveying
feelings and emotions,
images and impressions,
questions and doubts,
come tumbling out

often in a coherence that
startles me revealing
a wisdom reminding me
I am paying attention even when I think
I’ve forgotten how.


My mind is a trickster in this regard.

Perhaps I shouldn’t pay it
so much
attention.

– KW –

The Moment

below Athabasca Falls, Jasper, Alberta

THE MOMENT

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round. 

– Margaret Atwood –

This poem’s wisdom reminds me of that found in David Wagoner’s poem “Lost”– the need to stand still and let the forest find me, for to do otherwise will only guarantee my lostness. Both impart the knowing held by our First Nations’ peoples – being in “right relationship” with Nature; surrendering to its wisdom and power; trusting its medicine to heal and realign us.
In the Mountains, we settlers climbed and claimed and named peaks – ususally after people -which for hundreds, if not thousands of years before, had been named by the land’s first peoples in honor of the powers and gifts, the placeholding for tradition, ceremony, and travel direction. As an act of reconciliation, many people today are asking that we restore those original names – to acknowledge the Mountains never belonged to us, we didn’t find them. That it was and always will be the other way round.




Way Too Peopley

“It’s way too peopley outside.”

The new post lockdown t-shirt slogan nicely sums up my experience this past week.  I loved having coffee with my friends, sitting close, al fresco, one morning last week. Wept as we hugged – the first time in a year and a half. The next day I showed up at the courts eagerly hoping to play doubles pickleball with the women – the first time in a year and a half. Eight courts full of folks with others hanging around, waiting to rotate on. As the morning cool gave way to the buzzing of pent-up energy, I sat for a few minutes and then had to leave, suddenly uncomfortable and overwhelmed by the intensity of it all. It’s an odd feeling – that part of me wanting to throw a year and a half of caution to the wind, to be out and about with friends, see people without masks, tempered by the sobering reality Covid is not done with us yet, if ever. Another tension, another threshold space into another unknown reality.

“It’s been such an unprecedented year (or two) and I know many of us are just now starting to sense into the real possibility of rebirth and renewal. Some sort of new guidance or new way of being is beginning to emerge, but in some ways we’re still in that middle, liminal period… The reality is that many of us have been shaken, thrown off, or even shattered by all of the transition over the last year or so, where our nervous systems have been or toned or cued away from an embodied, felt sense of safety, and have shifted into subtle – or not so subtle! – states of restlessness, fear, loneliness, and stress of all kinds.”

Matt Licata

Matt’s email arrived this morning. I find him to be a wise and gentle soul. As psychotherapist, author and independent scholar, he brings to his practice, writing and online courses, an embodied, trauma-sensitive approach to psychological growth, emotional healing, and spiritual transformation. Occasionally I share his Facebook posts as he so compassionately reminds us to “welcome to all of our sensitivities, eccentricities, and wildness… which are all so needed in this world.”

I’ve been cranky this past month. Angry and impatient. Feeing lonely on one hand, saying I don’t like people on the other. I suspect some anniversary reaction stuff as self doubt about my worth and value swirls in the void left by the last year’s loss of my professional identity. And as many of us have acknowledged, forgetting to factor in the impacts – subtle and not so – of being socially isolated for a year and a half.

“Perhaps now, more than ever, it is essential to find ways to rest our nervous systems, a journey that will be unique for each of us, not only to manage traumatic stress and this core soul-level exhaustion and disorientation that many of us are experiencing, but to deepen our relationship with the earth and the natural world, with our hearts, and to reconnect with the sacredness of what it means to be a human being alive on the planet at this time.”

Matt Licata

I need to conscientiously tend to what and how I rest my nervous system. I realize it might mean not engaging in some of what has been postponed since Covid. As eager as I have been to travel, to play pickleball, to attend live music festivals and concerts, to join the throngs watching fireworks, it might be a matter of “no, not yet” or even… never. And while I always knew this time would never be a return to normal, this feeling my way through the tension of wanting what was, to doing or not doing what’s now feels right, to trusting the embodied knowing, is liminal and fluid.

cool dawn after the heat

“In order to experience the deep healing, joy, and aliveness that so many of us are longing for, it’s essential to be able to have our baseline or our psychic center of gravity within a felt sense of safety, where safety is the “neural scaffolding” you could say, or the experiential foundation from which we’re able to open, explore, play, connect, and create with one another. To really live.”

Matt Licata

It’s time to check and adjust my neural scaffolding. Then it might not feel “way too peopley outside.” And you?

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

A Blessing of Angels

A BLESSING OF ANGELS

May the Angels in their beauty bless you.
May they turn toward you streams of blessing.

May the Angel of Awakening stir your heart
To come alive to the eternal within you,
To all the invitations that quietly surround you.

May the Angel of Healing turn your wounds
Into sources of refreshment.

May the Angel of the Imagination enable you
To stand on the true thresholds,
At ease with your ambivalence
And drawn in new direction
Through the glow of your contradictions.

May the Angel of Compassion open your eyes
To the unseen suffering around you.

May the Angel of Wildness disturb the places
Where your life is domesticated and safe,
Take you to the territories of true otherness

Where all that is awkward in you
Can fall into its own rhythm.

May the Angel of Eros introduce you
To the beauty of your senses
To celebrate your inheritance
As a temple of the holy spirit.

May the Angel of Justice disturb you
To take the side of the poor and the wronged.

May the Angel of Encouragement confirm you
In worth and self-respect,
That you may live with the dignity
That presides in your soul.

May the Angel of Death arrive only
When your life is complete
And you have brought every given gift
To the threshold where its infinity can shine.

May all the Angels be your sheltering
And joyful guardians.

– John O’Donohue –
To Bless the Space Between Us

In the past week as I’ve created “love notes” to friends – for birthdays and retirements – I’ve turned several times to my much loved, dog-eared copy of John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us. In that search, several times I encountered passages that resonated so deeply, that for a moment they took my breath away. This was today’s and one I knew I had to share with you.

Much love, kindest regards, and my your angels bless and shelter you, dear friends.

Finding A Way

Maybe I have been languishing a bit. It’s been a month since I last wrote here. While most Fridays I’ve managed to post my photo and poem features, sometimes offering a bit of explanation as to why this poem now, I haven’t had the jam to write much else on this platform.

I have been writing. A couple of pieces for EdmontonEats (that sweet official writing gig), magazine submissions, poetry contests, and an application to an online summer writing session where, if accepted, I want to learn what it means to be a writer and hone my skills. Cover letters, bio notes, project proposals. At times I feel daunted by the newness of it all, and too, with the solitary, at times lonely space in which I am crafting this new identity, word by word. And it comes.

I thought about writing a piece describing last month’s felling of our Willow. I would have titled it “Beloved Willow Be Gone,” for in eight hours, with a three person crew of master arborists roping, climbing, cutting, grinding, and carrying, that magnificent fifty year old tree was no more. I now see too much of the backsides of garages, sheds and houses, and feel exposed unlike ever before during the near forty years we’ve lived here. But I do see an expanse of sky unlike I’ve ever seen, and we have more sun in the morning, making coffee on the deck a lovely start to the day. Winds have blown very strong many days since, and I am relieved not to wonder and worry would Willow finally give way, crashing into those garages, sheds and houses. Soon the stump will be ground and we’ll plant a new tree…a Mayday with its signature prairie spring perfume and white wedding bouquet blossoms…a quick growing canopy that will eventually begin to fill the still, stark void.

I simply didn’t have the gumption to write more than my “four word sad story” about the recent “discovery” of hundreds of unmarked indigenous children’s graves on the grounds of a residential school. The original reported number, 215, is now over 1000 after other grounds were explored, and is expected to rise significantly as all school sites across Canada are examined. My country’s dark secrets are literally being unearthed and coming to light. It is time, long overdue. I knew my words would be trite and so commit to listening, learning, and being open to being disturbed into wise and respectful action.

National Indigenous Day Celebrations, Jasper, Alberta

And then there’s the pandemic which, by the sounds of it, might become history next month, which is only a few days away. My province is intent to remove all safety measures come July 1st. Other provinces are following suit sooner than later. Vaccinations feel like a “get out of jail” pass. And while I’ve received both shots, I’m hesitant, skeptical even with this abrupt and arbitrary “end” while cities around the world are going back into lockdown as more virulent variants take hold.

Last week we drove to the mountains for a few days. Our first trip since this all began last March. Sitting on the dock our first evening, a balmy summer solstice, I felt myself decompress with every sigh, releasing months of anxiety and uncertainty. I imagined Nature having a mighty big job ahead as she transmutes everything released by people letting go of all we’ve carried these many months. But I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet.

Every week I receive a wonderful letter, The Pause, written by poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, giving insight into the coming week’s On Being podcasts. This week, he describes the conversation Krista Tippett has with Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows about their new translation of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. You know I’m a Padraig fan, quoting him here often. Once again, his words resonate and offer me a fitting conclusion to my meanderings today:

“The world — as it is envisaged in Rilke’s letters — is not a tame place. It is filled with pain and potential; joy and separation; war and wonder. These are not meant to be easy companions, and this is part of the marrow of the letters to a young poet: find a way to hold yourself while being in the world that is around you.”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.