Sometimes if you move carefully through the forest, breathing like the ones in the old stories, who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests, conceived out of nowhere but in this place beginning to lead everywhere. Requests to stop what you are doing right now, and to stop what you are becoming while you do it, questions that can make or unmake a life, questions that have patiently waited for you, questions that have no right to go away.
~ David Whyte ~
Coming on the heels of Monday’s post on midlife and eldering questions, Whyte’s words speak to the power of such questions. Questions which, like the white fluff of feather caught on the leafless limb of the red willow bush I met a couple of weeks ago, might easily go unnoticed. Soft and tenacious, in stark contrast to its surroundings and time of year…is why it caught my attention…had me stop to capture its moment and possibility. This is the stuff of questions that matter, that wait patiently, sometimes in obscurity, for our us to stop and notice and make something of them.
What might be some of the questions waiting patiently for you? Perhaps in the growing dark of these December days, with its invitation to go slow and look within, they may appear to you.
Over the years I’ve blogged some of my responses to entering the eldering stage of life, with one of my earliest references in 2016, when I cited the transition from ambition to meaning in Angeles Arrien’s The Second Half of Life. Searching this current blog, A Wabi Sabi Life, I again referenced Arrien in February 2020, mere weeks before the world was stopped by covid-19. In Threshold of Uncertainty, my first post of 2022, I described my experience standing on the threshold of a new year. Recently the gift of a question to a friend who has just crossed into his 7th decade – What joys and challenges will wearing the mantle of early eldering bring?… Last week’s wistful musings prompted by my short visit with my parents and to attend my mother-in-law’s funeral…Yesterday, an excerpt from Dr. Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude, cited in her weekly Art of Enchantment Substack…like a bell thrice rung:
In the last part of our life, focus is everything. The years when we imagined we needed to be all things to all people are long gone, along with our dilettante days: the days of experimenting with this and that, of adopting and discarding different personas, of reinventing ourselves for every season of the year. Now, it’s time to get serious. To let the inessential fall away and focus on the essence of who we are. What is it that is left of us when Old Bone Mother comes along and strips that old, decaying flesh from our bones? Who is it that we are; what is it that we feel we are here to do? What do we imagine these final years of our lives are really for?
Dr. Sharon Blackie
Like Blackie, who says she asks herself these questions every year at this time, when the dark grows long, and she grows older, I’m feeling a similar urgency with similar questions. I realize typing now, this is part of the root of that knot I mentioned a couple of weeks ago and wondered what thread I needed to pull to loosen its persistent grip.
For me, the urgency is more in asking the questions with an open heart and mind, rather than anticipating a set of simple answers. As in the old stories of the Grail, the Question That Must Be Asked is always more important than the answer it provokes.
…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Who is it that we are, or think we are? What is it that we feel we are here to do? What is the world asking of us now? What do we imagine these final years of our lives are really for? What joys and challenges will wearing the mantle of eldering bring? What thread(s) do I pull in hopes of loosening the interior knot’s persistent grip?
Sitting with, in the growing dark, growing patient with uncertainty. Light a candle in this season of light, advent of a holy reminder, a mystery we learn to trust.
a blessing for living between. Between miracles. Between answers. Between formulas.
Blessed are you who live here, this space between simple categories and easy answers.
You who wonder why this is your life, why you got this diagnosis, or why you still struggle with infertility, or why you haven’t found your birth parents, or why you can’t kick the addiction or why your kids haven’t come home.
Blessed are you who build a home on uneasy ground, who, despite your trying, your asking, you’re searching, haven’t found the satisfying feeling of discovery.
And blessed are you who never will. This is not an easy place to live. Outside of certainty, outside of knowing, outside of the truth.
But blessed are you who realize that love and beauty and courage and meaning live here too. Amid the unease and the frustration and the sleepless nights. In the way love and courage show up through people, through presence, through laughter.
May you be surprised by your capacity for ambiguity, for the way it makes you a great listener and a good friend, for you are someone who knows how to feel your way around in the dark and squint for the stars.
I wish it were easier, dear one. I wish I could hand you the answers you seek.
But for now, may you find comfort in the fact that you are not alone. We are all learning to live in the uncertainty in the unknowing. So blessed are we who live here together.
~ Kate Bowler, November 19, 2023 ~
A dear friend, well acquainted with grief, having lost her step-daughter to cancer a few years back, introduced me to Kate Bowler, herself close friends with cancer. I’ve listened to a couple of Kate’s “in your face with honesty” podcasts, and an interview on On Being. This recently posted poem speaks to me of her no holds barred, compassionate experience of living in the liminal – rife with challenge, rich with gifts.
I’m not sure why I felt moved to share this poem today, after many months’ pause in my Friday photo and poem posts. Maybe because right now – again – so many near and far are living “outside of certainty, outside of knowing, outside of the truth.” That our world, human and the more than, is living in the indefinite pauses between miracles, answers, and formulas. That we might each find comfort in knowing we aren’t alone, and in the blessing we all live here together, near and far.
“I don’t think the common thread that runs through humanity is greed or power or these sorts of things. It is this binding agent of loss.”
Nick Cave in “Loss, Yearning. Transcendence,” On Being with Krista Tippett, November 22, 2023
I’m home a day having made my annual sojourn to see my parents and attend my mother-in-law’s funeral. A typical Niagara November where heavy clouds threatened rain and snow; a steely grey river whitecapped when wind blew against its current; bare limbed trees; ditches and gutters filled with bland brown leaves. Dreary, yet an apropos outer mirroring of a family’s inner experience, with a beauty found in the skies. Wistful.
On the day of the funeral, as I drove with my parents the twenty minutes up the highway towards the church, the arrival on the wind of a short-lived weather system brought blue sky, sun and bracing cold, felt especially as we stood at the cemetery for the internment.
It was a short visit wherein I recognized it’s the time in the cycle of a family’s life where we congregate more often for weddings, funerals, and the births of babies. Amidst this occasion of loss, I found moments of gladness in meeting a nephew’s bright-eyed baby, a niece’s toddler-princess daughter who endearingly acknowledged the absence of her tiara, and new young partnerings. I heard about career promotions and sudden job loss, and how one young couple is intent to choose work in service of humanity, and life balance. With family members bedecked in sweaters hand knitted by their mother-oma, a talent about which I read to the congregation from Sig’s in absentia tribute, yes, we were bound together by our loss.
Too, an unexpected and joyful reunion with a professional colleague last seen thirty years ago. He and his then wife “chummed” with Sig and me before they relocated to Niagara. Reading the obituary, he made the trip to offer support, much as we had given each other as recently graduated social workers navigating the complexities of outpatient psychiatry.
I’ve learned, albeit wistfully, to keep in mind the adage attributed to Ben Franklin when visiting my family. With work schedules and weekend commitments, I saw only my nephew, appreciating his brief visit, acknowledging his life’s fullness as he makes his way as husband, father of two boys, field supervisor with Hydro One, and part-time farmer. My niece and her family, with a young daughter I’ve yet to meet (hampered by covid) has an equally full plate compounded by her husband’s chronic health condition. My sister, now living in the states, knew even before the closure of all border bridges due to an explosion (terrorism ruled out) the challenge of crossing during American Thanksgiving weekend, took a pass. This time, sitting quietly – at the funeral in the church pew with my parents, and in their home, each of us reading on our devices, watching a Netflix series or a Saturday morning soccer game – marked episodically with conversation, missing Sig’s presence, I wondered how many more times I’d be making these abbreviated journeys.
“Our lives are defined by that love, that joy, that laughter, but also by anxiety, fear, despair. And somewhere between those is, I think, a responsibility: recognizing the truth of our past and all that has preceded us, not in a way that’s meant to paralyze us or overwhelm us or trap us in a sense of despair, but in a way that is meant to help us recognize and remember our own agency.”
Clint Smith in “What We Know in the ‘Marrow of our Bones'”, On Being with Krista Tippett, November 2, 2023
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves”
“I haven’t seen anything from A Wabi Sabi Life lately,” remarked my friend in our long overdue, much awaited Zoom call. A myriad of reasons, excuses even, offered. And as I sit down in my studio Sunday night after dinner, my typical time to craft a post, what thread to pull from the dark interior knot in hopes of loosening its vague, inarticulate, persistent grip?
“A brave woman, a wisening woman, will develop the poorest psychic land, for if she builds only on the best land of her psyche, she will have for a view the least of what she is.”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves”
Do I write again about friendship? How my initial post rang true for so many women, coincidentally finding several at the time questioning their own friendships? How its precipitant, a letter written to a friend, sank like a stone? Its “no response” response – a risk I weighed yet chose to take – now a knot in my heart tied tight with other friendships that have waned or ended this year.
“So do not be afraid to investigate the worst. It only guarantees increase of soul power through fresh insights and opportunities for re-visioning one’s life and self anew.”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves”
Do I wonder how I’ll work with feedback given to me from a publisher considering my chapbook submission and why it was refused? Feedback that when taken into consultation with a writer I hold in high regard, she immediately understood and pointed to numerous examples where I hadn’t written myself into my poems. Another risk I had to take: to submit those poems and then to ask for help to understand. Profound and vulnerable, I sense this is as much about my poetry as it is about allowing myself to fully show up – on the page, in my poems, in my life.
“It is in this psychic kind of land development that Wild Woman shines.”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves”
Do I wax majestic on the memories of my solo month in Italy, fresh with every step I take walking, especially on Saturdays with my Camino group? Poles in hand, boots on feet, pack on back. Or every Italian inspired meal made, Moka pot Americano sipped? It all comes back viscerally even though the skyline is urban, there’s ice in the river, and I don’t hear much Italian spoken anywhere. I finished my photo journal last week, reveling in my photos and extracting from the posts I’d fortuitously written every day on Facebook. And just today I returned to the pages of my Morocco photo journal. Reading my travel diary and selecting photos, I felt a much-needed surge in love for my intrepid self. And now considering my writing, with several poems the result of my journeys, there’s a question I hold even closer, “How far do I have to travel to find myself?”
women on the wild edge
There’s the ever present, though softened ache in missing Annie, five months passed. Woven in now with the passing last week of my mother-in-law. Anticipated at ninety-eight years, to her family she had been lost twice due to Alzheimer’s attacking her memory and ability to communicate over the past several years, and now finally her body. I’ll make the trip this week to attend her funeral as Sig is tending to health issues that, while thankfully being resolved, have wearied, and episodically worried us since August. Grief weighs. I feel its silent tension in my body.
And then there’s the grief and trauma in the world “writ large,” unleashed again with manmade and natural upheaval and destruction (maybe they are one in the same?) taking up a lot of my “mind space,” to quote a friend. To quote another, in the title of a talk he gave last week, “What does love have to say at a time of war?”, I ponder this deeply. With beloved Muslim friends with Arabic backgrounds, and beloved Jewish friends, all of whom are reeling with the daily horrors of it all…and too, in my city with its significant Ukrainian demographic, again dear friends, people who now feel they are being forgotten by the world while their own horrors persist, I try to find and walk the middle way. I think of Rumi – “beyond right doing and wrongdoing there is a field and I will meet you there.” Or as my friend recommends, a higher field to see with depth and breadth a way through the entrenched complexities. It feels like the only way, and yet how? Who takes the first step walking into that dark field? Does it matter who, simply that it be?
“She is not afraid of the darkest dark, in fact, she can see in the dark.”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves”
It’s winter. I don’t think this is a premature pronouncement for given last week and the forecast for the next, temperatures are hovering at freezing or below with wind making it feel colder.
sea buckthorn path
We have snow. It is not melting. As is the way, I went to bed last Sunday night to wake Monday morning to the balcony lip edged white while our laurel leaf willows remain fully leafed. A seasonal oxymoron.
Those three days of outdoor pickleball that helped me land after a month of summer, being outdoors all day, every day for thirty days, are a memory as nets are now down and indoor courts filled. I went back to aquafitness last week. While I love how I feel after the workout, I’m not sure how I’ll fare wet in winter. In twenty plus days it’s lovely. In twenty below that’s another story. I missed Friday’s class… just too damn cold after having walked 8 km on Thursday in a deceptive wind that chilled me to the core. Cold hands, the bells palsied side of my face especially impacted. It meant I didn’t walk with my Camino group on Saturday. But yesterday the sun shone, the temperature rose a few degrees above zero with little wind, so I ventured forth.
Intent to do my best to maintain the fitness I gained this summer and trekking in Italy, I knew I needed to resume walking in the neighbourhood. Without Annie. I’d been avoiding this all summer, using my river valley training as a necessary though convenient distraction. Yesterday I woke up feeling sad. Met my dear grieving friend for breakfast and once home, after a couple more hours’ avoidance, I took my grieving self by the hand, ear buds and downloaded poetry podcasts at the ready, and walked one of our favourite routes through the golf course, now void of golfers and geese, with ponds frozen and fairways white.
For the first while I listened to Padraig recite a poem, interview a poet, and then recognizing this, too, was a distraction, I listened to myself, my heart, the wind, my grief. I remembered all the spots Annie would sniff, and how she’d wait for me to capture a photo. I wondered about a photo this time, to mark the day, the occasion, but nothing shimmered. Except my memories of walking with Annie.
Annie’s right paw – her signature, my memory
Tonight, I’m on the docket to read several poems at Edmonton’s Stroll of Poets monthly gathering. I remember years ago attending to listen to a now deceased friend read hers. With ten minutes allocated to each of four readers, I’ve chosen four, one recently composed as tribute to Annie and my realization that in an ironic twist of fate, her sudden passing in June gave me unfettered time to train for walking the Via di Francesco. Another poem, inspired by a dream, tells the story of the grandfather I never knew.
The veil is thin. I find myself thinking of friends who have passed…friends who are grieving the passing of mothers and sisters…ancients and ancestors…angels…Annie. Wars that continue to devastatingly claim thousands of innocent lives…thousands of children.
A friend enquired and I can say that yes, my molecules are settling, integrating, recalibrating. I’m grateful to be picking up life’s threads that needed to be put to the side, that the words I felt had died with Annie’s passing are now returning.
And with this poem I am further consoled:
BLESS ALL BRAVE THINGS
the prayer I cannot pray. the words that rest unspoken. the feelings that can’t be named. the grief that bursts wide open.
the cry that turned to laughter. the smile that broke the ice. the pain that was cut off. the poem I couldn’t write.
life, bless all the forming things that escape or remain in me; those resisting to be seen, and the ones that risk coming out as brave beginnings.
I am home. Met by my husband in sunshine and mild temperatures last Saturday after nearly 24 hours awake, most of those masked in the minority, I arrived safe, sound, very tired and with my checked luggage. It’s taken about a week to recover from jet lag and feel my soul return to my body. I’ve been grateful for another prolonged autumn, warm enough to get back on the pickleball courts and try out my foot after trekking 220/237 km on the Via de Francesco, and close to another 100 km wandering through Florence, Assisi and Rome during the days bookending my walk. I played so-s0 after five months off court, and while my foot felt OK, I realized it’s too much, too soon to resume play daily. Saturday found me in our still colourful river valley walking with my Camino group. It felt wonderful to tie on the boots I’d worn up and down those paths in Italy, now with a much lighter pack, and gloves, toque and a down coat given the sudden shift in temperature…to be reunited with friends who, too, had trekked this past month in Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe
Edmonton’s River Valley – Whitemud Creek towards Snow Valley
“Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging. One of the lovely things about us as individuals is the incommensurable in us. In each person, there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for things we need from within. The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by yourself. They are at home at the hearth of your soul.”
John O’Donohue
“After this recent month-long journey, bookended by several days of solo wandering, I can assuredly say I am friends with both.”– posted on Facebook, October 20, 2023
Too, I can assuredly say that combining a small group experience with solo time prior, after, or both, is my favourite way to travel. I experienced it most recently in Morocco this past spring when I arrived solo in Casablanca and then extended my stay in Marrakech after the small group excursion. When I think back to having flown into Florence late that Sunday afternoon – finding the tram to take me from the airport to the SMN train station, to then making my way to the monastery I’d booked for the week (all first time experiences) – the combination of trepidation and accomplishment – in this case particularly so as I knew my way better than the local I’d asked – delightfully got me off on the right foot.
Having been to both Florence and Rome several times, I felt confident in my ability to get around. I’m “old school,” preferring paper maps – this trip using a terrific popup version that tucked away in my purse – and I’m quick to ask for help, understanding that in the encounter made, people enjoy knowing they’re needed. I loved wandering early in morning, and suddenly, for example, coming upon the Duomo to be enthralled by the sunlight breaking through the clouds. Countless moments of “moving at the pace of guidance” – going where I wanted, when I wanted – enjoying my own companionship, not missing a soul, the boon of solo travel.
early morning at the Duomo, Florence
That being said, I know, too, what a well-travelled friend had called “low pot” days: when fatigue, feeling overwhelmed, displaced and lonely create inertia, low confidence and anxiety. Its remedy: to acknowledge and either sit with and rest, let be or move through depending on the situation. This crept up on me during my time in Trastevere, when after two weeks of companionship, walking alone together, I was suddenly alone alone. And I was tired… from the exertion, not only of the actual trek in the glorious hot late summer, but too, from the hundreds of kilometers I’d walked in preparation. The inevitable “come down” from the accomplishment and all it took.
So yes, I am intimate friends both with solitude and its gifts of sustenance, renewal, rest and creativity, and too, with loneliness and its sharp edge of separation and self doubt.
A well-established practice of self-care, I’d spend at least an hour daily editing the day’s photos and writing a description to post on Facebook, this time to soothing instrumental Spotify playlists. While it became THE chronicle of my experience (as the very small journal I brought often remained empty for days at a time), in those moments of solitude and occasional loneliness, the comments from friends shored me up to remember the gifts that can only given to me, by me.
at the Trevi Fountain, Rome
Dear friends, if you were among those who followed my journey, and perhaps commented, thank you for the lifeline.
Finally, enough space to for some words to emerge from that place “before, beneath and beyond” to find their way to the surface and onto this page.
Finally, enough that has been in process for summer’s duration now settling.
Finally, like my practice’s bell that signals the need for a pause with a breath in between, embodying and enlivening that breath here.
tingshas for ringing in a pause
FRIENDSHIP My last post almost two months ago was an opening into the seldom talked about territory of the distress with broken friendships. As I’d anticipated, my exploration evoked comments from many readers, mostly women. Ranging from encouragement for naming truth, to reframing as peace-making the individual acts of courageously and vulnerably stepping in to invite conversation and clarification, to women sharing related stories of long-standing friendships suddenly going awry, to others feeling the best friendships should be the easiest to maintain (an opinion I countered). If I were to edit that post, I’d clarify that while the opening quote was ample context for both my letter to my friend, and the post, I wouldn’t “walk away in disgust” but rather in sorrow. As has been the case.
Since then, longtime friend Tracy shared a book title that I promptly borrowed from the library. Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends by Maria Franco (2022) provides an accessible frame for understanding the complexities of early attachment wounding in adult friendships. Suffice to say that John Bowlby’s seminal work on attachment theory, now decades old, is thankfully again seeing the light of day, helping us understand the tricky ground of relationships. Add in the impacts of generational trauma, its impacts on the body-mind, and coping strategies of addiction and we have more than enough reason to find compassion for ourselves and others.
While I’d thought I might have more to write on the subject, my attention has shifted though the questions I hold and the sorrow I feel continue ebb and flow.
MEMORIES At some point during the day, as any of you who store your photos on the cloud know, photo memories appear. Sometimes it’s a past post on social media that I check for relevancy before sharing again. Always it’s the photos I’ve made and stored in the cloud over the years. For the past few days, it’s been photos of my first visit to Morocco in 2019. How utterly poignant to see over and over the beauty of her land, culture and people that captivated me then, that enticed me to return this past March, now in the aftermath of the weekend’s catastrophic earthquake. Writing today to a friend who shares my awe and appreciation for Morocco:“my return to Morocco was most satisfying…my love for her only deepened…my desire to spend more time there was only stoked, not sated.”
To others I acknowledged the bittersweet gift of travel: that with each journey taken, the world becomes smaller, more intimate with each connection made, each friendship forged. So that when such devastating events occur, I cannot help but feel a heart stopping immediacy, a bone resounding impact and meaning. Then anonymous concern gives way to personalized shock and grief.
My dear friend, Omid Safi, an acknowledged scholar of Islamic studies and Rumi, hosts regular “illuminated tours” of Morocco. Evidence of our small world when in March he was with his group in Marrakech as I was with mine in Casablanca. When he saw that I’d attended a cooking class at Marrakesh’s AMAL Women’s Training Center and Moroccan Restaurant, he wrote that its founder was a dear friend. Today he posted their efforts to gather and directly forward donations to families left bereft in the mountain villages hardest hit by the earthquake. I appreciated Omid’s post, resonant with the message I’d heard repeatedly while touring the country, reminding me of those most basic values shared among Abrahamic faith traditions: “send thoughts and prayers, please. Also send aid. Remember that our beloved Prophet says to change things first with your hands, then your tongue, and lastly by the heart. We begin by doing something.”
Marrakech’s Koutoubia Mosque, March 2023 September 8, 2023- it shook and swayed, yet stands still erect
ANNIE Among those photo memories are countless ones of Annie. Today a favourite taken a year ago.
It’s been three months since we had to say goodbye to our beloved fur companion. Striking for me has been the coincidence (?) of weather. On both the first- and second-month anniversaries of her passing, the day was exactly as it had been for those initial three days in June: leaden gray skies and steady soaking rain. And like those first three days, each month since I’ve felt held by the sheltering sky, in my grief, my love, my missing, my appreciation for this beautiful being called Annie.
I haven’t yet been able to return to our favourite bench overlooking the pond, nor walk our familiar neighbourhood routes. But in the meantime, I have walked. Close to 320 kms since the end of July. Up and down and through our river valley. Initially with great trepidation, now with confidence that I am as ready as I can be to walk the 16-day, 260 km Via de Francesco from Assisi to Rome. I tended to a collapsed metatarsal of my left foot for most of the spring and summer, the onset of which occurred during that day in March when walking on cobblestone through the labyrinthine medina of Fez. Finally surrendered to giving up pickleball in early June, the activity I’d counted on both to healthfully distract me from grief and to build my cardio fitness, I turned to deep water aqua fitness three times a week. Then my dear friend and former marathoner Thais, created a month-long training program wherein I’d gradually increase the distance and backpack weight to 20+ km and 13+pounds, some of the longest days walked during the highest temperatures of the summer with the greatest weight.
THREE COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN In a week’s time I’ll be settled in Florence for several days, about to meet up with my morning food tour in Otranto. On Tuesday, an early spot at the Uffizi to once again revel in the masters. Another day a city bus up to Fiesole. Then later in the week, a train to Assisi to wander solo and adjust to the first of many hill towns I’ll encounter walking. There I’ll meet with the small group of fellow walkers and pilgrims escorted by our Italian guide, and tour company host, Sandy Brown, writer of several Italian “camino” guidebooks. We’ll conclude our via at the Vatican, giving me several more solo days to decompress in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood. That coin tossed over my shoulder into the Trevi Fountain last October, now my third, has returned me yet again to another country of my heart.
third coin tossed at the Trevi Fountain, October 2022
“MOVING AT THE PACE OF GUIDANCE” (coined by my friend Christina Baldwin in The Seven Whispers) Walking one day on my own a few weeks ago, I realized how different my preparation for this long-distance trek compared to last year’s Portuguese Coastal Camino. Both then and now booked early in the new year, as I waxed and waned in the early weeks of summer, wondering if I was up to the challenge due to grief and injury, I realized I didn’t know WHY I was making this journey. Last year I had been so clear that I was responding to a decades’ held dream. Such clarity of purpose and my reading of Phil Cousineau’s The Art of Pilgrimage shaped so much of my planning and preparation. Now except for my lists, and clothing and supplies laid out on a bed for weeks, my dedication to my training, I began to wonder about the presence of grace in all of this.
One night trying to sleep after long, hot rugged day of walking, I wept…with exhaustion, with missing Annie, with fear I’d not be up to making the trek, with worry for my husband and a sudden health complication (resolving), and with realizing that with Annie’s passing, my words had died. I did not have the energy to find a word to write. I did manage to polish up a few poems to meet some submission deadlines. And while I trusted this was a temporary state, simply my fallow not a harvest season, I felt sorrow and disappointment that I’d been unable to use my writing to heal my grief, as I’d known other writers to do, published collections being an added result. I felt especially vulnerable as in June I had asked for and received the gift of a weekly writer’s circle with the group of remarkably kind and talented and generous women writers with whom I’d just completed an online course. How could I be in a writer’s circle and not be writing?
Come a week, those four weeks in Italy I will be moving at the pace of guidance. Beyond a food tour and gallery ticket I have nothing booked. Having visited Florence and Rome several times, I feel comfortable wandering, sitting at cafes, watching people, noticing, making photos, and taking a note or many to seed future writing. Walking every day for sixteen, I know from experience there is a simplicity and rhythm that invites heeding guidance, feeling grace.
Realizing the extent to which this summer I have been holding – grief, uncertainty, worry, pain – I feel myself exhaling.
Thank you, dear friends, for your patience as I find my words and my breath. Much love and kindest regards.
As friendships grow closer, conflict becomes more difficult to avoid. And this is often a good thing. Because the closer we get to each other’s hearts, the more triggers rise into view. Because you can’t fully know someone until you ignite each other’s fire. Because you won’t know if a connection has legs until it has been tested by conflict. And when it is, there is a choice to be made. Walk away in disgust or walk toward it in effort to deepen the connection. Conflict isn’t the adversary of connection. Fear of confrontation is.
Jeff Brown, Hearticulations
This is a deeply vulnerable topic…for me and I’ll presume many of you, particularly my women readers. It’s one of those areas that so deeply affects our lives and yet when friendships go sideways, fall apart, dissolve into thin air, we seldom if ever talk about it. I’m certain I’ve read somewhere from someone whose opinion matters to me, that breakups with friends can be as devastating as divorce, if not more so. And so it is, with the encouragement from a friend, I write this post to begin to illuminate the often shadowed dynamic so essential to our lives and well being.
I included the above quote in a letter I recently sent to a friend. Sensing our relationship was wobbling, for weeks – months even – I pondered reaching out to enquire of her. And then in a bout of insomnia several weeks ago, compelled I sat down in the dark of my writing studio to craft a letter. Several revisions later, coupled with my self doubt and courage that waxed and waned, this quote arrived last week. It both perfectly described my thoughts on friendship in general, and framed the intention and context specific to my letter to her.
It’s not the first time I’ve written such a letter to a friend, or initiated the conversation. And always the self doubt. Always the courage to reveal, to make myself vulnerable by asking, “Are we OK?” I think we’ve all seen how as we grow closer to another – a friend, a partner, a professional colleague – anyone with whom we’ve made an investment of time, care, attention and regard – that conflict is bound to arise. Paradoxically, our differences surface and grow in the very container of similarity and safety provided by the initial attraction and energy of the relationship. This is particularly so of marriage, and why it holds the potential for the healing of its partners, as old wounds come to light. But avoid naming it, fearful of our own vulnerability in the face of it, self doubt and shame grow, projection and denial thrive, and relationship languishes or collapses.
Friendships – like my self doubt, courage and insomnia – wax and wane. As the saying goes, they come for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. This and the analogy I’ve adopted – one of the astrological arrangements of stars and planets moving closer and then apart – help restore perspective. Given my nature, in those periods of waning and moving apart, I’ve found myself wondering “why?” In the absence of clarification, I’ve defaulted, sometimes distressingly, to a habit of mind cultivated in childhood that says, “I’m to blame.” That same childhood source of those triggers that get touched when I get close to another’s heart and they inadvertently say or do, or don’t say or do, and hit the target. When I do the same to another.
…Something in you knew Exactly how to shape it, To hit the target, Slipping into the heart Through some wound-window Left open since childhood.
John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)
With a child’s naiveté and cultivated by societal norms, I’ve believed in the possibility of, even yearned for a “bff” – that one girlfriend who, through thick and thin, over the ups and downs of life, would always be there. (But truthfully, when I consider my own life and its continuous unfolding, I’m not sure about it – except for Oprah and Gayle, perhaps.) Implied is a depth of trust and consistent connection which can be a displacement onto or substitute for what was missing in our earliest relationship with mother. Jungian analyst Marion Woodman writing about the “Death Mother” together with Daniela Sieff and Toko-pa Turner, and contemporary writer Bethany Webster on “The Mother Wound,” are each identifying an archetype arising from patriarchy with its pervasive damaging impacts for girls and women, and their relationships with self and other. I’ve felt deficient and heart broken when friends for whom I cared a great deal, loved even, despite efforts to make amends, broke up with me because I had hit their heart target. Even today, the memory is a tender ache.
…Meanwhile, you forgot, Went on with things And never even knew How that perfect Shape of hurt Still continued to work.
John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)
In relationships that matter to me, where the heart is touched, it’s the absence of clarification I’d find most troubling. It’s why I’d ponder for days and wake at 3:00 am to draft a letter. Muster the courage and allow myself to be vulnerable to enquire. I rest a bit easier now, in a solace knowing it might simply be a change in season, no longer the reason, that the planets have shifted. Why what was once close is not quite so, or any longer.
…Now a new kindness Seems to have entered time And I can see how that hurt Has schooled my heart In a compassion I would Otherwise have never learned.
John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)
I’ve said to friends who have mattered along the way, when you feel something is amiss between us, please don’t waste precious time, energy and sleep trying to figure out if it’s you or me, foolish or worthy of your attention. It’s most likely all true. So please bring it to the friendship so we can work on it together. Walk toward me for clarification, and deepen the connection. Please.
Or don’t. I’m learning to be OK with that choice, too.
…Somehow now I have begun to glimpse The unexpected fruit Your dark gift had planted And I thank you For your unknown work.
John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)
“I sometimes forget that I was created for joy. My mind is too busy. My heart is too heavy Heavy for me to remember that I have been called to dance the sacred dance of life.”
Hafiz
Last quoted a year ago when I created my photo blogs describing walking the Portuguese Coastal Camino last May, this excerpt from Hafiz aptly describes me since my last post. Two weeks ago today we said goodbye to our beloved Annie dog. It’s a day reminiscent, with its dark skies, rain, cold and wind, just like that Sunday and the two that followed, then giving me cause to say we were being held in a sheltering sky. That then, on the third day, the skies glowed with colour as the sun set, offering something, somewhat, holy in it all.
east and westheld by a sheltering sky
So yes, in the last two weeks I have forgotten I was created for joy. My mind has been too busy, my heart too heavy with memories of Annie. Yes, all things considered, Annie had a “good” death. She was alert, conscious, knowing we were with her in her final hours. She was tended to with loving kindness by the vet clinic staff. In grief’s waxing and waning rhythms, I’ve come to realize that my loss is acute for all the ways she loved being with me. Our loss is the realization that for the first time in twenty three years, our quiet home is all the more so for the absence of the love, lessons, and joy our dogs gave us. Dogs that except for Annie and Torch, our only male setter, died as their lives diminished with age and declined with health. Annie, despite having had that first stroke, gave us the gift of six weeks of unique and unabashed presence. To have that so suddenly gone…
Life in its way has a way of reminding me of joy. Just two days before we knew we had to make the “no choice” choice for Annie, I learned I was the grand prize winner of a raffle. My $20 investment had garnered two round trip international air tickets. That same morning, I took my first deep water aqua fitness class, a good cardio workout that isn’t aggravating my foot, allowing me to train for my September trek. I mustered myself to return the day after Annie’s death, and have persisted because it has no associations to her. This week, I’ll return to walking in the neighborhood, now and forever more without her. I’ll bring ear buds, downloaded podcasts and kleenex.
“I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought; the second a good word; and the third, a good deed.”
A Wabi Sabi Life 