Katharine Weinmann

Breathe and Create

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my participation in a poetry writing half marathon. As preamble to this week’s post, below is the prompt given for the 23rd hour, and the “list” poem I cobbled together from the book on my desk at dawn that Sunday morning, after 10 hours of writing 10 previous poems.

Hour 23 — Write a poem about harvesting something, it could be anything from clams to apples.

A List for Harvesting Creativity

Know that you and everyone is creative.
Tune into your ideas, impulses, dreams and hunches.
Make it up. Experimentation leads to innovation.
Expect surprises.
Mistakes are part of the process.
Rules can serve. Rules can hinder. Learn the difference.
Self doubt is part of the process.
So is rejection.
Keep your habits fresh.
What you don’t know is as, if not more, important than what you know.
Saying “no” is foundational to saying “yes”.
Play.

With thanks to Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023)

Now that I’m back to walking, often solo, in preparation for another long distance trek (destination and details to come), I’ve returned to listening to podcasts and audio books to help pass the time. I found Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act on Spotify and as I’m reading it for a monthly book study, hearing the author read his pithy chapters, the transition from one into the next marked by the ringing of a bell, has been as delightfully edifying as the book study conversations.

The list above captures a mere fraction of his self acknowledged “noticings” about what and how to open possibilities for a creative way of being. This past week, I was struck by his chapters on listening, and patience.

“Listening is suspending belief.”
Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

Given that we listen not only with our ears, but with our whole bodies, our filters of acculturation, beliefs, perceptions, and biases affect what we hear. Learning to listen with an awareness of these influences opens possibilities and grants us freedom from unconscious and accepted limitations. While I know this, to hear another say it, meaningfully hit home.

“There are no shortcuts.”
Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

So opens the chapter on patience. But it could be the mantra for entire book. I stopped walking and replayed Rubin saying:

“When it comes to the creative process, patience is accepting that the majority of the work we do is out of our control. We can’t force greatness to happen. All we can do is invite in it and await it actively. Not anxiously, as this might scare it off. Simply in a state of continual welcoming.”

To do otherwise, by letting our cultural predisposition towards efficiency govern instead of responding to life in sync with its revealed rhythms and not our imposed agendas, is an argument with reality. Another deep resonance.

On my writing desk, beside Rubin’s book is Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy. A gift from my sister, with a focus on journaling, its subtitle, A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life, suggests its hugging up against Rubin is not a coincidence.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Come

PRAYER

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention – the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here

among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.

~ Marie Howe, poet extraordinaire and winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry ~

For days I’ve felt compelled to write about Gaza.

About the thousands of children in Gaza maimed and killed by Israeli attacks.

About mothers and fathers in Gaza having to make the no-choice choice: stand in line for a meager ration of food to feed your family, and risk being killed while you do so.

About the genocide of Gaza.

To acknowledge with at least the same amount of moral outrage I’ve been feeling and writing about the current American president and his administration. An outrage drenched in horror and grief for Gaza and its people.

Last Sunday, the night I typically reserve to write Monday’s blog, I sat here and not a word emerged. Hoping to “prime the pump,” I looked over a first draft poem I’d written two years ago about searching for a middle way of compassionate understanding for my Jewish friends in bitter anguish for the October 2023 Hamas attacks and hostage-taking, and my Sufi friends reeling from those egregious acts. The poem is incomplete, my editor having suggested that neither it nor I were ready for its completion. There was no blog on Monday.

Completion? Is it even possible?

“The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?”

Today is the beginning of Eid ul-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, one of the most important festivals in the Muslim calendar.

Today I acknowledge my silent complicity in the face of sacrifice exacted from both the Jewish and Muslim peoples. Maybe there is no middle way. Maybe only the statement that what the Israeli administration is doing to the people of Gaza – to my way of thinking, an identification with the aggressor – is utterly wrong and as evil as I have said the current American president and his administration are. And, too, the actions of Hamas.

“Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.”

And in the words attributed to the Sufi poet, Rumi:

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come , come.”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. May we do better.

To Travel Is To Feel

The best way to travel, after all, is to feel,
To feel everything in every way,
To feel everything excessively,
Because all things are, in truth, excessive
And all reality is an excess, a violence,
An extraordinarily vivid hallucination.

~ Fernando Pessoa ~

This photo, taken three years ago while strolling in Lisbon the evening I arrived to acclimatize before walking the Portuguese Coastal Camino, is a modern homage to Portugal’s man of letters, Fernando Pessaro. His understanding of travel mirrors my own experiences, often reflected in my own poetry and photography.

This spring, SYNKRONICITI, the literary online quarterly founded by Katherine Grace McDaniel, again made a home for my creative expressions. In the current issue Identity, my poem “Ammonite Answers” and companion photo of the Moroccan mesa which inspired it, are but dozens of submissions beautifully curated by Katherine. As a poet who writes about the beauty in life’s imperfection and photographs its shimmer, often in response to my travels, I appreciate having my work accepted from among the many writers, poets, and visual artists from around the world who submit.

But what makes these acceptances all the more special is the time Katherine takes to uplift each contributor’s work by posting her often intuitive, always thoughtful impressions on her website’s blog and social media. In the case of my poem, she writes:

“Carl Jung recognized travel as a powerful tool for self discovery and individuation. Our interaction with unfamiliar parts of the outside world helps us hone who we are and often opens our eyes to things we didn’t know about ourselves, as well as confirming things we suspected.”

Hers is feedback as gift, both acknowledging, and inviting me into a deeper reflection on my writing and how it resonates with another. Thank you, Katherine.

Here’s the link to Katherine’s labor of love, that includes mine and that of many other global creatives.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Saudade

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about that quintessential Portuguese quality called “saudade.” A bittersweet yearning…a tender sadness…the presence of absence evoked in fado music and singing, dance, poetry. Qualities represented by this photo I took in Andalusia five years ago.

Last night, while eating dinner at our favorite Portuguese-Spanish influenced cafe, saudade stirred. Even before we entered, I felt waves of nostalgia for those times three years ago when eating in Portuguese cafes along the Camino, or in the tapas bars with Sig in Malaga, and that sweet match-box sized vermuteria we stumbled upon our last sunny Sunday in Sevilla.

Maybe it was yesterday’s summer-like weather inviting us to relax after a day working in the yard and garden, readying it for more outdoor living. Feeling the sun warm on our backs and faces, no jackets, gloves or toques, each of us remarked over the pleasure we felt not needing to brace against the cold.

Certainly, it was evoked by the cafe’s newest Sunday night addition, a Spanish singer-guitarist. Several of his songs so moving, I was almost brought to tears.

The longer I sat within the mood of the moment, I realized that this for me is particular to Portugal and Spain. That as much as I love being in Italy – and to date have visited many of its regions – I don’t recall being stirred in the same way.

I was to have returned to Italy this fall to again walk la Via Francigena with a small group of women. But due to no registration, I needed to cancel. I am disappointed. But I wonder if saudade is calling. And if one day, I’m to make another long-distance walk in Portugal and Spain. Not so much an “exterior” pilgrimage to Santiago, but the “interior” one to my soul. The outward destination not really the point. The journey that matters, experiencing anew what evokes and stirs.

Feeling saudade, the proof that I loved and lived,
dreamed and remembered… even if for a moment.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Bragging Rights

Early Sunday morning I completed my first half marathon.

For twelve hours, from 7:00 pm Saturday night to 7:00 am Sunday morning, I joined hundreds of poets from around the world in writing a poem an hour for twelve or twenty-four. Hosted by Caitlin and Jacob Jans from Toronto, I opted for twelve. Having the choice of joining the first or the last half, I elected the latter, knowing my preference for writing in the dark stillness as the day begins or ends. And given a recent bout of mid insomnia, waking like clockwork around 3:00 am (and what I learned during the marathon is called the “hour of the wolf”), I figured I’d be OK for the duration. And I was.

Once registered and having completed the online orientation, I took a peek at posts sharing preparation tips and writing strategies. I kept it simple by jotting down a few inspiring phrases that I’d heard or read last week, trusting they’d provide enough light structure for creating. I made snacks from leftovers, abstained from wine at dinner instead drinking an “americano,” and brewed several mugs of black tea over the course.

Funny thing is, I almost missed the start. By four hours!

Hard to believe, given I’d just been in Ontario and regularly call my parents, that I would have mixed up time zones. Instead of grokking that the official start time of 9:00 am EDT would be 7:00 am my time, I somehow thought it was 11:00 am. Ambivalence was definitely at play, though intention won the day, as arriving to my studio after supper Saturday, puttering around and getting organized, I thought I’d check in on the proceedings shortly after 7. There I saw the prompt posted for Hour 13, and recalled that was to be my start for the half marathon.

Thankfully, during my puttering, I’d given thought to writing a “found” poem from the book titles sitting on my desk in front of me. And that became my first poem, giving me a time to catch my breath and race upstairs to share my near calamity with Sig.

My strategy proved effective as I weaved a line I’d written down with Caitlin’s hourly verbal and/or visual prompts. I experimented with form, writing haiku, haibun, list, abecedarian, ekphrastic, and free verse. I realized my objective of creating some fresh pieces and successfully wrote a poem an hour, posting, and reading a few other entries.

With eyes “scorched” from twelve hours online, and a mushy brain that continued to compose even as I fell into bed at 7 am, I concluded that what I’d done once I’d not do again. But with rest and time outside planting my herbs and salad greens, and a more thoughtful review of my writing, I’ll reconsider.

While most of us conceded our efforts are at best “sh…tty first drafts” (thanks, Anne Lamott), several of mine are rough pearls in need of a polish to shine.

And I get to join four hundred global poets claiming bragging rights.

Thank Goodness for A Found Poem — when I confused time zones!
the carrying of apples on a windowsill,
when bright dead things become the creative act,
and the book of alchemy transcends the hurting kind

What kind of daughter messes up the time zone and writes
her first half marathon poem from book titles
sitting on her desk in front of her?

Rattle—d, but a smart one.

(Book titles in italics from the following authors in order of use: Ada Limón, Shawna Lemay, Ada Limón, Rick Rubin, Suleiaka Jaouad, Ada Limón, Rayanne Haines, Timothy Green (ed))

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

The Presence of The Absence

There is a word in Portuguese that has no direct equivalent
in any other language: “saudade.”
It is not just longing. It is more.
It is longing mixed with melancholy,
with expectation,
with tenderness and with a gentle sadness.

It is longing for something that was. . . or maybe never was.
It is absence with the scent of memory.
It is love that did not have time to end, but neither to continue.
It is music that echoes in the void left by someone.

In fado they sing saudade.
In our long silences, saudade is hidden.
In lonely walks,
in lost glances out the window,
in letters never sent.

Saudade does not want to leave.
It doesn’t heal, because it doesn’t hurt completely.
It doesn’t break you, but it doesn’t leave you whole either.
It’s the sweet wound of souls that feel deeply, beyond words.

Carrying saudade within you is proof that you loved,
that you lived,
that you dreamed… even if for a moment.

~ Waves of Life, Facebook, May 4, 2025 ~

*singing* *fado on the steps in Lisbon, May 2022*

Exactly three years ago I was walking the Portuguese Coastal Camino to Santiago. During my first evening in Lisbon, I encountered the essence of “saudade” in a young street musician strumming her guitar, perched on stone steps across from our hotel, singing “fado,” the Portuguese equivalent of the “blues.“

Once home, in preparation for writing about my experiences, I heard a Portuguese guide refer to fado as “the presence of absence.” This inspired a poem which was published later that year in 100 Caminos, an annual Chilean anthology celebrating Camino poetry:

. . . now my memory mends and fills
those cracked and empty places
with jasmine perfume and birdsong
blistered heels and sun kissed faces

Saudade captures much of how I’ve been feeling this year. Tired from the moral outrage I’ve felt in response to the incessant displays of blatant evil. . . disappointed with life events that didn’t quite become as I’d imagined. . . I feel “the longing for something that was . . . or maybe never was.”

Disillusionment giving way to letting go. Discernment that comes with age.
The proof that I have loved and lived and dreamed.
The presence of the absence acknowledged and allowed.
And what is asking to emerge next.

Life’s unfolding along its silver thread, invisible until it’s not.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. It’s nice to be back after several weeks’ absence.

To Say Nothing But Thank You

TO SAY NOTHING BUT THANK YOU

All day I try to say nothing but thank you,
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I
take through the rooms of my house and outside into
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring
and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy
after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work,
when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly
hair combs into place.

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I
remember who I am, a woman learning to praise
something as small as dandelion petals floating on the
steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup,
my happy, savoring tongue.

~ Jeanne Lohmann ~

I posted this poem a year ago, almost to the day.

Its message so vital. So simple. So enough. What else is there to say?

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Right On Time

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium,
small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos
have the capacity to shift the entire system
to a higher order.”
Ilya Prigogene

And this is what emerged in celebration of my birthday. Several small islands of coherence wherein “emotional density” (thanks to my friend Helen for introducing the term), presence, being seen and heard, AND acknowledging life’s inevitable one-way direction, became the criteria – anticipated and realized – for each gathering. Good food…fine wine… flowers and balloons. And meaningful, heartfelt conversations.

Given so much external chaos agitating, activating, and creating inner turmoil, I couldn’t have asked for a more fitting crossing into this new decade. Even the few unexpected exceptions simply became part of the landscape, reminding me again to let be and let go.

On Saturday, over a beautifully presented homemade filo pie evoking spring, made with salmon, leeks, eggs and cheese, accompanied by fresh tomato and cucumber and dill salads, followed by a dessert of individual Pavlova with lemon curd and blackberries, my yoga sister asked how it felt to be seventy? I sat quietly for several minutes. How did it feel? What had been emerging? What did I anticipate?

I silently recalled the wish I’d made when blowing out a candle at dinner with my Camino friends and then another in my monthly Zoom call with my island girlfriend.

Suddenly, out burst my response, “I’m right on time,” to which my friend burst out laughing at the utter spontaneous rightness of it. “Yes,” she said, “All your life … your steps and mis-steps…your practice… your devotion that waxes and wanes… have brought you precisely to this place, at this time. Right on time. Ready to step again into your life.”

Later, we all moved to the sofas in the room, looking out over the peaceful monochromatic vista of a farmer’s razed field and the lake shore beyond. There, we began in earnest sharing our fears, anxieties, and knowings about this time. Like me, they have the heightened awareness from being of German descent and remembering its history. To be seen and heard in the safe arms of our long-tended friendship, we were creating another island of coherence, knowing full well its sacred, though increasingly fragile right. Like the millions who showed up across the states last week to protest their president and his administration, seeing and hearing each other peacefully, without incident, saying this is ENOUGH, seeing we are not alone.

Like the Nobel prize winning chemist quoted above, to my friend’s Vedic way of thinking, simple actions particularly in such dark times have subtle yet significant capabilities, like a stone dropped in the pond, or the mythic flap of a butterfly’s wing altering the wind and weather. Right on time to shift the entire system to a higher order.

Let’s blow on another candle, shall we?

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

No One Told Me

No one told me
it would be like this—
how growing older
is another passage
of discovery
and that aging is one
grand transformation,
and if some things become
lost along the way,
many other means show up
to bring me closer
to the center of my heart.

No one ever told me
if whatever wonder
waits ahead
is in another realm
and outside of time.
But the amazement, I found,
is that the disconcerting things
within the here and now
that I stumble
and trip my way
through, also
lead me
gracefully
home.

And no one told me
that I would ever see
an earth so strong
and fragile, or
a world so sad
and beautiful.
And I surely
didn’t know
I’d have
all this life
yet in me
or such fire
inside my
bones.

~ Susan Frybort ~

I think this says it all.
The perfect complement to Monday’s post.
The intention for this next span of life I’ve been gifted.
Perhaps fitting for you, too.

Thank you for your kind birthday wishes, dear friends.
Much love and kindest regards.

So Many Gifts

“Across the wisdom traditions – from Jung to Erikson, from ancient Hindu sages to modern developmental theorists like Rohr, Plotkin, and Fowler – there emerges a shared understanding of life’s autumn-time that speaks in many tongues but carries a single breath…

These cartographers of the soul’s journey, though separated by centuries and cultures, all gesture toward a mysterious transformation in the later seasons of life. It arrives not like a sudden storm but like the gradual turning of leaves – this elder-wisdom that ancient peoples knew and modern frameworks rediscover.

The common ground these frameworks share is holy ground. They speak of a time when doing softens into being, when achievement yields to presence, when the gathering of things gives way to the gathering of meaning. This is the territory where personal ambition composts into collective wisdom, where the urgent whispers of ego quiet themselves before the deeper songs of soul.

These many maps of human becoming tell us that there comes a time when our task shifts from building to blessing, from acquiring to dispensing, from seeking to seeing. It’s a time when the soul’s gaze begins to extend beyond the horizon of a single lifetime – backward into ancestral waters, forward into futures yet unborn.

Perhaps what all these frameworks are really describing is not an achievement but an invitation – to let our lives be claimed by something larger than our plans, something older than our fears, something truer than our certainties. For in the end, these various mappings of life’s latter seasons all point to a similar truth: that there comes a time when our task is no longer to add to ourselves but to become empty enough to receive and transmit what the world needs next – like hollow bones through which the wind of spirit plays its necessary music….”
David Tensen

Tomorrow, I cross the threshold into my 8th decade. For that is what turning 70 means. Staggering, and I’ve been preparing for months in unobvious ways that remind me, “Yes, sweetheart, you are about to turn 70.” The end of a cycle in a yogic way of thinking.

And despite the mental preparation, I’ve had some ambivalence about how I acknowledge this milestone. A few months ago, I thought I’d host a tea party with girlfriends at a lovely local coffee and pastry shop. But after weighing several factors, I had to abandon the idea. Instead I’ll keep it simple. Brunch next weekend with my long-time yoga friends at their home in the country where our conversation always nourishes. Tomorrow, Sig and I will go for a late lunch at our favourite “happy hour” cafe where great wine is $1 an ounce and the burger and fries are terrific. Later, I’ll go to a poetry workshop. The following night, we’ll dine with two Camino couples at another favourite restaurant, its cuisine evoking our past and their upcoming Portuguese Coastal walks. A video call with my east coast and west coast friends, and who knows what further unfoldings in the weeks and months to come.

For me, this birthday emphasizes what’s embedded in the above lengthy quote: “the empyting to receive and transmit what the world needs next.” And that I’m supported in doing so by trusting in my intuition to keep it simple and attend to the fallow feelings of late, and applying Harrison Owen’s elegant principles for hosting Open Space, aka “living one’s life”:

Whoever comes is the right one.
Whatever happens is the only thing that can happen.
When it starts, it starts.
When it’s over, it’s over.

There’s another “birthday” quote I especially love. Attributed to Hafiz, rendered by Daniel Ladinsky, it always brings me joy and is one I regularly “gift” to friends:

“There are so many gifts
still unopened from your birthday,
there are so many hand-crafted presents
that have been sent to you by God…

O, there are so many hand-crafted
presents that have been sent to your life
from God.”

*a decade ago…a birthday dinner hosted by our friends*

Oh, so many gifts…thank you.
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: