Friendship – A Wabi Sabi Life

Resist

“One of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with reasons for despair is a counter-cultural act of courage and resistance, choosing it not despite the abounding sorrow we barely survive but because of it, because joy — like music, like love — is one of those entirely unnecessary miracles of consciousness that give meaning to survival with its bright allegiance to the most alive part of us.”
Maria Popova, The Marginalian, July 6, 2025

I would add that noticing beauty – in life’s imperfections and beyond -is, too, such a miracle of consciousness.

And so it was this past week when I en-joyed my now third annual, summer sojourn on Vancouver Island, visiting dear friends. My idea of paradise when we eat every meal outside in their “beyond gorgeous” garden – a labour of love this abundance of blossom, colour, bees, and butterflies. “Heaven on earth” is how I describe it, without a word of hyperbole.

Prosecco and a picnic on the beach; pickleball with a food truck lunch and ice cream cones; cooking together as I shared some favourite pasta and appetizer recipes while sipping a gorgeous Italian red from Brindisi (note to self: track it down); and the perfect “next in my year’s worth of celebrating” birthday party – with candles on the lovingly-made chocolate torte, a talking circle among friends, meaningful gifts, and an orange balloon! A “time out of time” experience that filled my heart.

And in a matter of eighty minutes I was home, landing on my piece of prairie patchwork, greeted by my man and our dog. Resuming routines – pickleball on a very cold and windy Friday morning, walking in the river valley on a summertime hot and green Saturday morning, and celebrating our 45th wedding anniversary at one of YEG’s (and Canada’s) finest restaurants, leaving us to wonder why it had taken so long to return.

Times grow darker south of the border. There is no denying the continued, utterly bewildering commitment to policies and practices devastating people. I like knowing that this week of choosing and celebrating joy, and love, and beauty, is my act of resistance. Like a stone dropped in the pond…the butterfly wings flapping…that dragonfly that landed on my chest and rested for several minutes… miracles of consciousness that matter.

…Everywhere I look there is tyranny.
Everywhere I look there is goodness.
This contradiction is killing me.
It is the only thing keeping me alive.
Abbey E. Murray, “Ode to the Grimy Breeze of an Underground Subway Platform“

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. Resist!

PS – I’ve been irregular getting to this page and so have chosen to take a “pause” for a bit, posting as the mood strikes.

A Night With No Dawn

The Big Self Watches the Small Self

Look at her, checking her watch again,
worried there’s not enough time. Not
enough minutes or hours to do all the urgent
or beautiful things she longs to do—
a list that unspools out of each second—
all those things she is certain must be done.
She how she squirms, how she bites her lip,
as if her unease will make time open up
like a peony. Oh sweetheart who I have lived
with for years, who I have sometimes mistaken
for myself, I see you. It is so easy right now
to be easy with you, a relief, really, not to judge you
for your worry, but to love you for how deeply
you care, how much you want to be in service.
There is a time outside of time in which
you exist, this timelessness from which
I am watching you–imagine a lake
with no shore. A night with no dawn.
A self with no sense of where she might end.

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer ~

Every morning, I’m greeted by three poems in my inbox. The most recent regular arrival is from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, self-named WordWoman. I love the simplicity of her writing. Accessible. Lyrical. Evocative. Most every one of her poems, I slip into my “keeper” file to pass forward, like I did last week in my writers’ circle. Like I am here, this morning, with you.

I’m touched by this poem’s tenderness. Referring to her little self as “sweetheart,” something I say regularly to myself. Encouraging her/me to slow down, pause, breathe. Noticing the worry. Reassuring her/me that there’s enough time to do what needs to get done.

I love this poem for seeing how we care and for naming that it’s because we care so much and so deeply, we worry.

I’m soothed by the reminder that my big self is always watching my small self from that timeless place, between the knowing and the not knowing, where infinite possibilities reside.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Tiny Choices and Small Moments

“So, what are you plans for the day?” I asked Sig one morning last week, before he got too involved in monitoring our stocks.

“I haven’t decided,” he casually responded.

Heading upstairs to get ready for the day, with a stop in the kitchen to warm up my coffee, I thought how wonderful, how privileged even, to have the freedom to decide your day. Later on, I mentioned this to Sig, and he agreed, both of us recognizing the gift, the abundance, the richness of his statement and our lived reality.

Yesterday, reading a couple of blogs from my writerly friends, both meandered around this insight. Helen, in Ageless Possibilities, opened her reflection inspired by a quote from novelist, Louise Penny, in which she describes life as being made up of the tiny choices we each make every day. Helen writes,“Years ago, I made a collage titled Someday, a visual dream of reading, gardening, lazing, yoga, friends, and family. I did not realize then that someday was quietly unfolding through my daily choices.”

Gretchen, author of the wise and bittersweet memoir, Mother Lode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver (IMHO, required reading for anyone navigating the care of elderly parents) wrote with spicy humor and a dash of irreverence, “One does not have to carpe the crap out of every single day.” Call it a gift to self as she described her recent 73^rd birthday, shored up by others who echoed that it’s always the small moments of a life – being present to and curious about – that matter.

We’ve had a ridiculously cold start to summer with inches of heavy, wet snow falling in the foothills and highway whiteouts on Solstice. Last weekend, thunderstorm warnings resulted in hailstorms that shattered flowers and shredded hostas and the fragile spinach, arugula and lettuce seedlings. The local greenhouse warned that recovery might be tenuous, particularly for large-leaved vegetables and fragile tomatoes. In the scheme of things, we needed moisture. Still do, as I recalled a skillful gardener-friend saying a few years ago, after a similar dry winter and spring, that if we dug down, at best we’d see an inch or so of damp soil and then dry, sandy earth beneath. I make mention of this because I’d planned to spend time weeding and tending to those hail-struck pots and beds. But instead, I made the small, yet significant choice to visit a friend who I hadn’t seen since we celebrated my birthday. My friend is living with lethal cancer, and depending on the day, would probably say on borrowed time, where and when those tiny choices, and small moments, matter enormously.

The final post I read yesterday was written by Anne Lamott in response to the USA’s choice to bomb Iran yesterday. A choice with consequences too profound and potentially devastating to fathom.

“I have no answers but do know one last thing that is true: Figure it out is a bad slogan. We won’t be able to. Life is much wilder, complex, heartbreaking, weirder, richer, more insane, awful, beautiful and profound than we were prepared for as children, or that I am comfortable with. The paradox is that in the face of this, we discover that in the smallest moments of taking in beauty, in actively being people of goodness and mercy, we are saved.”

We are saved.

May it be so.

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.

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.

This Spring

It’s 7:00 am Sunday morning. I’m an early riser. Lately, too early as I’ve been plagued with a bout of early morning insomnia, waking around 3. Sometimes I toss a bit, listen to the slow and steady breath of Sig sleeping beside me and try to synch my breath with hopes of falling back to sleep. When my mind overrides that intention, I quietly rise, slip into my robe and slippers and head downstairs to read, or write, or take my place on my cushion, or stare out the window, wondering.

In a couple of hours, I’ll be attending an onsite, in-person writing workshop. Hosted by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, it’s described as “an all-day retreat designed to nourish your creative process. Writing exercises, inspiring prompts, and focused discussion will get your juices flowing and keep you motivated for days and weeks afterwards.” Goodness, I hope so, for like an Alberta spring, no sooner do my juices start to melt and flow, when they freeze solid and need to be chipped and chopped to get flowing again.

Last week in my monthly online writers’ circle, we each spoke of being in a fallow season, making reference to Katherine May’s memoir Wintering; gave space for our reactions to democracy’s demise in the face of growing fascism; and anticipated Spring’s arrival the next day. A closing offering of a poem which I’ll share here to close today’s short, and “OK enough” post.

This Spring

How can I love this spring
when it’s pulling me
through my life faster
than any time before it?
When five separate dooms
are promised this decade
and here I am, just trying
to watch a bumblebee cling
to its first purple flower.
I cannot save this world.
But look how it’s trying,
once again, to save me.

~ James A. Pearson ~

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Mindful

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

– Mary Oliver –

“How are you?” ask friends who I’ve not seen, nor spoken to for a while.
“Terrified,” my response.

Not afraid, but terrified…for my country…the illegal apprehensions, deportations, and denied entry…the constant blatant disregard for law…evil in the guise of leadership.

Not a very mindful response, or is it? Certainly more intense and less palatable than “afraid.” But in the moment, truthful, uncensored. And then it passes. The weight of it lessens for its utterance. But I know, too, that I need those moments of seeing and hearing that kill me with delight.

Thankfully, Walker obliges. Every day. The shine in his eyes, tongue hanging in joyful anticipation as I dress to play with him outside. Chasing him with one of the store of sticks he’s taken from the woodpile in the back. Our backyard scattered with them. Or inside, tugging on the damp-with-drool dishrag nearly shredded, or his blue racquetball, or red kong – each tight in his mouth, until he lets go in false surrender just to keep the game between us going.

Thankful, too, that yesterday’s sunshine and warmth allowed me to sit outside on a cafe’s patio to eat lunch after my 8+km river valley walk. All of it a balm. Nature and good food as co-regulators.

And that exquisite hand-made card sent by a friend who is excelling at paper quilling, her latest fascination. In yesterday’s mail, the envelope with my name and address, written by a hand I didn’t recognize. The note inside, bearing the same beautiful script, thanking me for my words, the tapestry I weave with them, the meaning they bring to her.

Coming through a “wintering” season, again with many more rejections of my writing than acceptances, with words laying fallow, deep underground, her gift like a prayer made out of new, spring-green grass.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. And to you, Cate, thank you.

An Email Sent to a Friend Before Dawn

Buds in Spain, March 2020
(we know now the darkness that was soon to fall upon us all)

My gosh…what sweetness
to suddenly hear your voice and words
singing
on the radio
this morning.

My heart needed it all.

Such heavy harrowing times.
My words are stuck and stuffed
like my head cold.

Anyways…this moment
a sweet one.

Hope this finds you well.

Much love and kindness.

~ Katharine ~

Re-reading my email, with my friend’s lovely reply, knowing that I am, like many around me, at a loss for words, I knew this was “OK enough” for today’s photo and poem feature. With a line break here and there, formatted into stanzas…yes, it would be “OK enough.”

And how simple a gesture, to respond in the moment to the surge of surprise and joy upon hearing my friend’s name and then her singing, to reach out and connect when it’s darkest… before dawn.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.
May we all be bearing up well, responding in the moment to those many surges of unexpected joy.

So each word, each photograph, each email matters.
Each kind word, each warm embrace matters.
It’s what we have which I have to believe can turn the tide,
perhaps first within the unseen, liminal spaces.

This Matters

It’s Sunday morning. I’ve signed into a weekly Zoom hour hosted by a local writer, hoping for some inspiration for Monday’s post. At this point, I’ve spent many minutes affixing photos to notecards, and writing messages of care and connection with friends. To one, suffering the depths of grief since her husband’s passing during Covid, I included John O’Donohue’s blessing for one grieving. To the other – in response to her thoughtfully written, beautiful New Year’s letter – an acknowledgement of her word choice to describe her current lived condition, “subdued.” Such resonance.

Despite carefully curating my social media time, I cannot escape the onslaught of memes and messages, both harrowing and hopeful. In response to my husband asking how I slept last night, I shared my deep-in-my-belly fear about my country’s safety. The world has recent history of the devastating consequences of a leader’s stated intention to annex a country. So when I hear another threaten mine, my body responds.

“darling,
you feel heavy
because you are
too full of the truth.

open your mouth more.
let the truth exist
somewhere other than
inside your body.”
Della Hicks-Wilson, Small Cures

After last week’s post, several of you commented and emailed with kind and affirming responses. I wrote a version of the following to several of you:

“So each word, each photograph, each post matters.
Each kind word, each warm embrace matters.
It’s what we have which I have to believe can turn the tide,
perhaps first within the unseen, liminal spaces.”

So these minutes devoted to card-making and note-writing matter.
Love letters amplifying beauty matter.
A manifestation of the creative spirit matters.
Letting the truth exist somewhere other than inside my body matters.
This act of hope-filled dissent matters.

As do you, dear friends.
Much love and kindest regards.

Rest, My Friend

Arriving at my desk to write this blog, I opened an email to learn of the sudden passing of my first professional friend. With his wife and young son, they became our first “couple-family” friends when Sig and I made our first home together in small town Ontario. They hosted us for our final nights in Ontario nearly forty-four years ago before we packed up our first dog, Beckey, a few plants (a hosta that still blooms in our dining room window), and some luggage to make the trek across Canada in our little white VW Scirocco sportscar to our new home in Alberta. The vague sadness that has hovered around me for much of this grey, cold and damp day has now found a foothold.

Earlier today, I attended the 4th annual Poets Corner “Reading Rilke,” with Rilke translator-poet Mark S. Burrows in conversation with Padraig O’Tuama and Krista Tippett. Among my notes, the following bore my highlighted underlining:

“I believe in everything that has never been said.”
– Rilke

“We are here to listen the world into being
and then to share its stories.”
– Mark S. Burrows

Consistent among each of them was that much of Rilke’s writing was an embodiment of his famous directive to live into the questions.

Despite my cup feeling full, I don’t have much to write this evening. Questions tinged with sadness. So much that has never been said. Listening into silences. Trusting the infinite possibilities to be found in the unknown.

Remembering how my friend tempered my youthful naievety with his experience and wisdom. For years, throughout every career move, I pinned his handwritten note in front of me to remember: “The world is perfect, including my efforts to change it.” A bit like Rilke.

Rest, my friend.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

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