Category: Gratitude

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.

Composting Hope

…sometimes hope looks like compost, slow, surprising, quietly transforming what was into what could be.
So, maybe the best we can do is let ourselves be changed by love, by grief, by dirt under our fingernails, and by small, ordinary acts of grace.
So, wherever you are today, may you remember that your smallness is not insignificance, that love really is fundamentally expressed in potato chips and text messages and a place at the table. It is all still love. And that belonging is not something we earn, it’s something we practice over and over and over again…

~ Kate Bowler, Everything Happens with Kate Bowler, April 2, 2025 ~



Not a poem, but certainly akin to what I often post here on Fridays.

Several years ago, a dear friend grieving the passing of her daughter, told me about Kate Bowler. Admittedly slow on the uptake, to both Kate’s writing and podcasts, I recently subscribed to her weekly Lenten email, The Hardest Part. This week’s description of her recent podcast with long-time friend, Jeff Chu, struck a chord:

We talked about what it means to feel stuck in a life that doesn’t quite fit. About the grief of loving people who may never love us the way we wish. About small, ordinary acts of care—texts, meals, potato chips—that remind us we belong to each other. If you’re in the messy middle, tending what’s dying, planting without guarantees, or quietly rebuilding your hope, this conversation is for you.

And it was. Right on point. A bit of balm for its honesty, vulnerability, and invitation, as I’d been shaming and shunning myself for letting small and petty resentments and disappointments, and bigger betrayals eat away at me.

Their conversation reminded me – as I, we, navigate these bone-jarring and often dispiriting days – that I’m in another “messy middle”… of the Lenten season… of winter giving over to spring… of where I find myself in my own lifespan, soon to cross into the next decade. “May you live in interesting times.” Wasn’t that the greeting? Ahhh, well...

In case you’d like to listen, here’s the link.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

This Spring

soon…

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.

Trusting the Threads

grounded in Nature’s altar

I wondered if last Friday’s photo and poem feature were simply too much for readers, as few opened the post, either here or on social media. Perhaps if I’d titled it, “I Am NOT Happy,” and posted another photo, instead of using the title of Ilya Kaminsky’s poem, “We Lived Happily during the War,” with my photo of an actual Ukrainian door burned in the invasion, it might have evoked more curiosity and less reluctance. Please know this is not a critique, simply an observation AND acknowledgment of so much fatigue, despair, rage and fear, AND the wise self-care choices we each need to make, including what to click and read, and what to pass on. Though I must take a moment to acknowledge, with deep and abiding gratitude, another’s post that cracked open and gave me permission to name what I’d named in mine.

Karen Maezen Miller, an ordained Soto Zen priest, wrote last week, “I Am Not Free,” in which she unabashedly and vulnerably shared the impacts of and her feelings about the current goings on in the USA. I won’t go into detail, but to read a Zen priest – one whose writings have always hit the mark for me, and to whom I have occasionally, naively attributed a well-practiced, placid, equanimity – use the words “terrified,” “furious,” and “hate,” was one of the most reassuring pieces I’d read in weeks. One from which I did feel free.

Last week I attended a session hosted by my library’s new writer-in-residence. “Music and the Practice of Poetry,” it ended up being a wonderfully playful experience in understanding the importance of rhythm to writing and reading aloud poetry. As recommended, I brought something to write on, in this case my black journal of bits and pieces of writing transcribed over the years from my journals, letters, emails, social media posts. A collection of “seeds” that when I reviewed, saw how several had sprouted and blossomed into poems and essays. Like this piece, written in 2014, its essence rooted in last Monday’s post, “Rest.”

“I hear a murmuring of rest, OK, yes and then
the air smelling sweet and cool.
There are berries to pick and laundry to hang.
Groceries to buy and friends to call.
This could be enough. For right now is enough.
Ease back into life here at home.
Give thanks and send blessings
to all those suffering.”

Or this one, that I wrote and posted on Facebook exactly six years ago today. Its simple truth and prescience like Kaminsky’s poem.

And how I’ll end this post:

“There are the times when a poem becomes a prayer,
an image the beautiful antidote to the day’s atrocities.”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

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.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the trees seem to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm. I’ll take it all.

– Ada Limon, The Carrying, 2018 –


Just reading this poem I feel my heart lift and lighten.

My gosh, what a winter. What it’s done to us. The brutal cold and snow covering much of Canada, the least of it. Innumerable, immeasurable ways, “the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.” No need to list them because I know you know.

Spring in these parts takes her time arriving. Winter is reluctant to leave. Teased by today’s thirty degree rise in temperature, and a weeklong forecast hovering around zero feels balmy. But we know spring’s capricious nature.

The greening of trees gets to me, too. Recalling that birthday years ago, when Sig gifted me with my first hot-air balloon excursion. Silently floating upstream in the spring green of our river valley. Lacy silver tree limbs and thick dark conifers in contrast to those thousands of tender unfurlings.

Remembering that. Writing this.
Knowing once again. Not giving up.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Regardless of My Age

“baby, it’s cold outside”

It’s been mighty cold here in Alberta, and across Canada. A much-needed, honest-to-goodness winter with a snowpack forecasters say will lessen the impact of spring and summer forest fires. Temperatures well below zero, made colder with wind, killing off viruses and vermin. A restoration of balance that, while I appreciate, as I said to Sig as we layered to go out, I wish I wasn’t in. It’s been less than a month since celebrating his birthday in Huatulco, Mexico, but it feels like ages with this profound contrast.

And Walker, despite inheriting Annie’s insulated coat, and boots that he reluctantly wears, has found his first winter too cold to do much more outside than his business. And even that’s done fast, carefully perched on three legs, alternately the fourth to keep it from freezing. Last week, both of us bundled to play in the backyard, not a minute later and he was at the door. That night, he didn’t eat his dinner and slept all evening instead of his usual watching TV (I kid you not!) or playing with us. I sensed he was depressed and reflected to Sig we needed to move someplace more temperate, as both Walker and I need to walk…outside…in Nature…without freezing.

I’m going on about this because I’ve noticed with every passing year, I’m less inclined to brave winter’s elements and that troubles me. I used to ice skate…cross country and downhill ski…I haven’t walked with my Camino group since Christmas. Dog walking has become episodic. Reading my friend, Gretchen’s post this morning got me to thinking more about my own aging and how it’s showing up.

“Ageism is the last bastion of political incorrectness, and no one is going to fight it with us or for us. No one else cares, until they arrive there themselves…”

Gretchen Staebler, “You’re Doing Great…For Your Age”

I met Gretchen at a writing retreat years ago on Whidbey Island. Then, she was working on her – now published and highly recommended – moving, tender, and funny memoir, Motherlode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver. (For local readers, it’s available to borrow from my public library.) I love Gretchen’s fresh and candid take on life, and too, her big heart from which she responds to my recent posts about the harrowing state of our world. From her post which inspired my writing today:

“What do you see when you look in a mirror? Go ahead, look. Do you only see wrinkles and sagging skin? Yes, they are there, it’s a fact of the third act, it’s what the body does. And what else? What is reflected in your eyes, your smile?”

In this “third act,” what I’ve been calling “the eldering landscape,” my body is having its say, and I’m having to become more adept at listening. In this year, crossing the threshold into my eighth decade (mind-blowing what becoming seventy actually means!!!) I don’t know how I’ll celebrate. I do know I’ll continue to be enthralled, amazed, bewildered, curious, vulnerable, astonished, uncertain, afraid, grateful, courageous – the whole enchilada of words describing me being in love with the gift that is my life. Regardless of my age.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.
I’m so happy to welcome you, my newest subscribers, and grateful to you who have been reading me regularly.