Justice – A Wabi Sabi Life

Saying Thank You

*a birthday memory repurposed, with thanks*

THANKS

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

~ W. S. Merwin, 1988 ~

On Monday night, I listened to the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, recite this poem at an encore presentation of the annual Poetry and the Creative Mind fundraising celebration for National Poetry month. She, as did many of the guest readers, selected poems that had particular relevance for these times. Limón closed her reading with one of her own popular poems, A New National Anthem (the link here a YouTube of an earlier recitation.)

Evident the power of poetry to timelessly bear witness with profound prescience to current events and realities. Merwin’s poem was copyrighted in 1988. Limón’s thiry years later in 2018. Both were read at the event’s original broadcast on April 24, 2025, weeks before the Los Angeles protests and the illegal and incendiary reactions from the American president and the Republican administration.

Moved by both poems and Limón’s passionate reading, I was perturbed by the counter-intuitiveness of “saying thank you” with growing urgency in the face of the growing darkness. And yet is this not holding one’s heart open in hell? The gratitude for Life, all of it? The messiness and mystery and madness? The grace and grit and grief?

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. And to you who will be assembling in peaceful protest tomorrow, to say NO to any and all king-making, and who are marching from Cairo to Gaza, thank you.

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.

“We Lived Happily during the War”

*Ukrainian doors*
*burned* *and shattered*

We Lived Happily during the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house —

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

~ Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic. 2019 ~

I first heard Kaminsky’s poem in June 2021, read by Padraig O’Tuama in his Poetry Unbound podcast. Written in 2009, its powerful prescience grabbed me then, before hell was unleashed in Ukraine when Russia invaded in February 2022. And it hasn’t let go. Its grip now tighter as the American Republican administration, thinking it is the “great country of money,” backed by men in their “houses of money,” threatens my country, its people, and our livelihoods. Already killing the land, people and livelihoods of Ukraine, Gaza, and beyond.

I am not happy. In all honesty, I feel the rage that comes with such betrayal; fear; sadness; and, in moments, an unsettling hatred towards these men intent on destroying our world. Their acts are evil, committed without empathy and in full consciousness of the consequences of irreparable suffering and death.

Below is my post, written shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in which I first included Kaminsky’s poem and the wise words from Canadian elder, Stephan Jenkinson, suggesting “it is no accident that we were born at a time when the culture that gave us life is now failing.“

Life as Poem and Prayer

No one lives happily during war. It is madness to think otherwise, despite the lies and bravado to the contrary. Thankfully, our world is too connected, and blessedly our hearts, to ignore the assaults and violence being perpetrated. Admittedly, it does not make for easy living.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. May you keep well. You are needed. We need each other.

A Blessing On …

*a kinda sorta valentine heart* *– Canadian style*

a blessing on the meals you cook
as democracy collapses

a blessing on your healing hands
that mend what empire breaks

a blessing on your quiet mornings
when you choose to rise again

a blessing on the stories you preserve
when others would erase them

a blessing on your vigilant heart
beating steady through the storm of cruelty

a blessing on the seeds you scatter
in neglected spaces

a blessing on your fierce protection
of all things small and wild

a blessing on the wisdom you gather
from elders and from earth

a blessing on your careful documentation
of what must not be lost

a blessing on your mutual aid networks
flowering in capitalism’s dank shadow

a blessing on your kitchen table strategies
where sly revolution simmers

a blessing on the wild songs you sing
when courage starts to falter

a blessing on your strategic joy
deployed against despair

a blessing on the future
being born in what you do

a blessing on the bridges you build
between wounded communities

a blessing on your sacred rage
that fuels the work of redemptive justice

a blessing on the hope you sustain
when vulgar bullies assault hope

a blessing on your children’s children
who will know what you defended

a blessing on the future
you dare to imagine now

– Rob Brezsny , Facebook, February 12, 2025

How much worse will it get?
I hardly have words for the rage. The fear. The bitter sadness. The grief of it all.

A book I read decades ago, When Corporations Rule the World (1995). A book written by David C. Korten, in which he shed light on the infracture and policies leading to now. Only now, it’s beyond corporations. We are witnessing the dismantling of the world with a penstroke, at the whim of a few inordinately wealthy, self-serving men.

And so when I don’t have words for the foreboding in my belly, a foreboding shared by many, I am grateful to those who do. I take solace in others’ words that have echoed mine, blessing the future being born in what we each do, dare to imagine, and stand up for now.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. May it be a blessed Valentine’s Day.

Holding Vigil Holding Each Other’s Hands

*Capranica, Italy along la Via Francigena*

My usual pattern is to post a poem with one of my photos on Fridays, maybe with some reflection – what evoked it being selected, or what it stirs in me. Mondays are for my own writing. Musings on my wabi sabi life. What I call “contemplative creative nonfiction.” Not sure that’s a legit genre beyond my imagination, but it is an apt description.

This morning (I’m writing on Sunday for a Monday drop), fresh with that extra “fall back” hour, this poem arrived in my inbox, the daily offering from the Daily Rattle. Written by American poet, playwright and essayist, Alison Luterman, it’s her in-the-moment response to the mounting tensions in the US. It resonates for me, for like it or not, what happens Tuesday, on their election day, reverberates around the world with vast implications. So, I’m shifting my pattern in response.

Thinking of my American friends and family members, I share Luterman’s heaviness and hold vigil with, as I wrote here on Friday, deep hope and much prayer. And as I wrote last Monday, knowing, too, the profound gift of care and safety that comes from holding each other’s hands and having each other’s backs.

May we not let go.

HOLDING VIGIL

My cousin asks if I can describe this moment,
the heaviness of it, like sitting outside
the operating room while someone you love
is in surgery and you’re on those awful plastic chair
eating flaming Doritos from the vending machine
which is the only thing that seems appealing to you, dinner-wise,
waiting for the moment when the doctor will come out
in her scrubs and face-mask, which she’ll pull down
to tell you whether your beloved will live or not. That’s how it feels
as the hours tick by, and everyone I care about
is texting me with the same cold lump of dread in their throat
asking if I’m okay, telling me how scared they are.
I suppose in that way this is a moment of unity,
the fact that we are all waiting in the same
hospital corridor, for the same patient, who is on life support,
and we’re asking each other, Will he wake up?
Will she be herself? And we’re taking turns holding vigil,
as families do, and bringing each other coffee
from the cafeteria, and some of us think she’s gonna make it
while others are already planning what they’ll wear to the funeral,
which is also what happens at times like these,
and I tell my cousin I don’t think I can describe this moment,
heavier than plutonium, but on the other hand,
in the grand scheme of things, I mean the whole sweep
of human history, a soap bubble, because empires
are always rising and falling, and whole civilizations
die, they do, they get wiped out, this happens
all the time, it’s just a shock when it happens to your civilization,
your country, when it’s someone from your family on the respirator,
and I don’t ask her how she’s sleeping, or what she thinks about
when she wakes at three in the morning,
cause she’s got two daughters, and that’s the thing,
it’s not just us older people, forget about us, we had our day
and we burned right through it, gasoline, fast food,
cheap clothing, but right now I’m talking about the babies,
and not just the human ones, but also the turtles and owls
and white tigers, the Redwoods, the ozone layer,
the icebergs for the love of God—every single
blessed being on the face of this earth
is holding its breath in this moment,
and if you’re asking, can I describe that, Cousin,
then I’ve gotta say no, no one could describe it
we all just have to live through it,
holding each other’s hands.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Hope

HOPE
It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs
from the eyes to the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.

“Hope” by Lisel Mueller from Alive Together. © Louisiana State University Press, 1996.

I have a file where I save poems for my Friday blog. This one was posted by Parker Palmer in late July and felt apropos for today. He wrote by way of introduction:

“Today’s poet, Lisel Mueller (1924-2020), knew all about the threat of far-right politics, aka fascism. In 1939, her family fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to the U.S., where she eventually won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry.

In this poem, she reminds us that hope is a fundamental dynamic in all forms of life, a way to name the energy keeps creating more life, one small act at a time, even in the face of very long odds.

She’s urging us to be sources of hope, sources of a deep resolve “not to betray one another.” I can think of no line that better sums up what’s at stake in the upcoming election. Let’s keep fomenting new life in any way we can. Much depends on it.”

Yes. I hope, with prayers, for my friends south of the border. For all who are suffering from the destruction of war and weather, illness and death. For us all.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Unison Benediction

UNISON BENEDICTION

Return to the most human,
nothing less will nourish the torn spirit,
the bewildered heart,
the angry mind:
and from the ultimate duress,
pierced with the breath of anguish,
speak of love.

Return, return to the deep sources,
nothing less will teach the stiff hands a new way to serve,
to carve into our lives the forms of tenderness
and still that ancient necessary pain preserve.

Return to the most human,
nothing less will teach the angry spirit,
the bewildered heart;
the torn mind,
to accept the whole of its duress,
and pierced with anguish…
at last, act for love.

May Sarton, Collected Poems 1930-1993

I think recent events south of the border prompted the posting of this poem on social media this week. It’s a time fraught…again…continuously… with uncertainty and anxiety. The polarizing fight for power, opinions weighing heavier than truth…torn spirits, angry minds. Tonight, in this house, tempers flared at dinner as days of heat warnings and insomnia-induced fatigue made patience a precious thing.

Driving to the start of this morning’s training walk, I heard a brief interview with one of the members of DahkaBrakha, a Ukrainian band who combines “traditional folk and punk, drawing inspiration from their Ukrainian homeland with a global sensibility. Melodies from the ancient past collide with future sounds…their style ‘ethno-chaos.'” Marko said the point of their music is to declare to the world that, despite what their invading neighbor says, Ukrainian culture and language exist…and to remind people everywhere in the democratic world, that their problem is not only their problem, but also a big problem for all democratic countries. The truth of his words stung. And as I set out, I was struck with how news cycles now make almost obsolete, or at least only mid-section coverage of Ukraine’s plight, and how much duress, at every scale, many of us hold.

“Return to the most human,” Sarton’s benevolent instruction.

“The dark thought, the shame, the malice/meet them at the door laughing, /
and invite them in,” admonishes Rumi.

“Act for love,” always a way through.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Cross the Sea

CROSS THE SEA

A girl in Gaza
speaks into a table microphone:
Do you believe in infinity?
If so, what does it look like to you?

Not like a wall
Not like a soldier with a gun
Not like a ruined house
bombed out of being
Not like concrete wreckage
of a school’s good hope
a clinic’s best dream

In fact not like anything
imposed upon you and your family
thus far
in your precious thirteen years.

My infinity would be
the never-ending light
you deserve
every road opening up in front of you.

Soberly she nods her head.

In our time voices cross the sea
easily
but sense is still difficult to come by.

Next girl’s question:
Were you ever shy?

– Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air, 2018

I’m sitting at a worktable in my public library typing this post for tomorrow’s drop. We’ve been without WIFI in our home office for nearly a week (hence why no Monday post). WOW! How dependent are we on this technology? It’s tax time. My husband does all our investing online. Bills to be paid by the month end. Waiting to print time sensitive return labels. Looming project deadlines. I’ve managed with my phone but wonder how much I’m over the data limit and how much the costs will be. My neck aches from being hunched over…texting and tapping what I can to stay in touch, be responsive. So, in this moment, I’m reminded how much I enjoy and appreciate my library, surrounded by stacks, students plugged in working at other tables, surrounded by full-length windows.

It’s quintessential springtime in Alberta. After several days of sun, warm weather, and melted snow – after getting off really easy with winter – the temperature dropped below freezing and snow fell for most of the day. I took a leisurely start to my day with a coffee date being canceled. Sipping my Americano, in the flat white light of the living room, quiet with snow gently falling outside, I began reading this volume of poetry, waiting on my shelf for just this moment. Needing some shoring up given another week of rejections and trepidation about the manuscript I’m revising, I was not disappointed, as even its epigraph began to set me straight:

“Stay humble, blend, belong to all directions.
Fly low, love a shadow. And sing, sing freely,
never let anything get in the way of your singing,
not darkness, not winter,
not the cries of flashier birds, not the silence
that finds you steadfast
pen ready…”
Naomi Shihab Nye

Then this, the first sentence of her introduction:

“Poet Galway Kinnell said, ‘To me, poetry is someone standing
up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible,
what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.'”

And this, to open the first section, “Messages,”:

Broken pencil
Broken pen
Maybe today
I’ll write my best poem

Well maybe not a poem but a post. And maybe not my best, but enough. Enough to be thankful for Palestinian-American poet and educator, Naomi Shihab Nye who first came to my attention when I read her well known “Gate a4” and signature, “Kindness.” Enough to let her cultural perspective and experiences teach me, as she was taught when teaching a poetry workshop in an international high school in Japan, the word Yutori – “life space” – the place and space “in which to stand back to contemplate what we are living and experiencing. More spaciousness in being, more room in which to listen.” (Voices in the Air, xiii) And enough to remember a girl in Gaza, or Ukraine, or Israel, Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethopia, Yemen, Russia…asking profound questions, being deeply heard, and wishing her the infinity of the never-ending light she so deserves.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

In Times of Terror, Wage Beauty

There are those who want the
world to remain on its current
path. This is not only unacceptable,
but it is painfully unimaginative.
For the beauty of our generation
is we are uniquely situated to
achieve what so many in this
world currently consider
impossible. How exquisitely
beautiful it will be to watch the
current narrative go down in
flames, then witness poetics &
phoenix rise from the ashes.

Embers, ancestors, and angels
await us, loved ones. Forward.

– Mark Gonzales –
In Times of Terror, Wage Beauty, 2014

I’d forgotten I had on my poetry shelf this eloquent “collage of visions.” In response to last week’s attempt to find enough words to notice and name one of the current global narratives literally imploding and exploding, a friend, in her comment, referenced the book, one I had gifted her years back. Immediately retrieving it, thumbing through its simple and beautifully designed pages, I knew I wanted to uplift and amplify Mark’s message and intention here today. Quoting from the back cover:

In Times of Terror, Wage Beauty is a
meticulously crafted series of ideas in
tweet sized digestible prose. It serves as
a personal guide to social change makers
in the 21st century navigating complex
social systems by highlighting advanced
approaches to healing and global wellness.

A quick early morning scroll today on social media and I’m reminded it’s International Women’s Day. Aware of feeling cynical and crusty, perhaps the result of many very early mornings arriving at my desk to write, I’m less inclined to jump on the bandwagon and share any of its memes or create my own. As with so many of these socially-politically designated days, often created, if not co-opted, by the power brokers to highlight and assuage their own interests, or by corporations to make money, I’m tired and disillusioned with the narrative that has become a “painfully unimaginative” rhetoric. I need a narrative like Mark’s. One that insists we not live in a world where any of us needs to shout to be heard, seen, and valued (26).

Instead, a narrative that encourages the simple yet essential acts of creativity – dreams, laughter, love, and imagination (51). One that heals the hearts of those forced from their homelands by centering on their beauty (29). One that remembers stories as ceremony, vessels for ancestors, memories, futures, and the vehicle by which the divine is engaged (41). One that reminds me “now is not the time to be timid” (21).

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Be angry but do not sin.

*an artifact from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine*

“…Then there is the anger that leaves us shaken and shaking because a sacred trust is being treacherously broken; because those who have done no harm are being gratuitously harmed; because those who have too little now have even less, and those who already have much too much now have even more; because egregious wrongs are being perpetrated, and the perps don’t even admit that the wrongs they’re perpetrating are wrong.

What has happened—is happening now, here, and everywhere—is not merely a sin and a shame. It is an outrage, and outrage calls for rage, rage that ought to come out. Anger in such instances is not merely permissible. It is obligatory, imperative.

Thus, the imperative: “Be angry.” Faced with an outrage, anger is the price we pay for paying attention. It is the rage that ought to come out, because, when faced with an outrage, it is a sin not to be angry.”
Allen Dwight Callahan from”A Surprising Command,” in Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, Thursday, February 29, 2024

…February 24, 2022…
…October 7, 2023…
…February 29, 2024…

Most any time of every year in recorded history, anywhere in the world, on this precious Earth again soaked with blood, sacred trusts broken, egregious wrongs done.

This is not my usual Friday feature of photo and poetry. Yesterday afternoon, I’d written and scheduled one to drop at 0700 today. But sitting last night at a phenomenal concert featuring Canadian tour de force Allison Russell and her powerhouse band, opened by the equally remarkable Indigenous singer-songwriter Aysanabee, my thoughts kept turning the news of another massacre of more innocent people, this time starving people waiting for food to feed their families. And for those many moments and minutes of distraction – the price I paid for paying attention elsewhere -feeling numb, not yet able to access my own outrage, I knew I’d need to get up early and prepare another post.

As “luck” would have it, at 0500, tea steeping, I opened my email to find the daily meditation from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, this week’s theme, “When Anger Meets Love.” Thankful for another’s words, when the most I could muster are the dates above that I’ve been tracking this week, and the context for this post. When the most I could offer is the space here, without opining, to imagine the visceral horror and heartbreak of people like me, to pay with this kind of attention, until the anger comes.

#holyoutrage, much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

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