Category: Nature

One Path

“crossing the river of life”
Mo Chuu (mother river) Bhutan, October 19, 2025

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!”

Friedrich Nietzsche in The Marginalian

This time the path led to touring and trekking in Bhutan, with an early three-day layover in Bangkok. Curious about Bhutan since reading that its Gross National Product was based on happiness, in recent years I’d begun my research. Committed to traveling with a Canadian company, and wanting to experience the country by walking in its forests and on its mountain trails, after last year’s heartening experience, I opted for a women’s hiking tour hosted by Wild Women Expeditions. Away almost three weeks in October, companioned by three women from the US, we were expertly hosted by local guide Chhimi from Blue Poppy Travel.

Since walking the Portuguese Coastal Camino in May 2022, I’ve made annual long distance walks. Each has been a known pilgrimage with sacred sites marking well worn paths trodden for hundreds of years by seekers and practitioners. Bhutan was no exception, as ornately carved wooden temples perched on mountain plateaus, white stucco stupas scattered in fields and on roads, and prayer flags strung across chasms constantly reminded us that we were being held by Mayahana Buddhism, the state religion deeply integrated into all aspects of Bhutanese life.

From our first walkabout during our first day in Paro, when hearing chanting we came upon the first of several ceremonies and offerings for peace, compassion, and the ending of suffering of all beings – hallmarks of this form of Buddhism. Chhimi confirmed my hunch that given so much current global conflict and suffering, the monks and nuns were engaged in even more ceremony as antidote. As I write this post, the country is hosting an unprecedented Global Peace Prayer Festival, November 4-17, in its capital, Thimpu, at the site of the massive seated golden Buddha, in hopes of rekindling hope and shared prosperity. We were deeply moved that this small country of 700,000 citizens was undertaking such effort, and expense, for the well-being of the planet and all its beings … for each of us.

Buddha Dordemna, Thimpu (for perspective)

We were many times blessed on our expedition. Everyday the sun shone in an azure sky when the week prior had brought unprecedented rains washing out trails and creating landslides on the only highway traversing the country, resulting in hours’ long delays. Narrow road shoulders became more treacherous with debris and washout along cliff edges. Days after our departure, major storm systems in neighboring India were bringing more rain.

Too, we had countless “right place, right time” moments, including watching monks practice their festival dance in the field one Sunday morning; meeting a local girl who invited us to use her bow and arrow to practice the national sport; having an unusual roadside photo opp with a Himalayan Grey Langur; seeing one of the four Queen Mothers (the earlier king married sisters), and the current King and Queen pass us in their motor entourages (no photos allowed); and even seeing Mount Everest from our plane departing Paro.

To have journeyed in such a small group, with two women who, like me, were celebrating their 70th birthdays was an answered prayer, as we supported each other in challenging climbs that took us to heights of 3000+ meters, and lengthy, quad and calf gripping descents.

I am filled to the brim with visceral and visual impressions in which here, now, is my first humble attempt to put into words. Many times, as is my way, my heart overflowed in tears. I trust poetry will emerge … in the right place, at right time. But for now, may this suffice.

With much love and kindest regards, dear friends. “om mani padme hum”

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.

Making Spring


“As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can.
I won’t give up until the Earth gives up.” – Alice Walker

“Indeed, to garden — even merely to be in a garden — is nothing less than a triumph of resistance against the merciless race of modern life, so compulsively focused on productivity at the cost of creativity, of lucidity, of sanity; a reminder that we are creatures enmeshed with the great web of being…” – Maria Popova

“Like the seeds, we have to straddle that paradox of not leaving the comforts of our gestational time too quickly, while finding ways to keep moving. Coming out of winter is like waking from hibernation—we need to go slowly, steadily…
…As we step into the capacities of our next becoming, we must do two things. The first is to come into a clear conversation with that pulse of vitality and originality which is growing within us, and the other is to meet, name, and respect our resistances to that growth.
After all, resistance is what strengthens and protects us in ways we may not yet understand. Sometimes what looks like hesitation is actually wisdom in disguise.” – Toko-pa Turner

“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.” – Walt Whitman

Another snowstorm.
A new salvo of political cruelties.
A week further into the northern hemisphere’s Spring.
A vow made and shared.

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.

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.

It’s Like This

“What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinished story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until it all ends.”

– Mary Oliver, “What Can I Say”

Finally, feeling 90% better after a wicked chest cold that made for sleepless nights, where once home, I was grateful for the guest room in which to retreat, and the prescribed puffer to lessen the coughing. Almost three weeks’ duration, the symptoms so much like the time I came home with Covid after walking the Portuguese Coastal Camino in 2022, I wondered.

Finally, through the first month of a new year, that has felt particularly dark and heavy with foreboding. While the days are lengthening, noticeable in the late afternoon, the heaviness, experienced by many in my country and beyond, persists. I don’t have to name its source. Suffice to say, I feel a gut deep fear that we are witnessing the intentional takedown of the world as we have known it.

Finally, back here writing. A friend nudged me with an email last week, wondering if I was still sharing my thoughts here, that she missed them. I have been doing the work of writing: revising, editing, and collating poetry for submissions to several chapbook contests and literary journals. I read my poem, “Epiphany,” (my last post) on that day’s Open Mic. But here, in this space, it’s been a long, fallow month.

Since returning home in mid-October from my last long-distance walk, with the most recent variant of Covid as a souvenir, my experience has been one of wandering in the liminal. Vague and restless, moody and melancholic. Missing the rhythm of daily long walks in nature. Sensing inexplicable shifts within me and the world. Seeing more apparent the contours of my “eldering landscape” with the passing of friends, and again the worry as my mother suffered another health crisis just as we headed off to celebrate Sig’s birthday on a hot and sunny Pacific coast beach. (I suspect the aforementioned chest cold a consequence, compounded by the resort’s air conditioning.) Not one typically to write it out here, instead I need to mull, ponder, and give time for subtle impressions to emerge with words.

Re-reading this post, I think I’ve simply been embodying the transition of seasons. I need to say it again to remind myself: hibernating, wintering, keeping low, deep, and quiet. And now, finally, feeling the rising energy and clarity of this new month. Despite human machinations to the contrary, February’s stirrings are an ancient signal to the promise of spring’s rebirth. Its hope echoed by my thanks to the editors who have already this year accepted and published my work… to my friend’s nudge to get back to writing here… to finding my way to my rhythms.

To remembering the world needs us. To placing my faith in the unfinished story that will never end until it all ends, despite the  man-made maneuvering and power-play posturing.

We are needed, dear friends. Much love and kindest regards. And to you who have recently subscribed, a warm welcome and heartfelt thanks.

Still Wrapped

“But I don’t look like a sun,”
a young star still wrapped in swaddling
veils said.

To which I replied,
“But you will, my dear. You will, mashuq.
So don’t worry. Don’t fret.”

Daniel Ladinsky, A Year with Hafiz (2011), December 22

My day began before dawn, quiet and dark, lighting the final candle of the Advent wreath. Curious, Walker stood close, watched the flare of the match, the flickering of the four candles, and then left to keep silent vigil sleeping in his bed. I thought of family and friends, the passing of time, the moments of melancholy with the missing…thresholds crossed and yet to be.

It’s now Sunday evening, quiet and dark. I have just listened to poet Elizabeth Alexander read the final chapters from her memoir, The Light of the World. Recommended in Allison Wearing’s online memoir writing course, it’s the lyrical account of the sudden death of her beloved husband…beautiful, poignant, poetic.

A deep breath, a pause to reflect, and to register the sanctity of her story and the liminality of these holy days.

Then, I turned to the book beside me: The Dreaming Way, Toko-pa Turner’s brilliant invitation to the practice of dreamwork. The chapter, “Wisdom of Sophia.” Its essence, as the embodiment of paradox and the continuous chaotic cycle of creation and destruction, leads us to a refinement of our life force aligned with nature.

“Not only is there more to your story beyond this anguish, but one day you story will be the starlight for another to follow out of their own darkness.”

Toko-pa Turner, The Dreaming Way (2024)

Another deep breath and pause to let Toko-pa’s words land. And just before I turned off the floor lamp, I fetched from my box of sacred books and journals, Hafiz by way of Ladinksy to read today’s contemplation.

There’s a thread running through this day…revealed in the elements described here. And a blessing for you, dear friends, that you may trust in your own, perhaps still wrapped, starlight.

Much love and kindest regards.

The Longest Night

BLESSING FOR THE LONGEST NIGHT

All throughout these months
as the shadows
have lengthened,
this blessing has been
gathering itself,
making ready,
preparing for
this night.

It has practiced
walking in the dark,
traveling with
its eyes closed,
feeling its way
by memory
by touch
by the pull of the moon
even as it wanes.

So believe me
when I tell you
this blessing will
reach you
even if you
have not light enough
to read it;
it will find you
even though you cannot
see it coming.

You will know
the moment of its
arriving
by your release
of the breath
you have held
so long;
a loosening
of the clenching
in your hands,
of the clutch
around your heart;
a thinning
of the darkness
that had drawn itself
around you.

This blessing
does not mean
to take the night away
but it knows
its hidden roads,
knows the resting spots
along the path,
knows what it means
to travel
in the company
of a friend.

So when
this blessing comes,
take its hand.
Get up.
Set out on the road
you cannot see.

This is the night
when you can trust
that any direction
you go,
you will be walking
toward the dawn.

~ Jan Richardson ~

Wishing you a blessed Solstice, dear friends.
With much love and kindest regards…

The World Has Need of Us

cliffs and gulls and boats
Port Anthony, Newfoundland, 2015

The World Has Need of You
everything here seems to need us…
– Rilke

I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.

– Ellen Bass –

This notion of being reminded…remembering…knowing that we are needed by the world has been a theme in the poetry I’ve chosen for these recent Friday posts. Given that I retrieve many poems from social media, saved in a file for future sharing, apparently, I’m in good company – being reminded and inviting others to this remembering. When I read these poems, I feel soothed. My breath slows and deepens. A spaciousness from which to settle, reset, and choose emerges.

Yes, among many of us, last month’s US election and the subsequent appointments of those who will assume positions of power (over?) have evoked a collective bracing, an autonomic tightening of our bodies. This month, as we (in the Northern Hemisphere) are nudged or tossed into winter’s cold and growing darkness, and into a Holyday season where Hallmark cards and streamed movies consistently and reliably portray “the happily ever after,” and stores are filled to the rafters with Christmas tchotchkes, many of us are living a vastly different reality.

Yes, for many of us right now, it’s a hard time to be human. We know too much and too little. Suffering devastating losses, living in that tension, actually that grief, we may need to be repeatedly reminded – from whomever, wherever, whenever – that the world – animate and inanimate, human and more-than-human – has need of us. That “everything here seems to need us.”

Believe it. Then, notice the evidence.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Caretake This Moment

CARETAKE THIS MOMENT

Caretake this moment.
Immerse yourself in its particulars.
Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed.

Quit the evasions.
Stop giving yourself needless trouble.
It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.
You are not some disinterested bystander.
Exert yourself.

Respect your partnership with providence.
Ask yourself often, How may I perform this particular deed
such that it would be consistent with and acceptable to the divine will?
Heed the answer and get to work.

When your doors are shut and your room is dark you are not alone.
The will of nature is within you as your natural genius is within.
Listen to its importunings.
Follow its directives.

As concerns the art of living, the material is your own life.
No great thing is created suddenly.
There must be time.

Give your best and always be kind.

~ Epictetus ~

I’m glad to have not only a folder of saved poems for Friday’s photo and poem feature, but ones already crafted and sitting in the draft folder that occasionally fit the mood. Today was my good fortune as after yesterday’s grueling session at the dentist for a root canal (“Hard work,” declared the dentist. “Tell my jaw,” thought I.), all I was up to last night sipping soup, with a side of Tylenol and Advil, was watching the recommended new Netflix series “‘Man on the Inside.”

Epictetus says it. And in a similar vein, John Muth in his classic children’s tale, The Three Questions, a reworking of Leo Tolstoy, here read by Meryl Streep. Too, a verse from Mary Oliver’s poem, Dogfish, that I love:

“…And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world…”

Better late than never, here it is.

May your Friday be touched by the glow of nature that shines as much from within you as it does from outside. And may we each and all be kind as we caretake the moments of our lives.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.