Category: Nature

Beyond Any Silence You Have Heard

the old pine on the Niagara River bank at sunrise

BEHIND ANY SILENCE YOU HAVE HEARD

Different trees grow various heights and then
perish and evolve into another species.

They reach their limbs – their souls – a little
deeper into incandescence’s well

and then tell the world by their marvelous
appearance what life is like.

Yes, try to do that before you depart this
wondrous place we are visiting;

bring us some good tidings of silence beyond
and silence you have already heard.

Hafiz, as rendered by Daniel Ladinsky
A Year with Hafiz: April 29

This selection felt like a lovely follow-up from last week’s poem, Aunt Leaf, by Mary Oliver. Coming across it on April 29, my margin note reads: “This is exquisite. This is my knowing of trees, especially our beloved Laurel Leaf Willow, gone now two years.” Both poems spoke to me of that “before, beneath, beyond words” knowing we have with trees, and the other “more than human” beings.

It’s been a tough week. I’ll leave it at that for now. Yet as the miracle of spring explodes with Alberta’s record breaking heat – not a good thing given how dry, with province-wide fire bans and daily evacuations due to grass fires – I once again find myself in awe with and comforted by the silent beauty, graciousness and grandeur of trees. This quote from patron saint Catherine of Siena a fitting sign off for today:

All has been consecrated
The creatures in the forest know this,

the earth does, the seas do, the clouds know
as does the heart full of
love.

Strange a priest would rob us of this
knowledge

and empower himself
with the ability

to make holy what
already, always was.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Aunt Leaf

AUNT LEAF
Needing one, I invented her —
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I’d call into the leaves,
and she’d rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸,

and we’d travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker —

two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish —
and all day we’d travel.

At day’s end she’d leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she’d slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;
or she’d hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream,
this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

– Mary Oliver –
Twelve Moons

While never naming nor summoning a great-great aunt from among the trees, my earliest memory is of gazing up into the spring green canopies of maple and chestnut, where placed in my buggy to nap, I’d be lulled to sleep by their fluttering leaves, the play of dappled light, and the hum of cars passing by. Those maples surrounded my great gran’s home on the street hemming the mighty Niagara River, while the chestnuts, with their lacy pyramids of pink and white blossoms and glossy brown nuts hidden behind green prickly shells, held court over the fence and in the backyard of our main floor apartment, it, too, on that same river street.

A small Canadian town, across the river from the bustle of a big American city, both trees and river became my touchstones, providing a grounding for the inner and outer bustle. It’s only as I’ve grown older that I realized the necessity of that gift to my well being, that I would have known them to be, claimed them to be my friends.

While reading this poem, wishing I’d had the imagination then to have conjured a friend made out of leaves, maybe it was simply a matter of being inarticulate and diffuse. Maybe imagination was always at play, given my natural affinity for always noticing trees as I walk with Annie, or ride shotgun, and knowing that sitting in my yard surrounded by trees has been healing post surgery and illness. Maybe too, I’ve had my own Aunt Leaf all this time, inviting me to wander the world, and walk in circles wide.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Wisdom Without Words

Birthday celebrations over, and I’ve got one foot in the other out of the season. April in Alberta is like that. So warm and dry this past week that the county opened all the outdoor pickleball courts last week, but snow is forecast early this week. Buds and blossoms are slowly making their appearance through skiffs of snow and mounds of dried and dead leaves. Yet with one or two sunny, warm days and like the Easter miracle, they are risen. I’ve laundered and stored my winter down and blanket coats, those super warm Hestra mitts, and winter Blundstones, but still have wool toques ready to wear during the morning chill and nippy northern winds. Too, I washed Annie’s coats and mitts as her natural coat is plenty warm, too much so during our nearly 10,000 step walk today. Despite an old pattern of switching over my clothes closet from fall-winter to spring-summer Easter weekend, my bones are saying wait at least another week.

“I’m coming, but be patient,” Spring scolded. “You know Winter
likes to take her sweet, snowy time leaving. A bit slow and sluggish.
Likes to dig in her heels when she feels my push to get
going and growing.”

excerpt from my poem, “Call Me Caprice”

I wish I’d heeded that visceral nudge last week, when finally overcoming what I thought was inertia, I went to replace the outdoor winter wreath – a faded resplendence of red amaryllis, holly berries and evergreen – with the similarly faded spring circle of forsythia and willow. Laying the winter version on the carpet in the hallway while I placed the spring wreath on the door, I noticed Annie sniffing intently and gently nosing into it. Putting it inside its storage bag, I noticed on the carpet an egg, exactly the size and colour of those Easter mini eggs. At first glance and baffled I thought it was one, but where would a mini egg have come from? Then, taking the wreath outside and exploring, I discovered hidden within a masterfully constructed sparrow’s nest, camouflaged with sprigs of cedar just like the wreath’s own. No sooner had I carefully pried it out, when I replaced it, and the egg, hoping against hope for an Easter miracle. In hindsight, I had noticed two birds in the nearby tree paying close attention to me, but hadn’t put together that my actions around the wreath were worrying them. And Sig said he’d seen on the security cam, sparrows flying by the door for several days prior. While not the wisest place to build a nest – on the door that is our main entrance – I felt sad for having interfered. And several days later, when the temperature dropped below freezing, and I’d not seen the parent birds since, I ventured a look and found the egg cold, beyond hope. It now rests on my alter, inside its nest, with other found nests, sea glass and stones, dragonflies…each reminders of nature and the elements and seaons, and this time, the price paid for over-riding that visceral nudge.

Last night, the reverse. Pulling into our driveway, I noticed in the dark a neighborhood cat skulking in the hedge in front of my car. I got out, shooo’d and out it came with something in its mouth, whimpering softly. Not a mouse, but perhaps a baby rabbit? This time I didn’t interfere, knowing even if the cat had dropped it, given another cold night, where would I put the tiny being to ensure its survival? I felt sad.

Interfering. Not interfering. Who’s to say? Just as there is a wisdom deep in my bones that says “Too soon your spring-summer clothes (granted a small thing),” I trust there is deep and old wisdom among those more than human that asks of me to pay attention, to witness, and yes, to feel sad.

Earlier today I read “Spring Renewal, Rebirth, and the Purifying Activity of Grief,” this week’s e letter from oft cited therapist-contemplative, Matt Licata. I had actually finished this post when I felt the nudge to re-read his words:

…”There is no lasting, embodied, visionary renewal without passing through the portal of grief, which requires us to slow down, come into the earth and the ground, and honor all that we’ve lost. It requires that we provide a home for shattered ones and for the integration of the dying pieces of an old dream. 

…It’s a process where we collect the shattered pieces into a holy place and place them onto an altar in front of us, where we can enter into relationship with the shards of soul that must move on without us. And we can participate with a whole heart with the death of an old dream, and the way we were so sure that it was all going to turn out. 

The nature of this altar and this vase will be different for each of us, with calligraphy, engravings, colors, and in a shape that is crafted for our unique soulprint. We don’t design the vase ourselves, at least not by way of ordinary ego-consciousness. The vase is outside our deepest hopes, fears, desires, and unfolds apart from our personal sense of will. 

It is given to us by the transpersonal Self, by the Divine, however we come to conceive of that and is ours and ours alone – no one else can perceive or apprehend it, or design the vase on our behalf.

…The vase, the altar, and any aspect of the soul wanting to come into our conscious experience will present itself in unexpected ways, through our dreams, out in nature, in a moment of intuitive knowing, or even through a disturbance in our mood or emotional activation.”

Something about altar and vase… coming to us in unexpected ways… out in nature… through a disturbance in our mood… resonates deeply, and inexplicably for the time being. That old and deep wisdom within my human bones and the more than human. A wisdom without words.

altar and nest-vases, heart stones, dreams and peace

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Bravo to We Who Are

“When you reach a stage when you can have a very
dark and difficult experience, without having to look
on the “bright side,” then you know that you have
made progress on your healing journey. Because one
significant measure of our emotional health, is our
capacity to tolerate all of our experiences without
jumping to reactive reframes. You reach a stage where
you can stretch to accommodate the truth of your lived
experience. You have enough light inside, to own the
shadow. And enough shadow inside, to own the light.”

Jeff Brown, Hearticulations: on friendship, love and healing, 2020

Taking a step sideways from my usual posting of a Friday poem, I found this quote scrolling on my Facebook feed this week, something I’m doing only occasionally these days (that might be a story for another time). Posted on a friend’s timeline, after reading the comments I was reminded that decades ago I had read something Shakti Gawain of creative visualization fame, wrote about positively thinking herself into a psychosis. At a time when a heavy theme within the new age thought movement was espousing “think positive and manifest thus,” her words left an indelible mark. In that same era, I read Ken Wilber in an issue of the New Age Journal calling out this same tendency, particularly with reference to blaming those suffering with life threatening illness, as his wife at the time was dying of cancer. (Wilber, having created the brilliantly deep and expansive Intergral Theory, is who Fr. Richard Rohr describes in a recent podcast with Brene Brown, “the wisest philosopher of religion on the American scene.”)

I received the gift of insight a few weeks ago, during an interview with a fellow doing a Masters degree in Tourism, studying the transformations experienced by we who walk “secular,” non-religious inspired caminos. In response to his final question, “What in 3 or 4 sentences would I describe as the main lessons learned from my camino?” and as I wrote here last week, after several moments of quiet consideration, searching for the most accurate words, I said that I am developing an embodied, visceral familiarity with what it means to live in Life’s messy, inchoate middle, engaging with, partnering with, Life living itself.

Bravo to we who are so fiercely tender and tenderly fierce in our refusal to only live on the bright side of life, ignoring its necessary, organic, abundant mess. Life needs us to be so.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of
pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth
gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a
dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the
guardians who have known you before time, who will be there
after time. They sit before the fire that has been there
without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who
accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down
upon them.

Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises,
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a
hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave
your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of
time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the
keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your
heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors
to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many
forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases
of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in
pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to
be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean
clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and
supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through
the dark. 

– Joy Harjo –

For the new year…
May yours be filled with promise, good health, and joy with family and friends.
May you find your way through the dark, and help another to do the same.
Call upon and trust the ancients, ancestors and angels…those beings seen and unseen…and those more than human.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

The Coming of Light

THE COMING OF LIGHT

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

– Mark Strand –

This poem’s beautiful simplicity touched me as an elegant “gift” for these Holydays of darkness and coming light.

Dear friends – near and far, known on the page or felt in the winds – thank you for companioning me as I write what it’s in my heart and on my mind, and share my photography and some fine poetry – all the bits of a wabi sabi life.

May the season’s days and nights bring you time to pause and notice and savor what brings you joy. May you rest in the knowing you are loved. May you have more of each – joy and love – as the light comes again and the new year beckons.

With love and kindest regards.

Reroot, Rewild, Retell

Today I enter the third week of “Rewilding Mythology,” hosted and curated by contemporary writer, Sophie Strand, who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Compelled by several inspirations including a night time dream; Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation actions; the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer and Richard Wagamese; and the valuing of the dark, decayed and dead in essays by Perdita Finn and Matt Licata, I enrolled in this 8 week online course, and only afterwards read its description:

“For most of human history, myth was a durable mode of knowledge transmission, kept alive and resilient by the breath-laced web of communal storytelling. Just as we plant a seed in soil, so were vital pieces of agricultural and ecological lore planted into stories that were built to survive environmental and social collapse.

Myth-telling, as primarily oral and embodied, was revitalized by the same ecological cycles that depend on a balance of decay and regrowth: breaking down dead wood to generate new soil. Our culture-creating cosmogonies rarely grew stale because they were refreshed and adapted to new conditions each time they were retold. Myths were the maps of communities intimately dialoguing with their environment. Most importantly, they were contextual.

But the rise of empire depended on the deracination of mythologies. Just as landscapes were stolen and terraformed so were whole pantheons uprooted from their social and ecological contexts, coopted by the very cultures that ensured the demise of their originating cultures. Galilean magicians were turned into militaristic figureheads. Serpentine divinities were transformed into gorgon-headed monsters. Uprooted from their context and from the renewing respiration of communal storytelling, these stories ossified into abstraction and reinforced the anthropocentric hyper-individuality and colonial capitalism of today.”  

Following intuition. Knowing little. Not knowing a lot. Catching wisps – from last week’s poet story-teller, and the depth psychologist featured in Friday’s bonus session – that are coalescing into some kind of vague, embodied comprehension. Yet already it’s been informing what I’m hearing and seeing and talking about. Already, it’s re-shaping my context.

Quoting the host from her invitation: “I can’t wait to see how I’ll be changed by it.” And I wonder, too, “How can we reroot, rewild, and retell?“


I’m far from integration, synthesis, or even a coherent articulation about any of it, but from my notes, right now this excites me and grabs my curiosity:

“When you uproot a myth, dogma is the result.”

“Reading our alphabetic language makes it available for capture rather than response, while speaking we feel the energy vibrations in our body.”

“Is there a mode of writing that allows for space, breath and context?”

“Consider anthropomorphism as courtship to learn how to be in conversation and communion with the land and interior world, so that we can cultivate subjectivities that are less commodifying.”

“What if magic wasn’t supernatural but the most natural experience?”

“Magic is the logic of the world when the world is experienced from its own depths.”

“We’re used to listening in an habitual, usual way in the body. Let’s awaken the ancestral faculties of listening through the body to then become hollowed out for lightening to pass through…to be seized by a flow…”

“What stories are living us?”

Last week a friend invited me to his podcast conversation centering on wisdom, creativity, and living with uncertainty. As prompt, he referenced a meme he’d seen posted on my Facebook timeline:

“The ghosts of all the women you used to be
are proud of the woman you’ve become.”

@the global sisterhood

He asked what wisdom I’d have for those ghosts.

As is often the case with such a thoughtful question, in such beautifully contained conversation where we listen and are seen beyond habit, a conversation that is generative and holds the possibility for emergence, I found myself saying out loud things I’d never quite thought about before, let alone spoken. The stories living me. Asking to be spoken and shared.

After a lengthy pause, for his question deserved consideration, I responded that I’d ask about what excites them, grabs their curiosity, incites their wonder.

Theirs and mine. Then and now. To help us “reroot, rewild and retell.”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Inside the Season’s Cocoon

While a week late, and a post missed, I’ve kept my promise to myself to “stick to the knitting” and my writing practice here. During the interim, two rejections from the group where last year I’d been invited to read my submission to their ekphrastic poetry contest (beginner’s luck?) – I was sure I had a good one – and another written in the wee hours of Wednesday’s dawn to meet another contest deadline. Fingers crossed and regardless, I’ll get feedback from the judges. Always a boon.

Too, after a record-breaking long and warm and sunny August, September and October, wherein I was playing pickleball outside until Hallowe’en, winter – apparently fed up with waiting – suddenly, unequivocally barged in with November. Blowing and blustering throughout Alberta, it dropped nearly a foot of snow in a matter of days, wreaked highway havoc, and gave us the dubious distinction of being among the coldest spots on earth this week. Add Tuesday’s full moon lunar eclipse; peculiar and powerful planetary alignments wreaking their own astrological chaos; news from home that a high school chum has been seriously afflicted by dementia; another friend coping with pneumonia and two small children; a frozen vehicle; Annie down with a GI tract infection (she’s better now)…

Neither complaining nor making excuses, I’m simply noticing what now has the capacity to knock me sideways, crawl deeper into the covers, and, despite the sun and blue sky, colorfully renounce my gratitude for the seasons, especially this one. I refuse to call it a symptom of age…more the wisdom that comes with…a finer attunement to the nuanced…the paying with attention in my body, and not over-riding it with my thinking. Saturday’s Camino walk in the river valley with a reprieve in temperature, and later with Annie, restored my appreciation.

Last weekend I took the bus to Calgary to attend a Friday poetry evening and Saturday workshop with Pádraig Ó Tuama. Such a treat to physically sit in his presence and hear him do so brilliantly what I’d only ever heard him do through Zoom and podcast space…recite remarkable poetry and invite us into how to listen to its structure for its meanings. Thank God, I knew to book the bus when I’d made the arrangements during early September’s golden glory. (I have a kind of prescience when it comes to weather…that finer attunement thing.) Both of us walking alone as we approached the venue, I introduced myself, said a few words as we climbed the stairs to the entrance, and then made our separate ways. Pretty neat for this enthusiastic fan. Too, I was standing in line to purchase his “hot off the press” Poetry Unbound collection, only to recognize immediately behind me award-winning Calgary poet Rosemary Griebel. We have a virtual friendship initiated when she wrote me a lovely compliment on my blog. Knowing she’d be there, I’d brought my copy of YES, her most recent collection, for her signature. Again, pretty neat for this appreciative fan. And then at the Saturday workshop, of all the coincidences, by way of her friend, Peg, we discovered we share a birthday. How neat is that!?! A bit of kismet perhaps…especially as we talked about Camino walking and her interest in Portugal.

I had several takeaways from the weekend inspired by both Pádraig and Rosemary. With my own rejections fresh, I felt restored hearing Pádraig say how difficult it continues to be for him to find places and publishers for his poetry, still how many and often the rejections. Its antidote, he said, was finding a small, intimate group of writers with whom to share the work, so as to uplift each other in the efforts made, support each other through the process of editing, submitting, and receiving rejections and acceptances. In the acknowledgement of her book, Rosemary mentioned the friendship and support received from her regular local poetry writers’ group. Into my new vocation now for a couple of years, I know its solitary, often lonely nature. I returned home committed to putting a call out, both to the Universe (trusting my efforts are adding), and to some writers to ask if they’d meet me in the sandbox – virtual is fine – to support each other as we make our way with words.

And speaking of Camino, mid week I was invited to present “A Creative’s Way of Walking Her Camino” to the first, post covid, in person gathering of our local chapter of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims. Using a story I’d written for Portugal Green Walks and the upcoming issue of Sage-ing: The Journal of Creative Aging – a synthesis of my blogs – I shared my way of traveling in general, and in particular how I had walked the Portuguese Coastal Camino – using journal, painting, photography and poetry to grok within the experience’s impressions and memories. I was delighted not only with the feedback from attendees and planning committee, but more so to have been “seen” in this way of my vocation, to be, as one of the members said, the chapter’s “resident artist-poet.” Now this is very neat!

I am now inside the season’s cocoon, wintering. Despite the initial shock, I am surrendered to the inevitable, ready to savor having designed time for writing, studying Italian and “rewilding,” walking, cooking, hand work, seeing friends, sharing time with my “pack,” playing pickleball. Feeling life full in the midst of its fallow.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Sometimes

SOMETIMES

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

Sheenagh Pugh

Parker Palmer, wise elder, posted this a couple of days ago – his pithy response to the USA midterm elections. I’m sharing it today because I like how it echoes my first post back after my writing hiatus wherein I uplifted Hafiz’s notion that our efforts add to the universe – a message I personally need to remember and feel needs to uplifted and amplified continuously for us all.

OUR EFFORTS ADD TO THE UNIVERSE.
Mine. Yours. Ours.
Simple. Elegant. Complex. Messy.
The Universe does not judge. It simply needs our effort.
So let’s get at it!
One simple step…and let’s see where it takes us.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Adding to the Universe

In the past day’s reading of several favourite blogs, a few threads of thought shimmered and held my attention enough to ponder and weave together here…

In Transactions with Beauty, my friend Shawna Lemay shared as one of her “20 Things that Might Be Helpful,” the notion from Hafiz that our efforts are not insignificant…that through our humble efforts – none of which are irrelevant nor too important – finding the balance we add to the universe. I love this and gleaned the settling reassurance of being and doing “enough.” Thank you, Shawna, and our beloved Hafiz. Most definitely helpful.

This spun together with Robin Wall Kimmerer, her words imbued with beauty and the wisdom of her ancestors. Cited in another newsletter, she shared the teaching that by “paying” attention we give in return for the gifts we receive from Earth. As one who notices, a lot, this deeply resonated. I could take for granted such a simple gesture, but she reminds me it is an act profound precisely because our attention is fast becoming a limited resource, pulled in many directions and insidiously whittled away by myriad distractions. The question then is to what am I paying attention, and how or what does this attention serve and enliven?

My virtual friend Helen, over at Ageless Possibilities, shared her “October Reflections,” the year past and current. Closing with an invitation by way of questions – Do you do an annual reflection on changes in your life? Do you consider what has remained the same? And does that impact your life decisions? – I realized how in the last couple of weeks I’d been casually reflecting on my new vocation as writer-poet, and healthy pastime, my game of pickleball.

Despite a slow start to my game this summer, on the courts I saw how I’d developed in consistently serving well, handling the speed of a volley at the kitchen line, accurately placing more offensive shots, and in making more and better low and backhand shots. Yes, it’s still a fluke if I return a banger or a slam. The third shot drop still eludes me. And one day’s play can vary from the next. Despite saying at the outset of taking up the game several summers ago, that this would be the perfect practice for kindness – I falter, often, especially with myself. That’s why it’s called “practice,” I remind myself.

In the past year my writing efforts have borne fruits: poems published in two anthologies; writing the foreward and poetry for another; invitations to read at open mic events; my co-editing and featured writing “gig” at Sageing: The Journal of Creative Aging; and preparing a sixty poem manuscript for publication. It comes…word by word…line by line. And though reluctant to call myself “poet,” I know deep in my bones, poet is who and what I am, not just on the page, but in how I live my life.

“…attention generates wonder, which generates more attention … Paying attention to the more-than-human world doesn’t lead only to amazement; it leads also to acknowledgment of pain. Open and attentive, we see and feel equally the beauty and the wounds… Paying attention to suffering sharpens our ability to respond. To be responsible.” 

Robin Wall Kimmerer

While travelling earlier this month, I had a dream which gently guided me to registering for an eight week dive into “rewilding mythology.” In all honesty I have no idea what this is. But host, Sophie Strand, and several of the faculty intrigue and have piqued my sense of wonder, intuiting this will deepen my attention to the “more-than-human world,” and sharpen my ability to notice and respond. Next weekend I’ll travel to Calgary to sit in the presence of and learn from of a beloved poet, Pádraig Ó Tuama, someone I’ve mentioned here for his Poetry Unbound podcast. And in December I’ll participate in a poetry intensive with Alberta poet Alice Major, to learn about aligning my poems into the arc of a collection.

If the “job of a human is to learn,” I’m at least part-time employed. Revisiting my slogan – “making prayer, poetry, and beauty is holy alchemy for social change” – I trust my efforts – neither irrelevant nor too important – are adding to the universe. I trust yours are adding, too.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

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