Nature – Page 3 – A Wabi Sabi Life

Nothing Compares

*the truth of a well-lived and much-loved life*

Driving this past week, I don’t know where, I noticed the nascent greening of trees in the river valley. After a few much-needed days of precipitation – sloppy snow that turned to thick rain, and in the mountains, heavy snow accumulations, though hardly making a dent in snowpack levels needed to offset the province’s extreme risk for fires and drought – buds are popping, tiny indigo scilla and daffodils are blooming, the raspberry canes are reviving. Absorbed in the beauty of one of my favorite seasons, I suddenly realized this was how it looked the day I took Annie to the vet after what we thought had been a case of THC poisoning. Checking with Sig and my 2023 calendar, yes, it had been April 27th when she suddenly took ill. For several days, she was listless, frightened, eating little, and very unsteady on her feet. Our vet, Deb, and I wept as she laid out options, and Annie lay under the chair.

And then Annie’s miraculous recovery…of biblical proportions, a spring resurrection, to our way of thinking.

And then her sudden demise seven weeks later, just days before Solstice. In hindsight, it had been a stroke that felled her then, and now.

There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of Annie…that I don’t continue to feel the tender ache in my heart for missing her.

Yet in a month’s time, we’ll welcome into our home Walker, our sixth English Setter. I’m ready. Watching people dog-walking and IG reels featuring the antics of dogs, I’m excited with what this young teenager will bring to our lives, assured of being enriched by his presence.

Driving home yesterday from my first solo Saturday Camino, nothing planned but feeling the stirrings to train for another long distance walk this fall, I heard on the radio Sinead O’Connor’s iconic rendering of Prince’s song, “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Tears stung as I whispered along, “yes, nothing compares to you, Annie.”

Walking along the river path, enamored seeing more signs of the wheel’s turning, I took a photo that perfectly captured not only the going and coming of seasons, but also the truth of this threshold moment in my life: the endings and beginnings, the grieving and the welcoming.

Come Wednesday, we’ll be off exploring more of our beloved Italy…always an easy sell for the man who “eats well and travels seldomly.” I’m acquainting him with regions I first visited in 2011 – Sicily, Sorrento, and the Amalfi Coast – a tour I designed when, lost in translation, the tour company I thought we’d booked with, didn’t. Allora…

A presto!
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

To Say Nothing But Thank You

TO SAY NOTHING BUT THANK YOU

All day I try to say nothing but thank you,
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I
take through the rooms of my house and outside into
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring
and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy
after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work,
when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly
hair combs into place.

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I
remember who I am, a woman learning to praise
something as small as dandelion petals floating on the
steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup,
my happy, savoring tongue.

– Jeanne Lohmann –

Whew! I’m glad I’d clipped and saved this poem, shared on social media last week by Parker Palmer. Despite sitting here for a couple of hours writing, and up most weekday mornings to log onto a 7:00 am Zoom writers’ circle, I was ready to power off when I remembered today’s photo and poem feature. This one feels perfect, as it no doubt did for Parker when he posted it.

“I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring/and to the cold wind of its changes.” Alberta springs are notorious for their capricious nature: warm one day, snow the next; north winds blowing strong and cold, drying puddles, and disappearing shady pockets of crusty snow. Depending on the location, here you can ski in the morning and golf in the afternoon. Maybe because we had an exceptionally mild winter, thanks to El Nino, most of us have felt more bewildered than usual by spring’s ambivalent arrival. Toss in a solar eclipse, a new moon, and now a full moon, and yesterday’s collective lack of focus on the pickleball courts – wearing toques and gloves after two preceding days of short sleeves and shorts – might indicate our resiliency, or discombobulation! And that’s not writing a word about everything else going amuck in the world. “Weather and world weary,” would suffice.

So yes, I say “thank you” as I remember I am a woman praising something small…like the three browning hares who’ve taken to nestling under the spruce bough, or up against its trunk, the ones I call “honey bunnies,” happy to see them as they bring back memories of Annie fixated on them as she’d stand at the front window. As I do now.

Thank you to the sun that rises earlier and sets later, every day, now necessitating wearing an eye mask to fall asleep. To the robins I’m just beginning to hear singing their mating song. To the geese honking as they fly in pairs or in V formation. The murder of crows nest-making. Catkins and ice pads.

And to you, dear friends, thank you for being here.
Much love and kindest regards.

River

In celebration of Earth Day, today its 54th anniversary, my community hosted a free showing of the 2021 documentary, River, produced in Australia, narrated by actor Willem Dafoe, and described as “a stunning exploration of the timeless relationship between human civilization and Earth’s rivers, in all their majesty and fragility.”

Writing in earlier posts that I call myself a “daughter of Niagara,” having been conceived, born, and raised in the land bordered by that mighty river, this film, with its breath-taking photography, orchestral score, and poetic narration, touched that place deep within me where river resides.

“…Our early destiny was shaped
by the will of rivers.
We both feared and revered
them as forces of life,
and of death.
We worshiped them as Gods.

Rivers inspired us as a species,
allowing us to thrive.
Over time, they became the
highways by which trade,
and technology spread inland,
and along them also flowed poetry,
stories and religions,
politics and conflict…”

– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021

For the last forty-five years, I’ve made home near another mighty river, the North Saskatchewan. While not in my sightline every day, and in only a few ways resembling my river from home, at least once a week, as I drive into Edmonton or walk along its valley with my Saturday morning Camino group, I feel deep pleasure and appreciation for its presence in my life, for how it invites, metaphorically and in an embodied reflection, wise action for living.

By flowing with the power of its current; recognizing the value of being contained by its banks; attending to its shallows, hidden depths, and eddies, its seasonal highs and lows influenced by rainfall, snowpack, heat and cold – in sum, recognizing its innate alive wildness as mirror of possibility for my own.

“…For eons, running water
obeyed only its own laws.
Patient and persistent,
it wore mountains away.
It looped and meandered
laying down great plains
of lush, rich silt.
Where rivers wandered,
life could flourish.
For rivers are world-makers.
They have shaped the Earth,
and they have shaped us as a species.
For thousands of years
we worshiped rivers,
as the arteries of the planet,
the givers of gifts,
the well-springs of wonder…”

– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021

Like a sonnet’s volta, or a river’s ninety-degree turn, the film shifted perspective to show the impact on rivers of our interventions and interference in their natural flow, albeit while acknowledging their unpredictable, destructive capacities:

“…we devised extraordinary
means of controlling them,
of harnessing their force
and taming their wildness.
We discovered how to
regulate and manage them,
how to run them like machines.
We shifted from seeing
rivers as living beings
to seeing them as resources.
Our gods
had become our subjects…”

– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021

Repeatedly, I was held in awe by the film’s aerial photography showing the shape and flow of rivers and their profound resemblance to trees. Staggering to learn was that the amount of water in the hydrosphere, the Earth’s original water account, hasn’t changed since the beginning of time, while our numbers, in contrast, have grown beyond comprehension. Too, that worldwide, there is hardly a river unspanned, undammed or undiverted, and that the largest dams have held back so much water, they’ve slowed the Earth’s rotation.

“…The mystery and beauty
of a wild river is beyond our ability to comprehend
but within our capacity to destroy.
Rivers that have flowed for eons
have been cut off in decades.

Time and again,
upstream need and upstream greed
have led to downstream disaster.

We have become Titans,
capable of shaping our world
in ways that will endure for
millions of years to come…”

– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021

Throughout, I kept thinking back to John O’Donohue, and his poem, Fluent:

I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.

Such simple eloquence that holds reverence for – not interference with – river’s sovereignty.

If you, too, are enamored of rivers, I encourage you to find the film and take the 90 minutes to watch it. For Earth Day…which, IMHO, should be every day.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Standing Back

STANDING BACK

If this is the best you can do, citizens of the world,
I resolve to become summer shadow,
turtle adrift in a pool.
Today a frog waited in a patch of jasmine
for drizzles of wet before dawn.
The proud way he rose when water
touched his skin –
his simple joy at another morning –
compare this to bombing,
shooting, wrecking,
in more countries than we can count
and ask yourself – human or frog?

– Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air, 2018 –

Talk about prescience.
This poem was published in 2018, though most likely written months, if not years earlier. Given the poet’s Palestinian father, Naomi Shihab Nye has always had her eye on, and heart attuned to the chronic strife in her father’s homeland.

I wrote at the bottom of the poem’s page, after yesterday’s reading and in response to growing tensions and extended involvements, “Are we poised for WW3? And too, Ukraine and Russia since February 2022…” My question as reasonable as the poet’s, but I pray, not prescient.

I’ve been away for a several days, hence the pause. Writing, but not in this space. It’s nice to be back until I set off again in a few weeks. Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

A Curious Resonance

I
Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest
essence, something helpless that wants our love.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises in
front of you, larger than any you have ever seen;
if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows,
moves over your hands and over everything you do.

You must think that something is happening with you,
that life has not forgotten you,
that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

II
the places in our heart
where the world took bites
out of us

may never fully heal
and will likely become
wide open spaces

~ be careful to not fill them
with just anything or anyone

your wounds aren’t supposed
to become attics for you to hoard
unnecessary junk

these holes in our hearts
are holy sites

and we should treat
them as such

so when visiting your old wounds
make sure to take your shoes off
and turn off your cellphone

sit by candlelight
and watch how the shadows
tell the story how brave you are

~ to survive
– John Roedel

III
“When a lot of things start going wrong, all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born – and that this something needs for your to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.”
– Anne Lamott

IV
“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily and I must return the gift. “
– Robin Wall Kimmerer

I collect poems and quotes for my weekly Friday photo and poem feature. As I scrolled for today’s post, these four came together for me with a curious resonance, echoing from writ small to large, scaling from an individual’s questioning and suffering to Earth’s magnificent mystery.

I offer these selections as a reminder that there are forces seen and unseeen, angels, ancients and ancestors working on our behalf in ways we have little, if any way, of registering. I offer these up to salute the turning of the season, life’s cycles being just one of those vast and wondrous mysteries.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends, and blessings for the arrival of the Equinox, spring and autumn.

A Long Slow Walk

“I think that this sense of well-being that comes with timelessness, the sense of being at peace – it must be very, very old. And it must be like a stylus dropping into a groove on the surface of the planet and making this music. And we are, our bodies are, that stylus, and we’re meant to move at this RPM that comes with the movement of our bodies.”
Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine

Last week, I took the time to open, click, listen, and read the conversation with Paul Salopek and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, founder of Emergence Magazine, an award-winning magazine and creative production studio that explores the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. An hour later, so intrigued with their conversation, I shared it on Facebook, logged onto their follow up ZOOM conversation live streamed from the UK this past weekend, and recommended it to my local Camino group at the start of our Saturday walk.

Salopek, an award-winning journalist, embarked ten years ago on a winding course retracing the migration pathway of early humans out of Africa, across Asia, eventually to cross the Bering Strait, down the Americas to Patagonia. Both in Emergence and more fully on the National Geographic page hosting this epic photo story, he describes how his personal relationship to time and the sharing of meaningful stories has deepened while moving through the world at three miles (5 km) per hour, or as my friend Christina Baldwin writes, “at the pace of guidance” and story.

“And I thought this would be an interesting experiment in slow storytelling or slow journalism, a way of slowing down my methodology and immersing myself in the lives of the people who inhabit the headlines of our day. So it’s been kind of a giant kind of a planet-sized studio to think about how stories are connected—not just kind of mega stories, say the climate crisis or human conflict, but our individual stories as well. And one way that I’ve found that does it really well is by slowing myself down and walking from person to person. That’s basically the premise of this. It’s a listening project where the destination almost always is another person.”
Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine

I love to walk. I have been walking more or less every Saturday morning in Edmonton’s famed river valley with my local chapter of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims, a “yes” I’d said several years ago on a wintry morning in January, and easily the most significant “yes” I’d said that year. What initially started as one member’s quest to train for his first Camino de Santiago trek, where walking was the raison d’etre, has evolved into a time for us to walk, be in community, and enjoy coffee at local cafes. True to my style, some Saturdays find me more extraverted, engaged in a series of edifying conversations along the path, while others, like this past weekend, ask of me to surrender to the silent restorative of its sunny, almost balmy morning. Stopping for a moment near the trail end, I smelled and felt those faint stirrings of spring, in time with this week’s celebration of Imbolc, the first day of spring in Celtic tradition.

I didn’t grow up in a walking family. Though recently it registered that I may have “inherited” an affinity for trekking from my father, who as a young teen at the conclusion of WWII, found himself alone, displaced, and dodging prisoner of war camps in Germany, taking months to walk his way home to the Black Forest where his mother held her breath waiting for his safe return.

I used to regularly hike in the Rocky Mountains, though it’s been well over a decade, and I miss those outings with my women friends. Since Covid, I’ve made two long distance walks, the Portuguese Coastal Camino to Santiago de Compostela, Spain in May-June 2022, and most recently, the Via di Francesco, from Assisi to Rome in September-October 2023. I’ve discovered, like Paul, and many of us, my pace is about 3 miles (5 km) per hour…even when sauntering, my preferred way of moving (when I’m not kitchen dancing.)

“You do not have to, you know, make your way to the jungles of northeastern India to experience this thing. I think it’s there for you. And it might be a little tougher to see and experience if it’s part of your daily life, whether you’re living in a small town or a megalopolis or anything in between, because, as usual, if we stay sedentary, we get scales over our eyes, and we stop realizing the wonders of the everyday world around us because they become over familiar. But walking peels those scales off and allows you to rediscover the extraordinariness of so-called ordinary things. And that includes a walk through your town, a stroll out into the fields, or a park near your house—indeed, your backyard, if you choose to go micro, right?“
Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine

Walking with Annie was an invitation in peeling off the scales. As I wrote in a post during what would be her last days, “Walking Annie is no longer exercise. It’s fresh air, the gift of being outside noticing life around us.” Admittedly, still missing her, it takes a bit more presence and intention to notice life around me, scales off, without her. And yet, more often than not, I experience what Paul Salopek describes as an:

“astonishing internal metronome that’s built inside of us, inside of our body, that distinguishes us from almost every other animal…this goodness that’s kind of humming in our bones, waiting to be let out.”

Listening and reading and looking at Paul’s journey, I’m stoked to envision my next long, slow walk, wondering what memories will be evoked, people encountered, stories conjured, bones set to humming, all waiting to be let out?

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

I Saw It Coming

In a week’s time my husband and I were to have been with my family celebrating my parents’ 70th anniversary. A staggering accomplishment given current divorce rates. Instead, after several back-and-forth conversations with my father and sister, wherein the “no choice” choice was made to cancel the family dinner, photographer, and flowers, we’ll stick to the flight plan and hold vigil, virtually and in person, for my mother, whose health and life have been seriously compromised by taking Ozempic. She is the second person in my close circle who has recently suffered a life-threatening bowel obstruction from this much touted, so-called weight loss miracle drug. Here as I type, she is with my sister in a hospital 30 minutes from home, the closest facility able to provide the CT scan needed to determine the impact to her bowels and life, while my father, bearing a week’s weight of worry for his wife, collapses with fatigue at home. (Another story, the sorry state of health care crippled across my country.) Thankfully, my sister is an RN, astute in her holistic perspective, clear and courageous in her advocacy, compassionate in her care.

In the last twenty-four hours I have learned of two friends losing their life partners. Before Christmas, another. And I wonder, will my father be losing his? For an hour today of personal respite, I attended a silent writing circle. After introductions, the host set a 45-minute timer wherein we muted ourselves, turned off our video cameras, and wrote. “January, the first month in a new year…its first days always bring an undercurrent of unease…for decades I’ve stepped across its threshold, yet this time feel days darker with melancholy…a bone deep sadness, its source clearer with each passing day.”

“Epiphanies,” I wrote. “Three wise men bearing gifts; the anniversary of our arrival 43 years ago to the prairie province we call home; the sudden death of my young, never-known grandmother, shrouded in secrecy, and leaving behind her toddler child, my mother, now holding tenuously to her own life. And today, dawning stark cold and bright, like winter’s belated arrival, the realization of how intergenerational trauma has shaped and coloured my stepping into most every new year of my life, tarnishing it with inchoate anxiety and grief.”

I’m as OK with all of this as I can be. Intuitively, instinctively, even presciently, I’ve been naming and writing here about crossing the threshold into this hard next life chapter – the eldering landscape where death and illness, failing health and loss become its “leitmotif;” where unapologetic grief becomes an even deeper expression of my love for my life and this world.

Sustained by those few near and dear kindred friends, my community of walkers, a monthly check-in with my therapist, my beloved and our quiet sanctuary of a home; and the ever-present beauty a step outside my door, I’m OK.

By the time this post drops, I may find we need to shuffle flights to arrive earlier, and I pray my prayers of comfort, grace and gratitude carry me and us through. Too, being held by forces seen and unseen – the angels, ancients, and ancestors.

I’ll borrow a poem from Mary Oliver to sign off:

“You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

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

Mostly, I want to be kind.”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends, and thank you for yours…

A Gift to Bring You

I’m at a loss as to what to write for tomorrow’s (today’s) post. I started something and put it in the draft drawer, my “kill the darlings” file. No traction…no energy. Maybe an idea whose time has not yet come, or too soon too tender to write about.

Even though it’s Monday, not my usual day for posting a poem and photo, in the spirit of the season, I’ll gift forward a quote from a friend who shares my love of Rumi. A friend who I met years ago at our first writers’ retreat. A friend who made and gifted me and others with clay rattles during our vision quest retreat. A friend who recently published her first book, Solo Passage, the seeds of which she planted in that circle. Thank you, GG.

“You have no idea how hard I’ve looked for a gift to bring you.
Nothing seemed right.
What’s the point of bringing gold to the gold mine, or water to the ocean.
Everything I came up with, was like taking spices to the Orient.
It’s no good giving my heart and my soul because you already have these.
So, I’ve brought you a mirror.” – Rumi

Look. See your reflection. Know you are loved.

And my annual Solstice blessing, originally written in 2017, timeless and ever relevant:

May this Holyday season bring time to cherish all that is good and true and beautiful.
May its dark days invite rest for reflection and renewal.
May Nature welcome you to its beauty, magic and wisdom.
May good health be your companion, relationships enliven and encourage,
work and pastimes fulfill and affirm.
May strength in body, mind and spirit allow you to embrace life’s uncertainties.
May patience, love and kindness – given and received – be yours in abundance.

With love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Sometimes

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.

~ David Whyte ~

Coming on the heels of Monday’s post on midlife and eldering questions, Whyte’s words speak to the power of such questions. Questions which, like the white fluff of feather caught on the leafless limb of the red willow bush I met a couple of weeks ago, might easily go unnoticed. Soft and tenacious, in stark contrast to its surroundings and time of year…is why it caught my attention…had me stop to capture its moment and possibility. This is the stuff of questions that matter, that wait patiently, sometimes in obscurity, for our us to stop and notice and make something of them.

What might be some of the questions waiting patiently for you? Perhaps in the growing dark of these December days, with its invitation to go slow and look within, they may appear to you.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

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.

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