Category: Photography

The Presence of The Absence

There is a word in Portuguese that has no direct equivalent
in any other language: “saudade.”
It is not just longing. It is more.
It is longing mixed with melancholy,
with expectation,
with tenderness and with a gentle sadness.

It is longing for something that was. . . or maybe never was.
It is absence with the scent of memory.
It is love that did not have time to end, but neither to continue.
It is music that echoes in the void left by someone.

In fado they sing saudade.
In our long silences, saudade is hidden.
In lonely walks,
in lost glances out the window,
in letters never sent.

Saudade does not want to leave.
It doesn’t heal, because it doesn’t hurt completely.
It doesn’t break you, but it doesn’t leave you whole either.
It’s the sweet wound of souls that feel deeply, beyond words.

Carrying saudade within you is proof that you loved,
that you lived,
that you dreamed… even if for a moment.

~ Waves of Life, Facebook, May 4, 2025 ~

singing fado on the steps in Lisbon, May 2022

Exactly three years ago I was walking the Portuguese Coastal Camino to Santiago. During my first evening in Lisbon, I encountered the essence of “saudade” in a young street musician strumming her guitar, perched on stone steps across from our hotel, singing “fado,” the Portuguese equivalent of the “blues.“

Once home, in preparation for writing about my experiences, I heard a Portuguese guide refer to fado as “the presence of absence.” This inspired a poem which was published later that year in 100 Caminos, an annual Chilean anthology celebrating Camino poetry:

. . . now my memory mends and fills
those cracked and empty places
with jasmine perfume and birdsong
blistered heels and sun kissed faces

Saudade captures much of how I’ve been feeling this year. Tired from the moral outrage I’ve felt in response to the incessant displays of blatant evil. . . disappointed with life events that didn’t quite become as I’d imagined. . . I feel “the longing for something that was . . . or maybe never was.”

Disillusionment giving way to letting go. Discernment that comes with age.
The proof that I have loved and lived and dreamed.
The presence of the absence acknowledged and allowed.
And what is asking to emerge next.

Life’s unfolding along its silver thread, invisible until it’s not.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. It’s nice to be back after several weeks’ absence.

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 ~


I posted this poem a year ago, almost to the day.

Its message so vital. So simple. So enough. What else is there to say?

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

No One Told Me

No one told me
it would be like this—
how growing older
is another passage
of discovery
and that aging is one
grand transformation,
and if some things become
lost along the way,
many other means show up
to bring me closer
to the center of my heart.

No one ever told me
if whatever wonder
waits ahead
is in another realm
and outside of time.
But the amazement, I found,
is that the disconcerting things
within the here and now
that I stumble
and trip my way
through, also
lead me
gracefully
home.

And no one told me
that I would ever see
an earth so strong
and fragile, or
a world so sad
and beautiful.
And I surely
didn’t know
I’d have
all this life
yet in me
or such fire
inside my
bones.

~ Susan Frybort ~


I think this says it all.
The perfect complement to Monday’s post.
The intention for this next span of life I’ve been gifted.
Perhaps fitting for you, too.

Thank you for your kind birthday wishes, dear friends.
Much love and kindest regards.

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.

This Spring

soon…

It’s 7:00 am Sunday morning. I’m an early riser. Lately, too early as I’ve been plagued with a bout of early morning insomnia, waking around 3. Sometimes I toss a bit, listen to the slow and steady breath of Sig sleeping beside me and try to synch my breath with hopes of falling back to sleep. When my mind overrides that intention, I quietly rise, slip into my robe and slippers and head downstairs to read, or write, or take my place on my cushion, or stare out the window, wondering.

In a couple of hours, I’ll be attending an onsite, in-person writing workshop. Hosted by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, it’s described as “an all-day retreat designed to nourish your creative process. Writing exercises, inspiring prompts, and focused discussion will get your juices flowing and keep you motivated for days and weeks afterwards.” Goodness, I hope so, for like an Alberta spring, no sooner do my juices start to melt and flow, when they freeze solid and need to be chipped and chopped to get flowing again.

Last week in my monthly online writers’ circle, we each spoke of being in a fallow season, making reference to Katherine May’s memoir Wintering; gave space for our reactions to democracy’s demise in the face of growing fascism; and anticipated Spring’s arrival the next day. A closing offering of a poem which I’ll share here to close today’s short, and “OK enough” post.

This Spring

How can I love this spring
when it’s pulling me
through my life faster
than any time before it?
When five separate dooms
are promised this decade
and here I am, just trying
to watch a bumblebee cling
to its first purple flower.
I cannot save this world.
But look how it’s trying,
once again, to save me.

~ James A. Pearson ~

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Mindful

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

– Mary Oliver –


“How are you?” ask friends who I’ve not seen, nor spoken to for a while.
“Terrified,” my response.

Not afraid, but terrified…for my country…the illegal apprehensions, deportations, and denied entry…the constant blatant disregard for law…evil in the guise of leadership.

Not a very mindful response, or is it? Certainly more intense and less palatable than “afraid.” But in the moment, truthful, uncensored. And then it passes. The weight of it lessens for its utterance. But I know, too, that I need those moments of seeing and hearing that kill me with delight.

Thankfully, Walker obliges. Every day. The shine in his eyes, tongue hanging in joyful anticipation as I dress to play with him outside. Chasing him with one of the store of sticks he’s taken from the woodpile in the back. Our backyard scattered with them. Or inside, tugging on the damp-with-drool dishrag nearly shredded, or his blue racquetball, or red kong – each tight in his mouth, until he lets go in false surrender just to keep the game between us going.

Thankful, too, that yesterday’s sunshine and warmth allowed me to sit outside on a cafe’s patio to eat lunch after my 8+km river valley walk. All of it a balm. Nature and good food as co-regulators.

And that exquisite hand-made card sent by a friend who is excelling at paper quilling, her latest fascination. In yesterday’s mail, the envelope with my name and address, written by a hand I didn’t recognize. The note inside, bearing the same beautiful script, thanking me for my words, the tapestry I weave with them, the meaning they bring to her.

Coming through a “wintering” season, again with many more rejections of my writing than acceptances, with words laying fallow, deep underground, her gift like a prayer made out of new, spring-green grass.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. And to you, Cate, thank you.

“We Lived Happily during the War”

Ukrainian doors
burned and shattered
in the war
started by Russia

February 2022

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.

An Email Sent to a Friend Before Dawn

Buds in Spain, March 2020
(we know now the darkness that was soon to fall upon us all)

My gosh…what sweetness
to suddenly hear your voice and words
singing
on the radio
this morning.

My heart needed it all.

Such heavy harrowing times.
My words are stuck and stuffed
like my head cold.

Anyways…this moment
a sweet one.

Hope this finds you well.

Much love and kindness.

~ Katharine ~

Re-reading my email, with my friend’s lovely reply, knowing that I am, like many around me, at a loss for words, I knew this was “OK enough” for today’s photo and poem feature. With a line break here and there, formatted into stanzas…yes, it would be “OK enough.”

And how simple a gesture, to respond in the moment to the surge of surprise and joy upon hearing my friend’s name and then her singing, to reach out and connect when it’s darkest… before dawn.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.
May we all be bearing up well, responding in the moment to those many surges of unexpected joy.

So each word, each photograph, each email matters.
Each kind word, each warm embrace matters.
It’s what we have which I have to believe can turn the tide,
perhaps first within the unseen, liminal spaces.

Infinite Possibilities

“The truth is — the amount of days we have here is actually not so large. So if you have the opportunity to wake up tomorrow, to let this world age you and weather you and meet you where you are for even just one more golden minute — I hope you show up for it.
Do as much as you possibly can with your time here.
Risk your heart.
Express.
Take care of others, leave them better than you found them.
Give yourself permission to take up space.
Be all that you are.
Love the way you hope to love, and love people on purpose, with depth and intention.
Keep rescuing those younger parts of yourself.
Forgive.
Put every ounce of your patchwork soul into this world, crack tenderness into all of its dark corners.
Stay soft, stay curious, but most importantly – just hold on to your hope.”
Hold on to your hope.

~ Bianca Sparacino ~

Not yet, but soon those small indigo Siberian squill blossoms, emerging through the snow, sheltered in against our home’s southwestern exposure. Tomorrow, March arrives as a harbinger and holder of Spring. It’s been a very, very long two months into this new year. Despite knowing more snow and a return to bitterly cold weather is likely, standing outside at dawn waiting on Walker, I feel uplifted. Its breeze is making fast work of the snow that, just a week ago, covered our yards and walks. Melts leaving puddles that freeze overnight. That cycle making for treacherous walks.

Let Sparacino’s words be the tenderness cracked into the world’s dark corners. There can never be enough tenderness, or kindness, or hope. Admittedly, for me, dosed with times of righteous outrage and bewilderment.

During COVID’s then bewildering uncertainties and isolation, I first wrote about the mixed blessing of holy grief, holy gratitude, and holy love. Here I am again, now adding outrage. Holding our hearts open in hell as the tiny and tender indigo flowers find their place alongside the still icy cold snow. A metaphor for trusting that in that space between knowing and not knowing, there exists a realm of infinite possibilities.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.