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.
“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 treacherouswalks.
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.
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.
a blessing on the meals you cook as democracy collapses
a blessing on your healing hands that mend what empire breaks
a blessing on your quiet mornings when you choose to rise again
a blessing on the stories you preserve when others would erase them
a blessing on your vigilant heart beating steady through the storm of cruelty
a blessing on the seeds you scatter in neglected spaces
a blessing on your fierce protection of all things small and wild
a blessing on the wisdom you gather from elders and from earth
a blessing on your careful documentation of what must not be lost
a blessing on your mutual aid networks flowering in capitalism’s dank shadow
a blessing on your kitchen table strategies where sly revolution simmers
a blessing on the wild songs you sing when courage starts to falter
a blessing on your strategic joy deployed against despair
a blessing on the future being born in what you do
a blessing on the bridges you build between wounded communities
a blessing on your sacred rage that fuels the work of redemptive justice
a blessing on the hope you sustain when vulgar bullies assault hope
a blessing on your children’s children who will know what you defended
a blessing on the future you dare to imagine now
– Rob Brezsny , Facebook, February 12, 2025
How much worse will it get? I hardly have words for the rage. The fear. The bitter sadness. The grief of it all.
A book I read decades ago, When Corporations Rule the World (1995). A book written by David C. Korten, in which he shed light on the infracture and policies leading to now. Only now, it’s beyond corporations. We are witnessing the dismantling of the world with a penstroke, at the whim of a few inordinately wealthy, self-serving men.
And so when I don’t have words for the foreboding in my belly, a foreboding shared by many, I am grateful to those who do. I take solace in others’ words that have echoed mine, blessing the future being born in what we each do, dare to imagine, and stand up for now.
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.May it be a blessed Valentine’s Day.
It’s Sunday morning. I’ve signed into a weekly Zoom hour hosted by a local writer, hoping for some inspiration for Monday’s post. At this point, I’ve spent many minutes affixing photos to notecards, and writing messages of care and connection with friends. To one, suffering the depths of grief since her husband’s passing during Covid, I included John O’Donohue’s blessing for one grieving. To the other – in response to her thoughtfully written, beautiful New Year’s letter – an acknowledgement of her word choice to describe her current lived condition, “subdued.” Such resonance.
one love letter’s photo
Despite carefully curating my social media time, I cannot escape the onslaught of memes and messages, both harrowing and hopeful. In response to my husband asking how I slept last night, I shared my deep-in-my-belly fear about my country’s safety. The world has recent history of the devastating consequences of a leader’s stated intention to annex a country. So when I hear another threaten mine, my body responds.
“darling, you feel heavy because you are too full of the truth. open your mouth more. let the truth exist somewhere other than inside your body.”
Della Hicks-Wilson, Small Cures
After last week’s post, several of you commented and emailed with kind and affirming responses. I wrote a version of the following to several of you:
“So each word, each photograph, each post 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.”
So these minutes devoted to card-making and note-writing matter. Love letters amplifying beauty matter. A manifestation of the creative spirit matters. Letting the truth exist somewhere other than inside my body matters. This act of hope-filled dissent matters.
As do you, dear friends. Much love and kindest regards.
“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.
Forty-four years ago, Sig and I, with Beckey, our first of seven dogs, all English Setters except for one (Sassy, an English Pointer “rescued” from a divorce wreck shortly after our arrival, and soon to become Beckey’s inseparable friend) drove into Edmonton after four days’ traversing Canada from southern Ontario. I’ve written several times here about that journey and this anniversary. Today, I’ve chosen to share the poem I wrote last year.
EPIPHANY January, the first month in a new year, its early days bringing an undercurrent of unease. For decades, I’ve managed to find a way across its threshold. But this time, I’ve felt its days darken, weigh heavy with melancholy. A bone-deep sadness, its source finally becoming clearer.
Epiphany. When centuries ago, legend spoke of three wise men following a star, carrying gifts for a newborn king. When forty-three years ago, our arrival on this prairie province we made home. And decades before, the sudden death of my young, adopted, never-known grandmother, her passing shrouded in secrecy, leaving behind her toddler child, my mother, now holding tenuously to her own life.
Epiphany. Dawning stark cold and bright, like this winter’s belated arrival, that two-thousand-year-old desert shining star, when I realize my body’s primal response to grief touching and traversing maternal bloodlines. Embodied. Wordless. Anxiety rendering them, now me – the daughter of my young, adopted mother, born to bring her happiness – highly sensitive and self-doubting.
Today, holding vigil for my mother, wondering whether the 70th wedding anniversary celebration for which we’d booked our flights would instead become her funeral, I’ve had plenty of time to think. To see my family’s patterns and dynamics, know the stories and our secrets, the roles and rules, our shames and triumphs. What made me and entrapped me. What I’ve worked long to understand, unravel, to reclaim and make my life for me. Distance too, a boon, though long double-edged, has given me space and perspective, helping me navigate life’s complex and liminal terrains.
Now nearing seventy years myself, I’ve been naming the crossing of another threshold into this hard, next life chapter an “eldering landscape.” Here, in a world on fire, in drought, and in war, death and illness, failing health and memory, dashed dreams and diminished capacity become its leitmotif.
Epiphany. When claiming myself amidst ancestral loss and unapologetic grief becomes an even deeper expression of love for my life and this world.
(Spacing and line breaks have been altered to fit the page.)
Touched by its prescience. Grateful there was no funeral. Aware I am resolutely traversing the eldering landscape.
thankful for the still flowering gift from my friend
“Gratitude is so much more than a polite “thank you.” It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods. Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.”
I had no idea what to write for this, my last post of the year. I’d read some favourite bloggers who, too, wondered, knowing social media would be replete with eye-catching memes, inspirational quotes, thoughtful musings, and the perfect poem. But walking with Walker yesterday, noticing how much colder the temperature after a week of balmy days, and nearer to the horizon the mid-afternoon sun, I listened to an Emergence Magazine podcast wth Robin Wall Kimmerer reading her essay, The Serviceberry (known in these parts as the saskatoon berry). The above quote stood out as I struggled to keep the earbuds snug and the leash loose, my first time time navigating both since Annie’s passing. I knew I had a way in to writing, even if it meant I’d be adding more of the same to the year-end mix.
Looking back on this year, with its highs and lows, loves and losses, misunderstandings and reparations, I knew gratitude’s strong and persistent thread had, as always, had carried me across chasms of felt separation into the folds of belonging. I knew that by writing poems, walking long distances, seeing beauty in the imperfection and photographing its shimmer, I was saying “thank you.”
As I continue to walk the uneven and unpredictable terrain of the “eldering landscape” – a phrase I coined at the beginning of this year – I know with growing certainty that I am companioned by others. Friends and family who, further along, offer guidance and point out it waymarkers, and folks yet to cross its inevitable threshold. For this I am thankful, for it can be an arduous and sometimes lonely trek.
In the coming days, duing the great pause between exhaling this year and inhaling a new one, may I remember that infinite possibilities reside in its vast unknown. May I remember my sovereign capacity to shape a kinder, more generous and grateful future. May we all.
“Openness of hand, tenderness of embrace, spaciousness of heart, graciousness of home, blessedness of earth, vastness of sky, for all the spaces that bid me welcome, I give you thanks.”
Jan Richardson
Dear friends, thank you for companioning me here on these pages. I appreciate knowing my words matter.
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…
Isola di Farnese on la Via Francigena, October 2024
I don’t want to to sound out of touch, but I really am exhausted by the word “influencer”
that word suggests trying to have control over somebody else
and there is already too much of that going in the world already
I don’t like the term “clout” either
that word is too fickle for me
whenever I desire power it feels like I’m trying to hold a melting ice cube in my hand
I don’t want to sway anyone
I want to serve them
I don’t want to blaze a path for you
~ I want to get lost with you ~
to crave authority would require me to surrender my amateur status
and I quite love being a newbie here with you here
I don’t want to guide you down this River
I want to enjoy the ride with you until we reach the great waterfall
don’t follow me flow with me
and as we go
let’s not influence each other to be like us
instead
let’s listen to each other
until our ears become shaped like our hearts
~ John Roedel from his upcoming poetry collection “wonderache” ~
Called the Facebook poet, John Roedel has developed a reputation for heartfelt writing, often posting photos of his rough drafts hand-scrawled on lined notebook pages. From his website: “Offering a sincere and very relatable look at his faith crisis, mental health, personal struggles, perception of our world, and even his fashion sense, John’s writing has been shared millions of times across social media and lauded by fans and readers worldwide.”
There’s something touching about this poem for me because it illuminates a tender vulnerability within myself. The shift from having had a career with influence to when, after its abrupt end, I began in earnest to write. Engaging in this mostly solitary endeavour, my sense of community is fragile and self doubt can arise from “the sticky web of personal/with its hurt and its hauntings,” obscuring those occasions when I“become a pure vessel/for what wants to ascend from silence.” (John O’Donohue, “For the Artist at the Start of Day”).
To write as an act of service – not to sway, or blaze a path – is predicated on mutual reciprocity: releasing my poems into the world so that others may read them. Lately, I’ve been caught in the traditional-self publishing dilemma. After working this spring with my wise and thoughtful editor-essayist-poet Jenna Butler, my manuscript sits with three traditional presses whose protocols are precise on prior publications. Hence why I seldom post my own work here or on social media. Recently, I’ve initiated conversations with self-published writers, and with a press who assists, for a fee, writers to publish their own works.
I feel poised on the edge of a “great waterfall.” Vulnerable. Uncertain. But to imagine flowing with, and having my words be read, or heard by others, our eyes and ears becoming “shaped like our hearts,” brings me deep joy. Maybe the nudge to push me over.
A Wabi Sabi Life 