Soul Work – Page 2 – A Wabi Sabi Life

Trusting the Threads

I wondered if last Friday’s photo and poem feature were simply too much for readers, as few opened the post, either here or on social media. Perhaps if I’d titled it, “I Am NOT Happy,” and posted another photo, instead of using the title of Ilya Kaminsky’s poem, “We Lived Happily during the War,” with my photo of an actual Ukrainian door burned in the invasion, it might have evoked more curiosity and less reluctance. Please know this is not a critique, simply an observation AND acknowledgment of so much fatigue, despair, rage and fear, AND the wise self-care choices we each need to make, including what to click and read, and what to pass on. Though I must take a moment to acknowledge, with deep and abiding gratitude, another’s post that cracked open and gave me permission to name what I’d named in mine.

Karen Maezen Miller, an ordained Soto Zen priest, wrote last week, “I Am Not Free,” in which she unabashedly and vulnerably shared the impacts of and her feelings about the current goings on in the USA. I won’t go into detail, but to read a Zen priest – one whose writings have always hit the mark for me, and to whom I have occasionally, naively attributed a well-practiced, placid, equanimity – use the words “terrified,” “furious,” and “hate,” was one of the most reassuring pieces I’d read in weeks. One from which I did feel free.

Last week I attended a session hosted by my library’s new writer-in-residence. “Music and the Practice of Poetry,” it ended up being a wonderfully playful experience in understanding the importance of rhythm to writing and reading aloud poetry. As recommended, I brought something to write on, in this case my black journal of bits and pieces of writing transcribed over the years from my journals, letters, emails, social media posts. A collection of “seeds” that when I reviewed, saw how several had sprouted and blossomed into poems and essays. Like this piece, written in 2014, its essence rooted in last Monday’s post, “Rest.”

“I hear a murmuring of rest, OK, yes and then
the air smelling sweet and cool.
There are berries to pick and laundry to hang.
Groceries to buy and friends to call.
This could be enough. For right now is enough.
Ease back into life here at home.
Give thanks and send blessings
to all those suffering.”

Or this one, that I wrote and posted on Facebook exactly six years ago today. Its simple truth and prescience like Kaminsky’s poem.

And how I’ll end this post:

“There are the times when a poem becomes a prayer,
an image the beautiful antidote to the day’s atrocities.”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Rest

Walker… we all fall into bed after a full day

In yesterday’s inbox, I received two emails that struck me as contrasting approaches to coping with the current global state of affairs. In one, subject line: Sanity Repair Kit, its author listed thirteen personal strategies to help her stay above despair. The second, the weekly love note from Christine Valters Paintner, abbess of the online contemplative-creative community Abbey of the Arts, opened with the 6th principle of its Monk Manifesto:

“I commit to rhythms of rest and renewal through the regular practice of Sabbath and resist a culture of busyness that measures my worth by what I do.”

Deep, holy breath in and out…I could feel my body relax into the truth of rest being, as Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, writes: an act of resistance in a culture that wants to exploit and deplete our labor so others can profit. Could this be more on point at this time when we’re told that empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western civilization?

While the first email’s list included practices I know I could be doing, should be doing, and am doing – more or less – mostly, I felt overwhelmed and out of breath …except for the invitation to stare off into the sky for several seconds or minutes. Something I do quite regularly, sitting in my living room, often with Walker sleeping there in the sunshine. I understand “different strokes for different folks,” yet I want to uplift here an appreciation for and the wisdom in doing no-thing.

Suddenly, I am remembering with a smile the story I used to read during staff inservices, written by Robert Fulghum of the All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten fame. I no longer have that well-marked, tabbed, and dog-eared copy, but it was his experience of taking a pair of favorite leather shoes to the shoemaker for resoling that captures the essence of doing no-thing. He writes:

“The shoe repair guy returned with my shoes in a stapled brown bag. For carrying, I thought. When I opened the bag at home that evening, I found two gifts and a note. In each shoe, a chocolate-chip cookie wrapped in waxed paper. And these words in the note: ‘Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. Think about it. Elias Schwartz.’”

“Sabbath is not a doing, but a way of being in the world… In those spaces of rest comes renewal, with dreams for new possibilities. As a culture we face so many issues that feel impossible to tackle in meaningful ways. One way to begin is to allow enough space for visions to enter, to step back and see what happens when we slow down our pace first. . . .”
Christine Valters Paintner

Part of my Sabbath often includes cooking a good, ample meal giving us leftovers to get through the beginning of the week. With classical music or relaxing jazz streaming in the background and an occasional glass of wine, I’m in my element. Too, writing my Monday blog, warmly ensconced in my studio, surrounded by my various creative endeavors, inspiring images, vision boards and books, I sink into the wellspring of potential beneath the heartlessly cruel rhetoric filling so much airspace today.

Years ago, before The Abbey of the Arts, or The Nap Ministry, my friend Christina Baldwin penned the exquisite Seven Whispers (2002). “Move at the pace of guidance,” is the second whisper, combining two instructions: to re-humanize our speed of life, and to use a slower pace to actively listen for spiritual guidance.

“The pace of guidance, like peace of mind, begins internally – in me. Even though all my conditioning teaches me to accommodate speed, I am responsible for the pace I bring to the moment, just as I am responsible for the peace I bring to the moment.”
Christina Baldwin

What chocolate chip cookies might we find as we allow and settle into a slower pace and use this overwhelming and despairing time to do no-thing? What visions of possibility and inner wisdom might we access by resting and resetting our overwrought nervous systems? What might be the outcome of such a bold, strategic act of resistance?

“We must hang onto our humanity, it is why we’re in the world.”
Christina Baldwin

Much love, kindest regards, and moments of deep and abiding rest, dear friends.

Each moment of rest, of doing no-thing, of being our own Sabbath matters.
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.

February Memories

“Memory is the power to gather roses in winter.”
Anonymous, cited on a Mary Engelbreit card

Every day I see photo memories of that day stored in the cloud. This month it’s been the winter sojourn to Andalusia as COVID was nipping at our heels. Cross country skiing during cold COVID days. Walking Annie, both of us bundled in winter coats. Starting last week, it was the first days of my solo, midlife gap-year, three-month trip to Europe, now fourteen years ago. Photos of Bologna, Italy, my first exploration into a country I knew I’d love, but had little idea then how much. Like an dear friend I can’t wait to see again, I visited various regions of Italy three times during those three months, and five times since – Emila Romagna, Veneto, Lombardy, Liguria, Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio, Sicily, Puglia, Basilicata, Campagnia.

Castello di Procena, enroute to Acquapendente

A year ago, inspired by a heart-to-heart conversation with my husband where I invited us to both reflect on the dreams we had yet to realize, and what and how we could help each other do so in the time we had left, I was struck with the idea of returning to Italy for an extended period. I’d come to the realization that my big dream of living there was highly unlikely for many reasons. But what might it mean to adjust to the 90-day limit for visiting Canadians?

And so I began bringing shape to my dream. Drawing on the lustrous threads from that first-ever visit, I planned to depart this year, mid-February, and return mid-May. I’d live in Florence, where I found the perfect apartment in the market and cafe-rich neighborhood I’d first visited in 2023. Bright with lots of natural light, a soaker tub, well-equipped kitchen and spacious bedroom, and a lovely, English-speaking ex-pat host, I made the deposit. Too, I’d return to Venice during Carnevale, pulling through that golden thread. I made deposit on the Zen-like apartment in a glorious treed residential area, a bit beyond the Castello neighborhood I’d first visited that first time.

“*possibility in the palm of a hand,”* Venice 2011

Sitting with it, looking at dates, wanting to be in Italy during Easter, I modified the original three-month plan to become “70 Days for 70 Years,” a celebration of my upcoming decade crossing birthday. Catchy, the container for some writing, my dream coming to life glowed. Curiously, I kept putting off booking my flights.

Sitting with it a few more months, after a wonderful trip to Mexico for last year’s birthday, and the arrival of our wonderful Walker, I came to know I didn’t want to be away that long from my life here – with Sig, with Walker, in our home, in my community. Yes, I could have modified it, but that wasn’t the answer. I simply knew I simply needed not to go, now.

This past week, seeing those fourteen-year-old photos of Bologna, and of Venice during Carnevale – which really was an unexpected stroke of good fortune to be there then – and knowing if I had made that dream my reality, right now I’d be in my apartment in Florence. I’d be packing my overnight bag to head out on the train to Venice.

More wistful than sad or disappointed, I feel deep peace knowing I’d once again heeded my intuition. I’d picked my own bouquet of fragrant winter roses and was content with that.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Regardless of My Age

It’s been mighty cold here in Alberta, and across Canada. A much-needed, honest-to-goodness winter with a snowpack forecasters say will lessen the impact of spring and summer forest fires. Temperatures well below zero, made colder with wind, killing off viruses and vermin. A restoration of balance that, while I appreciate, as I said to Sig as we layered to go out, I wish I wasn’t in. It’s been less than a month since celebrating his birthday in Huatulco, Mexico, but it feels like ages with this profound contrast.

And Walker, despite inheriting Annie’s insulated coat, and boots that he reluctantly wears, has found his first winter too cold to do much more outside than his business. And even that’s done fast, carefully perched on three legs, alternately the fourth to keep it from freezing. Last week, both of us bundled to play in the backyard, not a minute later and he was at the door. That night, he didn’t eat his dinner and slept all evening instead of his usual watching TV (I kid you not!) or playing with us. I sensed he was depressed and reflected to Sig we needed to move someplace more temperate, as both Walker and I need to walk…outside…in Nature…without freezing.

I’m going on about this because I’ve noticed with every passing year, I’m less inclined to brave winter’s elements and that troubles me. I used to ice skate…cross country and downhill ski…I haven’t walked with my Camino group since Christmas. Dog walking has become episodic. Reading my friend, Gretchen’s post this morning got me to thinking more about my own aging and how it’s showing up.

“Ageism is the last bastion of political incorrectness, and no one is going to fight it with us or for us. No one else cares, until they arrive there themselves…”
Gretchen Staebler, “You’re Doing Great…For Your Age”

I met Gretchen at a writing retreat years ago on Whidbey Island. Then, she was working on her – now published and highly recommended – moving, tender, and funny memoir, Motherlode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver. (For local readers, it’s available to borrow from my public library.) I love Gretchen’s fresh and candid take on life, and too, her big heart from which she responds to my recent posts about the harrowing state of our world. From her post which inspired my writing today:

“What do you see when you look in a mirror? Go ahead, look. Do you only see wrinkles and sagging skin? Yes, they are there, it’s a fact of the third act, it’s what the body does. And what else? What is reflected in your eyes, your smile?”

In this “third act,” what I’ve been calling “the eldering landscape,” my body is having its say, and I’m having to become more adept at listening. In this year, crossing the threshold into my eighth decade (mind-blowing what becoming seventy actually means!!!) I don’t know how I’ll celebrate. I do know I’ll continue to be enthralled, amazed, bewildered, curious, vulnerable, astonished, uncertain, afraid, grateful, courageous – the whole enchilada of words describing me being in love with the gift that is my life. Regardless of my age.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.
I’m so happy to welcome you, my newest subscribers, and grateful to you who have been reading me regularly.

It’s Like This

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

– Mary Oliver, “What Can I Say”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epiphany

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.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Still Wrapped

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

To which I replied,
“But you will, my dear. You will, mashuq.
So don’t worry. Don’t fret.”
Daniel Ladinsky, A Year with Hafiz (2011), December 22

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

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

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

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

“Not only is there more to your story beyond this anguish, but one day you story will be the starlight for another to follow out of their own darkness.”
Toko-pa Turner, The Dreaming Way (2024)

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

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

Much love and kindest regards.

The Longest Night

BLESSING FOR THE LONGEST NIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Jan Richardson ~

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

Rest, My Friend

Arriving at my desk to write this blog, I opened an email to learn of the sudden passing of my first professional friend. With his wife and young son, they became our first “couple-family” friends when Sig and I made our first home together in small town Ontario. They hosted us for our final nights in Ontario nearly forty-four years ago before we packed up our first dog, Beckey, a few plants (a hosta that still blooms in our dining room window), and some luggage to make the trek across Canada in our little white VW Scirocco sportscar to our new home in Alberta. The vague sadness that has hovered around me for much of this grey, cold and damp day has now found a foothold.

Earlier today, I attended the 4th annual Poets Corner “Reading Rilke,” with Rilke translator-poet Mark S. Burrows in conversation with Padraig O’Tuama and Krista Tippett. Among my notes, the following bore my highlighted underlining:

“I believe in everything that has never been said.”
– Rilke

“We are here to listen the world into being
and then to share its stories.”
– Mark S. Burrows

Consistent among each of them was that much of Rilke’s writing was an embodiment of his famous directive to live into the questions.

Despite my cup feeling full, I don’t have much to write this evening. Questions tinged with sadness. So much that has never been said. Listening into silences. Trusting the infinite possibilities to be found in the unknown.

Remembering how my friend tempered my youthful naievety with his experience and wisdom. For years, throughout every career move, I pinned his handwritten note in front of me to remember: “The world is perfect, including my efforts to change it.” A bit like Rilke.

Rest, my friend.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

The World Has Need of Us

cliffs and gulls and boats
Port Anthony, Newfoundland, 2015

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

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

– Ellen Bass –

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

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

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

Believe it. Then, notice the evidence.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

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