Soul Work – Page 7 – A Wabi Sabi Life

Solo Traveling

I am home. Met by my husband in sunshine and mild temperatures last Saturday after nearly 24 hours awake, most of those masked in the minority, I arrived safe, sound, very tired and with my checked luggage. It’s taken about a week to recover from jet lag and feel my soul return to my body. I’ve been grateful for another prolonged autumn, warm enough to get back on the pickleball courts and try out my foot after trekking 220/237 km on the Via de Francesco, and close to another 100 km wandering through Florence, Assisi and Rome during the days bookending my walk. I played so-s0 after five months off court, and while my foot felt OK, I realized it’s too much, too soon to resume play daily. Saturday found me in our still colourful river valley walking with my Camino group. It felt wonderful to tie on the boots I’d worn up and down those paths in Italy, now with a much lighter pack, and gloves, toque and a down coat given the sudden shift in temperature…to be reunited with friends who, too, had trekked this past month in Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe

Edmonton’s River Valley – Whitemud Creek towards Snow Valley

“Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging. One of the lovely things about us as individuals is the incommensurable in us. In each person, there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for things we need from within. The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by yourself. They are at home at the hearth of your soul.”
John O’Donohue

“After this recent month-long journey, bookended by several days of solo wandering, I can assuredly say I am friends with both.”– posted on Facebook, October 20, 2023

Too, I can assuredly say that combining a small group experience with solo time prior, after, or both, is my favourite way to travel. I experienced it most recently in Morocco this past spring when I arrived solo in Casablanca and then extended my stay in Marrakech after the small group excursion. When I think back to having flown into Florence late that Sunday afternoon – finding the tram to take me from the airport to the SMN train station, to then making my way to the monastery I’d booked for the week (all first time experiences) – the combination of trepidation and accomplishment – in this case particularly so as I knew my way better than the local I’d asked – delightfully got me off on the right foot.

Having been to both Florence and Rome several times, I felt confident in my ability to get around. I’m “old school,” preferring paper maps – this trip using a terrific popup version that tucked away in my purse – and I’m quick to ask for help, understanding that in the encounter made, people enjoy knowing they’re needed. I loved wandering early in morning, and suddenly, for example, coming upon the Duomo to be enthralled by the sunlight breaking through the clouds. Countless moments of “moving at the pace of guidance” – going where I wanted, when I wanted – enjoying my own companionship, not missing a soul, the boon of solo travel.

That being said, I know, too, what a well-travelled friend had called “low pot” days: when fatigue, feeling overwhelmed, displaced and lonely create inertia, low confidence and anxiety. Its remedy: to acknowledge and either sit with and rest, let be or move through depending on the situation. This crept up on me during my time in Trastevere, when after two weeks of companionship, walking alone together, I was suddenly alone alone. And I was tired… from the exertion, not only of the actual trek in the glorious hot late summer, but too, from the hundreds of kilometers I’d walked in preparation. The inevitable “come down” from the accomplishment and all it took.

So yes, I am intimate friends both with solitude and its gifts of sustenance, renewal, rest and creativity, and too, with loneliness and its sharp edge of separation and self doubt.

A well-established practice of self-care, I’d spend at least an hour daily editing the day’s photos and writing a description to post on Facebook, this time to soothing instrumental Spotify playlists. While it became THE chronicle of my experience (as the very small journal I brought often remained empty for days at a time), in those moments of solitude and occasional loneliness, the comments from friends shored me up to remember the gifts that can only given to me, by me.

Dear friends, if you were among those who followed my journey, and perhaps commented, thank you for the lifeline.

Much love and kindest regards…

Exhaling

Finally, enough space to for some words to emerge from that place “before, beneath and beyond” to find their way to the surface and onto this page.

Finally, enough that has been in process for summer’s duration now settling.

Finally, like my practice’s bell that signals the need for a pause with a breath in between, embodying and enlivening that breath here.

FRIENDSHIP
My last post almost two months ago was an opening into the seldom talked about territory of the distress with broken friendships. As I’d anticipated, my exploration evoked comments from many readers, mostly women. Ranging from encouragement for naming truth, to reframing as peace-making the individual acts of courageously and vulnerably stepping in to invite conversation and clarification, to women sharing related stories of long-standing friendships suddenly going awry, to others feeling the best friendships should be the easiest to maintain (an opinion I countered). If I were to edit that post, I’d clarify that while the opening quote was ample context for both my letter to my friend, and the post, I wouldn’t “walk away in disgust” but rather in sorrow. As has been the case.

Since then, longtime friend Tracy shared a book title that I promptly borrowed from the library. Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends by Maria Franco (2022) provides an accessible frame for understanding the complexities of early attachment wounding in adult friendships. Suffice to say that John Bowlby’s seminal work on attachment theory, now decades old, is thankfully again seeing the light of day, helping us understand the tricky ground of relationships. Add in the impacts of generational trauma, its impacts on the body-mind, and coping strategies of addiction and we have more than enough reason to find compassion for ourselves and others.

While I’d thought I might have more to write on the subject, my attention has shifted though the questions I hold and the sorrow I feel continue ebb and flow.

MEMORIES
At some point during the day, as any of you who store your photos on the cloud know, photo memories appear. Sometimes it’s a past post on social media that I check for relevancy before sharing again. Always it’s the photos I’ve made and stored in the cloud over the years. For the past few days, it’s been photos of my first visit to Morocco in 2019. How utterly poignant to see over and over the beauty of her land, culture and people that captivated me then, that enticed me to return this past March, now in the aftermath of the weekend’s catastrophic earthquake. Writing today to a friend who shares my awe and appreciation for Morocco:“my return to Morocco was most satisfying…my love for her only deepened…my desire to spend more time there was only stoked, not sated.”

To others I acknowledged the bittersweet gift of travel: that with each journey taken, the world becomes smaller, more intimate with each connection made, each friendship forged. So that when such devastating events occur, I cannot help but feel a heart stopping immediacy, a bone resounding impact and meaning. Then anonymous concern gives way to personalized shock and grief.

My dear friend, Omid Safi, an acknowledged scholar of Islamic studies and Rumi, hosts regular “illuminated tours” of Morocco. Evidence of our small world when in March he was with his group in Marrakech as I was with mine in Casablanca. When he saw that I’d attended a cooking class at Marrakesh’s AMAL Women’s Training Center and Moroccan Restaurant, he wrote that its founder was a dear friend. Today he posted their efforts to gather and directly forward donations to families left bereft in the mountain villages hardest hit by the earthquake. I appreciated Omid’s post, resonant with the message I’d heard repeatedly while touring the country, reminding me of those most basic values shared among Abrahamic faith traditions: “send thoughts and prayers, please. Also send aid. Remember that our beloved Prophet says to change things first with your hands, then your tongue, and lastly by the heart. We begin by doing something.”

Marrakech’s Koutoubia Mosque, March 2023
September 8, 2023- it shook and swayed, yet stands still erect

ANNIE
Among those photo memories are countless ones of Annie. Today a favourite taken a year ago.

It’s been three months since we had to say goodbye to our beloved fur companion. Striking for me has been the coincidence (?) of weather. On both the first- and second-month anniversaries of her passing, the day was exactly as it had been for those initial three days in June: leaden gray skies and steady soaking rain. And like those first three days, each month since I’ve felt held by the sheltering sky, in my grief, my love, my missing, my appreciation for this beautiful being called Annie.

I haven’t yet been able to return to our favourite bench overlooking the pond, nor walk our familiar neighbourhood routes. But in the meantime, I have walked. Close to 320 kms since the end of July. Up and down and through our river valley. Initially with great trepidation, now with confidence that I am as ready as I can be to walk the 16-day, 260 km Via de Francesco from Assisi to Rome. I tended to a collapsed metatarsal of my left foot for most of the spring and summer, the onset of which occurred during that day in March when walking on cobblestone through the labyrinthine medina of Fez. Finally surrendered to giving up pickleball in early June, the activity I’d counted on both to healthfully distract me from grief and to build my cardio fitness, I turned to deep water aqua fitness three times a week. Then my dear friend and former marathoner Thais, created a month-long training program wherein I’d gradually increase the distance and backpack weight to 20+ km and 13+pounds, some of the longest days walked during the highest temperatures of the summer with the greatest weight.

THREE COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN
In a week’s time I’ll be settled in Florence for several days, about to meet up with my morning food tour in Otranto. On Tuesday, an early spot at the Uffizi to once again revel in the masters. Another day a city bus up to Fiesole. Then later in the week, a train to Assisi to wander solo and adjust to the first of many hill towns I’ll encounter walking. There I’ll meet with the small group of fellow walkers and pilgrims escorted by our Italian guide, and tour company host, Sandy Brown, writer of several Italian “camino” guidebooks. We’ll conclude our via at the Vatican, giving me several more solo days to decompress in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood. That coin tossed over my shoulder into the Trevi Fountain last October, now my third, has returned me yet again to another country of my heart.

third coin tossed at the Trevi Fountain, October 2022

“MOVING AT THE PACE OF GUIDANCE”
(coined by my friend Christina Baldwin in The Seven Whispers)
Walking one day on my own a few weeks ago, I realized how different my preparation for this long-distance trek compared to last year’s Portuguese Coastal Camino. Both then and now booked early in the new year, as I waxed and waned in the early weeks of summer, wondering if I was up to the challenge due to grief and injury, I realized I didn’t know WHY I was making this journey. Last year I had been so clear that I was responding to a decades’ held dream. Such clarity of purpose and my reading of Phil Cousineau’s The Art of Pilgrimage shaped so much of my planning and preparation. Now except for my lists, and clothing and supplies laid out on a bed for weeks, my dedication to my training, I began to wonder about the presence of grace in all of this.

One night trying to sleep after long, hot rugged day of walking, I wept…with exhaustion, with missing Annie, with fear I’d not be up to making the trek, with worry for my husband and a sudden health complication (resolving), and with realizing that with Annie’s passing, my words had died. I did not have the energy to find a word to write. I did manage to polish up a few poems to meet some submission deadlines. And while I trusted this was a temporary state, simply my fallow not a harvest season, I felt sorrow and disappointment that I’d been unable to use my writing to heal my grief, as I’d known other writers to do, published collections being an added result. I felt especially vulnerable as in June I had asked for and received the gift of a weekly writer’s circle with the group of remarkably kind and talented and generous women writers with whom I’d just completed an online course. How could I be in a writer’s circle and not be writing?

Come a week, those four weeks in Italy I will be moving at the pace of guidance. Beyond a food tour and gallery ticket I have nothing booked. Having visited Florence and Rome several times, I feel comfortable wandering, sitting at cafes, watching people, noticing, making photos, and taking a note or many to seed future writing. Walking every day for sixteen, I know from experience there is a simplicity and rhythm that invites heeding guidance, feeling grace.

Realizing the extent to which this summer I have been holding – grief, uncertainty, worry, pain – I feel myself exhaling.

Thank you, dear friends, for your patience as I find my words and my breath. Much love and kindest regards.

Friendship

As friendships grow closer, conflict becomes more difficult to avoid. And this is often a good thing. Because the closer we get to each other’s hearts, the more triggers rise into view. Because you can’t fully know someone until you ignite each other’s fire. Because you won’t know if a connection has legs until it has been tested by conflict. And when it is, there is a choice to be made. Walk away in disgust or walk toward it in effort to deepen the connection. Conflict isn’t the adversary of connection. Fear of confrontation is.
Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

This is a deeply vulnerable topic…for me and I’ll presume many of you, particularly my women readers. It’s one of those areas that so deeply affects our lives and yet when friendships go sideways, fall apart, dissolve into thin air, we seldom if ever talk about it. I’m certain I’ve read somewhere from someone whose opinion matters to me, that breakups with friends can be as devastating as divorce, if not more so. And so it is, with the encouragement from a friend, I write this post to begin to illuminate the often shadowed dynamic so essential to our lives and well being.

I included the above quote in a letter I recently sent to a friend. Sensing our relationship was wobbling, for weeks – months even – I pondered reaching out to enquire of her. And then in a bout of insomnia several weeks ago, compelled I sat down in the dark of my writing studio to craft a letter. Several revisions later, coupled with my self doubt and courage that waxed and waned, this quote arrived last week. It both perfectly described my thoughts on friendship in general, and framed the intention and context specific to my letter to her.

It’s not the first time I’ve written such a letter to a friend, or initiated the conversation. And always the self doubt. Always the courage to reveal, to make myself vulnerable by asking, “Are we OK?” I think we’ve all seen how as we grow closer to another – a friend, a partner, a professional colleague – anyone with whom we’ve made an investment of time, care, attention and regard – that conflict is bound to arise. Paradoxically, our differences surface and grow in the very container of similarity and safety provided by the initial attraction and energy of the relationship. This is particularly so of marriage, and why it holds the potential for the healing of its partners, as old wounds come to light. But avoid naming it, fearful of our own vulnerability in the face of it, self doubt and shame grow, projection and denial thrive, and relationship languishes or collapses.

Friendships – like my self doubt, courage and insomnia – wax and wane. As the saying goes, they come for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. This and the analogy I’ve adopted – one of the astrological arrangements of stars and planets moving closer and then apart – help restore perspective. Given my nature, in those periods of waning and moving apart, I’ve found myself wondering “why?” In the absence of clarification, I’ve defaulted, sometimes distressingly, to a habit of mind cultivated in childhood that says, “I’m to blame.” That same childhood source of those triggers that get touched when I get close to another’s heart and they inadvertently say or do, or don’t say or do, and hit the target. When I do the same to another.

…Something in you knew
Exactly how to shape it,
To hit the target,
Slipping into the heart
Through some wound-window
Left open since childhood.
John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)

With a child’s naiveté and cultivated by societal norms, I’ve believed in the possibility of, even yearned for a “bff” – that one girlfriend who, through thick and thin, over the ups and downs of life, would always be there. (But truthfully, when I consider my own life and its continuous unfolding, I’m not sure about it – except for Oprah and Gayle, perhaps.) Implied is a depth of trust and consistent connection which can be a displacement onto or substitute for what was missing in our earliest relationship with mother. Jungian analyst Marion Woodman writing about the “Death Mother” together with Daniela Sieff and Toko-pa Turner, and contemporary writer Bethany Webster on “The Mother Wound,” are each identifying an archetype arising from patriarchy with its pervasive damaging impacts for girls and women, and their relationships with self and other. I’ve felt deficient and heart broken when friends for whom I cared a great deal, loved even, despite efforts to make amends, broke up with me because I had hit their heart target. Even today, the memory is a tender ache.

…Meanwhile, you forgot,
Went on with things
And never even knew
How that perfect
Shape of hurt
Still continued to work.
John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)

In relationships that matter to me, where the heart is touched, it’s the absence of clarification I’d find most troubling. It’s why I’d ponder for days and wake at 3:00 am to draft a letter. Muster the courage and allow myself to be vulnerable to enquire. I rest a bit easier now, in a solace knowing it might simply be a change in season, no longer the reason, that the planets have shifted. Why what was once close is not quite so, or any longer.

…Now a new kindness
Seems to have entered time
And I can see how that hurt
Has schooled my heart
In a compassion I would
Otherwise have never learned.
John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)

I’ve said to friends who have mattered along the way, when you feel something is amiss between us, please don’t waste precious time, energy and sleep trying to figure out if it’s you or me, foolish or worthy of your attention. It’s most likely all true. So please bring it to the friendship so we can work on it together. Walk toward me for clarification, and deepen the connection. Please.

Or don’t. I’m learning to be OK with that choice, too.

…Somehow now
I have begun to glimpse
The unexpected fruit
Your dark gift had planted
And I thank you
For your unknown work.
John O’Donohue, “For Someone Who Did You Wrong,” in To Bless The Space Between Us (2008)

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Take Three Steps

“I sometimes forget that
I was created for joy.
My mind is too busy.
My heart is too heavy
Heavy for me to remember
that I have been
called to dance
the sacred dance of life.”
Hafiz

Last quoted a year ago when I created my photo blogs describing walking the Portuguese Coastal Camino last May, this excerpt from Hafiz aptly describes me since my last post. Two weeks ago today we said goodbye to our beloved Annie dog. It’s a day reminiscent, with its dark skies, rain, cold and wind, just like that Sunday and the two that followed, then giving me cause to say we were being held in a sheltering sky. That then, on the third day, the skies glowed with colour as the sun set, offering something, somewhat, holy in it all.

So yes, in the last two weeks I have forgotten I was created for joy. My mind has been too busy, my heart too heavy with memories of Annie. Yes, all things considered, Annie had a “good” death. She was alert, conscious, knowing we were with her in her final hours. She was tended to with loving kindness by the vet clinic staff. In grief’s waxing and waning rhythms, I’ve come to realize that my loss is acute for all the ways she loved being with me. Our loss is the realization that for the first time in twenty three years, our quiet home is all the more so for the absence of the love, lessons, and joy our dogs gave us. Dogs that except for Annie and Torch, our only male setter, died as their lives diminished with age and declined with health. Annie, despite having had that first stroke, gave us the gift of six weeks of unique and unabashed presence. To have that so suddenly gone…

Life in its way has a way of reminding me of joy. Just two days before we knew we had to make the “no choice” choice for Annie, I learned I was the grand prize winner of a raffle. My $20 investment had garnered two round trip international air tickets. That same morning, I took my first deep water aqua fitness class, a good cardio workout that isn’t aggravating my foot, allowing me to train for my September trek. I mustered myself to return the day after Annie’s death, and have persisted because it has no associations to her. This week, I’ll return to walking in the neighborhood, now and forever more without her. I’ll bring ear buds, downloaded podcasts and kleenex.

“I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought; the second a good word; and the third, a good deed.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

May my walks be replete with such steps.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

The Perfect Place, The Right Time

“And the road is plenty wide and welcoming,
speaking out to all,
This is the perfect place,
this is the right time,
this is where wish becomes possible.”
Susan Frybort, “On the Road of Great Wonder,”
in Hope is a Traveler, 2015

This is the opening quote to a story I wrote about walking my Camino last year. Always intent to write more about that month long experience, one over twenty years in the making, but having felt stuck for months, I enrolled in an eight-week online course beautifully taught by local author and scholar Jenna Butler and hosted by Calgary’s Alexandra Writers’ Centre. I’d reached out to Jenna with hope that by using the sensory explorations and writing prompts in “Chronicling Our Personal Relationship with Place,” I’d be inspired to write. I took as kismet – “the perfect place… the right time… where wish becomes possible” – the course’s starting date as it coincided with the evening before I began walking my Camino a year ago. To deepen into the course’s invitation, I posted on social media a few select Camino photos and salient recollections from each day I had walked last year, May 10-30. Too, I’ve been drawn to learn about some literary forms that I thought would lend themselves to my vision of combining the reworked lyric essays from last year’s Portuguese Coastal Camino blog, my journal entries, and those from the guide book provided by Portugal Green Walks, and my newly emerging poetry.

Half way through the course and my hesitation to begin has persisted. I’ve felt afraid to take the first step, not knowing what I’m getting myself into, or where this is going to take me, despite having reached Santiago a year ago. I’ve wondered if Camino doesn’t want, or isn’t yet ready for me to walk on or with him again. Yes, I am animating Camino, doing so out of reverence and regard for its centuries of history, people and their traditions, cultures and stories, and the more than human elements continuously making for its beauty and its challenges. And yes, I admit, maybe it’s simply me who hasn’t been ready, with it simply being a matter of not yet the right time. Then, after a few hours over the past month preparing – compiling my blog posts into a single document and adding my recent Instagram posts; propping up on my writing table my photo journal with its cover photo of me standing in front of the cathedral the day I arrived; stacking beside me my travel journal, course notes, and Portugal Green Walks’ self guided program notes – this week I finally lifted open my laptop and began. While I’d thought I’d use for incentive the June 30th chapbook submission deadline with a literary journal who recently published one of my poems, given the experimental nature of this undertaking, braiding together from several sources, and wanting to embody in my writing now how I walked then – sauntering to enjoy the vistas – I’ve decided wisely let that go.

Albeit reluctantly and with regret, I’m using the gift of time received by finally having conceded a week ago that I must step away from playing pickleball. A game I enjoy for its physicality and camaraderie with women, who like me, love being fully engaged in life. A game my chiropractor has suggested I may need to sit out as for the past three months I’ve been nursing an injured metatarsal. Despite regular appointments, taking a few days off from the game here and there, icing, and copious applications of extra strength Volartin, it’s been one healing step forward and several back. Compounding this is the pressure, with worry enough to wake me, of needing to seriously train for another long walk in September. This one not a saunter. This one strenuous with nearly double the daily kilometers over sixteen days, and steady ascents and descents. All a natural consequence of aging, this has brought its own grief as I face such realities. My foot and body as whole are feeling better, and I’m hoping this, too, will become “the perfect place… the right time… where wish becomes possible.”

***

As I’ve written here before, the writerly life is a lonely one, rife with rejection. Just this morning I received two. On the up side, I finally received a print copy of the local poetry anthology featuring both my photo as cover and poem inside, and in the past month, several other photos have been accepted by literary journals making me wonder if I should shift my genre!

As it’s been several weeks since I posted a Monday morning blog, by way of update, our dear Annie dog has had a remarkable recovery from the stroke she suffered the end of April. So much so, I call her our “Lazarus,” as it truly feels she rose from a near death listlessness during those early days. Today, she has returned to all the ways in which she is uniquely Annie to and with us, including interrupting my work at noon by persistently placing her big right front paw on my lap or keyboard. Now I kiss it and her in ever welcome gratitude.

walking with Annie “Bright Eyes”, June 5, 2023

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. May this post find you on roads plenty wide and welcoming.

Of The Empire

Of The Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Mary Oliver
Red Bird (2008)

I collect poems that appear in my inbox or on social media. This is one posted by wise elder Parker Palmer in mid March of this year. Is it prescience? Or simply another rendering of Mary Oliver’s astute skills in observation already so evident in her poetry situated in the natural world. I imagine is was cited often in the months following the 2016 American presidential election. It continues to have remarkable resonance there as states swing to vote in politicians and legislation undermining and undoing so much of what we have considered the hard won, inviolable rights of the historically vulnerable, marginalized and disenfranchised.

Today, I think it apropos for my province, mere days after the election that gave to the woman who took over her party’s leadership on a no confidence vote, the mandate to proceed with her view of things. A woman who, just days before, was found guilty of violating the province’s conflict of interest act. A woman who, in the first months of assuming leadership, was publicly apologizing for every verbal gaffe she’d made speaking, apparently without thinking. Or was she revealing a heart that was “small, and hard, and full of meanness.” A heart that regrettably becomes so shaped by empire. A heart that beats in my own chest unless I chose to cultivate otherwise.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

To The Sea

TO THE SEA
Sometimes when you start to ramble
or rather when you feel you are starting to ramble
you will say Well, now I’m rambling
though I don’t think you ever are.
And if you ever are I don’t really care.
And not just because I and everyone really
at times falls into our own unspooling
—which really I think is a beautiful softness
of being human, trying to show someone else
the color of all our threads, wanting another to know
everything in us we are trying to to show them—
but in the specific,
in the specific of you
here in this car that you are driving
and in which I am sitting beside you
with regards to you
and your specific mouth
parting to give way
to the specific sweetness that is
the water of your voice
tumbling forth—like I said
I don’t ever really mind
how much more
you might keep speaking
as it simply means
I get to hear you
speak for longer.
What was a stream
now a river.

– Anis Mojgani –

Once a month I have a Zoom call with a dear friend who lives near the sea. She and I have known each other for several years, a decade at least, maybe two. We’ll check in with each other and then see where our conversation takes us. Always into depth and meaning, relationship and emergence. Always held within a container of love and deep regard for each other. Always remarkable the interior landscapes we can traverse in an hour.

This poem arrived the morning after our most recent conversation. I love it for so beautifully capturing, despite being written by a man, the way my friend and I ramble together, often saying, just as the character in the poem, “Well, now I’m rambling,” and just like the poet’s response, “I don’t think you ever are.” Inevitably, because of the container we’ve created, one where vulnerability is welcome, curiosity cherished, and questions allowed to rest without answers, I come away with clarity, the results of which often show up in these posts.

Once in another Zoom conversation, this time with other dear women friends who live by the sea, I came to know that perhaps this way of talking with each other is simply, particularly, the feminine way of being with each other and in the world. A couple of years ago during early pandemic days, the day after that call, I emailed them:

“Many times it seems my thinking is foggy and lazy, that it isn’t “cogent” or coherent, that I can’t put together a compelling argument of defense. And then it came to me, this is the feminine way – to feel my way through a depth of complexity that is dark and foggy, that isn’t necessarily, yet, cogent nor coherent...You wrote to me, gifted me, once with the invocation that I recognize with increasing vividness that I know what I know, that find myself less and less inclined to self-doubt, meekness and hesitation.“

This rambling, vulnerably feeling one’s way through the depths of complexity and uncertainty is the “unspooling” described by Anis Mojgani, that “beautiful softness/of being human, trying to show someone else/the color of all our threads, wanting another to know/everything in us we are trying to to show them.”

I love that I can be this way with another, because it helps me be this way more with myself – soft, vulnerable, vivid and alive in the unknowing, the curiosity, the questions.

May we each have in our lives such persons with whom to ramble.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

A Burst of Light

*a fluke becomes magic on Erg Chebbi, Morocco’s sub Sahara*

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes – everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor.”

– Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and other essays

When I read this quote earlier in the month, I thought, “That’s a powerful manifesto… just what I need to claim for myself for my birthday and beyond.”

I’d been home a week from my three weeks in Morocco, basking in the full sensory experience that IS Morocco. I had enjoyed myself immensely – a feeling that’s lingered now a month, delighted with my decision to have returned. I felt deeply content with how I’d shown up – not by bringing the best of me, but by bringing all of me. I used my skills to navigate some tricky dynamics, to ask for what I needed, and to offer what I could, including having “an answered prayer” in a room mate, simpatico were we in many ways. (Not everyday do you have a room mate who suggests we meditate daily.)

*morning meditation, Errachidia, Morocco – photo credit Kimberly Wise Tyrrell*

Travelling solo meant I needed to stretch beyond several comfort points, and while I had some inevitable moments of anxiety, scared even the final morning in Marrakech when my driver never showed, I tended to myself with care, regularly checking in, quietly reassuring myself. My boundaries were intact, yet flexible.

I’ve learned over years of travelling that my creative practices – photography and journaling with the occasional small painted vignette – give me both wonderful personalized memories and in the moment help ground and grok the rich day to day experiences. As I’ve upped my photography skills in the last year, my journal entries lapsed. So this week I filled them in using ticket stubs, brochures, business cards and photos to prompt my recollections. A touch of water colour to brighten the text heavy pages already embellished with washi tape.

In short, I came home, to use a somewhat passé, admittedly overused description, feeling empowered. Ready to keep on living the rest of my life until “I go like a fucking meteor,” just as I’ve long imagined myself coming in.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

*“glamping” in Erg Chebbi, Morocco’s sub Sahara – photo credit: Rebecca Sugarman*

Wisdom Without Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

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