Walking – Page 3 – A Wabi Sabi Life

Seeing in the Dark

“The deepest work is usually the darkest.”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves”

“I haven’t seen anything from A Wabi Sabi Life lately,” remarked my friend in our long overdue, much awaited Zoom call. A myriad of reasons, excuses even, offered. And as I sit down in my studio Sunday night after dinner, my typical time to craft a post, what thread to pull from the dark interior knot in hopes of loosening its vague, inarticulate, persistent grip?

“A brave woman, a wisening woman, will develop the poorest psychic land, for if she builds only on the best land of her psyche, she will have for a view the least of what she is.”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves”

Do I write again about friendship? How my initial post rang true for so many women, coincidentally finding several at the time questioning their own friendships? How its precipitant, a letter written to a friend, sank like a stone? Its “no response” response – a risk I weighed yet chose to take – now a knot in my heart tied tight with other friendships that have waned or ended this year.

“So do not be afraid to investigate the worst. It only guarantees increase of soul power through fresh insights and opportunities for re-visioning one’s life and self anew.”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves”

Do I wonder how I’ll work with feedback given to me from a publisher considering my chapbook submission and why it was refused? Feedback that when taken into consultation with a writer I hold in high regard, she immediately understood and pointed to numerous examples where I hadn’t written myself into my poems. Another risk I had to take: to submit those poems and then to ask for help to understand. Profound and vulnerable, I sense this is as much about my poetry as it is about allowing myself to fully show up – on the page, in my poems, in my life.

“It is in this psychic kind of land development that Wild Woman shines.”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves”

Do I wax majestic on the memories of my solo month in Italy, fresh with every step I take walking, especially on Saturdays with my Camino group? Poles in hand, boots on feet, pack on back. Or every Italian inspired meal made, Moka pot Americano sipped? It all comes back viscerally even though the skyline is urban, there’s ice in the river, and I don’t hear much Italian spoken anywhere. I finished my photo journal last week, reveling in my photos and extracting from the posts I’d fortuitously written every day on Facebook. And just today I returned to the pages of my Morocco photo journal. Reading my travel diary and selecting photos, I felt a much-needed surge in love for my intrepid self. And now considering my writing, with several poems the result of my journeys, there’s a question I hold even closer, “How far do I have to travel to find myself?”

There’s the ever present, though softened ache in missing Annie, five months passed. Woven in now with the passing last week of my mother-in-law. Anticipated at ninety-eight years, to her family she had been lost twice due to Alzheimer’s attacking her memory and ability to communicate over the past several years, and now finally her body. I’ll make the trip this week to attend her funeral as Sig is tending to health issues that, while thankfully being resolved, have wearied, and episodically worried us since August. Grief weighs. I feel its silent tension in my body.

And then there’s the grief and trauma in the world “writ large,” unleashed again with manmade and natural upheaval and destruction (maybe they are one in the same?) taking up a lot of my “mind space,” to quote a friend. To quote another, in the title of a talk he gave last week, “What does love have to say at a time of war?”, I ponder this deeply. With beloved Muslim friends with Arabic backgrounds, and beloved Jewish friends, all of whom are reeling with the daily horrors of it all…and too, in my city with its significant Ukrainian demographic, again dear friends, people who now feel they are being forgotten by the world while their own horrors persist, I try to find and walk the middle way. I think of Rumi – “beyond right doing and wrongdoing there is a field and I will meet you there.” Or as my friend recommends, a higher field to see with depth and breadth a way through the entrenched complexities. It feels like the only way, and yet how? Who takes the first step walking into that dark field? Does it matter who, simply that it be?

“She is not afraid of the darkest dark, in fact, she can see in the dark.”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Shimmering Memories

It’s winter.
I don’t think this is a premature pronouncement for given last week and the forecast for the next, temperatures are hovering at freezing or below with wind making it feel colder.

We have snow.
It is not melting. As is the way, I went to bed last Sunday night to wake Monday morning to the balcony lip edged white while our laurel leaf willows remain fully leafed. A seasonal oxymoron.

Those three days of outdoor pickleball that helped me land after a month of summer, being outdoors all day, every day for thirty days, are a memory as nets are now down and indoor courts filled. I went back to aquafitness last week. While I love how I feel after the workout, I’m not sure how I’ll fare wet in winter. In twenty plus days it’s lovely. In twenty below that’s another story. I missed Friday’s class… just too damn cold after having walked 8 km on Thursday in a deceptive wind that chilled me to the core. Cold hands, the bells palsied side of my face especially impacted. It meant I didn’t walk with my Camino group on Saturday. But yesterday the sun shone, the temperature rose a few degrees above zero with little wind, so I ventured forth.

Intent to do my best to maintain the fitness I gained this summer and trekking in Italy, I knew I needed to resume walking in the neighbourhood. Without Annie. I’d been avoiding this all summer, using my river valley training as a necessary though convenient distraction. Yesterday I woke up feeling sad. Met my dear grieving friend for breakfast and once home, after a couple more hours’ avoidance, I took my grieving self by the hand, ear buds and downloaded poetry podcasts at the ready, and walked one of our favourite routes through the golf course, now void of golfers and geese, with ponds frozen and fairways white.

For the first while I listened to Padraig recite a poem, interview a poet, and then recognizing this, too, was a distraction, I listened to myself, my heart, the wind, my grief. I remembered all the spots Annie would sniff, and how she’d wait for me to capture a photo. I wondered about a photo this time, to mark the day, the occasion, but nothing shimmered. Except my memories of walking with Annie.

*Annie’s right paw – her signature, my memory*

Tonight, I’m on the docket to read several poems at Edmonton’s Stroll of Poets monthly gathering. I remember years ago attending to listen to a now deceased friend read hers. With ten minutes allocated to each of four readers, I’ve chosen four, one recently composed as tribute to Annie and my realization that in an ironic twist of fate, her sudden passing in June gave me unfettered time to train for walking the Via di Francesco. Another poem, inspired by a dream, tells the story of the grandfather I never knew.

The veil is thin. I find myself thinking of friends who have passed…friends who are grieving the passing of mothers and sisters…ancients and ancestors…angels…Annie. Wars that continue to devastatingly claim thousands of innocent lives…thousands of children.

A friend enquired and I can say that yes, my molecules are settling, integrating, recalibrating. I’m grateful to be picking up life’s threads that needed to be put to the side, that the words I felt had died with Annie’s passing are now returning.

And with this poem I am further consoled:

BLESS ALL BRAVE THINGS

the prayer I cannot pray.
the words that rest unspoken.
the feelings that can’t be named.
the grief that bursts wide open.

the cry that turned to laughter.
the smile that broke the ice.
the pain that was cut off.
the poem I couldn’t write.

life, bless all the forming things
that escape or remain in me;
those resisting to be seen,
and the ones that risk coming out
as brave beginnings.
Susan Frybort, Look to the Clearing

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

*my favorite river tree* *– still hanging on*

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.

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.

How to Walk an Old Dog

HOW TO WALK AN OLD DOG

Give up on your agenda – this
is exploration, not exercise.
She can’t hear you calling her on,
but then, you can’t smell whatever
is so intriguing about that clump of grass,
so maybe just relax. Stop counting steps.
Don’t even count birds, or minutes
or the things you have left to do
on your pressing and eternal list.
Move gently into the immeasurable.
Stop to greet children. Consider
that the most fascinating thing in the world
could be your neighbor’s garbage can.
Observe without judgement
what is near to hand – even if what you see
is the halt in her step, the way
her spine has begun to show. Walk
just long enough to remember
that love is not an antidote to death,
but loss is not the opposite of life.

– Lynn Ungar, May 2, 2023 –

Over the past year at least, I’ve been saying that walking Annie is no longer exercise. It’s fresh air, the gift of being outside noticing life around us. That I may walk 10,000 steps, but certainly not aerobically. And I’ve long known for a dog, walking is “scent shopping,” so I best be prepared for meandering. But in the last two weeks, the gift of this oh-so-perfectly-timed poem, could not be truer.

Some of you might know that two weeks ago yesterday – after our morning walk, treats in the kitchen, sleeping…errrr…supervising our work in the office, and then going outside to her kennel when the house cleaners arrived – Annie suddenly was not ok. Disoriented, barely able to walk let alone stand upright, shallow breathing, drooling, incontinent – the ER vet clinic gave us a diagnosis of THC poisoning, an increasingly common incident given our carelessness with roaches and edibles. We were given a prognosis, took her in to see our vet the following morning, who confirmed the diagnosis, but by Sunday her condition was not improving. No appetite nor eating, so we bought electrolytes for her water (on the suggestion from a Facebook friend who saw my posting). Her walk had not improved, in fact we were seeing more weakening. But of most concern was seeing her paw at her right eye, and when I did the reflex test I’d seen the vets do, she didn’t blink, leading us to believe she’d suffered vision loss. A return visit to the vet on Monday morning confirmed my first, and our worst suspicions: she’d most likely had a stroke. “She’ll not live to 17,” the vet said, referring to Annie’s predecessor, Peggy, who died late into her 17th year. And with further examination, and seeing Annie’s lethargy, I wondered if she’d last the week.

After deliberation, we decided to pass on the neuro consult, not wanting to add further distress to Annie with the battery of tests required pre-exam. We know she is happiest with us, and so we’d keep her home, tend to her best we could, hope for the best, and pray for a miracle.

This is my “Lazarus” story, because with every passing day, Annie has returned to herself, engaging in all the patterns and endearing ways she is who she is, with us. Looking eagerly for me to get her leash to walk, barking at the neighbors (fulfilling her job as guard dog), finally eating regularly with creative concoctions of smelly canned fish to pique her interest, remembering to remind us to fetch her favourite dessert of dentistix, and following me down into the office where she takes her place on her supervisor’s cushion. The big right front paw she would persistently, heavily place on my keyboard at noon to signal lunch and a walk…the one I would curse for interrupting my work…that has been slow to return being the side that became weakened. But tonight, she placed it on me as I napped, reminding me of dinner time. It comes. I pray it comes in the office, on my keyboard, and I will kiss and welcome it back.

Annie is a bird dog, smelling her particular stock in trade. We think her loss of vision and diminished sense of smell have been the most disorienting for her, with her hearing less for the past couple of years. Sleeping more than usual with the trauma of it all, and the neurological stress has been exhausting. At yesterday’s chiropractic session, we learned that dogs have the ability to reroute blood to injured areas of the brain. We’re hopeful that as we see her eating and sniffing with more precision and focus outside and during our walks, coming into the kitchen while we cook and eat dinner, her scenting is returning. We pray, too, that her eyesight might improve as pressure comes off the optic nerve, because the eye itself is in good health.

In the last week, I’ve read of several friends having to say goodbye to their beloved fur companions. Each time I feel my heart squeeze. With Annie being our sixth dog, this is a heartbreak I know too well, yet wouldn’t trade for the joy each brings, the love I feel, that grows with each one, in return. Lynn Ungar writes it one way. Mary Oliver in her volume Dog Songs, writes it another: “We would do anything to keep them with us and to keep them young”[1].

At thirteen years, walking slower, needing my help to be lifted onto the bed, and now ensuring she makes it up and down the stairs safely, with this health crisis, I know Annie isn’t young, and that I can’t keep her forever. I am simply so thankful to have her with us now, for as long as now is.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. And deep gratitude to you who replied to my posting on Facebook. Your love, thoughts and prayers have helped immeasurably.

[1] “Dog Talk” in Dog Songs, 2013, 115.

Aunt Leaf

AUNT LEAF
Needing one, I invented her —
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I’d call into the leaves,
and she’d rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸,

and we’d travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker —

two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish —
and all day we’d travel.

At day’s end she’d leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she’d slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;
or she’d hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream,
this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

– Mary Oliver –
Twelve Moons

While never naming nor summoning a great-great aunt from among the trees, my earliest memory is of gazing up into the spring green canopies of maple and chestnut, where placed in my buggy to nap, I’d be lulled to sleep by their fluttering leaves, the play of dappled light, and the hum of cars passing by. Those maples surrounded my great gran’s home on the street hemming the mighty Niagara River, while the chestnuts, with their lacy pyramids of pink and white blossoms and glossy brown nuts hidden behind green prickly shells, held court over the fence and in the backyard of our main floor apartment, it, too, on that same river street.

A small Canadian town, across the river from the bustle of a big American city, both trees and river became my touchstones, providing a grounding for the inner and outer bustle. It’s only as I’ve grown older that I realized the necessity of that gift to my well being, that I would have known them to be, claimed them to be my friends.

While reading this poem, wishing I’d had the imagination then to have conjured a friend made out of leaves, maybe it was simply a matter of being inarticulate and diffuse. Maybe imagination was always at play, given my natural affinity for always noticing trees as I walk with Annie, or ride shotgun, and knowing that sitting in my yard surrounded by trees has been healing post surgery and illness. Maybe too, I’ve had my own Aunt Leaf all this time, inviting me to wander the world, and walk in circles wide.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

The Destination Never Arrives

“trekking in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains” – photo credit: Sharon Gilbert

“To journey and to be transformed by the journeying is to be a pilgrim.“
Mark Nepo

A week from now I’ll be a year older and closer to closing in on a new decade, my 8th. THIS IS A STAGGERING REALIZATION. One I only came to several weeks ago when anticipating the women with whom I’d be traveling through Morocco. With the exception of one and our tour leader, we were all in our 6th, 7th, and 8th decades… fit, active, engaged in life, mostly retired or pursuing encore careers, well traveled, even if that simply meant in our own neighborhoods. So yes, I’m in my sixties and still will be next week, but this actually does translate to my 7th decade. Obvious for you, but a reframing that had escaped me.

Home a week, I’ve observed how this journey – traveling alone both to and from Morocco, arriving a day early in Casablanca without knowing anyone, and extending my stay in Marrakech several days once the tour had concluded and everyone else was homeward bound or extending their travels to other countries – with some of its requisite and complex inner and outer navigations – strengthened my confidence to discern and clarify boundaries, speak my truth, and not give away carefully considered intentions and plans. Embodied and illuminated by the act of solo traveling, these capacities are, too, the boon of aging, arriving at the solid ground of greater self acceptance – warts, quirks, idiosyncrasies, contradictions, and all. Able to name and claim:

“I’m not here to fix anyone.
I’m ready to honor my sensitive nature.
Taking care of my energy is my priority.
Saying no is a healthy way to set boundaries.
Self-care is my path to attracting amazing people.
I’m a super feeler, therefore I have a big heart.
I don’t owe anyone explanations why I feel this way.
My sensitivity is my strength and a source of intuition.”
Jane_lightworker, Empath Mantras at The Soul Journey with Sarah Moussa

Too, how I am showing up is a deepening clarification, a further consolidation and integration of the gifts and challenges from my Camino, now approaching its first anniversary. That journey is never far from my thoughts, living daily into the truth that the Camino continues to cook one long after having reached the destination in Santiago…paradoxically, the destination that never arrives.

Today is my first time posting a Monday blog in months. When I signed off in mid January, I only knew I needed to tend to the nuances of an emerging, inner, imaginary conversation:

Once again, it’s apparent to me that the stuff of my wabi sabi life is swirling inside, needing its time to sort and settle. After my new year’s post wherein I realized – the result of another episode of early morning insomnia – that I simply didn’t know much about how I stood on this threshold, I didn’t post my Monday blog last week, and am not inclined to push myself to produce one for this Monday, or beyond. For the time being, it’s my own inner “imaginary conversation” to which I will pay my attention, not yet to be mined for here.

I rest easier knowing I’m not one to procrastinate, but rather am becoming more familiar, in an embodied way, with living in the messy inchoate middle. That place I have named “before, beneath and beyond words.” That place where I become a conscious partner engaged with Life living itself.

Yet during those months I found myself well engaged with words. While not posting longer pieces, my regular Friday photo and poem posts invited shorter reflections as I shared why I’d chosen the poem and-or what it evoked. Then I surprised myself by submitting multiple poems to over twenty literary journals, entering several poetry competitions, and refining my collection for publication. As I wrote here days before departing for Morocco, in a post titled “True to Path,” I won a contest, had a photo chosen for a poetry anthology cover, will be published in several journals, and the anthology for which I wrote the foreward and chapter section poems has been accepted by an international publisher. Now April, National Poetry Month around the world, I’ll return to my desk to write words, maybe the ones that describe travel’s gift of new impressions, acknowledge a simple noticing and attention paid, heal a wound, light a fire, bring joy.

Staying true to path.
The destination that never arrives.
Naming and claiming the birthday to be celebrated.
A new dance around the sun begun.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

“embracing the boon” on the terrace of Morocco’s Kasbah du Toubkal – photo credit: Sharon Gilbert

The Pilgrim

THE PILGRIM

When you return from a long journey
air sweet with lilac and unfurled green
then you fall to your knees
and become gratitude’s pilgrim.
You were given the way at birth.
Given blue fields and loam.
Given an open throat, wild orchids,
a path lit by milky stars.
You were given desire,
sweet darkness of the body,
white hum in the bone.

It’s not the departure you long for,
nor the finish, with its thick incense,
tired feet and weeping.
It is the quiet loneliness in between,
When memory marries wind
and you are pure light. Walking.
One foot in front of the other.
You cannot speak of this place.
The way you cannot speak of grace
or what holds you to this world.
How at this moment you can only stand up
and move toward the light of home.

– Rosemary Griebel –
YES (2011)

Last week, listening to a past episode of The Road Home on my radio station CKUA, I heard my friend Rosemary recite three of her poems from this collection, YES. Her lovely voice, together with the background music selected by host Bob Chelmick made for several minutes of exquisite listening pleasure. I first met Rosemary virtually, and then in person when we both attended last November’s weekend workshop with our beloved Irish poet, Pádraig Ó Tuama. Knowing I’d see her, I brought my copy of her book for her to sign. It was there I learned how we are kin, not only in our shared love of words, but also in our both having walked the Camino de Santiago. It occurred to me while listening to Rosemary read last week, that I needed to feature here, in my Friday photo and poem post, some of the local poets whose love of words I share, to uplift those “prophets in my own land,” so to speak.

I’ve written here how the Camino does its work; on me, from the moment I made my decision and deposit a year ago December to walk, but more so upon my return. This past December I took some time to make the photo journal of my walk. Too, I wrote a short story, A Creative Walks the Portuguese Coastal Camino, drawing on my Camino blog posts, for both the Canadian Company of Pilgrims and Sage-ing: The Journal of Creative Aging. And I had the lovely opportunity to talk about my walk and its impacts, both to support a fellow doing his Master degree in Tourism, exploring the transformative gifts walking a non religious Camino, and on the Ellipsis Thinking podcast, “Paying Attention,” hosted by my dear friend, Greg Dowler-Coltman.

Rosemary’s poem speaks to me of so much that was my Camino. That in the planning, the going and the return, I was “gratitude’s pilgrim”… how the “quiet loneliness” while walking became my necessary and bittersweet companion… my “tired feet and weeping” with relief at our safe arrival…and since home, remembering the light, the grace, the beauty. Thank you, Rosemary.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

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