There are those who want the world to remain on its current path. This is not only unacceptable, but it is painfully unimaginative. For the beauty of our generation is we are uniquely situated to achieve what so many in this world currently consider impossible. How exquisitely beautiful it will be to watch the current narrative go down in flames, then witness poetics & phoenix rise from the ashes.
Embers, ancestors, and angels await us, loved ones. Forward.
– Mark Gonzales – In Times of Terror, Wage Beauty, 2014
I’d forgotten I had on my poetry shelf this eloquent “collage of visions.” In response to last week’s attempt to find enough words to notice and name one of the current global narratives literally imploding and exploding, a friend, in her comment, referenced the book, one I had gifted her years back. Immediately retrieving it, thumbing through its simple and beautifully designed pages, I knew I wanted to uplift and amplify Mark’s message and intention here today. Quoting from the back cover:
In Times of Terror, Wage Beauty is a meticulously crafted series of ideas in tweet sized digestible prose. It serves as a personal guide to social change makers in the 21st century navigating complex social systems by highlighting advanced approaches to healing and global wellness.
A quick early morning scroll todayon social media and I’m reminded it’s International Women’sDay. Aware of feeling cynical and crusty, perhaps the result of many very early mornings arriving at my desk to write, I’m less inclined to jump on the bandwagon and share any of its memes or create my own. As with so many of these socially-politically designated days, often created, if not co-opted, by the power brokers to highlight and assuage their own interests, or by corporations to make money, I’m tired and disillusioned with the narrative that has become a “painfully unimaginative” rhetoric. I need a narrative like Mark’s. One that insists we not live in a world where any of us needs to shout to be heard, seen, and valued (26).
Instead, a narrative that encourages the simple yet essential acts of creativity – dreams, laughter, love, and imagination (51). One that heals the hearts of those forced from their homelands by centering on their beauty (29). One that remembers stories as ceremony, vessels for ancestors, memories, futures, and the vehicle by which the divine is engaged (41). One that reminds me “now is not the time to be timid” (21).
“…Then there is the anger that leaves us shaken and shaking because a sacred trust is being treacherously broken; because those who have done no harm are being gratuitously harmed; because those who have too little now have even less, and those who already have much too much now have even more; because egregious wrongs are being perpetrated, and the perps don’t even admit that the wrongs they’re perpetrating are wrong.
What has happened—is happening now, here, and everywhere—is not merely a sin and a shame. It is an outrage, and outrage calls for rage, rage that ought to come out. Anger in such instances is not merely permissible. It is obligatory, imperative.
Thus, the imperative: “Be angry.” Faced with an outrage, anger is the price we pay for paying attention. It is the rage that ought to come out, because, when faced with an outrage, it is a sin not to be angry.”
Allen Dwight Callahan from”A Surprising Command,” in Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, Thursday, February 29, 2024
Most any time of every year in recorded history, anywhere in the world, on this precious Earth again soaked with blood, sacred trusts broken, egregious wrongs done.
This is not my usual Friday feature of photo and poetry. Yesterday afternoon, I’d written and scheduled one to drop at 0700 today. But sitting last night at a phenomenal concert featuring Canadian tour de forceAllison Russell and her powerhouse band, opened by the equally remarkable Indigenous singer-songwriter Aysanabee, my thoughts kept turning the news of another massacre of more innocent people, this time starving people waiting for food to feed their families. And for those many moments and minutes of distraction – the price I paid for paying attention elsewhere -feeling numb, not yet able to access my own outrage, I knew I’d need to get up early and prepare another post.
As “luck” would have it, at 0500, tea steeping, I opened my email to find the daily meditation from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, this week’s theme, “When Anger Meets Love.” Thankful for another’s words, when the most I could muster are the dates above that I’ve been tracking this week, and the context for this post. When the most I could offer is the space here, without opining, to imagine the visceral horror and heartbreak of people like me, to pay with this kind of attention, until the anger comes.
#holyoutrage, much love and kindest regards, dear friends.
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?”
women on the wild edge
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”
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.
sea buckthorn path
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.
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.
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
– Joy Harjo –
One of several, this poem by past Poet Laureate of the United States, was a gift to its subscribers from the Poetry Foundation in celebration of American Thanksgiving. Today is the day after, the formal kick-off to the holiday season, and Black Friday, another American invention, where for the lastmany weeks social media has run rampant with ads boasting big savings on just about everything imaginable. Curious that what comes to my mind as I type is remembering within days of 9-11, then President Bush telling Americans to go shopping to deal with their unspeakable shock and yet to be processed, still processing, grief.
A couple of days ago I made an “artist’s date” with a friend before going out to lunch together. We visited the Alberta Council for the Ukrainian Arts, recently relocated on the edges of our downtown core – desperate for post-pandemic revitalization – due to the demolition of its previous home in a sweet, enlivening neighborhood strip mall. Home, too, for a cozy family friendly café; a corner store “famous” city-wide for its fried chicken; a chic furniture and home décor shop; the place to go for small appliance repairs and replacement parts; a Buddhist bookstore…the lifeblood of a community soon to be bled and bulldozed for urban “development.” Yes, I feel grief about this.
I wanted to go to the centre to see Ruslan Kurt‘s “DOORS“, an art installation of doors taken from Ukrainian homes bombed, torched, and shot at by invading Russian soldiers.
February 24, 2022. Nine months to the day of this American Thanksgiving. Then the day the world, as the people of Ukraine and beyond knew it, ended perhaps at their kitchen tables. Most certainly at their front doors.
Eating lunch at a café table with my friend, she of Ukrainian descent on her mother’s side, I remarked on the juxtaposition of these battered doors within the art centre’s maker space – women chatting as they embroidered, and stitched quilts, sewed at machines set for creating, surrounded by walls hung with colourful Ukrainian art. How symbolic of life: on one hand, its cycles of creation and destruction, on the other, how in the space of these nine unimaginable months, so much has filled in and taken over and away my attention from this invasion and its deepening catastrophic impacts now come winter. Taken over and away by a continuous barrage of catastrophe, terror, trauma, and grief.
Too, remembering the ethical conundrum of Thanksgiving in North America with itshistory of colonization, enslavement and displacement. A history of catastrophe, terror, trauma, and grief that persists.
So this post – post Thanksgiving and pre the advent of the holyday season with its cross cultural celebrations of light returning – is an invitation to pause…to remember…to return my attention…to imagine the tables where “we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.”
Sometimes things don’t go, after all, from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail. Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war, elect an honest man; decide they care enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor. Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to. The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
Sheenagh Pugh
Parker Palmer, wise elder, posted this a couple of days ago – his pithy response to the USA midterm elections. I’m sharing it today because I like how it echoes my first post back after my writing hiatus wherein I uplifted Hafiz’s notion that our efforts add to the universe – a message I personally need to remember and feel needs to uplifted and amplified continuously for us all.
OUR EFFORTS ADD TO THE UNIVERSE. Mine. Yours. Ours. Simple. Elegant. Complex. Messy. The Universe does not judge. It simply needs our effort. So let’s get at it! One simple step…and let’s see where it takes us.
Portuguese Coastal Camino Stage 2: Vila do Conde to Apulia (This post in lieu of Friday’s usual photo and poem.)
“Travel is travail. The ancient Greeks taught that obstacles were the tests of gods, and the medieval Japanese believed that the sorrows of travel were challenges to overcome and transform into poetry and song.”
Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage, 1998
Quest. Pilgrimage. Hero’s journey. Each entails encountering and overcoming challenges and ordeals. Religious historian Huston Smith in Phil Cousineau’s The Art of Pilgrimage (1998) describes four aspects to pilgrimage: singleness of purpose; freedom from distraction; ordeal or penance; and offerings.
And so it was that on this 20 km, second stage to Apulia, blisters made their appearance. Given my feet would walk me to Santiago, I took their care seriously, each day rubbing them with foot glide, taping hot spots, and yes, even talking to them with words of encouragement and gratitude for their strength and resiliency. The last time I’d travelled internationally, I was recovering from an excruciating case of plantar fasciitis. Then, working with my chiropractor, putting indoor pickleball on hiatus, and packing a couple of pairs of shoes and Yamuna foot balls, I succeeded in walking pain free for three weeks. So yes, I took my feet and their care seriously.
This time I’d bought and broken in shoes a half size larger to account for swelling, and brought umpteen pairs of socks, finally arriving at the right combination of cushion, wicking, and comfort with Darn Tough merino light-weight hikers, socks that arrived just days before departure. My hefty but compact “foot care” kit included several sizes of COMPEED plasters, Rock Tape, moleskin, needles and thread, tweezers, scissors, antiseptic wipes, polysporin, bandaids, and while I was prepared, short of entirely taping each foot, I had no idea until that day of walking across varied surfaces, in growing heat, for six hours, what would be the rub and where the result. Rub identified – the outside heel edge of my insoles – and resolved with moleskin, several days later I was pain free and simply needed the COMPEED to do its work.
Apart from myriad details, and the hours and energy involved in planning and preparing for this first post pandemic international trip – researching equipment and resources, designing my packing systems for easy access, “rehearsing” during my Saturday Camino walks – I made sure to reserve time the week before departure for two vivifying activities: embellishing the pages of my travel journal with washi tape borders (tape I’d found resembling Portuguese tiles) and “touchstone” inspirational quotes; and preparing tokens of gratitude to gift people along the Way, to enact and realize my intention of walking in appreciation and gratitude.
“When you leave home, you are a stranger, and a stranger is always feared. That is why the wise traveler carries gifts. To make a peace offering at every stop of a pilgrimage is to recognize the sacred nature of the journey with a deep personal purpose.”
Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage, 1998
I had discovered a collection of bronzed metal maple leaves – what could be more Canadian! – and golden elm leaves in my craft kit, a couple of cool swag pins from my radio station, and some other small tokens that I wrapped in colorful tissue and a sealed with floral stickers, making for little lightweight packets.
Paula fitting me
After returning to Lisbon’s famous glove store, Luvaria Ulisses (1925), to gift Paula, the delightful saleswoman who the day before had spent a good hour fitting and teaching us about the shop’s exquisite handmade collection – and making two sales! – I learned to always have some packets tucked in my purse to gift to the right person at the right time.
From my journal, May 11, 2022, STAGE 2: Vila do Conde to Apulia: “Another beautiful walk, so diverse as we passed thru morning residential neighborhoods with kids going to school, people stopping for morning coffee; then along the beach and back on the boardwalks. Delighted to meet some local women sitting in the sand, plucking and cleaning their harvest of sage-like greens (though not for eating, indicated with head shakes), and the kind fellow who interrupted painting the beach W/C for me to use (that morning coffee!). Learning I was walking the Camino, he regaled me with his own Camino stories and phone photos. I gifted him with a ‘Keep the Circle Strong’ pin which delighted me as much as him, seeing his surprise and joy. ‘I’ll put this on my Camino shelf,’ he smiled, wishing me ‘Bom Caminho.'”
I wrote Monday’s post days before the US Supreme Court voted to overrule Roe vs Wade, the historic federal legislation ensuring and safeguarding a woman’s right to choose. While I live in Canada, I know it to be both naïve and privileged to think such matters don’t affect me. The personal is political, a truth ever and exceedingly so.
When a friend said she couldn’t wait to begin her Camino to get away from it all – not an uncommon urge – her words gave me pause to consider. I knew I wasn’t walking to get away but rather to deepen into life as it presented itself. And so with “singleness of purpose,” and “freedom from distraction,” I remained tuned in enough to know about and walk with my feelings and prayers for:
the millions of people affected by storms that devastated Ontario and Quebec, news of which reached Portugal and Spain. I knew my nephew, a supervisor with Hydro One, would be leaving his young family to head up a team and taking as long as needed, would together undertake significant safety risks to repair transmission towers and poles to restore power.
the people of Buffalo, New York in the aftermath of a strategic, race related mass shooting. As my birthplace and always visually present in my childhood and youth having grown up across the river, and with family who have always lived there, the shock and grief felt by its people carried across the sea to me.
the families and community of Uvalde, Texas. What can I say that hasn’t been said, watching Americans I met walking the Way shake their heads in grief, with shame for the hundreds of school shootings and children killed in their country?
the ongoing devastation caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Again, no words.
Many mornings I’d be awakened early with powerful dreams seeded by the previous day’s events – near and far – and the “loosening” created by walking kilometers by and in the elements. Deserving of my attention, I’d be preoccupied and silent during breakfast and as I walked, working through to their wisdom. Too, daily tending to my body’s aches and blisters…navigating long distance family matters…and weighing heavy, the worry and risks of misjudged and insufficient preparations rubbed, creating its own blisters: insomnia, injury, illness…
Given my intention, walking the Camino – and now writing about it – I couldn’t disconnect from life, people, and the world around me. The paradoxical gift being that the weight of these ordeals kept me present in my body, on the path, in my life, and in the world I inhabit. Now home, some blisters have healed, some are callused. Others remain tender to the touch.
From my journal: “I wondered this morning that if by walking shorter stages, by ‘sauntering,’ enjoying the vistas, meeting people, taking it all in, if this is enough? Should I be carrying a full pack, walking longer stages? If that by allowing one to encounter and deepen into oneself, easefully, is this the true Camino experience? But as I write, I am answering my own question, and go back to why now and in this way? To walk in love and appreciation. To notice the beauty and encounter people. To go slow and easy…with de-light and in joy. And while I’ve yet to write a poem or paint a picture, I’m gathering the pearls of impressions to string together a beauty.”
“Only through a journey such as this could I come full circle in my life and touch something sacred that could revitalize my life.”
If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail, but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider— lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe — should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, 1998
Two weeks ago, wise elder Parker Palmer shared this poem with an incisive commentary on Russian president Putin’s “bloody, power-hungry invasion of Ukraine,” while imploring his American readers to demonstrate bravery by confronting the anti-democracy darkness wielding its way in their country. I would add, around the world.Moments ago, doing a quick scan of the today’s news, I read that over 400,000 Ukrainian citizens have been forcibly taken to Russia, many to be used as hostages in the battle for Kyiv. Too, that more than half of Ukraine’s children have been driven from their homes, with their mothers, to take refuge in neighboring countries. As I wrote last week, I hardly have words. What I do have is a silent scream that could shatter if I gave it full voice. So instead, I will do as Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes implored earlier this week, “Dear Brave Souls: Now would be the time for prayer that uses everything you’ve got: muscle, fervor, rigor, verve, pounding down and raising up…”
May we all be brave in such ways. May we be awake for the darkness around us is deep, lulling us back to sleep.
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
Mary Oliver, Devotions (2017)
“There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be.” Posted by a friend mere days before Russia invaded Ukraine, I saved this gem for its reminder, and the abundance of joy described, never imagining the mind-numbing poignancy of its prescience.
My writing here has been episodic, due in part to Russia’s horrific war on Ukraine, for which I am at a loss for words. So as you may have read, I have relied on those from others (again, my plug for Mark Gonzales’ In Times of Terror, Wage Beauty – please consider buying and sharing it far and wide.)
Too, I’m quite full of my own words, preparing a manuscript of poetry for publication, riding the slipstream created at the start of the new year, when I submitted 22 pages for a chapbook contest. Both longshots. Both labors of my love. Both my ways of fighting back. Both my ways of saying,
Beauty made from love matters makes a difference during days of such madness.
A Wabi Sabi Life 