Category: Writing

Our Joined Sorrows

Niagara’s old sycamores
sycamore bark

LANGUAGE OF LIGHT
Next to the garden beds I wait
while summer’s profusion wanes

the sycamores stand in unity rows
guarding a path for the recently dead

arboreal complexion of limbs and trunk
sentient camouflage in pale olive and tan

trees older than first-born stars
leaves shimmering in the language of light.

Diana Hayes, Language of Light, 2023

I’ve started my preparation for another autumn long walk in Italy. This time, a small women’s group walking a small portion of the ancient Via Francigena from San Miniato, Tuscany to Rome. No doubt obvious to you who follow me here and on social media, I am smitten with Italy, and am borrowing a page from a once friend who said there was something about returning repeatedly to the same place, to venture deeper in.

I feel good going into this summer’s training. Last year’s foot injury has healed. So, too, my heart – mostly – from Annie’s year-ago passing. Following the same program developed by my friend, I’m starting a month earlier and so feel an ease and confidence I didn’t last summer. Every other day, alternating with pickleball, and a rest day, my chiropractor approves.

Today it rained. I opted for a slow start hoping for the forecasted three-hour break in the showers. Eventually I decided to dress for the weather and set out with my new floral knee-length rain poncho. I “ruck,” meaning when I walk, I carry at least ten pounds of weight in my pack, use my poles and wear my hiking boots, and made of today an experiment in waterproofing and breathability. Better to test here than thousands of miles and another continent away.

Last year, my friend accompanied me on many walks. This year, plagued by her own chronic foot injury, I’ll be walking alone most days. And I’m quite OK with that, given my proven way, even in groups, of often walking solo, in silence, with my camera ever ready. And so it was, Tuesday and today (Thursday), I resumed my lapsed practice of listening to podcasts. Several On Being with Krista Tippett episodes, the last one featuring a conversation with poet, essayist, teacher, and community gardener Ross Gay on The Insistence of Joy. His closing words struck deep:

Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine —
what’s that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
I’m saying: What if that is joy?

Step by step, mulling his concluding words, that powerful question, as light showers grew heavier, I switched over to another of my favourite podcasts, Ellipsis Thinking, created and hosted by my dear friend, Greg Dowler-Coltman. In this episode a conversation with Saltspring Island poet Diana Hayes, the author of today’s chosen poem. Greg had gifted me with Diana’s chapbook, Language of Light, an exquisite collection borne of her near inconsolable grief for her mother’s too-soon death from breast cancer, the same cancer she suffered at the same time. As I listened, struck again by Greg’s talent for deep listening and thoughtful questions emerging from his innate and kind curiosity, I felt a kindredness with Diana’s way of being in the world and as a poet.

Bittersweet is what comes to mind. Knowing oneself and another when we are vulnerable in disclosing and joining our sorrows. The poignant, piercing joy that can result when we do.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

A Mixed Bag

(It’s Sunday night when I typically sit down and pen a post for Monday morning. I’ve just finished responding to time-sensitive emails and polishing my submission package for one more look-over by my editor before meeting the month end deadline. Clock ticking and keen to keep my blogging commitment, I sat for several minutes to see what might emerge. I haven’t tapped into my usual sources – podcasts while I walk, newsletters, something that pops on social media – and given my focus has been quite singular in preparing poetry, the creative pump needed priming. So once again from the draft folder, this one originally penned in April, still pertinent with some reworking enhanced by today’s photo memories in Jasper 2021.)

catastrophe real or imagined?
Athabasca Falls, Jasper Alberta, 2021

“…while the difficult parts of aging are unavoidable, we can try not to add to them. For example, I have seen, throughout my life, the tendency to rehearse some catastrophe and thereby live it several times. So, I think the first question is always, ‘What are we adding onto a situation which is already hard enough?'”

Sharon Salzberg, Facebook, December 13, 2023

Rehearsing catastrophes.

Do you do this? Live an unpleasant event – either past or anticipated – several times, each time adding to the stew of anxiety? 

Currently it’s an event I must attend – a “no choice” choice kind of thing – that given experience is weighing heavy. I realize, in both its anticipation, and in the telling of it, I’m working myself into a corner, not allowing myself or the yet-to-be situation any space to become any different from my set-in-stone ideas. Once again, borrowing from Portia Nelson’s wonderfully pithy “Autobiography in Five Chapters,” I’m walking down the same street, heading for the same pothole, as if knowing this will somehow vindicate me.

While Sharon wrote this in relation to turning seventy specifically, and aging generally, she offers this glimpse into an aspect of our perfectly imperfect human condition.

“…aging is a mixed bag. Wisdom, perspective, gratitude—so many things grow stronger as we get older. But there are also distressing, growing incapacities from one’s body; the fear of what a moment of forgetfulness might mean; the sheer indignity of being treated as unimportant by some…”

Sharon Salzberg

I’m thinking of this in relation to how I’ve been feeling lately, seeing the tendency to overthink when feeling anxious or scared; worrying despite knowing it brings no relief nor clarity; impatience and irritability when questions of belonging lurk. The lapses in remembering that “this, too, will pass,” and that fatigue can amplify it all.

And then too, the counterpoint of moments and hours of contentment reading, immersed in a creative project, walking, sitting outside sky watching, steps consciously taken to bypass that street and its all too familiar potholes.

Maybe it’s as simple as remembering today’s photo memory from seven years ago:

“I’m restless.
Things are calling
me away. My hair is
being pulled by the
stars again.”

Anais Nin

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that we have a new dog, Walker. In the three weeks since arriving, he has settled in and is learning our routines in ways that amaze us. This is the first time in forty years having an “only” dog with no other to show him the ropes. And despite our saying “no” and “git” many times a day, we laugh and marvel as often. To quote my husband, he has become our “joy boy.” This past week, on the first anniversary of our Annie dog’s passing, I remarked to myself and wrote to my friend who took a moment to acknowledge the day, how utterly surprised I was to find myself falling in love with Walker. I wondered if and have since concluded that this is a gift of allowing myself to grieve so fully for the loss of Annie.

“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

It’s a mixed bag, this aging thing.
The messy catastrophes. The moments of contentment.
Beings that bring joy. Breath that makes me live.
Stars that pull my hair.
Yes, to it all. With love.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

mirroring a mixed bag
Jasper, Alberta, 2021

Cross the Sea

CROSS THE SEA

A girl in Gaza
speaks into a table microphone:
Do you believe in infinity?
If so, what does it look like to you?

Not like a wall
Not like a soldier with a gun
Not like a ruined house
bombed out of being
Not like concrete wreckage
of a school’s good hope
a clinic’s best dream

In fact not like anything
imposed upon you and your family
thus far
in your precious thirteen years.

My infinity would be
the never-ending light
you deserve
every road opening up in front of you.

Soberly she nods her head.

In our time voices cross the sea
easily
but sense is still difficult to come by.

Next girl’s question:
Were you ever shy?

– Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air, 2018

I’m sitting at a worktable in my public library typing this post for tomorrow’s drop. We’ve been without WIFI in our home office for nearly a week (hence why no Monday post). WOW! How dependent are we on this technology? It’s tax time. My husband does all our investing online. Bills to be paid by the month end. Waiting to print time sensitive return labels. Looming project deadlines. I’ve managed with my phone but wonder how much I’m over the data limit and how much the costs will be. My neck aches from being hunched over…texting and tapping what I can to stay in touch, be responsive. So, in this moment, I’m reminded how much I enjoy and appreciate my library, surrounded by stacks, students plugged in working at other tables, surrounded by full-length windows.

It’s quintessential springtime in Alberta. After several days of sun, warm weather, and melted snow – after getting off really easy with winter – the temperature dropped below freezing and snow fell for most of the day. I took a leisurely start to my day with a coffee date being canceled. Sipping my Americano, in the flat white light of the living room, quiet with snow gently falling outside, I began reading this volume of poetry, waiting on my shelf for just this moment. Needing some shoring up given another week of rejections and trepidation about the manuscript I’m revising, I was not disappointed, as even its epigraph began to set me straight:

“Stay humble, blend, belong to all directions.
Fly low, love a shadow. And sing, sing freely,
never let anything get in the way of your singing,
not darkness, not winter,
not the cries of flashier birds, not the silence
that finds you steadfast
pen ready…”

Naomi Shihab Nye

Then this, the first sentence of her introduction:

“Poet Galway Kinnell said, ‘To me, poetry is someone standing
up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible,
what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.'”

And this, to open the first section, “Messages,”:

Broken pencil
Broken pen
Maybe today
I’ll write my best poem

Well maybe not a poem but a post. And maybe not my best, but enough. Enough to be thankful for Palestinian-American poet and educator, Naomi Shihab Nye who first came to my attention when I read her well known “Gate a4” and signature, “Kindness.” Enough to let her cultural perspective and experiences teach me, as she was taught when teaching a poetry workshop in an international high school in Japan, the word Yutori – “life space” – the place and space “in which to stand back to contemplate what we are living and experiencing. More spaciousness in being, more room in which to listen.” (Voices in the Air, xiii) And enough to remember a girl in Gaza, or Ukraine, or Israel, Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethopia, Yemen, Russia…asking profound questions, being deeply heard, and wishing her the infinity of the never-ending light she so deserves.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

A Morning Offering

watching the sunrise on the Sahara a year ago

It’s dawn. Still dark, as yesterday’s “spring ahead” time change makes more noticeable the gift of more daylight in the evening.

It’s Monday, when I typically drop a post, or try to. Last night making pizza and watching the Oscars interrupted my typical pattern of getting to my desk at 6 to write. Too, yesterday I sent off to my editor the big writing project I’d been waking early each weekday for the past few weeks to complete. After pressing the “send” button on the email, I took a breather and walked in sunshine warming and snow melting, passing folks enjoying the same. Smelling, hearing, and feeling spring. My breather continuing until bed time.

It’s soon time to join my 7:00 am Zoom weekday writing space, where after exchanging good mornings we all mute and “vanish” ourselves to our keyboards to write for an hour or longer. I’ll finish this post, despite it being late, and begin pieces for several March submission deadlines.

It’s a post without a theme. Simply keeping my promise made to Muse to write. Showing up at my desk, in the space I created to create. Candle lit. Classical music streaming from the station I re-discovered during those recent trips to Niagara (WNED on TuneIn). Radiant heat glowing on my back. Americano cooling in its handmade Italian cup. Borrowing from my Friday pattern, I’ll leave you with what feels like the perfect poem for today, an excerpt from John O’Donohue’s “A Morning Offering,” in To Bless the Space Between Us:

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Waves of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

The Lightest Touch

walking toward the light

THE LIGHTEST TOUCH

Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests your whole body,
steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

– David Whyte –

Sooooo…in last Monday’s post – one I’d been thinking of writing since the first of the year, in celebration of four years of writing, including 265 posts here – I claimed myself a poet, describing the chronology of my journey to finding my way to a new career, or more aptly, vocation. And, of course, the next day dawned with several rejection emails in my inbox and more that came during the week. A coincidence, but my inner critic has been having a field day ever since.

“Getting too big for your britches, aren’t you?” came her scolding interjection. And for most of the week, despite signing on every morning for a 7:00 am Zoom writing circle, writing and editing poems for submissions, I’ve been hearing her, sotto voce, describe my words and my effort as “trite” and “maudlin”. Ouch.

And, of course. Not only is part of this practice about learning to roll with rejection “out there,” but also, and more significantly, working with (and that can mean ignoring, cajoling, considering…) the rejecting aspect of myself. So, I took us out to play pickleball with my friends. Got into my body and out of my head and was surprised to see both my game improve and my writing.

Too, I received kind feedback from friends, several of whom write and know this terrain well, letting me know their response to how and what I write. The timing of one was nothing short of an answered prayer. Allies who help shore me up to shut down the noise.

And suffice to say, I took several bold and audacious steps toward making a future dream come true, one that utterly delights me, and brings visceral joy whenever I think about it.

Sooooo…I persist. I’m finding my way to a lighter touch. I look forward to the day when my inner critic – who I know arrives to keep me in line because she IS deathly afraid – lifts up her hands, surrenders, and walks toward the light. On the page and in all aspects of my life.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.