The Rocking Pendulum

Maybe a short post.
More from a promise kept to me. To write.
Though of late, I feel wrung out of words and too full of others’.

I need to empty.
To make space.
To listen to what might want to be, needs to be heard.

Maybe it’s the belated onset of “Blue Monday,” but I’ve had little energy for much beyond the thrice weekly pool visits for deep water aquafitness and an occasional walk. Despite a ridiculous run of beyond glorious weather, confusing birds and buds and deeply concerning to all of us regarding forest fires and cumulative droughts, I’ve been in a slump, the likes of which I haven’t felt for almost two decades. Then, upon the advice of my GP, I made a card to myself called “Trust,” addressed to me, “to be opened in the dark days to remember”…that the light will and does always return.

I notice that now, again, every day, especially at dinner time, how dark is giving way to sunset. I notice beautiful sunrises as I dress for the pool.

As I read the words I wrote in spring of 2005, there in black and white is the recurrent theme of generational loss and its genetic vestiges that have weighed me down. This time amplified by my mother’s recent health crisis, harrowing for all of us.

Maybe “slump” is too hard a word. “Fallow” comes to mind, as in how I felt and named myself during those first months of covid when I had suddenly lost my career, never to be found in the same way again. Underground and uncertain. Bereft and lost. Yes, there’s that. Again. Still. As it must be. Walking this week, I met a neighbor I hadn’t seen for months. When she asked about Annie, and I said she’d died in June, it became a very tearful walk. A stop on the quiet fairway, held by a tree until my sadness subsided.

I especially love the phrase gifted to me by a dear friend in the card she made and sent to me last week: “The rocking pendulum of January…” a bit lullaby, a bit raucous…

Given that here is where I’ve named my fresh territory of living – an eldering landscape – I’ll defer to the words of John O’Donohue who speaks with a wise and knowing eloquence about the interior state of threshold:

“At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it?
A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up. At this threshold, a great complexity of emotion comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual.
It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds: to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.”

To Bless the Space Between Us

So, with little energy to spare, I’m taking my time…feeling as I can, the bigness, muchness, fullness of it all, attempting to listen inward with as much attention as I can summon.

Enough words.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

A Long Slow Walk

“I think that this sense of well-being that comes with timelessness, the sense of being at peace – it must be very, very old. And it must be like a stylus dropping into a groove on the surface of the planet and making this music. And we are, our bodies are, that stylus, and we’re meant to move at this RPM that comes with the movement of our bodies.”

Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine

Last week, I took the time to open, click, listen, and read the conversation with Paul Salopek and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, founder of Emergence Magazine, an award-winning magazine and creative production studio that explores the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. An hour later, so intrigued with their conversation, I shared it on Facebook, logged onto their follow up ZOOM conversation live streamed from the UK this past weekend, and recommended it to my local Camino group at the start of our Saturday walk.

Salopek, an award-winning journalist, embarked ten years ago on a winding course retracing the migration pathway of early humans out of Africa, across Asia, eventually to cross the Bering Strait, down the Americas to Patagonia. Both in Emergence and more fully on the National Geographic page hosting this epic photo story, he describes how his personal relationship to time and the sharing of meaningful stories has deepened while moving through the world at three miles (5 km) per hour, or as my friend Christina Baldwin writes, “at the pace of guidance” and story.

“And I thought this would be an interesting experiment in slow storytelling or slow journalism, a way of slowing down my methodology and immersing myself in the lives of the people who inhabit the headlines of our day. So it’s been kind of a giant kind of a planet-sized studio to think about how stories are connected—not just kind of mega stories, say the climate crisis or human conflict, but our individual stories as well. And one way that I’ve found that does it really well is by slowing myself down and walking from person to person. That’s basically the premise of this. It’s a listening project where the destination almost always is another person.”

Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine

I love to walk. I have been walking more or less every Saturday morning in Edmonton’s famed river valley with my local chapter of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims, a “yes” I’d said several years ago on a wintry morning in January, and easily the most significant “yes” I’d said that year. What initially started as one member’s quest to train for his first Camino de Santiago trek, where walking was the raison d’etre, has evolved into a time for us to walk, be in community, and enjoy coffee at local cafes. True to my style, some Saturdays find me more extraverted, engaged in a series of edifying conversations along the path, while others, like this past weekend, ask of me to surrender to the silent restorative of its sunny, almost balmy morning. Stopping for a moment near the trail end, I smelled and felt those faint stirrings of spring, in time with this week’s celebration of Imbolc, the first day of spring in Celtic tradition.

I didn’t grow up in a walking family. Though recently it registered that I may have “inherited” an affinity for trekking from my father, who as a young teen at the conclusion of WWII, found himself alone, displaced, and dodging prisoner of war camps in Germany, taking months to walk his way home to the Black Forest where his mother held her breath waiting for his safe return.

Germany’s Black Forest

I used to regularly hike in the Rocky Mountains, though it’s been well over a decade, and I miss those outings with my women friends. Since Covid, I’ve made two long distance walks, the Portuguese Coastal Camino to Santiago de Compostela, Spain in May-June 2022, and most recently, the Via di Francesco, from Assisi to Rome in September-October 2023. I’ve discovered, like Paul, and many of us, my pace is about 3 miles (5 km) per hour…even when sauntering, my preferred way of moving (when I’m not kitchen dancing.)

“You do not have to, you know, make your way to the jungles of northeastern India to experience this thing. I think it’s there for you. And it might be a little tougher to see and experience if it’s part of your daily life, whether you’re living in a small town or a megalopolis or anything in between, because, as usual, if we stay sedentary, we get scales over our eyes, and we stop realizing the wonders of the everyday world around us because they become over familiar. But walking peels those scales off and allows you to rediscover the extraordinariness of so-called ordinary things. And that includes a walk through your town, a stroll out into the fields, or a park near your house—indeed, your backyard, if you choose to go micro, right?“

Paul Salopek, “A Path Older Than Memory,” Emergence Magazine

Walking with Annie was an invitation in peeling off the scales. As I wrote in a post during what would be her last days, “Walking Annie is no longer exercise. It’s fresh air, the gift of being outside noticing life around us.” Admittedly, still missing her, it takes a bit more presence and intention to notice life around me, scales off, without her. And yet, more often than not, I experience what Paul Salopek describes as an:

“astonishing internal metronome that’s built inside of us, inside of our body, that distinguishes us from almost every other animal…this goodness that’s kind of humming in our bones, waiting to be let out.”

Listening and reading and looking at Paul’s journey, I’m stoked to envision my next long, slow walk, wondering what memories will be evoked, people encountered, stories conjured, bones set to humming, all waiting to be let out?

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Hallucinations of the Soul

HALLUCINATIONS OF THE SOUL
The longing for things that you could not have,
the yearning for places you were not destined to arrive.
Wistful memories of what was not ever meant to be.
Regret for not being who you thought you would become.
These hallucinations of the soul are agonizing prisoners
that must be pardoned and released.

Clear the room.
Open the door and let them leave.
And in this space, you’ll paint a glorious existence
of being here with presence and contentment
for what truly is a relevant and meaningful life.

– Susan Frybort, Open Passages –

Still in the first month, Frybort’s poem speaks to me of a tender way of approaching the new year. Not bound by resolution making, or even fixed on a word for the year (though comfort, grace and gratitude continue to accompany my focused breaths), the imagery of pardon and release, of allowing discontent an open door from which to leave, invite a softening and deepening into possibility. Evoked too for me, is a favourite from Rumi, The Guest House, as rendered by Coleman Barks.

It’s been a challenging month. I’m happy to be home to days that are ever so slightly growing longer, especially in the late afternoon, and to temperatures rising to comfortable from last week’s frigid depths. My family and I are relieved that my mother is home, regaining her strength.

Discerning “guides from beyond” from “agonizing prisoners,” balancing hospitable welcome with unabashed leave taking, giving gratitude its due, we all make our way.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Small Kindnesses

from Facebook, December 22, 2023

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

– Danusha Laméris –

I’m anticipating, weather permitting, that my mother will be discharged from hospital to home today. Like a cat with nine lives, she has made a remarkable recovery from her doctor’s sobering announcement two weeks ago that we prepare for the worst. Relief is mingled with realistic concern that she may not yet be out of the woods, as the crisis – impacted bowel, diverticulitis, pancreatitis, and a pancreatic cyst which is diminishing – the consequence of three years on Ozempic has lingering, if not long-lasting implications. Has she now entered her 9th and final life, having used the rest? Will her bowel and pancreas recover? Is she able to tolerate a gain in weight to return to health? What are the consequences for my father’s well-being? These are pressing, significant questions.

One day during a hospital visit, upon the recommendation of a patient recovering from leg reconstruction after a harrowing motorcycle accident last fall, we walked down the hall to the little tuck shop for homemade egg salad sandwiches on toast with sides of bread and butter pickles. That patient wheeled himself down for a coffee, saying he preferred it to Canada’s caffeine mainstay, Tim Horton’s, stopping regularly for one and to visit staff before his own admission. With a kind word for everyone, a twinkle in his eye, freshly showered, shaved, and dressed, admittedly bored and itching to be released, I sensed and said how he must bring a much-welcomed kindness to the overworked nurses with his amiable nature. Just one of the kindnesses that abound in hospitals, those “true dwellings of the holy.”

We’re home now, having arrived late Wednesday night to still frigid weather. But yesterday, enough warmth mixed with sunshine made that hour walk outside a healing balm. Too, sleeping in our bed. I’ve caught up on correspondence, letting friends know how my family and I are faring. Your small kindnesses – expressed here, on social media, in emails and messages – have most certainly created another “true dwelling of the holy,” for which I am beyond grateful.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

One Life

He said, “One life on this earth
is all we get, whether it is enough
or not enough, and the obvious conclusion
would seem to be, that at the very least
we are fools if we do not live it
as fully, and bravely, and beautifully
as we can.”

– Frederick Buechner –

This was a new one for me from author – theologian – minister, Frederick Buechner. I always appreciated his oft quoted definition of vocation – “the place where God calls you is the place where you deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Sitting at my mother’s desk, having arrived yesterday from the ridiculously frigid temperatures at home to the balmy “banana belt” of Niagara with its 30+ degree difference, I’m hours late posting today’s photo and poem feature. We made a quick trip to visit my mother in hospital last night and see that while weak, tired, and thin, she is rallying, with the original prognosis of preparing for the worst, modified. Tomorrow is the MRI and ultrasound, which will help us know what next. My father is relieved for this development, happy for our presence, and my sister can step back into her life.

With hours of waiting – at home, in the air, here – I’ve had plenty of time to think…about family patterns and dynamics, history and story, roles and rules. I smile to myself thinking that undergraduate degree in family studies and social work graduate degree specializing in individuals, families, and groups have served me well. Distance, too, has long been double-edged, giving me space, clarity, and perspective, all helpful in navigating liminal terrains such as this, an eldering landscape. I found Buechner’s quote earlier this week on Facebook, one of those “right place at the right time” sightings. It fits.

Thank you for the kind and thoughtful comments here and on social media which hold and support from afar me and my family.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends...

I Saw It Coming

In a week’s time my husband and I were to have been with my family celebrating my parents’ 70th anniversary. A staggering accomplishment given current divorce rates. Instead, after several back-and-forth conversations with my father and sister, wherein the “no choice” choice was made to cancel the family dinner, photographer, and flowers, we’ll stick to the flight plan and hold vigil, virtually and in person, for my mother, whose health and life have been seriously compromised by taking Ozempic. She is the second person in my close circle who has recently suffered a life-threatening bowel obstruction from this much touted, so-called weight loss miracle drug. Here as I type, she is with my sister in a hospital 30 minutes from home, the closest facility able to provide the CT scan needed to determine the impact to her bowels and life, while my father, bearing a week’s weight of worry for his wife, collapses with fatigue at home. (Another story, the sorry state of health care crippled across my country.) Thankfully, my sister is an RN, astute in her holistic perspective, clear and courageous in her advocacy, compassionate in her care.

In the last twenty-four hours I have learned of two friends losing their life partners. Before Christmas, another. And I wonder, will my father be losing his? For an hour today of personal respite, I attended a silent writing circle. After introductions, the host set a 45-minute timer wherein we muted ourselves, turned off our video cameras, and wrote. “January, the first month in a new year…its first days always bring an undercurrent of unease…for decades I’ve stepped across its threshold, yet this time feel days darker with melancholy…a bone deep sadness, its source clearer with each passing day.”

“Epiphanies,” I wrote. “Three wise men bearing gifts; the anniversary of our arrival 43 years ago to the prairie province we call home; the sudden death of my young, never-known grandmother, shrouded in secrecy, and leaving behind her toddler child, my mother, now holding tenuously to her own life. And today, dawning stark cold and bright, like winter’s belated arrival, the realization of how intergenerational trauma has shaped and coloured my stepping into most every new year of my life, tarnishing it with inchoate anxiety and grief.”

I’m as OK with all of this as I can be. Intuitively, instinctively, even presciently, I’ve been naming and writing here about crossing the threshold into this hard next life chapter – the eldering landscape where death and illness, failing health and loss become its “leitmotif;” where unapologetic grief becomes an even deeper expression of my love for my life and this world.

Sustained by those few near and dear kindred friends, my community of walkers, a monthly check-in with my therapist, my beloved and our quiet sanctuary of a home; and the ever-present beauty a step outside my door, I’m OK.

By the time this post drops, I may find we need to shuffle flights to arrive earlier, and I pray my prayers of comfort, grace and gratitude carry me and us through. Too, being held by forces seen and unseen – the angels, ancients, and ancestors.

I’ll borrow a poem from Mary Oliver to sign off:

“You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway, it is the same old story –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends, and thank you for yours…

A Voice From I Don’t Know Where

A Voice From I Don’t Know Where

It seems you love this world very much.
“Yes, I said. “This beautiful world.”

And you don’t mind the mind, that keeps you
busy all the time with its dark and bright wonderings?
“No, I’m quite used to it. Busy, busy,
all the time.”

And you don’t mind living with those questions,
I mean the hard ones, that no one can answer?
“Actually, they’re the most interesting.”

And you have a person in your life whose hand
you like to hold?
“Yes, I do.”

It must surely, then, be very happy down there
in your heart.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

– Mary Oliver in Felicity, 2015 –

This wasn’t my original selection for my first Friday photo and poem for this new year. Initially, I was moved by Gregory Orr’s “Aftermath Inventory,” a short, unflinchingly exquisite poem from his collection, The Last Love Letter I Will Ever Write (2019), one posted this week on another poet’s site. It was the final line “My scars?/Someday/They might shine/Brighter than stars.” that stirred because of how I and many are feeling about this cusp of ending and beginning.

I chose not to write my “irregular” regular Monday post which would have dropped on New Year’s Day. Enough inspiring, heartful, hopeful, earnest prayers, blessings, quotes, and memes that I had nothing to offer to the mix, not wanting to dilute those kind and loving intentions. Though can there ever be too many prayers and blessings? Considering Orr’s poem, I thought of it as a humble gesture of my acknowledgment of the suffering of others, close and far, in war, illness, climate disaster, bereavement, poverty, homelessness, addiction. To stand in that unflinchingly, sorrowfully. Grateful for the hands I have to hold, for this world I still find utterly beautiful, loving it very much.

Many times, I start the year with a word. Choosing to forego the practice this year, life had other plans. Sitting one morning having my conversation with God, an Anne Lamott kind of help, thanks, wow conversation, I found myself inhaling to the word “comfort,” exhaling to “gratitude.” Over the days, it’s morphed to asking for grace on the in breath and giving gratitude on the out breath. Words, a mantra, a grounding for my being, body, and breath whispered many times a day. A voice from I don’t know where, or I do, having asked and been heard.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

May this new year bring you all that is good and true and beautiful, with grace and gratitude aplenty, and the courage and compassion to withstand its inevitable heartache and challenge.

The Valuable Time of Maturity

candies from Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar

The Valuable Time of Maturity

I counted my years and discovered that I have
less time to live going forward than I have lived until now.

I have more past than future.
I feel like the boy who received a bowl of candies.
The first ones, he ate ungracious,
but when he realized there were only a few left,
he began to taste them deeply.

I do not have time to deal with mediocrity.
I do not want to be in meetings which parade inflamed egos.

I am bothered by the envious who seek to discredit
the most able, to usurp their places,
coveting their seats, talent, achievements and luck.

I do not have time for endless conversations,
useless to discuss about the lives of others
who are not part of mine.

I do not have time to manage sensitivities of people
who despite their chronological age, are immature.

I cannot stand the result that generates
from those struggling for power.

People do not discuss content, only the labels.
My time has become scarce to discuss labels,
I want the essence, my soul is in a hurry…
Not many candies left in the bowl…

I want to live close to human people,
very human, who laugh of their own stumbles,
and away from those turned smug and overconfident
with their triumphs,
away from those filled with self-importance,
who does not run away from their responsibilities…
who defends human dignity.
And who only want to walk on the side of truth
and honesty.
The essential is what makes
life worthwhile.

I want to surround myself with people,
who know how to touch the hearts of people…
People to whom the hard knocks of life
taught them to grow with softness in their soul.

Yes …. I am in a hurry … to live with intensity
that only maturity can bring.
I intend not to waste any part of the goodies
I have left …
I’m sure they will be more exquisite,
than most of which so far I’ve eaten.

My goal is to arrive to the end satisfied and in peace
with my loved ones and my conscience.
I hope that your goal is the same,
because either way, you will get there too. ”

~Mário de Andrade~
Brazilian Poet
October 9, 1893 – February 25, 1945

Standing on the cusp of a new year, many of my generation are in the season where we have counted the years and realize there are less now going forward. Fewer candies in the bowl, we are savoring more care-fully what is left. In the last week I learned of the too soon passing of a colleague, life threatening illnesses beleaguering same-aged friends, and terminal illness ready to snatch all the candies from others. Seldom arriving at New Year’s threshold with a feeling of ease, this one accentuated by both the many harrowing and hallowed events, I, too, find myself more care-fully discerning and winnowing to essence. I, too, want to end satisfied and in peace with my loved ones and conscience, hopefully after tasting deeply from that candy bowl, and, as Thoreau wrote, sucking out all the marrow of life.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

A Gift to Bring You

I’m at a loss as to what to write for tomorrow’s (today’s) post. I started something and put it in the draft drawer, my “kill the darlings” file. No traction…no energy. Maybe an idea whose time has not yet come, or too soon too tender to write about.

Even though it’s Monday, not my usual day for posting a poem and photo, in the spirit of the season, I’ll gift forward a quote from a friend who shares my love of Rumi. A friend who I met years ago at our first writers’ retreat. A friend who made and gifted me and others with clay rattles during our vision quest retreat. A friend who recently published her first book, Solo Passage, the seeds of which she planted in that circle. Thank you, GG.

“You have no idea how hard I’ve looked for a gift to bring you.
Nothing seemed right.
What’s the point of bringing gold to the gold mine, or water to the ocean.
Everything I came up with, was like taking spices to the Orient.
It’s no good giving my heart and my soul because you already have these.
So, I’ve brought you a mirror.” – Rumi

Look. See your reflection. Know you are loved.

And my annual Solstice blessing, originally written in 2017, timeless and ever relevant:

May this Holyday season bring time to cherish all that is good and true and beautiful.
May its dark days invite rest for reflection and renewal.
May Nature welcome you to its beauty, magic and wisdom.
May good health be your companion, relationships enliven and encourage,
work and pastimes fulfill and affirm.
May strength in body, mind and spirit allow you to embrace life’s uncertainties.
May patience, love and kindness – given and received – be yours in abundance.

With love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Give Me Your Hand

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.

– Rainer Maria Rilke –
Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, Riverhead Books: 1996

In a week’s time it will be Solstice, winter in the northern hemisphere with the longest night, summer in the south, with the shortest. Dark and light, day and night, advancing and receding. Never final. May yours bring you hands to hold as you go to the limits of your longing.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.