A Wabi Sabi Life

Infinite Possibilities

“The truth is — the amount of days we have here is actually not so large. So if you have the opportunity to wake up tomorrow, to let this world age you and weather you and meet you where you are for even just one more golden minute — I hope you show up for it.
Do as much as you possibly can with your time here.
Risk your heart.
Express.
Take care of others, leave them better than you found them.
Give yourself permission to take up space.
Be all that you are.
Love the way you hope to love, and love people on purpose, with depth and intention.
Keep rescuing those younger parts of yourself.
Forgive.
Put every ounce of your patchwork soul into this world, crack tenderness into all of its dark corners.
Stay soft, stay curious, but most importantly – just hold on to your hope.”
Hold on to your hope.

~ Bianca Sparacino ~

Not yet, but soon those small indigo Siberian squill blossoms, emerging through the snow, sheltered in against our home’s southwestern exposure. Tomorrow, March arrives as a harbinger and holder of Spring. It’s been a very, very long two months into this new year. Despite knowing more snow and a return to bitterly cold weather is likely, standing outside at dawn waiting on Walker, I feel uplifted. Its breeze is making fast work of the snow that, just a week ago, covered our yards and walks. Melts leaving puddles that freeze overnight. That cycle making for treacherous walks.

Let Sparacino’s words be the tenderness cracked into the world’s dark corners. There can never be enough tenderness, or kindness, or hope. Admittedly, for me, dosed with times of righteous outrage and bewilderment.

During COVID’s then bewildering uncertainties and isolation, I first wrote about the mixed blessing of holy grief, holy gratitude, and holy love. Here I am again, now adding outrage. Holding our hearts open in hell as the tiny and tender indigo flowers find their place alongside the still icy cold snow. A metaphor for trusting that in that space between knowing and not knowing, there exists a realm of infinite possibilities.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

February Memories

“Memory is the power to gather roses in winter.”
Anonymous, cited on a Mary Engelbreit card

Every day I see photo memories of that day stored in the cloud. This month it’s been the winter sojourn to Andalusia as COVID was nipping at our heels. Cross country skiing during cold COVID days. Walking Annie, both of us bundled in winter coats. Starting last week, it was the first days of my solo, midlife gap-year, three-month trip to Europe, now fourteen years ago. Photos of Bologna, Italy, my first exploration into a country I knew I’d love, but had little idea then how much. Like an dear friend I can’t wait to see again, I visited various regions of Italy three times during those three months, and five times since – Emila Romagna, Veneto, Lombardy, Liguria, Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio, Sicily, Puglia, Basilicata, Campagnia.

Castello di Procena, enroute to Acquapendente

A year ago, inspired by a heart-to-heart conversation with my husband where I invited us to both reflect on the dreams we had yet to realize, and what and how we could help each other do so in the time we had left, I was struck with the idea of returning to Italy for an extended period. I’d come to the realization that my big dream of living there was highly unlikely for many reasons. But what might it mean to adjust to the 90-day limit for visiting Canadians?

And so I began bringing shape to my dream. Drawing on the lustrous threads from that first-ever visit, I planned to depart this year, mid-February, and return mid-May. I’d live in Florence, where I found the perfect apartment in the market and cafe-rich neighborhood I’d first visited in 2023. Bright with lots of natural light, a soaker tub, well-equipped kitchen and spacious bedroom, and a lovely, English-speaking ex-pat host, I made the deposit. Too, I’d return to Venice during Carnevale, pulling through that golden thread. I made deposit on the Zen-like apartment in a glorious treed residential area, a bit beyond the Castello neighborhood I’d first visited that first time.

“*possibility in the palm of a hand,”* Venice 2011

Sitting with it, looking at dates, wanting to be in Italy during Easter, I modified the original three-month plan to become “70 Days for 70 Years,” a celebration of my upcoming decade crossing birthday. Catchy, the container for some writing, my dream coming to life glowed. Curiously, I kept putting off booking my flights.

Sitting with it a few more months, after a wonderful trip to Mexico for last year’s birthday, and the arrival of our wonderful Walker, I came to know I didn’t want to be away that long from my life here – with Sig, with Walker, in our home, in my community. Yes, I could have modified it, but that wasn’t the answer. I simply knew I simply needed not to go, now.

This past week, seeing those fourteen-year-old photos of Bologna, and of Venice during Carnevale – which really was an unexpected stroke of good fortune to be there then – and knowing if I had made that dream my reality, right now I’d be in my apartment in Florence. I’d be packing my overnight bag to head out on the train to Venice.

More wistful than sad or disappointed, I feel deep peace knowing I’d once again heeded my intuition. I’d picked my own bouquet of fragrant winter roses and was content with that.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the trees seem to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm. I’ll take it all.

– Ada Limon, The Carrying, 2018 –

Just reading this poem I feel my heart lift and lighten.

My gosh, what a winter. What it’s done to us. The brutal cold and snow covering much of Canada, the least of it. Innumerable, immeasurable ways, “the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.” No need to list them because I know you know.

Spring in these parts takes her time arriving. Winter is reluctant to leave. Teased by today’s thirty degree rise in temperature, and a weeklong forecast hovering around zero feels balmy. But we know spring’s capricious nature.

The greening of trees gets to me, too. Recalling that birthday years ago, when Sig gifted me with my first hot-air balloon excursion. Silently floating upstream in the spring green of our river valley. Lacy silver tree limbs and thick dark conifers in contrast to those thousands of tender unfurlings.

Remembering that. Writing this.
Knowing once again. Not giving up.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Regardless of My Age

It’s been mighty cold here in Alberta, and across Canada. A much-needed, honest-to-goodness winter with a snowpack forecasters say will lessen the impact of spring and summer forest fires. Temperatures well below zero, made colder with wind, killing off viruses and vermin. A restoration of balance that, while I appreciate, as I said to Sig as we layered to go out, I wish I wasn’t in. It’s been less than a month since celebrating his birthday in Huatulco, Mexico, but it feels like ages with this profound contrast.

And Walker, despite inheriting Annie’s insulated coat, and boots that he reluctantly wears, has found his first winter too cold to do much more outside than his business. And even that’s done fast, carefully perched on three legs, alternately the fourth to keep it from freezing. Last week, both of us bundled to play in the backyard, not a minute later and he was at the door. That night, he didn’t eat his dinner and slept all evening instead of his usual watching TV (I kid you not!) or playing with us. I sensed he was depressed and reflected to Sig we needed to move someplace more temperate, as both Walker and I need to walk…outside…in Nature…without freezing.

I’m going on about this because I’ve noticed with every passing year, I’m less inclined to brave winter’s elements and that troubles me. I used to ice skate…cross country and downhill ski…I haven’t walked with my Camino group since Christmas. Dog walking has become episodic. Reading my friend, Gretchen’s post this morning got me to thinking more about my own aging and how it’s showing up.

“Ageism is the last bastion of political incorrectness, and no one is going to fight it with us or for us. No one else cares, until they arrive there themselves…”
Gretchen Staebler, “You’re Doing Great…For Your Age”

I met Gretchen at a writing retreat years ago on Whidbey Island. Then, she was working on her – now published and highly recommended – moving, tender, and funny memoir, Motherlode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver. (For local readers, it’s available to borrow from my public library.) I love Gretchen’s fresh and candid take on life, and too, her big heart from which she responds to my recent posts about the harrowing state of our world. From her post which inspired my writing today:

“What do you see when you look in a mirror? Go ahead, look. Do you only see wrinkles and sagging skin? Yes, they are there, it’s a fact of the third act, it’s what the body does. And what else? What is reflected in your eyes, your smile?”

In this “third act,” what I’ve been calling “the eldering landscape,” my body is having its say, and I’m having to become more adept at listening. In this year, crossing the threshold into my eighth decade (mind-blowing what becoming seventy actually means!!!) I don’t know how I’ll celebrate. I do know I’ll continue to be enthralled, amazed, bewildered, curious, vulnerable, astonished, uncertain, afraid, grateful, courageous – the whole enchilada of words describing me being in love with the gift that is my life. Regardless of my age.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.
I’m so happy to welcome you, my newest subscribers, and grateful to you who have been reading me regularly.

A Blessing On …

*a kinda sorta valentine heart* *– Canadian style*

a blessing on the meals you cook
as democracy collapses

a blessing on your healing hands
that mend what empire breaks

a blessing on your quiet mornings
when you choose to rise again

a blessing on the stories you preserve
when others would erase them

a blessing on your vigilant heart
beating steady through the storm of cruelty

a blessing on the seeds you scatter
in neglected spaces

a blessing on your fierce protection
of all things small and wild

a blessing on the wisdom you gather
from elders and from earth

a blessing on your careful documentation
of what must not be lost

a blessing on your mutual aid networks
flowering in capitalism’s dank shadow

a blessing on your kitchen table strategies
where sly revolution simmers

a blessing on the wild songs you sing
when courage starts to falter

a blessing on your strategic joy
deployed against despair

a blessing on the future
being born in what you do

a blessing on the bridges you build
between wounded communities

a blessing on your sacred rage
that fuels the work of redemptive justice

a blessing on the hope you sustain
when vulgar bullies assault hope

a blessing on your children’s children
who will know what you defended

a blessing on the future
you dare to imagine now

– Rob Brezsny , Facebook, February 12, 2025

How much worse will it get?
I hardly have words for the rage. The fear. The bitter sadness. The grief of it all.

A book I read decades ago, When Corporations Rule the World (1995). A book written by David C. Korten, in which he shed light on the infracture and policies leading to now. Only now, it’s beyond corporations. We are witnessing the dismantling of the world with a penstroke, at the whim of a few inordinately wealthy, self-serving men.

And so when I don’t have words for the foreboding in my belly, a foreboding shared by many, I am grateful to those who do. I take solace in others’ words that have echoed mine, blessing the future being born in what we each do, dare to imagine, and stand up for now.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. May it be a blessed Valentine’s Day.

This Matters

It’s Sunday morning. I’ve signed into a weekly Zoom hour hosted by a local writer, hoping for some inspiration for Monday’s post. At this point, I’ve spent many minutes affixing photos to notecards, and writing messages of care and connection with friends. To one, suffering the depths of grief since her husband’s passing during Covid, I included John O’Donohue’s blessing for one grieving. To the other – in response to her thoughtfully written, beautiful New Year’s letter – an acknowledgement of her word choice to describe her current lived condition, “subdued.” Such resonance.

Despite carefully curating my social media time, I cannot escape the onslaught of memes and messages, both harrowing and hopeful. In response to my husband asking how I slept last night, I shared my deep-in-my-belly fear about my country’s safety. The world has recent history of the devastating consequences of a leader’s stated intention to annex a country. So when I hear another threaten mine, my body responds.

“darling,
you feel heavy
because you are
too full of the truth.

open your mouth more.
let the truth exist
somewhere other than
inside your body.”
Della Hicks-Wilson, Small Cures

After last week’s post, several of you commented and emailed with kind and affirming responses. I wrote a version of the following to several of you:

“So each word, each photograph, each post matters.
Each kind word, each warm embrace matters.
It’s what we have which I have to believe can turn the tide,
perhaps first within the unseen, liminal spaces.”

So these minutes devoted to card-making and note-writing matter.
Love letters amplifying beauty matter.
A manifestation of the creative spirit matters.
Letting the truth exist somewhere other than inside my body matters.
This act of hope-filled dissent matters.

As do you, dear friends.
Much love and kindest regards.

It’s Like This

“What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinished story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until it all ends.”

– Mary Oliver, “What Can I Say”

Finally, feeling 90% better after a wicked chest cold that made for sleepless nights, where once home, I was grateful for the guest room in which to retreat, and the prescribed puffer to lessen the coughing. Almost three weeks’ duration, the symptoms so much like the time I came home with Covid after walking the Portuguese Coastal Camino in 2022, I wondered.

Finally, through the first month of a new year, that has felt particularly dark and heavy with foreboding. While the days are lengthening, noticeable in the late afternoon, the heaviness, experienced by many in my country and beyond, persists. I don’t have to name its source. Suffice to say, I feel a gut deep fear that we are witnessing the intentional takedown of the world as we have known it.

Finally, back here writing. A friend nudged me with an email last week, wondering if I was still sharing my thoughts here, that she missed them. I have been doing the work of writing: revising, editing, and collating poetry for submissions to several chapbook contests and literary journals. I read my poem, “Epiphany,” (my last post) on that day’s Open Mic. But here, in this space, it’s been a long, fallow month.

Since returning home in mid-October from my last long-distance walk, with the most recent variant of Covid as a souvenir, my experience has been one of wandering in the liminal. Vague and restless, moody and melancholic. Missing the rhythm of daily long walks in nature. Sensing inexplicable shifts within me and the world. Seeing more apparent the contours of my “eldering landscape” with the passing of friends, and again the worry as my mother suffered another health crisis just as we headed off to celebrate Sig’s birthday on a hot and sunny Pacific coast beach. (I suspect the aforementioned chest cold a consequence, compounded by the resort’s air conditioning.) Not one typically to write it out here, instead I need to mull, ponder, and give time for subtle impressions to emerge with words.

Re-reading this post, I think I’ve simply been embodying the transition of seasons. I need to say it again to remind myself: hibernating, wintering, keeping low, deep, and quiet. And now, finally, feeling the rising energy and clarity of this new month. Despite human machinations to the contrary, February’s stirrings are an ancient signal to the promise of spring’s rebirth. Its hope echoed by my thanks to the editors who have already this year accepted and published my work… to my friend’s nudge to get back to writing here… to finding my way to my rhythms.

To remembering the world needs us. To placing my faith in the unfinished story that will never end until it all ends, despite the man-made maneuvering and power-play posturing.

We are needed, dear friends. Much love and kindest regards. And to you who have recently subscribed, a warm welcome and heartfelt thanks.

Epiphany

Forty-four years ago, Sig and I, with Beckey, our first of seven dogs, all English Setters except for one (Sassy, an English Pointer “rescued” from a divorce wreck shortly after our arrival, and soon to become Beckey’s inseparable friend) drove into Edmonton after four days’ traversing Canada from southern Ontario. I’ve written several times here about that journey and this anniversary. Today, I’ve chosen to share the poem I wrote last year.

EPIPHANY
January, the first month in a new year,
its early days bringing an undercurrent of unease.
For decades, I’ve managed to find a way across its threshold. But this time,
I’ve felt its days darken, weigh heavy with melancholy.
A bone-deep sadness, its source finally becoming clearer.

Epiphany. When centuries ago, legend spoke of three wise men
following a star, carrying gifts for a newborn king. When forty-three years ago,
our arrival on this prairie province we made home. And decades before,
the sudden death of my young, adopted, never-known grandmother,
her passing shrouded in secrecy, leaving behind her toddler child,
my mother, now holding tenuously to her own life.

Epiphany. Dawning stark cold and bright, like this winter’s belated arrival,
that two-thousand-year-old desert shining star, when I realize my body’s
primal response to grief touching and traversing maternal bloodlines.
Embodied. Wordless. Anxiety rendering them, now me – the daughter
of my young, adopted mother, born to bring her happiness – highly sensitive
and self-doubting.

Today, holding vigil for my mother, wondering
whether the 70th wedding anniversary celebration for which we’d booked our flights
would instead become her funeral, I’ve had plenty of time to think.
To see my family’s patterns and dynamics, know the stories and our secrets, the roles and rules, our shames and triumphs. What made me and entrapped me. What I’ve worked long
to understand, unravel, to reclaim and make my life for me.
Distance too, a boon, though long double-edged, has given me space and perspective,
helping me navigate life’s complex and liminal terrains.

Now nearing seventy years myself, I’ve been naming the crossing of another threshold
into this hard, next life chapter an “eldering landscape.” Here, in a world on fire, in drought,
and in war, death and illness, failing health and memory, dashed dreams and diminished capacity become its leitmotif.

Epiphany. When claiming myself amidst ancestral loss and unapologetic grief
becomes an even deeper expression of love for my life and this world.

(Spacing and line breaks have been altered to fit the page.)

Touched by its prescience.
Grateful there was no funeral.
Aware I am resolutely traversing the eldering landscape.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Gratitude

thankful for the still flowering gift from my friend

“Gratitude is so much more than a polite “thank you.” It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods. Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry

I had no idea what to write for this, my last post of the year. I’d read some favourite bloggers who, too, wondered, knowing social media would be replete with eye-catching memes, inspirational quotes, thoughtful musings, and the perfect poem. But walking with Walker yesterday, noticing how much colder the temperature after a week of balmy days, and nearer to the horizon the mid-afternoon sun, I listened to an Emergence Magazine podcast wth Robin Wall Kimmerer reading her essay, The Serviceberry (known in these parts as the saskatoon berry). The above quote stood out as I struggled to keep the earbuds snug and the leash loose, my first time time navigating both since Annie’s passing. I knew I had a way in to writing, even if it meant I’d be adding more of the same to the year-end mix.

Looking back on this year, with its highs and lows, loves and losses, misunderstandings and reparations, I knew gratitude’s strong and persistent thread had, as always, had carried me across chasms of felt separation into the folds of belonging. I knew that by writing poems, walking long distances, seeing beauty in the imperfection and photographing its shimmer, I was saying “thank you.”

As I continue to walk the uneven and unpredictable terrain of the “eldering landscape” – a phrase I coined at the beginning of this year – I know with growing certainty that I am companioned by others. Friends and family who, further along, offer guidance and point out it waymarkers, and folks yet to cross its inevitable threshold. For this I am thankful, for it can be an arduous and sometimes lonely trek.

In the coming days, duing the great pause between exhaling this year and inhaling a new one, may I remember that infinite possibilities reside in its vast unknown. May I remember my sovereign capacity to shape a kinder, more generous and grateful future. May we all.

“Openness of hand, tenderness of embrace, spaciousness of heart, graciousness of home, blessedness of earth, vastness of sky, for all the spaces that bid me welcome, I give you thanks.”
Jan Richardson

Dear friends, thank you for companioning me here on these pages. I appreciate knowing my words matter.

Much love and kindest regards…

Still Wrapped

“But I don’t look like a sun,”
a young star still wrapped in swaddling
veils said.

To which I replied,
“But you will, my dear. You will, mashuq.
So don’t worry. Don’t fret.”
Daniel Ladinsky, A Year with Hafiz (2011), December 22

My day began before dawn, quiet and dark, lighting the final candle of the Advent wreath. Curious, Walker stood close, watched the flare of the match, the flickering of the four candles, and then left to keep silent vigil sleeping in his bed. I thought of family and friends, the passing of time, the moments of melancholy with the missing…thresholds crossed and yet to be.

It’s now Sunday evening, quiet and dark. I have just listened to poet Elizabeth Alexander read the final chapters from her memoir, The Light of the World. Recommended in Allison Wearing’s online memoir writing course, it’s the lyrical account of the sudden death of her beloved husband…beautiful, poignant, poetic.

A deep breath, a pause to reflect, and to register the sanctity of her story and the liminality of these holy days.

Then, I turned to the book beside me: The Dreaming Way, Toko-pa Turner’s brilliant invitation to the practice of dreamwork. The chapter, “Wisdom of Sophia.” Its essence, as the embodiment of paradox and the continuous chaotic cycle of creation and destruction, leads us to a refinement of our life force aligned with nature.

“Not only is there more to your story beyond this anguish, but one day you story will be the starlight for another to follow out of their own darkness.”
Toko-pa Turner, The Dreaming Way (2024)

Another deep breath and pause to let Toko-pa’s words land. And just before I turned off the floor lamp, I fetched from my box of sacred books and journals, Hafiz by way of Ladinksy to read today’s contemplation.

There’s a thread running through this day…revealed in the elements described here. And a blessing for you, dear friends, that you may trust in your own, perhaps still wrapped, starlight.

Much love and kindest regards.

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