A Wabi Sabi Life

Returning

“Returning is a wonderful thing when great
friends are involved. Years dissolve and time is
irrelevant in the light of true reunion. It means to
become one again. It means to be joined. It means
to be one in spirit, one energy, one song. It means
to be returned to the balance you find when
friendships are struck – and the entryway is a hug.”
Richard Wagamese, Embers, 2016

This quote, neatly printed, matted, and framed, hung in the guest room where I stayed last week, visiting my friends. A recent addition, it struck me as both new and the perfect description of the way my friends host theirs. Now my second summer in their beautiful home, with an outdoor living space only possible in their temperate island climes, I experienced the reunion, the song, the return to balance with both our entryway and departure marked by big, warm, heart to heart hugs…and donuts!

Yesterday, I wrote the quote in a card I’d created in celebration of another dear friend’s 60th birthday. It had been a couple of years since we had last connected, and our friendship, like the planets that had for a time, swung out of alignment. I was touched to have received an invitation to her party, and felt the years’ gap dissolve and time irrelevant as we embraced, said how much we had missed each other, and I stepped in comfortably to help her with food prep. This returning was an answered prayer, I’d said, as I hugged her goodbye with the promise to see each other soon.

“We approach our lives on different
trajectories, each of us spinning in our own
separate, shining orbits. What gives this life its
resonance is when those trajectories cross and we
become engaged with each other, for as long or as
fleetingly as we do. There’s a shared energy then,
and it can feel as though the whole universe is in
the process of coming together. I live for those
times. No one is truly ever ‘just passing through.’
Every encounter has within it the power of
enchantment, if we’re willing to look for it.”
Richard Wagamese, Embers, 2016

Last Saturday marked my return to walking with my Camino group. Seeing the sandwich sign marking our start brought joy to be reunited with friends who love to walk. We share an enthusiasm and energy as we support those readying for their late summer and early fall Caminos. This weekend we ventured out for the first time to St. Albert, a community north of Edmonton, with its own river, park trails, botanical garden, and splendid outdoor farmers’ market. More than twenty plus folks enjoyed a summer morning engaged in convivial conversation. I was so engrossed with a dear friend that little attention was paid to the route, and both of us were bewildered on our return to see sights totally missed. Such was our deep, connected returning.

It’s a short post, dear friends, sent, as always, with much love and kindest regards.

Consider the Life of Trees

Consider the life of trees.
Aside from the axe, what trees acquire from man is inconsiderable.
From their mute forms there flows a poise, in silence;
a lovely sound and motion in response to wind.
What peace comes to those aware of the voice and bearing of
trees!
Trees do not scream for attention.
A tree, a rock, has no pretense, only a real growth out of itself
in close communion with the universal spirit.
A tree remains in deep serenity.
It establishes in the earth not only its root system but also
those roots of its beauty and its unknown consciousness.
Sometimes one may sense a glisten of that consciousness, and with
such perspective, feel that man is not necessarily the highest form of life.

Cedric Wright in Earth Prayers From Around the World, 1991

I returned home last night from four days on Vancouver Island, visiting dear friends whose home and hospitality make for a soul-restoring haven. They graciously show me their favourite sights, trusting I’ll delight in what they’ve discovered since relocating there a few years ago. This year, the weather was more in keeping with a Pacific Northwest autumn: cool, overcast, misty with showers, giving us plenty of conversation time in the warm glow of their indoor and outdoor fireplaces. Tuesday, we drove to Cathedral Grove, a popular tourist site along the Tofino highway, graced by a stand of giant, ancient Douglas Firs. It was my first time encountering these enormous stately sentinels. I was rendered awestruck and silent in their presence, taken to the place I have named “before, beneath and beyond words.” One hundred photos later, my friend’s one of me standing in that awe in front of the grove’s largest tree, one estimated to be over 800 years old, and taller than Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa, confirmed the perspective that neither man nor woman are the highest form of life.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. And a heart full of gratitude to my friends for the unforgettable experience.

These Days

THESE DAYS
Anyone who tells you not to be afraid
should have their head examined.
Cities are burning, hillsides are ablaze.
and the dumpster fire of our common life
is out of control. I wish I could tell you
when it was going to get better.
I wish I could promise that better
was anywhere down this road.
I miss dancing, bodies in something
between conversation and flight.
I miss singing, the way we trusted
the air that moved between us. I miss
the casual assumption that everything
would be alright in the morning.
These days I am trying to be buoyed
by the smallest things –
a ripe tomato, a smattering of rain.
These days I am trying to remember
that songs of lamentation
are still songs.

Lynn Ungar, These Days: Poetry of the Pandemic Age, 2020

There is so much about this poem – found searching my bookshelf for one to frame my day, this week, my life, LIFE – that is in perfect alignment, despite it being written four years ago with its context the pandemic.

Today, I did a Medicine Walk along my favourite river valley route. Despite training for my long walk in September, this walk was not about distance, elevation, or pace. In honor of the feast day of Saint James – Sant Iago, as in Santiago, as in the Camino – it would be a walking prayer for the health and well-being, for a miracle, for a friend… for several friends… each besieged by life-threatening illness. It became, too, a prayer for all beings displaced, distraught, and destroyed by the wildfires.

Despite an almost twenty-degree drop in temperature, with the morning overcast, thick with smoke from wildfires that last night ravaged one of Alberta’s beloved treasures, Jasper National Park, and its century old townsite, and heavy with rain that eventually, blessedly fell, I dressed for weather and set out. I chose as my audio companion the exquisitely composed “Camino” by the late Canadian violinist, Oliver Schroer. The first notes of the first track, “Field of Stars,” are a haunting homage to Santiago de Compostela (field of stars). The ambient tracks blended with birdsong on my path such that I felt surrounded and held by the morning’s poignant beauty. A perfect reflection of my interior landscape and the devastated one to the west.

Where a few weeks ago pink wild roses bloomed thick and heady with perfume, today’s bushes were laden with ripe purple saskatoon berries and blood-red wild raspberries. Golden yarrow and wild sage filled river banks. To my way of thinking, tasting those berries was my holy communion, the real “body of Christ.”

As steam rose from the placid river, a lone pelican glided above on its huge, outstretched wings. I lost sight of it, and then looking up, there he was again, effortless in his flight. I wondered about the significance of his appearance as I’d never seen one before on this stretch. Once home, I consulted Ted Andrews’ classic Animal Speak to learn they represent renewed buoyancy, unselfishness, and the need to not be weighed down by emotion. Wise medicine for these days.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

An Elder Woman’s Words

“As I grow older, I realize that my own writing is very much more than just a pleasurable form of self-expresssion – at its heart, it’s a way of trying to change the story, of weaving the possibility of a better world into being through the power of words.”
Sharon Blackie, Hagitude, 2022

*space and a horizon from which t*o *consider*

I’ve been walking alot these days and keeping me company has been the wonderful voice of Sharon Blackie reading her words in Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life. She offers in the chapter “The Creatrix,” one of featured archetypes, that the creative work of elder women is about making art that matters, showing others the way, transcending, and transforming our limiting and dysfunctional cultural narratives. Quoting Betty Friedan’s The Fountain of Age (1993):

“‘late-style’ artists and scientists, creators and great thinkers seem to move beyond tumult and discord, distracting details and seemingly irreconcilable differences, to unifying principles that give new meaning to what has gone before and presage the agenda for the next generation.”

While not as articulate, I’ve held the hope that my writing, here in this blog, and in my poetry, offers a new perspective or amplifies and uplifts a current one. I wish for my writing to create and invite readers into a space of contemplation and affirmation, a heart and mind space from which to know and claim their personal power to make a difference.

Since January, I’ve continued to submit my poetry and photography to literary journals and magazines. Once again, where poems have been rejected, often a photo or several have been accepted. This year, two of my photos were first and second choice for the cover of the 2024 Edmonton Stroll of Poets Anthology. After a winter’s worth of rejections, I received word that my poem, “Contemplating the Cherry Tree,” had won first place in the 3rd annual Carmen Ziolkowski Poetry Prize, hosted by Ontario’s Lawrence House Centre for the Arts. And I’m happy to have found some global homes for my work: in Katherine McDaniel’s beautifully curated Synkroniciti, the German-English Amaranth Journal of Food Writing, Art & Design, and Greece’s Raw Lit.

A month ago, I sent to a publisher twenty pages of my fifty-eight-poem collection, Skyborne Insight. My winter-spring labour of love, working with my skilful editor, essayist-poet Jenna Butler, this manuscript is distilled from noticing and naming the grief and the beauty in life’s imperfections, and the sacred in the mundane moments at home, and those extraordinary ones when travelling abroad. In the final editing, heeding Jenna’s advice, I printed and posted each poem on the wall, read aloud, changed a word, added a comma or new line break, re-ordered, and finally realized, as I read the totality, that I had created a wise and vulnerable collection, one of which I am deeply proud. Now I wait and see…and as Jenna wisely advised, celebrate this significant accomplishment: my manuscript.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here about the memories evoked by a poem sent to me in celebration of a previous significant accomplishment: my retirement. Every summer, by habit, I compose a to-do list of activities. “Shred files” was this summer’s prompt to review, shred, and recycle the last of my professional files. Drawers and shelves emptied, bags and boxes filled, my heart heeded me to hold on to the folders on facilitation, The Circle Way, the Art of Hosting, and bits from coaching – the mainstays of the career I loved, the career that was my love made visible. I now look forward to re-configuring how to use both the physical and energetic space that’s now been opened for my writing, to more fully nurture its potential to weave into being, with words and photographs, a better world…to presage by continuing to notice and name the nuances of what is asking to be born, of what the world is asking of me.

“…the role of the elder woman as visionary isn’t always an active, ‘out there’ role; sometimes it’s associated with a quieter, more inward-looking aspect of elderhood – perhaps a later life stage, in which she has withdrawn to the solitude and darkness of her symbolic cave…

These old women have left their strivings behind, and in the clarity of all that not-doing, they’ve made room for the space in which to cultivate deep vision, insight, and wisdom.”
Sharon Blackie, Hagitude, 2022

Exploring further and deeper the terrain that is my eldering landscape.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Unison Benediction

UNISON BENEDICTION

Return to the most human,
nothing less will nourish the torn spirit,
the bewildered heart,
the angry mind:
and from the ultimate duress,
pierced with the breath of anguish,
speak of love.

Return, return to the deep sources,
nothing less will teach the stiff hands a new way to serve,
to carve into our lives the forms of tenderness
and still that ancient necessary pain preserve.

Return to the most human,
nothing less will teach the angry spirit,
the bewildered heart;
the torn mind,
to accept the whole of its duress,
and pierced with anguish…
at last, act for love.

May Sarton, Collected Poems 1930-1993

I think recent events south of the border prompted the posting of this poem on social media this week. It’s a time fraught…again…continuously… with uncertainty and anxiety. The polarizing fight for power, opinions weighing heavier than truth…torn spirits, angry minds. Tonight, in this house, tempers flared at dinner as days of heat warnings and insomnia-induced fatigue made patience a precious thing.

Driving to the start of this morning’s training walk, I heard a brief interview with one of the members of DahkaBrakha, a Ukrainian band who combines “traditional folk and punk, drawing inspiration from their Ukrainian homeland with a global sensibility. Melodies from the ancient past collide with future sounds…their style ‘ethno-chaos.'” Marko said the point of their music is to declare to the world that, despite what their invading neighbor says, Ukrainian culture and language exist…and to remind people everywhere in the democratic world, that their problem is not only their problem, but also a big problem for all democratic countries. The truth of his words stung. And as I set out, I was struck with how news cycles now make almost obsolete, or at least only mid-section coverage of Ukraine’s plight, and how much duress, at every scale, many of us hold.

“Return to the most human,” Sarton’s benevolent instruction.

“The dark thought, the shame, the malice/meet them at the door laughing, /
and invite them in,” admonishes Rumi.

“Act for love,” always a way through.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Morning

the old pine on the river bank at sunrise

“Morning!” we call out in passing –
the dog walkers, the bicyclists,
the ambitious lady with her water bottles
and her sports bra, all out
unfortunately early to avoid the heat.
“Morning!” Not even
“Good morning,” which
could be an overstatement,
given the hour and the fact
that the world is on fire. It’s what
we have to offer. We have the gift
of a couple fresh hours,
the fact that we are out
moving through it,
a whiff of possibility, the reality
that our lives keep on
touching one another’s in the
tiniest of ways. Morning
is as good as word for it as any.

Lynn Ungar, July 8, 2024

…Morgen…Dia…Giornata…
On a German markplatz filling with farmers’ stalls for market day…mumbled by an elderly man in the small coastal fishing village on the Portuguese Camino…nodding to locals and those few fellow tourists at dawn on Florentine cobblestone streets.

This week a heat dome descended on my province. Sig was up early training Walker to become his name through neighborhood streets, quiet yet surprisingly busy with others intent to spare their dogs from the rising heat. I’d set out early one morning to climb stairs and hills in preparation for September’s long walk (sports bra left at home, water bladder instead of bottles in my pack). Cyclists early for the workouts or commutes. Our lives touching each other with a nod, a smile, a mumbled “morning,” and then each of us on our respective ways into days that held possibility and for some, or many, grief.

A world on fire. With suffering and love.

Beauty in passing.

Morning, friends. Much love and kindest regards.

Memories

For Retirement

This is where you life has arrived,
After all the years of effort and toil;
Look back with graciousness and thanks
On all your great and quiet accomplishments.

You stand on the shore of a new invitation
To open your life to what is left undone;
Let your heart enjoy a different rhythm
When drawn to the wonder of other horizons.

Have the courage for a new approach to time;
Allow it to slow until you find freedom
To draw alongside the mystery you hold
And befriend your own beauty of soul.

Now is the time to enjoy your heart’s desire,
To live the dreams you’ve been waiting for,
To awaken the depths beyond your work
And enter into your infinite source.

John O’Donohue, “For Retirement,” To Bless the Space Between Us, 2008

I have tried umpteen times to format a post using parts of this poem, one gifted to me by a dear friend and colleague twelve years ago on my “retirement.” It appeared as a Facebook memory last week, June 30, as had photo memories from my retirement party that last week in June. I concluded I was pushing the river and so have included the entire piece, in a manner more typical of my Friday blog, together with my posted response:

“Twelve years ago, I had a remarkable career with Edmonton Public Schools. I made wonderful friends. It was my “love made visible.” Hopefully, this current chapter writing poetry will bear similar fruits. Thank you for the memories.”

Within weeks of saying goodbye, I’d launched a new website, and – parlaying my talents, honed skills, and cherished relationships – a private consulting practice. For another seven years I made visible my love supporting leaders, hosting group conversations that mattered, and teaching The Circle Way. Then, government budget cuts and Covid-19 and “poof,” my career ended. Then, I truly stood “on the shore of a new invitation to open my life to what is left undone.”

These have been a few weeks’ worth of memories…professional…personal with the anniversary of Annie’s passing and the joyful arrival of Walker and last week’s simple celebration of our 44th wedding anniversary at a favourite cafe…last year’s preparation for my first long walk in Italy, now to be followed by another this September. Memories that invite reflection and confirmation that I make it a practice to be regularly “drawn to the wonder of other horizons.”

Writing poetry, my consciously chosen next chapter, invites me to “befriend my own beauty of soul.” And because how I’d been able to shape my career allowed for the same, I still miss it. I always said I had the remarkable good fortune to work with people who I loved and cherished and knew they’d felt the similarly about me.

I’ve certainly cultivated a new approach to time. Alongside a slower pace – one enhanced by walking – we live a quiet life and marvel at Walker’s ability to accommodate.

Lately I’ve noticed how my once attraction to life’s “hoopla” has given way to noticing, marking, and often passing over the myriad opportunities for engagement “out there.” Quoting Leonard Cohen, “I ache in the places I used to play.” And while this can be literally – like the ache after a night of dancing a few weeks ago – what I really mean is the tender bit of heart ache, grief even, in finding myself drawn to the still and quiet, letting go, or might it be entering into my infinite source?

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

If You Are

If You Are
If you are angry, let your anger be fire
So it can warm someone chilly.
If you are grieving, let your grief be a river
So someone thirsty can drink.
If you are numb, let your numbness give you capacity
To walk in hard places and not feel hurt.
If you are broken, let your brokenness
Be what makes space for a new thing to enter.
If you are fearful, let your fear be a warning signal
That others may look up.
If you are lost, let your being lost
Make a new place and call it home.
However you are,
Keep going.
However you are,
Keep going.

– Laura Martin –

I’m partial to poems that invite us to hold it all…the bitter and the sweet. To see the light in our dark places. To have faith that there is a pony hidden in all the muck, and gold to be mined from the dross of our mistakes.

Like my perennial favourite, Rumi’s “The Guest House,” to welcome all that we’d prefer to turn away from and “be grateful for whoever comes/because each has been sent/as a guide from beyond.”

The power of alchemy where we take ourselves to the fires of our grief and numbness, our brokeness and fears, our uncertainties and feeling lost. To be burned away and hollowed out.

To talk about the condition of our hearts, instead of the weather.

To keep going.

Of all of this I need to be reminded. Again, and again.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Our Joined Sorrows

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.

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