A Wabi Sabi Life

More Awake in Dreams

More Awake in Dreams
for June 20th

Many are more awake, with greater
abilities in dreams, than in daylight.

I walked through a world last night of
such exquisite intricacies…in my sleep
some might say.

But no, it was not really like that. It
was surely as real as any place you ever
visited.

Whatever the hand can shape and make
last…the advanced mind can do a
millionfold.

And love, there too while I slept so alert
with perceptions keen and powerful,

did I know you, love, and could more
bear your fire.

In dream, in spirit, are we not closer to
Her likeness?

– Daniel Ladinsky, A Year with Hafiz, 2011

It had been ages since I’d picked up this book, one sitting in my basket with others contemplative and poetic, and with my journal (ages, too, since I’d picked up a pen to write). But this morning – sitting in the solstice summer sunshine, cool and fresh breeze whispering through the open window, green grass and willow leaves glistening, after several minutes of quiet, reflecting on yesterday’s events, today’s to-dos, Walker occasionally peeking over the pet gate preventing his entry, wishing he could – I did.

Allowing the book to open in its way didn’t reveal an oracular resonance. Turning pages with intention to today, June 21, not quite. Yesterday, yes. That reading, today’s featured poem – Ladinsky’s rendering of Hafiz – its title struck the right chord. One amplified when I read a friend’s early morning post describing a vivid dream with her long-lost sister. (Beautifully written, dear one.)

Like many of you here, I pay attention to my dreams, having learned the value of doing so when I was in analytic therapy. I can recall ones from decades’ past, still pondering them, intuiting they continue to have richness and relevance for my life now. Again Hafiz, via Ladinsky:

“There are so many gifts
still unopened from your birthday,
there are so many hand-crafted
presents that have been sent to you by God.”

This week, two dreamt in the same night with similar “main characters,” continue to nudge my consciousness. Last year, a recurrent dream of urgently needing to catch a flight and not having packed. And over the decades, one of houses I find myself inhabiting, unique and magnificent in potential and needing a lot of work. (Your interpretations are welcome in the comments!)

My dreams both inform and have become poems. One, “The Grandfather I Never Knew,” has been recently published, along with my photography, by the beautifully curated Synkroniciti Magazine in Volume 6, Number 1, Katherine McDaniel, editor.

And those dreams where I have greater abilities than in daylight with the associated visceral feelings of exhilaration, satisfaction, freedom? I’ve wondered how to bring forth that dream-time mastery into my day-time life. I realize how increasingly my poetry, photography, this blog, and even my personal conversations and correspondence have become the bridge across and into my eldering landscape. Heeding my dream-time grandfather’s advice.

Closing this post – one more typical of my Monday missives – as I did my early morning text to another of my dear friends:

“I’ll sign of with love for you and this summer day, for friendships near and far, those waxing and waning…the new beings who bring joy and love, and those steadfast in theirs.”

Kindest regards, dear friends.

Aftermath Inventory

*famed Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj’s winged Ikaria on exhibition at il Castello Maniace, Siracusa, Sicilia*
*May 2024*

Aftermath Inventory

Shattered? Of course,
That matters.
But
What comes next
Is all
I can hope to master.

Knowing, deep in my
Bones,
Not all hurt harms.

My wounds?
If
Somehow, I
Grow through them,
Aren’t they also a boon?

My scars?
Someday,
They might shine
Brighter than stars.

Gregory Orr, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write, W.W. Norton & Co., 2019

One from the draft folder. For a morning when the night before, after my monthly Zoom with a friend, I opted for time with Walker rather than sitting at my desk, searching for a poem that might fit the week.

Maybe not exactly relevant, but eventually it comes around to this. The shattering. The reflection on hurts – given and received. Remembering that not all hurt harms. That it could be an invitation to lean in. Get real. Remember who and what matters most in the moment. At the time. Take the step, say the word to let them know.

My wounds. Your wounds. Our wounds. That when we grow through them, use them as compost for this day and the next, we might discover we’ve grown a well-lived and much-loved life.

My scars. Your scars. Our scars. Inevitable, too. Mark us among the living. The loving. Hearts broken by griefs shared, untold. Filled with gold, may they shine brighter than stars.

May we.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Komorebi

Flying home two weeks ago, with no foreknowledge, simply intrigued by the two-line description, I watched Perfect Days, a 2023 Japanese film written and directed by Wim Wenders. After three weeks of slow travel, designed with time to stay put and settle into the experiences of southern Italy, it was a soothing transition back into our quiet life at home. Clocking in at two hours, the film is described by The Criterion Collection as:

“A perfect song that hits at just the right moment, the play of sunlight through leaves, a fleeting moment of human connection in a vast metropolis: the wonders of everyday life come into breathtaking focus in this profoundly moving film by Wim Wenders. In a radiant, Cannes-award-winning performance of few words but extraordinary expressiveness, Koji Yakusho plays a public-toilet cleaner in Tokyo whose rich inner world is gradually revealed through his small exchanges with those around him and with the city itself. Channeling his idol Yasujiro Ozu, Wenders crafts a serenely minimalist ode to the miracle that is the here and now.“

The main character seldom speaks. Day in, day out, his routine is the same – thoughtful, simple, purposeful marked with moments of gratitude for the sky, trees, and the light shimmering among the leaves.

The film’s final frame, shown above, defines the central principle grounding the story, and served as its working title. Reading, I smiled with recognition and appreciation, and sighed knowing its essence, as I am one whose first memory is of komorebi.

A few years ago, I wrote here about my love affair with trees, then inspired by a Sunday reading of The Marginalian and quote by Maria Popova, “A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air.” My love affair with skies became conscious when I travelled to Iceland in 2018. While I fully anticipated the landscapes would tug on my heart, I had no idea how indelible the impact of those skies.

But back to trees and some of those that caught my attention in Italy last month. Some captured with komorebi:

Taormina’s “Duca di Cesaro” public gardens

Borrowing from my earlier post on trees, I’ll conclude in the same way, with a poem by Mary Oliver, in gratitude for the trees I gaze upon in my yard, and in vistas miles and oceans away, and for my friends who share a special kinship with them:

WHEN I AM AMONG THE TREES
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Rembrandt’s Late Self Portraits

Rembrandt’s Late Self Portraits

You are confronted with yourself. Each year
The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly. You stare
Into yourself, beyond. Your brush’s care
Runs with self-knowledge. Here

Is a humility at one with craft.
There is no arrogance. Pride is apart
From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift
The way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt
But there is still love left.

Love of the art and others. To the last
Experiment went on. You stared beyond
Your age, the times. You also plucked the past
And tempered it. Self-portraits understand,
And old age can divest,

With truthful changes, us of fear of death.
Look, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose,
The sadness and the joy. To paints, to breathe,
And all the darknesses are dared. You chose
What each must reckon with.

– Elizabeth Jennings, ‘Collected Poems’ Carcanet, 1987

First post in a month, and this poem fits the bill. To be confronted with one’s aging self – the fatigue that lingers from almost two weeks of jetlag; stiff and aching knees upon waking, and after playing pickleball; vision that increasingly, more often than not, needs the assistance of my glasses; hearing that fades in noisy spaces; crepey skin and protruding veins on my suntanned hands – I could go on, but suffice to say, with truthful changes and a new anguish, there is still love left.

Italy was terrific. She never disappoints, even though it was quite cool for a few days in Taormina, Sicily. The Fairweather Goddess made her presence known, only giving us showers when indoors at a cooking class, touring Palermo, driving in a small touring to a vineyard luncheon on Mount Vesuvius, and full out sunshine when it mattered most – during our drive along the Amalfi Coast on, what locals call, the “Via Mama Mia.” Having arranged this trip, I was pleased that all our plans came together, with the only travel delay back in Canada, where we sat for over an hour on the tarmac during our final leg home from Calgary. I had no idea, as I was sound asleep.

Home less than a week, Sig drove to Kamloops to fetch Walker, our sixth English Setter. Not a year old, he’s playful, eager to please, a quick learner and from one side, looks so much like Annie that I occasionally lapse and call him by her name. It will be quite some time before he becomes the walking companion I had in her, but we’re both amazed at how much he’s settled in six days. Too, we’ve concluded, given our fatigue with the full-out attention required (managed in part by putting a bell on his collar, silence signaling we might need to check out what he’s up to), this will be our last dog, a reckoning as we stare beyond our age, the times.

*Walker… we all fall into bed after a full day*

At the beginning of this year, I wrote here about “an eldering landscape,” that inevitable next threshold that defines this age and stage of life. Balancing the sadness and the joy, in this stage, in this poem, I think back to one of our seven touring companions in Sicily. Patricia, an eighty-five-year-old American who, with her sixty something daughter, climbed every stair, walked every cobblestone path, sipped every taste of Sicilian wine, cooked with us savoring every morsel. Late self-portrait, hardly! I’ll take a page from her album any day.

I’m happy to be home, and back here on the page with you, dear friends.
Much love and kindest regards.

Nothing Compares

*the truth of a well-lived and much-loved life*

Driving this past week, I don’t know where, I noticed the nascent greening of trees in the river valley. After a few much-needed days of precipitation – sloppy snow that turned to thick rain, and in the mountains, heavy snow accumulations, though hardly making a dent in snowpack levels needed to offset the province’s extreme risk for fires and drought – buds are popping, tiny indigo scilla and daffodils are blooming, the raspberry canes are reviving. Absorbed in the beauty of one of my favorite seasons, I suddenly realized this was how it looked the day I took Annie to the vet after what we thought had been a case of THC poisoning. Checking with Sig and my 2023 calendar, yes, it had been April 27th when she suddenly took ill. For several days, she was listless, frightened, eating little, and very unsteady on her feet. Our vet, Deb, and I wept as she laid out options, and Annie lay under the chair.

And then Annie’s miraculous recovery…of biblical proportions, a spring resurrection, to our way of thinking.

And then her sudden demise seven weeks later, just days before Solstice. In hindsight, it had been a stroke that felled her then, and now.

There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of Annie…that I don’t continue to feel the tender ache in my heart for missing her.

Yet in a month’s time, we’ll welcome into our home Walker, our sixth English Setter. I’m ready. Watching people dog-walking and IG reels featuring the antics of dogs, I’m excited with what this young teenager will bring to our lives, assured of being enriched by his presence.

Driving home yesterday from my first solo Saturday Camino, nothing planned but feeling the stirrings to train for another long distance walk this fall, I heard on the radio Sinead O’Connor’s iconic rendering of Prince’s song, “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Tears stung as I whispered along, “yes, nothing compares to you, Annie.”

Walking along the river path, enamored seeing more signs of the wheel’s turning, I took a photo that perfectly captured not only the going and coming of seasons, but also the truth of this threshold moment in my life: the endings and beginnings, the grieving and the welcoming.

Come Wednesday, we’ll be off exploring more of our beloved Italy…always an easy sell for the man who “eats well and travels seldomly.” I’m acquainting him with regions I first visited in 2011 – Sicily, Sorrento, and the Amalfi Coast – a tour I designed when, lost in translation, the tour company I thought we’d booked with, didn’t. Allora…

A presto!
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

To Say Nothing But Thank You

TO SAY NOTHING BUT THANK YOU

All day I try to say nothing but thank you,
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I
take through the rooms of my house and outside into
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring
and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy
after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work,
when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly
hair combs into place.

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute,
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I
remember who I am, a woman learning to praise
something as small as dandelion petals floating on the
steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup,
my happy, savoring tongue.

– Jeanne Lohmann –

Whew! I’m glad I’d clipped and saved this poem, shared on social media last week by Parker Palmer. Despite sitting here for a couple of hours writing, and up most weekday mornings to log onto a 7:00 am Zoom writers’ circle, I was ready to power off when I remembered today’s photo and poem feature. This one feels perfect, as it no doubt did for Parker when he posted it.

“I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring/and to the cold wind of its changes.” Alberta springs are notorious for their capricious nature: warm one day, snow the next; north winds blowing strong and cold, drying puddles, and disappearing shady pockets of crusty snow. Depending on the location, here you can ski in the morning and golf in the afternoon. Maybe because we had an exceptionally mild winter, thanks to El Nino, most of us have felt more bewildered than usual by spring’s ambivalent arrival. Toss in a solar eclipse, a new moon, and now a full moon, and yesterday’s collective lack of focus on the pickleball courts – wearing toques and gloves after two preceding days of short sleeves and shorts – might indicate our resiliency, or discombobulation! And that’s not writing a word about everything else going amuck in the world. “Weather and world weary,” would suffice.

So yes, I say “thank you” as I remember I am a woman praising something small…like the three browning hares who’ve taken to nestling under the spruce bough, or up against its trunk, the ones I call “honey bunnies,” happy to see them as they bring back memories of Annie fixated on them as she’d stand at the front window. As I do now.

Thank you to the sun that rises earlier and sets later, every day, now necessitating wearing an eye mask to fall asleep. To the robins I’m just beginning to hear singing their mating song. To the geese honking as they fly in pairs or in V formation. The murder of crows nest-making. Catkins and ice pads.

And to you, dear friends, thank you for being here.
Much love and kindest regards.

River

In celebration of Earth Day, today its 54th anniversary, my community hosted a free showing of the 2021 documentary, River, produced in Australia, narrated by actor Willem Dafoe, and described as “a stunning exploration of the timeless relationship between human civilization and Earth’s rivers, in all their majesty and fragility.”

Writing in earlier posts that I call myself a “daughter of Niagara,” having been conceived, born, and raised in the land bordered by that mighty river, this film, with its breath-taking photography, orchestral score, and poetic narration, touched that place deep within me where river resides.

“…Our early destiny was shaped
by the will of rivers.
We both feared and revered
them as forces of life,
and of death.
We worshiped them as Gods.

Rivers inspired us as a species,
allowing us to thrive.
Over time, they became the
highways by which trade,
and technology spread inland,
and along them also flowed poetry,
stories and religions,
politics and conflict…”

– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021

For the last forty-five years, I’ve made home near another mighty river, the North Saskatchewan. While not in my sightline every day, and in only a few ways resembling my river from home, at least once a week, as I drive into Edmonton or walk along its valley with my Saturday morning Camino group, I feel deep pleasure and appreciation for its presence in my life, for how it invites, metaphorically and in an embodied reflection, wise action for living.

By flowing with the power of its current; recognizing the value of being contained by its banks; attending to its shallows, hidden depths, and eddies, its seasonal highs and lows influenced by rainfall, snowpack, heat and cold – in sum, recognizing its innate alive wildness as mirror of possibility for my own.

“…For eons, running water
obeyed only its own laws.
Patient and persistent,
it wore mountains away.
It looped and meandered
laying down great plains
of lush, rich silt.
Where rivers wandered,
life could flourish.
For rivers are world-makers.
They have shaped the Earth,
and they have shaped us as a species.
For thousands of years
we worshiped rivers,
as the arteries of the planet,
the givers of gifts,
the well-springs of wonder…”

– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021

Like a sonnet’s volta, or a river’s ninety-degree turn, the film shifted perspective to show the impact on rivers of our interventions and interference in their natural flow, albeit while acknowledging their unpredictable, destructive capacities:

“…we devised extraordinary
means of controlling them,
of harnessing their force
and taming their wildness.
We discovered how to
regulate and manage them,
how to run them like machines.
We shifted from seeing
rivers as living beings
to seeing them as resources.
Our gods
had become our subjects…”

– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021

Repeatedly, I was held in awe by the film’s aerial photography showing the shape and flow of rivers and their profound resemblance to trees. Staggering to learn was that the amount of water in the hydrosphere, the Earth’s original water account, hasn’t changed since the beginning of time, while our numbers, in contrast, have grown beyond comprehension. Too, that worldwide, there is hardly a river unspanned, undammed or undiverted, and that the largest dams have held back so much water, they’ve slowed the Earth’s rotation.

“…The mystery and beauty
of a wild river is beyond our ability to comprehend
but within our capacity to destroy.
Rivers that have flowed for eons
have been cut off in decades.

Time and again,
upstream need and upstream greed
have led to downstream disaster.

We have become Titans,
capable of shaping our world
in ways that will endure for
millions of years to come…”

– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021

Throughout, I kept thinking back to John O’Donohue, and his poem, Fluent:

I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.

Such simple eloquence that holds reverence for – not interference with – river’s sovereignty.

If you, too, are enamored of rivers, I encourage you to find the film and take the 90 minutes to watch it. For Earth Day…which, IMHO, should be every day.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Standing Back

STANDING BACK

If this is the best you can do, citizens of the world,
I resolve to become summer shadow,
turtle adrift in a pool.
Today a frog waited in a patch of jasmine
for drizzles of wet before dawn.
The proud way he rose when water
touched his skin –
his simple joy at another morning –
compare this to bombing,
shooting, wrecking,
in more countries than we can count
and ask yourself – human or frog?

– Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air, 2018 –

Talk about prescience.
This poem was published in 2018, though most likely written months, if not years earlier. Given the poet’s Palestinian father, Naomi Shihab Nye has always had her eye on, and heart attuned to the chronic strife in her father’s homeland.

I wrote at the bottom of the poem’s page, after yesterday’s reading and in response to growing tensions and extended involvements, “Are we poised for WW3? And too, Ukraine and Russia since February 2022…” My question as reasonable as the poet’s, but I pray, not prescient.

I’ve been away for a several days, hence the pause. Writing, but not in this space. It’s nice to be back until I set off again in a few weeks. Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

an open poem…

“*Aries and Viriditas*” original artwork by Katharine Weinmann

…to a world-weary empath

you can’t leave Earth yet

~ because I just flipped ahead about
a hundred pages in your story and I read
that someday you will be the reason someone else
doesn’t give up on their life

I’m sorry to spoil the end of your epic tale

~ but someday you will be the one who ignites
the blaze in another person’s heart that
won’t ever be put out again

don’t complicate the plot of your story

~ you are here to be lamplighter that hands out
little bits of your flame to ensure the rest
of the world doesn’t exist in darkness

I know you have been scorched so many times

~ to love the world is to sometimes be burned at
the stake by others who mistake your gift
of compassion as a personal weakness

I know it’s not easy to be a bringer of light
to those who have become addicted to shadows

~ but we need you to be a gardener of effervescent seeds
that you will perhaps never see grow into burning rosebushes
that can be seen from space

Oh, my love, don’t give into the calling despair

~ set your life on fire with kindness and watch how many
other people come out of their caves to sit by your
campfire heart to share their own stories of survival

Oh my love, you are my favorite element

~ john roedel ~

It’s Easter Sunday. Cold, with a skiff remaining of the crusty snow that blew in on Thursday, and sunny. We were treated by our friends to a quintessential Easter brunch: locally sourced smoked ham and scalloped potatoes, sauteed asparagus, hot cross buns, and bread pudding with maple syrup. While flowers remain hidden here, a solitary bird, perched high within the branches of the still-bare alder tree, serenaded both our coming and going. A “slow” meal, interspersed with watching the antics of their cats, and our always edifying conversations, with the window open feeling the gentle breeze and hearing the birdsong, I felt the day’s hopeful promise.

Now home, and after a nap (I’ve been plagued with early waking for the past few weeks – The recent full moon? An upcoming solar eclipse? Excitement with Tuesday’s trip? Editing? Anxiety anticipating the long-time-in–coming meeting with a friend on Good Friday, one that allowed us both to lay down our metaphoric load of disappointment and grief?), I turned down the furnace and opened wide the windows to invite in Spring’s energy to displace Winter’s. A bit of packing, tending to correspondence, and this blog, one held in the draft folder for a day when time is short, concentration spent.

John Roedel is a self-described “Facebook poet,” sharing his bittersweet, aimed straight-for-the-heart compositions, often in the form of a photo of a first draft scratched in pen on the lined page of his notebook. On the heels of today’s brunch conversation, one that weaved back and forth through life’s joys and despairs, this felt like the right one to post. Too, that it speaks to his “favorite element” fire, which is Aries and the astrological sign currently ruling our planet. Aries is my sign, too. Fire my element and dosha. And as a self-described “empath,” at times world-weary – the trifecta of reasons for sharing it with you, many of whom I suspect are, too, world-weary empaths.

So, take heart, dear ones. Continue to set your life on fire with kindness and know we’re all in exceptionally good company.

Much love and kindest regards.

Adios, Flamenco

One winter night in 2015, we attended a concert at our local theatre. Conceived and produced by local musician Cam Neufeld,“The Road to Django”celebrates the music of Django Reinhardt, founder of “gypsy jazz,” made famous with violinist Stephane Grappelli in Parisian hotclubs during the 1930s and 40s. Tracing its origins musically, following the migratory path of the Roma people from northern India to Spain, through Turkey and the Balkans to France, Cam and his ensemble educated and entertained us splendidly. But it was when their “journey” brought them to Andalusia with a “vignette” of Flamenco, its origins attributed to the impoverished Romani, a form initially despised but now a UNESCO recognized part of the World’s Intangible Cultural Heritage, that I became enthralled. Arriving at home, I immediately went in search of lessons and a teacher. Two days later, I was in class.

Fast forward to 2017 and my first visit to Andalusia en route to a weeklong writing retreat in a hill town northwest of Sevilla. While the “raison d’etre” left much to be desired, its location – a pink stucco villa built by long time British expats to raise their family and open a cooking school – was a culinary dream come true, the daily treks through the forests into different villages worth the price of admission. And the once in a lifetime opportunity to join the annual pilgrimage, la Romeria Reina de Los Angeles, where the Flamenco tradition was on show at every turn, became a most memorable feast for the eyes and ears. (I wrote about this experience in my earlier blog site.)

Returning to Sevilla after a week of writing, I witnessed a street performance of Flamenco dance and guitar the morning I visited the Plaza de España and later that evening, first in line for front row seats, I saw a live show at one of the local Flamenco cafes.

Returning home, and to classes, I realized this was a dance form I needed to have begun as a child, in another life, in another world if I were to ever realize the dream I had in my head, the feeling held in my heart. Yet, I persisted and finally felt I was making some progress when I switched to a teacher whose approach was organized, coherent, and aligned with my learning style. Jane was a devotee, studying every summer in Sevilla’s blistering heat, coming home to teach and produce annual Flamenco festivals featuring those same masters from Andalusia. I regretted not finding my way to her sooner and losing those precious years.

In 2020, I designed a winter sojourn in southern Spain to introduce my husband to another country of my heart (Italy and Morocco each taking chambers). Arriving in Sevilla, we quickly made our way to the pink stucco villa in the hill town to enjoy its remarkable hospitality and meals. Stops in Cordoba, Granada, Malaga (all described in past posts here) followed, with enough time in each to mosey around, take in the galleries and sights, taste the tapas and sip the icy vermuts. Returning to Sevilla, we took in a Flamenco show at the same cafe I’d visited in 2017. Again, first in line for front row seats, I recognized the male dancer and the singer. It was a performance not to be forgotten. The male dancer knew it. We knew it. He knew we knew it, as the energy in that cafe and on that stage soared and his footwork almost made sparks. Did he know what was to come? Winter 2020. Spain, then Italy, then Portugal, then the rest of the world falling to Covid-19. Was that performance, one where all was put on the stage, nothing held back, imbued with prescience?

Fast forward to this month when I met my teacher for coffee. We’d met earlier in the summer as she was returning to Sevilla for the first time since Covid. I would be soon traveling to Italy to embark on my 250+ km Via di Francesco. I’d told her of my healing foot and wondered if I’d be able to return to her classes. During coffee this time, she confirmed my hunch that dancing again might seriously compromise my foot.

Last week, moved by spring’s enlivening energies and the age-old tradition of spring cleaning, I reached into the closet for the bag containing my nearly new hammered toe shoes, and to my surprise, the castanets I’d purchased while studying with my first teacher. In another closet, I gathered the long black trimmed red ruffled skirt. I took some photos and posted them on the local flamenco page and shared to mine. Within an hour an inquiry. By the next morning, all were sold to a local dance teacher.

We agreed to a day and time for her to pick them up and all day long, very atypical of me, it kept slipping my mind. Come the day of, I totally forgot our appointment. Apologetic, I offered to deliver the package to her. And that day, again atypical, I was running late. My husband, noticing all of this, together with my abrupt shunning of his attempts to help me get going, suggested I might be having a tough time parting with my skirt and shoes. Yes, I was, I conceded.

And then I cried…for the dream not to be…for the memory of that last time I danced…wearing my black shoes and my red skirt with a black ruffled sleeved shirt, looking very much the Flamenco dancer in my mind, on those stages…standing in a row with other dancers, each of us being watched by the teacher from Sevilla as he counted and clapped the beat…our feet tapping, hands held on hips, erect, looking straight ahead into the mirror…reflecting my focus, my precision… even when he stood directly in front of me.

It was a performance not to be forgotten. I knew it. He knew it. I knew he knew it, as the energy soared, and my footwork almost made sparks. Did I know what was to come? Winter 2020. Covid-19. Time passing. My final Flamenco class.

This is my homage to Flamenco, my dream of dancing it, the time I did.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

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