Tag: Friendship

Right On Time

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium,
small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos
have the capacity to shift the entire system
to a higher order.”

Ilya Prigogene

And this is what emerged in celebration of my birthday. Several small islands of coherence wherein “emotional density” (thanks to my friend Helen for introducing the term), presence, being seen and heard, AND acknowledging life’s inevitable one-way direction, became the criteria – anticipated and realized – for each gathering. Good food…fine wine… flowers and balloons. And meaningful, heartfelt conversations.

Given so much external chaos agitating, activating, and creating inner turmoil, I couldn’t have asked for a more fitting crossing into this new decade. Even the few unexpected exceptions simply became part of the landscape, reminding me again to let be and let go.

On Saturday, over a beautifully presented homemade filo pie evoking spring, made with salmon, leeks, eggs and cheese, accompanied by fresh tomato and cucumber and dill salads, followed by a dessert of individual Pavlova with lemon curd and blackberries, my yoga sister asked how it felt to be seventy? I sat quietly for several minutes. How did it feel? What had been emerging? What did I anticipate?

I silently recalled the wish I’d made when blowing out a candle at dinner with my Camino friends and then another in my monthly Zoom call with my island girlfriend.

Suddenly, out burst my response, “I’m right on time,” to which my friend burst out laughing at the utter spontaneous rightness of it. “Yes,” she said, “All your life … your steps and mis-steps…your practice… your devotion that waxes and wanes… have brought you precisely to this place, at this time. Right on time. Ready to step again into your life.”

Later, we all moved to the sofas in the room, looking out over the peaceful monochromatic vista of a farmer’s razed field and the lake shore beyond. There, we began in earnest sharing our fears, anxieties, and knowings about this time. Like me, they have the heightened awareness from being of German descent and remembering its history. To be seen and heard in the safe arms of our long-tended friendship, we were creating another island of coherence, knowing full well its sacred, though increasingly fragile right. Like the millions who showed up across the states last week to protest their president and his administration, seeing and hearing each other peacefully, without incident, saying this is ENOUGH, seeing we are not alone.

Like the Nobel prize winning chemist quoted above, to my friend’s Vedic way of thinking, simple actions particularly in such dark times have subtle yet significant capabilities, like a stone dropped in the pond, or the mythic flap of a butterfly’s wing altering the wind and weather. Right on time to shift the entire system to a higher order.

Let’s blow on another candle, shall we?

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

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.


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.

To The Sea


TO THE SEA
Sometimes when you start to ramble
or rather when you feel you are starting to ramble
you will say Well, now I’m rambling
though I don’t think you ever are.
And if you ever are I don’t really care.
And not just because I and everyone really 
at times falls into our own unspooling
—which really I think is a beautiful softness
of being human, trying to show someone else
the color of all our threads, wanting another to know 
everything in us we are trying to to show them—
but in the specific, 
in the specific of you
here in this car that you are driving
and in which I am sitting beside you
with regards to you 
and your specific mouth
parting to give way
to the specific sweetness that is
the water of your voice 
tumbling forth—like I said 
I don’t ever really mind
how much more 
you might keep speaking
as it simply means 
I get to hear you 
speak for longer. 
What was a stream 
now a river.

– Anis Mojgani –


Once a month I have a Zoom call with a dear friend who lives near the sea. She and I have known each other for several years, a decade at least, maybe two. We’ll check in with each other and then see where our conversation takes us. Always into depth and meaning, relationship and emergence. Always held within a container of love and deep regard for each other. Always remarkable the interior landscapes we can traverse in an hour.

This poem arrived the morning after our most recent conversation. I love it for so beautifully capturing, despite being written by a man, the way my friend and I ramble together, often saying, just as the character in the poem, “Well, now I’m rambling,” and just like the poet’s response, “I don’t think you ever are.” Inevitably, because of the container we’ve created, one where vulnerability is welcome, curiosity cherished, and questions allowed to rest without answers, I come away with clarity, the results of which often show up in these posts.

Once in another Zoom conversation, this time with other dear women friends who live by the sea, I came to know that perhaps this way of talking with each other is simply, particularly, the feminine way of being with each other and in the world. A couple of years ago during early pandemic days, the day after that call, I emailed them:

“Many times it seems my thinking is foggy and lazy, that it isn’t “cogent” or coherent, that I can’t put together a compelling argument of defense. And then it came to me, this is the feminine way – to feel my way through a depth of complexity that is dark and foggy, that isn’t necessarily, yet, cogent nor coherent...You wrote to me, gifted me, once with the invocation that I recognize with increasing vividness that I know what I know, that find myself less and less inclined to self-doubt, meekness and hesitation.“

This rambling, vulnerably feeling one’s way through the depths of complexity and uncertainty is the “unspooling” described by Anis Mojgani, that “beautiful softness/of being human, trying to show someone else/the color of all our threads, wanting another to know/everything in us we are trying to to show them.”

I love that I can be this way with another, because it helps me be this way more with myself – soft, vulnerable, vivid and alive in the unknowing, the curiosity, the questions.

May we each have in our lives such persons with whom to ramble.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

My Beautiful, Credible Friends

“Spheres of Influence” – Chihuly Glass Exhibit, Seattle, USA

ALL MY FRIENDS ARE FINDING NEW BELIEFS

All my friends are finding new beliefs.
This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.
In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew
God whomps on like a genetic generator.
Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.
Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.
One man marries a woman twenty years younger
and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;
another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles
into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases
like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea,
decides to die.
Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees,
high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt,
sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of  being …

All my friends are finding new beliefs
and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track
of the new gods and the new loves,
and the old gods and the old loves,
and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives,
and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness,
and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends,
my beautiful, credible friends.”

– Christopher Wiman –

As we begin to live our way into this long awaited new year, I reflect on friendships…
near and far,
here and “home”,
past, present, and yet to be known,
lapsed and tended,
cherished and challenging,
liked and loved,
beautiful,
credible.
Your presence in my life matters, immeasurably.

Listen hear to Pádraig Ó Tuama’s beautiful recitation and considerations of this poem.

With love, kindest regards, and best wishes for a New Year shimmering with all that is good and true and beautiful.