Tag: Kate Bowler

Composting Hope

…sometimes hope looks like compost, slow, surprising, quietly transforming what was into what could be.
So, maybe the best we can do is let ourselves be changed by love, by grief, by dirt under our fingernails, and by small, ordinary acts of grace.
So, wherever you are today, may you remember that your smallness is not insignificance, that love really is fundamentally expressed in potato chips and text messages and a place at the table. It is all still love. And that belonging is not something we earn, it’s something we practice over and over and over again…

~ Kate Bowler, Everything Happens with Kate Bowler, April 2, 2025 ~



Not a poem, but certainly akin to what I often post here on Fridays.

Several years ago, a dear friend grieving the passing of her daughter, told me about Kate Bowler. Admittedly slow on the uptake, to both Kate’s writing and podcasts, I recently subscribed to her weekly Lenten email, The Hardest Part. This week’s description of her recent podcast with long-time friend, Jeff Chu, struck a chord:

We talked about what it means to feel stuck in a life that doesn’t quite fit. About the grief of loving people who may never love us the way we wish. About small, ordinary acts of care—texts, meals, potato chips—that remind us we belong to each other. If you’re in the messy middle, tending what’s dying, planting without guarantees, or quietly rebuilding your hope, this conversation is for you.

And it was. Right on point. A bit of balm for its honesty, vulnerability, and invitation, as I’d been shaming and shunning myself for letting small and petty resentments and disappointments, and bigger betrayals eat away at me.

Their conversation reminded me – as I, we, navigate these bone-jarring and often dispiriting days – that I’m in another “messy middle”… of the Lenten season… of winter giving over to spring… of where I find myself in my own lifespan, soon to cross into the next decade. “May you live in interesting times.” Wasn’t that the greeting? Ahhh, well...

In case you’d like to listen, here’s the link.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Always Beauty

Yesterday morning a friend posted a poem-blessing by Kate Bowler, “Keeping a Soft Heart When Everything is Broken” in which she wrote, “Blessed are you who see the world as it truly is. Terrible. Beautiful. Fragile.”

To which I responded, “A wise man once told me our task is to learn how to keep our hearts open in hell. Welcome to class. We have a four-year curriculum.”

Again. In addition to the heavy course load of continuing, persistent tragedy and devastation that encompasses our world.

And yet there is beauty. Still and always.
Often hidden in plain sight, against all odds.

November pansies – against all odds in Alberta

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

A blessing for living between

a blessing for living between.
Between miracles.
Between answers.
Between formulas.

Blessed are you who live here,
this space between
simple categories and easy answers.

You who wonder why this is your life,
why you got this diagnosis,
or why you still struggle with infertility,
or why you haven’t found your birth parents,
or why you can’t kick the addiction
or why your kids haven’t come home.

Blessed are you who
build a home on uneasy ground,
who, despite your trying,
your asking, you’re searching,
haven’t found the satisfying
feeling of discovery.

And blessed are you who never will.
This is not an easy place to live.
Outside of certainty,
outside of knowing,
outside of the truth.

But blessed are you
who realize that love and beauty
and courage and meaning live here too.
Amid the unease and the frustration
and the sleepless nights.
In the way love and courage
show up through people,
through presence, through laughter.

May you be surprised by
your capacity for ambiguity,
for the way it makes you
a great listener and a good friend,
for you are someone who knows
how to feel your way around
in the dark and squint for the stars.

I wish it were easier, dear one.
I wish I could hand you
the answers you seek.

But for now,
may you find comfort
in the fact that you are not alone.
We are all learning to live
in the uncertainty in the unknowing.
So blessed are we who live here together.

~ Kate Bowler, November 19, 2023 ~

A dear friend, well acquainted with grief, having lost her step-daughter to cancer a few years back, introduced me to Kate Bowler, herself close friends with cancer. I’ve listened to a couple of Kate’s “in your face with honesty” podcasts, and an interview on On Being. This recently posted poem speaks to me of her no holds barred, compassionate experience of living in the liminal – rife with challenge, rich with gifts.

I’m not sure why I felt moved to share this poem today, after many months’ pause in my Friday photo and poem posts. Maybe because right now – again – so many near and far are living “outside of certainty, outside of knowing, outside of the truth.” That our world, human and the more than, is living in the indefinite pauses between miracles, answers, and formulas. That we might each find comfort in knowing we aren’t alone, and in the blessing we all live here together, near and far.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.