“As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can. I won’t give up until the Earth gives up.” – Alice Walker
“Indeed, to garden — even merely to be in a garden — is nothing less than a triumph of resistance against the merciless race of modern life, so compulsively focused on productivity at the cost of creativity, of lucidity, of sanity; a reminder that we are creatures enmeshed with the great web of being…” – Maria Popova
“Like the seeds, we have to straddle that paradox of not leaving the comforts of our gestational time too quickly, while finding ways to keep moving. Coming out of winter is like waking from hibernation—we need to go slowly, steadily… …As we step into the capacities of our next becoming, we must do two things. The first is to come into a clear conversation with that pulse of vitality and originality which is growing within us, and the other is to meet, name, and respect our resistances to that growth. After all, resistance is what strengthens and protects us in ways we may not yet understand. Sometimes what looks like hesitation is actually wisdom in disguise.” – Toko-pa Turner
“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.” – Walt Whitman
Another snowstorm. A new salvo of political cruelties. A week further into the northern hemisphere’s Spring. A vow made and shared.
It’s 7:00 am Sunday morning. I’m an early riser. Lately, too early as I’ve been plagued with a bout of early morning insomnia, waking around 3. Sometimes I toss a bit, listen to the slow and steady breath of Sig sleeping beside me and try to synch my breath with hopes of falling back to sleep. When my mind overrides that intention, I quietly rise, slip into my robe and slippers and head downstairs to read, or write, or take my place on my cushion, or stare out the window, wondering.
In a couple of hours, I’ll be attending an onsite, in-person writing workshop. Hosted by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, it’s described as “an all-day retreat designed to nourish your creative process. Writing exercises, inspiring prompts, and focused discussion will get your juices flowing and keep you motivated for days and weeks afterwards.” Goodness, I hope so, for like an Alberta spring, no sooner do my juices start to melt and flow, when they freeze solid and need to be chipped and chopped to get flowing again.
Last week in my monthly online writers’ circle, we each spoke of being in a fallow season, making reference to Katherine May’s memoir Wintering; gave space for our reactions to democracy’s demise in the face of growing fascism; and anticipated Spring’s arrival the next day. A closing offering of a poem which I’ll share here to close today’s short, and “OK enough” post.
This Spring
How can I love this spring when it’s pulling me through my life faster than any time before it? When five separate dooms are promised this decade and here I am, just trying to watch a bumblebee cling to its first purple flower. I cannot save this world. But look how it’s trying, once again, to save me.
Every day I see or hear something that more or less
kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle
in the haystack of light. It was what I was born for – to look, to listen,
to lose myself inside this soft world – to instruct myself over and over
in joy, and acclamation. Nor am I talking about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant – but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations. Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help
but grow wise with such teachings as these – the untrimmable light
of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?
– Mary Oliver –
“How are you?” ask friends who I’ve not seen, nor spoken to for a while. “Terrified,” my response.
Not afraid, but terrified…for my country…the illegal apprehensions, deportations, and denied entry…the constant blatant disregard for law…evil in the guise of leadership.
Not a very mindful response, or is it? Certainly more intense and less palatable than “afraid.” But in the moment, truthful, uncensored. And then it passes. The weight of it lessens for its utterance. But I know, too, that I need those moments of seeing and hearing that kill me with delight.
Thankfully, Walker obliges. Every day. The shine in his eyes, tongue hanging in joyful anticipation as I dress to play with him outside. Chasing him with one of the store of sticks he’s taken from the woodpile in the back. Our backyard scattered with them. Or inside, tugging on the damp-with-drool dishrag nearly shredded, or his blue racquetball, or red kong – each tight in his mouth, until he lets go in false surrender just to keep the game between us going.
Thankful, too, that yesterday’s sunshine and warmth allowed me to sit outside on a cafe’s patio to eat lunch after my 8+km river valley walk. All of it a balm. Nature and good food as co-regulators.
And that exquisite hand-made card sent by a friend who is excelling at paper quilling, her latest fascination. In yesterday’s mail, the envelope with my name and address, written by a hand I didn’t recognize. The note inside, bearing the same beautiful script, thanking me for my words, the tapestry I weave with them, the meaning they bring to her.
Coming through a “wintering” season, again with many more rejections of my writing than acceptances, with words laying fallow, deep underground, her gift like a prayer made out of new, spring-green grass.
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. And to you, Cate, thank you.
I wondered if last Friday’s photo and poem feature were simply too much for readers, as few opened the post, either here or on social media. Perhaps if I’d titled it, “I Am NOT Happy,” and posted another photo, instead of using the title of Ilya Kaminsky’s poem, “We Lived Happily during the War,” with my photo of an actual Ukrainian door burned in the invasion, it might have evoked more curiosity and less reluctance. Please know this is not a critique, simply an observation AND acknowledgment of so much fatigue, despair, rage and fear, AND the wise self-care choices we each need to make, including what to click and read, and what to pass on. Though I must take a moment to acknowledge, with deep and abiding gratitude, another’s post that cracked open and gave me permission to name what I’d named in mine.
Karen Maezen Miller, an ordained Soto Zen priest, wrote last week, “I Am Not Free,” in which she unabashedly and vulnerably shared the impacts of and her feelings about the current goings on in the USA. I won’t go into detail, but to read a Zen priest – one whose writings have always hit the mark for me, and to whom I have occasionally, naively attributed a well-practiced, placid, equanimity – use the words “terrified,” “furious,” and “hate,” was one of the most reassuring pieces I’d read in weeks. One from which I did feel free.
Last week I attended a session hosted by my library’s new writer-in-residence. “Music and the Practice of Poetry,” it ended up being a wonderfully playful experience in understanding the importance of rhythm to writing and reading aloud poetry. As recommended, I brought something to write on, in this case my black journal of bits and pieces of writing transcribed over the years from my journals, letters, emails, social media posts. A collection of “seeds” that when I reviewed, saw how several had sprouted and blossomed into poems and essays. Like this piece, written in 2014, its essence rooted in last Monday’s post, “Rest.”
“I hear a murmuring of rest, OK, yes and then the air smelling sweet and cool. There are berries to pick and laundry to hang. Groceries to buy and friends to call. This could be enough. For right now is enough. Ease back into life here at home. Give thanks and send blessings to all those suffering.”
Or this one, that I wrote and posted on Facebook exactly six years ago today. Its simple truth and prescience like Kaminsky’s poem.
And how I’ll end this post:
“There are the times when a poem becomes a prayer, an image the beautiful antidote to the day’s atrocities.”
Ukrainian doors burnedand shattered in the war started byRussia February 2022
We Lived Happily during the War
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house —
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
~ Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic. 2019 ~
I first heard Kaminsky’s poem in June 2021, read by Padraig O’Tuama in his Poetry Unbound podcast. Written in 2009, its powerful prescience grabbed me then, before hell was unleashed in Ukraine when Russia invaded in February 2022. And it hasn’t let go. Its grip now tighter as the American Republican administration, thinking it is the “great country of money,” backed by men in their “houses of money,” threatens my country, its people, and our livelihoods.Already killing the land, people and livelihoods of Ukraine, Gaza, and beyond.
I am not happy. In all honesty, I feel the rage that comes with such betrayal; fear; sadness; and, in moments, an unsettling hatred towards these men intent on destroying our world. Their acts are evil, committed without empathy and in full consciousness of the consequences of irreparable suffering and death.
Below is my post, written shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in which I first included Kaminsky’s poem and the wise words from Canadian elder, Stephan Jenkinson, suggesting “it is no accident that we were born at a time when the culture that gave us life is now failing.“
No one lives happily during war. It is madness to think otherwise, despite the lies and bravado to the contrary. Thankfully, our world is too connected, and blessedly our hearts, to ignore the assaults and violence being perpetrated. Admittedly, it does not make for easy living.
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.May you keep well. You are needed. We need each other.
In yesterday’s inbox, I received two emails that struck me as contrasting approaches to coping with the current global state of affairs. In one, subject line: Sanity Repair Kit, its author listed thirteen personal strategies to help her stay above despair. The second, the weekly love note from Christine Valters Paintner, abbess of the online contemplative-creative community Abbey of the Arts, opened with the 6th principle of its Monk Manifesto:
“I commit to rhythms of rest and renewal through the regular practice of Sabbath and resist a culture of busyness that measures my worth by what I do.”
Deep, holy breath in and out…I could feel my body relax into the truth of rest being, as Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, writes: an act of resistance in a culture that wants to exploit and deplete our labor so others can profit. Could this be more on point at this time when we’re told that empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western civilization?
While the first email’s list included practices I know I could be doing, should be doing, and am doing – more or less – mostly, I felt overwhelmed and out of breath …except for the invitation to stare off into the sky for several seconds or minutes. Something I do quite regularly, sitting in my living room, often with Walker sleeping there in the sunshine. I understand “different strokes for different folks,” yet I want to uplift here an appreciation for and the wisdom in doing no-thing.
Suddenly, I am remembering with a smile the story I used to read during staff inservices, written by Robert Fulghum of the All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten fame. I no longer have that well-marked, tabbed, and dog-eared copy, but it was his experience of taking a pair of favorite leather shoes to the shoemaker for resoling that captures the essence of doing no-thing. He writes:
“The shoe repair guy returned with my shoes in a stapled brown bag. For carrying, I thought. When I opened the bag at home that evening, I found two gifts and a note. In each shoe, a chocolate-chip cookie wrapped in waxed paper. And these words in the note: ‘Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. Think about it. Elias Schwartz.’”
“Sabbath is not a doing, but a way of being in the world… In those spaces of rest comes renewal, with dreams for new possibilities. As a culture we face so many issues that feel impossible to tackle in meaningful ways. One way to begin is to allow enough space for visions to enter, to step back and see what happens when we slow down our pace first. . . .”
Christine Valters Paintner
Part of my Sabbath often includes cooking a good, ample meal giving us leftovers to get through the beginning of the week. With classical music or relaxing jazz streaming in the background and an occasional glass of wine, I’m in my element. Too, writing my Monday blog, warmly ensconced in my studio, surrounded by my various creative endeavors, inspiring images, vision boards and books, I sink into the wellspring of potential beneath the heartlessly cruel rhetoric filling so much airspace today.
Years ago, before The Abbey of the Arts, or The Nap Ministry, my friend Christina Baldwin penned the exquisite Seven Whispers (2002). “Move at the pace of guidance,” is the second whisper, combining two instructions: to re-humanize our speed of life, and to use a slower pace to actively listen for spiritual guidance.
“The pace of guidance, like peace of mind, begins internally – in me. Even though all my conditioning teaches me to accommodate speed, I am responsible for the pace I bring to the moment, just as I am responsible for the peace I bring to the moment.”
Christina Baldwin
What chocolate chip cookies might we find as we allow and settle into a slower pace and use this overwhelming and despairing time to do no-thing? What visions of possibility and inner wisdom might we access by resting and resetting our overwrought nervous systems? What might be the outcome of such a bold, strategic act of resistance?
“We must hang onto our humanity, it is why we’re in the world.”
Christina Baldwin
Much love, kindest regards, and moments of deep and abiding rest, dear friends.
Each moment of rest, of doing no-thing, of being our own Sabbath matters. Each word, each photograph, each email 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.
“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 treacherouswalks.
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.
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.
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…”
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 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.
A Wabi Sabi Life 