A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about that quintessential Portuguese quality called “saudade.” A bittersweet yearning…a tender sadness…the presence of absence evoked in fado music and singing, dance, poetry. Qualities represented by this photo I took in Andalusia five years ago.
Last night, while eating dinner at our favorite Portuguese-Spanish influenced cafe, saudade stirred. Even before we entered, I felt waves of nostalgia for those times three years ago when eating in Portuguese cafes along the Camino, or in the tapas bars with Sig in Malaga, and that sweet match-box sized vermuteria we stumbled upon our last sunny Sunday in Sevilla.
Maybe it was yesterday’s summer-like weather inviting us to relax after a day working in the yard and garden, readying it for more outdoor living. Feeling the sun warm on our backs and faces, no jackets, gloves or toques, each of us remarked over the pleasure we felt not needing to brace against the cold.
Certainly, it was evoked by the cafe’s newest Sunday night addition, a Spanish singer-guitarist. Several of his songs so moving, I was almost brought to tears.
The longer I sat within the mood of the moment, I realized that this for me is particular to Portugal and Spain. That as much as I love being in Italy – and to date have visited many of its regions – I don’t recall being stirred in the same way.
I was to have returned to Italy this fall to again walk la Via Francigena with a small group of women. But due to no registration, I needed to cancel. I am disappointed. But I wonder if saudade is calling. And if one day, I’m to make another long-distance walk in Portugal and Spain. Not so much an “exterior” pilgrimage to Santiago, but the “interior” one to my soul. The outward destination not really the point. The journey that matters, experiencing anew what evokes and stirs.
Feeling saudade, the proof that I loved and lived, dreamed and remembered… even if for a moment.
There is a word in Portuguese that has no direct equivalent in any other language: “saudade.” It is not just longing. It is more. It is longing mixed with melancholy, with expectation, with tenderness and with a gentle sadness.
It is longing for something that was. . . or maybe never was. It is absence with the scent of memory. It is love that did not have time to end, but neither to continue. It is music that echoes in the void left by someone.
In fado they sing saudade. In our long silences, saudade is hidden. In lonely walks, in lost glances out the window, in letters never sent.
Saudade does not want to leave. It doesn’t heal, because it doesn’t hurt completely. It doesn’t break you, but it doesn’t leave you whole either. It’s the sweet wound of souls that feel deeply, beyond words.
Carrying saudade within you is proof that you loved, that you lived, that you dreamed… even if for a moment.
~ Waves of Life, Facebook, May 4, 2025 ~
singingfado on the steps in Lisbon, May 2022
Exactly three years ago I was walking the Portuguese Coastal Camino to Santiago. During my first evening in Lisbon, I encountered the essence of “saudade” in a young street musician strumming her guitar, perched on stone steps across from our hotel, singing “fado,” the Portuguese equivalent of the “blues.“
Once home, in preparation for writing about my experiences, I heard a Portuguese guide refer to fado as “the presence of absence.” This inspired a poem which was published later that year in 100 Caminos, an annual Chilean anthology celebrating Camino poetry:
. . . now my memory mends and fills those cracked and empty places with jasmine perfume and birdsong blistered heels and sun kissed faces
Saudade captures much of how I’ve been feeling this year. Tired from the moral outrage I’ve felt in response to the incessant displays of blatant evil. . . disappointed with life events that didn’t quite become as I’d imagined. . . I feel “the longing for something that was . . . or maybe never was.”
Disillusionment giving way to letting go. Discernment that comes with age. The proof that I have loved and lived and dreamed. The presence of the absence acknowledged and allowed. And what is asking to emerge next.
Life’s unfolding along its silver thread, invisible until it’s not.
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. It’s nice to be back after several weeks’ absence.
Imagine the wrongs made right, the crooked made straight the middle way the means to hold the center strong the point to rise again to choose again to act with love, to be kind.
Invoke the wisdom of ancients, angels, and ancestors with wild words of song, and prayers whispered over a cauldron wrought of shadowed griefs fired by our righteous rage.
Mix equal parts beauty, truth, and justice into an elixir made in paradox, luminescent in the dark heaven sent on the more-than-human breath earth bound on waves of sand and water.
Elemental formula with sacred geometry to bravely mend and steadfastly restore our broken hearts, a torn country, the exhausted planet.
A work in progress, this poem coalesced the day following the US election. Like many around the world, I awoke to the news I’d hoped and prayed would be different. A brief scroll though social media and a friend’s post of an image – no words – of a tear falling down a woman’s cheek said it all.
Last night, I began reading The Dreaming Way: Courting the Wisdom of Dreams (2024), the latest book by Toko-pa Turner. An internationally recognized dreamworker and one with whom I have personally studied, Toko-pa writes, “As our dreams nudge us in step with the larger intent of nature, we grow to see how necessary we are to these troubled times.”
Describing the Dreaming Way as the practice of choosing to live in reciprocity with the inner and outer worlds, she encourages us to regularly shiftour attention away from our modern, external life of reason and rationale to take seriously the imaginal world and dreaming. By doing so, we are contributing to the shifting power in the world and enacting a revolution from within.
My poem, sourced from and steeped in the richness of the imaginal world, is a homage to knowing, trusting, and valuing the necessity of walking in both worlds, my long-time way of being. Now, I recommit to paying more and regular attention to my inner life, a takeaway from my most recent long walk, andthe boon of living in my eldering landscape.My life andour world depend on it.
“We were lovers who … decided to make the world a better place by slowing down long enough to pay for its improvement—by paying attention, the reverent, even holy attention of love.”
Brian McLaren, The Galápagos Islands
My understanding of “paying attention” as a form of gratitude and reciprocity for the abundance we receive from the natural world first came to my awareness when I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. A couple of years ago, I wrote here about its impact on me. Now, reading last week’s daily meditations from Father Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, with the theme “Befriending Nature,” and listening to podcasts wherein the notion of “anima mundi” had been mentioned, I re-remembered a gift of walking alone, or with another but silently: the slowing down to notice… to really take in… to pay with my attention.
Since July, I have walked over 400 km solo, accompanied by the soft tapping of my poles on dirt and pavement paths; voices heard through my earbuds narrating novels and poetry, or in podcast conversations; urban infrastructure; people and their dogs and babies. During every outing, along routes that have become like familiar friends, I’d stop several times to simply breathe deeper and take in my surroundings: the unusual birdsong; the season’s changing colours; temperatures warmed or cooled by a sudden breeze; the river’s surface. During every outing, always an image or several made with my phone to reflect some essence of that day’s beauty. And after every walk, I’d record the steps, kilometers, and time walked and post it together with my photos and a brief description of my experience. The longer I did this, the more I realized that what I was really doing was composing love letters to life. By showing up on those paths every other day for weeks and noticing and recording, I was saying:
I am here to be with you, to walk in, and among, and on you. I am here to notice you, to be in relation withyou, to be moved, and changed by you. I am here to say thank you for always, unfailingly, uplifting me – turning my fatigue into curiosity, my sour mood into a smile or a tear.
When I walked the Portuguese Coastal Camino, most of that distance solo and unplugged, I composed a chant from words I’d read by Thich Nhat Hahn and Rumi, to help maintain my rhythm and bring some ease and pleasure to the long distances:
With every step I kiss the Earth. With every step I make a prayer. The Soul comes for its own joy. Dance on, dance on, dance on.
This time, while I’d only remembered the first line, whisper-singing it in a new iteration as I walked, I was mindful of making prayers for friends unwell and suffering. This summer, and in a few weeks’ time in a country I deeply love, walking a section of the Via Francigena, I slow down long enough to pay my attention…my reverent, holy attention of love.
Much love, kindest regards, and many thanks for your support and encouragement during my preparation.
“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.
“I believe poetry is very old. It’ s very sacred. It wishes for a community. It’s a community, ritual, certainly. And that’s why, when you write a poem, you write it for anybody and everybody…It’s a gift to yourself, but it’s a gift to anybody who has the hunger for it.”
Mary Oliver, as quoted in On Being with Krista Tippett
Four years ago, in January 2020, I designed and published this, my third blog, to serve as a platform for my writing. Little did I know then, that with the sudden arrival two months later of world-stopping Covid-19, I’d need to be leaning into writing and this space to cope with the grief of having lost my career and much of what I had assumed to be certain. I wasn’t alone in any of this, but the resulting systemic social isolation occasionally had me wonder.
By September that year, I’d set my sights on learning how to write poetry. I’d dabbled over the years in my blogs and journals, and for as many, was a devoted listener of The Road Home, a spoken word and music program curated by Bob Chelmick on my local radio station. I discovered Poetry Unbound, a podcast offering from my favourite On Being with Krista Tippett, hosted by Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama. With Annie on her leash, I’d plug in my earphones and for fifteen time-stopping minutes, walking familiar neighborhood routes, I’d listen to him read a poem and share his understanding about its structure, meaning, and resonance. An ardent fan, occasionally I’d write about him here, and took advantage of tuning into every free Zoom event around the world, hosted by Padraig reading, talking, teaching poetry. When I learned he’d be coming to Calgary for a retreat in 2023, I made haste months earlier to buy my ticket and reserve my bus ticket – a wise move as we had our first blizzard that weekend.
I joined a couple of Facebook groups for writers and took advantage of many free online readings and workshops to gain exposure to contemporary poets, seeing how they compared with my favourites, helping me find my voice. I was invited by Karen Close, founder and editor of Sage-ing: The Journal of Creative Aging with Creative Spirit, Grace and Gratitude to be her thinking partner and co-editor. Then exactly two years ago, upon the encouragement from one of my public library’s writers-in-residence – another complimentary service of which I have availed myself, I began the work of preparing a manuscript for submission to a well-known Canadian poetry publishing house. With Annie on her cushion by my side, I edited over seventy poems, received feedback from several friends and fellow writers, and emailed the package a week before heading off to walk the Portuguese Coastal Camino. An email in July brought the not so surprising, but none the less disappointing, news that my work had not been selected. It closed with the concise instruction “to persist.”
And so, I have. 2023 found me back in the saddle, submitting regularly to literary journals and online magazines around the world. I attended master classes with esteemed poets and prepared a chapbook for a publisher who had previously accepted one of my pieces. Another rejection, but she gave me the gift of feedback I’m using now to move my writing forward. Monitoring my submissions, tracking rejections and successes, with 70 sent last year, over 20% have been published, including several in national and international anthologies. In the meantime, as many journals invite submissions of art and photography, I’ve jumped in and have had several photos published – for money – have been included in a 2024 calendar featuring Edmonton’s river valley and have won the cover contest twice for our local poetry anthology. I feel chuffed.
I think alot about my writing: Why do I do it? What I give to it and what it gives to me? I’m committed to making poetry my writing genre of choice. Or, it has chosen me, being one who has long had a poetic turn of phrase and outlook on life. Like Mary Oliver, I believe poetry is sacred, being one of the ways I bring the sacred into my life, making my life as poem and prayer. However, unlike many writers, I’m not yet confident that writing is my way to, for lack of a better word, salvation…to reconciling what troubles me. I haven’t had enough experience waking during my soul’s dark night to trust that taking pen to paper will see me through to a metaphoric dawn, let alone a literal one. It is a faith that grows.
I am learning about poetry’s inherent nature of ritual, especially in the process of revising. Here I can immerse myself for hours, quietly reading for rhythm and assonance, writing for placement on the page, making space for the breath, embodying the imagery. This gives me pleasure.
I don’t know who proclaims one a poet. Maybe joining a professional group and paying the membership dues legitimizes one’s efforts. I’m leaning more into the empowering wisdom that comes from claiming myself through learning what it means to be a practicing poet. Exploring organically the design of my way of working; developing discipline and technical skill; rolling with rejection and celebrating success; reaching out for support; being vulnerable. Much of it done in isolation. In hindsight, Covid-19 prepared me well.
Four years ago, I began a new career, or rather, a new one found me. Today I am an internationally published poet and photographer. When I waver in my confidence and question the value of my words in a world inundated with others, I have those from my dear friend, author, and first writing mentor, to hold me in its community:
“And the quality of your writing offers me a moment of presence with you, your thoughts and reflections, and the complexities of the road we travel in and through these times at both the very personal and the larger scale. This is alchemy. Please continue. Please imagine me in early morning–still dark, tea and low light, and waking my day with your gift.”
Christina Baldwin
Thank you, too, for yours sent to me, dear friends. Much love and kindest regards.
“I think that this sense of well-being that comes with timelessness, the sense of being at peace – it must be very, very old. And it must be like a stylus dropping into a groove on the surface of the planet and making this music. And we are, our bodies are, that stylus, and we’re meant to move at this RPM that comes with the movement of our bodies.”
Last week, I took the time to open, click, listen, and read the conversation with Paul Salopek and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, founder of Emergence Magazine, an award-winning magazine and creative production studio that explores the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. An hour later, so intrigued with their conversation, I shared it on Facebook, logged onto their follow up ZOOM conversation live streamed from the UK this past weekend, and recommended it to my local Camino group at the start of our Saturday walk.
Salopek, an award-winning journalist, embarked ten years ago on a winding course retracing the migration pathway of early humans out of Africa, across Asia, eventually to cross the Bering Strait, down the Americas to Patagonia. Both in Emergence and more fully on the National Geographic page hosting this epic photo story, he describes how his personal relationship to time and the sharing of meaningful stories has deepened while moving through the world at three miles (5 km) per hour, or as my friend Christina Baldwin writes, “at the pace of guidance” and story.
“And I thought this would be an interesting experiment in slow storytelling or slow journalism, a way of slowing down my methodology and immersing myself in the lives of the people who inhabit the headlines of our day. So it’s been kind of a giant kind of a planet-sized studio to think about how stories are connected—not just kind of mega stories, say the climate crisis or human conflict, but our individual stories as well. And one way that I’ve found that does it really well is by slowing myself down and walking from person to person. That’s basically the premise of this. It’s a listening project where the destination almost always is another person.”
I love to walk. I have been walking more or less every Saturday morning in Edmonton’s famed river valley with my local chapter of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims, a “yes” I’d said several years ago on a wintry morning in January, and easily the most significant “yes” I’d said that year. What initially started as one member’s quest to train for his first Camino de Santiago trek, where walking was the raison d’etre, has evolved into a time for us to walk, be in community, and enjoy coffee at local cafes. True to my style, some Saturdays find me more extraverted, engaged in a series of edifying conversations along the path, while others, like this past weekend, ask of me to surrender to the silent restorative of its sunny, almost balmy morning. Stopping for a moment near the trail end, I smelled and felt those faint stirrings of spring, in time with this week’s celebration of Imbolc, the first day of spring in Celtic tradition.
I didn’t grow up in a walking family. Though recently it registered that I may have “inherited” an affinity for trekking from my father, who as a young teen at the conclusion of WWII, found himself alone, displaced, and dodging prisoner of war camps in Germany, taking months to walk his way home to the Black Forest where his mother held her breath waiting for his safe return.
Germany’s Black Forest
I used to regularly hike in the Rocky Mountains, though it’s been well over a decade, and I miss those outings with my women friends. Since Covid, I’ve made two long distance walks, the Portuguese Coastal Camino to Santiago de Compostela, Spain in May-June 2022, and most recently, the Via di Francesco, from Assisi to Rome in September-October 2023. I’ve discovered, like Paul, and many of us, my pace is about 3 miles (5 km) per hour…even when sauntering, my preferred way of moving (when I’m not kitchen dancing.)
“You do not have to, you know, make your way to the jungles of northeastern India to experience this thing. I think it’s there for you. And it might be a little tougher to see and experience if it’s part of your daily life, whether you’re living in a small town or a megalopolis or anything in between, because, as usual, if we stay sedentary, we get scales over our eyes, and we stop realizing the wonders of the everyday world around us because they become over familiar. But walking peels those scales off and allows you to rediscover the extraordinariness of so-called ordinary things. And that includes a walk through your town, a stroll out into the fields, or a park near your house—indeed, your backyard, if you choose to go micro, right?“
Walking with Annie was an invitation in peeling off the scales. As I wrote in a post during what would be her last days, “Walking Annie is no longer exercise. It’s fresh air, the gift of being outside noticing life around us.” Admittedly, still missing her, it takes a bit more presence and intention to notice life around me, scales off, without her. And yet, more often than not, I experience what Paul Salopek describes as an:
“astonishing internal metronome that’s built inside of us, inside of our body, that distinguishes us from almost every other animal…this goodness that’s kind of humming in our bones, waiting to be let out.”
Listening and reading and looking at Paul’s journey, I’m stoked to envision my next long, slow walk, wondering what memories will be evoked, people encountered, stories conjured, bones set to humming, all waiting to be let out?
“And the road is plenty wide and welcoming, speaking out to all, This is the perfect place, this is the right time, this is where wish becomes possible.”
Susan Frybort, “On the Road of Great Wonder,” in Hope is a Traveler, 2015
This is the opening quote to a story I wrote about walking my Camino last year. Always intent to write more about that month long experience, one over twenty years in the making, but having felt stuck for months, I enrolled in an eight-week online course beautifully taught by local author and scholar Jenna Butler and hosted by Calgary’s Alexandra Writers’ Centre. I’d reached out to Jenna with hope that by using the sensory explorations and writing prompts in “Chronicling Our Personal Relationship with Place,” I’d be inspired to write. I took as kismet – “the perfect place… the right time… where wish becomes possible” – the course’s starting date as it coincided with the evening before I began walking my Camino a year ago. To deepen into the course’s invitation, I posted on social media a few select Camino photos and salient recollections from each day I had walked last year, May 10-30. Too, I’ve been drawn to learn about some literary forms that I thought would lend themselves to my vision of combining the reworked lyric essays from last year’s Portuguese Coastal Camino blog, my journal entries, and those from the guide book provided by Portugal Green Walks, and my newly emerging poetry.
Half way through the course and my hesitation to begin has persisted. I’ve felt afraid to take the first step, not knowing what I’m getting myself into, or where this is going to take me, despite having reached Santiago a year ago. I’ve wondered if Camino doesn’t want, or isn’t yet ready for me to walk on or with him again. Yes, I am animating Camino, doing so out of reverence and regard for its centuries of history, people and their traditions, cultures and stories, and the more than human elements continuously making for its beauty and its challenges. And yes, I admit, maybe it’s simply me who hasn’t been ready, with it simply being a matter of not yet the right time. Then, after a few hours over the past month preparing – compiling my blog posts into a single document and adding my recent Instagram posts; propping up on my writing table my photo journal with its cover photo of me standing in front of the cathedral the day I arrived; stacking beside me my travel journal, course notes, and Portugal Green Walks’ self guided program notes – this week I finally lifted open my laptop and began. While I’d thought I’d use for incentive the June 30th chapbook submission deadline with a literary journal who recently published one of my poems, given the experimental nature of this undertaking, braiding together from several sources, and wanting to embody in my writing now how I walked then – sauntering to enjoy the vistas – I’ve decided wisely let that go.
Viana do Casteloview from VilladesusoPontevedra
Albeit reluctantly and with regret, I’m using the gift of time received by finally having conceded a week ago that I must step away from playing pickleball. A game I enjoy for its physicality and camaraderie with women, who like me, love being fully engaged in life. A game my chiropractor has suggested I may need to sit out as for the past three months I’ve been nursing an injured metatarsal. Despite regular appointments, taking a few days off from the game here and there, icing, and copious applications of extra strength Volartin, it’s been one healing step forward and several back. Compounding this is the pressure, with worry enough to wake me, of needing to seriously train for another long walk in September. This one not a saunter. This one strenuous with nearly double the daily kilometers over sixteen days, and steady ascents and descents. All a natural consequence of aging, this has brought its own grief as I face such realities. My foot and body as whole are feeling better, and I’m hoping this, too, will become “the perfect place… the right time… where wish becomes possible.”
***
As I’ve written here before, the writerly life is a lonely one, rife with rejection. Just this morning I received two. On the up side, I finally received a print copy of the local poetry anthology featuring both my photo as cover and poem inside, and in the past month, several other photos have been accepted by literary journals making me wonder if I should shift my genre!
As it’s been several weeks since I posted a Monday morning blog, by way of update, our dear Annie dog has had a remarkable recovery from the stroke she suffered the end of April. So much so, I call her our “Lazarus,” as it truly feels she rose from a near death listlessness during those early days. Today, she has returned to all the ways in which she is uniquely Annie to and with us, including interrupting my work at noon by persistently placing her big right front paw on my lap or keyboard. Now I kiss it and her in ever welcome gratitude.
walking with Annie “Bright Eyes”, June 5, 2023
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. May this post find you on roads plenty wide and welcoming.
When you return from a long journey air sweet with lilac and unfurled green then you fall to your knees and become gratitude’s pilgrim. You were given the way at birth. Given blue fields and loam. Given an open throat, wild orchids, a path lit by milky stars. You were given desire, sweet darkness of the body, white hum in the bone.
It’s not the departure you long for, nor the finish, with its thick incense, tired feet and weeping. It is the quiet loneliness in between, When memory marries wind and you are pure light. Walking. One foot in front of the other. You cannot speak of this place. The way you cannot speak of grace or what holds you to this world. How at this moment you can only stand up and move toward the light of home.
– Rosemary Griebel – YES (2011)
Last week, listening to a past episode of The Road Home on my radio station CKUA, I heard my friend Rosemary recite three of her poems from this collection, YES. Her lovely voice, together with the background music selected by host Bob Chelmick made for several minutes of exquisite listening pleasure. I first met Rosemary virtually, and then in person when we both attended last November’s weekend workshop with our beloved Irish poet, Pádraig Ó Tuama. Knowing I’d see her, I brought my copy of her book for her to sign. It was there I learned how we are kin, not only in our shared love of words, but also in our both having walked the Camino de Santiago. It occurred to me while listening to Rosemary read last week, that I needed to feature here, in my Friday photo and poem post, some of the local poets whose love of words I share, to uplift those “prophets in my own land,” so to speak.
I’ve written here how the Camino does its work; on me, from the moment I made my decision and deposit a year ago December to walk, but more so upon my return. This past December I took some time to make the photo journal of my walk. Too, I wrote a short story, A Creative Walks the Portuguese Coastal Camino, drawing on my Camino blog posts, for both the Canadian Company of Pilgrims and Sage-ing: The Journal of Creative Aging. And I had the lovely opportunity to talk about my walk and its impacts, both to support a fellow doing his Master degree in Tourism, exploring the transformative gifts walking a non religious Camino, and on the Ellipsis Thinking podcast, “Paying Attention,” hosted by my dear friend, Greg Dowler-Coltman.
Rosemary’s poem speaks to me of so much that was my Camino. That in the planning, the going and the return, I was “gratitude’s pilgrim”… how the “quiet loneliness” while walking became my necessary and bittersweet companion… my “tired feet and weeping” with relief at our safe arrival…and since home, remembering the light, the grace, the beauty. Thank you, Rosemary.
THE PILGRIM When you return from a long journey air sweet with lilac and unfurled green then you fall to your knees and become gratitude’s pilgrim. You were given the way at birth. Given blue fields and loam. Given an open throat, wild orchids, a path lit by milky stars. You were given desire, sweet darkness of the body, white hum in the bone.
It’s not the departure you long for, nor the finish, with its thick incense, tired feet and weeping. It is the quiet loneliness in between. When memory marries the wind and you are pure light. Walking. One foot in front of the other. You cannot speak of this place. The way you cannot speak of grace or what holds you to this world. How at this moment you can only stand up and move toward the light of home.
– Rosemary Griebel –
In Monday’s post I mentioned meeting in person Calgary poet, Rosemary Griebel. All week, during my morning ritual of sitting with Annie sipping my americano (now laced with a half pump of eggnog syrup, tis the season and all), I’ve been re-reading her poetry collection YES. Last night I texted to her:
“Rosemary, it truly is a beautiful collection…so grounded in your intimate, lived experience of the prairies, one I came to know only a bit when my husband, Sig, and I moved here from ON in 1981 and when I learned to appreciate them accompanying him many weekends in the spring and late summer on field trials – horses with bird dogs like Annie, our English setter. The Pilgrim…yes, what an evocative and deeply resonant beauty…and the several I heard you recite on The Road Home, how I first learned of it, you. And some “hard” ones…all so beautifully, deftly composed. Hard but light filled…”
And so to share here one of hers with you, together with my photo walking one rainy day from Viana do Castelo to Vila Praia de Ancora along the Portuguese Coastal Camino. “A day of quiet loneliness in between. A day when memory marrie[d] the wind and [I felt like] pure light. Walking. One foot in front of the other.”
I’ve written several times of the lesson shared with me in 2011, when walking along the path, high on the cliffs of Italy’s Ligurian coast, from the Cinque Terre town of Vernazza to its Corniglia, with a couple who had walked the Camino Frances a year earlier: the Camino is what happens once home. After preparing for last week’s presentation on my walk; talking this week with a friend about curiosity, creativity, and wisdom for his podcast; and lunching with a friend who, having walked the Camino Frances several years ago, wanted to hear some of my story; once again I feel Camino making its presence known deep within as I prepare for my next writing project.
I feel myself hesitate. Find myself distracted. Yet I know it’s simply a matter of placing my stake in the ground, and saying YES. Then Camino begins once again to work with me.
A Wabi Sabi Life 