“As I grow older, I realize that my own writing is very much more than just a pleasurable form of self-expresssion – at its heart, it’s a way of trying to change the story, of weaving the possibility of a better world into being through the power of words.”
Sharon Blackie, Hagitude, 2022
I’ve been walking alot these days and keeping me company has been the wonderful voice of Sharon Blackie reading her words in Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life. She offers in the chapter “The Creatrix,” one of featured archetypes, that the creative work of elder women is about making art that matters, showing others the way, transcending, and transforming our limiting and dysfunctional cultural narratives. Quoting Betty Friedan’s The Fountain of Age (1993):
“‘late-style’ artists and scientists, creators and great thinkers seem to move beyond tumult and discord, distracting details and seemingly irreconcilable differences, to unifying principles that give new meaning to what has gone before and presage the agenda for the next generation.”
While not as articulate, I’ve held the hope that my writing, here in this blog, and in my poetry, offers a new perspective or amplifies and uplifts a current one. I wish for my writing to create and invite readers into a space of contemplation and affirmation, a heart and mind space from which to know and claim their personal power to make a difference.
Since January, I’ve continued to submit my poetry and photography to literary journals and magazines. Once again, where poems have been rejected, often a photo or several have been accepted. This year, two of my photos were first and second choice for the cover of the 2024 Edmonton Stroll of Poets Anthology. After a winter’s worth of rejections, I received word that my poem, “Contemplating the Cherry Tree,” had won first place in the 3rd annual Carmen Ziolkowski Poetry Prize, hosted by Ontario’s Lawrence House Centre for the Arts. And I’m happy to have found some global homes for my work: in Katherine McDaniel’s beautifully curated Synkroniciti, the German-English Amaranth Journal of Food Writing, Art & Design, and Greece’s Raw Lit.
A month ago, I sent to a publisher twenty pages of my fifty-eight-poem collection, Skyborne Insight. My winter-spring labour of love, working with my skilful editor, essayist-poet Jenna Butler, this manuscript is distilled from noticing and naming the grief and the beauty in life’s imperfections, and the sacred in the mundane moments at home, and those extraordinary ones when travelling abroad. In the final editing, heeding Jenna’s advice, I printed and posted each poem on the wall, read aloud, changed a word, added a comma or new line break, re-ordered, and finally realized, as I read the totality, that I had created a wise and vulnerable collection, one of which I am deeply proud. Now I wait and see…and as Jenna wisely advised, celebrate this significant accomplishment: my manuscript.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here about the memories evoked by a poem sent to me in celebration of a previous significant accomplishment: my retirement. Every summer, by habit, I compose a to-do list of activities. “Shred files” was this summer’s prompt to review, shred, and recycle the last of my professional files. Drawers and shelves emptied, bags and boxes filled, my heart heeded me to hold on to the folders on facilitation, The Circle Way, the Art of Hosting, and bits from coaching – the mainstays of the career I loved, the career that was my love made visible. I now look forward to re-configuring how to use both the physical and energetic space that’s now been opened for my writing, to more fully nurture its potential to weave into being, with words and photographs, a better world…to presage by continuing to notice and name the nuances of what is asking to be born, of what the world is asking of me.
“…the role of the elder woman as visionary isn’t always an active, ‘out there’ role; sometimes it’s associated with a quieter, more inward-looking aspect of elderhood – perhaps a later life stage, in which she has withdrawn to the solitude and darkness of her symbolic cave…
These old women have left their strivings behind, and in the clarity of all that not-doing, they’ve made room for the space in which to cultivate deep vision, insight, and wisdom.”
Sharon Blackie, Hagitude, 2022
Exploring further and deeper the terrain that is my eldering landscape.
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.
A Wabi Sabi Life 