Buds in Spain, March 2020 (we know now the darkness that was soon to fall upon us all)
My gosh…what sweetness to suddenly hear your voice and words singing on the radio this morning.
My heart needed it all.
Such heavy harrowing times. My words are stuck and stuffed like my head cold.
Anyways…this moment a sweet one.
Hope this finds you well.
Much love and kindness.
~ Katharine ~
Re-reading my email, with my friend’s lovely reply, knowing that I am, like many around me, at a loss for words, I knew this was “OK enough” for today’s photo and poem feature. With a line break here and there, formatted into stanzas…yes, it would be “OK enough.”
And how simple a gesture, to respond in the moment to the surge of surprise and joy upon hearing my friend’s name and then her singing, to reach out and connect when it’s darkest… before dawn.
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. May we all be bearing up well, responding in the moment to those many surges of unexpected joy.
So 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.
“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.
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.
A Wabi Sabi Life 