All day I try to say nothing but thank you, breathe the syllables in and out with every step I take through the rooms of my house and outside into a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.
I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work, when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly hair combs into place.
Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute, and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I remember who I am, a woman learning to praise something as small as dandelion petals floating on the steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup, my happy, savoring tongue.
– Jeanne Lohmann –
Whew! I’m glad I’d clipped and saved this poem, shared on social media last week by Parker Palmer. Despite sitting here for a couple of hours writing, and up most weekday mornings to log onto a 7:00 am Zoom writers’ circle, I was ready to power off when I remembered today’s photo and poem feature. This one feels perfect, as it no doubt did for Parker when he posted it.
“I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring/and to the cold wind of its changes.”Alberta springs are notorious for their capricious nature: warm one day, snow the next; north winds blowing strong and cold, drying puddles, and disappearing shady pockets of crusty snow. Depending on the location, here you can ski in the morning and golf in the afternoon. Maybe because we had an exceptionally mild winter, thanks to El Nino, most of us have felt more bewildered than usual by spring’s ambivalent arrival. Toss in a solar eclipse, a new moon, and now a full moon, and yesterday’s collective lack of focus on the pickleball courts – wearing toques and gloves after two preceding days of short sleeves and shorts – might indicate our resiliency, or discombobulation! And that’s not writing a word about everything else going amuck in the world. “Weather and world weary,” would suffice.
So yes, I say “thank you” as I remember I am a woman praising something small…like the three browning hares who’ve taken to nestling under the spruce bough, or up against its trunk, the ones I call “honey bunnies,” happy to see them as they bring back memories of Annie fixated on them as she’d stand at the front window.As I do now.
Thank you to the sun that rises earlier and sets later, every day, now necessitating wearing an eye mask to fall asleep. To the robins I’m just beginning to hear singing their mating song. To the geese honking as they fly in pairs or in V formation. The murder of crows nest-making. Catkins and ice pads.
spring’s juxtaposition
And to you, dear friends, thank youfor being here. Much love and kindest regards.
In celebration of Earth Day, today its 54th anniversary, my community hosted a free showing of the 2021 documentary, River, produced in Australia, narrated by actor Willem Dafoe, and described as “a stunning exploration of the timeless relationship between human civilization and Earth’s rivers, in all their majesty and fragility.”
Writing in earlier posts that I call myself a “daughter of Niagara,” having been conceived, born, and raised in the land bordered by that mighty river, this film, with its breath-taking photography, orchestral score, and poetic narration, touched that place deep within me where river resides.
“…Our early destiny was shaped by the will of rivers. We both feared and revered them as forces of life, and of death. We worshiped them as Gods.
Rivers inspired us as a species, allowing us to thrive. Over time, they became the highways by which trade, and technology spread inland, and along them also flowed poetry, stories and religions, politics and conflict…”
– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021
For the last forty-five years, I’ve made home near another mighty river, the North Saskatchewan. While not in my sightline every day, and in only a few ways resembling my river from home, at least once a week, as I drive into Edmonton or walk along its valley with my Saturday morning Camino group, I feel deep pleasure and appreciation for its presence in my life, for how it invites, metaphorically and in an embodied reflection, wise action for living.
By flowing with the power of its current; recognizing the value of being contained by its banks; attending to its shallows, hidden depths, and eddies, its seasonal highs and lows influenced by rainfall, snowpack, heat and cold – in sum, recognizing its innate alive wildness as mirror of possibility for my own.
“…For eons, running water obeyed only its own laws. Patient and persistent, it wore mountains away. It looped and meandered laying down great plains of lush, rich silt. Where rivers wandered, life could flourish. For rivers are world-makers. They have shaped the Earth, and they have shaped us as a species. For thousands of years we worshiped rivers, as the arteries of the planet, the givers of gifts, the well-springs of wonder…”
– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021
Like a sonnet’s volta, or a river’s ninety-degree turn, the film shifted perspective to show the impact on rivers of our interventions and interference in their natural flow, albeit while acknowledging their unpredictable, destructive capacities:
“…we devised extraordinary means of controlling them, of harnessing their force and taming their wildness. We discovered how to regulate and manage them, how to run them like machines. We shifted from seeing rivers as living beings to seeing them as resources. Our gods had become our subjects…”
– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021
Lake Oroville, 2017 and May, 2021Lake Oroville, July 26, 2021
Repeatedly, I was held in awe by the film’s aerial photography showing the shape and flow of rivers and their profound resemblance to trees. Staggering to learn was that the amount of water in the hydrosphere, the Earth’s original water account, hasn’t changed since the beginning of time, while our numbers, in contrast, have grown beyond comprehension. Too, that worldwide, there is hardly a river unspanned, undammed or undiverted, and that the largest dams have held back so much water, they’ve slowed the Earth’s rotation.
“…The mystery and beauty of a wild river is beyond our ability to comprehend but within our capacity to destroy. Rivers that have flowed for eons have been cut off in decades.
Time and again, upstream need and upstream greed have led to downstream disaster.
We have become Titans, capable of shaping our world in ways that will endure for millions of years to come…”
– Willem Dafoe, River, 2021
Throughout, I kept thinking back to John O’Donohue, and his poem, Fluent:
I would love to live Like a river flows, Carried by the surprise Of its own unfolding.
Such simple eloquence that holds reverence for – not interference with – river’s sovereignty.
If you, too, are enamored of rivers, I encourage you to find the film and take the 90 minutes to watch it. For Earth Day…which, IMHO, should be every day.
If this is the best you can do, citizens of the world, I resolve to become summer shadow, turtle adrift in a pool. Today a frog waited in a patch of jasmine for drizzles of wet before dawn. The proud way he rose when water touched his skin – his simple joy at another morning – compare this to bombing, shooting, wrecking, in more countries than we can count and ask yourself – human or frog?
– Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air, 2018 –
Talk about prescience. This poem was published in 2018, though most likely written months, if not years earlier. Given the poet’s Palestinian father, Naomi Shihab Nye has always had her eye on, and heart attuned to the chronic strife in her father’s homeland.
I wrote at the bottom of the poem’s page, after yesterday’s reading and in response to growing tensions and extended involvements, “Are we poised for WW3? And too, Ukraine and Russia since February 2022…” My question as reasonable as the poet’s, but I pray, not prescient.
I’ve been away for a several days, hence the pause. Writing, but not in this space. It’s nice to be back until I set off again in a few weeks. Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.
“Aries and Viriditas” original artwork by Katharine Weinmann
…to a world-weary empath
you can’t leave Earth yet
~ because I just flipped ahead about a hundred pages in your story and I read that someday you will be the reason someone else doesn’t give up on their life
I’m sorry to spoil the end of your epic tale
~ but someday you will be the one who ignites the blaze in another person’s heart that won’t ever be put out again
don’t complicate the plot of your story
~ you are here to be lamplighter that hands out little bits of your flame to ensure the rest of the world doesn’t exist in darkness
I know you have been scorched so many times
~ to love the world is to sometimes be burned at the stake by others who mistake your gift of compassion as a personal weakness
I know it’s not easy to be a bringer of light to those who have become addicted to shadows
~ but we need you to be a gardener of effervescent seeds that you will perhaps never see grow into burning rosebushes that can be seen from space
Oh, my love, don’t give into the calling despair
~ set your life on fire with kindness and watch how many other people come out of their caves to sit by your campfire heart to share their own stories of survival
Oh my love, you are my favorite element
~ john roedel ~
It’s Easter Sunday. Cold, with a skiff remaining of the crusty snow that blew in on Thursday, and sunny. We were treated by our friends to a quintessential Easter brunch: locally sourced smoked ham and scalloped potatoes, sauteed asparagus, hot cross buns, and bread pudding with maple syrup. While flowers remain hidden here, a solitary bird, perched high within the branches of the still-bare alder tree, serenaded both our coming and going. A “slow” meal, interspersed with watching the antics of their cats, and our always edifying conversations, with the window open feeling the gentle breeze and hearing the birdsong, I felt the day’s hopeful promise.
Now home, and after a nap (I’ve been plagued with early waking for the past few weeks – The recent full moon? An upcoming solar eclipse? Excitement with Tuesday’s trip? Editing? Anxiety anticipating the long-time-in–coming meeting with afriend on Good Friday, one that allowed us both to lay down our metaphoric load of disappointment and grief?), I turned down the furnace and opened wide the windows to invite in Spring’s energy to displace Winter’s. A bit of packing, tending to correspondence, and this blog, one held in the draft folder for a day when time is short, concentration spent.
John Roedel is a self-described “Facebook poet,” sharing his bittersweet, aimed straight-for-the-heart compositions, often in the form of a photo of a first draft scratched in pen on the lined page of his notebook. On the heels of today’s brunch conversation, one that weaved back and forth through life’s joys and despairs, this felt like the right one to post. Too, that it speaks to his “favorite element” fire, which is Aries and the astrological sign currently ruling our planet. Aries is my sign, too. Fire my element and dosha. And as a self-described “empath,” at times world-weary – the trifecta of reasons for sharing it with you, many of whom I suspect are, too, world-weary empaths.
So, take heart, dear ones. Continue to set your life on fire with kindness and know we’re all in exceptionally good company.
One winter night in 2015, we attended a concert at our local theatre. Conceived and produced by local musician Cam Neufeld,“The Road to Django”celebrates the music of Django Reinhardt, founder of “gypsy jazz,” made famous with violinist Stephane Grappelli in Parisian hotclubs during the 1930s and 40s. Tracing its origins musically, following the migratory path of the Roma people from northern India to Spain, through Turkey and the Balkans to France, Cam and his ensemble educated and entertained us splendidly. But it was when their “journey” brought them to Andalusia with a “vignette” of Flamenco, its origins attributed to the impoverished Romani, a form initially despised but now a UNESCO recognized part of the World’s Intangible Cultural Heritage, that I became enthralled. Arriving at home, I immediately went in search of lessons and a teacher. Two days later, I was in class.
Fast forward to 2017 and my first visit to Andalusia en route to a weeklong writing retreat in a hill town northwest of Sevilla. While the “raison d’etre” left much to be desired, its location – a pink stucco villa built by long time British expats to raise their family and open a cooking school – was a culinary dream come true, the daily treks through the forests into different villages worth the price of admission. And the once in a lifetime opportunity to join the annual pilgrimage, la Romeria Reina de Los Angeles, where the Flamenco tradition was on show at every turn, became a most memorable feast for the eyes and ears. (I wrote about this experience in my earlier blog site.)
Returning to Sevilla after a week of writing, I witnessed a street performance of Flamenco dance and guitar the morning I visited the Plaza de España and later that evening, first in line for front row seats, I saw a live show at one of the local Flamenco cafes.
Returning home, and to classes, I realized this was a dance form I needed to have begun as a child, in another life, in another world if I were to ever realize the dream I had in my head, the feeling held in my heart. Yet, I persisted and finally felt I was making some progress when I switched to a teacher whose approach was organized, coherent, and aligned with my learning style. Jane was a devotee, studying every summer in Sevilla’s blistering heat, coming home to teach and produce annual Flamenco festivals featuring those same masters from Andalusia. I regretted not finding my way to her sooner and losing those precious years.
In 2020, I designed a winter sojourn in southern Spain to introduce my husband to another country of my heart (Italy and Morocco each taking chambers). Arriving in Sevilla, we quickly made our way to the pink stucco villa in the hill town to enjoy its remarkable hospitality and meals. Stops in Cordoba, Granada, Malaga (all described in past posts here) followed, with enough time in each to mosey around, take in the galleries and sights, taste the tapas and sip the icy vermuts. Returning to Sevilla, we took in a Flamenco show at the same cafe I’d visited in 2017. Again, first in line for front row seats, I recognized the male dancer and the singer. It was a performance not to be forgotten. The male dancer knew it. We knew it. He knew we knew it, as the energy in that cafe and on that stage soared and his footwork almost made sparks. Did he know what was to come? Winter 2020. Spain, then Italy, then Portugal, then the rest of the world falling to Covid-19. Was that performance, one where all was put on the stage, nothing held back, imbued with prescience?
Fast forward to this month when I met my teacher for coffee. We’d met earlier in the summer as she was returning to Sevilla for the first time since Covid. I would be soon traveling to Italy to embark on my 250+ km Via di Francesco. I’d told her of my healing foot and wondered if I’d be able to return to her classes. During coffee this time, she confirmed my hunch that dancing again might seriously compromise my foot.
Last week, moved by spring’s enlivening energies and the age-old tradition of spring cleaning, I reached into the closet for the bag containing my nearly new hammered toe shoes, and to my surprise, the castanets I’d purchased while studying with my first teacher. In another closet, I gathered the long black trimmed red ruffled skirt. I took some photos and posted them on the local flamenco page and shared to mine. Within an hour an inquiry. By the next morning, all were sold to a local dance teacher.
We agreed to a day and time for her to pick them up and all day long, very atypical of me, it kept slipping my mind. Come the day of, I totally forgot our appointment. Apologetic, I offered to deliver the package to her. And that day, again atypical, I was running late. My husband, noticing all of this, together with my abrupt shunning of his attempts to help me get going, suggested I might be having a tough time parting with my skirt and shoes. Yes, I was, I conceded.
And then I cried…for the dream not to be…for the memory of that last time I danced…wearing my black shoes and my red skirt with a black ruffled sleeved shirt, looking very much the Flamenco dancer in my mind, on those stages…standing in a row with other dancers, each of us being watched by the teacher from Sevilla as he counted and clapped the beat…our feet tapping, hands held on hips, erect, looking straight ahead into the mirror…reflecting my focus, my precision… even when he stood directly in front of me.
It was a performance not to be forgotten. I knew it. He knew it. I knew he knew it, as the energy soared, and my footwork almost made sparks. Did I know what was to come? Winter 2020. Covid-19. Time passing. My final Flamenco class.
This is my homage to Flamenco, my dream of dancing it, the time I did.
A girl in Gaza speaks into a table microphone: Do you believe in infinity? If so, what does it look like to you?
Not like a wall Not like a soldier with a gun Not like a ruined house bombed out of being Not like concrete wreckage of a school’s good hope a clinic’s best dream
In fact not like anything imposed upon you and your family thus far in your precious thirteen years.
My infinity would be the never-ending light you deserve every road opening up in front of you.
Soberly she nods her head.
In our time voices cross the sea easily but sense is still difficult to come by.
Next girl’s question: Were you ever shy?
– Naomi Shihab Nye, Voices in the Air, 2018
I’m sitting at a worktable in my public library typing this post for tomorrow’s drop. We’ve been without WIFI in our home office for nearly a week (hence why no Monday post). WOW! How dependent are we on this technology? It’s tax time. My husband does all our investing online. Bills to be paid by the month end. Waiting to print time sensitive return labels. Looming project deadlines. I’ve managed with my phone but wonder how much I’m over the data limit and how much the costs will be. My neck aches from being hunched over…texting and tapping what I can to stay in touch, be responsive. So, in this moment, I’m reminded how much I enjoy and appreciate my library, surrounded by stacks, students plugged in working at other tables, surrounded by full-length windows.
It’s quintessential springtime in Alberta. After several days of sun, warm weather, and melted snow – after getting off really easy with winter – the temperature dropped below freezing and snow fell for most of the day. I took a leisurely start to my day with a coffee date being canceled. Sipping my Americano, in the flat white light of the living room, quiet with snow gently falling outside, I began reading this volume of poetry, waiting on my shelf for just this moment. Needing some shoring up given another week of rejections and trepidation about the manuscript I’m revising, I was not disappointed, as even its epigraph began to set me straight:
“Stay humble, blend, belong to all directions. Fly low, love a shadow. And sing, sing freely, never let anything get in the way of your singing, not darkness, not winter, not the cries of flashier birds, not the silence that finds you steadfast pen ready…”
Naomi Shihab Nye
Then this, the first sentence of her introduction:
“Poet Galway Kinnell said, ‘To me, poetry is someone standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.'”
And this, to open the first section, “Messages,”:
Broken pencil Broken pen Maybe today I’ll write my best poem
Well maybe not a poem but a post. And maybe not my best, but enough. Enough to be thankful for Palestinian-American poet and educator, Naomi Shihab Nye who first came to my attention when I read her well known “Gate a4” and signature, “Kindness.” Enough to let her cultural perspective and experiences teach me, as she was taught when teaching a poetry workshop in an international high school in Japan, the word Yutori – “life space” – the place and space “in which to stand back to contemplate what we are living and experiencing. More spaciousness in being, more room in which to listen.” (Voices in the Air, xiii) And enough to remember a girl in Gaza, or Ukraine, or Israel, Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethopia, Yemen,Russia…asking profound questions, being deeply heard, and wishing her the infinity of the never-ending light she so deserves.
I Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do.
You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. – Rainer Maria Rilke
II the places in our heart where the world took bites out of us
may never fully heal and will likely become wide open spaces
~ be careful to not fill them with just anything or anyone
your wounds aren’t supposed to become attics for you to hoard unnecessary junk
these holes in our hearts are holy sites
and we should treat them as such
so when visiting your old wounds make sure to take your shoes off and turn off your cellphone
sit by candlelight and watch how the shadows tell the story how brave you are
~ to survive – John Roedel
III “When a lot of things start going wrong, all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born – and that this something needs for your to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.” – Anne Lamott
IV “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily and I must return the gift. “ – Robin Wall Kimmerer
I collect poems and quotes for my weekly Friday photo and poem feature. As I scrolled for today’s post, these four came together for me with a curious resonance, echoing from writ small to large, scaling from an individual’s questioning and suffering to Earth’s magnificent mystery.
I offer these selections as a reminder that there are forces seen and unseeen, angels, ancients and ancestors working on our behalf in ways we have little, if any way, of registering. I offer these up to salute the turning of the season, life’s cycles being just one of those vast and wondrous mysteries.
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends, and blessings for the arrival of the Equinox, spring and autumn.
It’s dawn. Still dark, as yesterday’s “spring ahead” time change makes more noticeable the gift of more daylight in the evening.
It’s Monday, when I typically drop a post, or try to. Last night making pizza and watching the Oscars interrupted my typical pattern of getting to my desk at 6 to write. Too, yesterday I sent off to my editor the big writing project I’d been waking early each weekday for the past few weeks to complete. After pressing the “send” button on the email, I took a breather and walked in sunshine warming and snow melting, passing folks enjoying the same. Smelling, hearing, and feeling spring. My breather continuing until bed time.
It’s soon time to join my 7:00 am Zoom weekday writing space, where after exchanging good mornings we all mute and “vanish” ourselves to our keyboards to write for an hour or longer. I’ll finish this post, despite it being late, and begin pieces for several March submission deadlines.
It’s a post without a theme. Simply keeping my promise made to Muse to write. Showing up at my desk, in the space I created to create. Candle lit. Classical music streaming from the station I re-discovered during those recent trips to Niagara (WNED on TuneIn). Radiant heat glowing on my back. Americano cooling in its handmade Italian cup. Borrowing from my Friday pattern, I’ll leave you with what feels like the perfect poem for today, an excerpt from John O’Donohue’s “A Morning Offering,” in To Bless the Space Between Us:
I place on the altar of dawn: The quiet loyalty of breath, The tent of thought where I shelter, Waves of desire I am shore to And all beauty drawn to the eye.
May my mind come alive today To the invisible geography That invites me to new frontiers, To break the dead shell of yesterdays, To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today To live the life that I would love, To postpone my dream no longer But do at last what I came here for And waste my heart on fear no more.
There are those who want the world to remain on its current path. This is not only unacceptable, but it is painfully unimaginative. For the beauty of our generation is we are uniquely situated to achieve what so many in this world currently consider impossible. How exquisitely beautiful it will be to watch the current narrative go down in flames, then witness poetics & phoenix rise from the ashes.
Embers, ancestors, and angels await us, loved ones. Forward.
– Mark Gonzales – In Times of Terror, Wage Beauty, 2014
I’d forgotten I had on my poetry shelf this eloquent “collage of visions.” In response to last week’s attempt to find enough words to notice and name one of the current global narratives literally imploding and exploding, a friend, in her comment, referenced the book, one I had gifted her years back. Immediately retrieving it, thumbing through its simple and beautifully designed pages, I knew I wanted to uplift and amplify Mark’s message and intention here today. Quoting from the back cover:
In Times of Terror, Wage Beauty is a meticulously crafted series of ideas in tweet sized digestible prose. It serves as a personal guide to social change makers in the 21st century navigating complex social systems by highlighting advanced approaches to healing and global wellness.
A quick early morning scroll todayon social media and I’m reminded it’s International Women’sDay. Aware of feeling cynical and crusty, perhaps the result of many very early mornings arriving at my desk to write, I’m less inclined to jump on the bandwagon and share any of its memes or create my own. As with so many of these socially-politically designated days, often created, if not co-opted, by the power brokers to highlight and assuage their own interests, or by corporations to make money, I’m tired and disillusioned with the narrative that has become a “painfully unimaginative” rhetoric. I need a narrative like Mark’s. One that insists we not live in a world where any of us needs to shout to be heard, seen, and valued (26).
Instead, a narrative that encourages the simple yet essential acts of creativity – dreams, laughter, love, and imagination (51). One that heals the hearts of those forced from their homelands by centering on their beauty (29). One that remembers stories as ceremony, vessels for ancestors, memories, futures, and the vehicle by which the divine is engaged (41). One that reminds me “now is not the time to be timid” (21).
Good poetry begins with the lightest touch, a breeze arriving from nowhere, a whispered healing arrival, a word in your ear, a settling into things, then like a hand in the dark it arrests your whole body, steeling you for revelation.
In the silence that follows a great line you can feel Lazarus deep inside even the laziest, most deathly afraid part of you, lift up his hands and walk toward the light.
– David Whyte –
Sooooo…in last Monday’s post – one I’d been thinking of writing since the first of the year, in celebration of four years of writing, including 265 posts here – I claimed myself a poet, describing the chronology of my journey to finding my way to a new career, or more aptly, vocation. And, of course, the next day dawned with several rejection emails in my inbox and more that came during the week. A coincidence, but my inner critic has been having a field day ever since.
“Getting too big for your britches, aren’t you?” came her scolding interjection. And for most of the week, despite signing on every morning for a 7:00 am Zoom writing circle, writing and editing poems for submissions, I’ve been hearing her, sotto voce, describe my words and my effort as “trite” and “maudlin”. Ouch.
And, of course. Not only is part of this practice about learning to roll with rejection “out there,” but also, and more significantly, working with (and that can mean ignoring, cajoling, considering…) the rejecting aspect of myself. So, I took us out to play pickleball with my friends. Got into my body and out of my head and was surprised to see both my game improve and my writing.
Too, I received kind feedback from friends, several of whom write and know this terrain well, letting me know their response to how and what I write. The timing of one was nothing short of an answered prayer. Allies who help shore me up to shut down the noise.
And suffice to say, I took several bold and audacious steps toward making a future dream come true, one that utterly delights me, and brings visceral joy whenever I think about it.
Sooooo…I persist. I’m finding my way to a lighter touch. I look forward to the day when my inner critic – who I know arrives to keep me in line because she IS deathly afraid – lifts up her hands, surrenders, and walks toward the light. On the page and in all aspects of my life.
A Wabi Sabi Life 