... You died and so did my words. Now, I grasp at memories of you in all the familiar places.Talk to you as I had, rooms utterly quiet without you.Imagine you on the cushion that still rests on the floor beside me,where, overcome with sadness, I lay down and cry. I grasp at words, jotting them down to hold onto forms…

"crossing the river of life"Mo Chu (mother river) Bhutan, October 19, 2025 "No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you.

Ring a Bell ... Take a Pause ... Find Some Patience - Touching in with musings about my summer.

a red and many petalled zinnia Beyond Patience If I knew another word for patience,would it open me to the act?Perhaps something that invokes the patiencein the zinnias after first central flower has diedand before the next buds are formed.Something that speaks to the patience of winterwhile the field is greening more deeply every day.

"One of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with reasons for despair is a counter-cultural act of courage and resistance, choosing it not despite the abounding sorrow we barely survive but because of it, because joy — like music, like love — is one of those entirely unnecessary miracles of consciousness that give meaning to survival with its bright allegiance to the most alive part of us."

The Big Self Watches the Small Self Look at her, checking her watch again,worried there’s not enough time. Notenough minutes or hours to do all the urgentor beautiful things she longs to do—a list that unspools out of each second—all those things she is certain must be done.She how she squirms, how she bites her lip,

“So, what are you plans for the day?” I asked Sig one morning last week, before he got too involved in monitoring our stocks. “I haven’t decided,” he casually responded. Heading upstairs to get ready for the day, with a stop in the kitchen to warm up my coffee, I thought how wonderful, how privileged even, to have the freedom to decide your day.

"Cracks do not just let light in, they let world in. When we say cracks come with their own weather, we name their atmospheres of grief and astonishment, their humidity of longing, their winds that do not blow in straight lines. We name the business of becoming undone in ways that make new touch possible. We speak to the climates of feeling that resist tidy names, where sobbing might be a form of measurement, where disorientation is a form of orientation.

..."At the same moment, I experienced exactly the opposite emotion. The tears were at the same time tears of an immense sadness—a sadness at what we’re doing to the earth, sadness about the people whom I had hurt in my life, and sadness too at my own mixed motives and selfishness. I hadn’t known that two such contrary feelings (joy and sadness) could coexist.

a birthday memory repurposed, with thanks THANKS Listenwith the night falling we are saying thank youwe are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railingswe are running out of the glass roomswith our mouths full of food to look at the skyand say thank youwe are standing by the water thanking itstanding by the windows looking out…

in a state of continual welcoming A few weeks ago, I wrote about my participation in a poetry writing half marathon. As preamble to this week's post, below is the prompt given for the 23rd hour, and the "list" poem I cobbled together from the book on my desk at dawn that Sunday morning, after 10 hours of writing 10 previous poems.

PRAYER Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more importantcalls for my attention – the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage I need to buy for the trip.Even now I can hardly sit here among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outsidealready screeching and banging. The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.

a tribute to Lisbon's favorite literary son, Fernando Pessoa The best way to travel, after all, is to feel,To feel everything in every way,To feel everything excessively,Because all things are, in truth, excessiveAnd all reality is an excess, a violence,An extraordinarily vivid hallucination. ~ Fernando Pessoa ~ This photo, taken three years ago while strolling in Lisbon the evening I arrived to acclimatize before walking the Portuguese Coastal Camino, is a modern homage to Portugal's man of letters, Fernando Pessaro.

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…

Early Sunday morning I completed my first half marathon. For twelve hours, from 7:00 pm Saturday night to 7:00 am Sunday morning, I joined hundreds of poets from around the world in writing a poem an hour for twelve or twenty-four. Hosted by Caitlin and Jacob Jans from Toronto, I opted for twelve. Having the choice of joining the first or the last half, I elected the latter, knowing my preference for writing in the dark stillness as the day begins or ends.

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.

TO SAY NOTHING BUT THANK YOU All day I try to say nothing but thank you,breathe the syllables in and out with every step Itake through the rooms of my house and outside intoa profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the gardenwhere the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups. I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring…

"When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaoshave the capacity to shift the entire systemto a higher order." Ilya Prigogene And this is what emerged in celebration of my birthday. Several small islands of coherence wherein "emotional density" (thanks to my friend Helen's blog for introducing the term), presence, being seen and heard, AND acknowledging life's inevitable one-way direction, became the criteria - anticipated and realized - for each gathering.

No one told meit would be like this—how growing olderis another passageof discoveryand that aging is onegrand transformation,and if some things becomelost along the way,many other means show upto bring me closerto the center of my heart. No one ever told meif whatever wonderwaits aheadis in another realm…

"Across the wisdom traditions - from Jung to Erikson, from ancient Hindu sages to modern developmental theorists like Rohr, Plotkin, and Fowler - there emerges a shared understanding of life's autumn-time that speaks in many tongues but carries a single breath... These cartographers of the soul's journey, though separated by centuries and cultures, all gesture toward a mysterious transformation in the later seasons of life.

...sometimes hope looks like compost, slow, surprising, quietly transforming what was into what could be. So, maybe the best we can do is let ourselves be changed by love, by grief, by dirt under our fingernails, and by small, ordinary acts of grace. So, wherever you are today, may you remember that your smallness is not insignificance, that love really is fundamentally expressed in potato chips and text messages and a place at the table.

“Anger is always the bodyguard of our woundedness.­ There’s the trauma, ­there’s the anger, ­there’s the rage, but healing is about moving through that. Not distancing, not distracting, but moving through it to that really fundamental sadness and hurt that’s beneath the anger.” Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens in the Harvard Divinity School's newsletter A few decades ago, I sat in a week-long workshop with a teacher I'd long admired.

"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…

soon... 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.

Mindful 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…