  It poured the day I was invited to see the Shiro-fugen Cherry Blossoms. For a moment it seemed like the rain had abated, but when I headed out the door I had to duck under where it flowed off the roof. It’s the west coast. One expects wet. The garden in the rain felt fresh and inviting. This is a two-acre oasis in the midst of the neighbourhood and I’m grateful to have been invited into the quiet beauty. Stepping through the gate from the road is like stepping over a threshold. Every time I do, and close the gate behind me, I just stand for a moment and breathe. Of course the garden in Spring is in its glory. This is the second round of Cherry Blossoms. I love this time when the blossoms from the early trees have fallen and these ones are peak. Both fresh and fallen are so beautiful.   Today I stood beneath the petalled branches listening to the rain fall. Then kicked off my sandals and walked the garden. Most of the green is moss rather than grass. Plush, thick, cushiony moss and I wonder why anyone bothers with lawns. This is so much nicer under the feet. I felt like a parched plant welcoming rain, as if I was absorbing the moisture straight through my feet. Beauty quenched my soul and water my arid body. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this, except to express gratitude. For welcoming neighbours, this small bit of lush west coast growth teaming with ducks, song-birds, eagles, squirrels, insects and blossoms, and a moment of refreshment. 
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 Illustration by Tallulah Fontaine Originally published in Broadview magazine for my reflection What is Precious in Life. Today is seven years since Paul slipped away. The veil had been gossamer for a week. He wasn’t ready to let us go, his beloved Finn, the beauty that had emerged between us. I felt the veil flutter as his body could no longer hold him. An exhale brushing past and then . . . I only looked up the meaning of Bean Sidhe after it broke me open today. How did my body know? 1 About six months after Paul died I wrote “joy and sorrow are not opposites. They are here together companionably having tea, inviting me to sit and drink in both the gladness and anguish because both speak to what is precious.” Today I am feeling grief and gratitude. So much has happened in seven years. I am not the person I was. Like Jesus’ disciples needing his death to integrate what he had been trying to teach them, it was after Paul fell ill that I began to understand what he had been teaching me. Since then I have looked deep into the depth of my own brokenness and the hurtful ways it rose out of me. Paul was the one who that most landed on as he held the container for me. My grief today emerges out of loss. And so does my gratitude. The truth is that Paul’s shift also untethered me. I was suddenly freed to begin a journey. Not that he had ever held me back from anything. His support allowed me to shift careers, pursue interests, become a diaconal minister. But this journey was one I needed to do on my own. It has taken me many places both earthly and other-worldly. Some of my grief is that he did not experience the partner that I could be to him now. Some of my gratitude is that others will experience that as I am more able to offer grace and love to those around me.  Desert, hill and mountains later, I am preparing for another journey. This one into the depth where the roots of Yama (Mountain) mingle with the roots of Sakura (Cherry Blossom) deep in Earth and bones ~ the ancient and lasting with that which lives seasons upon seasons then ultimately gives it’s body and seed to something new. These two energies have accompanied me for the past 4 years of exile and isolation. Now we are all emerging out of isolation and this place of exile has become my home. Only as I write do I recognize both the Biblical and mythological in this. Now begins a necessary deepening as I draw down into these roots. There is a convergence of energy happening. In me, in the world, in this moment. Thank you Paul. Because of you I am more ready for this. Because of you I am more ready to encounter me. Thank you Bean Sidhe for cracking me open. I’m coming in. ~ 1Bean Sidhe is a track on Alana Levandoski’s Folk Opera Cianalas/Tãsknota, released February 1, 2024. Bean Sidhe is an Irish fairy woman who keens at the death of a family member.  The coming of Autumn feels the most dramatic of all the seasonal shifts. At least to me. I wonder if it’s because it is a time of loss. We feel loss so much more acutely than other things. It is the fading of Summer, the dimming of light, the shortening of days. Abundance is preserved for storage. Leaves change colour and begin to fall.
I wonder, too, if I particularly notice today because I am in the Autumn of my own life. The abandon of youth long past but the (hopefully) stillness and wiser time of being an elder yet ahead. I’ve long appreciated Macrina Wiederkhr’s poem “The Sacrament of Letting Go.” In it she celebrates this season of shift. Slowly She celebrated the sacrament of Letting Go… First she surrendered her Green Then the Orange, Yellow, and Red… Finally she let go of her Brown… Shedding her last leaf This is less about the loss of light, which is what I’m currently feeling most acutely. But it is the shorter daylight that triggers the leaves to begin to change. It is the time of harvest for the tree as it is for us, putting away food, energy, to get us through the darker days of Winter when the Sun is far away. And then letting go of what is no longer needed. I appreciate how Wiederkhr couches the Letting Go as sacrament. It’s a kairos moment, an outward sign of an inward grace. There’s a communion feel to it. A time of tender sharing that portends an even greater loss. But a loss that, ultimately, becomes the most beautiful thing. Trust. Hope. Patience. She stood empty and silent, stripped bare Leaning against the sky she began her vigil of trust… Shedding her last leaf She watched its journey to the ground… She stood in silence, Wearing the color of emptiness Her branches wondering: How do you give shade, with so much gone? And then, the sacrament of waiting began This is the stuff of daily work, to be honest. I don’t know how it is for you. For me it requires constant drawing back to practices that ground and centre – times of stillness, breath, writing, gratitude, beauty. The loss brought by Summer’s end is a rich time of contemplation. Seasons remind us that endings are beginnings. This is a time of multiple sacraments. There is the letting go. And then there is the waiting. The sunrise and sunset watched with Tenderness, clothing her with silhouettes They kept her hope alive. They helped her understand that her vulnerability her dependence and need her emptiness her readiness to receive were giving her a new kind of beauty. Every morning and every evening she stood in silence and celebrated the sacrament of waiting. The waiting is the hard part. But Wiederkhr also reminds me that while the light may have shifted and continue to shift, the Sun still rises and sets, daily modelling the rhythm of seasons and lifetimes. Vulnerability and emptiness. How we abhor them. But there is beauty in the readiness to receive what will be. How many times in my life have I learned that beauty always emerges, re-emerges. Resurrections. Sometimes those moments don’t seem nearly big enough to fill holes left by loss. But one blossom becomes two, one new leaf becomes many. It doesn’t replace the thing lost, but provides new moments to draw to life. There are only a few leaves on the ground at this moment and just a hint of red on the edges of trees in the park. Evening are cool and the sunset earlier. But it is still twilight as I eat my evening meal and the days are Spring-warm. I revel in this and squeeze in one more picnic into the fading Summer. Looking back on 2020, from the midst of it. Recently I found this reflection that I had written five months into the pandemic and never published. Prescient for me now.   If you want to get to know a place, you might as well go there in a time of global pandemic. And if you have one, take your camera as a companion as you walk the neighbourhood for exercise. Much like a dog draws you into conversation with dog owners, the camera encourages you into dialogue with the empty lot, with the Beach and particularly the fence that spans the length between the freeway and the golf course where you walk when they cut off access to the Beach. If you're typically an urbanite like I am, your camera will help you see that the notion of four seasons is simplification. We think of the movement of the year as Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Yet this Spring I became aware of the micro-seasons in that rhythm. Ornamental Cherry blossoms in March and April make way for Azalea and Rhododendron in May which wither as the Wild Roses bloom in June. Blueberries, Blackberries, and the one random Cherry Tree that inexplicably grows on the Beach begin to drop their Spring blossoms in favour of fruit as we move toward the time called Summer.  I suspect that looking back on this time of pandemic will be the same. It will become known as the 2020 Pandemic and remembered in a singular way, but in fact we live it in micro moments of blessings and witherings. Much like with flora, what grows depends on where you are located and the soil you're rooted in. Unlike with flowers, the things that burst forth and the things that wither may not be as directly connected as blossoms and fruit. As one recent meme noted, our social feeds first bloomed with sour dough tips and successes and shifted to highlighting the need to dismantle white supremacy. Growing a new sense of sufficiency evolved to disintegrating those things in myself that have kept unjust structures in place. Throughout this, seasons can also be marked by the colour of the lawn in the park across the street changing along with our level of fatigue and determination to use this time wisely. Simple green grass turns yellow with dandelions then fluffy white within weeks, only to become a different shade of yellow as buttercups take their turn. Small purple clover ornament the grass after that while larger varieties turn the empty lot into a wildflower garden along with thistles, tall grasses and seeding kale which you harvested before it seeded.  The Beach brings its own rolling seasons, each moment new. Changing tides, weather, and wildlife add layers to seasonal shift tracked through things that grow above the tide line. Horsetails alone mark microseasons with its evolving look. One evening the Beach is a wide expanse of pebbles. The next time a layer of drying seaweed covers the breadth. Yet another time dead crab carcasses scatter across the shore. Tide in, tide out. And then the geese come to mark the summer.  In the past five months my camera and I have walked this neighbourhood a myriad of times capturing glimpses. I feel like we’re getting to know it in a more intimate way because we stop and listen. We hear perseverance here which we could retell as hope or understand as persistence. Humans may have felt stopped by the pandemic, but the seasons, the land, carry on. If I were paying attention, I'd have noticed sooner the commonality of books that have reached out to me in my exile — Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Martin Shaw with Scatterlings. Each of these laid a finger on my wrist and whispered "here." This was a poetic here: Here, read me; Here, this place; Here, this moment. It was as if something had conspired to draw me toward the stories I had forgotten to attend to, the living ones that carried on despite the constraints of human attempts to subdue. These reflections all centre on being gently shaken awake by the land outside your door.   Story, myth, even parable live here. The principle moral, if you want to call it that, is that humans are not the centre, not even kinda. And we catch this by witnessing ourselves on the landscape. We are the barbed wire fence, the garbage on the Beach, the freeway and boarded houses. Not hero, not protagonist. Nature neither adores us nor abhors us. She will cover our barbed wire with petals, fill in our lots, and keep rising, setting, tide in, tide out, blooming and seeding. She will model what it means to admire the Sun setting on the Beach, without leaving beer cans. Come if you like. Or don’t. Now while walking the neighbourhood I feel a shift. The Wild Land on the corner (notice not empty lot) no longer tracks me with suspicion but beckons me over to hear what's going on. Even after someone has clearly mowed down its peak summer glory the stories are here if I care to listen. And if not, they’re here anyway. It transforms my understanding of God. While I continue to understand that Divine Love is unconditional I realize it’s also not personal. The Sun does not shine for my sake and yet my entire life is contingent on it. And my gratitude is even greater. I pick apples and bags of garbage off the Beach. Then I sit in comfortable silence watching geese land for the night as the Sun moves over the horizon.   I catch myself looking for you
under the tree where you never promised to be except in the story I’m writing on this postcard to send to you on the wind pollen for the seed I hope we planted that one time we spoke ~ Kimiko 2023 |
Kimiko KarpoffScattered moments 
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