Tag Archives: #listen

Bad Bunny, Humanity, Language, Melt The Ice Hats

Translation Not Needed.

There is a daffodil blooming on the back hillside and a rosy pink camellia peeking through the greenery outside the kitchen window. Temps in Seattle have been changeable but recently 50 degrees, the red-winged blackbirds chortling in the hedgerow. Plenty of rain has come and gone but three feet of snow just fell on my other coastal nest; this works for me. What has not worked is finding my place in the many, many words — some interesting, most angry, all emotional — flying around as our country tries to find ballast during the current devastation of our culture and values. I do not know where to dip my oar, pull hard, gain traction against the tides. Or do I?

Bad Bunny sure did. He blew love to the top of the Super Bowl rafters; love for his country, his family, his people, all people. He hugged and kissed and shook his hips and danced on the roof and fell through the ceiling and kept singing and hugging and kissing And guess what? I didn’t understand ONE WORD because ask my family I do not have the language gene so to speak. But I felt him. And this isn’t new, is it? All you need is love.

Love first. Love before hate. Love Strong. Love Wins.

What does love look like? Well, whatever it looked like before this administration has to be amped up a billion times more. I am trying to look deeply into the faces of those around me. Smile first. Give a compliment. Lend a hand. Pay it forward. Buy a stranger a cup of coffee. Think kindness before inconvenience. Understand anger pulsing from so many people is fear and grief and despair. Follow the @walkforpeace monks on Instagram who are walking through snow and sleet to Washington D.C. peacefully, single file, in love and peace. Just walking.

I wonder if you are reading this with an eye roll. Maybe. But when I asked a sight-challenged man last week if I could help him as he was going off the sidewalk edge it wasn’t a lifelong commitment but a moment of humanity and I felt a feeling I have been missing for a few months: I felt ok. He was ok. We would be ok.

Don’t let anyone tell you or frighten you otherwise: we need each other. And the each other in this country is made up of everything — different colors, languages, shapes and sizes. Remember when this was what made us proud of our country?

I am mostly angry but not helpless. We cannot feel helpless or we have failed our neighbors. Find a way to help. Write. Speak. Listen carefully, even if you don’t understand the words.

Thanks, Bad Bunny. I didn’t need a translation:

A hug is a hug in every language.

Yes, we have knit many #melttheicehats too. Let me know if you want one.

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October, Retreat, Thinking, time

October 2025

A different kind of shutdown.

I am always a little short of breath in October. The month arrives a few days after another birthday and there is an sense of urgency to hurry up and get ready for the changing season ahead: from writing submissions to swapping out closets, packing away the cottons for wool, light quilts for down puffs, figuring out if my pants fit from last February and OMG closed shoes. And not to mention the blousy, overgrown garden beds. Writing has taken a way-back seat in the face of the tasks.

The result is I spin in circles and never feel like I have actually accomplished anything, the day is so short, the lists so long.

This week I booked a few days to myself in Vermont at my daughter’s empty house, another year older not wiser, lugging mountains of newspapers to catch up on, two laptops (in fairness and gratitude I was given a beautiful new Airbook for my birthday and I don’t trust it yet), four books to choose from, too many sweaters and several knitting projects. That old adage there are only so many hours in the day seems pretty obvious. But my instinct called for a reset, and my old instinct said pack it all, get’er done.

As I sit in the stillness of a sweet house set between a mountain and a river I am drinking tea, breathing the crisp air, and have some take-aways.

  1. There is in reality so much time.

After I unpacked the car, put away the food, unlocked the front door, dragged a chair onto the stoop, boiled the kettle and made a cuppa I sat and didn’t think about anything except the gift of this week and that my time was my own here. I bet this took all of fifteen minutes and it was NOT a waste of time. In fact, I felt it expanded the hour.

2. What I really needed to do (and drive four hours to realize) was just think.

The best writing — the blogs, the essays, the flash memoir, the submission bio’s — happens to me in stillness. That’s when can let my brain receive a sentence. That’s when I run with it. All this tasking has shut it down. It has taken two days of staring into solitude to realize I can just let the season change without my help.

3. There are no cider donuts to be found here. Vermont, come on. Stillness requires donuts.

I am heading out to the store now, stopping along the way at a few farm stands, really needing nothing just meandering the county, looking at the land breathing. Then I will get back to things. Maybe.

Don’t put your phone in your pocket. Look at the sky for a while. Drink a little hot beverage. Think about the colors. Or lack of color. Or the birdsong. Or your gratitude that the trash truck is whining down the street doing its job. Or the dog that is not yours is barking at nothing. Apply no judgement. Feel the time. It is all yours.

And somebody tell me where to get a cider donut, stat.

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