Dear Friends ~ My young children replay variations on the same stories over and over. They are learning and growing through recurrent dramas of goodness, love, and bravery. In truth, I do the same: playing with the idea of myself.
[Scene 1: The Garden] This playground represents my teetertotter approach to existence, one moment trying to control it and when that breaks me, at first humbly and then jubilantly, marveling at that which is larger and more clever than I. I learn to simply follow the beauty, adding my own weavings, whittlings, and winding foot paths; my own song and silence.
[Scene 2: Lake Erie] The lake turned over last month. The cold water below rises to the surface, stirring what has stagnated. Air from the surface sinks, breathing dreamy life into the lakebed. The shores are covered with rotting fish in this necessary but turbulent process. I swing high into the elation of the lake's fresh start and then fall back in sorrow and loss for each glassy eyed fish.
[Scene 3: A Conversation] An urban farmer slowly built a system of Pay What You Can markets, school gardening programs, and community food workshops, suddenly defunded. "I still have the same work. I just don't get the same pay checks." It opens my imagination to the rich possibilities of "in come," and our unshakability when rooted in what cannot be defunded: relationships. She is practiced in silence, a place from which the beauty of who she is and the meaning of her actions can pulse through the city and into soil and souls.
Concepts of work and play, wild and cultivated, life and loss, spiritual and earthly, scarcity and abundance are stories. We play with them daily, trying to find ourselves in the narrative.
Here is the story I am telling today: I believe your beauty blesses every garden you enter. I hope this newsletter stands with you on the shore with the turning of lakes. I trust we will find in ourselves, in the silence, the will and way to weave our wonders into this world. ~ Katie
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