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Love, as an act of resistance

Love, as an act of resistance

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We live in a time when empathy, charity, and even love has become radicalized. Those of us who strive to emulate the Prince of Peace might interject here, “But weren’t those ideas always radical?” Apparently, they were two thousand years ago. But I’m not sure if that was always the case. There’s evidence that our ability to empathize and show compassion has allowed us to work together, care for each other, share food and resources—all characteristics that aided in our collective survival.

With the winds of intolerance, greed, and brutality at gale force, practicing love and kindness is radical. And creating art becomes an act of resistance, spreading concentric circles of love and refilling depleted reserves. In the midst of chaos, take time for quiet reflection, meditation, and prayer—a respite from the storm. Be good to yourselves and patient with each other. Create art.

Today, on the anniversary of an insurrection, I finished sketching my second children’s book. I’m experimenting with different illustration techniques. Like The Golden Rule, it takes place in the Rocky Mountains and features the wildlife I love. And also like The Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you), it might be considered radical. I’m calling it Love One Another.

The Love Religion

The inner space inside
that we call the heart
has become many different
living scenes and stories.

A pasture for sleek gazelles,
a monastery for Christian monks,
a temple with Shiva dancing,
a kaaba for pilgrimage.

The tablets of Moses are there,
the Qur’an, the Vedas,
the sutras, and the gospels.

Love is the religion in me.
Whichever way love’s camel goes,
that way becomes my faith,
the source of beauty, and a
light of sacredness over everything.

 ~~ Ibn Arabi

Translated by Coleman Barks (From the introduction of his book of Daily Readings, A Year with Rumi)

 

Copyright © 2026 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.

On Winter Solstice

On Winter Solstice

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Growing up in Alaska, summer days were long and warm and generous. No sooner had the sun dipped into Cook Inlet, than it began its climb back into the sky. In the winter, the opposite was true.  Winter’s long nights stretched their cold tendrils into the day.

That said, I remember being mystified by my parents’ friends who headed south for the cold months. Even our darkest night contained light. The Alaska state flag honors that light with seven stars of gold on a field of blue. My winter days were spent beneath a multitude of twinkling stars, the moon, and undulating aurora borealis. Reflected light glistened from fields of snow and frost-covered trees. My childhood winters were not dark, they were magical.

Maybe I’d have felt differently if I’d been commuting by car to work every day. My sister and I cross country skied two miles (uphill both ways) through wilderness to the paved road, where we caught the school bus. We buried our skis in the snow bank there, so we could retrieve them at the end of the school day. Then, with stars studding the sky, we made the same trip home again.

In the winter, the teachers flooded the playground and created an ice rink where we played crack-the-whip. We built snow forts, snowmen, and had snowball wars. We shoveled the pond in the woods behind our A-frame for our own bumpy rink, and brought thermoses of hot cocoa to warm our hands and cheeks. In the mornings, there were crystalline works of window art and new tracks through the snow.

As an adult, I have more empathy for those suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. My husband and I live in the Rocky Mountains and I love the quiet winters there. But, with so much darkness, my energy reserves run low. I think that’s true for a lot of us. We begin our day before the sun comes up, and the day’s work isn’t done until long after dark – no doubt, a metaphor for our time.

But still we rise. Because we must.

And there’s strength for the long winter nights in a common truth.  That nothing is permanent except change. Darkness, in itself, is unsustainable.

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, a 13th century Sufi poet, said:

We bury our seeds and wait,
Winter blocks the road,
Flowers are taken prisoner underground,
But then green justice tenders a spear.

On this Solstice evening, we are reminded that – even at its most powerful – darkness cannot keep us from the light. Dark days will give way to the warmth and generosity of summer. Like the arc of moral justice, the earth’s gradual tilting toward the sun is inevitable.

I’ll close with another of Rumi’s thoughts:

“If everything around seems dark, look again, you may be the light.”

Copyright © 2025 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.

Moving Within

Moving Within

A child walks through the forest on a snowy night to bring carrots to a hungry rabbit. This is an illustration from my children’s book, The Golden Rule (the first book of the Ardea Herodeas Books “Collected Wisdom” series).
Each morning, my husband and I start the day with a short reading and meditation. We cycle through books by Thich Nhat Hanh, Robin Wall Kimmerer, or other inspirational writers, and then we read from Coleman Bark’s A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings. Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī was a Sufi mystic and a prolific poet from the 13th century. Craig and I are often struck by how his words ring true in our current time. Here’s Rumi’s poem for today:
Move Within
Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within,
but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
Yes, it’s November 4th, election day. Fear has permeated our national and international politics. Rumi’s poem is a good reminder that we don’t know what the future will bring. Still, we keep putting one foot in front of the other. Get to the polls; cast our votes. But the poem resonated in other ways, as well.
Renovation-in-process. Panhandle Creek Press will be based in the area over the garage.

As many of you know, we have been living in a small cabin for over a year while we complete the addition to our cabin over Panhandle Creek. It’s taken much longer than we expected, but that’s the nature of most renovations (especially at 8725′). We had hoped to be in by the holidays, but yesterday we learned it will most likely be January or February before we can move back home. Disappointing, but we’re grateful to have a roof over head and plenty of firewood for the stove. My books will stay in boxes for a couple more months. In the grand scheme of things, this is a small setback. Do I sound convinced? I’m getting there!

The back of the cabin viewed from up the ravine.

Completing Denver Publishing Institute was the catalyst for tremendous movement within. I’ve known since Writing for Peace what kinds of books I wanted to publish. DPI gave me new tools and greater clarity of vision. To that end, we’ve added two new imprints:

Ardea Herodias Books which aims to cultivate unique voices in children’s literature and develop beautiful books that challenge young readers to grow their capacity for empathy.

North Fork Publishing will serve as the hybrid press, providing support from initial book concept to developmental, copy, and line editing, from book design and page layout to publishing and distribution. North Fork Publishing provides authors with the flexibility to design a program that best meets their publishing needs, and replaces our previous hybrid press, “Panhandle Creek Publishing.”

Both Panhandle Creek Press and Ardea Herodias Books will operate as a traditional press.

When Craig bought me watercolors last Christmas, they opened up a whole new world of possibilities. I began painting the natural world—my home in the Rocky Mountains, childhood memories of the Alaskan wilderness where I grew up.

With the increased hostility toward immigrants and cultures from around the world, the books being purged from schools and libraries, and the political move to remove empathy and compassion from faith, I knew I wanted to create a children’s book about “the golden rule.” My time at DPI also helped clarify my vision for the book and a “Collected Wisdom” series of children’s books written by authors from within many cultures—children’s stories that pass knowledge through the generations. I’ll be honest, the illustrations are a stretch for me. It’s taken much longer than I had planned!

The first book in the series, The Golden Rule, shares simple quotes from various faiths, cultures, and traditions. The illustrations tell a story of how one small kindness spreads on a wintry night. The book will release on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, November 25th.

And on Tuesday, December 2nd, we’ll celebrate another launch for author Nancy Johnson’s book, Essence of Our Humanity: Portraits of My Beloved Psychiatric Patients. It’s a small, beautiful, and very unique book. I’ll tell you about it next time!

Back to Rumi’s poem. Though so much is at stake now, and so many of the sign posts along the way are darkly foreboding, Rumi’s wisdom still holds true. Genuine strength is found in empathy and compassion. Without knowing the future, we resist fear and walk on, acknowledging kindnesses and adding our own where we can.

 

 

 

 

A Truing of Vision

A Truing of Vision

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways.  Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for more is in us — more range, more depth, more feeling: more associative freedom, more beauty.  More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstunted delight, more longing, more darkness. More saturation and permeability in knowing our existence is also the existence of others. More capacity to be astonished. Art adds to the sum of the lives we would have, were it possible to live without it. And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share.

~Jane Herschfield, from TEN WINDOWS: How Great Poems Transform the World

 

Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.

Another Modest Proposal, in memory of those lost

Another Modest Proposal, in memory of those lost

On Memorial Day, I hiked our property’s wildlife trail with Max and my three-year-old granddaughter. We descended the rocky path into the ravine, wove through aspens and the dense stand of lodgepole pine, then scaled the granite formation we call Moon Temple. There, she released my hand to climb from one boulder to the next.

“Are you going to be a mountain climber when you grow up?” I asked.

She nodded, her eyes fixed with fierce determination on her next hand-hold. Watching her climb, my heart ached with love and the knowledge that across the country other families were grieving the loss of their children.

Since the Uvalde shootings, when 19 children and two adults were murdered by an 18 year old with an assault weapon, the death tally continues to rise.

I know many on the right believe more guns in the hands of the “good guys” will protect the innocents that our trained police could not. Gun sales spike after every mass shooting, and we will never get real solutions from lawmakers funded by the National Rifle Association.

I believe in the power of the written word to change minds. I’ve ruminated over taking the approach Jonathon Swift did in his 1729 satirical essay, “A Modest Proposal.” During that time, Irish families couldn’t pay their high rents, let alone feed or cloth their offspring. Much like today, the propertied elite were indifferent to the suffering caused by their greed.

Jonathon Swift proposed that, rather than watch their children starve, the Irish should sell their babies to feed the wealthy. He goes so far as to suggest recipes for infant flesh, “a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.”

Swift’s proposal raised awareness and inspired activism. I thought something similar might shock both the left and right into working together to end this insanity. The parallel to Swift’s satire would be a gruesome scenario something like a “whack-a-mole” game at a county fair, but here the moles are school children cowering behind their desks. The exorbitant fees for this game would be paid directly to the 2nd Amendment-supporting representative of your choice.

But I couldn’t write it.

It was too horrible to imagine. If the facts of gun violence in this country aren’t shocking enough, my fiction never could be.

Are there words that could sway gun lovers, those who value their imagined personal safety (or sport, or collections) more than the lives of innocents?

I suppose this is the dilemma for all writers who hope to change the world through their words.  Reading fiction can increase empathy. Writing for Peace was based on that premise. We shouldn’t give up transporting readers to new understanding and compassion, but sometimes the best course is to write and call our legislators, opine in our local papers and on social media.

When our children’s safety is on the line, the most powerful writing we can do is register to vote, to show up at the polls, and to elect representation that will protect our democracy and human rights—representatives who refuse to accept money from the NRA or the gun lobby.

So here is my very modest proposal:

I challenge my writer friends to keep searching for the right words, and to keep working for change…

…for the sake of our dreamers and future mountain climbers.

 

 

Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.