Revelations of Divine Love
“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
―
Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.
Writing In The Rockies
Winter in the Rockies
Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself. A white flower grows in the quietness. Let your tongue become that flower. – Jalaluddin Rumi
Winter is quiet in the Rockies. The weekenders have returned to their busy lives in the city – work, shuttling kids, running errands. Those of us fortunate enough to live here full time bundle up and slow down.
The snow falls and melts, and falls again. As the weeks go by, there is less melting and more accumulation. The ice thickens and becomes covered with snow, silencing the creek’s gentle murmur. A thick white blanket insulates the earth, muffling sounds – the owls calling to each other, the coyotes celebrating a kill.
We awaken predawn to a cold house and begin our morning rituals. Craig builds a fire in the wood stove while I put the kettle on. I sip my tea while he reads aloud – Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, the Dalai Lama – something that helps us adjust our mindset, I read our Rumi poem for the day, invite the bell to sound, and then sit a short meditation as the fire crackles into warmth. On the mornings we drive into town to work or spend time with my mom, sometimes our meditation is only five minutes. Still, it helps. We are not Buddhists, but we’ve found we have much to learn from many traditions.
We’re often asked about the commute. A little over an hour, we try not to do it more than three or four times per week. It’s a beautiful drive. In the winter, we leave in the dark and watch the sunrise slowly illuminate the horizon, reflecting on the frozen lakes and snow covered trees.
The days we are here more than compensate for the days we are not. Even when we’re driving through the snow.
Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.
Writing the Mystery
Yesterday morning, I opened my eyes from meditation to see translucent bodies dancing outside the window. Gusts of wind were scooping up powder from the deck and sending it swirling into the east. Gradually, dark trees emerged from the foggy gloom like sentinels. I found myself transfixed; words formed and dissolved, as I grasped at the moment’s magic. What I settled on is this:
Morning dawns through mountain fog, as powdery snow puffs and swirls steadily eastward like a spirit migration.
And when I say “settled,” that’s what I mean. If I’d sat there for another hour, or the entire day, I suspect I would never have found the words to recreate the reality of that moment.
Life transcends words – every moment of it. And yet, I am compelled. I think we all are – writers – compelled to attempt recreation through inadequate words, and trust that those same words will take on a life of their own and create something new in the reader.
When I reread what I wrote, I see again the wonder of that moment, but the words also conjure up something fresh and original. My hope is that they will conjure, in the mind of another reader, something worthwhile in the context of their own lives. In this way, writers and readers move together through the mystery of this moment.
To my writing friends, I think you’ll understand when I say we must forgive our shortcomings and continue to explore where writing leads us, trusting that the words will find their way.
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
–Jack Kerouac
We’ve seen this bunny’s tracks for months, but here he sits in watchful contemplation. Wishing you all a Happy Lunar New Year!
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Copyright © 2023 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.
Ravens
Two ravens alight,
share a branch in falling snow,
then fly away home.
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Copyright © 2023 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.
Finding Balance in the New Year
After a beautiful holiday, we go back to work on our little cabin on Spokane Court this weekend. It’s become a kind of art project for us, but we’ve made some concessions along the way. Originally, we planned to live there for a year while we remodeled the Panhandle Creek cabin where we live, but we’ve decided to finish this Spokane cabin and sell it in the spring. Then we can put those funds directly into the construction of our Panhandle Creek Bed & Breakfast. We’ll live in a construction zone for several months, but ultimately, it will allow us to keep costs down and get to our end-goal sooner.
Still, this is a labor of love. We’re creating something beautiful. When we bought the cabin a year ago, it was a summer weekend residence. It didn’t have year-round water or a heat source other than the wood stove. It had been built in the 70s and the interior was sheathed in dark fake paneling and orange floral wallpaper. I’m still scraping the paper off the walls, but we’re sheet-rocking, putting in double-pane windows, a gas fireplace, on-demand hot water, and electric baseboard heaters. We’ll change the floor and cupboards and update the bathroom. The big change will come in the spring when we add a second bathroom and a cistern system that will allow the cabin to be used year-round. Once we get a little further along, I’ll share some pictures of the inside.
We have a lot of work to do before first thaw. In addition to the Spokane cabin, we plan to break ground on the BnB addition to our Panhandle Creek cabin. That will involve adding a garage with a handicap accessible suite upstairs and extending the front of our cabin toward the creek another 10 feet. The inside of our home will be reconfigured dramatically, but I’ll share more about that another time. Suffice it to say, it will be intense!
The biggest challenge in all this will be to find balance in the middle of major transition. This is a difficult one for me. I’ve never been especially good at walking the middle road. I’m passionate and all-in with everything I do. One thing I have learned, is time and energy are limited resources. I can’t pull all-nighters like I used to. I have pared down many of my responsibilities – like Writing for Peace – in order to concentrate on a few things more effectively – my family, my own writing, and developing a BnB/literary home here in the mountains I love.
My husband (who knows my passions well) and I have come up with a simple strategy to help us accomplish our goals while still allowing us to be present for family. The plan is to alternate construction weekends with family/friend/relaxation weekends. We hope this balance will allow time to refuel, while still making progress on our projects.
I’ll let you know how it goes!
On another note, my short essay, “Nobody Knows,” appears in Volume VI of Hive Avenue Journal this morning. You can find it on page 63, but I hope you’ll take time to read all of the wonderful work included in this journal. My thanks to Sam Hyatt, Nonfiction Editor, and Damia Walker, Managing Editor.
I hope your first week of the New Year was happy and productive. Thanks for spending a bit of it with me here.
Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.
Hoarfrost
Hoarfrost on the mountain today. It’s magical. We plan to go out with snowshoes shortly.
A moose cow visited early this morning. She showed up on camera at about 3:30am, moving slowly through the snow and leaving deep tracks in her wake. In the picture, above, you can see her tracks in the bottom right corner. She followed the same tracks up and back, and wandered the yard a little while she was here.
In the video, she appears rounded and heavy with calf, though (by my count) she would only be three or so months along. Gestation is about 230 days. I wonder if she is carrying twins.
The hoarfrost and moose visitation brings me back to my childhood in Alaska. We lived in the foothills outside Anchorage, and they seemed attracted to the open area behind our home. It wasn’t unusual to find two or three in the yard. I remember one morning looking out my window to find six cows there in snow up to their bellies.
Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.
Welcoming the New Year
“The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.”
― Maya Angelou
In our writers’ group on Wednesday, I suggested that we consider our writing over the last year and, during our “free-write” time, imagine a trajectory through 2023. I was thinking of exploring direction, rather than resolutions. Regretfully, I used the word “goals,” and the response was pretty humorous. The writers, all in their 80s and 90s, laughed at the idea of setting goals. Their free-writes were biting, if tongue-in-cheek. Better, they agreed, to just see what each new day presents and remain open to the creative opportunities that present themselves in the moment. I thought of Jane Hirschfield’s poem, “The Bowl.”
The Bowl
If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten.
If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.
If a shoe is put into the bowl,
the leather is chewed and chewed over,
a sentence that cannot be taken in or forgotten.
A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl.
Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness,
it eats them.
Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry.
The bowl cannot be thrown away.
It cannot be broken.
It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless,
and, big though it seems, fits exactly in two human hands.
Hands with ten fingers,
fifty-four bones,
capacities strange to us almost past measure.
Scented—as the curve of the bowl is—
with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.
I love the idea of the new year as an empty bowl, spotless and hungry. And, though that may be true of every moment, the symbolism of the holiday always strikes me as especially beautiful. So I’ll say this.
May your 2023 be bursting with an abundance of health and love, with personal growth, and creative exploration. May exciting and enriching new opportunities appear the precise moment you are most open to embracing them.
Wishing you a Happy New Year!
Snowy Owls on Christmas Morning
We spent Christmas Eve in town with my mom in her independent living facility. We had dinner in the common dining room, chatting with her neighbors, and then returned to her apartment to read A Child’s Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas.
This morning, across the snow-covered parking lot, the tall blue spruce still glows with blue and white lights. Not even the resident Canadian Geese are stirring. Soon, we’ll bundle into the car to visit our daughter’s home and the merry rauckous will begin.
For those of you who are celebrating Christmas, I wish you a day filled with joy, both in the moments of stillness and in those of communion. I’m sharing, below, the short nonfiction piece I wrote for our Winter Solstice Reading last week. The story is a reflection about a moment of quiet communion I experienced when I was a child in Alaska. I hope it will bless your day as it did mine.
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Snow Owls
It was late afternoon, sky black and glittering, in the deep Alaskan winter. I walked the trail between my friend Jane’s house and mine, leaving behind the old homestead with its metal half-round dwelling, golden light etching distorted square panes across the untouched snow.
The stars grew brighter as the air cleared of chimney smoke, and I cut through a hushed forest of hoar-frosted birch and stunted mountain hemlocks, snow-laden and slumping heavily against each other. Branches thick with white crystals and mounds of snow, brilliant white, reflected starlight. I walked with mittened hands pushed deep into the pockets of my down parka, the only sound the rhythmic crunch of mukluks on encrusted snow.
Until the reverberation of icy air carved open by wings – and two great white snowy owls alighted in the frozen birch beside me. White, on white, on white, and four bright gold eyes blinking. I could have reached out and touched their feathered bodies. I stood breathing in the sparkling silence, blinking back, my toes and fingers and cheeks growing numb.
If there is a center of our lived experience, something beyond the birth of our children, the death of a loved one, something beyond the major milestones in life – graduations, marriages, retirements – this moment of sacred silence was mine. When the world spins in chaos, my memory of two snowy owls in a hoar-frosted birch tree is the eye of the hurricane. A single moment in my childhood on the longest night of the year. Winter Solstice.
Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.
Cabin Christmas
It’s tight quarters and not “real” Christmas (Santa climbs down our daughter’s chimney next weekend), but cabin Christmas is special in it’s own way. We brought the little table up from the utility room where the 300 gallon cistern collects well-water. We angled the tables into the kitchen, surrounded them with every chair we could find, and the piano bench, and everybody got a spot at the table.
We first added the “cabin Christmas” last year on a small scale. It makes sense to celebrate in our grandchildren’s home on the actual day, but they live in town and we all wanted a little bit of mountain magic during the holidays. So I wrapped coloring books and colored pencil sets and put them under the cabin tree for the whole family.
This year, with four generations, and all the children and grandchildren in town, we thought we would try an expansion of that. We’re scaling back a bit and breaking up the holiday, so the grandkids aren’t overwhelmed.
We celebrated “cabin Christmas” last Sunday, a week before the actual day. We exchanged most gifts between the generations, and that was fun. On Christmas day, the kids will open gifts from their parents and Santa. Craig and I will spend Christmas Eve with my mom, and we’ll join the rest of the family in the morning with a stack of Swedish pancakes (a favorite that travels well).
We’ll see how it goes! The most important thing in all of this is that we’re together. With so many of us recovering from various ailments, we chose to celebrate Thanksgiving separately.
Next year, we hope to have the Bed and Breakfast up and running by winter. If that happens, the table will be longer and accommodations more comfortable.
For children, there’s nothing like the magic of bounding out of your own bed to see what Santa left under the tree. But, there’s still something to be said for a Rocky Mountain white Christmas. May the two always coexist in the peace of the season.
Whether near or far, may each of you find a little mountain magic in your life. Wishing you all a wonderful holiday!
Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.
A December Morning
“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”
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The fire crackled in the wood stove and coyotes howled in the distance while Craig and I did our morning reading and meditation. When I opened my eyes, the sky was ablaze. I ran out onto the deck with my camera, the colors becoming more vivid and complex with every breath.
We finished our breakfast as the light caught the snow on the wagon trail, reflecting pinks and reds and golds between the dark sage. The colors were still evolving when we started down the mountain. It’s always a good day when we see a moose. They bring me back to my childhood in Alaska. But this morning we were blessed with the sunrise, elk, moose, and a herd of deer crossing the road in front of us while drivers flashed their lights at each other in communal protection – of each other, and our fellow mountain dwellers.
Just a note on a December morning. In gratitude for the sky, the weather, and all they have to teach us.
Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.