Regular readers of Catching Courage will recognize the name of this poem’s author, Marilyn Raymond. This is the sixth of her poems to appear here. The others are Sunflowers, That Apple, Baba Yaga, Sucking on Stones, and Anne. Marilyn wrote the poem for a special Women’s Day service at the Unitarian Fellowship of Kelowna....
Farming was never on my bucket list, not when I was child, not when I was a young wife, and not when a second marriage set me down on a small acreage on Vancouver Island, with no prior knowledge of agricultural pursuits. However, sheep have no use for bucket lists. When a pregnant ewe...
Sometimes I look back at my life and wince, but mostly I trace the meandering path with gratitude. I’ve carried a bag of troubles, as everyone does, but these days it seems light. When I open the bag, I see shiny baubles instead of lumps of coal. They have been transformed by time. I...
When Aunt Grace moved into a seniors care home, we all held our breaths. We expected her to hate it. She had run her own life with no-nonsense efficiency and was quite happy to step in if someone else had trouble running theirs. She was also the soul of generosity. Where would she find...
In a post on Vibrant Nation, a Web site for women over 50, DarryleP created a “list that’s the flip side of the Bucket List.” She calls it the “F**k-it List”. The popular movie of that name added “Bucket List” to the cultural lexicon. Since then, it seems everyone is compiling Bucket Lists of...
E.Dee Conrad is a very welcome guest on Catching Courage today. This is Day 15 of the Virtual Blog Tour for A New Dawn Awaits, her newly released book. I’m pleased to post this interview here because E.Dee’s experience is outside the scope of my own so opens my world little wider. The experience...
Medicine Song Woman leads me to a meditative state. That’s not easy, with this bouncing-ball mind in my head. Her music also brings back memories. I’m sitting in centuries-old cathedrals in France. Around me, believers genuflect and finger their rosaries. They repeat incomprehensible lines from a Latin mass. Glorious music rolls over us, reverberating...
By all accounts David Foster Wallace was successful and admired, a writer of soaring talent. But on the twelfth day of September in 2008, he hung himself in his home. To be honest, I was not a fan of Wallace’s writing. I found it precious and overly abstruse. For me Infinite Jest was impenetrable;...
You’d think I’d learn, particularly since the lesson has pounded me on the head repeatedly. There’s even a “law” that covers it. The basic premise of the law of attraction is that what you focus on materializes in your life, though perhaps in a different form than you anticipated. I’ve been contemplating what part...
This poem first appeared in Sheddings, a collection of poems by members of the Unitarian Fellowship of Kelowna. It was written by an extraordinarily talented poet, one who savors every word, its sound, its feel, its texture. Marilyn Raymond is also the author of Sunflowers, Baba Yaga, and Sucking on Stones. © 2007 Marilyn...
[I subscribe to Lisa Bloom's Kachanga e-zine. When this essay appeared in the last issue, I asked her if I could post it here. You can find more of Lisa's blog entries here. I love it that the Web can link us around the world. Lisa lives in Israel. I live in Canada. We...
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