Copyright © Jakub Krechowicz/Shutterstock

by Susan McCaslin

From the moment I heard poet Robin Blaser lecture in my first graduate course at Simon Fraser University in 1969, I was drawn like a moth to the strings of a piano, to borrow a metaphor from his well-loved “The Moth Poem”:

The moth in the piano
will play on
frightened wings brush
the wired interior
of that machine

I said, ‘master’[1]

Coming as a callow graduate student from Seattle to SFU at the age of 22, I found that Robin had only been teaching there since 1966.  Like me, he had emigrated from the United States, and similarly (though I had no idea then), we both were to become Canadian citizens and remain permanently in Canada.

It was one of the most fortunate days of my life when I walked into Robin’s course on classical backgrounds. Robin was impeccably dressed, with silver hair, aquiline nose, dark brows, and an elegant bearing.  He seemed more European than American; yet was, strangely enough, originally from Idaho (though part of the San Francisco poetry Renaissance).  I had been reading fairy tales and myths since I was a young child, but he opened ancient myth for me in a radically new way.  Robin made it clear that graduate school was not about just credits or jobs, but about soul-making.

For my first graduate seminar I chose to write a paper on Olson’s poem “The Praises.”  Putting off my presentation till the very last, I rushed through my reading hurriedly, not once looking up or making eye contact with either instructor or class, struggling through an agony of shortness of breath.  Finally, when I finished, a long uncomfortable pause ensued; then a single word floated miraculously on the air from Mr. Blaser’s lips:  “Maaahvelous!”   I was hooked on Olson, writing, and Blaser’s seminars.

I have to confess, I quickly became a Blaser groupie, or as they were called then, a “Blaserite.” Someone joked we should be called “Blaseriods,” a troop of blazing asteroids.  Sometime afterward I summoned the courage to approach the poet’s office, the door of which was always open, and ask if he’d consider being my thesis advisor on Edgar Allan Poe.  After finishing my course work, I visited Robin fairly regularly to talk about Poe, Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, and the Romantics. I took a year off grad school to work out some personal difficulties, but returned and finally completed the thesis under Robin’s guidance in 1973.  Always ready to meet, never intrusive or controlling, Robin allowed me to flounder a bit and eventually find my own voice.

In later years, even after the self-consciousness of youth wore off, I didn’t look Robin up as much as much as I wished to, partly because my aura of shyness remained.  Though he wasn’t at all intimidating, he was so erudite I feared I would betray my relative ignorance or what I felt were great gaps in my knowledge.  I had come from a family where I was the only one who ever read much of anything besides the newspaper, and had not attended even a play or symphony growing up.   Robin had an encyclopaedic memory and a way of being able to pull together wisdom traditions from many eras and cultures.  In comparison, my cultural exposure and word-hoard, though expanding, seemed small.

When consulting the revered man about my thesis, I screwed up the courage to present him from time to time with a few of my early poems.  He always took these embryonic efforts seriously and retuned them with detailed commentary, praising one and offering valuable suggestions for another.  Though SFU didn’t offer a program in Creative Writing, having Robin for a professor was like getting a two-for-one deal, as he took the poetry just as seriously as the academic papers.  Looking back at my raw juvenilia, I marvel at how gently he responded, and how much he shaped me as a writer.  Writing was serious business, the process as important, if not more so, than the product, though he was rigorous about insisting on the exact word and line break.  He corrected more by example and through the kind of poetry to which he pointed me, than by overt criticism.

I inherited from Robin the sense of poetry as a high calling.  Throughout a long teaching career as an English professor at Douglas College, marriage, and raising a child, this sense of poetry as my essential vocation has remained. Because of his influence, at the end of my life I will not ask whether I have succeeded, but whether I have been obedient to my poetic calling.

Once Robin spoke about the importance of honouring one’s teachers in the context of his own early mentors.    A teacher who transmits not only the love of his subject but a lifetime of inspiration is an honour to celebrate.  If this tribute seems unrelievedly laudatory, it is not because Robin, like all human beings, didn’t have his faults or shadows, but that my slowly awakening interior poet found him unstintingly supportive and nurturing at a crucial stage in my life. The number of his students who went on to become poets themselves is evidence of his ability to transmit creative fire.

Robin has now permanently entered the realms of the great companions” like Dante, Blake, and Shelley; therefore he becomes for me another of the luminous companions as I continue to encounter him through the legacy of his living words where, as he said, the “truth is laughter.”[2]

Susan McCaslin is a Canadian poet and Faculty Emeritus of Douglas College in Westminster, BC where she taught English and Creative Writing for twenty-three years.  She is the author of ten volumes of poetry, including her most recent, Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press, 2011).  The latter was a finalist in 2012 for the BC Book Prize (Dorothy Livesay Award) and the first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award (Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award). Susan has recently published a volume of essays, Arousing the Spirit: Provocative Writings (Wood Lake Books, 2011). She has edited two anthologies and is on the editorial board of Event: the Douglas College Review.  She lives in Fort Langley, BC with her husband and an active Australian shepherd. www.susanmccaslin.ca

Copyright © Africa Studio/Shutterstock

by Robert V. Thompson

It’s no overstatement to say that children love magic. Kids love to see rabbits pulled out of hats, people being sawed in half, and birds flying out of the magician’s sleeves. When I was a kid I loved magic too. My parents gave me a magic kit one Christmas. In it was a little tube of gooey salve that made smoke when I rubbed between my fingers. This little trick made me feel powerful because of the way it amazed my friends.

Then it happens. We learn that what seems like magic is nothing more than illusion, sleight of hand, mere manipulation. We find out that this sort of magic requires trickery and sight gags.

In his book The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, John Dominic Crossan says that Jesus regularly performed magic. By that, Crossan does not mean that Jesus was an illusionist. In Crossan’s view a real magician is one who makes “Divine power present through a miracle.”

In the Gospel miracle stories Jesus restores sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and makes the lame walk. These miracles are an outward sign of Divine favour at work in Jesus. Miraculous cures, however, only last for so long. Even if you get the miracle eventually you die. Every cure is at best temporary.

Nonetheless, miracles, extraordinary magic – Jesus was and is known for them.

Crossan says Jesus practiced an even greater magic that was natural, ordinary, and even more astounding that the appearance of a supernatural cure. People who carried their disease to Jesus sought the inexplicable miracle but gave no thought to healing beyond the cure. Being restored to their families and communities provided them with healing beyond the cure. Ordinary magic.

Jesus’ greatest magic was ordinary. Sharing a meal with the religiously unclean. Breaking bread with the maimed, the lame, the blind.  Practicing Pure Presence – non-judging, open-hearted presence. Loving the unlovely. Announcing grace.  It was all ordinary magic.

When Jesus performed extraordinary magic, everybody was amazed. But it was the ordinary magic that so alarmed the religious and political authorities. Those in power knew that nothing has the power to change people’s lives and reorder the world like ordinary magic. Extraordinary magic may change the appearance of the world around us but ordinary magic changes the world within us.

One day, that Sufi character Nasrudin decided to start a flower garden. He prepared the soil and planted the seeds of many beautiful flowers. But when they came up, his garden was filled not just with his chosen flowers but also overrun by dandelions. He sought out advice from gardeners all over and tried every known method to get rid of them, to no avail. Finally he walked all the way to the capital to speak to the royal gardener at the sheik’s palace. The wise old man had counseled many gardeners before and suggested a variety of remedies to expel the weeds. Nasrudin tried them all, but nothing worked. They sat together in silence for some time and finally the gardener looked at Nasrudin and said, “Well, then I suggest you learn to love the weeds.”

Ordinary magic.

When we learn to love the weeds in our lives, everything else changes. It’s magic – ordinary magic. Extraordinary magic has to do with what we see. Ordinary magic has to do with how we see.

We learn life’s most important lessons of life when we come up against our limits.

Pema Chodron says that when we are forced to face our limits it is like looking into a mirror and seeing a gorilla. The mirror is there showing us our life, and what we see looks bad.  We try to angle the mirror so that we look a little better; we still look like a gorilla. ”That’s being nailed by life,” Chodron says. “The place where you have no choice except to embrace what’s happening or push it away.”

I will never forget a cartoon that appeared many years ago in The Atlantic. Two Zen monks are sitting cross legged in meditation. They are wearing robes and their heads are shaved. One is young, the other is old and the younger  is looking somewhat quizzically at the older one, who is turned toward him saying, “Nothing happens next.  This is it.”

The moment we begin to feel some discomfort or pain (physical or emotional); the moment we realize that now is not what we expected, the mind says let’s get out of here and races ahead to the future or back to the past. When life becomes unpleasant the first impulse is to look for a way out. But the deeper spiritual question is whether we can open up to this moment and allow it to teach us not how to think ourselves into a new way of living, but how to live ourselves into a new way of thinking.

In my experience ordinary magic is the greatest miracle.

Have you experienced this ordinary magic?

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Bob Thompson graduated from Berkeley Baptist Divinity School (Graduate Theological Union) and was ordained an American Baptist minister in 1973.  He served American Baptist Churches in Kansas, Ohio, and for 30 years, as Senior Minister of the Lake Street Church in Evanston, Illinois.  He retired in November of 2010. Over the years he has contributed articles to periodicals including The Christian Century, The Chicago Tribune (op-ed), Sound Vision (a Muslim outlet), and others. He is the author of A Voluptuous God: A Christian Heretic Speaks (CopperHouse, 2007), and a contributor to the book for preachers, Feasting On the Word, Westminster John Knox Press.

Photo from Stock.Xchng

Each week, we bring you interesting stories from around the web. Here’s what caught our eye this week!

WEATHER

Heavy rain causes deadly flood in central Europe

Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria are experiencing flooding of “historic proportions,” officials say. The BBC reports that Austria had the 7th wettest spring in about 150 years, saturating the ground and causing rivers to rise…Read Full Article

From Treehugger

LEGAL

Walmart fined $82 million for dumping poisons

Walmart doesn’t just scrimp on employee wages. It also scrimps on employee training, and that led to its workers dumping returned pesticides, bleach, and other hazardous products into the trash or sewer systems…Read Full Article

From Grist

SPIRITUALITY

My eyes behold the wonders

Copyright © De-V/Shutterstock

by Donna Sinclair

When social justice types run out of new ways to make our voices heard, we can always fall back on writing letters. I like this approach. It gives me a chance to do research and offers the recipient a chance to read and reflect on my argument carefully.

Well we could always fall back on writing letters until now that is. This is the first time for me in almost 60 years of environmental awareness and activism (if you count lobbying my parents for a bike when I was ten) that even writing a letter is problematic.

It’s one (more?) signal that Canada is plunging into a significant democratic deficit.

Here’s what happened:

When I heard that Enbridge was looking for National Energy Board approval to reverse one of its pipelines in order to carry tar sands bitumen to Eastern Canada, I thought I should write to the Enbridge board. Enbridge, after all, brought the American Midwest its biggest oil spill ever – over a million gallons of diluted bitumen into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. It took Enbridge 18 hours to turn off the flow. They’re still cleaning it up. As a citizen of Canada, and a person of faith who believes in the holiness of Creation, I thought I could help the NEB with their deliberations by bringing the other-than-material values attached to the land by many Canadians to their attention.

It is my right as a Canadian. Always has been. But under the new rules about communicating with the NEB, I was now required to fill out a multi-page form requesting permission to comment in writing on the subject of Hearing Order OH-002-2013 -Enbridge Pipelines Inc.

It took me four days of reflecting and looking up terms, along with some computer skills I’ve never needed before, to ask permission simply to write a letter.

This seems a deliberate effort to disconnect us ordinary folk from a crucial aspect of a democratic state. It is spring. I am a gardener. I have other things to do than figure out what “the application to participate form described in paragraph 29 of the Hearing Order is provided in Appendix II of this procedural update” actually means, and where to find it. It’s disheartening to see the complexity of bureaucracy that has fallen like a net over the public participation process.

I managed to fire my application into the electronic ether. Then I mailed a hard copy of the 11 pages to the NEB. Then I informed Enbridge (three different people) that my application was on file with the board. A polite process advisor at the NEB began addressing me by my first name.

(I admit I took some pleasure in flinging about phrases like “consider this email as notification that my Application to Participate is on the NEB’s repository.” I might write a poem, I thought; I have never used the word “repository” before.)

Forty days later, on May 23, I heard back from the National Energy Board. I am not allowed to comment. Not even a letter. My efforts to persuade the board that the land is sacred and we shouldn’t mess with it came to naught because in Northern Ontario I am too far away from Southern Ontario and Quebec (the land in question) to be affected. Also, my well-honed knowledge (70 years of Sunday worship, for starters) about some-things-being-holy isn’t an area of expertise the board finds helpful.

Here is their ruling:

Ms Sinclair applied to participate on the basis of being both directly affected by the proposed Project and having relevant information or expertise. Ms Sinclair supported these assertions on the basis of her religious beliefs and her Canadian citizenship in general. The Board is of the view that this is only a general public interest in the proposed Project. Further, Ms Sinclair lives in North Bay, Ontario, which is not in the vicinity of the Project.

The Board’s Ruling

In the Board’s view, these individuals did not demonstrate how they would be directly affected by the Project, nor did they demonstrate that they had relevant information or expertise that would assist the Board in its assessment. Accordingly, the Board has denied standing to these individuals in this proceeding.

This is a harsher blow to our democracy than you might think. The criteria for public participation in this matter of pipelines have been narrowed to a point where we cannot comment on climate change or water contamination emanating from the tar sands operations that produce the bitumen. We cannot express affection or principled care for any land beyond our own area. We cannot discuss the dangers of tanker traffic should the augmented line eventually make it to tidewater. We are silenced on a matter of urgent importance.

A journalist for more than 30 years, Donna Sinclair is an award-winning writer who has traveled widely in Canada, Africa, Central America, Britain, and Eastern Europe. She is the author of The Spirituality of Bread, The Spirituality of Gardening, A Woman’s Book of Days, A Woman’s Book of Days 2, and numerous other titles. Donna lives with her husband Jim in North Bay, Ontario. Her most recent book is The Long View: An Elderwoman’s Book of Wisdom (2011).

Photo from Stock.Xchng

Here’s what caught our eye this week!

ENVIRONMENT

Can we blame climate change for the tornado that took out Moore, Okla.?

It was a quiet year for tornadoes — until last week, that is. A string of twisters has ravaged the middle of the country over the past several days, culminating in a two-mile-wide tornado tearing up Moore, Okla., Monday afternoon…Read Full Article

From Grist

TECHNOLOGY

3-D printer makes life-saving splint for baby boy’s airway

A 3-D printer is being credited with helping to save an Ohio baby’s life, after doctors “printed” a tube to support a weak airway that caused him to stop breathing. The innovative procedure has allowed Kaiba Gionfriddo, of Youngstown, Ohio, to stay off a ventilator for more than a year…Read Full Article

From NPR: The Two-Way

ARCHITECTURE

Skinny house in Tokyo is barely wider than a parking space

Copyright © Oleg Gekman/Shutterstock

by Robert V. Thompson

A number of years ago I had an opportunity to do something I had always been curious about – go to a psychic and get a reading.

After a friend sang the praises of a psychic named Tomeiko, I decided to go.

As I entered her house, Tomeiko instructed me to sit on the sofa.  She sat directly across from me and closed her eyes.  Then she said  slowly, “Now, it if is all right with you, Robert, I want to talk about your past lives.

“I see that in one life you were in the mystery religions.  You have a very strong spiritual impulse.” She paused and  continued, “Now I see you in India.  You were a disciplined yogi, working at your spiritual practices day and night.  In yet another life, you appear to me as a monk in a monastery.”

Then she stopped, and got this puzzled look on her face. , Opening her eyes, she said, “Very interesting.  Your past lives have a strong spiritual heritage.  I don’t believe I know what you do for a living.  Tell me, Robert, what you do for a living?”

“ I am a minister,” I answered,.

“Oh, a minister.  What kind of minister?”

“I am a Baptist minister.”

“Oh.” she said. “That’s a marvelous disguise.”

Then, perplexed, she asked, “What kind of a Baptist minister comes to a psychic?”

All I knew to say was, “One who is curious.”

Later, it occurred to me that Tomeiko’s little phrase “a marvelous disguise” is a metaphor that points to a universal human truth. However our differences appear to and among us –however our lives are dressed up on the surface – there is more to each and every one of us than meets the eye. We are more than our religion, more than our gender, more than our ethnicity, more than our sexual orientation.

All of these costumes cloak the fact  that one Truth, one Life, animates every form. In spite of the many wonderful ways in which we are all different, every living being simply wears each difference as  a marvelous disguise. As the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart puts it, “every creature is a living word of God.”

When we see this we realize that while we appear to have differences on the surface, beneath the surface there is this Divine Presence that lives in every living being.

To see every being as a living word of God is to know that whenever we see life in terms of insiders and outsiders, my tribe or your tribe, what we are really seeing is nothing more than a marvelous disguise.

This I believe is why Jesus sat down at the table and ate and drank with anyone and everyone who wanted to share a meal.  He was accused of cavorting with call girls and crooks, the religiously unclean, the downtrodden and dejected. In the gospels the religious elite ask Jesus’ disciples, “Why does he eat with those people?”

It turns out that eating with anybody and everybody was one of Jesus’ primary spiritual practices.  He ate and drank with everyone.  Which is why he is reported to have said, “The realm of God lives in and among each and every one of us.  I therefore sit at the table with one and all.”

Were Jesus here in the flesh and blood today he would say it again: “God lives in us all;  rich and poor; male and female; black, brown, red, yellow, white; LGBT; Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, agnostic and atheist. We are all wearing a marvelous disguise.” Or as the Sikhs put it, “if you can’t see God in all then you can’t see God at all.”

In Hinduism there is the practice of mirror mysticism.  It is observed in the spring of the year.  In devout Hindu households, each family member is led, one at a time, eyes closed, by the mother or grandmother to the family altar.  As the incense burns all around there is an atmosphere of great reverence. The youngest member of the family is the first to be led to the altar where the mother or grandmother has assembled an arrangement of flowers, fruit, and legumes. At the center of this little altar is a mirror.

Let’s say the youngest happens to be a little girl.  Standing before the altar she is told to close her eyes and to repeat her mantra (the repetition of God’s holy name).  She is then led to the mirror and told to open her eyes and see the Lord. Of course, the first thing she sees is the reflection of herself, surrounded by the beauty of the flowers and fruit.

Then each family member takes a turn to sit in front of the altar. With eyes closed, repeating the name of God to themselves, they hear the words: When you open your eyes you will see God.

All the world’s a stage, and we are all in disguise and the disguise is so good that we are even disguised from ourselves.  Our work perhaps, is to open the eyes of our hearts and see beneath the disguise. This is my daily spiritual practice.

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Bob Thompson graduated from Berkeley Baptist Divinity School (Graduate Theological Union) and was ordained an American Baptist minister in 1973.  He served American Baptist Churches in Kansas, Ohio, and for 30 years, as Senior Minister of the Lake Street Church in Evanston, Illinois.  He retired in November of 2010. Over the years he has contributed articles to periodicals including The Christian Century, The Chicago Tribune (op-ed), Sound Vision (a Muslim outlet), and others. He is the author of A Voluptuous God: A Christian Heretic Speaks (CopperHouse, 2007), and a contributor to the book for preachers, Feasting On the Word, Westminster John Knox Press.

Photo courtesy of Margaret Kyle (www.kylearts.ca)

This is the first card I created using the “Soul Collage” method and it brings me a lot of joy when I look at it. This card reminds me of a time as a child that I sat on a hillside covered with the golden Arrowleaf Balsamroot flowers that bloom in the Okanagan Valley in May. I felt at one with the rocks, the blue sky, the flowers, and the sound of humming bees as I soaked the landscape into my being. The card contains images of connection and curiosity in the giant star clusters as well as in the intricate web-spinning of a spider. May I always remember this curious and connected inner child.

Margaret Kyle was a part of the creative process at Wood Lake Publishing for more than 20 years. She has illustrated many children’s books, including The Family Story Bible and Lectionary Story Bible (Years A, B, C) by Ralph Milton; Is that Story True, by Laura Alary and After the Beginning by Carolyn Pogue. Her painting “Burning Bush” graces the cover of the hymnal More Voices.

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Here’s what caught our eye this week!

FOOD

The Weirdest, Most Interesting Ice Cream Flavors in Washington

Washington’s notorious heat affords a few pleasures, none quite as appreciated as the license to eat ice cream like it’s the only food group that matters during summertime. But no longer are we slaves to plain old vanilla…Read Full Article

From The Washington Post

NEWS

Cry for Help Led to Freedom for Missing Women in Cleveland

three young women who had gone missing between 2002 and 2004 were found Monday afternoon inside a home where the shades were said to be always drawn. No one who lives nearby seems to have suspected that there might be kidnapping victims inside…Read Full Article

From NPR: The Two-Way

ENVIRONMENT

Finally, Some Not-Terrible Climate News: Greenland Not Melting Any Faster

Photo from Stock.Xchng

by Donna Sinclair

I have a scattered approach to prayer. I think I am like many people; I mostly pray when I am in distress.

I am good at praying at three o’clock in the morning when I wake up worried about one child or another. I am pretty good at praying when I am asked to do the prayers of the people in Sunday worship because that is an honour, as well as a responsibility I need to fulfill.

But I am not so good at praying at three o’clock in the afternoon on a sunny spring day when all of my children have checked in with good news and the trees are leafing out green. Yet I know that this is the very moment when I need to stop, and breathe and thank God deeply.

I am long on prayers of petition as I am “running from the neighbourhood bullies straight to God” (as the psalmist David puts it in Psalm 17). I am short on prayers of gratitude.

I picked up a new book (a gift to me) called Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone. They suggest that it would be better if I took the gratitude approach. If prayers of gratitude were always close at hand, the world (whose fate is often a subject of my prayers) would begin to be healed.

One section of Active Hope tells the story of delegates from the Iroquois Confederacy to a United Nations conference in Geneva in 1977. The Haudenosaunee brought with them a statement of their values, their “Basic Call to Consciousness,” part of which reads like this:

The original instructions direct that we who walk about on the earth are to express a great respect, an affection, and a gratitude toward all spirits which create and support Life. We give a greeting and thanksgiving to the many supporters of our own lives – the corn, beans, squash, the winds, the sun. When people cease to respect and express gratitude for these many things, then all life will be destroyed and human life on this planet will come to an end.

Thirty-five years later I can hear the same heartfelt gratitude from a First Nations member of my congregation. Kimberly Robinson’s prayers of the people last Sunday were filled with powerful evocations of water and plants and the four directions – images which owe much to her Algonkian heritage. As the writers of Active Hope point out, the Haudenosaunee and other First Nations “see humans as interconnected parts of a larger web of life… Crops, trees, rivers, and the sun are respected as fellow beings in a larger community of life, and if you have this view, you don’t tear down the forests or pollute the rivers.”

When I reach back into my own ancestry, I see much the same principle at work. The Celts (my Scottish forebears) were very aware that they were dependent on a God who was completely and wholly present in our marvellous Creation. They prayed lovingly and constantly, always aware that they were surrounded by angels and always grateful for the beauty of sea and forest.

So with the examples of my ancestors and my friends before me, I am trying to become a better pray-er. This does not mean that I am giving up prayers of petition. After all, I have as a model David the psalmist talking in Psalm 17 as if God and he were buddies:

I’m staying on your trail;
I’m putting one foot
In front of the other.
I’m not giving up.
I call to you, God, because I’m sure of an answer.
So—answer! bend your ear! listen sharp!

~ Bible translation from The Message

Taking a leaf out of David’s companionable approach to God, I am trying to notice what is in front of me and then mention my happiness to my buddy, God.

Bend your ear God, I say. I see this wonderful maple tree and I rejoice. Listen sharp, God. I see a crocus, and I rejoice; I rejoice that the world has just enough carbon and oxygen in the atmosphere so that the maple tree and the crocus and I can live. I rejoice in your rain and your sun. I rejoice in Lake Nipissing and the rocky beach you have given me and Baba and our grandson to play with. I rejoice.

A little later maybe we will talk, God, about the neighbourhood bullies who are destroying your Athabasca watershed and threatening your west coast shoreline and putting your caribou, your very own frightened children, at risk.

But for right now, for all that surrounds me, for the friends I love and the community that gives me strength, for your beautiful creation, I give you thanks.

A journalist for more than 30 years, Donna Sinclair is an award-winning writer who has traveled widely in Canada, Africa, Central America, Britain, and Eastern Europe. She is the author of The Spirituality of Bread, The Spirituality of Gardening, A Woman’s Book of Days, A Woman’s Book of Days 2, and numerous other titles. Donna lives with her husband Jim in North Bay, Ontario. Her most recent book is The Long View: An Elderwoman’s Book of Wisdom (2011).

Photo from Stock.Xchng

Here’s what caught our eye this week!

NATURE

15 Photos Celebrating National Wildflower Week

It is around this time of year each year that many places across the world experience something incredible: the bloom of colorful wildflowers…Read Full Article

From Treehugger

ENVIRONMENT

Snow In May? The Nation’s Midsection Bundles Up

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning Wednesday for parts of Colorado. It says the heavy snow that has blanketed swaths of the Rocky Mountains is moving east…Read Full Article

From NPR: The Two-Way

NEWS

Restoring a Community Garden in the Sandy-Torn Rockaways