Saturday morning. Sky slowing lightening. The solar lantern on the deck ontinues to flicker like a candle in the night. Days are getting longer. Where once its light lasted only a few hours, it flickers throughout the night. I imagine wayfarers of centuries gone by passing through the ethereal night, using its beacon of hope as a marker on their journey.

It is the time at the edge of night. The world outside my window remains quiet. The new lights on the pedestrian bridge changing colour, from rose to blue to yellow to green. A string of incandescent shimmering light strung from east to west, growing ever dimmer as day slowly breaks across the horizon.

In the past week, the ice and snow that clogged the river has disappeared. Spring is awakening. One long sliver of ice covers the gravel bar on the other side where geese have gatghered for the past month, honking and flapping their wings, a raucous welcome to returning flocks of family and friends.

The two coyotes have returned to the trail along the riverbank outside my window. I think of them as ‘mine’. I first saw the two of them on the morning of my mother’s Celebration of Life 3 years ago.

“Look!” I said to my sister who was here to participate in the celebration and lying on the chaise beside me, reading as I put the finishing touches to the eulogy I would be reading later that day. One coyote sat at the back gate looking up at me sitting in the large window where my writing desk is strategically placed to catch the happenings along the river. “It’s dad and mom. See how he’s turning his head to who us mom hiding behind the tree? He’s telling us she’s okay. He’s got her now.”

I believed then, and continue to hold onto the comfort of believing, my father, who died 20 years before my mother, stood at the gate that day to tell us, they’re reunited on the other side. All is well.

They’ve been ‘my coyotes’ ever since.

This is my favourite time of day. Quiet morning. The house sleeps while I muse, latte steaming in a mug beside me. Olavar Arnalds playing softly in the background.

I cannot see my coyotes this morning. I know they were here last week. We had friends visiting from New York and Gerry was excited to spy the two of them wandering back and forth along the train.

“They’re waiting for me,” I said confidently. “They want me to know, all is well.”

And it is. All is well with my soul.

Tonight. We’ll be 12 gathered around our dining room table. Laughing. Chatting Sharing. Our ‘family’. At least the family who lives here.

“Our family” includes dear friends, my eldest sister and her husband, my youngest daughter and her partner along with his father, my beloved’s son, the daughter and her fiance of dear friends whom I have called ‘family’ since moving to Calgary in the early 80s. And my oldest friends here in Alberta whom I met in the late 70s and have remained close to ever since.

We shall be missing some but they will be with us in spirit and in our hearts. Some have left this earthly plane for horizons unknown.

Others live in other cities or are enroute back here as they move from the east to west to return home. Or, like his sister who cannot join us due to a long-standing engagement this weekend with a group of atheletes.

There are others I’d love to invite but, interestingly enough, COVID (or perhaps it’s the wisdom/affects of aging) has curbed my desire/need to fill our table to overflowing. Where once I thought nothing of putting on dinner for 20 or 25, now, I find 12 a comforting number.

And as I stop typing, the lantern on the deck stops flickering. The sky is pale blue streaked with gold skimming the treetops to the north. Strands of wispy, still night-tinged clouds, skim the sky.

And the river flows on.

Whether it is Easter, Ramadam or any other festive occassion for you, may you share good times with those you love and cherish. May your heart be full of comfort and ease and may you always know there is a place for you at the table where you belong.

Namaste.

I often experience what I think is a common human dilemma. We want change. We don’t know what that ‘change’ looks like, but we want it anyway.

To change, at least to change for the better, I need a plan. A destination. A goal.

As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ve set a goal of looking and feeling alive in every fibre of my being. It’s my ‘healthier, more loving me’ goal and it begins with determining ‘how do I want to look and feel’ and then mapping out the markers to bring me closer and closer to my optimum, ‘healthier more loving me’ goal.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what I look like on the outside if inside, I am feeling less than satisfied with myself. Which is why I’ve created a ‘mission statement’ for my desire to look and feel exactly the way I desire.

I deserve to look and feel from the inside out in ways that the mind chatter in my head does not diminish or interfere with me loving myself completely.

Loving ourselves completely is an inside-out job.

For some people, the outside looks great, the inside not so good.

For others, it’s the reverse.

Rarely have I met anyone who completely embodies inside-outside looking/feeling the way they desire. There’s usually a ‘nose too big’ or ‘hair too curly’ or ‘teeth too crooked’ caveat to their feeling good about themselves.

Recently, a woman in a dress shop told me that the biggest complaint she gets from women over the age of 50 focuses on their dissatisfaction with their upper arms. “Nearly every woman who comes in here says they quit wearing sleeveless tops after 50,” she told me.

Of course, her comment was precipitated by my commenting on an outfit that was sleeveless that she thought I might like.

I of course, fell into her over 50 majority.

I may never grow comfortable wearing sleeveless tops (I want my goals to be reasonable and as I wasn’t comfortable going sleeveless in my 30s why would I suddenly be now?), I do believe I can and will divest myself of the slurpy, sinuous, yucky mind-chatter that undermines my calm, my sense of self-worth and my ease in this world.

I believe I deserve to love myself completely.

To get their, I come full circle — I return to loving myself the way I am, knowing that I am a work in progress, a built-by-design undertaking that will take my whole life to discover, unravel and create.

My desire to love myself completely is worthy. Exploring all the ways I can feel and live it is a beautiful journey of self-discovery I venture into every single day of living completely, lovingly me, just the way I am today, knowing deep within me, that I am a work in progress – a beautiful mysterious sculpture revealing itself to the world with every layer I peel back to discover my true essence.

We all are.