Re-post: For love of a burning bush

 Autumn winds throw heaps of pine needles on our semi-landscaped lawn and gold leaves flutter into the team's outdoor swimming pool by the bushels. My favorite scarlet burning bush drops leaves reluctantly onto the porch and I'm reminded of this post I wrote in the year of my recovery from auto-immune illness. I decided to re-post it, remembering both the long recovery from my illness and also laughing at the hype over missing Boy Scout badges. If only life in 2025 was so simple . . .

From 2012

There's a burning bush outside the dining room / office window and the crimson color reflects early morning sunlight so vividly that the kitchen ceiling turns pink each day after the kids go to school. The autumnal fireworks are stellar in Colorado this year, and they keep my mood from turning dark on mornings like this when digestive hemmings and hawings produced another restless night, and William's vital Webelo badges turned up missing on the morn of a big Pack Meeting.

I just went to the basement in a desperate attempt to find the Wolf Badge and the wreckage downstairs drove me screaming from the arena. If we just dragged all of the toys and props and scraps into a gigantic trash heap would the children ever miss them? I feel a strong desire to toss it all, to winnow our lives down to the things that have meaning, just as the my life has been whittled down to the basic activities that feed me and my family and keep our little house running.

If the burning bush on my right suddenly spoke and revealed truth to me, what would it say? Make the most of what you have today and be positive! Never give up, never ever give up! Be humble and accept the gift of suffering and knowledge of your limitations!  The Boy Scout badges are in the lower left hand drawer in the new cabinet (I wish)!

I've learned a few truths in the time of the burning bush for myself: we may never find the badges and pins but my husband and I made a good team in looking for them, neither assigning blame and both equally concerned for our son. That I am lucky to be out in the autumnal splendor and I can witness and give thanks for the brilliant trees and leaves much better at a walking pace than at a run. That time passes and progress occurs at slow rates but yet great gobbles of days pass by and somehow things are better.

Three Days of Cake

The Missoula airport has served as backdrop for countless emotional family reunions and goodbyes since my parents moved to Polson in 2001. This past weekend proved no exception as my sister Karen and I converged at the terminal, ready to drive north for a visit with Mom to celebrate Karen's milestone birthday. We launched into conversation immediately after I snapped her picture with the lobby's resident moose, and the words tumbled forth uninterrupted for the entire seventy-five-minute drive. Karen had endured two connecting flights to reach Missoula, but she declared the journey worthwhile for that single conversation—the kind of deep, rambling talk that only sisters can share.

Our darling mother stationed herself in the driveway, keeping eagle-eyed vigil on the road and checking her watch obsessively. Thank goodness the warm autumn sun blessed her with its golden rays—though knowing Mom, she would have maintained her post even through a deluge. After a joyful collision of hugs and the awkward choreography of dragging luggage while attempting simultaneous embraces, we settled into easy chairs for tea and conversation, activities that would occupy the heart of our weekend.

What a profound blessing to share unguarded emotions, genuine concerns, and unvarnished joys with people who know you at your core—to confess foibles they've already catalogued with affection, to dissolve into laughter over inside jokes that have weathered decades of repetition. I gathered updates on my other siblings and their families, caught up on the new season of The Great British Baking Show, and settled in for a marathon of football games tracking our family's beloved teams: CU, Illinois, Ohio State, Oregon, Montana. The throwback Montana uniforms struck me as remarkably candy corn-like—all orange and yellow patterns that seemed perfectly calibrated for autumn.

During a solo afternoon walk, my eyes hungrily devoured Montana's fall splendors. Tundra swans drifted across the lake's mirror surface like white brushstrokes on blue canvas. Heavy purplish crab apples weighed down tree limbs until they bowed like supplicants. A fox capered across the golf course, its russet coat blazing against the manicured green. I found the familiar yellowing cottonwoods that populate Colorado's landscape, but Montana offered her own autumn poetry—flames of maple leaves scattered across lawns and caught in purple sage, white berries clustering on buck brush, deer materializing to drift soundlessly across the grass.

Being on the same wavelength, we indulged in Karen's chocolate birthday cake crowned with melting ice cream three evenings in a row—a delicious ritual. The final day brought a symphony of raindrops drumming against the skylights, the storm graciously offering the briefest window of opportunity to collect vibrant autumn leaves for Karen's fourth-grade class back in southern California. Between the carefully pressed leaves and new pj's from mom, my sister joked that her luggage wouldn't fit back on the plane.

What a blessing to carve out these stolen weekends from our overscheduled lives, to weave new memories with the people who knew us when we were young and still choose to love us now. The cake was delicious, but the real sweetness lay in being together—in that particular alchemy that happens when family gathers, when laughter flows as freely as conversation, when three days feel simultaneously endless and far too brief.

Barriers to Connection

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." - Rumi

We tumbled through a life-affirming weekend—Friday's dinner dissolving into games and music with friends, Saturday's wedding reception spilling margaritas and laughter, Sunday's fall hike threading us through aspens ablaze in October gold. My eyes felt gritty from sleep deprivation, yet my heart expanded Grinch-like, swelling several sizes as we moved from one gathering to the next.

A persistent inner whisper craves weekend nights at home, pajama-clad and nestled into the couch with a magazine, novel, or remote control in hand. This domestic longing intensifies when the alternative involves navigating conversations with unfamiliar faces. I once made small talk with relative ease, but somewhere across the past two decades—accelerated by a pandemic that hermit-crabbed us all into our shells—I misplaced that social fluency. Here lies one of my barriers to cultivating platonic love: transcending superficial exchanges and investing sufficient time to build genuine trust, rather than executing an Irish goodbye the moment anxiety stirs.

Rob navigates such social waters with remarkable dexterity. Saturday evening, he confidently steered me between different clusters of guests, undeterred even by the CU football game flickering on a nearby screen. If social anxiety plagues him, he conceals it masterfully, and I cling to his side like a burr in a packhorse's coat. He declared the evening successful, though I felt certain I'd babbled continuously like a brook swollen with spring melt runoff.

The following morning discovered us hiking by eight o'clock in Golden Gate Canyon State Park, having outpaced fellow leaf-peepers to claim a parking spot. Frost glazed the ground cover flanking the trail, rendering rose hips unexpectedly soft beneath our fingertips and demanding warm outer layers for the first time this fall. Sharp easterly rays from the morning sun sliced through the warm yellow aspen leaves, igniting the trees like beacons of joy against the shadowed evergreens. We traversed seven miles, absorbing panoramic views, and I drove away feeling replenished—my spirit restored by movement and natural beauty.

This past weekend, my barriers to discovering loving connection revealed themselves clearly: laziness, social anxiety, inertia, misplaced priorities. We toppled them one by one. I'm capturing this reflection now as a reminder to myself—to knock them down again next time, and the time after that, because the reward of genuine connection always outweighs the comfort of retreat.

The Web Makes the Weaver

Afternoon sunlight filtered through the shifting tapestry of autumn leaves as I walked with Hana, one of my hiking companions, our conversation meandering between book recommendations and uplifting discoveries on recent hikes. She mentioned reading something called The Web Makes the Weaver—or perhaps a similar title—exploring traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture's ancient wisdom. Though I couldn't locate the exact book online later, the phrase has lingered in my thoughts for days.

The concept delights me precisely because it inverts our expectations. We naturally assume the weaver creates the web, yet here lies a profound truth wrapped in delightful surprise: the web shapes its maker just as surely as the weaver shapes their intricate product.

Different spiders craft entirely different webs depending on their needs and surroundings—a reminder that environment profoundly influences creation. The exquisite circular masterpieces I discovered glistening with morning dew in the mountains represent just one architectural approach. Orb weavers construct these geometric marvels that supposedly capture sound waves, allowing the spider to actually hear approaching prey. Others fashion what appear to be chaotic boxy traps or delicate cocoons nestled within late-summer bushes and ground cover—each design perfectly suited to its creator's survival needs.

We humans emerge as products of our own intricate webs: the communities that embrace or challenge us, the stories and headlines we allow to penetrate our consciousness, our seemingly coincidental daily encounters, our families, even our beloved pets (as my black cat demonstrates by stalking across my keyboard at this very moment!). Our deepest desires and sharpest conflicts intensify through everything we touch, simultaneously influencing what we ourselves release into the world—the words we speak or commit to paper, the digital contributions we generate, the tender or hurried touch we bestow upon our loved ones, the smiles or scowls we offer fellow drivers navigating traffic's daily chaos.

As a writer, coach, and family member, my web consists of words of affirmation, constructive guidance, gentle encouragement, and thoughtful questioning. Words carry tremendous power, yet in our current climate they're often hurled about carelessly, as if they possessed no capacity for destruction. Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama wisely observes that "the power of words to wound is also a measure of the power of words to heal"—a truth that challenges me to help us all spin our webs of words and touch toward healing our fractured communities, the very webs that shaped us.

I strive earnestly to honor this ideal, though I do stumble in the privacy of my own heart or within my living room's sanctuary. Yet I believe each of us wields profound influence over those within our orbit. We possess the capacity to spin words of love, welcome, and peace—should we choose to accept that responsibility. In these times when our collective web feels particularly fragile, perhaps we might remember that every thread we add either strengthens or weakens the whole, and that we are both the weavers and the woven.

The Unlikely and Unimaginable

In my last post, I shared Rebecca Solnit's uplifting words: "The grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly." I turned to this wisdom repeatedly last week, clinging to it like a lifeline amidst the relentless churn of tragic headlines—more shooting deaths, violent rhetoric both spawning tragedies and erupting in their wake. How do we hold onto hope and light when companies profit from an "engage to enrage" model that fractures us as a people, turning neighbor against neighbor for the sake of clicks and quarterly earnings?

I found my answer in retreat. Shutting off news feeds and email notifications, I fled to the mountains with friends and family, seeking sanctuary on a clear mountain lake and nearby trails. We surrendered ourselves to the symphony of water threading alongside the path, our steady footsteps on damp, leaf-littered earth, and the kaleidoscope of early fall foliage—leaves glistening pale yellow, peachy orange, and bold crimson against large boulders.

Over two days, we hiked twenty-six miles and climbed over 3,500 feet, sometimes filling the trail with stories and laughter, other times letting the profound quiet wrap around us like a benediction. And there, in that sacred space between effort and grace, we discovered Solnit's "unlikely and unimaginable" manifesting with startling frequency.

A rare, heavy fog descended to the meadows, bifurcating the massive peaks so they appeared to float like ancient ships above a silver sea. Countless spiderwebs, heavy with morning dew, materialized against dead branches—intricate mandalas outlined in crystalline perfection. A pair of plump gray ptarmigan materialized on a rocky slope, camouflaged and confident, regarding us with steady gaze.

The season's first snowstorm blessed us with fat flakes that kissed our gloves and dusted the high country beyond Winter Park with delicate tracings of white. Aspen groves revealed their autumn metamorphosis in waves—first glowing buttery yellow, then deepening to pale orange, finally blazing crimson on various altitudes and rock faces, each grove responding to its unique microclimate with painterly precision. Rain drummed against the cabin roof as we gathered around a worn wooden table, savoring warm soup and losing ourselves in card games punctuated by laughter.

The catalog of small miracles grew with each passing hour, and I began wielding it as counterweight to the crushing headlines from the world below. Each dewdrop, each bird call, each moment of shared laughter became evidence of a different truth—that beauty persists, that wonder endures, that connection transcends the manufactured divisions designed to keep us scrolling and seething.

Now, settled back into my familiar desk chair with the glow of the computer screen replacing mountain vistas, I clutch these memories like smooth worry stones worn gentle by countless hands. The unlikely and unimaginable didn't abandon us when we descended from those heights—it simply awaits our attention, ready to unfold in ways we cannot predict or orchestrate. Hope isn't about knowing what comes next, but about remaining radically open to the glowing miracles that surround us, even in—especially in—our darkest hours.