Bearing the Beams of Love

 Those Questions

Warm enough in October to sit / outside without a jacket, barefoot / The seasons broken.

A mourning dove calls: Why / do you grieve? This world, / I answer. And what makes you

rejoice? This world, I answer. / Always those same questions, / that same response.

- Rebecca Baggett in The Sun Magazine October 2025, Issue 598.

Throughout 2025, small explosions of feeling detonate routinely in my chest, each blast triggering varied aftershocks—laughter that doubles me over, tears that arrive without warning, temper tantrums I'm not proud of, or wholesale retreat from the world's demands. Moving our son across the country, navigating the emotional minefields of working with teenagers, rising each morning to a contradictory cocktail of gratitude for continued existence and anticipatory dread of the day's headlines—all register as seismic events. The year has proven so disorienting that I titled my current playlist "Adventure 2026"—failing to notice my temporal error until my husband pointed it out - in August. Wishful fast-forwarding? Denial masquerading as optimism? Menopausal brain fog? Perhaps all three.

Being human requires stamina—deep, seemingly bottomless reserves of it across physical, emotional, and mental capacities. Yet even the deepest well runs dry occasionally, and I find myself turning to books, relationships, music, and movement to replenish what the world depletes. I seek out poems like those by Rebecca Baggett that make me feel understood, one voice among many rather than a lone boat tossed on indifferent waves. I devour books like the wonderful Sandwich by Catherine Newman that articulate the exquisite agonies and unexpected joys of motherhood with such precision they feel like testimony. Center quotes William Blake in her novel: "And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love." That distillation captures everything. 

Bearing and hopefully sharing the beams of love—even when those beams feel too bright to hold, too heavy to carry alone—becomes the quiet work of our days. This is what it means to recognize we're all on "team human," fumbling forward together through uncertainty. We find our footing in rituals both grand and humble, in the presence of our loved ones, in the stubborn decision to trust the journey even as the road buckles beneath us with fresh potholes and sudden mudslides. The light grows bearable only when we stand shoulder to shoulder, reflecting it back and forth between us until it becomes something that illuminates rather than blinds, warms rather than burns.

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.