Susan Gabriel's Blog, page 4
June 17, 2020
Resilience Dispatch – June 17th – Day 61
“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four...
June 15, 2020
Resilience Dispatch – June 15th – Day 60
I woke up feeling sad today, and I wasn’t sure why. So, I sat with it a while. In my experience, it is important to honor our emotions. It is the fastest way to get them to move along and not settle in for an extended stay.
While there are plenty of reasons to be sad in the world, my current sadness centered around not...
June 12, 2020
Resilience Dispatch – June 12th – Day 59
Are you more of a sheepdog these days or a sheep? Either way, I hope you find this cartoon humorous. Like all effective humor, it has some truth to it. Do you find yourself being a little more controlling than usual right now? Perhaps needing things to be or stay a certain way? Or maybe you know or live with someone who is...
June 10, 2020
Resilience Dispatch – June 10th – Day 58
This is for those of you who have a flower or a vegetable garden, those who wish they had a garden, or who had a garden in the past. Gardens are great metaphors for resilience. The entire cycle of life can be seen in one season. A seed sprouts, matures into a full plant, thrives, begins to fade, returns to the earth, and then...
June 8, 2020
Resilience Dispatch – June 8th – Day 57
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself….
These lines were written by John O’Donohue in a poem called For One Who is Exhausted, A Blessing.
I am intrigued by what it might mean to be excessively gentle with ourselves. I imagine it might require a soft lens. A way of...
June 5, 2020
Resilience Dispatch – June 5th- Day 56
Remember drive-in movie theaters? Because of the coronavirus, the fabulous summer music festival where I live had to cancel its concerts this year, but it will be hosting drive-in movies in their large parking lot a couple of times a week. I thought this was an ingenious way to recoup some of the revenue they will be losing....
June 3, 2020
Resilience Dispatch – June 3rd – Day 55
Trueluck Summer takes place in 1964 in the beautiful city of Charleston, South Carolina. A city I lived in for 14 years. I wrote this novel over a span of a decade in between other stories and was inspired to finish it in the summer of 2015 after the heartbreaking events in which nine African Americans were killed during a...
June 1, 2020
Resilience Dispatch – June 1st – Day 54
Stay steady, my friends. Our world can get scary sometimes. Periodically, things fall apart, in our lives and in our communities. Pandemics happen, as do social injustices. But we humans are resilient creatures. We can do hard things. We will work to right the wrongs. We will get creative and rebuild.
In the meantime,...
May 29, 2020
Resilience Dispatch – May 29th – Day 53
Although I am not much of a thrill-seeker these days, the ladies in the front definitely look like they are having more fun than the ones in the third seat. It makes me wonder if we might want to change our attitude about the roller coaster we’ve found ourselves on for the last three months, and embrace it as an adventure....
May 27, 2020
Resilience Dispatch – May 27th – Day 52
White-Squirrel-Video Life goes on. Even though the human species is vexed with a renegade virus right now, the rest of the natural world carries on as usual.\n
Here in my neck of the woods, we are not only blessed with mountain laurels in full stunning bloom right now, but a year-round species of white squirrel.\n
Whenever people visit from out of town, seeing these creatures seems to be one of the highlights of their visit. My small town even has a White Squirrel Festival every year, which this year was cancelled due to that renegade virus mentioned earlier.\n
I am fortunate to have a family of white squirrels who live in the forest around my house.\n
Every day, without fail, they come up on my back deck to look for sunflower seeds discarded by the birds. Every day\u2014as if answering a double-dog-dare from their friends\u2014the white squirrels attempt to conquer my Mt. Everest of squirrel-proof bird feeders. Every day, they fail.\n
However, they don\u2019t fail at entertaining me and my dogs Jack and Charlie.\n
By the way, there is plenty of discarded seed below the feeders that is much easier to get to, so they are not being deprived.\n
In your area, what are you seeing in the natural world that reminds you that life goes on?\n
Love,
Susan\n
P. S. Thanks so much for your best wishes while I was under the weather. I am feeling much better now.\n\n
