LIFE

 

Source: Finding Joy on Facebook

tender truth

 

The rain taps lightly on the roof of an umbrella and someone says,

listen to the rain

while someone else smiles and says,

listen to the music.

It is the same sky,

the same water falling,

the same soft drumming

on temporary shelter

but one hears the downpour,

and one hears a song.

The soil settles between our fingers as hands sink into earth and one finds grit,

whilst another finds grounding.

The ocean folds, as its waves crash hard against the waiting shore, and one sees chaos, whilst another sees beauty.

Because maybe the music never came from the rain at all.

Maybe the music and the beauty and the grounding comes from the quiet, tender truth that we do not see the world

as it is.

But as we are looking at it.

*****

A new poem that I wrote for my Patreon a couple of weeks ago. A reminder for a new week that - when it feels like the world isn't what we hope to find out there - we can still look at our own little world in a way that brings more calm, less chaos.

Becky Hemsley 2026

Lovely artwork by Maria Quezada

Source: Becky Hemsley Poetry on Facebook

Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mtn Boys - Dark and Stormy is the Desert

 

Dark and Thorny

Dark and stormy is the desert
Through which pilgrims make their way
Yet beyond this vale of sorrow
Lie the fields of endless day

Oh young soldiers are you weary
Of the roughness of the way
Does your strength begin to fail you
And your vigor to decay

Jesus Jesus will go with you
He will lead you to his throne
He whose thunder shapes creation
He who bids the planets roll

Around him are ten thousand angels
Ready to obey his command
They’ll all be there to hover round you
Til you’ve reached the heavenly land

There on flowery hills of pleasure
Lie the fields of endless rest
Love and joy and peace forever
Reign and triumph in your breast

Loneliness isn’t always the sound of an empty room.

 

Loneliness isn’t always the sound of an empty room.

Sometimes it’s found in a cluttered kitchen counter, a bursting inbox, or your little one calling, “Mom, mom, mom, Mom!” over and over. Sometimes loneliness comes wrapped in the glittery bow of productivity and completed to-do lists. Sometimes it sneaks in on the best days, in the highlight moments of life, when you seem surrounded by good.

Loneliness surprises me.

I think I know how to recognize it: the silence, the echo of my thoughts bouncing off the walls of my brain, the feeling of being left out, unheard, or overlooked.

But loneliness?

It likes to hide within the noise.

It hides in tired eyes that no one seems to notice. It hides in the cracks and crevices of the typical day. I’ve felt it after racing here and there, after doing laundry and sweeping and cleaning and prepping dinner and helping with homework and rarely being asked, “How are you today?” after a day spent meeting everyone else’s needs.

Does anyone see me? Does anyone care?

And then the sigh. The breath.

And then, going right back to doing what needs to be done.

Loneliness doesn’t always look like being alone.

Sometimes it can be sitting at a table with friends or in a crowd and still feeling invisible. It can be found in doing all the right things — laughing on cue, answering messages, volunteering, staying busy — and still, deep within there is this ache, this longing for a connection that goes beyond the surface.

I know. I’ve felt that, too.

It’s surprising how quickly it can creep in and how deep it can feel.

Am I the only one?

Sometimes it feels like everyone else is moving and everyone else’s plans are unfolding, and there we are: stuck. Stuck is the loneliness of lonely places, at least for me. Stuck is lonely because who wants to say, “Look at me! I’m so stuck and I’m so alone!”

So instead, we stay quiet. It feels safer. We shrink and think, “I must be the only one.” But so often, others are walking right next to us, wondering if they, too, are the only ones.

I’ve wondered that so many times.

Loneliness is the master of disguise, honestly.

Sometimes it looks like fierce independence, sometimes like strength, and sometimes it’s within the words, “I’m fine.”

But here’s what I’ve learned: loneliness doesn’t mean something is wrong with me. Or you. It means WE ARE HUMAN. It means we are created and wired for this connection and depth, and a friend, a person seeing us and saying, “Me too. I see you.” It means my soul, your soul, has a part that wants to be seen, appreciated, and valued.

And that? That’s not weakness. It’s beautiful.

It’s part of being human.

So my dear friend, if today you’re feeling that ache, that one that often can’t be described with words, please know this: you are not alone.

You are not the only one.

You are not broken.

You are not too much or too little.

I see you. I appreciate you. I am proud of you. I value you.

I’m so proud of you for showing up, giving, and loving.

Sometimes it just takes one person to remind us that we’re seen and matter.

And today, today, that just might be me to you.

~Rachel

Source: Finding Joy on Facebook

...if we keep checking on each other

 

The first voicemail lasted nineteen seconds.

“Hi, sweetheart, this is your reminder to take the chicken out of the freezer before church. Also don’t trust those grapes in the fridge. They’ve turned on us.”

I stood in my kitchen staring at my phone and smiling like an idiot.

It had come from an unknown number.

Wrong number, obviously.

But the voice was warm and Southern and matter-of-fact in exactly the way my mother’s had been, and for one little moment, hearing a woman call somebody “sweetheart” and warn her about grapes felt like opening a window in a stuffy room.

My mother had been gone three years by then.

Long enough that the sharp pain had softened, but not long enough that I didn’t still miss her in all the ridiculous little places. At the grocery store when I reached for her favorite canned peaches. In the church pew when the alto line came in. On Sunday afternoons when I made roast chicken and wanted to ask whether she thought the potatoes needed ten more minutes.

So that voicemail landed hard.

I almost deleted it.

Instead, I listened to it twice.

The next day, there was another one.

“Baby, if you’re stopping by the drugstore, can you get the unscented lotion this time? The lavender one smells like a funeral home to me.”

I laughed out loud.

Then, because I am a grown woman with some manners, I called her back.

She answered on the second ring.

“Well, hello?”

“Hi,” I said. “I think you may have the wrong number. I’m not… whoever you’re trying to reach.”

There was a little pause.

Then she said, “Oh, mercy.”

Her voice was exactly the same as the voicemails. Soft, sure, and full of the kind of life that notices grapes.

“I am so sorry,” she said. “My daughter changed her number and I clearly wrote it down wrong because I was distracted by my neighbor’s peacock.”

I laughed. “Your neighbor has a peacock?”

“He does, and it has no respect for boundaries,” she said.

That was how I met Miss Loretta.

She was seventy-four, lived two towns over, and had one daughter named Janine, two arthritic knees, and strong opinions about lotion, produce, and doctors who “talk too fast and listen too little.”

I was fifty-eight, widowed, and still getting used to a house that echoed after dinner.

What started as me returning a wrong-number call somehow turned into a conversation that lasted twenty-eight minutes.

At one point she asked, “Do you cook?”

I said, “Enough to stay alive and comforted.”

She laughed and said, “Good. Then write this down. If your cornbread tastes dry, you’re being too proud with the buttermilk.”

I wrote it down.

That should have been enough.

It wasn’t.

Three days later, another voicemail.

This time very clearly intended for me.

“Just checking on you. The weather looked gloomy and I thought you might need a nudge to make something warm for supper.”

I called her back laughing.

After that, we settled into the oddest, sweetest routine of my life.

Loretta left voicemails.

I called her back.

Sometimes we talked five minutes.

Sometimes forty.

Her messages were tiny gifts.

“Remember to buy stamps before you run out. Running out makes people feel more isolated than they need to.”

“Take your vitamins, even if they insult your dignity with how many there are.”

“I saw strawberries on sale and thought of you, though I don’t know if you even like strawberries. That’s all.”

I did like strawberries.

I began to look forward to being thought of in such small, specific ways.

Especially because my own life, while full in many respects, had gotten terribly quiet in the spaces nobody notices from the outside.

My daughter lived in Denver.

My son called often but briefly, usually while driving.

My friends were dear but busy.

And evenings had become the kind of stillness that can feel peaceful one day and too wide the next.

Loretta’s calls softened that.

Then one week she didn’t call.

Not Monday.

Not Tuesday.

Not Wednesday.

By Thursday afternoon, I realized I was worried.

I told myself that was ridiculous. She was a wrong-number woman in another town. I did not know her last name. I had no formal reason to be concerned.

Then my phone rang.

It was her.

“Before you fuss,” she said immediately, “I had a little hospital nonsense and forgot where I put my charger.”

I sat down so fast I nearly missed the chair.

“What happened?”

“Oh, nothing dramatic,” she said in a voice that absolutely meant at least some drama. “A blood pressure scare. They’ve sent me home with stern instructions and tasteless crackers.”

That was all I needed to hear.

I asked for her address.

She said, “Now don’t get carried away.”

I said, “Too late.”

The next morning, I drove to her town with a grocery bag full of things women know to bring.

Real crackers.

Chicken soup.

Good tea.

Fresh fruit.

A better lotion than lavender.

And a little potted mum because nobody should recover from “hospital nonsense” without something alive nearby.

She opened the door in a pale blue robe, looked at me for one second, and said, “Well. I suppose this is what I get for calling strangers sweetheart.”

I laughed and stepped inside.

Her house smelled like lemon oil and books. She had afghans on the couch, framed photos everywhere, and one ceramic chicken collection that made me instantly trust her more.

We spent the afternoon together.

I fixed lunch.

She complained about doctors.

We folded towels because apparently neither of us can sit with clean laundry nearby without addressing it.

She told me stories about Janine as a teenager and about the peacock next door, whose name was apparently Kevin and who had become “emotionally entitled.”

When I left, she hugged me hard and said, softly, “You came like family.”

That undid me a little.

Because it had been a long time since someone had said something like that and meant it.

After that, our odd little friendship became real in every way that mattered.

I drove over once a month.

We went to lunch sometimes.

She mailed me handwritten recipes with notes in the margins like:

Needs more pepper if weather is rude.

I helped her set up a doctor portal she hated on principle.

She taught me how to make coconut cake that didn’t dry out.

She called when my daughter had surgery.

I called when her peacock problem escalated.

Then last spring, I had a mammogram callback.

Nothing bad in the end, thank God.

But those days waiting for the extra imaging felt like walking around with a stone in my chest.

I hadn’t told many people.

I don’t know why.

Maybe because naming fear makes it louder.

The morning of the appointment, there was a knock at my door.

A florist delivery.

Inside the box was one small bouquet of yellow roses and a card in Loretta’s handwriting.

For whatever the doctors say,

Wear the good bra.

Breathe before parking.

And remember that waiting is not the same thing as losing.

Love,

Loretta

I sat at my kitchen counter and cried into the flowers.

Because how did she know exactly what kind of care I needed?

Then again, maybe that’s what older women do best.

Not solve.

Not rescue.

Just notice the practical shape of fear and answer it with something useful and tender.

Now it’s been four years since that first wrong-number voicemail about chicken and traitor grapes.

Loretta is eighty now.

She still leaves messages.

I still save some of them.

One says:

Take a sweater. Public buildings are run by men with no circulation issues.

Another:

If soup sounds good, trust that. Soup is wisdom.

And my favorite says:

You are not bothering the right people.

I listen to that one more than I probably should.

Because she’s right.

Sometimes love arrives by blood.

Sometimes by marriage.

And sometimes by one wrong number, one warm voice, and a woman old enough to know that the world goes easier if we keep checking on each other.

Source: Cheryl Purcell on Facebook

ai art by me

Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water (Audio)

 

Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water album was released on January 26, 1970. The title single was also released that same month. As their final studio album, it topped the charts for 10 weeks in the US and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. 

Clinging to a Bridge Over Troubled Water

I was just shy of fifteen when Bridge Over Troubled Water drifted into my life. I was a confused, headstrong teenager, certain I understood love.

I didn’t.

I fell for the boy I would marry—and stayed with for twenty-two years in a life that never quite fit. I stayed for my daughters. I stayed because I was agoraphobic. I stayed because I believed I couldn’t leave.

Until 1992, when I had no choice.

It took three years to end it on paper, and far longer to quiet the ache of regret. I think now I carried a touch of Cinderella Syndrome—waiting for something to transform that never would. Betrayal came, more than once, and each time it hollowed something out in me.

I was devastated when it finally broke.

But somewhere in that breaking, I found a kind of bridge.

Not a person. Not a rescue.
Something quieter.

A thin, trembling strength that carried me forward when I was sure I couldn’t move at all.

I didn’t cross it beautifully. I crossed it barely.

But I crossed.

And sometimes, that is the miracle—
not that we are saved,
but that we survive.

Wild Geese

 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver - Wild Geese, 1986.

Art: Kayama Matazō - Cranes, 1988.

Source: Ravenous Butterflies on Facebook