My life so far: 29,220 days and counting.

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Remember the Reader’s Zoom this Saturday April 11!  CLICK HERE to copy zoom link or to sign in on Saturday morning. Dialogue and discussion with Colleen O’Brien, author of Baited, a thriller based in Glacier National Park. We will talk about Nature and Place as characters in our stories. Starts @ 9:00 AM/Pacific US time—you can do the math.

And on April 16, 2026, I turn 29,220 days old. You can do the math. It means I was conceived on a hot August day with the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the trauma of WWII, floating molecules in the breath of my young parents. It means I was born on a spring morning in Montana when millions of my grandfather’s bees were hurling themselves from hives to clover buds and war crimes trials were starting up in Europe and Japan.

These 29,220 days are the time blocks that built my life. I have awakened in any number of moods on these days. I have wasted days, raced unthinkingly through hours as though life was an endless Instagram scroll. I have been brought to my knees with grief and awe, flung myself passionately into love and writing and work. I have made mistakes, bad choices, unwittingly caused harm, and wished I could roll back time. I am walking a yellow brick road with most of the bricks behind me and a decade that curves into terrain unknown.

And here I am, turning 80 years old.

I enter this birthday with profound gratitude. Still here. Still healthy and cogent. Living with a beloved partner and

Ann & me among the 8 million protesting.

held within—and contributing to—a loving community. And I have the stamina to keep practicing my passion for stories, for writing, for creating spaces where stories can be respectfully shared.

 I’m starting a Substack column called Backstories, because at 80 most of my stories are back there, trailing behind me, swirling around me, awaiting articulation into the unimaginably huge conversation humanity is having at this time.

Standing on this threshold, I have the audacity to pray for 3,650 more days. Another 1/8 of life and, in my aging body and eldering years, I vow to live ever more consciously. I not only want my remaining days to count, I want to literally count them. I want to see each sunrise as a copper coin and to deposit that penny at sunset into a pottery jar marked “Prayers for Change.” Or maybe I can construct a calendar filling one wall where I cross off each day, noting some gratitude, no matter the internal weather of my emotions or the terrors of the wider world.

I am old enough now to know the preciousness of time. I step into this decade with a sense of accomplishment and a sense of purpose. And on the day I depart—whenever and however that comes— I want my last word to be “Thank you.”

April 17—my first day of being eighty.

I received this as a gift and no designation of who it might be from. Whoever you are, thank you. I will plant many more words in this vase.

If you want to help me celebrate, the best gift you can give me is to go online and deposit good reviews for any of my books! They don’t have to be long or intricate, a few words to encourage the next reader. “I read Seven Whispers 20 years ago and it’s still on my bedside table…”  Or, “Life’s Companion is my favorite journal writing friend and teacher.” Or, “My book club loved The Beekeeper’s Question. Don’t miss this story!”

All these titles are on Bookshop,  Amazon, and in BookClubs.com. Please love on Alyssa’s amazing audio in Audible or Libro or Spotify–wherever you have downloaded it. You can recommend it on Instagram and follow me @ChristinaBeeTrue and on Facebook as The Beekeeper’s Question by Christina Baldwin.

And Thank YOU for being part of my journey and letting me be part of yours.

Pray for PEACE. Pray for JUSTICE. Pray for the children whose days are just starting that they may live in a new world we insist into being!

Story in the Week Between Time

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NEWS for BEEKEEPER’S QUESTION READERS: Next Zoom call, January 17, 9:00 Pacific, etc. ZOOM LINK–CLICK HERE. Focusing on words from home: the importance of letters, pocket books, and the military press.  Now also available, CLICK HERE FOR November’s interview with Alyssa Keene, narrator of the audio edition.

 

The celebratory days are waning: Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa. Here in the North, it’s raining or snowing and the still imperceptible “return of the light” inches forward one more minute of sunrise at a time. The furnace is doing yoga breathing, recirculating warmth in my quiet house. We’re eating leftovers and cookies. I didn’t get cards out… Anticipation, which fueled the first three weeks of December, floats in the corners like stale incense.This liminal space is tiring. I  want life to tidy up.

Sometimes I cannot sleep unless I get up and write in my journal.

Sometimes I cannot write because the days are so packed with experiences, I cannot process one thing before another piles on top of it.

Sometimes I cannot process my personal life because I am overwhelmed by our collective lives and the trauma that accumulates in actual and vicarious ways.

Sometimes I sit by a small lamp in the otherwise darkened house and cry a river of emotional debris.

Ann and Vivi

Then I make a cup of calming tea, give thanks for the roof over my head, for the return of electricity after a two-day outage, for the steady recovery of my beloved from surgery, for the strength of community and friends, for my own stamina. I take a breath, here/now in the pause between one year and the next. I know the consumer world is crazy with post-holiday sales, the media full of retrospectives and predictions, but I want slowing down, touching in, space for my own contemplation. In this space between, I claim time to spin the wooly jumble of too-muchness into a narrative thread I can stitch into the new year. I take a breath. I write.

Not beautiful pages of inspiration or poetics—just shifting the accumulated overload to the page and book. And then I can take these narrative threads and begin to knit my way forward into January. Every year I notice how my mind weaves experience into story. My story. The way I say what is happening—to me, in me, around me: to us, in us, around us. History is what scholars and victors say happened: story is what it is like to live on the ground.

My collage for 2026

These are strenuous times to be living on the ground. Our primary task is to not be ground up, not be crushed, but to persistently proclaim our own perspective, to take our place in the story and believe in our individual and collective voice. Our stories, whether left shimmering in the electronic blogosphere, or stashed on paper in letters and journals, become a treasure for our own life review, for grandchildren, for archives, for the mystery of the long clock that ticks beyond our lives.

When I look into the well of the world and am faced with so many things I cannot fix, or address, or even touch from the boundaries of my life—I return to the storyline to reclaim empowerment, for myself and for others.

January 2nd, the local Write Café returns. Friday mornings at the senior center, twenty+ of us gather with our journals. We say hello, settle in, read the circle agreements, light an LED candle in our centerpiece. Jeanne or I read a poem. People choose any phrase that starts them off. We write in silence for thirty minutes. Then a round of gentle checking out before we exit into our lives until next Friday morning. There is a core group always welcoming new people. Versions of this are now happening on other mornings in other coffeehouses, hosted by members of the original group. The format is simple, replicable, and community- building.

January 24th, I am hosting a fundraiser for a local love of mine, Healing Circles Langley. People are invited to join in “Shaking Your Family Tree for Stories.” I’ve done a version of this several times on-line and am excited to bring a roomful of folks together to explore how we harvest stories from our lineages. Not only is storycatching a rich personal experience, but it also leads to stronger community. Communities are shaped by the stories of inhabitants: the story of the collective is held together by the stories individuals bring to it. So, the greater number of individuals who are engaged in honoring, writing, telling their own stories, the stronger we are as citizens of our community spaces. We stand strong in the truths of who we are, where we come from, what we have arrived at this place and time to contribute, and we see this same strength in the diverse stories of those around us.

January 28th I am taking these narrative threads to another level, teaching a five-week course, “Storycatching for the Times We Are Living,” for the Natural Transitions Institute. It is a deeply gratifying series and the stories shared at the end of the autumn cohort were touching and gorgeous. I am delighted to be repeating the offering.

  • Class 1:Storycatching for the Times we Live in.
  • Class 2:Narrative Arc in a Time of Chaos.
  • Class 3: Story as Sacred Activism
  • Class 4:Living a Mythic Story in the Midst of it All.
  • Class 5:Celebration, witness, and commitment to our words. (In a large cohort, this class will be repeated in week 6 so that every voice may be heard.)

Writing, teaching, bearing witness to one another is what I know how to do. It feels good to step into the new year able to continue sharing this life-long passion.

Thank you for coming along… for the ways you hold onto and spin your own narrative threads, and for the gifts you offer to the world from your own skills and passions.

My quote for the year is attributed to crusty old, trusty old George Bernard Shaw: “This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead off a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

See you in the burning brightly!

Hanging onto the thread

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The sky is streaked with lingering light.

Mid-October 2025: Before going into the storyline that I’ve been noodling on the past few weeks, I want to acknowledge the huge hingepoint we are in: Portland and Chicago under siege by the US president, Gaza in tenuous ceasefire and hostage release, Ukraine shouldering into another season of war. None of this goes away. All of this breaks our hearts one way and another. Pause. Breathe. Keep an open heart.

Moonset, early morning facing west.

In Chapter One of my book, Storycatcher, I write, “Life hangs on a narrative thread. … The thread is slender, but strong: we trust it to hold us and allow us to swing over the edge of the known into the future we dream in words.” Never have I felt this more than true than now. I am swinging over the unknown while the threads coming at me are a tangled mess of broken narratives, soundbites, AI concoctions, manipulated information, reels and threads and phone-held videos—some of them helpful, amidst all that is not. Some of them the warps of lies. The lies are the hardest to deal with—the assumption that I will simply turn over my own thought process, moral code, and reality to whatever they say is true.

Every autumn for 30+ years this backyard maple has turned golden yellow… this year it is turning crimson red.

It’s a mystery.

In this whiplash environment, in the debris field of narrative, the battle of the story wars rages. And I am doing my best to hold on to the storyline that is my life, one thin thread-of-selfhood stitching my way through these times.

Greenbank Farm– early morning dog walks.

I am repeatedly challenged to ask myself, “What is my storyline in all this chaos? How do I articulate and live out what is most important to me? How do I hold myself to purpose on a daily, even hourly, basis? When I wander, where do I go to find my thread again? Journal writing? Dog walk? Weeding the garden? Tea with a friend?

Many days, this constant need for self-redirection is strenuous practice. My capacity to put “mental arms” around huge quantities of information and story and to synthesize incoming data into coherence has been a lifelong gift and challenge. As I age, and as the quantity of incoming stimulation explodes around me, the double-edged nature of being a synthesizer becomes ever more apparent. This is my skill: and it requires focus in the midst of all the peripheral data and story.

It is exactly a year since The Beekeeper’s Question came out, and I realize how deeply that writing project and  background research held me to a core sense of purpose. Waking in the mornings, I would project myself into the hours of the day and look for writing time, research time, hours to fit my life with the Cooper family, the Shines the Light clan, and the wartime lives of folks in Pigeon River, Montana, into my life with my beloved partner and family, dear friends, and the lives of folks on Whidbey Island, Washington. My author question remained: What have they, then, got to teach us, now, about how to live through times of social uncertainty and war without assured outcome?

My parents & grandparents, aka: Franklin, Maire, Doc, Leo

People ask me: “What’s the sequel? How do Maire and Franklin, Jesse and Willow move through the postwar years? Why don’t you write the lives of Flora and Drum? Or Boyd’s journey through the war… Are you doing a screenplay?” Of course, I still have big dreams for this book and the potential that it could be a dynamic mini-series. And the reality is that a book is like a baby—it needs daily feeding, tending, reminding other people it’s still here. The Beekeeper’s Question is now a toddler, and I am holding its hand and walking with it into a wider world.

She who tends and translates the hummm of the hive.

 

This autumn I am also teaching on-line, offering lectures, co-hosting our local writing café. These activities counterbalance the many ways I feel incompetent dealing with on-line promotion, bookstore introductions, booking podcasts, or seeking reviews. It would be easy to give up–but I am the servant to the story. I spent ten years dedicated to this book. These incredible people live only the page and in the audio. They kept me going through DT’s first presidency, the pandemic, and most the years of my seventies. They are counting on my stamina to keep them alive. But now that I’m in the piecemeal tasks of book maintenance, I often feel lost as a writer.  I want my core back— I want a sense of holding onto the thread.

 I do not know if I will be able or willing to take on another huge project. In six months, I will turn eighty years old. I am basically strong, healthy, dealing with small health challenges, nothing life threatening. I can recite huge quantities of story and background research on World War II, beekeeping, Celtic Shamanism, labor issues in the 1940s, etc. etc. and then forget for a few seconds why I walked into the kitchen. Overall, okay. More than okay. Thriving in a serious hearted way.

Friends on the road. Friends in chemo and radiation. Friends in the hospital. Late Dahlias and prayer candle… going 24/7.

Meanwhile, three things I know to be true about myself. One, writing is a lifeline. Writing is spiritual practice, activism, tribal—and I will continue this never-ending story as long as I have fingers and mind.

Two, Nature is my holy place.  I need daily contact with earth/air/fire/water. Geranium in a flowerpot, a tree pushing up the sidewalk, beach stones rolling under the wave action remind me of the planetary interdependence to which I belong. Everywhere I have traveled, Nature is the biggest marvel and my touchstone. I am so grateful to live where I do—a modest house nested at the edge of wild.

Leucistic doe eating apples in the roadbed.

Three, my life is seated in community. I put my time and attention into loving engagement. I show up to community needs—from tending aging neighbors, to demonstrating, to facilitating places of repose.  I am getting ready for whatever shall be asked of me in all these crises. Loving the folks in front of me, steadying myself and staying strong.

Watch for surprises–like a rooster escaped from the chicken yard crowing his freedom.

So, holding onto the thread means touching the ground I stand on, for some time every day. It means staying in the swirl of reciprocity with people around me and in connection through channels like these. And it means that every day between now and my birthday I am going to write something—short or long, I don’t know, but to keep putting who I am to the page, to discover what passion and projects remain mine to do.

“Life hangs by a narrative thread.

This thread is a braid of stories that inform us about who we are,

and where we come from, and where we might go…”

If we can make the path by writing: write.

The heart of the world is always expressing itself… even the fir needles beg the wind to shape a heart in my meandering path.

READER ZOOM CONVERSATIONS RETURN ON NOVEMBER 22. 9:00 AM PACIFIC/NOON EASTERN…  This session will be a dialogue between Christina and Alyssa Keene, the actress who narrated the audio version of the book.  On Audible and 30+ other distribution networks–including Libro. You can buy it through any local bookstore that has an audiobook account.

Read/listen.

Join in for a delightful conversation.

The Baldwins and the Coopers—multiple Leos.

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Second reader’s ZOOM, for folks who have finished my novel: The Beekeeper’s Question. Live conversation was held on January 11, with a special treat: Baldwin cousins, including men now 80s/90s who worked in honey harvesting, and our matriarch cousin, 95-years-old, with family memories from that era. 

In a long-ago writer’s group of mixed genre projects, I asked a friend who was novelizing her family history why she was writing fiction instead of memoir. Her answer, “Because with fiction I can offer my lineage another way out, alternatives they didn’t take.”

Her comment burrowed deep into my writing mind and inspired me, decades later, to borrow vestiges from the life of my grandfather, Leo Baldwin, and my father, Leo Baldwin Jr., and the small Montana town where the family ran “Baldwin and Sons Beeline Honey” for over 50 years. If you have recently read The Beekeeper’s Question, this locale and bee business is sounding familiar. And if you have visited the book page and watched the Langley Book Launch video you will see photographs of the actual homestead, town, and family members posing as stand-ins for the place and characters in the book.

I taught memoir and autobiography for thirty-plus years, wrestling with students over issues of integrity: How much can be shifted and still be considered true? Can I combine characters? What if people are still alive? What if the rest of my family doesn’t agree, or know, or admit to the realities of my story? What do I have the right to write about other people?

Well, a lot of that is solved by declaring a story is fiction and stating on the copyright page: “The characters do not represent actual persons, living or dead. All opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with the author’s.”

Well, mostly. There was a female doctor in the valley in those years. She was a close friend of my grandparents. However, Doc Jereldene in the book is my creation. Why she moved to the valley and her character is sourced from my imagination. The rest of the towns people are all imagined—Gertie, Belle, the Pocket, Torgerson, and Sivertsen families. The Shines the Light family, emerged out of hours of cultural and historical research.

Rev. Leo Cooper, well, he bears a lot of resemblance to Rev. Leo Baldwin. And while I placed the story within the house of my grandfather’s life, I had to break free of reconstructed half-memories, and source Leo Cooper from writer’s mind. Leo, the character, was brought to life to fulfill what the story required and to be what his sons and daughters-in-law, and the valley needed him to be.

My greatest hope for this work of fiction, and the role of fiction in general, is to offer readers “another way out.” Reading a good story allows us as readers to consider choices and consequences that play out in the drama of plot and illuminate alternatives. The Beekeeper’s Question provides a storyland in which we get to vicariously struggle with issues of racism, morality, love, violence. We are invited into imaginary communities in hopes we learn from these fictional characters how to live in our own communities. Reading allows us to imagine ourselves in the world of then and there, and prepare ourselves for how we will speak, listen, and act in the world of now.

I have been reading works of fiction for seventy years. I know that memorable characters, from Caddie Woodlawn and Little Women, to a thousand adult novels, all contribute to my sense of how to be a human—especially, how to be the kind of human the story of my life requires, and what “the valley” of these times need me to be.

More soon. Keep reading…

A year of all things

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Book Announce: The next Zoom call for readers who have finished reading The Beekeeper’s Question is January 11, 2025. One hour: 9:00 AM Pacific (10/mtn/11/central/12/east—US zones). Click here to get zoom link. Casual discussion on plot and background/backstories, how then and now are connected— whatever interests the group that shows up.

The following is a poem by Donna Ashworth, with commentary by me. 

HAPPY NEW YEAR

When I say ‘happy new year’,

I’m not for a moment,

expecting this to occur,

for that is not possible,

a year must be all things.

This is the line that calms my heart: a year must be all things. Ann and I spent last week putting together a scrapbook of photos and handwritten commentary on the year past. It is a decades long commitment, a kind of life review, composing pages of collaged photos that help us reflect and remember. We lost a handful of friends this year, endured the rise and fall of our political hopes, and practiced the line below: letting happiness come and go.

Happiness must come and go,

like the tides and the winds,

just as sadness,

and all the emotions in between.

When I say ‘happy new year’,

Maybe it helps that we live on the western edge of the continent where tides and winds are a real phenomenon. We are not in control of the sway of moon over water, or the increased velocity of winter storms.

I’m really wishing you,

a baseline of peace,

of gratitude.

This is the practice: to hold onto a baseline of peace and gratitude. In these dark winter weeks, I am often up two hours before dawn. We’ve had a little tree in the corner of the living room to bring the starlight in. It will go down on Twelfth Night, commemorating the release of the holidays (holy days). The lights and decorations put away for a year, the naked little Doug fir will be tied to the garden fence to shelter little birds that come to the feeder. It will still be January, chilly rain, probably a touch of snow, and a time when I must be my own light.

Because if you can sit with these things,

for the most part,

happiness will thrive,

when it does arrive,

and sadness will know its place in the mix.

For us to know a thing, we must know its opposite. Happiness without sorrow would be an unremarkable state of being and sorrow without happiness, the same. (Here I hear my grandmother saying, “Even in heaven the angels don’t sing all the time.”)  It is fluctuation that makes happiness remarkable and sorrow endurable. I will try to nourish that awareness in the coming months. Emotions are weather: let them pass through.

If you can nourish these things,

daily,

you will also grow hope,

for it flourishes in such soil.

And hope is the key,

to this enigmatic state

of ‘happiness’ we seek.

So, hope. Some folks count on it: some distain it. I think of hope as a verb. To have hope means I am taking action. Hope requires I do something to positively impact my tiny part of the world. I send money to World Central Kitchenbecause they are feeding people in places I cannot reach. I make dinner for neighbors in need because I can walk across the street. Both gestures give me hope.

When I say ‘happy new year’,

I’m really wishing you more happy days,

than sad days,

more joy than misery,

more laughter than tears . . .

and the wisdom to accept,

that they all belong.

When I say “Happy New Year,” I am thinking of the new, the now, the opportunity to change habits, to step out of the holy days grounded by the tiny lights that we have shined in the dark Northern Hemisphere weeks. I am thinking of empowerment, of continuing to define, situation by situation, where I can act to shift, to acknowledge, to celebrate, to hold one another dear.

Here’s to you, dear community: may we keep our hearts open, may we notice how happiness sneaks into even the hardest days, may we be fierce and tender to the right degrees. More soon—after Epiphany.

BLESSING FOR THE LONGEST NIGHT

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Thinking we could all use some beauty and light–I am sharing some of my sunset photos–taken from the edge of our neighborhood– and Jan Richardson’s Solstice poem. She is such a generous poet, sending words of comfort, companionship, and wisdom into the world.

(I have adjusted the line breaks to fit in this blog format.)

 

All throughout these months as the shadows have lengthened, this blessing has been
gathering itself, making ready, preparing for this night.

It has practiced walking in the dark, traveling with its eyes closed, feeling its way
by memory, by touch, by the pull of the moon even as it wanes.

So believe me when I tell you this blessing will reach you even if you have not light enough
to read it; it will find you even though you cannot see it coming.

You will know the moment of its arriving by your release of the breath you have held
so long; a loosening of the clenching in your hands, of the clutch around your heart;
a thinning of the darkness that had drawn itself around you.

This blessing does not mean to take the night away but it knows its hidden roads,
knows the resting spots along the path, knows what it means to travel in the company of a friend.

So when this blessing comes, take its hand.
Get up. Set out on the road you cannot see.

This is the night when you can trust that any direction you go,
you will be walking toward the dawn.

~ Jan Richardson ~

Prayers unceasing in whatever ways we pray/in/tend for peace.

And when we turn around… a new day is rising.