Letter to my loyal blog readers

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Nosing around in my website, I am surprised to realize I have been blogging since 2011—that was a fast fifteen years! I love much about this path—especially the wisdom so many of you share in response. I look forward to continuing this outreach and dialogue as I jump over the broom today from 79 to 80!

And because I am still actively supporting my books, especially The Beekeeper’s Question, it is also time to expand my outreach and dialogue onto Substack so that people who don’t already know my body of work can more readily find it.

For you—several options: 1. Do nothing and the blog posts will arrive in your inbox as usual. They may be formatted slightly differently than you are accustomed to, but you can read them. 2. If you go out to Substack, you can subscribe for free and will be able to read everything I post, plus make comments. 3. If you choose to support me through a paid subscription you will also be able to join live zoom calls around many aspects of story and life.

As you are coming over from my blog, and to honor your loyalty, send me a message and I will gift you the paid subscription.

It has taken me a long while to make this shift because of the monetary element to Substack. But it takes money to maintain an online presence. Income from Substack will go to maintaining Ann’s and my websites and outreach lists. Additional funds will be distributed to the Piikani Health Institute, Save the Bees, and The Circle Way.

Thank you—and here’s the link to the first post.

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!

Place as a Character in Stories

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Next READERS’ ZOOM on APRIL 11, 9:00 AM Pacific.  See details at end of post.

The Body knows where it belongs. There seems some configuration in nature between the dropped fawn and the grassy knoll that receives it, between the river and the salmon that returns from the sea, between the bee and flower and darkened geometry of the hive. And even in my human blinders, I have experienced this for myself.

I was born in Deaconess Hospital in Great Falls, Montana and carried home to the rural homestead where my grandparents had homesteaded thirty-six years earlier. I was the second generation of Baldwins born on that homestead edging a tiny town. The first photograph of me I am four months old, July, my christening day. I am on a little blanket on the grass, torso sprawled, head lifted (cobra pose they call it in my senior yoga class).

Belly on the ground, on ground that still calls me, ground that holds my grandparents, parents, various aunts and uncles in the Sun River Cemetery. The Blackfeet here count ancestors going back ten thousand years. It will take me half a century to begin to reckon with the thievery that made this place a place I thought I belonged.

from Wikipedia

It was when I went to Europe, particularly into the English countryside, walking among the standing stones of Avebury, I had a different sensation of belonging. The ground came up through the soles of my feet, shaking me like lightening. I was filled with a kind of Earthy energetic programming. Though my Enlish ancestors immigrated to America in the late 1700’s, I immediately thought: this is what ancestral linkage feels like! This is what Native Americans feel when they walk the land we call Montana. The land they call Niitawahsin.

When I wrote The Beekeeper’s Question, the story demanded I “go home” to love and reckon with the place of my birth. Though fictional, the characters, the vocations, the struggles, the social issues all stream out of the place I come from. And everything happens in place, under the buttes, in the dry winds, the weather, the ways Montana shapes people’s characters.

Last fall I discovered Colleen O’Brien’s book, Baited, a mystery/thriller based in Glacier National Park and the small town of East Glacier, inside the borders of the Blackfeet Reservation. I enjoyed it both for the storyline and for O’Brien’s amazing use of place. Well—she lives there. She’s taught at Blackfeet Community College in Browning. She’s well acquainted with the Park, the rangers, the Blackfeet, the tensions of then and now. She stocks Beekeeper’s Question in her store, Glacier Park Trading. Seemed like a match.

We connected recently and decided to share the next READERS’ ZOOM on APRIL 11 (9:00 AM Pacific—check your timezone) to talk about PLACE as a character.  I am an author born in Montana who has always been a visitor and not a resident. Colleen is an author born elsewhere, now a resident. The books are our debut novels after careers in nonfiction. Should be fun. Click on the live link, above. Put on your cowboy hat and join us.

Fibrillation and Ablation in the collective heart

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Fibrillation is an irregular heart rhythm that originates in the muscle’s upper chambers (the atria). Symptoms include fatigue (√), heart palpitations (√), trouble breathing (√), and dizziness (√). Pretty much describes my year so far—exhausting, heartbreaking, breathtaking, and dizzying horror at the regime.

From Mayo Clinic site.

People experience A-fib as a sensation in which there is no “resting” pulse. Their heart is beating 100-175 beats a minute. The upper and lower chambers of the heart are out of synch, as though the muscle itself is in a state of panic. (See Mayo Clinic for a clinical explanation.)

Fortunately, I do not have this actually happening in my chest, but it is happening in my metaphoric heart.  And it’s happening in our collective hearts. A friend referred to this feeling as “having one foot on the brake, one foot on the accelerator, each pressing equally hard, spinning in place.”

from Robert Hubbell blog–he posts daily submitted photos of resistance.

These are heart racing times. Incredible words of wisdom and eyewitness accounts are coming out of cities, communities, and states under siege. I am not currently under siege, but I am ready. I have my whistle, my cell phone, “know your rights” cards in English and Spanish, and a military version letting enlisted know their loyalty is to the Constitution. I attend local protests. I call my Democratic senators and representative. I have a candle lit in my window, joining the movement to “Be the Light,” and send out a flickering (battery operated) glow “every night until America is free.”

My partner, Ann, and I were raised in Minnesota, she in Austin, me in suburban Minneapolis. We have family and friends in the middle of the siege supporting those in most direct threat. They are protesting, driving teachers to and from schools, helping food drives, donating to nonprofits, watching out for neighbors. We are staying in touch, making sure they know the country and wider world is watching, learning from them, and aware of the horrors being perpetrated in their communities.

Instagram photo.

At a weekly circle gathering in my hometown on Whidbey Island. Out of twenty-one people, a third of us have Minnesota ties. The circle opened with a reading of Alison Luterman’s poem, Outpouring. An homage to Minnesotans’ responses to ICE invasion, the poem initiated a heartfelt conversation wondering how best to be engaged, for we believe the slogan: All this stops when enough of us say NO.

We are saying no—but it doesn’t feel like enough. It feels like fibrillating: waiting for the heart of the country to regulate, for enough of us to understand how to move from fight or flight. We know risk is present. We see that death can be dealt out of the most innocuous gesture; a woman saying, “I’m not mad at you, dude…” a man reaching to help a woman pushed to icy ground.

Hubbell’s column-submitted by participants.

It is so obvious that the actions we take today shape the future. We are in a purge: when the white supremacy inherent in our nation’s founding, history, and present pushes us into this test.  The empire is exposed. In a hinge of history, the door can swing either way; we the people are pushing for democracy while the regime is pushing for authoritarianism. (One foot on the brake and the other on the accelerator—how the heart is racing!) And the chambers of our government are out of synch and seemingly frozen. There is no going back from this: and the way forward is uncharted.

We’ve had several dear friends experience A-fib episodes. The heart wears itself down pumping like this. There is potential for blood clot, stroke, heart attack. In the winter of 2026, we are collectively at this stage of chronic fibrillation: hyped, out synch, exhausted by chaos. We carry on with daily lives altered by the state we are in.

Sometimes late night, when I sense the newsfeed slowing and the houses around me are dark, I can find this thready pulse, this deeper breath. I put my hand on my heart whispering to myself, “You can do it, dearie. Have courage without certainty. Love the folks in front of you. Hold your piece of the light: admit your piece of the dark. Move at the pace of guidance. Notice how help comes.” I fall asleep pressing assurance into my sternum.

Sometimes medication helps the heart slow. Sometimes A-fib just stops. For several friends,  the onset and departure of fibrillation episodes are a mystery. Like living in these days. We don’t know where in the Great Turning we are. We are just here. In Minneapolis, a thousand protestors are singing to the ICE agents, “It’s okay to change your mind, show us your courage, leave this behind. It’s okay to change your mind, you can join us, join us any time.”

Instagram.

And sometimes the heart habituates to chaos and to cannot regulate. The treatment of choice is ablation—where tiny catheters are inserted into veins and threaded to the heart. Once there, the surgeon zaps specifically targeted surfaces of the heart muscle with heat or cold to create scar tissue. The scars block the irregular heartbeat.  Rebirth in rhythm. (Again, see Mayo Clinic for clinical explanation.) The people are singing, “Put down your weapons and sing your part, we walk the same ground, we’ve been torn apart. We are here with our bravery, our love for each other will carry us through. Yes, our love for each other will carry us through.

ICE is the chaos disrupting the rhythm of daily life. The protestors are the ablation. The world is watching and learning from Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Minnesota. The protestors are stopping life as usual—a deliberate procedure to restore order—well, to establish a new order. Minnesota will never be the same. The country will never be the same. We will have to find a new rhythm for our lives that includes the scar tissue, and honors the sacrifices being made. Be Pretti. Be Good. And also be: Porter, Dominguez, Diaz, La, Yanez-Cruz, Caceres, Campos—who were killed or died in detention in January 2026.

It’s risky, working on a person’s heart alive in their chest. It’s risky working on our societal denial, but protestors across the country know the collective heart must be called into a new regulation. They choose the risk. They choose to be examples of how to create new social pathways, working with and around the scar tissue of our history. They know it is imperative to correct the rhythmic pulses of collective life. By the tens of thousands, Minnesotans march down frozen streets: Nicollet Mall as Gettysburg. In bitter cold, breaths puffing white clouds, they sing, “No one is getting left behind this time, we get there together or never at all, we get there together, all of us now.”

Instagram.

Minnesota strong.

Take care of yourself. Take care of each other. Take care of whatever place you stand. This is going to take a while.

To rouse the heart—play Bruce Springsteen’s, “On the Streets of Minneapolis.”

And to regulate the heart listen to Jacob Collier elicit collective harmony in the Wild Mountain Thyme.

Saving the World: Saving the Stories

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Niece, nephew, and sister.

We have work to do to save what we most value in our world.  Well, we try. Keep trying. Keep reaching for each other. Managing our griefs. Across America people are activated. We will not stop. And we invite those who are wondering/wavering to join in. For decades of my life Minneapolis was my home. I know these streets, this weather, and the kind of people Minnesotans are. My family that still lives there is on the streets. Again. After George Floyd. After Melissa Hortman. After Annunciation Catholic School. Now, Renee Nicole Good.

On January 11, Simon Rosenberg, in Hopium Chronicles wrote:  “The world is deeply unsettled now. We don’t know how all this is going to turn out. We could lose, or we could win. But we will not win unless we understand the nature of the conflict we now find ourselves in and organize ourselves to win it. 

“To do this our Democratic leaders and all of us must far more consciously see themselves not just as legislators or party leaders or grassroots activists but as actors in a global battle for freedom and democracy. We must come to see ourselves as heirs to the American Revolution and the Post WWII Four Freedoms global system that made freedom – not dominion – the founding organizing principle of our country and the world, and recognize that it is our obligation, our responsibility, to lead this global fight – as we have for 250 years. We must be warriors for the middle class and working people, AND proud American patriots fighting for freedom and democracy here and everywhere – for our Founders declared that our inalienable rights included not just the “pursuit of happiness” but “life” and “liberty” too. And we must summon the power of those great American patriots who came before – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Dr. King – and other global freedom fighters – Churchill, Gandhi, Mandela – to inspire us in the years to come.”

Norman Rockwell illustration of the Four Freedoms

While writing The Beekeeper’s Question, I kept asking: “What have they/then got to teach us/now?” A lot, it appears.  I continue leading conversations about the values, theology, and moral code implicit in the story and in the country at that time. In his State of the Union Address on January 6, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt, laid out his vision of global human rights and the need for America to step onto the world stage and take up moral and military leadership in a world falling into fascism. (Remember that WWII started in Europe in September 1939, and by 1941, Hitler occupied the continent, leaving Britain to flight on its own while Churchill pleaded with the US to get involved.) When the US did enter the war eleven months later, it did so to carry out Roosevelt’s vision. And when the Cooper family listened to the radio, and dealt with the challenges of their community, they were informed and inspired by the Fireside Chats broadcast by their president. They were given the courage to do what must be done to wage the battle for freedom and democracy.

And here we are, dangerously abandoning the structures that have held some kind of global order together all the lifetimes of those of us alive on the planet. We find ourselves in a multi-faced “war” of myriad conflicts and bloody battlegrounds and “we don’t know how all this is going to turn out.”

At a library author panel last November, a women in the audience announced, “I want you to know I carry The Beekeeper’s Question in my car. Whenever I am in the ferry line or a waiting room, I read a few pages. I need them with me. They give me courage.” What a marvelous moment—to know the story is fulfilling my intention for it in the world.

The history of WWII has pretty much been written, but the stories continue to rise. In recent conversation with Alyssa Keene, the novel’s marvelous audio narrator, she used the word “blueprint;” that the actions, bravery, willingness to risk of people who lived during WWII provide a model for our own actions, bravery, and willingness to risk now. Alyssa has completed writing the first draft of her grandfather’s experiences being rescued by the French resistance and secretly passed to safety, so another blueprint is coming.  And things that were lost or disregarded keep coming to light.

Last summer, a tiny ad appeared on the local e-list: “1940s postage stamps, anybody want them?”

I do.

A little collection I could paste into signed copies of The Beekeeper’s Question, alongside letters I had made up between the characters of the separated newlyweds. Maire was writing from Montana where she’s gone to live with her father-in-law. Her soldier man, Franklin, was billeted in Northern Ireland and then fighting in the North Africa campaign. Letters—crossing the Atlantic in a mismatched timeline, crumpled into mailbags, riding the bowels of ship conveys (40% sinking rate in the early years of the war,) communication missing or repeated or uncertain of reception. This was how it was—the best that ordinary people could do. Sure, I’ll take those stamps.

I arrived to find this woman clearing out her garage, getting ready to move. I tell her why I want the stamps, offer her a copy of the book. We chat about that long-gone era of our parents’ generation. “There’s this box,” she says,  “War letters between my parents. My father’s Army memorabilia, photos, ration books, military instructions for an occupying Army. I don’t know what to with it all.” My eyes got large. “You want it?”

I do.

The box is sitting in my backyard office. I haven’t read the letters or tried to organize them by date (all those helpful stamps with postmarked dates were cut off and dumped into a little plastic bag, so the chronology of the envelopes is gone). I have sorted out some interesting booklets (see photo) and asked if Molly Guptill Manning, who wrote the acclaimed, When Books Went to War, and who curates the exhibit “The Best Read Army in the World,” if she wants them. I’ll find an archive that wants the letters.

I reached out to my friend and sister/writer, Gretchen Staebler, for advice. She has a published memoir about her years dedicated to caring for her mother (who died at age 100) and living in the house of her childhood—including everything her parents had ever saved. Including their World War II correspondence, and her father’s family’s war correspondence—a boxed cache of over 1500 letters. Eventually, she edited the letters into a privately published volume. She let me read some to help set the tone of letters between Maire and Franklin. We remain in a long dialogue about what impact the letters had in the moments of their exchange, in the lineage of a family, and where these might be deposited for a future we cannot imagine to find and explore.

Gretchen appeared with me on the January 17, readers zoom to talk about letter writing in the 1940s, the work of cataloguing and archiving, and how the realness of these exchanges reaches through time. 

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!

A Hmmm in the Chaos

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In these tumultuous weeks of autumn, 2025, I have been thinking about the generations in my novel, The Beekeeper’s Question. The impact and uncertainty of a faraway war rocks the community of Pigeon River, Montana in 1942-43. The young are swept into the situation, into the pressures of living through. Chapter 2 ends with a scene in the Philadelphia train station where Franklin Cooper is leaving for deployment and Maire, his bride, is standing on the platform among other women and families. (p14)

“At 30th Street Station, she buried her face in his jacket, nervously twisting the brass button bright on olive-green wool. Franklin heaved his duffel onboard and jumped up behind it. His hand reached through an open window. Maire’s hand reached from the platform. The hiss of brakes releasing. Rail cars jerking. Fingers slipping. His hand waving among dozens of finger-tipped branches reaching from the train. He was a soldier. She was his wife. It was their war.”

Though circumstances are different, I hear a similar tenor of concern, endurance, determination to make a life in the midst of it all, in conversations with mid-life nieces, nephews, and our daughter. These conversations focus on the practical, applicable, manageable: How do I stabilize my employment? Get to the right place to make it through? Cope with rising costs for housing, cars, insurance, food, education? What’s going to still be in place when my children are grown?

And then there are the elders in the story: Doc, Leo, Josie. They are the holders of perspective and life experience. Doc and Leo talk about the edgy moment of their arrival, how the Homestead Act gave them land and title, how the Indians had been forced into reservations, and then how the presence of the Indian School and the suffering of Native children awakened them to history and social consequences they still grapple with decades later.

Doc, the only woman in her medical school at the turn of the twentieth century. Leo, carrying on a life-long discussion with the bees and the Bible. And Josie Shines the Light, attached to the spirit of the land and the soul of her people, protecting knowledge forbidden by colonization.

In a scene in Josie’s lodge, tucked in the backcountry hills of the reservation, Leo is crediting her with saving his adopted son’s life. (p128) Josie responds, “Your son owes his life to his own spirit and to Iistapatapiop, Creator. We who serve our people know each one must swim their own river. Jesse was drowning when he arrived, but he was reaching for the surface.”

Regret twisted Leo’s heart. “In that season of loss, I too was near drowning. I was not a good father when he needed me most.”

Her eyes bore into him. “He needed you most on the day he was born. You took him as your own. You gave him a name, a family, a childhood.”

Our circumstances are different, but in the peer conversations around me, I hear a similar awareness of how we both hold and cannot hold the generations behind us. These conversations focus on where we can exercise empowerment, protect moral values, take care of grandchildren, leave our stories for a future we will not see.

At a recent panel for community authors, one woman said into the crowd, “This is a book I keep in my car. Whenever I’m in the ferry line or waiting somewhere, I pull it out and read whatever pages come open. I need these people. They are spiritual guides from their time to our time.”

And now we can have it in the magical voicing that Alyssa Keene brought to the story. Join us for the reader Zoom, and a merry conversation on the spoken and written word.

SHORT – The Beekeeper’s Question Audio Sample Video

The Thinning Time

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October 22 is the anniversary of my father’s departure from this life in 2018. The phrase is a fitting explanation of what happened that afternoon in the rehab center next to the local hospital. He’d been enduring a month in kidney failure after 98 years of a good life. Despite the pain and indignities of his final weeks, we had some good times. We played Quiddler, a word-making card game, that is a family staple. He watched football games and CNN. A life-long analyzer of news and current events, he cried over the Kavanaugh hearings, declaring from his hospital bed, “Christine Blasey Ford ought to become the justice, not that sniveling man.” It was the last public event he tracked.

Saturday October 20, family members and dad.

October was a bridging time in which we—his community and family, if not the medical team—hovered between thinking he’d get better and adjusting to the idea he would not. We had a family huddle on Saturday night, posed with our elder smiling in the middle. But early next morning a neurological event catapulted him into active dying.  We shifted to holding vigil. Family gathered: he departed.

Two years earlier, November 26, 2016, our mother departed less than three weeks after her 96th birthday. Having married a Canadian after our parents divorced, she lived in British Columbia. We four siblings would gather annually at our house and do days with dad then ferry across the border to Vancouver Island, do days with mom.

Her 96th birthday was election day in the US. A fierce fighter for social

Daughters and mom

justice and women, she would have loved to vote for Hilary, but that part of her mind was long gone. My sister and I could see was pulled deep inside.  Chair bound, nursing home attendants lifted her ingloriously out of bed on a canvas swing, plopped her into a wheelchair. After local friends came by for muffins, she whispered, “Well that was sweet. Can I go now?”

We hugged her gently. “Of course, Mom. You’ve had a good life. Living like this is not fun and you’ve been curious about the other side for a long time.” She departed never knowing what was unfolding south of the border.

Ann and I often comment how glad we are that all four parents died before the pandemic, before the political destruction of the values that guided their lives, before escalating crises on so many fronts. However, if the soul survives its departure from the body, and if aspects of consciousness that determine karma and soul growth, like conscience, moral code, integrity, accountability, survive death, then the departed areexperiencing these times, albeit from a perspective we cannot comprehend.

We often pray to our ancestors and call upon the angelic/invisible realms for help. We attune ourselves, like this favorite quote from Willa Cather (in Death Comes for the Archbishop): “Miracles seem to rest not so much upon healing power coming near us from afar, but on our perceptions being made finer so that our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there around us always.” We look for signals, for morphed presence. A bee that hovers, a raven that follows us, a light but discernible hand on the shoulder, a voice that calls out warning or blessing.

But oh, in these days of slanting autumnal light and lengthening dark, I would love to lay my head on the solid, heart-thumping chest of my elders. I remember Gramma Emma’s strong hands scrubbing my grubby tomboy fingers. Grandpa Leo’s husky voice and the weight of his work-coarsened palms laid in blessing on my head. I feigned sleep after car rides so my father would carry me into the house of childhood, I hummed along with my mother’s lullabies—moments of parental tenderness, even in the emotional storm of their marriage. What luxury to have had places to rest, to lay my head, to be touched with safety and held in comfort.

And now, I am a holder of the vulnerable, a provider of refuge by word, gesture, and deed, a speaker of reassurance. I feel the responsibilities of elderhood, especially as we live in collective stress so immersive it’s hard to register the impact. I’m not sure I want to know how stressed I am, though every time “something happens,” I feel tension ricocheting around in me, and I pray for our abilities to relieve the accumulating trauma. I want to wash the tiny hands of children in the rubble. I want to bless our heads in tongues of benediction. I want to swoop and carry us, folded over one another’s shoulders, resting heart to heart, into shelter I am not sure exists anymore.

 Annie Dillard, writes in Holy the Firm, “There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead — as if innocence had ever been — and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been.”

The old man walks into the ER, October 1, 2018

Okay then, what happens to this precious world is up to us. All of us.

The old soul ascending through a cloudbow rising out of the meadow near the hospital on October 22,2018.

I shall accept and provide comfort that is lateral, wrinkle to wrinkle, as we walk each other home. I will take care of the generations following and contribute what I can between now and my own departure.

When depleted, I shall visit  the forest and the beach, sit with my meditation chimes, write in my journal, pray for guidance. And I shall rely on the strengths of my ancestors, their soulful presence in the ethers around me, their courage embedded in my DNA and carry on because life is up to us.

Samhain, Hallow’s Eve, All Souls Day, El Dia de los Muertos: let the veil thin. And let my eyes see and my ears hear  nudges from the other side, so that I am given strength from the arms greater than my own.

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.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye–AUDIO is up!

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Front Cover

The audio version of The Beekeeper’s Question is ready for your ears! It went live on Audible September 8, and there is a one-week sale—so order now. The book is also available on thirty-four other audio distribution channels—Barnes & Noble, Chirpy, Spotify—wherever you like to download audio books—you can find it. In the next couple of days, I’ll be make arrangements with Kingfisher Books in Coupeville, WA so you can order through an independent bookstore—but because of the shortness of the sale (Audible sets these things)—I wanted to get word out to you all as soon as possible.

To get the audio into your library loaning system put in a request through Libby or Overdrive—whatever they use, and they can order it.

Rehearsing for Shakespeare–so many words!

Who wouldn’t want this bright energy reading you a story?!

The voice of the story is local actress and voice coach, Alyssa Keene. In just the last six months, Alyssa has been a shining lead as Golda in Fiddler on the Roof, and Island Shakespeare Festival’s production of As You Like It. She brings professional quality and a deep empathy  into the book’s voices as she immerses herself in the complexities of accents, genders, and narrative. And we will both be on the Readers’ Zoom call November 22nd: what it was like to write it/me, what it was like to read it/her. And then—what it was like to listen to it/you all.

So now, The Beekeeper’s Question is available in all formats.  More unfolding in this relaunch and celebration of the book’s first birthday.

Autumn presentations and classes!

Inkspiration—on September 27, I am part of three presentations by journal writing pioneers–myself, Tristine Rainer, Jamie Pennebaker, and series organization Kathleen Adams. For registration and more information go to The Center for Journal Therapy.

Story circle Network—on October 4, Writing from the Heart, Virtual Conference, I am presenting in the midst of a great line-up on “Shaking your Family Tree for Stories.” This day is a bargain—early bird discount until September 26.

For a longer dive into the power of story, writing your own story, and “Storycatching for the times we are living”, my five session zoom class, sponsored through Natural Transitions Network on the five Thursdays of October is a rich opportunity.

MOST OF ALL –THANK YOU, for all the ways you support this creative, circle-ly, story wandering life of mine. And to know that my writing and teaching continue to be meaningful, well what a blessing. And finding meaning is a blessing we create together—shared experiences of life and story and bearing witness. The world is hurting and cruel, and wonderful, and inspiring. We’re in it together. And as Doc says in the book, “We’ll figure it out.”

Artwork used with permission: Queen of the Bees… she who puts honey in our hearts.