Karinaland River

  Seven Days Ago – A  Stollen  Story   The night of December 24 has multiple meanings for me. The sun is hiding for 3 days before and 3 days after Solstice. We are suspended in darkness. It is cold. Soon it will get even colder, winter arrives. Then, three days after December 21 and some waiting, the miracle happens. Promise of new life & hope is finally breaking the sun’s standstill, a turning point, a humble birth. We human beings need light, don't we?   The day before Christmas Eve, when a friend asks what I am doing, I text back: “Weeding, reading, mending clothes by candle light, sharing  Stollen  and four one-dollar bills, as well as a 20-dollar bill, with an older unhoused Black man near the downtown Berkeley farmer’s market. A younger homeless white woman comes over handing him a new sleeping bag. We are not drunk, on drugs, or crazy – the sun is warming the cold morning….”    Seeing the man’s wet sleeping bag spread out to dry in...

  came into this world  A few days ago, I find a decades-old poem, typed in a visual design on my Canon typewriter on December 21 in 1989. It is about birth. Thirty-four years later on December 14, I turn seventy. Unimaginable, back then. I remember the 36-year-old woman in the freezing attic,  rented  from a friend, on a bitter cold night, ready to uproot her life and embark on a new journey. After six months, I am involuntarily catapulted back to my life in theater and teaching. But that winter – solitude my companion – the first spirit movement of a new chapter, the beginning of a slowly unfurling deep transformation, lasting the next four years. Taking me to places of death, endings, new beginnings, re-birth. Not the first major dramatic turning point, and not the last.                   When the very first step                            ...

  December’s Wonder Joy Awe  Walt Whitman describes the questions I have engaged in all year long:                               Queries in my Seventieth Year                           Approaching, nearing, curious,                           Thou dim, uncertain spectre—bringest thou life or death?                           Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier?                           Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet?                           Or haply cut m...

  Crossing Over I was going to write about wonder, awe, and joy, how it shows up for me in the small gestures of daily life, beholding the awe-inspiring leaps of a young squirrel,  drinking garden herb tea …  despite… despite… despite… about the short days in December, darkness, star light. Then this morning, in the New York Times, I come across the harrowing  guest essay by   Atef Abu Saif , a writer and minister of culture in the Palestinian Authority who lives in Ramallah, on the West Bank. I have followed his recent diary entries in other publications. While reading my body starts shaking like the children whom he describes waiting in line when crossing from North to South Gaza as they evacuate. The taste of young bodily fear – not the one that we experience later in life swirling mostly in our heads, well contained. Human beings, young & old, in the violent throws of historical forces, political chaos and utter destruction. Unimaginable. Mr. Saif’s und...