It's 10 pm. Do you know where your solace is?

Thank you for being at the other end of this conversation.

If I've learned one thing from sharing each issue of The Wild Now, it's that whenever I wonder if what I'm writing is helpful to others, there's a comment or an email out of the blue with a personal story.

I receive and hold a vulnerable expression of one person's journey in a world of more than 8 billion people. It's entirely unique, with its own beauty and its own pain.

At the same time, there are always threads common to every one of us.

Yes, is the message. The connection is meaningful.

Now that the month-long Joy Experiment that focused The Wild Now during April is done, I'll be playing with formats and ideas.

That's what you'll find below. Please keep commenting, emailing, letting me know what you like or don't like. I really do want this to be a conversation, even if most simply read and move into their day.

From my journal | Early May 2025

Sometimes solace comes to you, uninvited.

The world presenting itself on wings and hooves, or arms clad in colorful cloth printed with bats and foxes, or bare-naked feet with their laughable toes, or as the single foot of a snail slowly turning a circle, reminding you how little you need to dance.

The night arrives on stars, each a tiny, kind fist holding up the purple-black net as we sleep, not all, but most of us safe in a huge mystery.

The day rises on clouds, soft and grey. You want to say the start of this day feels sad. Ah, how we expect so much of sun and blue sky to decide our day.

What if, instead, you look up from your berries and eggs, just in time to hear those slate and silver clouds silently speaking to you?

“Look how the low light allows a fern frond to glow.”

“Feel how air through the window screen is damp on your dry skin, each cell a little mouth, drinking.”

“Hear how it’s so quiet that the wingbeats of two ravens are a kind of panting, a breathing, the day itself a living body.”

A line from poet Carl Sandburg lands like a feather in my thoughts:

“The fog comes
on little cat feet.”

And here it is, the fog along with cat feet. A thin coastal mist on one side of the glass door, my two cats on the other, watching more than a dozen Band-tailed pigeons, big-awkward birds, bathing, splashing wildly in the shallows of our pond.

After a restless night, my beloved other dozes in his chair. Each time he drifts off, feels like a drifting away. Sleeping more, speaking less.

Body language takes on new meaning. Sheer physical presence, pheromones, the energy that seeps out of each of us—all tethers and biological crosstalk.

Do you find you can be with another, two bodies in one space, silent and in sync?

The cats’ tails whip, excited. For a moment, I wonder why my tailbone never grew a tail. The world could use less words right now anyway, and tails, well, they speak only truth.

Sometimes the one you’ve loved for more than 30 years, the one you’ve been caring for now 7 years, the last few years, the last few months, getting harder, becomes a third person in your marriage.

There’s you and your familiar face in the mirror, ripened by years, a little weathered, but still you.

There’s the one who put a ring on your finger, and spun you in swirls on a summer morning under the sprawl of old Live oak branches, the music of Acorn woodpeckers singing, wick-ka, wick-ka, wick-ka!

There’s this other being so caught in illness, of body, of mind, of spirit, feeling his ending almost close enough to touch but not yet, that he takes on the quality of an angry ghost, grieving, lost at times, fighting to find his way back to a place that’s no longer there.

When this third being’s words are harsh, and yes, to be real, sometimes unkind, I try not to believe them, the words.

Where are you? I call in my mind’s private room, trying to look through the ghost to find that beloved other, who once had the power to summon a Barn owl out of dusk in an autumn field, floating on luminous white wings above my head.

Angel. That’s what that long-ago owl felt like. Angel. Now my signal word to see not the ghost but the man.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. My inner voice asks, Where are you? only to answer itself with other voices. You’re doing this wrong. You’re not trying hard enough. Why can’t you make this better?

Have you ever been a caregiver? Have you heard those voices of inadequacy?

Crying actually helps, but you never want to get stuck there. Doesn’t change anything and there’s always so much to be done.

Plus, life is short, too short, to give much time, to give away your agency, your free will to sorrow, forgetting to savor what’s light and lovely and all around you, really, right there with you.

Recently several evenings hit me hard. As I prepared dinner, tears fell on the cutting board, and I had to muffle some full-lunged sobbing. Thankfully my husband’s deepening hearing loss is a protective blessing.

I never want him to feel bad because I’m feeling bad, caught in some grief-hole.

The other night I let YouTube and it’s math, its algorithm showing you what it thinks you want, play into my earbuds as I tried my best at cooking. Making dinner was a creative daily task that my husband enjoyed doing ‘before.’

For me, for too many reasons to enumerate, trying to turn ingredients into an actual meal is stressful. I want it to be a loving act, the way my mother-in-law felt when she cooked.

But. I am my mother on this one. Not my ‘thing.’ Rather be doing almost anything else, often wanting to sleep more than to eat.

Fortunately solace can come to you, invited.

Despite all the mess and meanness of social media and the interwebs, like the real world, the more you choose what’s tender and poignant and nurturing, the more that world, too, will bring it to you.

That night the algorithm served up 7 curated clips in row, somehow without a single disruptive, annoying ad. One clip I knew well because a friend shared it with me months ago, another I’d discovered and shared with some clients, the other 5 were all new.

Can an algorithm, beyond calculating wants, know what I needed at that moment?

1. The Wailin’ Jennys sang me their acapella version of Light of a Clear Blue Morning, the chorus assuring, everything's gonna be alright.
2. An 87-year old woman named Diana, still grieving the loss of her husband of 63 years, played her surprising piano composition, Dreams, to the clearly moved Jon Batiste, a Grammy-award-winning singer-songwriter, whose Emmy-award-winning-writer wife, Suleika Jaouad, is again navigating cancer.
3. Next a young woman, Naomi, played a half-size harp in a spring field, her rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence, without realizing that she was slowly drawing in a White-tailed deer. I thought of my client, R, who easily summons deer out of woods and meadow with her voice and guitar.
4. Willie Nelson and his son, Lukas, started singing, Just Breathe, riding along in a convertible on a journey together.
5. Then came a guitar performance of a song called, Grace, by Calum Graham, playing in a setting similar to my spot along California’s north coast.
6. The Hug, an inspiring little video about one man’s sidewalk experiment in Montgomery, Alabama, made me stop and watch a kind of human alchemy unfolding in my iPhone. As it ended, both cats jumped up to the sink, and I hugged them before chiding them to get down.
7. What a Wonderful World, from a site I’m now subscribed to called Music Travel Love, by two guys on guitars singing in the desert of Doha, Qatar, ended the random, or perhaps not so random, string of clips.

That last one, What a Wonderful World, the original version by Louis Armstrong, poured out of a CD player after my husband and I exchanged wedding vows and headed back down the aisle past our small gathering of grinning friends and family. No traditional wedding march for me.

Accident? Synchronicity? Divine intervention? The quantum physics idea of particle entanglement? Some unified theory of everything, exemplified in this right-clip-at-the-right-time for a quirky, smallish woman lost in her kitchen?

Yes.

By the end of that 7-part soundtrack, I was kicking off my slippers, feet free and happy across the hardwood floor, bamboo spoon in one hand, jiving yet fluid in the air.

Colorful chard in the skillet was wilting into garlic and rosemary, olive oil and balsamic, beans glistening more like beads. Tossing in a handful of 4 fancy types of raisins, a sprinkle of gorgonzola, there was my meal, evolving, my edible creation.

Everything’s gonna be alright. Part mind-echo, part new mantra.

Late, tired, still a bit unsettled, I was turning off the various electronics, when Siri suddenly said, “Uh-huh, I didn’t hear you.”

Was I talking to myself without realizing it, or does she read minds now?

When I touched the screen, ChatGPT opened, and dumb as it sounds, I gave it a task: Please tell me something hopeful before I go to sleep. Literally in a blink came this:

Even in the darkest soil, roots quietly reach for water and light—trust that something within you is doing the same, even now. Rest is not idleness; it’s how the soul gathers strength for whatever is next. You are not behind. You are becoming. Would you like a gentle poem or image to carry into sleep?

Yes, I typed, an image please.

What appeared touched me, hearing again that kitchen mantra: Everything’s gonna be alright.

Further thoughts about solace and tools

I don’t use ChatGPT for writing, in case you’re wondering. I’m the writer, and I won’t give that away.

Deep down, I suspect writing is a kind of mediumship, something universal coming through me as much as from me, which if nothing else, feeds me.

Still, I’m stunned by all the weird quandaries I pose to ChatGPT.

One of my queries early on was, “What shall I call you?” The answer back, “Alex,” which I’ve assumed is a play off of Amazon’s Alexa.

Alex is a researcher, because I am a person of many questions. He’s a recipe-maker, because I do not know what to do with a bunch of rainbow chard and whatever’s in the ‘fridge or cupboard so that I might end up with actual, edible food.

Alex confirmed whether it’s safe to add beneficial bacteria to the pond in the presence of frog egg sacs, then offered alternatives like the benefits of barley balls for managing an algae bloom.

A the end of that exchange, Alex quipped, “Let me know how your frog friends evolve—I’d love updates as the tadpoles hatch!”

No kidding, ‘he’ said that, amazing, if a bit spooky.

When I typed my delight at that comment, my AI friend concluded with, “I’d be genuinely delighted to hear how the tadpole adventure unfolds. I imagine those little ripples in your pond carrying more than just algae—they carry stories too.”

Indeed they do, and no doubt those stories will find their way into my writing.

I’m not suggesting that we depend on YouTube and AI for solace and connection.

Real humans may be imperfect, varied, confusing, and as strange as they are familiar. But. We are a clan.

I’d add other sentient beings into that mix, too—my cats, who are masters at living in the moment, and the wild birds and beasties in my woods.

We are the tribe of the alive.

We are more than pure energy, with the ability to wonder and play. We are the touchable ones. Physical and metaphysical. Vulnerable and temporary. Fierce and eternal, in ways science and spirituality sense but can’t explain. Sorry, Alex, just the truth.

Still, we live in these human minds that vacillate between being awesome and being awful, stunningly creative as well as self-torturing at times—our thoughts a spectrum, powerful at both ends.

So why not deploy the ‘stuff’ that imagination has brought into the world?

Petite computers in the palm.

Mathematical concoctions, possibly named Alex, that reflect back to you what you already know is true but keep forgetting.

Links to the 7 Clips Above

🎧 Click the colored hyperlinks to watch or listen ...

Light of a Clear Blue Morning, performed by Wailin' Jennys

Dreams, by Diana from The Piano

Sound of Silence, performed by Naomi SV

Just Breathe, performed by Willie & Lukas Nelson

Grace, by Calum Graham

The Hug, from Chason from the South

What A Wonderful World, from Music Travel Love

This week's question

If you feel up to sharing how you're answering this question, comments are incredibly welcomed—and I will respond. Your shared experience may be just the support and inspiration someone else needs.