Choosing
"...And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom..."
~AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon
Healing Through Poetry
Finding Gratefulness After Grief
Welcome to Healing Through Poetry, a culmination of a 6+ year journey of discovering myself, finding my voice, and working to heal my grieving heart through nature and writing. It is my deepest desire to reach into the hearts of humanity with my words and pictures, while simultaneously offering camaraderie and a healing space for heartache and sorrow. Explore my writings and photographs; perhaps Healing Through Poetry will speak to a part of you that is longing for answers, looking for a home, or simply searching for a kindred spirit.
May my words bring comfort and introspection, and perhaps even light a spark that ignites your own healing journey, so that together we can create a ripple effect of love that heals the world one person,
one heart, one spirit at a time. ♥
Recent Poetry
Where the crooked path of sorrow meets the sound of a living heart.
More Poetry
By Category / Interest
This section continues to be under construction. New poems are being added regularly!
A Bit About Me
I'm a wife, a mom of 3 grown girls, a retired preschool teacher, a nature lover, a writer, an eternal optimist, and a s-l-o-w-l-y recovering perfectionist and people pleaser.
I am passionate, empathetic, intuitive, and a fierce believer in the power of love to overcome. I love hard, work hard, cry hard, and tend to put my whole heart and soul into everything I do. I am very hard on myself; I don't relax well (unless I'm writing); I'm challenged by finding a good balance in my life between giving to myself and giving to others; and I'm now wrestling with slowing my pace and expectations of myself as I age.
Ok, so essentially, I'm like everyone else - a hot mess of perfectly imperfect (even though I try hard to appear otherwise), an up-and-down-and-all-over-the-place bundle of good intentions and inconsistency, and a canvas still being painted. But how wonderful is it that life constantly gives us the opportunity for do-overs, and the chance to rediscover and reinvent who we are?!
The short story here is that I experienced more emotional and spiritual upheaval in my 50's than during any other decade in my life. Between helping care for my aging/ailing parents and subsequently dealing with the loss of both of them, as well as the deaths of my mother-in-law and a brother (all in just over two years!), I also grappled with the last of empty nesting, the letting go of the victim that lived buried deep inside me, the learning of how to forgive some really hard stuff, and some significant health challenges. There was also tremendous joy in the form of my three daughters' weddings, the welcoming of grandbabies, and first time traveling. In essence, my 50's were filled with HUGE emotional swings! HUGE!
Enter writing, which became my lifeline (quite literally), and a newly discovered love of the miracle that is nature, and I entered the decade of my 60's having caught my breath just in time for social unrest, COVID, political chaos, and all the uncertainty and change and grief that has come with it. One thing in life is certain; there will always be hardship, challenge, and grief to navigate, so the healing journey continues. And so does my writing.
Through all the highs and lows, the one theme that has remained consistent is this feeling that I am meant to be sharing with others what I write. It feels as though my whole life journey has brought me here to this moment; brought me to start Healing Through Poetry. This site is about Love, because what I've learned in these last several years is that it's ALL about love, EVERY. SINGLE. LAST. BIT. OF. IT! All of life - all of us - are interconnected in the crazy powerful energy that is love, and we can access this truth by immersing ourselves in quiet solitude (meditation, prayer, nature, etc.). The key is to find what works for you and to let yourself fall into the beauty of letting go. I hope my words can help you do that. ♥
I confess I have little idea what I'm doing or where all of this will go, but my heart tells me that this is where the next leg of my journey begins. Bear with me while I learn how all of this blogging stuff works, and as I make changes to this site through trial and error. It is my sincerest hope that this grows into something beyond my wildest expectations.
I welcome you to join me on this wild ride!
Thank you for being here.
♥Chris
The Ramblings of a Healing Heart (Blog)
I tell my girls all the time to pull from what they read the things that resonate in their gut as true, and to leave the rest. If we discard what someone has to say simply because we don't agree with their every single word, we lose out on an opportunity to learn from what that person may know or understand that we yet don't (or aren't yet ready for), or that speaks to a part of us in need, or that helps us to stretch the bubble of our own thinking.
Such is the case with my blog posts here. Please read them in search of the snippets that speak to your heart and soul, and if you disagree with something I've said, that's ok! My truth may be different from yours because my journey is different than yours. We are here to learn from one another and to grow in love and wisdom. Sometimes our journey to this end is easy, and sometimes it's hard. Sometimes we learn the message placed before us right away, and sometimes it takes multiple hardships to teach us what we need to know to climb up onto the next rung on the ladder of enlightenment. BUT the one thing I do know is we always have choice in how we see the hardship when its occurring, just as we have choice in how we respond to another human being when we disagree with them. Too, we have choice in what we are ready and willing to see as the take-away once any hardship or disagreement is over. I hope by reading my blog I can help you take away hope when you are struggling, food for thought when we disagree, and specks of insight that help you or grow you in at least some small way.
In my experience, sometimes it takes just the right person to say just the right thing, in just the right way,
at just the right time, and BAM!, it's an ah-ha moment.
Maybe, just maybe, you'll find an ah-ha moment here.
Mostly, though, I hope you find healing and love. ♥
Nature Gallery
In my last several years of travel, nature has been the single greatest aid to my healing, as well as some of the greatest inspiration for my poetry. May these pictures reach into your soul the way they did mine when I took them. ♥ Note: a few of these photographs were taken by my daughter during her world travels.
Where this is the case, it is noted with the picture.