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Kathy Donchak

I write about nature, family, creativity, and wellbeing.

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Sunday Letter: Flower Aunt

A garden is a space I have always carved out for myself, from the smallest balcony to the potted flowers by my door. Every one reflects the season of my life. An expression of self in a constantly changing landscape. Looking out into our small backyard, I look at the native serviceberry trees I bought from a local landscaper who saved them. Their form is delicate and rhythmic, standing in their small pots like a lanky teenager learning to balance and move with their fresh growth. This week I...

6 days ago • 1 min read

Source One must work with the creative powers - for not to work with is to work against; in art as in spiritual life there is no neutral place.” ~ Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures Our garden is taking shape. Inspired by one of my favorite gardening books by Rebcca Cole, I am dreaming and choosing plants to create a small garden of evergreens and deciduous trees, espalier fruit trees, and flowers. My husband is working through plans for raised vegetable and herb beds to feed the body while I work to...

13 days ago • 1 min read

And here I build my platform, and live upon it, and think my thoughts and am high. To rise, I must have a field to rise from. To deepen, I must have a bedrock from which to descend. ~ Mary Oliver, Long Life I can hear the birds again. The rainy mornings have been flooded with sounds of so many frogs, you are sure you left a window open, but today, thanks to the early morning urging of our cat at the window, I began to hear them again. The geese honking overhead, woodland songbirds, even an...

27 days ago • 1 min read
green plants beside brown wooden door

Threshold You want a door you can be on both sides of at once. You want to be on both sides of here and there, now and then, together and—(what did we call the life we would wish back? The old life? The before?) alone. But any open space may be a threshold, an arch of entering and leaving. Crossing a field, wading through nothing but timothy grass, imagine yourself passing from and into. Passing through doorway after doorway after doorway. ~ Maggie Smith Walking our new neighborhood each...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read
One Notebook

The more I journal, the more people in my life show up in its pages. This morning, Chris Brogan wrote about what happens when I tell them about it. I started writing in a journal years ago, but it wasn’t in one book. It was all over the place. My journal became so cluttered with to-do lists and work projects, I grew frustrated that I couldn’t keep my thoughts organized. During the pandemic, I tried something new. I gave myself permission to let all of my thinking show up in my pages, with...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read

I am learning Telugu. /ˈtel.ə.ɡuː/. I met a beautiful, bright, and curious seven-year-old girl that lives across the street, who was bursting at the seams to tell me all the words she knows from her native language. She shared how hard it was to move away from friends, and why she cannot write in Telugu yet, by swirling her finger through the air. I asked her how to say neighbor in Telugu, but she didn’t know that word yet, so I looked it up when I came inside. Hopefully one of my readers can...

about 2 months ago • 1 min read

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself. ― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

about 2 months ago • 1 min read

The mornings here are quiet and dark. Mist replaces sound. You wait to see light rise into day. Here, you listen to the silence. How do you greet the day? Be well, Kathy

3 months ago • 1 min read

“Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.” ~ Edvard Munch Being immersed in a forest for the past few weeks has me thinking about the connection between biodiversity and neurodiversity. We have been noticing things. The colonies of trees and the soft carpet of mosses, from far away, look the same, but getting closer reveals an understory. A diverse ecosystem of plants living harmoniously, supporting the growth of one another. For...

3 months ago • 1 min read

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. ~ John Muir We moved to the woods, while our house in town is being built. Surrounded by forested wetlands, it feels as though we are living in a treehouse in this feast for the senses. Limbs and trunks blanketed by thick mosses capture your attention in a way few other things can. The ambient sounds of rain, sleet, and snow falling on the skylight replace the birdsong of Texas. The first weeks in this soft, lush forest,...

3 months ago • 1 min read
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