Wild – Gifts from the Trail

For Siblings Day

A gold coin slipped to each of us ©Stella Body, 2021 Those for whom light is blood … -quote from Tim Bowling Today, as I step into the morning kitchen, my arms leave me to lift and stretch outward – my own body surprising, involuntary, sibling-stemmed as a young plant. Single andContinue reading “For Siblings Day”

Element of Launch

Element of Launch ©Stella Body 2020 A woman wearing a hijab is taking two children out in a canoe. I watch the lake unfold its hugeness, the sky bring its boulders down. She hesitates a moment, but once in, she sits dead center, straight as Joan of Arc, saddled by the twin forms of herContinue reading “Element of Launch”

Element of Still

Element of Still ©Stella Body 2020 African Journal: All afternoon, a small green frog sits near me at the far southern edge of a diminishing ‘mkondo’ (Swahili word for creek). Today, the water flows so slowly, it has begun to go backwards. Still he doesn’t move. His skin is smooth, live green freckled with amber. Continue reading “Element of Still”

What flows here

What flows here (a piece for Canada Day) ©Stella Body 2020 It may seem strange to write about Africa on Canada Day, but for me it makes perfect sense. I remember arriving in Montreal as a teenager, still parched and shrunken from an ailment I had developed on the dark continent, where I was born. PerhapsContinue reading “What flows here”

Rewilding

Return me, oh sun, to my wild destiny…the solitary peace…the wind alive like a heart… I want to go back to being what I haven’t been. -Pablo Neruda Rewilding (Part 1 of a Series) ©Stella Body 2020 As I grow older, I can’t stop asking this question: Who can show me how live with a lightContinue reading “Rewilding”

Element of Father

Element of Father ©Stella Body 2020 Climber of peaks, you I saw first on the steep East coast of Africa, hurling your slender dark, a javelin into the turbid waves, a chaos you craved. I was not yet three, but a faint motherly care-song pressed from my lips, a murmur for the rosebud tenderness of yourContinue reading “Element of Father”

Element of Wild

Element of Wild ©Stella Body The flash taught me to be calm, not to lose light in the sky, to search inside of myself for the galleries of earth… -Pablo Neruda In the summer night, I find you, perched in a branch above me. Your markings, the subdued gray and white of one who once decorated aContinue reading “Element of Wild”

The Healing Power of Memoir

The Healing Power of Memoir Copyright Stella Body 2020 I feel it now: there’s a power in me, to grasp and give shape to the world. -Rilke There are many ways to remember. Linda Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, suggests that if we are not yet comfortable with words, we can start with aContinue reading “The Healing Power of Memoir”