Hallellujah

Meditation on All Things Wild

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

—Leonard Cohen

Photo by Jonas Schöne on Unsplash

Hello Lovelies—

Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing and supporting my work with a paid subscription. Your generosity means the world to me. Thank you for being here.

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Each weekly meditation of A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is an offering, an evocation of the world around me. You will rarely find me writing about climbing to the top of a mountain or counting the miles I’ve walked as if collecting notches on a belt.

Instead, I want to adventure in.

This is the kind of nature writing needed now, narratives of place—localities, with its root in the Latin, locus, for place—the kind that rise over time out of relationship, that allow us to understand that we are place, too. As the Scottish writer, Nan Shepherd says, “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.”

This is my project here.

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Waxing Sininen Kuu (Blue Moon) - Spring 2026

Water returns.

Into this strange spring-no spring landscape, into the perilous month of May when there will be not one but two full moons¹, two chances for fruition and fulfillment, two bright full bright faces presiding over the mountain as it awakens fully to emerge into the long days of summer.

This water comes first as fierce rain that pelts an earth still so dry, it kicks up tiny puffs of dust. But hours later, by midnight, the rain has shape-shifted, becoming first sleet then slush then at last fat flakes of snow.

The weather guy says a foot might fall.

I flip the heat back on and move my newly potted pansies to the green house as Hummingbirds strafe the feeders. Then I cancel plans to drive down to Boulder and instead, sit in bed to watch the the forest through a delicate scrim of falling snow.

Greg lights a fire.

This snow is wet and dripping—as any good spring snow is—and I swear I can feel the earth throw her arms wide to drink in its embrace.

Just last week I was spending mornings on the deck writing and, at night, Greg and I slept with the deck doors open. Then, on the heels of the driest winter in fifty years, we seemed to be running headlong into a hot and tinder-dry summer, fire-worry fluttering at the edges of our days.

On the first full day of the storm, snow drifts and flurries, falling and melting, falling and melting. Each day will be like this, clouded and full of wet, dripping snow, for three days.

On the second day, I clip a few early-blooming tulips to keep them from crumping beneath the weight of all this moisture and and listen to the crash of snow cleaving in clumps from the tops of trees or landing in great thumps on the deck as whole sheets release from the roof.

I pull on my rubber boots to walk Yuki. Slushy puddles fill the sides of the road and the trees makes mysterious and arcane forms with snow-laden limbs. Tiny pools of water form in patches and slush dissolves beneath our feet.

All the world is, as e e cummings, says, mud-luscious.

Yuki and I walk the loop through the forest and come across the clotted tracks of bear: the mama and her twins following exactly behind her, their footsteps placed inside hers, into the morning landscape.

The snow continues, filling the air. It’s as if a curtain of white has been dropped over the landscape. I cannot see the horizon as trees holding their bundles of snow fill the space. I imagine the skirts of some water goddess covering us. Imagine this tender mercy, the unexpected offering of much-needed moisture.

I think of the greening of plants beneath the snow, the emergence of moss stretching open their leaflets to collect water in a thousand tiny basins, then swelling and swelling. By this weekend, her patches will emerge a deep and glowingly green along with bouquets of wildflowers.

We each of us opens to our moment when it arrives. What grace.

More and more I try to live my life by this instinct—the one that looks wide-eyed into the new day and embraces what is offered in appreciation and quiet celebration. I’ve spent so much of my life fighting and gripping, forcing and just holding on that I return often in my writing to the image of a salmon swimming up stream; this has been my fight: determination, grit, perseverance.

Now in what is the last third my life, I no longer feel the need to push so hard. Instead, I want to gather, to accept, to praise, to open wide.

At home, I feed Yuki and then play every version of Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” I can find (my favorite, by k.d. lang, I play over and over). It’s an aching song about heartbreak and disappointment, but also somehow transcendence—the ability to praise even through pain.

So much of the world is on fire right now—metaphorically and literally. Some days I think the Destroyers ae winning, but this, the unexpected grace of water, this beauty, reminds me the world holds so much possibility even still.

So Hallelujah for the mystery. Hallelujah for water. Hallelujah for this renewal, this chance, this small blessing.

Halleluiah by Mary Oliver

Everyone should be born into this world happy
     and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward  it.
Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
     almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
         and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
     is ever that easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

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Hold onto beauty, friends, and to each other. Carry hope. And practice being human, practice loving the earth and each other, each day. Thank you for reading.

Big love,

Karen

A Writer’s Note: If these this have brought you outside, or made you stop and look at the beauty of the natural world, please consider becoming a paid supporter. Doing so keeps this work alive.

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5 Spaces Left

Writing Wild: Writing the Language of the Land

Rollinsville, CO

Space Limited to 8 Women

Workshops - Rollinsville, CO

SUMMER 2026 - Space Limited to 8 women

Full Day Workshop - $150 or $125 when you sign up with a friend.

Lunch + Snack included.

For More Information or to Register

1. And what anyway do we call this moon other than blue? Is it still a planting or flower moon? It’s too early for the Summer or Strawberry Moon, which will arrive on time on June 29th. Message me if you know.