Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Linda Parsons

Fall Diptych

Meditations on a season

I want to notice the moment everything changes, like the subtle shift in daylight, when what was impossibly bright is now a smaller, deeper dark coming on.

Read more

Fertile Ground for Art

Suzanne Stryk’s The Middle of Somewhere travels outward and inward

Suzanne Stryk’s The Middle of Somewhere leads us through mosquito clouds and dusty barns, inviting us to witness flow and change, the endangered and the enduring, the gone and the going away.

Read more

Visible Signs

I’m looking for whatever support comes along, earthly and otherworldly

I’m a believer in synchronicity: one sighting begets another — the more you see, the more you get — like these spiraled pearls outside my door just as summer ends, on the cusp of bittersweetness when losses cut deeper in autumn, bleed into the brilliant dying back.

Read more

Messenger

Moving past sadness and old hopes

I needed a messenger this morning, in the kitchen where my former mate and I had shared meals and talk for 24 years. He had passed 5 days before of a heart attack.

Read more

Nesting

On the mystery of mothering

This spring, thinning my garden beds overfull with hellebores, the early- and long-blooming Lenten rose, I accidently exposed a rabbit’s nest. It was the first I’d ever seen. I gently pulled back the top layer of gray fluff — then the scream. A humanlike scream of innermost fear.

Read more

COVID Garden Diary

Dialogues with nature in a time of pandemic

Though we fight every step up and out, we ascend by sheer muscle of will, purpose, and service. The convergence is with our highest and best self. The blade of change slices our tender middle; we smooth the jaggedness of some force we didn’t see coming.

Read more