A New Book by Katherine Chantal – Streaming from the Inside: Navigating Middle Elder
What is motherhood after decades of an overflow of activities, after children become adults? For Katherine Chantal, what’s next has been a personal journey of self-nurturing, of following a thread, the cords of birth, a lineage. It’s been navigating soulful aging without a map, but with curiosity and discovery.
In her latest book, Streaming from The Inside: Navigating Middle Elder, Katherine compares life in her ‘70s to cleaning the stream along her home gardens, clearing the silt that has built up over the years, reshaping and freeing the waterway with every rock she clears away.
Picking up where she left off with her first poetic memoir, Poetic Memoir of a Nascent Senescent: Musings from my Sixties, Katherine delves deeper, reflecting on loss and grief, attending the dying and pondering her own death through poems that embody sadness, gratefulness and the wonder of life and its changes.
She invites her readers to “open to the quiet conversation with communion of interiority.” She grounds us with flowers, the moon and an old rocking chair, weaving in archetypical heroes and heroines with “narratives of personal vulnerability and authenticity.”
There is a section in the book on writing, poems about poems with titles like The Tea Zone, Some Poems Take Time and Words Have Their Ways.
The collection of more than 100 poems concludes with what I call her magnus opus to her five sons, titled If You Want to Know Me, where she suggests they walk and take some of her steps, read her favorite book to know her secrets, sip a cup of tea to feel her stillness within them or sit in her rocking chair where each son was nursed.
If you want to know me / Be still and go within/ To your own welcoming soul / We can meet there anytime / The more familiar it becomes / As you reside there / You will know/ All you need / to know me. – Colleen Redman
