✨ QuietVerse Digest Issue #3: The Light Between Worlds

Date: May 30, 2025
Theme: The Light Between Worlds

The Quiet Opinion – Editorial

The Light Between Worlds

Light that doesn’t blaze, arriving without answers.
Flickering at thresholds, hovering in mist—
The light waiting at the edge of becoming.

This issue steps into that space—
between clarity and confusion,
between who we were and who we might be.

It honors the pause, the question,
and the soft glow of a truth not yet spoken.

You’ll find poems shaped like echoes,
reflections written in the fog, and reminders—
even in uncertainty, we are not alone.

May the light, still searching—
find you.

✍️ A Quiet Line

“How cruel the contrast between the city's glow
and the fog that clings to her spirit's flight.”
— from The Centennial Festival of Lights, Sight Searching

This line lives at the heart of our theme—
The Light Between Worlds—
capturing the tension
between outer brightness
and inner obscurity.
Between celebration and solitude.
Between what others see…
and what only the soul knows.

May this issue hold space
for both kinds of light.

🌱 From the Garden

Where Light and Scent Meet

i awoke in the Solstice not to dark night,
in the gray and a stroll of the morn...
a branch embraced the sliver,
entangled with its life, yet not quite fully.
— From Moon Whisp, Songs of Cape Breton

The garden is more than a place of growth—
it’s a portal.

Sometimes it's light that lingers in branches.
Sometimes it’s scent that lingers in memory.

Aromas weave the air / into layers of the past.
The scent of lilacs, voluptuous and lingering,
permeates the yard...
a cornerstone / in a bouquet of memories.
— From Lilac Memories, Spring Flowers

In this season of almost-summer, we stand where worlds touch:
between night and dawn,
between blooming and fading,
between the life we live,
and the memories that still breathe beside us.

Let yourself pause.
Smell the air.
Watch the moon slip through a branch.

Somewhere between the seen and the sensed,
you might feel the light between worlds.

💌 What I’m Carrying

The black branches reach into my heart,
like the fingers of time—gnarled and wise—
probing the depths of my quiet introspection.
— From My Leafless Soul

A sense of being between things—
between endings and beginnings,
between grief and hope,
between old selves
and the ones still forming.

Some seasons arrive slowly.
Others find us already hollowed.

This winter lingered longer than I thought.
Even now, as light begins to return, I feel it—
the weight of what hasn’t quite ended,
and the tremble of something
unnamed just beginning.

I stand here, rooted in place,
wrestling with the relentless march of time…

This month, I carry the ache of clarity unfinished.
The longing for newness,
entangled with fragments of the old story
that still need time to whisper their last words.

📖 Featured Verse: Lantern in the Mist

In September 2024, I participated in a month-long challenge
to write a poem every day.

On Day 12, we were presented with an image prompt:

“Today’s prompt invites you to draw inspiration from a powerful image:
a lone lantern glowing in the mist and snow.
Picture this scene—soft light cutting through a foggy, snowy landscape,
illuminating just enough to make you curious, yet leaving much in shadow.
This lantern can represent many things: a guiding light, a source of warmth,
or a mysterious signal in an uncertain landscape.”

Lantern in the Mist

A lantern shimmers in the mist?
It draws me, as fate insists
I turn away, retreat my steps—
The light tugs, and I can't resist.

Glittering through cold driving snow,
A soft flicker in golden light—
I ponder what secret it shows,
This beacon in gathering white.

I progress through thickened drifts,
Though silence begs its wrath.
Each heavy step as I persist,
I can not stray from this path.

What waits beyond, I can not guess—
The lantern's swing o'er icy streams.
I must follow, till the tale addressed,
In icy mist, who's lantern gleams?

I must continue until dawn
When the beacon's light is gone.

— from My PoCoChapMo 2024 Poems

I think a mythic, liminal poem is perfect for this theme—
mystery, light, ghosts, and sacred pull.

🕊️ A Gentle Prompt

What light is calling you forward—even if you don’t yet know what it reveals?

Sometimes the first step feels small.
A flicker of instinct. A hush before dawn.
Still, it draws you.

Here are four quiet invitations to help you explore that moment of crossing:

---

🕯️ From “At the Threshold”

“The light beckons, heavy with promise…”

Write about a time you stood on the edge of something new.
What were you leaving behind—and what called you forward?

🌫️ From “Lantern in the Mist”

“The lantern leads… pulling me in where the cold retreats.”

Describe a moment when you followed a light in the fog—
an instinct, a whisper, a yes.
Where did it lead you?

🌧️ From “Embrace”

“Change no longer arrives like floodwater. It comes like rain after a long drought…”

What quiet change slowly took root in you—
without fanfare, but with force?

🌌 From “Deviation”

“I cradled the light into my soul, yet... unable to resolve conflicts of the mind.”

Write about a time when knowing and doubt walked beside you.
What question (or clarity) did you carry away?

📚 Rooted Reading: The Loaf

While researching what to include in Digest Issue #3,
I discovered that June 5 is Gingerbread Day.

A few days ago, I saw I had hazelnut flour in the pantry.
I use it to make gingerbread.

My 4th great-grandfather—gingerbread maker—
may have had a bakery on Drury Lane in London.

Serendipities.

I discovered a recipe for German gingerbread and imagine
this is the one used by my 4th great-grandfather.

The Loaf I Shared With Ghosts

A recipe—yellow with time.
I did not bake alone.
The air grew thick with past aroma:
Clove, anise, shadowed inspiration.

My kitchen flickered
Like a candlelit chapel—
Each breath, a sigh
From Drury Lane.

A hand touched mine in the mix,
and heart attended to the oven
Guided the blade with family loving.

I sliced a square,
left one in the pan,
in case the ghost
came home hungry.

— From Gingerbread Legacy

Do you think this captures the idea
of our theme “Light Between Worlds”?

🪞 Echoes from You

“I’m learning to release the need to explain my healing.”
— A.Q., follower

Healing doesn’t always announce itself.
It doesn’t always make sense in the moment,
or look like a sunrise.

Sometimes it’s just the choice not to explain—
to hold your story like a secret lantern.

These poems remind us: healing lives quietly in the places between.

• From Wisdom of the Quiet Muse — “Flawed Bowl”
  “I am still whole / even in the places I once shattered. / I’ve stopped pointing to the cracks.”
• From Possible Poems of Quiet Renewal — “Forgive”
  “To let go is not to forget, / but to soften the ground where grief set.”
• From Sight Searching — “Deviation”
  “I cradled the light into my soul / yet... unable to resolve conflicts of the mind.”
• From PoCoChapMo 2024 — “Shattered”
  “in my silence, / i wonder if I could. / Your soul feels closed now, / fragments of life, / of love...”
• From Leaning Toward Light — “Deepening Roots”
  “Growth isn’t loud. / It moves beneath / the soil of me.”

🔗 What We Sow

Each line is a pathway,
each blank space a field,
ripe for the sowing of thoughts.
My pen, a diligent farmer,
tills the soil of these pages,
planting seeds of reflection…
— From Dear Diary, The Journey Within

We don’t always sow in gardens.

Sometimes we sow in notebooks,
in shared silences,
in the way we choose to notice the world.

This month, consider what you’re planting—

• in the earth,
• in a page,
• in someone’s heart.

🌱 Walk a familiar path slowly.
What grows differently when you move
through the world with awe?

A mindful practice:
Walk a familiar path slowly and intentionally.
Ask:

What new world opens
when I move through this one with awe?

🪶 Story Seeds

A liminal, luminous space
where the unseen stirs,
and the soul listens.

🔹 At the Threshold

“The light beckons, heavy with promise.”
— From At the Threshold, PoCoChapMo 2024

Not all light is soft.
Some jars you like lightning in the distance—
not yet here,
but already pulling you forward.

Step slowly.
Let it arrive before you chase it.

🔹 The River

“The current waits for your awareness.”
— From The River, Sight Searching

The universe doesn’t need you to swim faster.
Just to notice the water.

The way it gathers,
glimmers,
flows around your feet—
even when you’re still.

🔹 Joy

“Joy, it turns out, is quieter than I expected.”
— From Joy, Wisdom of the Quiet Muse

It didn’t shout.
It didn’t arrive wrapped in fanfare.
Perhaps, brewed in tea,
breathed in birdsong,
rested in the rhythm of unremarkable days.

And you look—
joy.

🌤️ The Light Between Posts

A moment passed while scrolling—
a comment surfaced, written by someone I’d never met,
yet the language felt familiar.

It reminded me of someone I lost.
And for a beat, the algorithm became a ghost story.

Even here—
in these manufactured feeds and filtered photos—
something deeper sometimes slips through.

This is the light between posts:
those unplanned echoes
that remind us we’re never really alone in what we feel.

🎭 Behind the Screen

Lantern in the Mist began as a response to a single image prompt
during PoCoChapMo 2024.

I return to mist a lot in my work.
I grew up in Eastern Canada, where the cold Labrador current
meets the warm waters of the Gulf Stream.
The inevitable fog was more than weather—it was memory.

As I worked on Lantern in the Mist, it felt like I was back there—
wrapped in that hush.
I hadn’t intended to write a ghost story.
But by the end, I realized I had.

“A lantern shimmers in the mist?
It draws me, as fate insists…”
— From Lantern in the Mist

I put it aside, unsure what it wanted to become.
But the poem wouldn’t let go.

Later, I returned to it—this time, from another point of view.
Lantern in the Mist Revisited imagines the voice of the one who left.

The story deepened again.
I remembered the night my father wandered across a frozen lake.
I followed him. Found him. Brought him home.
The original poem was mine.
The second was his.

“No mortal hand holds it thus—
Yet there it burns and I must trust…”
— From Lantern in the Mist Revisited

There’s a third poem now:
Search for the Lantern in the Mist—my own journey
of reckoning, grief, and final understanding.

“You vanished past the orchard’s rim
Where frost hangs thick and dusk grows dim.”

“When the misty lantern returns,
I know for whose soul it will yearn.”

These poems weren’t written in order,
but they follow a deep emotional sequence.

Now I wonder:
Should I include Search for the Lantern in the Mist
in the final PoCoChapMo collection?

🧠 Deep Quiet

The Light Between Worlds: On Poets and the Leaning Toward Light

“With the pen stilled, I found a silence between unwritten lines…”
— From The Poet’s Pause, The Poet Within

Light doesn’t always arrive all at once.

For poets—maybe for all of us—it comes in waves:
light on, light off,
insight followed by quiet.

There are seasons when the words flow freely,
and seasons when we live in pause,
unsure if the light will return.
But it does.

That’s the calling of the poet:
to dwell in the in-between.
To live not only in clarity,
but in the mist that precedes it.
To trust the flicker, even when it disappears.
And to not allow the opaque veil to control.

This cycle of ebb and return pulses through the pages of
Leaning Toward Light: Essence of Spring—
a collection that leans into the fragile, faithful act
of turning toward warmth again.

In The Poet Within, the poet faces the light cycle,
over and over—light chasing dark chasing light.

In Apprentice, the Muse emerges from shadow:

“…teaching that even in the depths of despair,
the spark of creation flickers a light.”

In Why Continue, the poet nearly gives up—
until something whispers: “What if a twist remains?”

We don’t write because we know the ending.
We write because we are called to listen,
and to follow the light—even when it’s only a trace.

🖋️ The Quiet Opinion

On Mystery in Modern Poetry

Not every poem wants to be solved.
Some want to be felt.

To me, mystery isn’t the absence of meaning—
it’s the presence of something that resists full capture.
And that, I think, is sacred.

There are poems I’ve written that I still don’t fully understand.
They arrived like mist and lanternlight—
Lantern in the Mist, Whispers of Passion, The Poet’s Pause—
each one shaped more by instinct than architecture.
But they stayed with me. They still speak, revealing layers.

Sports athletes often talk of being in the zone—
the focus on playing right now.
Poets write in that zone when words pour from the pen or keyboard.
We don't know where they come from,
but we know we have tapped into something.

I believe poetry has permission to hover. To haunt.
To echo what language alone can’t hold.

Mystery in a poem isn’t confusion—
it’s a kind of reverence.
A way of honoring what the soul knows before the mind does.

When a poem gives me goosebumps but no explanation,
I know I’ve touched something true.

Sometimes, clarity is too small a container
for the depth we’re trying to carry.

📦 Life, Unboxed

Mystery Is the Most Honest Form I Know

There are days I second-guess everything I’ve written.
Not because I didn’t mean it—
but because someone asked, “What does this poem mean?”

And I didn’t have an answer that fit in a neat sentence.

“I cradled the light into my soul / yet… unable to resolve conflicts of the mind.”
— Deviation, Sight Searching

I used to think that meant I was doing something wrong.
That clarity was the currency of good poetry.

That if a reader couldn’t easily paraphrase the poem,
I had somehow failed them.

But over time, I’ve come to understand:
the fog isn’t a flaw in my work—it’s part of its truth.

Some poems are not written after the revelation.
They’re written in the ache of not knowing,
or the search into the unknown.
They carry longing, not conclusion.

“Be found by Light’s search.”
— The Light Draws Us, Sight Searching

To surrender as purpose—
a beautifully passive yet powerful invocation of alignment, belonging, and cosmic intimacy.

The great mysteries.

Mystery, for me, is the most honest form I know.

I don’t write to perform answers.
I write to hold a lantern in the mist—
to say, “I’m walking, too. I don’t know yet. But I feel something here.”

“The muse, though born of his darkness,
revealed a path through the black abyss.”
— Apprentice (Part III)

Image, tone, silence, shape—these are how I tell the truth.
Not always with answers, but with presence.
Not with certainty, but with resonance.

The mystery lives in Echothreads,
the strands that bind all.

I chose mystery not because I have nothing to say—
but because I trust the reader
to meet me in my fog.

📓 The Maker’s Table

While editing the poems I wrote during PoCoChapMo,
I kept returning to one theme: transformation.

Some poems wore it plainly—like Welcome Home,
with its reflection on identity and return:

“I had wandered too long in a house of mirrors
looking for a doorway shaped like me…”

“Now, the threshold greets me / not as stranger, but kin.”

Others whispered change more subtly.
Lantern in the Mist Revisited was one of those—
a ghost poem spun from the Day 15 prompt:
"Rewrite an old poem or reinterpret a past work of art."

It deepened a character I’d only glimpsed in an earlier draft,
walking further into the fog—and emerging,
if not fully changed, then certainly altered.

But not everything I wrote made the final cut.

Earlier that week, in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day,
I wrote a haiku:

Howling through the sails,
Rolling freedom riding waves—
Chase the pirate storm.
— Pirate Song

Still in Pirate mode, I took it further and wrote a full sea shanty:

ye hear the winds, howlin' 'cross the deep,
the pirates, untethered by land or laws.
upon the waves, they cleave their untamed path,
the ship, their home, on restless, boundless seas.

makin' no claim on soil, nor for mankind's rules,
they find freedom in the billowin' sails.
gold or crowned thrones hold no sway o'er dark hearts
but seek the stars that guide them to their storm.

the thrill of bloody life on rolling tides—
these be the treasures they hoard with pride.
so fear them, for slayin' be their passion,
leavin' behind dark echoes of their gun.
— the pirates be comin’

It’s a fun poem—in a ghastly way. But thematically, it didn’t belong.
These pirates weren’t transformed. They were terrible from the start—and stayed that way.

“The thrill of bloody life on rolling tides—
these be the treasures they hoard with pride.”

That was the point, and the joy, of writing it.
But transformation? Not a whisper.

In the end, the pirates be comin’ walked the plank.

Maybe they’ll resurface in a future pirate-themed chapbook.

For now, this collection belongs to the ones who changed—
and those still becoming.

What do you think of my choice?

🔧 Still in Draft

Building a Love Story in Sunlight and Silence

Summer Verses began as a loose gathering of seasonal poems—
fireflies, soft heat, chance encounters.
I didn’t intend to write a love story.
But somewhere between Early Summer Morn and The Last Bonfire,
I realized I had one.

It wasn’t a straightforward romance.
It was something softer, more elusive.
A slow-burn narrative wrapped in nature, nostalgia, and myth.
A love that moved like summer itself—
beginning in wonder, peaking in passion, and fading with beauty still intact.

guardians of the threshold,
keepers of the secret
dividing day from night.
dancing in the cool air,
—firefly my heart with magic

There’s flirtation in the beginning (Across the Lake, The Enchanted Pool),
intimacy and enchantment in the middle (Night Dance, Firefly my Heart with Magic),
and emotional reckoning near the end (Risk of Thundershowers, Resolve).

By the time we reach The Last Bonfire,
what remains is less a resolution and more a transformation.

Each poem felt like its own scene,
but only in revision did I notice how tightly they spoke to each other.

Love, in this collection, is a force—but not the only one.
There’s also grief, memory, environmental warning, even prayer.
All of it unfolding under the arc of a single season.

It’s still in draft—some lines wander, some sections need reshaping—
but I’m learning to trust the emotional compass.
I’m letting the story tell me what it wants to become.

And maybe that’s what this collection is really about:
What we’re willing to feel before we know how it ends.

🔮 The Whisper Ahead

Summer doesn’t just happen to us.
We make it—
in small rebellions of laughter,
in the slow bloom of quiet joy,
in choosing tenderness even when the world burns.

In our next issue, we’ll explore:

“The Summer We Make”

—on joy as a quiet act of resistance.

Because some days, choosing to rest is radical.
Choosing beauty, a protest.
Choosing love—especially love that endures—is its own revolution.

Issue #4 will arrive at the height of summer,
just two days after our wedding anniversary.

We’ll feature reflections on long-lasting love,
poems drawn from the upcoming Summer Verses collection,
and a first look at Freedom Light—
a book born from the tension between longing and liberation.

This next issue is for those who carry sunlight in their pocket
and joy like a hidden lantern.
Not because it’s easy—
but because it’s necessary.

Until then, may you walk barefoot through memory,
and may the sun write something gentle across your shoulders.

🧵 Threaded Thoughts

What holds Issue #3 together?

“Be found by Light’s search.”
— The Light Draws Us

Across these pages, we’ve walked between what was and what’s becoming—
between poems about thresholds, stories about transformation,
and notes from the quiet fog of mystery.

Issue #3, The Light Between Worlds,
has never been about blazing clarity.

It’s been about presence. Trust.
The courage to let the unseen find you
before you name it.

Let this be your invitation to stop striving—
and start listening for the light that’s already looking for you.

🌑 Unspoken

Leave a blank space between stanzas in “The Verse”—
a visual pause inviting the reader to breathe into the mystery.