23 Sunday Jul 2023
I lay my head in the spanning palm of her leaf,
a tall gracious rising of greenness
from out of the pond’s living muck.
My head, without thought, becomes that of a newborn
held aloft in unexpected and vibrant tenderness.
On bended knee, bowed in thanks,
words disappear, a ribbon of silver.
In a clear and generous light
she offers her presence to anyone slow enough
to accept the invitation.
18 Tuesday Jul 2023
Beneath my bones, a broad rock softens,
curly in green,
brown edged summer moss
shaded and alive,
alive and moving slowly across millennia.
Sitting and looking out, deer gazing back,
sitting and sensing,
sitting, staring.
Shifting light. Hugging heat.
The massive stone suddenly nudges:
Be clear,
I have been cleaved,
nearly in two.
A ravine in me deepens,
leaves filling, critters finding home
in darkness.
Up wells Spirit–
split rock, cleaved heart–
in a heart broken life grows,
surfaces crack, creation revealing itself
in breakage.
A community of beings inhabits
what was once a terroir of the unbroken.
Insight flashes, quickening my blood
along with the ants.
I’m swarmed.
What rose from below erupted in them too.
Go, sit still
in the fertility of brokenness.
09 Sunday Jul 2023
Today is a tiny girl
in a dress half deep with velvet,
her finger twirling a curl of fine brown hair,
staring off fixedly
in the opposite direction from her big family.
Today is walking along with dragonfly
while a frog sings across the ravine
and buck, broad with his own velvet,
grazes in new season antlers
through ponderosa sweetened midday sun.
It’s a sticking point in the neck,
a filling of time,
the nectar-drip of writings so rich
two pages fill me up and stir until
I’m unable to sit still–
such beauty must be moved.
Familiar faces in the coffee shop
belong to no one I know.
Summer days of blueberries and salmon,
liquid shadows in the breeze,
heat layering in the cradle of this valley,
magnolia blossoms
and wondering, in tolerable doses,
what could possibly be next?
03 Monday Jul 2023
Walking into the kitchen,
sleepy and 8 and nightgowned and knowing,
her mother sits at the kitchen counter
harming herself
again,
she speaks up, for the first time,
trying to stop her.
The girl is sent away
sharply,
that cut deep in her heart following her,
a small needy dog, for decades.
Until, one morning,
under broad green whispering trees,
cicadas thrumming toward full release of day,
her heart receives what grace that rejection was–
for had her plea changed the course
of her mother’s pain
she would have become indentured servant
to an identity:
I help, therefore I am.
In that grace came release from a lifetime
of doing others’ work for them,
the danger of not existing unless
she were needed.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 