25 Friday Jun 2021
And if the River guiding you IS the ache
bruising your deep, seeming no end,
where might She be bringing you?
Taking you, I mean?
It feels to be a taking, I know,
but come a day,
come a day,
there will be a giving to this blind journey
and it will show
the Becoming of who you truly are.
Let be with the River,
She is holding you…
24 Thursday Jun 2021
Today is the wagging tail of a red squirrel,
and an open door.
It doesn’t close now, outside being home,
inside being a storage place.
Yesterday two hummingbirds chased hawk,
funny youngster learning her way,
an iridescent green-backed fly sat still
at the center of a jasmine flower
and I laughed in the toppled, strong arms of a ten year old,
who pushes me always to the floor loving
every taboo body part and happening of hers
as she, too, learns her way.
In the tumbly, bumbly flight lessons
of the two towhees
I witness a desire to enter through the propped door
after hopping the limits of the garden perimeter,
speaking confusion and discovery.
Here, together, the sky-reaching cypresses,
the eucalyptus bird hotel
and the sweeping vultures,
all of us, we are finding our way;
some heavier with faith and knowing
bring needed weight into the feet of those
easily tousled by winds blowing hard.
What must it be to be full
each day
with relation, within the great motions,
settled during movement
and drinking in the finite, ever-renewing Beauty
at no distance at all to a single one of us?
19 Saturday Jun 2021
In the pain of remembering
body and mind hurt
but I look to the Crow on the wire
and hear Hummingbird marble singing
above the fence.
I think in this knitted brow sometimes
tissues rearrange–slow motion, soft earthquakes
moving tiny body mountains towards
a little more soul food, a morsel for the ant,
a morsel for me.
Humanness is a tanglement,
confusion a rushing river thick.
Taming forces in an undoing of habit
I drop below the river top
and listen
to deeper music that dances along
within a different rhythm,
one at which the learning turns gently
and Spirit joins in.
06 Sunday Jun 2021
Seems I’m becoming the neighborhood wild one,
unkempt, bedraggled, living out of pile and box,
a two-legged more attuned with the four and winged,
becoming something I can’t yet recognize,
likely to speak a language closer to the birds and loping raccoons
than the stuff that’s tangled my brain until now.
Night walks are introducing those I live with,
swooping bats among them.
There’s lots of soft chatter out there…
28 Friday May 2021
My father,
he was of the sort willing
and able
to kick me out of the family.
His threat came three times.
Not once, or, oops, twice,
but three times that cruelty was uttered, even written,
knives thrown not in spirit alone, but in substance:
To a child that is survival at stake.
And belonging.
And…so much and…
My hands tremble and my heart pounds with
the memory of it.
I grieve for her, the young one who had to stand there
and take it.
He forgot. I couldn’t.
His violence lives in me. I work with the wounds
daily.
What he was never given he could not give.
What I was never given, I intend to learn.
Some days it is a story, a living aspect
of history.
Other days I must rise up, in frightened fury,
to say no.
Absolutely not.
What family there is that is mine,
wherever they be,
their fullness of heart and vision and being
reside within and around me,
and my hands and heart can return the gifts
I have been given
in stillness and
without reserve.
24 Monday May 2021
Today, finally, I can sit in the sun
and let tears run their river course down upon
this new place I call home.
Walnuts in my teeth and blueberries in my belly,
I’m meeting the many pincher bugs residing here,
the flies and bees, jays, roses, swallows and eucalyptus.
I awoke suddenly night before last
not knowing what hit me until my senses explained
skunk had a nocturnal exchange with an uninvited guest
and the room had filled with the intensity of her defense.
I understand.
At times I could lift my tail and release my own musk
if I had it.
And then the neighbor whose
sexual escapade she sustained for nine hours
straight
left me crooked and grumbly for, well,
hours more than that.
But the mission bells ring, the hills that held me as a child
hold me once again.
Much will come of this, here, together
with land that made me work to the distant edges
of my heart’s own end.
Stories and word shall find matter,
yes,
and maybe my heart can rest and open again
in the constant cricket song and salted wind
of ground long missed and calling.
23 Sunday May 2021
The fourth decade
walks me between prayers,
of one blinked forth twenty years ago,
a blessed ‘Fuck it’ rising from the earth
to cup and guide and split open, and
of another gathered in the thirties–simply
‘Thank you.’
With solid scaffolding of experience under me
I can walk with the first tucked in a back pocket,
the second, on more able days, held in heart,
and the infinite wanderings between
growing a garden of ripening fruits and blooming flowers
with seeds maturing slowly toward ground
rich with Life ready to receive them.
06 Saturday Mar 2021
If your animal rhythm is faltering,
light the flame.
Light the flame at the altar.
Allow Her pulse to fish swim and bloom
back into skin, through muscle,
through lung;
that fur rises, ripples, musky and thick.
She contours your breath when breathing
can be forgotten.
Light the flame
sit
sniff;
Her rhythm returns to guide
along paths stony, unmarked
and yours,
to wander and learn
alone.
24 Sunday Jan 2021
I’ve love for things I can not see.
I’ve been destroyed by things I can.
If all in its existence might bloom
into beauty we can know,
what holds us back from knowing?
Not wondering?
Not admiring?
The blows of living a human life on this planet?
Being like a mole now, head and wide webbed paws
digging towards light,
I’m throwing off weight of earth
to find a way of nourishment, instinct
and abundance.
Who needs strong sight when every cell reverberates
with the songs of the universe?
I might place a pair of tap shoes on my feet
and make some noise
because the rhythm of having been born
quakes again inside me
and, this time, it might be building until
no one can mistake the sound.
22 Friday Jan 2021
Grieving the grandchildren never to be had,
I step back downward on the path
away from the peak wondering
what unborn children might become
among seeds of the treasured and unsung.
Tomorrow,
I’ll pick up a brush and dash color across
textured cotton and dried pulp
to interview an inner nobility I’ve yet to know,
to praise a blooming that’s still to come.
Come,
come unnamed seeds and show me your way,
we can cross the river, a bridge to stay,
at least until your voices are heard
whether in color, sound or word.
Sleep, you blessed ones,
a womb welcomes you now
whatever your form;
Sleep for now, you blessed ones,
fertile ground awaits you,
your brightness a bell, an arrival
celebrated ever and always along.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 