Category Archives: beauty

Down the line

12 Sunday Oct 2025

Posted by in Autumn, beauty, Body, departing, distance, grief, honoring, motion, poems, poetry, presence, wind

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An acoustic guitar and a train track beat…

we’re chugging rugged countryside,

rounding bends,

wind streaming through open windows.

I think I’ll watch every dry yellow leaf flutter

and fall,

each flock of grass nod, swish and bow to the sun.

Sometimes grief’s a tar sticking in the lungs

and working to let it go means little

but waiting, waiting becomes the story,

waiting until it decides to let go of you.

The strum will fill your warm heart

as the clack-clack rhythm moves you through time–

be with what is,

it’s got its own magic, which you hold

and holds you,

growing in clarity, in beauty

somewhere on down the line.

New

18 Thursday Sep 2025

Posted by in ancestors, beauty, devotion, grief, Healing, heart, history, home, liberation, Life, medicine, mystery, new, Opening, poems, poetry, question, shame, song, transformation, unlearning, violence, waking, weaving, welcoming, wonder, work, world

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Confusion tumbles out of us,

violence and shame, ever pointing–

over there, over there.

Look in the mirror, friend, we each must

consider our part, the veins of ugliness within,

ignored, denied, pushed away.

Wounds need care,

sunlight and tenderness.

Otherwise, they fester.

None goes unhurt, none walks without darkness

to be held.

Point not that way, and that,

drop the pointer all together.

We are a we, and in it together to reweave

an old, old decaying story into blessing and art,

connection, nourishment and song.

What beauty brings us here now?

What Beauty to be bestowed back to Life?

Ask the ancestors,

they know,

ask the ancestors for help–

healing takes everyone, form and formless alike.

Let the new story begin..

it breaks through already

in the most delightful, unexpected ways.

Draw nearer

10 Saturday May 2025

Posted by in adventure, beauty, companion, Infinite, movement, mystery, poems, poetry, unlearning, welcoming, wonder

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I draw nearer the Unknown.

How can I not,

to be closer to God is this;

Unknown–true Creation.

Not noble or shiny, maybe missing teeth,

limping, dusty and brilliant..

Stay close,

the past can not play out forever,

only mind does that,

read the signs, look for what’s different,

if, at a thought, ice fills your blood

and belly turns sour,

power has been tossed away.

Relax back into change,

those arms wait to hold you,

the generosity of a reliable and beloved friend.

Ride the horse.

Can’t say

06 Thursday Mar 2025

Posted by in beauty, play, poems, poetry, sound

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Sun vacates frost from its bed atop the roof,

deer, a chain of three, run through the trees,

one..then another..and another, limping,

in her way, behind.

Heat warms the room, click on,

click off, and trucks low

along the river rumble, rumble.

If the Spanish guitar stops sounding,

am I still here?

Can’t say it matters,

the castanets, listen to those castanets play…

Mettle

02 Thursday Jan 2025

Posted by in abundance, approaching, beauty, becoming, companion, courage, dark, devotion, discomfort, dreaming, fertile, food, Found, freedom, human, Love, loving, medicine, movement, night, offering, Opening, pain, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, receiving, release, return, storm, water, welcoming, wonder, work

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Withstand the Void.

Please.

Be upon your own two small feet,

at the edge,

darkness cloud-forming,

ledge a tipping perch.

Night ocean crashes on rock straight below,

the rhythmic waters moon-guided, rich and dangerous.

Call forth in echoless open and

wait,

the wind will snap and take it up.

Let the Void offer

all your fears, inadequacies, foolishness,

rage, grief, shame and sorrows.

Be with them.

Sense their intolerable

movements in your one body–

these are the monsters

you are to marry.

In union, living through and beyond

your exiled, an invitation

to what Beauty is yours deeply,

the gift to be offered back.

Leave no aspect behind–

you are here to love the denied.

Blood needs circulate.

Bones need grow. Air must enter.

Bring the outcasts and castaways under

warmth of your grand cloak.

Allow them refuge of your beating heart.

Welcome the unwanted,

a feast-filled table is set to feed everything

in dawn of this new year.

Ever?

30 Monday Sep 2024

Posted by in adventure, approaching, beauty, departing, distance, laughter, lost, movement, poems, poetry, roughness

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Ever make a choice that lands you

smack

in foul waters?

The best made plans…

God continues laughing.

Somewhere down the dusky road

dotted lines passing softly in the rearview

will paint an unexpected picture,

shaking disparate puzzle pieces into place,

the pieces having been siblings from creation.

Keep looking ahead,

the unfurling story behind you,

rugged with color, disturbing in greys,

fuels what is to come.

And there’s no expecting

what that may be . . .

Cafe

17 Friday May 2024

Posted by in abundance, beauty, community, poems, poetry, welcoming

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She barks at him

bitterly

across two tables and a faux fire

(real flame, no wood),

he nods,

yuh, yuh,

nose angled toward his paper.

They’re married,

the cafe their living room.

Meanwhile, Nina Simone

and a squealing cappuccino machine.

A man, clearly successful,

speaks at air,

bluetooth lodged in both ears.

Opposite,

women burble of this and this,

while another couple, thick grey locks

lidded by heavy cowboy hats,

laughs together.

At a single,

a young one,

pale and half asleep, sits alone,

the lower half of her face parked in her palm.

Two dogs, wide eyed,

wait.

Spanish wafts over from the counter.

With warm cup held in both hands,

I drink it all in.

Rise

30 Saturday Dec 2023

Posted by in approaching, beauty, becoming, movement, poems, poetry

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They rise to the occasion,

the ones you called

to a come-to-Jesus–(minus the Jesus)–and,

truly,

they break bread and drink wine.

With you.

For the first time.

Mountains of stone become sand.

Standing centuries diminish to an hour:

Movement.

You initiated it and

rise, they do;

an occasion

holding both

life

and death

because, really, how damned much time

do we have?

Really.

Grapes, and the blessing,

the bleeding,

of injury and heart,

must not be

wasted.

Moments of chance,

swim up

to our lightly closed fists.

Let the bright, fluid young creatures in.

This may be the last.

And nothing like living waters

ushers in a new year.

Upwelling.

I gave up pretty

07 Monday Aug 2023

Posted by in beauty, break out, change, freedom, loving, nature, poems, poetry, strength, unlearning

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I gave up pretty for a greater feast,

potato chips and jellybeans turned in.

Wrinkles declare descents into primal deserts,

splotches and patches and spots imprints

of the boot crush of heartbreak,

greys the stories of the non-forgotten.

Pretty hasn’t much to offer

and with it comes trails of trouble,

trials of the kind modern fairy tales

simply can’t grok.

Twisted

30 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by in beauty, break out, change, generations, learning, light, pain, poems, poetry

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Had I never entered this country

dark magic would have remained part

of fairy tales.

But tales are born of happenings,

not purely imagination.

What can be directed towards light can also

be twisted black.

Centuries of pain does that

to people’s souls,

leading them to avenge this blessed world.

Living amongst the workings,

talk will be talk, suspicion

suspicion,

and yet what I’ve seen

turns firm ground to putty.

You’d best not leave any hair behind.

Still, the cruelty that fuels and fires does,

in the end, destroy

those who’ve let ghosts poison them.

And the original curse

rolling through the generations lives on

until someone down the line breaks it

by gathering up their own light.