23 Thursday Nov 2017
If you need more time
for the new birds to find you,
take more walks with your awkward, fledgling self.
Squawking and flight, a generous song now and again,
will always surround you.
Being the only of a kind in a place
opens more relationships than you might think, while
flavor of faith develops
with your stronger listening ears.
It is needed as you continue, seeing ahead
and noticing the talon prints you’ve left behind.
21 Tuesday Nov 2017
Born from uninitiated folk,
as most Westerners are,
creates holes in knowing that let icy winds enter.
Weaving oneself back together requires attention,
a briny commitment, earthly,
sight of an old fist-width rope tying the now to a millennia of then:
the family line.
Mostly invisible shoulders carry
the wobbling essential unformed
human walking known as you.
Start asking questions.
20 Monday Nov 2017
Wanting to know what satisfies
an ancient hunger you’re not even certain is yours,
countless streets, endless questions,
bottomless pans, and tears of frustration
over a lifetime
have added up to a hillock of humus,
dark, fertile, and remembered.
The sought after whatsit, the toil of time and love,
may or may not ever amble up to you,
paws dirty with devotion.
The wanting filling your carved out places,
a blue, swirling smoke scented from the beyond,
is itself required elixir
drawing you deeper into life.
Cursing that desire away, and aimlessly trying to fulfill it
means trading your own gold for dull, already forgotten tin.
17 Friday Nov 2017
Feather etchings of wrinkles,
our tributaries of experience, deepen
towards more
not less.
Must we forget what the soul always knows,
that appearance is not worth
and youth is not to be strived for
but grown beyond?
Instead of living seventy years
as wobbly egos forever hungry and
needing to be bolstered,
we can throw our arms, like thick-barked tree limbs,
around death,
our constant friend teaching us
the riches of storied contours and
what it is to truly live.
16 Thursday Nov 2017
Maybe it feels like standing forever in a head-high river current,
yearning.
Yet, igniting moments drop the belly
and lurch steps-
songs jump into hiccups, the nights being
so long.
And the syrup drip into sinews brought about by
–fill in the blank here–
well, if that thing, that other
is not what it’s really about,
what more enticing invitation could possibly surface
asking you
to re-weave yourself
into God?
18 Monday Sep 2017
Memories are being given away,
space no longer for rent to the unwelcome.
A wooden chair with woven seat sits now
facing sunrise.
Closets have been emptied, drawers cleared out
and sold.
Neither vacancy nor void, but place has opened,
safe, dynamic, light and warm.
11 Tuesday Jul 2017
To the fierce woman–
not the girl, whatever the age, trying to look pretty,
to be nice,
not the girl in the woman’s body aiming
to be desired, seductive, adored, heroic, cool, mysterious,
No, no-
To the fierce woman who knows the song of her own heart’s beat,
who cares not about how she appears, but about who she is,
who isn’t reaching for the next best outfit, witty comeback, title or
right answer–
To the fierce woman who walks how she walks,
talks how she talks,
ages as she brilliantly ages,
sees how she sees and
loves how she loves,
my God, Welcome.
Welcome to this world.
You
are
needed.
03 Monday Apr 2017
Darkness, silence, brightness of stars,
silhouetted tree crowns,
the beauty of five a.m.
I’m not sure why we forget,
so readily forget,
the preciousness we participate in.
These troubles,
the wasting, threatening, destroying-
maybe turning ourselves right-side-round toward
birthing light
relies upon one task:
Remembering.
27 Monday Mar 2017
Having never felt this old,
nor so young and inept
– and simultaneously –
well,
there’s a fence-crashing, a home-burning,
a finding-one’s-own-nose-on-someone-else kind of mess.
What is to be done with a tension like that?
Bear it.
Stretch with it.
Let be torn loose the decayed, the ineffectual,
follow the twisting into the twist,
watch new movements be born.
I guess.
Still, if I’m a living version of a mr. potato head,
could I waddle in those shoes a ways?
It might do me some good.
10 Friday Mar 2017
If suffering is the path laid down for us, by us
stone by stone,
How might we love
not only each one but
the trying burden of laying them
on the surface of this Earth
(could as easily be the moon. still, it’s not)
for our own feet to walk upon?
If meaning is found
simply
in carrying our suffering
in devotion
– not as martyr, but pilgrim
with full unknowing of why,
or even how-
to the making of a life,
by virtue of its having been given,
then
might we lean into the expectations
life holds for us
and do right by them
by our own true Selves-
that Essence buried
beneath all the heaviness requiring our backs, hearts, hands
which knows what it is
to burn brightly
for no reason
what
so
ever?
.
.
* with thanks to Viktor Frankl
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 