19 Monday Jul 2021
A gull squawk and bristle of wind enter the room,
I’m unsure how to wake to this day.
With the candle flicker and race of hummingbirds
a bigger drumbeat of my heart joins in.
It has changed.
Heart rhythm deepens in my ears now
and tangles with the low vibration of traffic.
There’s no telling the rivers apart.
Strange.
In this turning,
listening and sensing, borders braiding,
resting a few minutes more,
I wonder,
where might we be going together from here…
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…
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.
26 Saturday Dec 2020
The song of your voice rises,
one none but you can sing.
In dry winter when the pond hasn’t filled
memory of full banks and amorous critters rises.
I think of you and wish.
Perhaps that is the water,
the falling rain that swale of earth calls
as seasons become unseasonal
and our world changes.
03 Saturday Oct 2020
Orange light shines
through half covered window.
Not sure any of us have footing now.
Collective free fall may be exactly
what’s needed.
Don’t hang on,
time’s come to rearrange all the pieces
on the board.
24 Friday Apr 2020
When the worst in you climbs out
pale and slick from a basement of your own making
do you cower and freeze?
Do you move fast as distraction will whip you
toward anything,
anything at all but that?
Do you block the acquaintance with projects-type
fast, cheap, ugly construction,
forcing it into another, though now above ground,
prison?
Who are you in your fullness?
What do you do with the wretched creature who is, also,
you?
What if you stop your steps away from the intolerable,
turn in your terror,
and place a crown on that wretched head?
Even if, at first, it is made of paper
and sags a little.
Because one of gold has yet to be forged.
What would the welcoming of one forced down,
forced out and away,
move like?
At the start,
even a whispered hello
will do.
Until you can both bow
to the darkness in light and soften
toward light
in the dark.
Free.
18 Saturday Apr 2020
A cat has moved in next door.
Tuxedo.
White whiskers and a spot at the window.
Lace curtains always closed now stay pinned aside,
for his sleeping and watching perch depends
upon the ever-changing sight of visiting creatures
for peanuts.
To the railings and porch boards come jay and squirrel
and crow, large as the cat zeroed in
with green eyes shining in face of black fur.
And lucky for me, this virus-induced foster
and I visit with eyes watching
through two panes of glass.
Provided, of course, no wildlife prevails.
In the new quiet of town,
sound of the bells reaches the house every quarter hour.
The big trees, strange as it seems, have yet to leaf out
like a reminder of the sickness slowing life down
even though spring
is in full swing.
12 Sunday Apr 2020
They’ve opened up the moon to mining.
We have opened the moon to be mined.
The news rakes my insides raw.
Somehow it, amid the chaos of now,
pushes so far beyond the line
I can barely stand.
Yet
this is where we are.
And what tiny thread appears for me to follow,
thin as for sewing on a button,
is in total,
Love it while it’s here.
Love it while it’s here.
And, really, might that truly be
our utmost in the end:
Love it, whatever it is, while it’s here.
29 Saturday Feb 2020
Days long
become years
and one most loved becomes a harm,
and through protection and confusion you seek
understanding of drastic change,
and the heart must learn
Safe? Not safe?
Safe? Not safe?
While you search blindly for pillar of heaven,
with eyes playing no part in this pilgrimage,
Heaven rests closer than the newly loud beating
in your chest..
so it goes and on it goes and through you go
asking for direction to the River when it has sunk
far underground within life that continues on
always always life continues on
beyond twist, injury, death and journey toward Spirit
alone.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 