Category Archives: courage

The unsettlement

01 Sunday Jun 2025

Posted by in confusion, courage, Opening, poems, poetry, seasons, spring

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Critters chasing through high trees,

squirrels limb to limb and birds,

in flight, one to another to another,

and the song,

songs,

braiding on the wind,

wind gathering applause of soft and hardening

oak leaves,

dark, thick, fresh to the season,

and I,

far into the unsettling,

year of the unsettled,

take counsel:

keep faith, drop the choking self-doubt,

open back up, out, into Spirit–

no flower is itself

without

loss,

loss of safety’s deceit.

Nothing guarantees certainty but

betraying yourself for mere

survival.

That rushing in?

Trust it.

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.

At the start

24 Friday Apr 2020

Posted by in change, courage, fear, listen, loving, naked, poems, poetry, welcoming, work

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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.

Emptied streets

04 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in adventure, community, courage, dark, global, light, offering, pain, poems, poetry, song

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A man walks beneath black umbrella,

Calla lilies bloom in the rain;

A woman stands at the kitchen window

staring out with soapy hands and sponge,

singing,

“And you look at yourself,

pacing the cage…”

The playground is taped off in yellow tape,

A child speeds home on scooter with no cars in sight,

“All the spells I could sing, it’s as if the thing is written

in the constitution of the age…”

Grass is greening, lungs ache,

and hearts are breaking,

“Sometimes the best map will not guide you…”

Stay strong and bend, be well

We are in this together together together

We are all pacing the cage–

Not alone not alone

As we walk thin line between birth and death

Now and here

Now and here

Together

Not alone

Hold that thin line dear,

Dear,

Hold it dear.

Perhaps for the first time.

04 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by in beauty, becoming, courage, fearlessness, freedom, honoring, Infinite, movement, nature, poems, poetry, story

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She pours glitter out of the glass slipper.

Ridiculous thing, sweat filled, fragile and unyielding.

With a moment’s further pause..

She hucks it and its mate straight

into the Sea.

Maybe there, in salty, living brine

they can return silica to sand,

or, at minimum, make homes

for lonely crabs looking

to entertain the holy wisdom

within their ocean-loving neighbors.

Glass slippers be damned, She mutters,

and skips off between broken waves and flattened

wet shore

simply to find her own fleshy rhythm.

Perhaps for the first time.

Where lies

26 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in abundance, beauty, becoming, break out, change, community, courage, crafting, Creating, devotion, dreams, freedom, honoring, listen, movement, nature, poems, poetry, prayer, release, song, stillness, welcoming, wonder, work

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If a push,

somewhere a pull.

Where taken,

pray it has been given.

The Western sense of community..

in itself a paradox?

We’re part–everyone–of centuries of history

cycling, tumbling, molasses-thick onward

with nanosecond “advances.”

No mystery that you, and you, and I

can not seem to catch our breath.

Faster is not forward,

as bigger not better, nor more money success.

Where lies the soul stuff making life

Life?

Now

01 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in abundance, adventure, becoming, courage, devotion, discomfort, dread, fearlessness, freedom, honoring, learning, movement, mystery, nature, pain, poems, poetry, release, stillness, strength, transition, welcoming, work

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He slams the door behind him.

You think, Good riddance!

When next your heart stops and breath catches,

out comes a gasp, What have I done?

Melting down, falling to bits, the world goes

from complete sense to non-sense,

and it is on that iceberg of moment

(and each drifting ice island following)

when wondering, Is this true?

might most gather you back together in a form

strong enough,

wise enough

to hold all the sensations and feelings

threatening to tear you to pieces

to be with Now,

an actual fullness of Life

for which you have the grandest capacity.

Flock

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in becoming, break out, change, community, courage, family, movement, poems, poetry, release, the road

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He

a sheep

like us all

walks, one day,

in a new direction.

Sheep don’t do that,

leave their flock.

In this he becomes a black sheep

turning away from name, money, easy street-

which isn’t so easy.

With him, now, he carries weight

of blame, criticism, and no one bothering to ask

why.

Years, many, pass.

His children grow, not knowing the stories he never told,

seeing him as just another sheep folded into the flock.

They wander for a path of their own.

One, separating from the rest, looks back

wondering

why he never asked why.

The clay we’re given

15 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by in abundance, beauty, becoming, courage, Creating, devotion, Infinite, Love, poems, poetry, wonder, work

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Someone told me today,

“You have great energy.”

Someone else

turned out to be my middle school literature teacher.

Another day, perhaps, I’m terrible,

and a familiar stranger might not be

who I think at all.

Ground is uneven.

Earthquakes come, volcanoes blow.

A life is a creative act,

parceled out in retrospect,

birthed forward through chaos.

Unformed to the end

each of us shapes the clay we’re given.

The world will think

whatever it thinks,

what matters is speaking God straight back

into God’s own ear.

A fire, a wave, a mountain

23 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in becoming, break out, change, courage, discomfort, dread, fear, Fire, home, learning, movement, poems, poetry, work

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The basements, bathrooms, shrouded corners,

narrow, black to seem endless, alleys,

the Do-Not-Enters,

these are the intended places.

Go to them.

What courage lies docile and low

will rise up, a fire, a wave, a mountain

to have your back even as growing fear

dissolves

what you think holds you together.