Category Archives: discomfort

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.

This valley

18 Saturday Feb 2023

Posted by in becoming, break out, discomfort, fertile, poems, poetry, ride

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This valley

has a strange hold on me.

Through flourishing, violent uprisings,

bloody defeats,

this ancient soil fruits a people belonging,

unmoving, and struggling

cavernously.

I’ve been transplanted, migratorily bound,

the next move both imminent and unimaginable.

Time is ridiculous–

when that change comes

and twists me from these mountains’ grip,

it could be Thursday,

or next millennia.

A loosening grip

and a thunderous push to be here,

beautifully unexamined,

saddles beneath me.

I must ride.

Discomfort undertows us to

get

over

ourselves.

Movement of a bone

12 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by in adventure, approaching, becoming, change, discomfort, flood, Infinite, learning, movement, poems, poetry, presence, receiving, still, welcoming

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Movement of a bone.

Suddenly.

A gate I never thought I’d walk through

swings open–

access to land traversed by others

but never by me

spreads wide and borderless.

Vast, a savannah,

broad, an ocean,

hidden, intricate, bold–

a cave, universe of a moss, storm cloud.

Speechless, held still and utterly restless,

I do not know what emergence now includes me

but this smile keeps flashing across my teary face.

Tyranny over

03 Friday Feb 2023

Posted by in beauty, becoming, break out, devotion, discomfort, fearlessness, freedom, honoring, Infinite, movement, poems, poetry, water, welcoming

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Tyranny over self,

Tyranny over body,

Tyranny over the Land.

Carve mountainsides, slash prairies, pollute valleys, hate,

hate and control, cellulite, humps, wrinkles, and jiggles.

Hide and hate, turn upon the landscape inner,

the landscape outer–

one and the same.

Within this domination resides

everlasting distraction from the rhythmic pulsing

of our own heart’s rivers.

In service to the status quo.

As Earth’s waters are Life,

our blood is Life.

Break the shaming silence–the waterways know

to indulge their curves, bumps, and depths

singing praises through movement,

of tree roots, reflected sky, grating rocks

and wriggling fish.

We have only so long to celebrate and dance

our one beloved Body:

Skip the contempt useful to maintaining outdated ways.

Jump straight into dark waters full

of more Beauty than any one lifetime can hold.

Failing

11 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by in becoming, discomfort, Expanse, gratitude, pain, poems, poetry, rage, undone, unlearning, welcoming, wonder, work

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What if you woke up each day pissed off.

Pissed off that you’re still here, that things are the way they are,

feeling impotent to change any of it,

that, somehow, crucial basic needs have not been accounted for

in the constellation of whoever is responsible.

What an enduring and repetitive hell.

And instead of beating yourself for–yet another–failing

you settle in

to an endless buzz of unspoken confusion

to wonder,

where could such constant pain come from?

And what, truly, is the soil to tree relationship

between rage and gratitude?

Don’t kid yourself,

those roots do tangle together

and grow in ways

so large and unarticulated you haven’t yet

begun

to trust the imagination entrusted to you

to welcome the discomfort of the discovery

Life is asking.

Bloom

09 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in abundance, becoming, change, Creating, devotion, discomfort, movement, nature, poems, poetry

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Wild rose

has begun her bloom once again

held safely within bower of thorn and halo

of virile and lustrous poison oak.

She reaches toward fullness,

touched by bee and blue,

balanced in sun and flickering shadow.

We, too, grow into bloom,

toward heaviness of fruit

and bounty of seed for generations to come.

All in time,

all in good time.

Much more

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by in abundance, community, craving, discomfort, Expanse, mystery, poems, poetry, wonder

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Women, warm, round and expecting,

wandered my dream, greeting me,

and I wondered how

how;

Three before me, at three drugstore registers,

buying sodas, and sodas and alcohol,

at 8 a.m.

and I wondered how

how;

Baristas, happy, welcoming, enjoying

each other, customers, both and

still… how

how.

Knowing fullness, itch for escape, joy,

and my own irritation with life that,

conveniently, hasn’t been included in the list,

leaves confusion with a half-smile at how

all this exists now

along with much, much…

much more.

Knots in the wood

30 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in aging, beauty, becoming, crafting, discomfort, honoring, loving, nature, poems, poetry, welcoming

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The knots in the wood strong

hands might try

to force flat and out,

erase..

impossible.

The tree has earned those twists and kinks,

hardened, toughened grooves and bubbles,

bulged eyes skilled at a different sight.

Gentle the hand given access

to the yearning, sorrowed places-

they are not to be fixed.

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.

Through bright sky

06 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by in abundance, adventure, break out, change, Deliverance, discomfort, flight, home, learning, nature, poems, poetry, work

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The swallow dip of joy,

swift arc and cut through bright sky,

has been on lengthy migration

to lands unnamed.

Yet the time allotted here, however long,

confined in concrete, noise, requirement and excess

may finally break me of this place.

What follows out

of the daily abrasions of adjusting

while not giving everything and nothing away

may open space enough for that swallow

to return truly

home.