Category Archives: discomfort

A slurry of nettles and skunk

26 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by in becoming, break out, change, Creating, discomfort, learning, nature, poems, poetry, release

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While sitting in a slurry of nettles and skunk,

a confused mess of fury and grief,

I had to remember,

remember those I know well who will do anything not

to change.

Clenching to what doesn’t grow,

but metastasizes, brings more comfort

than trying it all, somehow, differently.

Yet the questions have yet to be born in them,

and time, with practice, has taught them not to find any stirring

since the familiar is the balm that keeps the abyss

from glistening up and pulling them under and out,

as it is for me now from the slick, hard cornered rock

I seem desperate to hold.

Time and body say, release this faithless fight and self-loathing,

those committed shackles of the past,

and give in, set adrift and enter

what is unimaginably larger than the Seen.

Work of the chrysalis

27 Sunday May 2018

Posted by in beauty, becoming, change, discomfort, flight, movement, mystery, nature, poems, poetry, transition, work

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The transformed steals the love-light,

not for greed

but for our preference.

What’s left behind in grit and dust,

even discarded in rank alleyways,

is the work of the chrysalis.

The

cramped

confused

identity-erasing

dark

of wrestling for the next life form,

of flight,

of nectar,

of tumbling in gravity’s wave

among flowers, bees and blue.

Remember what beauty lies in ugliness

before walking away from the misunderstood.

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.

Born hungry

16 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by in abundance, adventure, becoming, break out, Creating, discomfort, fearlessness, freedom, learning, movement, poems, poetry, Sight

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A princess in the tower,

at a distance looking down,

wishing

and kept.

How to get out? How to get away?

Desperate for rescue, a puddle of tears

and fury.

Why me? This terror and despair.

But, one sunrise, a light switches,

the kaleidoscope shifts,

her untapped power surges

along with the sight that she is on the inside.

An inside most would never know.

Following the sun

with fingertips searching slowly

the walls that keep her,

Somewhere, like the chink in the dragon’s scales,

a crack in stone

will bring the first ray of wisdom,

and freedom for which she was born

hungry.

Thirteen-step boogie

06 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by in abundance, adventure, beauty, break out, discomfort, Infinite, learning, movement, mystery, poems, poetry, release, wonder

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Having lost touch with the beauty of chaos

a fogged vision sewn of fear

and the iron-grip of hoped for control

eventually forces bursting rolls of laughter, or

sphincters tight enough to pop

(not so pretty- quick, turn toward the pansies planted to your left).

If remembrance of having a tail to shake breaks through,

that romp, leap, roar and thirteen-step boogie

will plunk soul back in wild order

and life’ll flow naturally once again.

Displaced, longing, spent

04 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by in adventure, change, discomfort, home, poems, poetry, transition

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If displaced, longing, or spent

a gnawing twistiness of home

erupts

with an ugh, tug, a grrrrmph

and out tumbles a wish-

well, a need-

for a spot, covered nook, a nest or wee corner

stocked full of warmth, quiet, books

and visiting songbirds to the window ledge

but

an illusion of safety, the net many speak of

(what, again, is the fabric of that?),

mocks such steady states in a mind

abuzz with too much time

and hunting

for the next place to call one’s own.

Her own

21 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in adventure, aging, beauty, becoming, Body, break out, change, discomfort, freedom, honoring, learning, movement, pain, poems, poetry, welcoming

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At forty

she felt seventy.

Experience’s weight

had sunk posts deep into the landscape of her being.

Ache and limitation, an undertow of fatigue,

confusion at the seeming permanence

of the uninvited, the resisted,

lead this human to take possession, fully-

and for the first time-

of a life unwritten, free of guarantees,

and her own.

Entirely her own.

Her landscape now is a garden,

loved and wanted, with posts that may disappear.

Or not.

With their origins recognized, appreciated,

and their presence finally respected,

perhaps a hammock will be slung between them

in honor of spring’s arrival.

In the saddle

06 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by in adventure, becoming, break out, change, discomfort, honoring, learning, listen, movement, mystery, nature, poems, poetry, prayer, transition, wonder

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At a beginning,

with the closest solitary prayer being

“I don’t know,”

my hips work to keep the rest of me in the saddle.

Movements in the sky-

valley fog, and clouds weaving high through the hills-

live their nature in waves, currents, and vanishings,

grand teachings of the cycles of continual change.

Sometimes, I wish I knew.

But, unintentionally, artfully, that greatest illusion

has been set on the shelf-

a furry trickster friend

who flashes me a smile, and snaps his tail

at the most wicked, and absurd times.

I don’t know becomes

a delicate, gritty daily worship.

A lopsided egg of a moon

07 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by in abundance, adventure, change, discomfort, dreams, light, nature, poems, poetry, transition

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A lopsided egg of a moon

invited me into sleep

even after shutting the curtain against her light.

She stirred wakefulness,

and a sloshing fancy of dreams,

dreams of time travel and remembered people,

an upsurge of unknown futures and staccatos of history.

New land, an unwritten life, and no one to catch me

disturbs digestion,

but moments come when slow, long-distance swell

breaks overhead,

washing my shoulders, sucking at my ankles,

shifting immense vulnerability to a salty, and fresh excitement.