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Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone

~ a wild and sacred journey

Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone

Category Archives: home

New

18 Thursday Sep 2025

Posted by feralpoet in ancestors, beauty, devotion, grief, Healing, heart, history, home, liberation, Life, medicine, mystery, new, Opening, poems, poetry, question, shame, song, transformation, unlearning, violence, waking, weaving, welcoming, wonder, work, world

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Confusion tumbles out of us,

violence and shame, ever pointing–

over there, over there.

Look in the mirror, friend, we each must

consider our part, the veins of ugliness within,

ignored, denied, pushed away.

Wounds need care,

sunlight and tenderness.

Otherwise, they fester.

None goes unhurt, none walks without darkness

to be held.

Point not that way, and that,

drop the pointer all together.

We are a we, and in it together to reweave

an old, old decaying story into blessing and art,

connection, nourishment and song.

What beauty brings us here now?

What Beauty to be bestowed back to Life?

Ask the ancestors,

they know,

ask the ancestors for help–

healing takes everyone, form and formless alike.

Let the new story begin..

it breaks through already

in the most delightful, unexpected ways.

Burgundy overstuffed chair

24 Thursday Oct 2024

Posted by feralpoet in home, poems, poetry, the road

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Sitting in a burgundy overstuffed chair

in the children’s library,

one of the most joyous places to be,

with an oval blue rug edged with smiling kids,

their woven images holding hands, underfoot,

a mom begins reading a story aloud.

A green spotted carved dragon listens in,

and the enormous bear and giraffe,

they lean closer from high,

cappuccino-colored corners.

I thank the world for libraries,

for books, for people behind counters who say,

Yes.

Once again, having no house key on my ring,

I breathe in while I still can,

knowing all this will continue on

without me.

Limitations

30 Saturday Dec 2023

Posted by feralpoet in change, Expanse, father, growing, Healing, heart, history, home, learning, leaving, light, movement, poems, poetry, unlearning, vision, waking

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The limitations of our fathers,

they are not ours to live by. See

and be done.

Do

and live beyond.

The next generations are here to end

that which came before.

Sweep the threshold

12 Friday May 2023

Posted by feralpoet in freedom, generations, ghosts, grief, home, honoring, movement, poems, poetry, ride, unlearning, welcoming

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Sweep the threshold,

unlock the door,

put the busyness away–

what comes is far

too important.

Build a fire,

quiet the house,

all your sensing is required.

Hear the hoof beats?

The full horse breaths?

Mice may scratch in the walls,

spiders rattle the roof,

you’ve nothing to do

but be home.

Movements beneath your skin,

flashes of thought,

quickening heart,

allow them.

This is a welcoming.

You don’t know who approaches

only that they must.

Freedom blooms

as we set

a place for everything.

What you carry in your blood

has voice–

Let her sing.

The open door

12 Saturday Feb 2022

Posted by feralpoet in change, community, growing, home, honoring, learning, listen, Love, poems, poetry, transition, unlearning, wonder, work

≈ Comments Off on The open door

Somehow it is February and 79 degrees.

What a wonder.

We have entered a new world, mostly of our own making.

Turning back is a fantasy holding some together,

imagining it isn’t happening holding others.

Our earth mama talks with us, through us, always–

she shows more loudly by the year

the honest consequences of our actions.

Birds sing loudly on the other side of the open door,

more kinds than usually heard in chorus.

They bathe bathe bathe and chitter, twinkling songs..

A magical day,

yet strange.

Prayer flies through the open door that we all learn to listen,

listen and praise, find ourselves on our knees ready

for change that serves Life.

Burial

29 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by feralpoet in devotion, family, ghosts, Healing, home, honoring, poems, poetry, prayer, strength, work

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What’s it like to live the lives of the ghosts that inhabit you?

You know it well.

Ask the parts with poison in a syringe

ready to inject each time you step off their worn,

possessing and ever hungry killing path.

They seek–you know this, even without words–all light,

your light,

and they search with senses unimaginable,

like magnetism, or gravity, the tender flame

at the heart of you. And feed.

The very heart of you, the Spirit of you,

the stuff they, while living, could not tend in themselves;

the marrow of their being they nurtured with death ways.

When can the exorcism begin? How can you reclaim

your own Self,

that beauty and gift of which no one else is replica?

That’s in you,

still.

Reach for Her with every ribbon of strength

you thought you’d lost.

You are here, now, with feet on this sweet Earth,

not lost, no, only wrestling

with the ghosts your family left for you to battle.

Some warriors do not carry sword or shield,

yet they walk the battlefield alone, year after year,

collecting back the bones of those who were truly lost,

giving them, finally,

Burial.

At no distance at all

24 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by feralpoet in abundance, beauty, home, learning, nature, poems, poetry, welcoming

≈ Comments Off on At no distance at all

Today is the wagging tail of a red squirrel,

and an open door.

It doesn’t close now, outside being home,

inside being a storage place.

Yesterday two hummingbirds chased hawk,

funny youngster learning her way,

an iridescent green-backed fly sat still

at the center of a jasmine flower

and I laughed in the toppled, strong arms of a ten year old,

who pushes me always to the floor loving

every taboo body part and happening of hers

as she, too, learns her way.

In the tumbly, bumbly flight lessons

of the two towhees

I witness a desire to enter through the propped door

after hopping the limits of the garden perimeter,

speaking confusion and discovery.

Here, together, the sky-reaching cypresses,

the eucalyptus bird hotel

and the sweeping vultures,

all of us, we are finding our way;

some heavier with faith and knowing

bring needed weight into the feet of those

easily tousled by winds blowing hard.

What must it be to be full

each day

with relation, within the great motions,

settled during movement

and drinking in the finite, ever-renewing Beauty

at no distance at all to a single one of us?

Full circle

25 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by feralpoet in becoming, home, honoring, learning, Loss, loving, mystery, offering, pain, poems, poetry, receiving

≈ Comments Off on Full circle

A full circle closed today,

from expectation to loss,

from pedestal to the fall..

A journey made time and time

again.

Bound to a nature of its own making,

the question of when the final turn

arrives being that eerie shimmer

at the horizon.

With delusion’s slap in the face

what you do with the broken fantasy

remains the treasure

at the end.

What shall be created from the rubble

and bruises?

Can you be what fed you?

Could you embody what your heart was sure

you couldn’t live without?

Generative

15 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by feralpoet in becoming, change, Creating, home, poems, poetry

≈ Comments Off on Generative

A box marked EXPLOSIVES

sits beside my front door.

Red paint on wood, hinges on lid;

a trunk for ammunitions

holds my shoes.

Today the light dawns,

it’s time I walk possessing

that kind of power,

reside within what transforms

not through simple destruction

but vast imaginative

Creation–

Stepping forward not one, but two.

What has sounded

08 Friday Nov 2019

Posted by feralpoet in community, home, honoring, learning, Loss, Love, nature, poems, poetry, the road, work

≈ Comments Off on What has sounded

What has sounded

to others

like endless gripe and grating unfinished complaint,

a chosen rageful fixation,

certain Pathology…

has been body and mind finding its way

through toxic darkness.

Nature being destroyed by humans

in blind arrogance and greed,

consumption wired into how many “likes” and “followers”–

those empty signs of worth and feedings of narcissism–

in ever-widening circles,

in rapid speed, increasing.

How.

How does a body and mind adjust to such devastation?

To home being pillaged and raped?

To the Temple filling with piles of trash,

masses of people,

noise and excrement along every path?

There is no adaptation to that.

There is constant heartache

and anger.

With home now being just another thing for sale

and silence and solitude disappeared,

what illness have we invited through our collective front door

in exchange for one more meaningless photo

gone viral?

It’s time we spend time on the virus

we have ignored

for entertainment.

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