Category Archives: honoring

Sweep the threshold

12 Friday May 2023

Posted by 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.

Flourishing life

11 Tuesday Apr 2023

Posted by in fearlessness, honoring, Love, mystery, poems, poetry

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Surprising

what we cling to

the stuff and ways

that serve us no more.

Time comes

when what must break

will be broken

and the methods once keeping you alive

those now killing you

ask for burial.

Honor them..

No easy terms to dodge.

No simple way out.

Break or be broken.

Give over, give up, give

to the starving one in you

who can no longer live unnourished.

Let die

what must die.

Your flourishing life depends upon it.

Visitations

06 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by in approaching, honoring, movement, poems, poetry, presence, welcoming, wonder

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Eagles have been visiting.

One Golden.

One Bald.

Their flight cups the sky in feathers,

wings like hills undulating in earthquake–

broad, liquid, generous,

a strength and self-possession of mountains.

Excitement, a sparkling water spring,

surfaces with their arrival.

Lifting my eyes to greet them,

my heart fills,

and I lower forehead to Earth.

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.

Wind blows a chorus

21 Thursday Apr 2022

Posted by in abundance, community, honoring, learning, listen, loving, movement, Music, offering, poems, poetry, wind

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Wind blows a chorus in the mountains.

I’d forgotten how the trees sing in rounds,

sometimes whispering,

sneaking a song, suddenly, behind you

then switching far out in front, down the hardscrabble

with its abundant life of stone and tiny leafings,

scales and flitting feathers.

I wonder about the songs echoed

from those not swishing needles and branches.

What part of the rondo do our human ears miss?

How sweet to offer our voices back

to the heart of the mountain

by joining in its steep and generous sound.

Enter the River

23 Wednesday Feb 2022

Posted by in honoring, learning, movement, poems, poetry, receiving, transition, water, welcoming, wind

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A new movement is afoot,

with steps unknown. There are none.

Enter the River, whose banks

support you now.

Fear may be stripping away, removing the old,

debriding the wounds, a turpentine in the veins.

Let it be.

She beckons. Enter, and be moved.

You will learn–they will teach you.

Call up faith, rebuilding the trust you think

has been lost.

When ready, your own feet will guide and

root you deeply in place where waters and winds

may dance you, earth holding close.

In time, in time,

the Way emerges…

The open door

12 Saturday Feb 2022

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

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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.

How to begin a day

13 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by in abundance, beauty, community, flight, honoring, movement, nature, offering, poems, poetry, stillness, wind

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The storm is making noisy mouths of the shingles this morning,

and pom-poms of the pine’s branches.

Rain beads the panes,

droplets meet socially, gather in their weight

and river down, down towards wet ground.

A limy glow. Needles sticking long on fence, on chair,

all throughout lavender’s hair.

Yesterday at this time crows were dancing in sunrise light,

pink orange, sorbet swirl of clouds,

save one:

She sat still atop a black fir, staring.

Our four eyes, in settled bodies, soaked in the welcoming arms

of our rising Sun–

now, She knows how to begin a day.

Burial

29 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by 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.

From sleep into waking

29 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in aging, approaching, community, devotion, digging, dreams, friends, Healing, honoring, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, weaving, welcoming, work

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A day arrives

during night dreaming

when you come to retrieve a child, an infant

in button-up full-blue onesie,

from a house expecting you

and, upon entry, you recognize the woman

whose house it is. She rises from a room sized table,

oblong, solid, warm and wooden. An enormous shined egg.

Around its edges sit monks, scholars, drummers–

elders all. It feels better than anything you’ve felt

in ages.

She not only welcomes you, while rising,

but asks you to stay.

Come join us.

She says that. . Come. Join us.

Somewhere, slung between infancy and elderhood, you stand,

at times barely, and then holy invitation is spoken,

warmly.

Keep hollowing out the space,

hallowing the place,

where the invitation can finally cross from sleep

into waking.