Category Archives: learning

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.

This is your life

19 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by in death, learning, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, the road, welcoming, wonder

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This is your life.

You will be abandoned again and again.

Until you stop abandoning yourself.

You will die.

Die before you die

and what emerges will hold you.

The way is long

yet it will end quickly.

What bursts through you like a flower singing

to the sun?

What cat are you curled beneath the moon?

Whatever you hold dear will be gone.

So,

how can the shimmer and spark of you

become

fully

in this moment?

Languages

31 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by in learning, light, listen, nature, poems, poetry, return, silence, wind, words, work

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I keep checking for messages.

They aren’t there, of course.

What sends messages these days

doesn’t use the language I grew up learning.

How many languages don’t we speak because of those

we had to,

pinning words down with force for

efficiency

exactness

precision

accuracy

literalness lopping off the Song of the universe?

There is light, instead, what trees eat,

reflecting on the full belly of blood-red

garden pot,

and wind talking the leaves high,

high up the towering eucalyptus.

Clapping faeries have flitting epochs to share,

and they await those willing to listen

to languages bodies understand.

More quiet than I yet can hold

is the ear that can translate for me.

God, I know what I would like to be

in service to what is far greater~

please, show the winding way…

All the sense in the world

18 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by in learning, poems, poetry, return, unlearning, water, wind

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What does waiting on the world’s approval do to us?

When we lose and lose, and the land we’ve invented

continually falls away underfoot,

a time must come,

a place emerge,

within us

when and where grasping stops.

For there is no service

to the wind, the passing butterfly, the breaking wave, or

the stone resting, thousands of years on,

inches from where we stand,

to hate ourselves in response to another’s judgment.

Think the butterfly bothers?

Or the wind?

We’ve much larger things to become

than the tarnished expectations we’ve clung to.

Move like the water,

sit with the stone,

they’re whispering a wisdom far beyond

what we’ve been told.

And it makes all the sense in the world.

At no distance at all

24 Thursday Jun 2021

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

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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?

Spirit joins in

19 Saturday Jun 2021

Posted by in aging, change, learning, movement, poems, poetry, prayer, water

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In the pain of remembering

body and mind hurt

but I look to the Crow on the wire

and hear Hummingbird marble singing

above the fence.

I think in this knitted brow sometimes

tissues rearrange–slow motion, soft earthquakes

moving tiny body mountains towards

a little more soul food, a morsel for the ant,

a morsel for me.

Humanness is a tanglement,

confusion a rushing river thick.

Taming forces in an undoing of habit

I drop below the river top

and listen

to deeper music that dances along

within a different rhythm,

one at which the learning turns gently

and Spirit joins in.

Without reserve

28 Friday May 2021

Posted by in father, honoring, learning, Loss, movement, pain, poems, poetry, stillness

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My father,

he was of the sort willing

and able

to kick me out of the family.

His threat came three times.

Not once, or, oops, twice,

but three times that cruelty was uttered, even written,

knives thrown not in spirit alone, but in substance:

To a child that is survival at stake.

And belonging.

And…so much and…

My hands tremble and my heart pounds with

the memory of it.

I grieve for her, the young one who had to stand there

and take it.

He forgot. I couldn’t.

His violence lives in me. I work with the wounds

daily.

What he was never given he could not give.

What I was never given, I intend to learn.

Some days it is a story, a living aspect

of history.

Other days I must rise up, in frightened fury,

to say no.

Absolutely not.

What family there is that is mine,

wherever they be,

their fullness of heart and vision and being

reside within and around me,

and my hands and heart can return the gifts

I have been given

in stillness and

without reserve.

Between prayers

23 Sunday May 2021

Posted by in abundance, aging, becoming, giving, growing, Infinite, land, learning, poems, poetry, prayer

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The fourth decade

walks me between prayers,

of one blinked forth twenty years ago,

a blessed ‘Fuck it’ rising from the earth

to cup and guide and split open, and

of another gathered in the thirties–simply

‘Thank you.’

With solid scaffolding of experience under me

I can walk with the first tucked in a back pocket,

the second, on more able days, held in heart,

and the infinite wanderings between

growing a garden of ripening fruits and blooming flowers

with seeds maturing slowly toward ground

rich with Life ready to receive them.

Such kindness

17 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by in learning, mystery, pain, poems, poetry, shame, the road, welcoming, wonder

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Such kindness lives in “I don’t know how.”

Past a freedom of “I don’t know”

little HOW asks in the mystery tender

after years of silently absorbing assumptions,

a force feeding of belief that you are supposed to have

already

walked the path no one had shown you and

you hadn’t yet found.

How, on this fault line shaking, cracked

and dappled light lit earth

are we to know before we know

and who–back to who before who before who–

syringed that toxin into our bloodstreams

fueling generations of debilitating pain and shame

saying we are broken

and must fight a way through

simply

to

endure?