22 Monday Sep 2025
Autumn,
time of longing
and remembrance
rolls in pale liquid light.
Yellows, softness, dry and sombre.
Mountain cold drops, magpies dip
and squabble.
Why fear grips me isn’t fully known.
Begin again, the season angles into quiet,
a blanket across empty lap.
11 Tuesday Apr 2023
I live at the borderlands,
between mountain and grassland,
river and sea.
Here, vultures gyre above the hollows, high
as the peaks
in gliding circles,
where death meets light
and darkness greets the sun.
I live the in-between,
not expected, not sane, full
in constant emptying,
I rise as others fall, gather while
the confused lose.
Accompanying all, I am ever ready
to catch the tender hand
finally opened
by life.
I can not be held,
you will never be without me.
In cracks cursed for tripping you up,
that’s my nestling place.
I can not be found where money buys me, nor
in the thing anyone else swears will conjure me–
but my laughter will.
Eventually,
you will feel within
the kindness in those peals
and the years of loss, confusion, pleading
shall mulch the most fertile ground
you could set restful, strong,
willing roots into.
Welcome the borderlands,
for in them I dwell
ungraspable.
28 Friday Oct 2022
What, then, is born
of disconnection that bleaches the Soul,
fragments Spirit and sends it flying
never to land,
to land in place where it may feed and be fed,
stoke the tender embers of Beauty herself?
What have we traded to get
things?
Things.
Paper money and all the rest, what is it
but nothing,
nothing, especially
when we make it everything and carve ourselves
and one another up
for more of it?
Call back,
Call back,
Call back yourself.
Call back every shard and ripple,
each precious drop, and voluminous chunk.
None but people bringing themselves back toward wholeness
can right this ship we share.
Please, let us remember,
let us remember all
to bring ourselves
Home again.
09 Thursday Sep 2021
No one ever said,
Loss will remake you.
Again and again.
Loss will nearly kill you. More than once.
Ground down, burned to ash, you will have to sift through
the grit
for your own bones.
How are we to know?
The drumbeat death cry of what you hold to most dearly,
will resound out of your heart, out from your thrown open jaw,
that great river mouth of grief,
echo against lines of sinew, ripple not your blood only
but others’: Plants may bow,
may sneeze an offering of recognition and understanding.
Owl and Hawk will fight over the same food.
Your movement will tighten and slow to drink that in.
A shudder will go through the house,
making sleep a jumbled memory.
Hundreds of crows will shake the air with their passing.
No one ever said.
How are we to know?
Loss will remake you.
Thank God.
12 Monday Jul 2021
At 8 I lost my best friend,
with the end of the school year she skipped right up two grades,
and there without I continued on,
no one near.
At 11, overnight, my best friend decided she hated me
and the girl to whom I’d tied my heart,
living right up the sidewalk at the top of the hill,
was gone.
At 15, my best friend, girl who searched with me dark star-filled skies
and distant philosophies, disappeared
right in front of me. On a path
between two pines, she separated,
saying it was over. No reason given. And walked away.
Years passed. Each returned
for a moment.
The first in a market near a pile of avocados,
wandering through with friends on a visit home from college.
Word reached me later
she died of cancer far too soon after.
The next circled back simply to say
she’d left me because everyone in her life had left her first
and she was keeping that from happening again.
The last found me by phone, states away,
wanting to say she’d ended our friendship
because I asked too many questions
and she, being confused enough on her own,
couldn’t take it.
More recent losses diminish even those crushing endings,
hitting harder still than death–
that visitor being inevitable, embraceable and understood.
How loss does shape us,
at times the shape taking decades to decipher.
Wonder steps in,
the companion who never rejects or abandons.
Wonder walks alongside, reverently,
devotedly.
A reminder comes in the morning song of hummingbird…
turn towards wonder, always
she sings,
towards wonder.
28 Friday May 2021
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.
09 Monday Nov 2020
This is not stick feathers in your hair and prance round
the earth as if you are one. You
couldn’t not be if you tried. You
can, however, think it, feel it, behave it as if
it were so. You aren’t here
to earn it. To remember it, Yes,
and to work it through.
Mass microbes work upon you–feathers
are the cartoon version (blessed though they be).
If no brook bubbles beside you, neighbors’
televisions blare craftless tales, and your mother
is dead, Remembrance,
work though it must and will take,
is what these days reaching toward your own death
are for..
Slow into morrow, into marrow..
not only could you lose everything–
you will.
With that might your cellular awakening bring glimpse
before the end
Gold of what you are made.
25 Saturday Apr 2020
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?
29 Saturday Feb 2020
Days long
become years
and one most loved becomes a harm,
and through protection and confusion you seek
understanding of drastic change,
and the heart must learn
Safe? Not safe?
Safe? Not safe?
While you search blindly for pillar of heaven,
with eyes playing no part in this pilgrimage,
Heaven rests closer than the newly loud beating
in your chest..
so it goes and on it goes and through you go
asking for direction to the River when it has sunk
far underground within life that continues on
always always life continues on
beyond twist, injury, death and journey toward Spirit
alone.
08 Friday Nov 2019
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.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 