Category Archives: movement

With ceremony

05 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by in ghosts, movement, pain, poems, poetry, prayer, rebirth, transformation

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With ceremony comes the sweat

and all the questions of what to leave behind.

Set down your pain in recognition

that that heavy visitor, with tricks up its sleeve,

is simply

the pain,

looking for an identity.

If you’ve offered it one, you’ll know

because the pain has moved in and set up house,

happily snuggled behind a breast bone, or deep in the pelvis,

grateful to be held there in perpetuity.

The pain stays.

Suffering of any or every kind,

the pain translates easily from heartbreak

to backache–

ache being the tone of its song.

Pain will keep singing,

and your mouth is the one it uses

as if the voice belongs to you.

There are guests who need to be kicked out of the house,

might the pain be one of yours?

A place I have become

12 Saturday Mar 2022

Posted by in laughter, motion, movement, names, new, poems, poetry, the road, transition, undone, unlearning, weaving, welcoming

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A place I have become,

with no knowing where home is.

I carry home with me and in her, them, him I reside.

Words only bring us to the doorway,

imagination opens the door.

In this extended departure

the landscape broadens, roads disappear,

names change, expectation reveals its hollowness,

and desert mountain awaits.

A place I have become, moving upon this earth

without long plan, without people on the receiving end,

with nothing of permanence.

Laughter will replace fears and doubts soon enough.

For now, chasing details fills the days.

This place I become will carry me to the grave,

wherever and whenever that shall be.

In the meantime, feeding the soil, sitting with what is,

allowing for what will be, dropping off

assumptions,

and listening softening listening softening. . .

I want to know this place deeply and dearly

before I go.

What is to come?

11 Friday Mar 2022

Posted by in approaching, becoming, community, fertile, motion, movement, poems, poetry, violence, work

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What is to come

with such violence in the world?

Old as existence, violence arises and

falls away, erupts and leaves ash heaps,

sterility, an airlessness that waits,

waits,

waits

until seeds able to withstand–and bring Life–

from extremes

begin anew.

But the cycles can not, will not, alter

until every one of us, each one unto themselves,

can reach the threshold of greeting

the violence with and in

ourselves.

Begin, begin, as those stalwart seeds,

to come consciously into relationship

with the most difficult impulses we humans possess,

one by one by one, together,

let us move into wisdom’s ability

to navigate this earthly realm

beautifully and whole.

Where rivers join

27 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by in movement, poems, poetry, transition, water

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Where rivers join

goodbye and hello are fingers entwined,

one feeling like another in swift,

painted tangles and currents.

Waters from here

meet

Waters from there.

Confusion and torrent, swirl and coherence.

Holding on is a goodbye with wings,

watch it fly away~

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…

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.

The unanswerable

16 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by in approaching, movement, poems, poetry, still, transition

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How do you prepare for something

that can’t be prepared for?

How do you lighten your load knowing

what comes next requires lightness yet

her terrain, her ways,

are utterly unknown?

A voice calls down lengthy corridors,

twisting the unremitting labyrinth,

sound bouncing, all warps and echoes and dives–

who raises it may be behind, ahead..

Impossible to say.

So you must sit where you are,

without guidance or plan,

steeping in agitation, discomfort, a readiness to go,

still,

while the journey approaching may be next week

or a year from now.

Alas, where you are is what you must be.

And to what will that bring you?

Wah, there rests the unanswerable.

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.

Long missed and calling

24 Monday May 2021

Posted by in change, land, movement, nature, night, poems, poetry, story

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Today, finally, I can sit in the sun

and let tears run their river course down upon

this new place I call home.

Walnuts in my teeth and blueberries in my belly,

I’m meeting the many pincher bugs residing here,

the flies and bees, jays, roses, swallows and eucalyptus.

I awoke suddenly night before last

not knowing what hit me until my senses explained

skunk had a nocturnal exchange with an uninvited guest

and the room had filled with the intensity of her defense.

I understand.

At times I could lift my tail and release my own musk

if I had it.

And then the neighbor whose

sexual escapade she sustained for nine hours

straight

left me crooked and grumbly for, well,

hours more than that.

But the mission bells ring, the hills that held me as a child

hold me once again.

Much will come of this, here, together

with land that made me work to the distant edges

of my heart’s own end.

Stories and word shall find matter,

yes,

and maybe my heart can rest and open again

in the constant cricket song and salted wind

of ground long missed and calling.