15 Thursday Jul 2021
All the unacceptable parts of you
you catapulted into the junk drawer as a child
the moment someone you loved
clearly didn’t approve,
they don’t belong there.
Try singing them back out of the dark.
Back into you.
The best sauces dance on the tongue with
their rightful bloom of spice and vigor.
13 Tuesday Jul 2021
I, like many, come from a long line
of self-hating people.
The road back from that twists,
arduously,
and is often blind.
Today’s prayer for each of us~
May your return be beautiful.
May the old break be discovered and lovingly mended,
honored in its new foundness,
and a way of celebration, a wisdom
to walk along softly,
be born again in you.
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.
11 Sunday Jul 2021
When you think you are failed,
a shameful gash of a human,
misdirected, twenty years off course
and without a single storyline resembling your own
to take to your dreams, to warm a milk of recognition,
read a poem aloud to the trees.
They lean in, I swear it.
And when waters rise to your eyes
maybe your throat catches on memory
and disorientation fogs your vision,
pick up a stone, full with its permission,
and ask if it would like you to feed it the tears.
Springs of salty waters rainbowed with cares
are precious,
not to be wasted on regret.
There’s a much bigger world beyond the fears
binding you to confusion.
Cry a while with sweet words forming upon moving lips.
Walking a path others have not will wipe you out,
no need for surprise there.
It will also leave you, eventually,
soulfully
in the welcoming arms of Spirit.
And isn’t that always where you’ve wanted to be?
27 Sunday Jun 2021
Last I wrote, a river–the River–spoke of pain
guiding the carving of your banks,
erosion of soils meant to flush and drift,
to migrate and feed downstream, freed up
to do work really intended,
as it exposes rock, the talking stones
holding spirit to place.
It didn’t get much traction.
Today, I can offer that that River isn’t all water,
but Wind
and Song…
Twitterings rise from the bathing towhee
utterly beheld in the flesh reaching waters
from where she sings and wiggles
every noodley wet feather, bone and muscle.
From tub to branch she flits, rubbing (always)
her beak first–this side then that–
and shakes complete giggling pleasure,
full release, refreshed.
That, too, is the River, the Wind, the Song.
Somehow the unrelenting ache brings you there, too,
shining the dull parts
in a reflection of glory.
25 Friday Jun 2021
And if the River guiding you IS the ache
bruising your deep, seeming no end,
where might She be bringing you?
Taking you, I mean?
It feels to be a taking, I know,
but come a day,
come a day,
there will be a giving to this blind journey
and it will show
the Becoming of who you truly are.
Let be with the River,
She is holding you…
24 Thursday Jun 2021
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?
19 Saturday Jun 2021
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.
06 Sunday Jun 2021
Seems I’m becoming the neighborhood wild one,
unkempt, bedraggled, living out of pile and box,
a two-legged more attuned with the four and winged,
becoming something I can’t yet recognize,
likely to speak a language closer to the birds and loping raccoons
than the stuff that’s tangled my brain until now.
Night walks are introducing those I live with,
swooping bats among them.
There’s lots of soft chatter out there…
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.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 