Category Archives: the road

Twenty-five years on

19 Saturday May 2018

Posted by in adventure, becoming, break out, dark, devotion, freedom, friends, gratitude, honoring, Infinite, learning, mystery, nature, night, poems, poetry, receiving, release, the road, welcoming, wonder

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Not until the attentive itch

do they exchange glances to mean

It’s Time.

And off we pile into the car, heading deep

into night and whatever flight waiting

with breath, rolling, in the wings.

Winding round and up and up and round

through dark and sensation

into rolled down window sweetness of valley grass and oak,

Stumbling, graceful, grit of dirt road scuffing,

spinning under 2 a.m. sky and flopping across hillsides,

the stars, sharp and grabbable,

become a spiral

spiral

spiral

as alive to be tucked in a pocket,

as hover, massive and in reach, directly overhead,

as rest in mind twenty-five years on.

At the door

15 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by in adventure, community, friends, listen, movement, mundane, nature, poems, poetry, the road, welcoming, words

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A kitten knocks at the door.

In truth, a word behaving like a kitten,

soft, sweet, riled

from chasing a baby squirrel along the avenue.

Baby tore across the asphalt, tail barking,

no visible sign of what gave chase.

Course, words are like that,

and now one has followed me home.

A fur-lined nook between the armrest and my hip

awaits her.

Curious what mischief we can achieve today.

But first,

a short nap.

Stumbling

10 Thursday May 2018

Posted by in change, listen, movement, Music, poems, poetry, receiving, release, the road, welcoming

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Stumbling,

having missed a pebble for the story in your head,

breaks the monotone

in favor of dripping notes tangled, soft,

attentive.

Dipping into that honey, the stream beneath the firehose flow,

entices a hidden music into the aching

and sharp places, wounded from too much narrow focus.

Broadening,

that song- touched by your welcome-

changes things.

Clearing the pasture

17 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in aging, change, community, home, movement, poems, poetry, the road

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I’m surrounded by endings here.

And I came back,

came back

to where what can grow

I don’t know.

The ties, bindings, wrappings and scenarios

they’re old,

done, hardened and strange.

Perhaps the ghosts need herding,

finally clearing the pasture for

what belongs beneath this patch of sky

of salt, and pine, cypress and stone.

Too much concrete dulls the senses-

Sun aches to touch earth,

it may be my time to help her do so.

Status quo

20 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by in aging, becoming, break out, change, courage, Creating, family, fearlessness, Found, freedom, learning, movement, poems, poetry, release, the road

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A conditioning of impotence,

reaching for the salt when another swipes it first,

mounting silence in heavy boots, step upon step,

crags of volcanic history ignored by all

but you.

Buttons pop in flights of frustration,

and the weight of carrying baggage,

generations of status quo,

threatens to break your back

until

the ludicrous heart-heaviness and surge

for a real place in family becomes visible

for the impossibility it is.

Pitching the straps off your shoulders,

searing sight of that graveyard of the forgotten

rising skyward

into memory, you shake your head

at the Sisyphean absurdity,

turn around

and walk away.

Trying to get home

03 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in adventure, courage, poems, poetry, the road, transition

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Through the night, and every inch of its darkness,

you keep trying to get home.

Missing buses, the next being the last

before a no service emptiness of midnight.

And the priest you met was no priest behind that supermarket,

but a desperate man wearing inside out shirt

with black short sleeves and shabby collar.

Waiting, waiting, wanting and anxious

with one goal in mind,

standing alone at the bench eager

to get to the end of the line when you can start walking

a long stretch of highway

in the wee hours

to a home that no longer exists

yet is the one place to which you know the way.

Halfway through

10 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in aging, becoming, change, devotion, Expanse, poems, poetry, story, the road, wonder

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And what if it turns out,

or turns in or turns about,

that you find yourself starting over

-o-v-e-r-

at roughly (obscurely) halfway through

-as best you can tell-

the life you’ve been given?

Did you miss something along the way?

A flowering path, a waterfall dive, a hollow

to watch stars fall?

A tricky switchback, a higher climb, a conversation

with a person you ignored

(or whose shoes you noticed but whose words you never met)?

The questions fill every available basket.

Meanwhile.

An unobscured landscape has poured itself out

before you.

Maybe there,

there is the place to begin.

Human walking

21 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by in becoming, family, honoring, learning, listen, nature, poems, poetry, story, the road, weaving, work

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Born from uninitiated folk,

as most Westerners are,

creates holes in knowing that let icy winds enter.

Weaving oneself back together requires attention,

a briny commitment, earthly,

sight of an old fist-width rope tying the now to a millennia of then:

the family line.

Mostly invisible shoulders carry

the wobbling essential unformed

human walking known as you.

Start asking questions.

Feather etchings

17 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by in aging, beauty, becoming, change, death, devotion, freedom, honoring, mystery, nature, poems, poetry, the road

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Feather etchings of wrinkles,

our tributaries of experience, deepen

towards more

not less.

Must we forget what the soul always knows,

that appearance is not worth

and youth is not to be strived for

but grown beyond?

Instead of living seventy years

as wobbly egos forever hungry and

needing to be bolstered,

we can throw our arms, like thick-barked tree limbs,

around death,

our constant friend teaching us

the riches of storied contours and

what it is to truly live.