Category Archives: unlearning

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.

Out of the dissonance

28 Monday Feb 2022

Posted by in poems, poetry, question, slow, undone, unlearning, wonder

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God, how we fight, fight

to get our needs met.

Out of the dissonance of yesterday

today arrives, new and in flux.

Sitting with turmoil after a verbal attack,

I wonder.

Wonder at our repetitions of what has befallen us,

of the disrespect and dismissal,

bullying and belittling;

What came at me with heavy disorganization

and aggression, brought a new face

to an old pattern. What came at me at home

as a child

came at me again in my home

as an adult.

Only now, now! I could say,

there is no fight here,

slow down and hear what I am saying.

Having one’s boundaries blatantly ignored

and crossed may be

a desperate ploy for power

but I wonder,

might not power be the question at all?

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.

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.

Out there

06 Sunday Jun 2021

Posted by in becoming, change, community, land, nature, night, poems, poetry, unlearning

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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…

Failing

11 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by in becoming, discomfort, Expanse, gratitude, pain, poems, poetry, rage, undone, unlearning, welcoming, wonder, work

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What if you woke up each day pissed off.

Pissed off that you’re still here, that things are the way they are,

feeling impotent to change any of it,

that, somehow, crucial basic needs have not been accounted for

in the constellation of whoever is responsible.

What an enduring and repetitive hell.

And instead of beating yourself for–yet another–failing

you settle in

to an endless buzz of unspoken confusion

to wonder,

where could such constant pain come from?

And what, truly, is the soil to tree relationship

between rage and gratitude?

Don’t kid yourself,

those roots do tangle together

and grow in ways

so large and unarticulated you haven’t yet

begun

to trust the imagination entrusted to you

to welcome the discomfort of the discovery

Life is asking.