Category Archives: wonder

Hell is a how

15 Saturday Jan 2022

Posted by in companion, dark, poems, poetry, receiving, wonder

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Do you know hell?

Hell. Funny word. It is a concealed place;

Only, it isn’t a place–it has no where.

Hell is a how.

How withheld the light. How the ghosts possess.

How living has not Life within it.

Flames? There may be…but they cast dark upon

darkness, and a way beyond seems

to have no way at all…

Until, a laugh. I mean, like the kind that jiggles your belly cells.

Or whispered breeze wafts rose your way,

or homemade bread greets you as you walk in the door..

Once in a while–and a while in hell is certainly interminable–

the lid gets cracked. Gasp! The light! Air!

…holy hell, how did I come to you (or, you to me?)…

Keep following the holy, wondering,

wondering,

robe yourself in the wondering:

She’ll guide you through the non-place

back to you,

and Life,

richer for the knowing, with a precious crumb more

for the offering…

If your love

20 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by in abundance, aging, break out, death, Love, loving, new, peace, poems, poetry, shame, the road, wonder

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If your love has courted you

winding and strong

to the door of Death, again, again,

ya kinda gotta wonder- – what

in

the

hell?

(An exclamation ! floowing from that question

seems most appropriate

but not in sting of a shaming judgement, No, no,

as it needs usher in a tender resignation,

an emollient of wondering in which

you slip a hand beneath that tiny bird,

approach slowly with soft eyes to ask,

how, oh how, did this loyal heart of mine learn

to love like that, to love those with inclination,

without qualm,

to do those things they’ve done?)

A new snail trail, steady and true, awaits

in this, the second half of life . . .

Devotedly

12 Monday Jul 2021

Posted by in devotion, friends, grief, Loss, poems, poetry, wonder

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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.

The River

25 Friday Jun 2021

Posted by in devotion, poems, poetry, welcoming, wonder

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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…

If then

23 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by in poems, poetry, presence, welcoming, wonder

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And if God moving in us is

n o t h i n g

like we expect?

Not sublime or transcendent or ethereal,

but exactly the unrelenting pains and grief,

the dark slogging through what we hope

to shed, be done with and grow beyond?

If that confusion is the way

and all that separates us from God

is our rejection–

If then . . .

what?

Such kindness

17 Tuesday Nov 2020

Posted by in learning, mystery, pain, poems, poetry, shame, the road, welcoming, wonder

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Such kindness lives in “I don’t know how.”

Past a freedom of “I don’t know”

little HOW asks in the mystery tender

after years of silently absorbing assumptions,

a force feeding of belief that you are supposed to have

already

walked the path no one had shown you and

you hadn’t yet found.

How, on this fault line shaking, cracked

and dappled light lit earth

are we to know before we know

and who–back to who before who before who–

syringed that toxin into our bloodstreams

fueling generations of debilitating pain and shame

saying we are broken

and must fight a way through

simply

to

endure?

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.

Much more

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by in abundance, community, craving, discomfort, Expanse, mystery, poems, poetry, wonder

≈ Comments Off on Much more

Women, warm, round and expecting,

wandered my dream, greeting me,

and I wondered how

how;

Three before me, at three drugstore registers,

buying sodas, and sodas and alcohol,

at 8 a.m.

and I wondered how

how;

Baristas, happy, welcoming, enjoying

each other, customers, both and

still… how

how.

Knowing fullness, itch for escape, joy,

and my own irritation with life that,

conveniently, hasn’t been included in the list,

leaves confusion with a half-smile at how

all this exists now

along with much, much…

much more.