11 Saturday Mar 2023
People walk the oceanside
with leash in one hand, coffee mug in the other.
Small waves lick the shore, clouds,
in a brief break between storms,
milk water to sky–
horizon barely a line.
Fog clings to the crowns of pines, the shoulders of hills,
mist rising,
sand grits beneath occasional footsteps.
Salt and wetness heavy the air.
Dawn seems to extend the whole morning long.
10 Friday Mar 2023
I drink in a teal grey ocean,
lap after lap of frothing wave, cormorants bobbing.
Rain falls, unstopping,
tree-ripping wind having settled.
Thousands remain without power, businesses are closed,
emergency vehicles and power technicians stand in the roads.
I love my car. She’s keeping me warm, safe, mobile.
Such a strange trip.
How I will face that mountain pass is beyond me.
Adventures are like that.
09 Thursday Mar 2023
I’ve entered a middle place.
Nothing similar, all askew, between there and there–
Here.
From bone-sucking desert dryness
to an active atmospheric river in the West:
A massive dumping of snow approaches
and may freeze me in a fractured state.
And it’s good.
Being taken apart to be remade is soul medicine–
ever becoming means
relinquishing the familiar.
Seems this journey demands long nights’ jarring of a wagon ride,
heavy, unavoidable air of fuel burning,
relentless winds whipping rain in my face.
After an evening arrival,
a grumpiness of wants corroded my vision.
Once heat reached many sore muscles,
I could see the riches surrounding me.
And a first deep sleep in weeks
seeped into thirsty veins
with voices of owl
and a community of frogs singing
a long and generous lullaby.
03 Friday Mar 2023
Posted in approaching, movement, poems, poetry, rebirth
≈ Comments Off on Magpie arrived with a twig
Magpie arrived with a twig in her beak this morning,
pausing on a bare branch of one tree
before taking it to last year’s nest in the spruce.
I guess that nest will be renewed.
And the plumpest ladybug, full of spots,
waddled up a window facing the mountain.
How lucky spring is to have these visitors, and early.
How lucky am I.
Time to take my sun-starved skin outside
and face the quiet with this internal buzz.
The gathering busyness of the season seems already
to have taken hold.
02 Thursday Mar 2023
Posted in becoming, change, Deliverance, movement, mystery, poems, poetry, unlearning, wind
≈ Comments Off on Changing the seer
Changing the seer,
the ground beneath and
circulation within,
in asking for this, I surrender,
for candle-flicker
moments.
Yet the moments expand
as a stranglehold of my brain loosens.
Yesterday,
bald eagle sailed–
she really does sail–
through currents of air unseen
while held aloft close to unmoving.
I’ve much to unlearn, hands of habit
to release,
both mine and not.
Ever more is asked of us to become
what we are intended to become.
Watching the slow wave wings
of white bodied, brown feathered eagle,
a glimpse of what magic surrounds us,
the Spirit of which we are made,
up-lifts me too,
reminding me of the spring that never runs dry.
28 Tuesday Feb 2023
How do we tender the fire,
walk the line,
embody a waking spectrum of both
the violence within–that murderous rage–
and the sacred Spirit we carry?
How do we live between
the harm we are capable of and
the goodness of our natural being?
Until each of us faces that living death,
cashes in the chips of our denial,
we humans will continue to destroy one another,
our earthen home,
and ourselves.
Let’s rise to the task.
We have, perhaps, no better work to do.
18 Saturday Feb 2023
This valley
has a strange hold on me.
Through flourishing, violent uprisings,
bloody defeats,
this ancient soil fruits a people belonging,
unmoving, and struggling
cavernously.
I’ve been transplanted, migratorily bound,
the next move both imminent and unimaginable.
Time is ridiculous–
when that change comes
and twists me from these mountains’ grip,
it could be Thursday,
or next millennia.
A loosening grip
and a thunderous push to be here,
beautifully unexamined,
saddles beneath me.
I must ride.
Discomfort undertows us to
get
over
ourselves.
12 Sunday Feb 2023
Movement of a bone.
Suddenly.
A gate I never thought I’d walk through
swings open–
access to land traversed by others
but never by me
spreads wide and borderless.
Vast, a savannah,
broad, an ocean,
hidden, intricate, bold–
a cave, universe of a moss, storm cloud.
Speechless, held still and utterly restless,
I do not know what emergence now includes me
but this smile keeps flashing across my teary face.
06 Monday Feb 2023
Eagles have been visiting.
One Golden.
One Bald.
Their flight cups the sky in feathers,
wings like hills undulating in earthquake–
broad, liquid, generous,
a strength and self-possession of mountains.
Excitement, a sparkling water spring,
surfaces with their arrival.
Lifting my eyes to greet them,
my heart fills,
and I lower forehead to Earth.
06 Monday Feb 2023
Mud’s come
but you wouldn’t know it
until your foot is three inches deep.
Or, god forbid, your tire by far more.
That’s the thing about this place–
dry as the brown cracked skin lining the arroyos
but a certain season arrives
and the steady, hard, rocky road you’ve trusted
decides to gulp you and whatever force is moving you along
straight into its earthen gullet.
I can understand that kind of gluttony.
Maybe it’s best I slow down and prison-break my shoe.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 