A welcoming

30 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by in approaching, grace, motion, poems, poetry, water

≈ Comments Off on A welcoming

When was the last time

someone kissed tears from your eyes?

Perhaps never.

Or, maybe, a memory comes of what used to be.

Neither matter, for there is more being asked.

A calling. A welcoming.

Have you ever wished to lower your own lips

to those salty waters?

A writing arrived today about fixing our brokenness.

I armored up at the thought.

How misguided a notion, this fixing. And

truly, how impossible.

Our treasures rest there, pulling us

gently

towards grace.

It’s all in how we approach.

Be kind.

From here

19 Monday Jul 2021

Posted by in change, poems, poetry

≈ Comments Off on From here

A gull squawk and bristle of wind enter the room,

I’m unsure how to wake to this day.

With the candle flicker and race of hummingbirds

a bigger drumbeat of my heart joins in.

It has changed.

Heart rhythm deepens in my ears now

and tangles with the low vibration of traffic.

There’s no telling the rivers apart.

Strange.

In this turning,

listening and sensing, borders braiding,

resting a few minutes more,

I wonder,

where might we be going together from here…

All the sense in the world

18 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by in learning, poems, poetry, return, unlearning, water, wind

≈ Comments Off on All the sense in the world

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.

The unanswerable

16 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by in approaching, movement, poems, poetry, still, transition

≈ Comments Off on The unanswerable

How do you prepare for something

that can’t be prepared for?

How do you lighten your load knowing

what comes next requires lightness yet

her terrain, her ways,

are utterly unknown?

A voice calls down lengthy corridors,

twisting the unremitting labyrinth,

sound bouncing, all warps and echoes and dives–

who raises it may be behind, ahead..

Impossible to say.

So you must sit where you are,

without guidance or plan,

steeping in agitation, discomfort, a readiness to go,

still,

while the journey approaching may be next week

or a year from now.

Alas, where you are is what you must be.

And to what will that bring you?

Wah, there rests the unanswerable.

The road back

13 Tuesday Jul 2021

Posted by in poems, poetry, return, the road

≈ Comments Off on The road back

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.

Devotedly

12 Monday Jul 2021

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

≈ Comments Off on Devotedly

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.

When you think you are failed

11 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by in adventure, becoming, companion, devotion, fear, nature, poems, poetry, water, words

≈ Comments Off on When you think you are failed

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?

Shining the dull parts

27 Sunday Jun 2021

Posted by in poems, poetry, release, song, water, wind

≈ Comments Off on Shining the dull parts

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.

The River

25 Friday Jun 2021

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

≈ Comments Off on The River

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…