From sleep into waking

29 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in aging, approaching, community, devotion, digging, dreams, friends, Healing, honoring, poems, poetry, prayer, presence, weaving, welcoming, work

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A day arrives

during night dreaming

when you come to retrieve a child, an infant

in button-up full-blue onesie,

from a house expecting you

and, upon entry, you recognize the woman

whose house it is. She rises from a room sized table,

oblong, solid, warm and wooden. An enormous shined egg.

Around its edges sit monks, scholars, drummers–

elders all. It feels better than anything you’ve felt

in ages.

She not only welcomes you, while rising,

but asks you to stay.

Come join us.

She says that. . Come. Join us.

Somewhere, slung between infancy and elderhood, you stand,

at times barely, and then holy invitation is spoken,

warmly.

Keep hollowing out the space,

hallowing the place,

where the invitation can finally cross from sleep

into waking.

Opening the way

20 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by in new, poems, poetry

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Pot tipped on its side, dirt bits scattered,

monk man turned backwards, tilting away,

succulent rolled on pavement,

the one alive yet unplanted, no walls for its roots,

these greet me this windy, clear morning.

I suspect raccoon found the low bird bath

climbed on over and up

to wash–who knows what.

Funny,

since I’ve wondered about that nearly homeless plant

that keeps going

and thought I’d dig a hole for it once its neighbor

finished flowering.

Seems raccoon opened the way.

Righting things, welcoming them back, includes

reaching two fingers into less than dry soil

and joining the small green ones together.

Something new now can grow.

And that’s a promising start to a day.

Autumn

19 Sunday Sep 2021

Posted by in change, community, poems, poetry, water

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Today thanks also falls to the light;

Autumn light may be my favorite food.

Rain keeps trying to come. We’ve been without

the rains for far too long.

I can feel rain in the clouds, smell it,

though a little sideways.

The trees’ roots are hungry for it to fall.

They are far from alone.

The equinox approaches but, here,

Autumn stretches her paws in August. My heart feels

more full then, my bones begin to rest.

Maybe the big rabbit with wild eyes will come through

the fence again soon.

My bet is a different visitor will usher in

the first official days of the season.

Towards him

19 Sunday Sep 2021

Posted by in death, Hope, pain, poems, poetry, thanks

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Once there was a man

who stood tall at the head of the room

teaching numbers; he greeted us at the door

as we entered each day

and he called me Hope. But

it was longer and flowing and in

another language more musical.

He’d switched an a to an e in there,

making it a song closer to my birth name, somehow.

No one had ever called me Hope, only him. And,

truth be, it wasn’t exactly hope, but a name somewhere between

mine and more.

Between what is and what becomes, approaching without end.

Something between.

The man who taught numbers, years after I knew him,

he killed himself. The exact place where always now

enfolds him.

The man who called out Hope,

his pain outlived him.

My tears and thanks fall towards him today.

No one ever said

09 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by in Loss, poems, poetry

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No one ever said,

Loss will remake you.

Again and again.

Loss will nearly kill you. More than once.

Ground down, burned to ash, you will have to sift through

the grit

for your own bones.

How are we to know?

The drumbeat death cry of what you hold to most dearly,

will resound out of your heart, out from your thrown open jaw,

that great river mouth of grief,

echo against lines of sinew, ripple not your blood only

but others’: Plants may bow,

may sneeze an offering of recognition and understanding.

Owl and Hawk will fight over the same food.

Your movement will tighten and slow to drink that in.

A shudder will go through the house,

making sleep a jumbled memory.

Hundreds of crows will shake the air with their passing.

No one ever said.

How are we to know?

Loss will remake you.

Thank God.

Day enters

11 Wednesday Aug 2021

Posted by in community, dark, light, poems, poetry, prayer

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Day enters, the birds have yet to wake.

Outside, settling in beside stone and succulent,

greetings begin.

First, to the distant trees.

My, they have much to say

and they know what it is to hold it

in silence.

To the white faces of flowers, turned up

towards a sky leaning in,

I whisper hello.

Hummingbird swoops through the half-dark.

Surprising to see her beside me on a branch

this early.

Are you here for poetry?

It seems to be so.

Owl hasn’t stepped into dreaming,

and he calls, and calls, and calls…

A welcoming

30 Friday Jul 2021

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

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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

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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

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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.

The unanswerable

16 Friday Jul 2021

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

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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.