When you think you are failed

11 Sunday Jul 2021

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

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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

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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

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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…

At no distance at all

24 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by in abundance, beauty, home, learning, nature, poems, poetry, welcoming

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Today is the wagging tail of a red squirrel,

and an open door.

It doesn’t close now, outside being home,

inside being a storage place.

Yesterday two hummingbirds chased hawk,

funny youngster learning her way,

an iridescent green-backed fly sat still

at the center of a jasmine flower

and I laughed in the toppled, strong arms of a ten year old,

who pushes me always to the floor loving

every taboo body part and happening of hers

as she, too, learns her way.

In the tumbly, bumbly flight lessons

of the two towhees

I witness a desire to enter through the propped door

after hopping the limits of the garden perimeter,

speaking confusion and discovery.

Here, together, the sky-reaching cypresses,

the eucalyptus bird hotel

and the sweeping vultures,

all of us, we are finding our way;

some heavier with faith and knowing

bring needed weight into the feet of those

easily tousled by winds blowing hard.

What must it be to be full

each day

with relation, within the great motions,

settled during movement

and drinking in the finite, ever-renewing Beauty

at no distance at all to a single one of us?

Spirit joins in

19 Saturday Jun 2021

Posted by in aging, change, learning, movement, poems, poetry, prayer, water

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In the pain of remembering

body and mind hurt

but I look to the Crow on the wire

and hear Hummingbird marble singing

above the fence.

I think in this knitted brow sometimes

tissues rearrange–slow motion, soft earthquakes

moving tiny body mountains towards

a little more soul food, a morsel for the ant,

a morsel for me.

Humanness is a tanglement,

confusion a rushing river thick.

Taming forces in an undoing of habit

I drop below the river top

and listen

to deeper music that dances along

within a different rhythm,

one at which the learning turns gently

and Spirit joins in.

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…

Without reserve

28 Friday May 2021

Posted by in father, honoring, learning, Loss, movement, pain, poems, poetry, stillness

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My father,

he was of the sort willing

and able

to kick me out of the family.

His threat came three times.

Not once, or, oops, twice,

but three times that cruelty was uttered, even written,

knives thrown not in spirit alone, but in substance:

To a child that is survival at stake.

And belonging.

And…so much and…

My hands tremble and my heart pounds with

the memory of it.

I grieve for her, the young one who had to stand there

and take it.

He forgot. I couldn’t.

His violence lives in me. I work with the wounds

daily.

What he was never given he could not give.

What I was never given, I intend to learn.

Some days it is a story, a living aspect

of history.

Other days I must rise up, in frightened fury,

to say no.

Absolutely not.

What family there is that is mine,

wherever they be,

their fullness of heart and vision and being

reside within and around me,

and my hands and heart can return the gifts

I have been given

in stillness and

without reserve.

Long missed and calling

24 Monday May 2021

Posted by in change, land, movement, nature, night, poems, poetry, story

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Today, finally, I can sit in the sun

and let tears run their river course down upon

this new place I call home.

Walnuts in my teeth and blueberries in my belly,

I’m meeting the many pincher bugs residing here,

the flies and bees, jays, roses, swallows and eucalyptus.

I awoke suddenly night before last

not knowing what hit me until my senses explained

skunk had a nocturnal exchange with an uninvited guest

and the room had filled with the intensity of her defense.

I understand.

At times I could lift my tail and release my own musk

if I had it.

And then the neighbor whose

sexual escapade she sustained for nine hours

straight

left me crooked and grumbly for, well,

hours more than that.

But the mission bells ring, the hills that held me as a child

hold me once again.

Much will come of this, here, together

with land that made me work to the distant edges

of my heart’s own end.

Stories and word shall find matter,

yes,

and maybe my heart can rest and open again

in the constant cricket song and salted wind

of ground long missed and calling.

Between prayers

23 Sunday May 2021

Posted by in abundance, aging, becoming, giving, growing, Infinite, land, learning, poems, poetry, prayer

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The fourth decade

walks me between prayers,

of one blinked forth twenty years ago,

a blessed ‘Fuck it’ rising from the earth

to cup and guide and split open, and

of another gathered in the thirties–simply

‘Thank you.’

With solid scaffolding of experience under me

I can walk with the first tucked in a back pocket,

the second, on more able days, held in heart,

and the infinite wanderings between

growing a garden of ripening fruits and blooming flowers

with seeds maturing slowly toward ground

rich with Life ready to receive them.

Light the flame

06 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by in companion, Fire, listen, poems, poetry, stillness, welcoming

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If your animal rhythm is faltering,

light the flame.

Light the flame at the altar.

Allow Her pulse to fish swim and bloom

back into skin, through muscle,

through lung;

that fur rises, ripples, musky and thick.

She contours your breath when breathing

can be forgotten.

Light the flame

sit

sniff;

Her rhythm returns to guide

along paths stony, unmarked

and yours,

to wander and learn

alone.