05 Monday May 2025
Bees have buried themselves
in crab apple’s blooms,
hummingbird launches skyward,
chattily, all the frills of mating on display.
Stripey-legged bobcat’s ghostly moves
stitch the garden knoll
while anise hyssop digs into her new home
and calendula flowers at hollyhock’s feet.
Everybody’s humming their song…
26 Saturday Apr 2025
The Mountain meets the clouds,
the Mountain stands on the other side
of the world.
Moving your feet, left
then right,
muscles flex, breath rushes in
then out..
you are fire,
heart pumping,
you are water,
blood rivering through,
you are air,
lungs bellowing,
you are earth,
bones holding, levering, building.
Shoes crease, then crack,
soon tear,
body aches,
mind strains.
You can journey to the Mountain
on two feet, on all fours, on belly
with hands clawing along.
You can also sit–
the depths required, the same–
whatever territory that needs be traversed
travels with you,
rests with you,
sleeps within you,
requires the all of you.
Awake.
The Mountain is close at hand.
04 Friday Apr 2025
How tangled we are
in the journey back to God,
the ever-winding, no two ways the same,
trial and error, washing the mirrors
of our own perceptions, struggles and joys of it.
But your way and my way, they quiver the web,
shimmer the web of which all
is part.
My awakening is your awakening
and back again,
waves of the One ocean
mothering every being, each singular thing,
into itself
again.
Nature recognizing its true nature,
life falling into love
with Life.
Here we are,
discovering what never
wasn’t there.
How funny.
02 Wednesday Apr 2025
I begin now,
and now,
now.
I am born here,
in this,
as this,
through that.
How many times can a person be born
in a single lifetime?
Infinite births.
Unending new; we are
Creation
always attending
to the delicious upwelling
of awareness.
Ditching the stories, clearing debris
of mind
by arriving
in this eternal moment.
Just words–
meaningless–
. . . until Lived.
28 Friday Mar 2025
Posted in poetry
≈ Comments Off on Dead calm
Lost while the green ones grow,
inches shrinking daily between ground and raining sky.
I’ve set down a reasonable life
for something deemed
unacceptable.
The unguessable carving
of my river’s path.
The pressures out there
and what a life is to look like–
meaningless.
Singular urges toward Yes
are the winds at my back, yet
this is dead calm,
throwing me.
What next?
What now?
Planning might as well be building
with cracker crumbs.
So I stay, and sit, and waste the days
visited by wonderings
but, mostly, placing one foot ahead
of the other,
going no place.
Survival.
Is this it?
The doubting of an eddy.
Come next year, come next forty,
it will be revealed.
27 Thursday Mar 2025
Posted in poetry
≈ Comments Off on March
Cracking thunder in the night,
buds breaking
in short bursts of sun.
A bat swoops low overhead
as dawn still dawns.
The springfulness of robins,
a chorus encircling,
and ground squirrels surface, chirp-barking,
sprint across open earth.
Before yesterday’s strange storm–76 degrees–
sap in bodies,
in tree, in human,
was already running hard.
Staying here, leaving here,
no clear way forms..
months in, I am swinging in a swing
straight over the high lip
of the edge.
21 Friday Mar 2025
Shake the tree of ancestors down,
down low in the roots,
shake the earth holding old stories
together.
I shake, shake–
Wake,
Wake up!
This handoff of poison chain-filling my heart,
hindering my body,
take it, claim it, you men,
you women, you hidden, you reviled,
you celebrated and lauded,
the claiming is now, is yours.
I’ve given nearly half a century to the unmaking
and now is the return.
Wake,
Wake up!
Rattle the tree yourselves and we’ll all reclaim,
liberate our souls back and back and back,
seeing the parts each have played, taking account,
learning the stock
of which we come.
Destroy the sickening story–
look around at the shattering, the cruelty,
division, violence–
the story did this.
Break it. Set it free. Kiss it, bow to it,
laugh as we all place it on the waves of great mother
Ocean, Her arms open and generous breasts
waiting.
She has waited eons for this. Give it
to Her.
The wounded ones return to primal waters,
freed, Reborn, brought home
into swirling creation,
compassion,
divine pilgrimage upon the greening surface
of this sensuous, generous Mother Earth
who gives, unendingly gives.
The story no longer burdens, we
are free.
Infinite gifts spring forth.
The turning.
12 Wednesday Mar 2025
Time is a not-knowing.
Life flow.
Infinite creative arising;
Step in
to where you can’t not be.
Awareness will return you there.
Here we are, within continent-birthing
and crumbling upheaval–
crashing edges, sudden limits, tighter twists,
unleashings,
every corner a blind turn.
So where do we go?
No place but here. This moment.
And when the lead line of anxiety
rockets out past our knowing,
we nod kindly, gather it home–
to breath, scent, pulse, wind, ground–
gently pulling back our reach,
that which takes us out past ourselves,
tipping us
away
from what is true.
Be loyal to this,
this,
this.
It is All.
06 Thursday Mar 2025
Sun vacates frost from its bed atop the roof,
deer, a chain of three, run through the trees,
one..then another..and another, limping,
in her way, behind.
Heat warms the room, click on,
click off, and trucks low
along the river rumble, rumble.
If the Spanish guitar stops sounding,
am I still here?
Can’t say it matters,
the castanets, listen to those castanets play…
21 Friday Feb 2025
A sister dies,
and in morning
the robin atop a bare-limbed tree sings,
and sings,
bold rusty breast full toward sunrise.
Frost clings to windows,
the fuzzy round-leafed plant beside the door,
and plans.
Nothing moves.
Arranging a future, an impossibility,
a flourish at the end of a dance
not being danced.
Coffee, a book, clean water,
a quiet night,
follow the small blessings.
They are, really, thousands of rocky miles
from small,
tall as the crown of a tree attracting music
to the cold, restful,
fading dark.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 