Because touch is one way we offer praise,
this morning I touch my ears
to the see-sawing song of birds
in the tree beside me. I still myself
to focus on their song, and they stop
singing, as if to tease. I touch my ears
to the silence where the song is not.
Touch the warm tones of wind chimes
stirred by a breeze I barely feel.
Touch the hum of the cars
and the growl of a motorcycle I’d rather
shut out. I think of how my grandmother
used grass, even weeds in her flower arrangements.
She taught me you could make anything beautiful.
I try to stop slandering the traffic noise
and gather it into an audible bouquet complete
with birds, chimes, silence, my breath.
How to make the unwelcome welcome?
How to hold tension in ways that compliment?
All morning, all day, I practice opening
to what isn’t easy to love. I make a vase
of the moment. Add all the sound that’s here.
So much I’d rather not to listen to.
I think of my grandmother. I try to find
new ways to hear.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bouquet, garden, grandmother, sound | 2 Comments »
I imagined every step a step toward integrity,
toward justice. Toward language that respects
diversity. Every step a step toward equality. Truth.
I imagined every step one step closer to peace
in our country, toward peace in the world.
I am old enough to not believe in arrivals,
I am fool enough to believe in love.
I am human enough to believe in community.
I am scientist enough to know we need each other.
Perhaps some part of me wondered what good it did
for a few hundred people in a remote mountain town
to walk together a few blocks, chanting, then walk
back to the courthouse again, but tonight, in my body,
I feel it, the trust in humanity that rises when I think
of how we gathered and drummed and believed
in what our country can be. My heart beats
a new rhythm in time with belonging.
“This is what democracy looks like.”
Tonight, after we’ve all gone home,
I know we’re all still marching.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged community, democracy, integrity, march, politics, protest | 12 Comments »
In soil not yet worked this spring,
two perfect rows of parsley emerge
in a curly leafed celebration of green,
vestiges from last year’s planting.
Where is not garden?
Good hands, what will you do
with this new trust rising
out of what looked like failure?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged failure, garden, parsley, patience, seeds, trust | 6 Comments »
Today, for a time, I am more red rock cliff than river.
I sit and do not do.
Perhaps some part of me crumbles.
I do not resist the crumbling.
I do not resist stillness.
I am weary of resisting.
So weary that today
I promised myself
I would make time for nothingness.
What pleasure I found in not rushing,
not rising, not streaming, not traveling to,
not coming from.
Why have I put off, again and again,
the chance to be intimate
with nothing?
Yesterday, when I heard myself
tell a friend my experience of nothing
is what I think God is,
then I wondered why I fill my hours
with so much everything?
So today I cliff. I rock wall.
I sandstone. I canyon.
I sit still and undo
and meet the great nothing
that holds up everything.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged canyon, cliff, nature, not doing, nothing, stillnes | 10 Comments »
While all around us the world rushes by,
our conversation becomes a wide flat rock
in the midst of the river where we can rest
long enough to see not everything
is snarl and torrent, rapid and rush.
See how the heron lands in the eddy,
how soft moss grows on rocks in the shade.
Holding up all the tumult, the peaceful.
At the edges of chaos, the beautiful.
This is why, when I call you in the middle
of the day and you answer, I almost cry.
Because the timbre of your voice is enough
to land me. I lie on the solid rock of our talk.
I rest there long enough for my own pulse
to slow, long enough dangle my ankle
into the current and think, yes,
I can swim again.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged connection, conversation, friendship, phone call, refuge, respite, rest, river | 4 Comments »
Wini weeps as she tells me “everyone is so broken,”
and a small shrine appears in the tear on her cheek.
I kneel inside it as it slips to her chin.
My throat clenches, my own heart widens,
enlivened by how deeply Wini cares,
and somehow her heartache begins to mend
my own grief for this cruel and callous world.
More than any beauty. More than the uplifting song
of the red wing black bird trilling through the open window.
More than the scent of basil and lemon.
More than the dark silhouette of two herons winging
through the nectarine sunset. Wini’s tears heal me.
Shared ache becomes its own medicine.
No. Not the ache. The medicine is in the love that fuels
the ache. It feels so right, I forget to wish it didn’t hurt.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged brokenness, connection, friendship, healing, heartache, medicine, trust | 4 Comments »
Ask a surgeon if a millimeter matters.
how the smallest measure marks
the difference between a heartbeat
and a silence that lasts forever.
I’ve seen you, poet, take joy in ambiguity,
in word bending, word twisting, word play.
“So many ways to do it right,” you say.
What if, for a day, you tried to speak
as impeccably as I measure?
What would be clearer? What
would be lost? What if you knew
only the most precise word
could save another’s light? Or your own?
You know it’s true because
words have saved you—
Think of Rilke. Neruda. Dickinson. Frost.
Precision matters. In poetry, too.
Even what’s free has a cost.
Oh friends, this poem that began just playing with metaphor got me really thinking… I love the way poems help us challenge what we think we know.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ambiguity, ars poetica, certainty, ruler | 5 Comments »
She wanted a little room for thinking.
With no room available,
she settled for a chair.
She sat there.
To anyone else, it might have looked
as if nothing was happening.
Inside her, whole foundations
were crumbling. Maps were
unmapping. Paths
were unpathing. A tornado
of doubt did its perfect work.
Somewhere there was light.
No one else could see the rubble
rising all around her.
Also in that wreckage,
her belief in fixing.
God, she was raw.
Now, now
there was room.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged change, inner landscape, shift, spaciousness | 4 Comments »
To stay open
is what I wanted.
Though winter and war
have taught me
the importance of refuge.
Even then, like a wild rabbit
that is no less soft
and no less gentle
inside its dark burrow,
the heart in its shelter
finds ways to stay open,
if not to the world,
at least to whatever
it is that shines
through the self,
and the deep remove
becomes a chance
to steep in tenderness
before re-emerging again
into the world
with all its threats
and dangers,
with all its green
and radiant beauty.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged heart, opening, rabbit, refuge, shelter | 4 Comments »
It was exactly 20 years ago on the Spring Equinox in 2006 that I began a daily poem practice. On that day, I committed to write a poem a day for 30 days. I thought that sounded impossible. But now it is over 7,300 days later. And the daily practice has completely changed everything about how I meet the world. Thank you for joining me in this daily practice … I’m so grateful you’re here seeing what happens next with me!
Posted in Uncategorized | 44 Comments »