For an hour I held
the new child in my arms,
watched her eyes flutter
open and closed and open
and closed again, held
her through the jolt
of her startle reflex,
held her as she resettled
into quiet contentment
in the unfamiliar body.
The hands know what
the mind cannot fathom.
Just two days ago, I sat
beside an old man
with bright eyes and
a thick German accent.
He told me, Most people
don’t know how wonderful
they are. My whole body
startled at his words,
aware of all the insecurity
and worry I carry, then
softened, softened, as if I, too,
were newly born, learning
for the first time
what it means to be
wonderful.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged baby, conversation, newborn, seeing the self, wonder | 4 Comments »
Somewhere, Warren writes me in his letter,
somewhere right now the Lutherans
are singing “For the Beauty of the Earth,”
and though I am sitting on a plane as I read his words,
I am standing in the grand auditorium
with the other first sopranos in All State Choir
and our voices soar and build and rise
as the tenors and altos swell beneath us
and we weave a trill through the height
of a phrase, and my whole body has bloomed
into praise on that stage and I,
for the first time, am no longer singer
but song. Now, almost forty years later
all I have to do is trace that moment
with the softest fingers of memory and
I’m weeping in 10B, soggy with old ecstasy.
How is it such power was stored somewhere
in my cells, enough to take me from zero to puddle
in two seconds flat, and how much more
latent beauty is hiding inside this aging vessel
somewhere beneath old TV jingles and daily drivel
and heartbreaking news and yellowed layers of guilt
just waiting for me to touch it?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged aging, memory, singing | 7 Comments »
pouring time
into the shape of this question—
how do I serve life?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged devotion, serving, time | Leave a Comment »
he’s a slot canyon
just wanting to hold things close—
then, there’s all that rain
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged canyon, disaster, flash flood, flood, rain | 2 Comments »
I sat for hours in concourse A,
the plane delayed, delayed again,
surrounded by a young mother
with three hungry children and two
elderly couples who played endless
rounds of go fish and men in dark suits
on their cell phones and girls filming
dances for TikTok, when I looked up
and saw out the window a double rainbow,
ridiculously pretty against the slate sky,
and not wanting to be alone in my joy,
I touched the arm of the boy beside me
and he leaped up and ran to the window,
and all of us stopped to point or smile
or make jokes about pots of gold.
We will never see each other again,
but for a moment, we stood together
at the edge of delight, and the rainbows,
they just kept getting brighter, and I thought
it couldn’t possibly get any more lovely.
And the boy smiled at me. And then it did.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged airport, beauty, rainbow, strangers, travel | 8 Comments »
hoping it finds me
hiding in the shadow of the blue spruce
that glorious half-moon
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged moon, play | 4 Comments »
Alone, I am too small to meet
the great weight of your pain.
Loving, I want to turn toward you.
Aching, I want to turn away.
But yesterday I rested for a time
on a wide gray rock in an alpine cirque.
In my stillness I felt how surely
I was cradled by the world so much
vaster than I. There, surrounded
by greatness, I invited your pain
into my heart and held you there in me.
I breathed in your ache, my ache,
and felt us both surrounded
by vast fields of wildflowers,
by the deep green shoulders
of sheer gray cliffs. I envisioned
I was breathing out love, but more truly,
I was being breathed by the mountain,
or perhaps by life itself.
The weight of the pain was no less,
but I knew it as a blessing,
a gravitational force magnetizing you and me.
What a gift to hold the weight together,
to know in my whole being
how miraculously we are held.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged breathing, friendship, holding, mountain, tonglen | 2 Comments »
after Jane Hirshfield
Oh look, I say to the cat
You have a soup belly.
I jiggle and wiggle her soft, floppy middle.
She does not love it.
I get it, I say to her. Sometimes
I don’t want to be touched either.
More truly, I do want to be touched,
but only in the way I want to be touched.
The cat holds her paws midair, frozen there,
as if not yet sure if to attack or relax.
She chooses relax. I choose
to massage between her ears.
She nuzzles her small skull into my palm.
I know, I say to the cat. I miss her, too.
We both know she’d rather be with my daughter.
We both feel the absence here.
We sit a long time like this, the cat nuzzling,
me dragging my fingertips forward and back,
forward and back.
With her body, she shows me
just where and how much to touch her.
When I move to rise, she lashes out with a claw
to keep me in place beside her.
In this way, I study my life.
How to hold. How to let go.
Loneliness wears a haunting perfume,
resinous, sweet, full of laughter
and silence. What a gift, I say to the cat,
to miss her together.
I cross the room. The cat follows to where I sit next.
Later, she leads me to her bowl. I follow.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cat, connection, daughter, loneliness, pet, touch | 4 Comments »
Starting here, I want to remember
the spaciousness that emerges in me
when my heart knows itself as an expression
of the one great heart. In those moments,
when the I slips away and the we is all,
when love is unbound from the walls
of my chest and expands across mountains
and deserts and oceans and returns
with the peaks and tide in each breath,
then the rightest parts of my being unclench
themselves, as if all the bars of the inner prison
dissolve and what’s left is freedom
to love beyond judgment, beyond should
and should not, beyond how my one small heart
is capable of loving. I remember the first time
I felt love carry me through a moment
I knew I could not meet alone. Since that time,
I am learning to trust that the heart of all hearts
can rise up in any moment to illumine the path
I do not yet see is possible. Since that time,
I am still surprised but not surprised when
the spaciousness opens me again
to loving what feels impossible to love.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged loss of the separate self, love, spaciousness, surrender | Leave a Comment »
Already the river is lighter in color,
less brown, less turbid, more
translucent. Just yesterday
the currents were thick with mud
and logs, needles and sticks
and bits of once-living debris.
Now that the furious flood has lost
its force, the gravel and sand
have begun their settling.
Whatever was floating now rests
on the banks and all that is left
suspended in the water
is what is most fine.
Soon, even that will sink
and the water will be clear again.
I, too, have felt the gift of slowing,
how it invites a sedimentation
of all I try to carry—the silt of my stories,
the muck of the world.
Like a river, the more calm I am,
the more clear I can become.
No magic, just a matter of physics.
How natural it is, the clearing.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged clearing, river, slowness | 4 Comments »