for Kyra
She faced, for an hour, a mountain lion.
She made noise. She spoke to it.
Eventually she sang to it.
Today, I return to the place where
my friend learned that just because
something can kill you doesn’t mean it will.
Eventually, the cancer did take her.
It’s true. But first she lived with it.
For years. First she played cello,
belly danced, snuggled with cats
and climbed with goats. First she sat
with me on the couch and giggled
and snuggled and read. First she knit
me a deep red shawl because I’m afraid of red.
First we sat by the river and made daisy chains
for each other’s long dark hair.
It sounds so improbable, but she met
the great cat and the cancer and her life
and her friends in the same great way—
with gentleness. She carried
a big stick not to swing but to pull
through the brush to make music.
She was a listener, a walker, a maker,
a lover of life. It sounds so improbable,
but she valued kindness above all else.
In the end, the mountain lion, after letting
my friend know full well she’d been seen,
it folded its ears and walked away.
In the end, the cancer traveled to her bones.
In the end, my friend will be known
for her gentleness, for how the tenderest touch,
the smallest note of love, the one most honest word
is the best way to make the whole world lean in.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged friendship, gentleness, kindness, Kyra Kopestonksky | Leave a Comment »
with gratefulness for all the bees
When you are soft, when you lay bare
your innerness and unfold your layers
for the world like a voluptuous, purpling
O’Keefe iris, it is true, there will be some
so threatened by your opening they will attack,
will sow fear and hatred into the warm field
of the gentle night. When it happens, may you
be surprised by how others rise to protect you
like a humming, swarming swirl of bees
that baptize the air with a wild and fierce
aliveness, a rousing acrobatic vocalizing
that shields you from that which would trample
you or cut you down. May you be astonished
by the power of the hive as they surround you.
Even as fear ripples through you, may you
be so enthralled by the buzz of their joy
that you don’t snap shut like a fist, like a trap.
And in honor of the gift you’ve received,
the gift of belonging, may you stay open.
May you be so stunned with gratefulness
that every word that falls from your mouth
tastes of truth, raw praise and dark, secret honey.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bees, flower, gratefulness, heckling, honoring, performance, safety, vulnerability | 2 Comments »
for Kayleen Asbo
In those days when I was terribly raw,
my friend would make mandalas
out of petals and sticks, pinecones and rocks,
sometimes shells, sometimes leaves.
She’d send a photo and a note
to say she was thinking of me.
I still marvel at how, of the thousands of choices
she made on any given day, she chose to spend time
sending love to me. How simple the act, really.
A smattering of acorns shaped into a circle
with some leaves arranged in the center.
Now I trust even the humblest, most ephemeral act,
when motivated by love, has the power
to reach through the years. Now I trust
I am made of thousands of acts of kindness,
most of them small. I can’t touch where they live
in my body, some I have even forgotten,
but to this day I am made of them all.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged care, Kayleen Asbo, kindness, making, mandala, small acts | 1 Comment »
The weather changes the beans,
Svetlana tells me as we sit in her home.
I sip the coffee she’s made me,
a blend she and her partner created
from five different beans that they roast
themselves. She can taste in her cup
whether the growing season was rainy
or dry. Everything changes everything.
No detail too small to link us to the world
of the real, to help us remember who we are.
I am thinking of the piano player
today in Santa Fe. As her hands
flew across the keys, passionate
and precise, it was the way she moved
her eyebrows that stirred me,
her utter commitment and wonder
expressed in a single arch or furrow,
lift or frown. I am thinking of how
my friends Don and Mindy have written
the word wisdum on the wall in their home,
and how all day I have giggled about it.
They can seem so trifling, the details
that capture us, claim us, rearrange us.
I once thought redemption was something grand.
Something costly. Unlikely. Now I believe
the lost pieces of ourselves can, in part, be
recovered through noticing the smallest of things—
the raising of a brow, a handwritten word,
the treble notes in a roasted coffee bean.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged coffee, details, music, noticing, small things, travel | 4 Comments »
After I drove six hours
she welcomed me at the door
of her home
with a pair of slippers
and a glass of water—
there are many languages
I want to learn to speak fluently.
Kindness, most of all.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged hospitality, kindness, language, travel | 1 Comment »
I was sitting beside my mother on the couch,
knitting a blanket for my girl. My mother held
the yarn in her lap, a cloud of muted pinks.
Outside, the tall dry grasses weaved
in golden evening light. A Western Warbling Vireo
rambled on in its jumbled, warbly way. Mom spoke
of her plans for dinner the next night
and I knit two, purled six, knit two, purled six.
She guided the soft wool through her fingers,
keeping just the right amount of slack. I felt
such a tide of love for her. Wanted to tell her
I’m sorry for every time I’ve been hardened,
every time I’ve pushed her away instead
of pulling her close. I wanted to whisper
the love beyond words, some sentence true
as the sweetness I felt today sitting beside her
in the sun in the grass while we waited
for a Belted Kingfisher or Northern Yellow Warbler
to fly across the pond. But to name a feeling is so
much harder than naming a bird. So when the row
was done, I rested my head on her shoulder, closed
my eyes and nuzzled in. There was only softness
in me then. I’d like to think she translated what
I meant. Just as I knew what she was saying to me
with each length of unspooling yarn: I know
how you love me. I know your heart. I love you, too,
my girl. By the time we rose, we were held
by the dark. Even the swallows were quiet.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged birds, conversation, daughter, forgiveness, knitting, love, mother, naming | 1 Comment »
With a white plastic five-gallon bucket
as a stool, she sits in the middle
of my garden’s gravel path and wrestles
the long notched rod through the stones.
She moves her arm slowly,
her back hunched over her task.
I see in her body her father’s body,
how he, too, would toil in the gardens
of others for hours, tool in hand, patient
and thorough. I watch as mom dangles
a slender white root in the air
to marvel at its twisted length.
I hear her triumphant ha!
as she adds it to the small but
growing pile of roots and leaves.
The bindweed will grow back
with admirable speed, but she makes
an enduring mark—not in the rows,
but in the heart of this daughter,
teaching me again how it is we find joy
offering ourselves in service to each other.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bindweed, legacy, mother, service, weeding | Leave a Comment »
How gently I move the volunteer sprouts
out of the potato bed and into another row,
careful to gather the fragile roots with a bit
of damp dirt, tamping lightly around the slender stem.
How fragile it all can be. I think of how tenderly
this morning my husband touched my face,
as if too well aware of how a single moment
can change everything. We folded
into each other then like two petals
of a single flower. In the garden,
I stare at the spindly transplants,
a new row of tiny, rounded green leaves.
A delicate ache rises in me, charged with
love for the spare beauty of what is here
and an awareness of how the simplest scrape
can make a whole world disappear.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged fragility, garden, love, marriage | 1 Comment »
It’s because to try to describe this feeling is
to render it instantly dull, flat.
It’s like when you see a rock on the bottom
of the river—all shimmering and bright—
but the moment you bring it to the air
to share it, what seemed precious
becomes cloudy, mundane, a dumb lump,
the stuff of filler in a suburban parking lot.
And so you learn to be quiet, to let your syllables
float away like dry leaves. What is heaviest
stays. Does not wash away. Is polished by friction, years.
Sometimes you meet others in the river. What shines
shines. Together you stare, stunned by the damn beauty.
Maybe you hold hands. Watch the light as it plays.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged connection, grief, ineffable, language, paradox, silence | 4 Comments »