Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cat, meditation, poem, poetry, touch on September 13, 2017| 2 Comments »
The cat does not care that I’m meditating.
She cares that I am warm and seated and still.
I pretend that I am ignoring her and notice
when I pretend not to notice I am pretending.
She settles in my lap. I notice how
this act seems to involve the whole world.
All day, I consider how powerful an act
to touch someone. how even the sky leans in.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anger, forgiveness, Inuit, poem, poetry, walking on September 12, 2017| 89 Comments »
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be angry.
Anger seems reasonable. But perhaps
we will do what I’ve heard the Inuit do—
spend the emotion on walking, walk a line
until all the anger has left our bodies.
The moment the Inuit notice the anger is gone,
replaced, perhaps, by sadness or fear,
compassion or just a quietness,
they mark that spot with an object
to show the extent of their anger.
And perhaps, if we’re lucky, when we walk
this way, it will be a long enough walk
that we arrive at each other’s doors,
object in hand, and when the object
leaves our grip, we’ll be able to use our hands
to greet each other, touch each other’s faces,
point to the horizon to all the other places
we might choose to walk now together.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged loving, mothering, poem, poetry, September 11 on September 11, 2017| 5 Comments »
This morning, like every morning,
his mother rises with her heart open.
Somehow, overnight, it has healed.
She is not like the paper doll
that, when wrinkled by callousness,
will not ever return to its former shape.
No, somehow the heart not only heals,
it grows bigger—some miracle she cannot
understand. She thinks back
to the day he was born, the day
the towers fell. As she went into labor,
she thought no, not today, no not today,
until some strange grace slipped into her
and spoke the new words,
of course today, of course today.
How beautifully, how forcefully
love insists on itself. How astonishing,
the daily miracle that leads us
again to each other.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, jackson pollock, poem, poetry on September 11, 2017| 4 Comments »
Let me be the canvas, then,
and you be Jackson Pollock—
be the wild one, the one
who burns, the one who
never sleeps and never yawns,
the one who steals the sun
and gives it to me.
Be the one who transforms me
again and again with colors,
ardent and avid and mad—
no, let me be the canvas,
and let life be the painter,
and you, you be the paint.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, poem, poetry, saying yes to the world as it is on September 9, 2017| 4 Comments »
We stand in the field.
I swallow any words
that might try to fix things.
Some things cannot be fixed.
Instead, we say the words
that make us weep.
Grief stands with us then,
and holds us
with absolute tenderness,
its arms impossibly kind.
It starts to rain.
We do not move to leave.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fool, poem, poetry, what is living this life on September 8, 2017| Leave a Comment »
The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.
—Epicurus
Then let me be the other kind of fool,
the fool who lives too much,
the fool who jumps in
before the water is in the pool
and ends up running instead
of treading water,
the fool who loves wholly before
she is certain that her heart will not break.
Let me be the fool who wakes
at 5:30 to start the day in the generous dark
and goes to sleep after midnight
so as to play with all the shades of the day.
Let other fools be the infinite planners,
the perfection engineers, and let me
be the fool who leaves the house
in such enthusiasm to play
that I leave behind the things I think I need.
It is foolish, perhaps, to wish
to be a fool. Yes, just be. Just be.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cleanliness, koan, poem, poetry, spilling, The Gateless Gate on September 7, 2017| Leave a Comment »
I inadvertently topple the vase,
the water more pouring than dripping
from counter to floor,
and I think of Isan, the lowly cook
in the koan. As the story goes,
the Zen master fills a vase
with water, then asks his disciples,
“Who can tell me what this is
without naming it?”
The senior disciple says,
“No one can call it a wooden shoe.”
But Isan, he walks over
to the vase and kicks it
so that it falls over and the contents spill.
The master smiles.
Standing now, with the sponge
in my hand, I know I am too practical
to have done what Isan did.
I wouldn’t want to clean it up,
nor would I want anyone else
to have to clean up my mess.
I wonder, if, without having
knocked over my own vase,
I would have ever considered
my own answer to the master:
I would walk to the garden
and return with a small bouquet
of calendula, salvia, cosmos and thyme,
then arrange the cut flowers
in the water in the vase.
Perhaps they are gifts,
these mistakes—this knocking over
of things and cleaning them up—
how it makes the old lessons
come home. Isn’t it like me
to want to keep things beautiful and clean?
How I honor old Isan, his understanding
that the truth cannot be held.
I honor the spilling, the infinite spilling,
even now as I finish wiping up the spill,
then rearranging in my own small vase,
now refilled, the scattered calendula,
salvia, cosmos and thyme.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cafe dawn, poetry reading, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, salida on September 6, 2017| 2 Comments »
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged marigolds, poem, poetry, seeds, sowing on September 6, 2017| 2 Comments »
I can’t wait until they die
my daughter says to the marigolds,
a wild joy grows on her face,
because then, she says,
I can pull them apart
and spread seeds
all over the place.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dying, grass, poem, poetry, shavasana, yoga on September 5, 2017| 2 Comments »
Once again, the field rehearses how to die.
Some of the grass turns golden first. Some
simply fades into brown. Just this morning,
I, too, lay in corpse pose, practicing
how to let myself be totally held by the earth
without striving, how to meet the day
without rushing off to do the next necessary
or beautiful thing. Soon, the grass will bend
or break, molder or disintegrate. Every year,
the same lesson in how to join
the darkness, how to be unmade, how quietly
we might lean into the uncertainty
of whatever comes next.