Any light I carry
is nothing I
have manufactured.
It’s entirely unearned.
It is easiest to notice
in the dark.
It cannot be faked.
Perhaps I wished
I could control it.
Instead, I marvel,
ask it, how
can I serve?
Archive for March, 2020
Sitting Quietly, Asked to Consider My Inner Light
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, light, service on March 15, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Tucking in my Daughter in the Time of Corona Virus
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, daughter, mom, parenting, story, wisdom on March 13, 2020| 6 Comments »
And because she is wise
in the ways the young are,
my daughter, frightened and weeping,
asked between sobs
for a happy story.
There are times when a story
is the best remedy—
not because it takes us away
from the truth but because
it leads us closer in.
I told her the story of her birth,
and we laughed until
it was my turn to cry as I realized
no matter how scary the world,
what a miracle, the birth of a child.
Then, as fear made a sneaky return,
we whispered a list of things we
were grateful for, falling asleep with these
words on our breaths: cats, books, rivers,
home, family, soft blankets, music.
Secret Agent Operation Love: Remedy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged operation love, secret agents of change on March 13, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Hi Secret Agent and Potential Secret Agents,
Rosemerry and Sherry invite you to participate in an important Secret Mission as part of Operation Love! Our emergency project is called “Remedy.”
There is a lot of fear and anxiety in the world right now, Secret Agents.
We need your love and kindness more than ever.
We’ll be going live in our Secret Agents Facebook group tomorrow afternoon (Saturday, March 14th!) at 1:15pm PDT/2:15pm MT/4:15pm EDT to reveal the weekend’s mission.
Please join us LIVE if you can; we’d love to see you and feel your stealthy, loving, ninja awesome agent energy while we are on live.
All you have to do is log into your Facebook account at the designated time and pop over to our Secret Agent group.
Here’s that Secret Agent page!
Keep refreshing the page if it is 1:15pm PDT/4:15pm EDT and you don’t see us. (Sometimes that ole refresh makes everything right again. Just like in life.)
However, if you’re out running errands, napping, playing games, or out planting seeds of kindness, that’s okay. You can watch the video any time tomorrow and then set forth on your spy mission. Just be sure to report back by the end of the day on Sunday.
You don’t wanna miss Operation Remedy because Rosemerry has a brand new beautiful poem to share with you. And we have a mission, should you choose to accept it.
Thank you for being a part of our world!
And — we thank you for being exactly who you are: phenomenal Secret Agents of Change with loving hearts.
What a difference you make.
We can be an antidote to fear.
We’re so excited to create mission of love with you this weekend!
With big, happy hugs from your spymasters,
Rosemerry and Sherry
P.S. Don’t forget to pop over to the Secret Agent Facebook Group when Rosemerry and Sherry go live at 1:15pm PDT/4:15pm EDT.
P.P.S. If you have friends whom you think would enjoy these kinds of missions, please have them sign up here: https://simplycelebrate.net/secret-agents-of-change. The more the merrier! We will notify everyone via email when the next Operation launches! Also, make sure you send them to our Facebook group if they want to join in this weekend’s LOVE!
P.P.P.S Kindness is no small thing. Never underestimate how important your single act of love can be.
💕 Stay connected! 💕
If you would like to know more about Sherry, her book Say It Now, and her coaching business, Simply Celebrate, please click here: https://simplycelebrate.net/
And if you would like to know more about Rosemerry, her books, her daily poems and her creative consulting practice, please click here: https://www.wordwoman.com/
Staying Home
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, fear, gratitude, perspective on March 12, 2020| 8 Comments »
And when fear comes to the door bringing flowers
acting as if it’s a friend,
it’s okay to not want to let it in.
It’s okay to lock the door—
it’ll make you feel as if you’re doing something.
Fear will enter anyway.
At least it won’t expect a hug.
It won’t wash its hands,
not even when you ask nicely.
And it is more contagious than any virus—
spreads without sneezes or coughs.
It won’t leave when you ask, but
there are ways to make it quieter—
like inviting a few others to join you,
preferably gratitude, compassion, love,
kindness, vulnerability. These friends
always come when asked, wearing
the loveliest perfume. They change
the conversation, the way lemon
and honey change the bitter tea.
They remind you who you are,
invite you to look out the window
and see how beautiful the world
when the shadows are long.
The Afternoon the World Health Organization Declared the Pandemic
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged avalanche, connection, Corona Virus on March 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »
That was the afternoon
we watched the avalanches—
dozens and dozens of them
flowing over the cliff bands.
How beautiful they were
from a distance—
bright falls of billowing snow.
They began as dark rumble,
then burst into plume, into rush.
Unstoppable they were.
Powerful. Inevitable.
Such a gift to feel humbled,
to exult in forces
greater than our own.
Later that night, reading
the tumbling graphs,
the sliding accounts,
the unforgiving reports,
I began to understand
the scale of the cliff.
And as everything
I thought I knew
slid over the escarpments
of comprehension,
how clear it all became.
What really matters.
How we’re all in this together.
The Great Beyond
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged loss of separate self, perspective, self on March 10, 2020| 2 Comments »
And once again the invitation
to see beyond the self—
the way water knows itself
not only as river and lake
but also as fern, as cloud, as cat.
Forgive me for believing
I end with this skin, these ideas,
these imaginings. Sometimes
I forget to choose vastness,
forget to know the self
as cliff, as maitake, as crumb.
How is it I so often miss the invitation?
How is it I overlook that I
am lemon, asteroid, wren?
Interview with Jane Hirshfield
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Book Review, ecology, Jane Hirshfield, ledger on March 10, 2020| 2 Comments »
What does one of the most brilliant and compassionate minds of our time have to say about human action/inaction and climate crisis? I got to interview Jane Hirshfield about her new book Ledger, a poetic and scientific account of the ecological reckoning we now face. Our conversation was published in The Open Notebook. Jane has been one of my heroes for twenty years, and now, after reading this book and getting the chance to converse, I respect her 9000 times more.
The Day after International Women’s Day I Think of My Mother
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, equality, international women's day, mother, women on March 9, 2020| Leave a Comment »
My mother did not forge tech innovation,
didn’t win Olympic medals, didn’t write
a textbook on equal rights.
But she did run for office. And won.
She coached the soccer team so girls could play.
At church, she led the people from the pew.
And she started a company so my father
could leave his job. I don’t think
she thought of herself as an activist.
She’ll be surprised, perhaps, I see her this way—
as a leader, a role model, an example
of a gender equal world. Because of her,
I never felt less than. Because of her,
I could see myself as doctor, poet,
model, president. Because of her,
I know how to scratch my children’s heads
each night before sleep. How
to make up a song when life is too much.
How to cry for beauty and love.
How to notice and praise
what is right with the world.
Daylight Savings: Spring Forward
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Daylight savings, loss of separate self, time on March 8, 2020| 4 Comments »
And what did you do with your lost hour?
—Harry Teague
Well, I didn’t sleep, that’s for sure,
nor did I bake bread. Didn’t practice piano
or write a poem, skate ski or do sumo squats.
Neither did I throw javelins.
Nor fake my own death in a gruesome car accident,
nor steal modern art nor moon rocks nor whiskey.
I didn’t spelunk. Didn’t sink in a ship.
Didn’t crawl through the sewer.
Didn’t get a tattoo. Didn’t twerk.
Perhaps there was part of me
that did what I am always trying to do—
untether from time and lose all sense
of who I am and what I think and
what comes next and how it’s supposed to be—
yeah, I’d like to believe that for a lost hour
perhaps some part of me thrived and joined
with the universe so completely that it knew itself
as the dawn that comes when it comes.
A Change in the Light
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brightness, dark, light on March 8, 2020| 5 Comments »
Now while the moon
is hiding behind the clouds
now when the rain
is falling midwinter,
and now that they’ve told us
not to hug or kiss each other
for fear of contracting
and spreading disease,
yes now is the time to find
whatever light we have
been hiding inside us—
whatever measure of brilliance
we’ve managed to conceal
from each other, from ourselves—
now is the time to bring forth
that luminescence and offer it
freely to the world, now
when light matters most.
Golden Slumbers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Beatles, Golden Slumbers, home, music, tears on March 6, 2020| 4 Comments »
Please pretty darlin’, do not cry.
—Paul McCartney, “Golden Slumbers” adapted from Thomas Dekkers’ “Cradle Song”
And if the candle noticed
that I played the song six times,
it didn’t say anything.
And if the pan were aware
that I struggled to find a harmony,
it kept the failure to itself.
And if the kitchen noticed
that I continued to sing the song
long after the recording was done, well—
The onion did its best
to mask any tears
that no one was there to see.
And if once there was a way
to get back homeward, well,
perhaps, perhaps it will appear again.
*To listen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbcvf8a5BwM
One Heroine
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged story on March 5, 2020| 2 Comments »
The Big Vase
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flower, friendship on March 4, 2020| 2 Comments »
What is friendship but the ground beneath
the melting snow, the earth that is present
regardless of drift or grass or garden or wasteland.
A friendship is a flower that thrives
whether it is watered or not.
It is the flame that cooks the soup and does not ask
to be included on the menu as an ingredient.
And it burns through months, through decades,
burns, long after one might have thought the fuel
would have run out.
It would seem like a miracle, the way true friendship
survives, except it’s so commonplace—
the persistent warmth, the inextinguishable glow.
And if friends are torn apart—perhaps by years,
perhaps by circumstance—what is friendship then
but an enormous vase with a wide enough mouth
to hold those separate stems over space, over time,
and still call them a bouquet.
One Innovation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged curve, innovation, line, math on March 3, 2020| 2 Comments »
Devotion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged devotion, ekphrasis, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keefe, love on March 2, 2020| Leave a Comment »
I didn’t know then that devotion
was jumping off the high dive into a pool
though there was no life guard,
though there was no telling
what or who else was in that water.
I didn’t know devotion would mean
tattooing another’s face to my forehead
the way Frida once did with Diego—
how the whole world would be able to see
what I thought was invisible.
I didn’t know devotion meant walking barefoot
into the wind, a wind so strong it shredded my coat.
Didn’t know my destination
would become so unknowable,
would remain so far away.
Perhaps I thought it would be more mechanical—
as if the nuts and bolts of you
would meet the nuts and bolts of me,
and through sun and rain we would fuse together,
belly to belly, nose to nose.
Instead, I meet devotion now
the way I once met Georgia O’Keefe’s clouds
in the stairwell of the Chicago Art Museum.
I stared at the giant painting, thinking to myself,
That’s not at all what it’s like.
Years later when I visited Abiquiu,
I saw the sky so true to what she’d painted,
gasped to see that herd of perfect ovals
flocked white above the red land.
Perhaps this is what devotion is like—
being willing to trust I know nothing at all
of what it looks like. That the only way it reveals itself
is when I meet it with wonder, the way I might meet
the work of a master, willing to be curious,
willing to be awed.
Exquisite Corpse?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ekphrasis, exquisite corpse, kiss on March 1, 2020| 2 Comments »
inspired by an exquisite corpse drawing by Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró and Max Morise
It all began
as just a kiss—
but there was a handgun
inside of a fist.
Our pages were folded
so we couldn’t see
where the story started
and where it would lead
(couldn’t know what would happen
below the waist—
another man crushed
by love’s unwitting weight).
It all began
as just a kiss—
who knew that it
would lead to this?
*
to see the image and read about the surrealist game of exquisite corpse, visit https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-explaining-exquisite-corpse-surrealist-drawing-game-die
Things I Can’t Pack When Coming Home After the Crestone Poetry Festival
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Crestone Poetry Festival, impermanence on March 1, 2020| 4 Comments »
Can’t bring home the Sangre de Cristos with me.
As if I need another mountain in my back yard—
but these peaks are different, somewhat softer,
somewhat closer, somehow new.
A photo isn’t the same.
Can’t bring back the strange jazz of Friday night
with its ancient clarinetist, its renegade bass.
Can’t bring the back porch where we drank tequila.
Can’t bring the bright howl of coyotes
heralding dawn. I would like to pack
the conversation Julie and I had
this morning, the one in which she shared
her unmet dreams. And the laughter
in class today when hope was plucked
like a chicken and made into soup,
and the way the clouds were strangely blown
across the morning sky. The dark red gourd
Wendy carried with her. Scent of pinion.
Sound of Rachel’s drum. We can’t bring anything with us, really.
A toothbrush, a change of clothes, some boots.
But nothing that matters. Nothing
that we most want to hold. Like the love
I feel for these people who gather
in small rooms to talk about poems. Like
the friendship that blooms when we dare
to know just how much we can never bring back.