like a dandelion seed
in the land of wind,
this heart longing to serve
Archive for August, 2022
One Willingness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dandelion, service, surrender on August 31, 2022| 4 Comments »
After a Year of Grieving
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, spaciousness, time on August 30, 2022| 14 Comments »
Not that the sorrow became smaller.
Not that I stashed it away.
Not that I moved through it.
More as if a spaciousness grew,
as if the lens of life had been zoomed in tight
and slowly, slowly it widened.
Or as if I’d been cupping my hands
around something precious
and finally I trusted I could open my hands
and that precious thing would not fly away—
or perhaps it would, and I would still be fine.
All I know is today, I feel it,
not only the sorrow, but also
an inner vastness, a capaciousness,
an ability to breathe, to be opened,
as if my own back has turned
into a window. As if my heart
has become clear sky.
When Feeling Stuck
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged starry night, stuck, Van Gogh on August 29, 2022| 8 Comments »
Sometimes I forget I’m surrounded
by whirl, forget the earth’s turning,
forget our galaxy’s spiraling nature.
But it helps me today to remember myself
as swirl, from the whorl in my fingerprints
to the curl in my hair to the twirl in my step
as I move through the rooms of a house
that somehow feels solid and stable. It helps
to think of the day as a twist,
an infinite trip on a mobius strip,
and suddenly stuck isn’t quite so stuck,
and whatever in me is wedged
isn’t quite so wedged, and I become more
like a starry night, ethereal, dreamlike,
as I start to recall the joy in the spinning,
the freedom in the churning,
and I open again to a magic that invites me to play
far beyond the frame.
Kalsarikännit
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aloneness, drinking, Finnish, wine, words on August 28, 2022| 10 Comments »
Finnish: The feeling when you are going to get drunk home alone in your underwear—with no intention of going out. (pronounced CAHL-sahr-ree-CAN-neet)
Let’s say a woman worked in the garden all day
pulling up old kale and bolted chard and harvesting
potatoes and garlic and onions, and let’s say
her whole evening plan is to stay home
and shower and not get dressed,
and sip on a glass of wine, or whiskey
until she is sweetly light-headed,
well, wouldn’t it be lovely if there were a word
to describe her aspirations? A word
she could write in her calendar to be sure
no other loud plans swooped in. A word
she could say if her friends called and asked
what was happening tonight. And if
no one should call, she could say it to herself
for the joy of saying it—Kalsarikännit—
as she toasted the air, clinking her glass
against all that isn’t there.
And the wind on her skin, so brisk.
And the wine, so heady, so dry.
Late Summer
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, fruit, harvest, orchard, present, summer on August 28, 2022| 8 Comments »
for Vivian and Christie
This lyric afternoon with its fruit trees
and friendship and barest kiss of rain,
is it so wrong to want to save it, the way
I will process the dark plums into jam?
Is it so wrong to want to preserve
the honeyed song of summer, the warmth
of sun, the pleasure of an afternoon
with my daughter and a friend?
An ovation of thunder.
Scent of basil. Purr of cat.
The creamy fuzz of the growing quince.
The joy as we try for the first time
black apricots, their skin so surprising,
their flesh so nectar-ish. I will freeze
most of the ripe blackberries we gathered,
will savor them come snow, come cold.
A day such as this is like yeast in wheat dough—
it’s not there just for taste, it’s the difference
between bread and a brick.
It invites a trust there will be other days
filled with elation. Dig in, it seems to say.
Don’t save for later what can only be lived today.
Even the disbelief that a day could be so good—
that too, tastes so nourishing, so sweet.
Real Time in the Uncompahgre River Valley
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged moment, nature, time on August 27, 2022| 2 Comments »
An hour means nothing
to this rivulet
unbraided from the stream.
To the towering spruce,
what’s a day?
What know these red cliffs
of a week? A month?
To the deep meadow,
what’s a year?
But for those who give themselves over
to the wind-kissed field,
the quiver of grass,
the great rise of Mount Abrams
and the quieting,
for those who linger on this timeless land,
a moment could mean everything.
At the Potter Ranch
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged nature, open space, silence, sitting, solitude, spaciousness on August 25, 2022| 8 Comments »
Ridgway, Colorado
On a day when the human world feels like a fist—
when it clenches and squeezes,
fierce and relentless—
I leave the four walls and sit
on an old fallen cottonwood tree,
long and silver and smooth.
There, in the center of a wide river valley,
I sit. And sit. And sit.
And the tall green grasses
and the graceful white yarrow don’t refuse me.
And the murmur of waves
and the musk-yellow scent of sweet clover
replace any thoughts, save being here.
The ring of red mesas
with their vast crowns of spruce
form a vase great enough to hold it all—
and I am gathered into spaciousness
along with dark green sedges and white butterflies,
with the tantrums of brambles
and the tangled flight patterns
of thousands on thousands of dark tiny flies.
A flock of birds rise all at once from the river
and my heart and my eyes rise, too.
A long time passes before I am quiet enough
to hear the chorus in the willows,
the bright clicking of insect wings,
the silence that weaves through everything.
Then the flickers come close
and the dragonflies draw nearer in.
And I current. I cloud. I leaf. I wing.
I leave unwalled, un-selved.
The spaciousness comes with me.
Contentment
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged contentment, music, tears on August 24, 2022| 4 Comments »
What were you doing when you last felt content?
—Ada Limón
And there, beneath the white tent,
beneath the blue sky, beneath the stars
I could not see, while spinning somewhere
inside a spiral galaxy, I closed my eyes
and let the sound of flute and piano find me,
an Irish song meant to be played with a wee lilt,
though the tune itself knew something of loss,
and I felt my lungs swell and my heart expand
felt my spine straighten and my soles ground,
and I floated inside the music, stunned and surprised
by the vibrant inheritance of being alive. I hummed
with full cellular resonance and then, I was crying—
a warm spilling of tears—for what?
for beauty? for loss? for living with both in one breath?
What was it the tears meant? Oh friends,
as I felt it all with no attempt to push it away,
I was wildly, alively content.
A New Kind of Conversation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged absence, connection, conversation, death, presence, speaking on August 23, 2022| 2 Comments »
It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
—Linda Gregg, “The Presence in Absence”
I have no phone receiver to connect me to the other side,
but every day I speak to my beloveds through candle flame.
Every night, I speak to them through the dark before sleep.
I speak to them in the car when I am alone.
I speak to them when I walk beneath stars,
when I walk in the woods, when I walk in the rain.
It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
It is possible to feel what cannot be seen,
to sense what cannot be heard,
to be held by what cannot be touched.
It is possible for love to grow after death.
If there is a secret, it is, perhaps, openness.
The way air lets light move through.
The way a window invites in the scent of grass.
The way sand receives the ocean,
then, rearranged, lets it pass.
This poem was published in ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry on 9/11/22
Dear Gregory Orr,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, gratefulness, grief, loss, poetry on August 22, 2022| 8 Comments »
Like a pale blue ribbon,
soft and lovely,
your words are woven
through the nest that has held me
since the merciless shot of loss.
Your poems meet me again and again
with their open eyes
and their open hands.
They say, Rest here,
sweetheart. I understand.
You, with your pilgrim heart,
your insistence on devotion,
you have cradled me
with your honesty.
Long before I knew
I needed to be saved,
your words found me,
stitched through me with love
as if that is what words are for.
*
Dear friends, here is where you can find out more about the remarkable Gregory Orr.
And here is where you can find one of his poems that has saved me in the past year.