I would carry your ache
if I could. Would carry the throb
and the raw fury, would dress
your wounds with a salve of full moon
and the gold of the tall summer grass.
I would wrap you in the softest song,
and whisper blood-true prayers
so quietly they resemble the sound
of petals falling—something more felt
than understood. And because
I cannot carry your ache, I do
what the helpless do. I love you.
With my own broken open heart,
I love you. With every breath, every blink,
I Iove you. There is a peace
that comes when we deeply
lean into the ache. I wish you
that courage, that peace.
Archive for July, 2023
Deep Peace
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brother, compassion, love, suffering on July 31, 2023| 6 Comments »
One Almost Impossible, And Yet
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged haikuling, joy, kindness, plum on July 31, 2023| 1 Comment »
at the end of a day
crowded with kindness and joy
one perfect, ripe plum
With Surprise, I Realize
Posted in Uncategorized on July 30, 2023| 6 Comments »
The way San Francisco
goes quickly from fog to clear blue,
I notice that within moments
of being crumpled by my tears,
they are gone, replaced
with openness. Not
that I shut the tears down.
More that they do what tears do—
fall like necessary weather,
then nourish all that blooms.
After We’d Been in the Cave Over an Hour: Video!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark praise, poetry video on July 29, 2023| 7 Comments »
Go spelunking in the depths of your imagination. Join me in the cave for a few moments in this video from my new album, DARK PRAISE, created with guitarist Steve Law and artist Marisa S. White. Album and track available for free download on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you listen to music. Please share!
One with the Smallest Mewls
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged kitten, stray on July 29, 2023| 4 Comments »
curled beneath the grape vine
five tiny feral kittens—
bringing all them home in my thoughts
When She Is Being Herself
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Kayleen Asbo, story, transformation on July 28, 2023| 4 Comments »
I listen as she spins
gold out of words,
infusing the room
with grail and goddess,
with Celtic greens
and Grecian blues,
until the whole room
is glowing and golden, lit
by her love for the world.
Stories are, perhaps,
one of the simplest
proofs that miracles exist.
Look how before
there was only a room.
Now everything
and everyone in it
is shining, changed,
drenched in grace.
These Hot Days
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged breeze, heat, summer, wind on July 27, 2023| 6 Comments »
And when at last
the breeze comes
on the breath of night,
the whole body sings
with the chill of it—
craves the cool lick
of sharp tongues
on the skin, the bite
of the distant storm.
Touch me here,
says my flesh,
as if I’ve been waiting
all day for my lover—
here, touch me here.
And it feels so good
when the wind slips in
and does what a breeze will do,
but the wanting—
I notice how it, too,
has something
painfully beautiful
to teach me.
Love Letters to Vincent
Posted in Uncategorized on July 27, 2023| 3 Comments »
Celebrating the Art & Life of Vincent Van Gogh
Saturday, July 29
11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. mountain time
Zoom
Join me and my beloved friend and creative partner Kayleen Asbo for our annual broadcast on the day of Van Gogh’s death, featuring the collaboration between my words and music written by Kayleen in response to Van Gogh’s paintings. This year we have a triumphant postscript to add, with heart warming and inspiring news from both the asylum at St. Remy where Vincent painted “Starry Night” and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam which is currently featuring an exhibition on Vincent’s last years in Auvers.
If you haven’t joined us before–I’ll just say this. It’s ecstatic. Full of history and respect and grief and beauty and vulnerability and madness and so much love, so much love. A weaving of biography, art, personal story, and devotion.
Register here on a sliding scale ($11-$44); also recorded for later viewing.
Ignoramus: An Aspirational Etymology of Sorts
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aspriation, etymology, not knowing, openness on July 25, 2023| 21 Comments »
It means, “We don’t know.”
It means, “I refuse to judge you.”
It means, “Too much is at stake
to pretend I’m aware when I’m not.”
It means, “Oh, self, you have tried
to build a fortress out of scribbles,
but the world is a giant eraser.”
It means, “Sometimes the root
offers more shade than the tree.”
It means, “There is so much
we don’t understand.”
It means, “Here, let me
meet you with open hands.”
When the Ambush Comes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daily life, grief, love on July 24, 2023| 8 Comments »
You might be standing in line at the bank,
Perhaps taking out the trash after midnight,
the moon somehow too bright.
If you can predict the quick tears, the tight throat,
that’s not the ambush. That’s just grief.
The ambush comes when you’re laughing.
Or when you’re eating popcorn.
Or when you drive by a parking lot
where once you practiced parallel parking
with the one who is no longer here.
The ambush might come when you’ve just
put on mascara. Or when you’re talking
on the phone to customer service.
Or when you’re dusting the piano
where once your loved one sat
and practiced the theme
to Pirates of the Caribbean
over and over and over. And over.
And then you’re crying again.
Not that you mind it.
Not that you’re surprised.
You don’t even apologize anymore.
This is what happens now.
It’s what love looks like.
You call it life.
Meadow
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged epistemology, grass, meadow on July 24, 2023| 18 Comments »
Walking through tall grass
on a narrow path, my fingers
spread wide to pull through the seedheads.
As if to touch is to be touched.
As if, with open palms,
I could pull this beauty
inside me and carry it with me
until I give it to you—
as if I could somehow
slip a whole meadow into your pocket
so you could unfold it anytime
and wander through grass
as high as your chest
and feel how the vastness
reminds us who we are.
Above Treeline
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged sky, spaciousness, transformation on July 23, 2023| 4 Comments »
Everywhere I turn,
the measureless sky,
wild open sky,
deep bluing,
unencumbered sky,
and how is it
it enters me
and fills my lungs
with vastness,
steeps my mind
in spaciousness,
slips immensity
into my cells,
and I, who
have been stone,
who thought I knew
something of
what a life is,
I feel myself dissolve
into blue
as if it’s the only
thing I could do.
When I leave,
the blue comes
with me.
One Instruction
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, humility, nasturtium, teaching on July 22, 2023| 4 Comments »
not here to teach me
but to bring beauty
this red nasturtium
Because
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief on July 21, 2023| 4 Comments »
Because it is Thursday,
I miss you, which is to say
because I am alive, I miss you.
I miss you rolling in the grass,
your laughter rising like sunlight.
I miss your enormous shoes
piled beside the front door.
I miss how you wanted
and wanted and wanted.
I miss the knives of your words
when you were unhappy
and the cloud of your dissatisfaction,
the blushing dusk of your joy.
Tonight I crawl inside the missing
and sprawl there
like a woman washed up on shore,
spent, shocked, traumatized
and grateful, astonished
to still be alive.
After a Difficult Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged becoming, garden, self-care on July 19, 2023| 8 Comments »
I go to the garden
and snip the dead blooms
and talk to the beans
and stake the tall stalks
of blue delphiniums.
I plunge my hands
in the dirt to pull weeds
and pull spinach into my mouth.
In an hour, I am wholly new.
But to remember who I am,
five minutes will do.
Returning to Stillness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged earth, paradox, perspective, stillness on July 17, 2023| 16 Comments »
I can’t unnotice this fist
that has grabbed my chest
and squeezes it hard, this prickly balloon
that seems to have blown itself up
in my belly. To be still today
is to notice that so much inside me
is writhing, squirming, thrashing.
Hello discomfort. Hello agitation.
Hello wishing that stillness
could be more still.
Eyes closed, I watch myself
as I sit in the middle of the empty room,
sunlight stretching across the floor
in bright and angled shapes.
I zoom out and see the whole house.
Zoom out farther and see the yard, the trees.
Zoom out until I see our small town,
then a blur of green and brown,
then the familiar blue and green curve of the earth.
As it spins and orbits, the earth is anything but still,
and yet such spaciousness surrounds it.
Oh, sweet woman sitting still in your room
with your hand on your heart
and a world of thrust and upheaval
spinning inside you,
right now, it’s like this.
You’re being moved. You’re still.
It’s like this.
*
Um, yeah … so if you read yesterday’s poem, I have to laugh… yesterday being still felt so easy, so simple, so open, so, well yummy. And then today??? Oh friends. This is one of the great gifts of poetry–every day the chance to notice what is here. And every day, the same thing feels so new.
On my daily program “The Poetic Path,” I use the tag “Seeing the same world in a new way … with poems.” If you haven’t checked out this other daily offering, perhaps consider it. It’s an app for your phone, found on the Ritual Wellbeing app. Unlike the daily poems, i curate them … and it’s a chance to hear the poems aloud. I always talk a little about where they came from and how they were written, then read the poem again, and then offer an optional writing/thinking prompt for you. There is a monthly or annual fee for Ritual–and there are MANY other programs available on it. You can try it out for free. If you’re interested, from your phone visit HERE.
On a Day When Stillness Seems Possible
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged contentment, ease, stillness on July 16, 2023| 6 Comments »
and the river is a long white stroke
of roiling and continuous surge,
and the grass, gone to seed,
wavers in the wind, then stills,
wavers, then stills, and the swallows
spiral, the leaf shadows spangle
and the ants braid a path
across the stones.
But I rhyme today with the cottonwood trunks,
my own body unmoving in the breeze.
It feels good in this moment
to be more tree than cloud,
more silence than song.
So easily, the stillness opens me,
softens me. How simple, really,
to do nothing. How is it I so often resist?
If there is no in me now, I do not notice it.
Stillness has made a home in me
and there seems to be nothing
the stillness refuses. Come,
it seems to say. There is room here
for everything. It opens me wider.
The world rushes in.
Almost Two Years After Your Death
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, grief, love, presence on July 15, 2023| 12 Comments »
I no longer pick up the phone to call you.
No longer expect you to walk in the room.
Eventually, the brain learns to expect
the absence, the ears learn to expect
the silence, the body grows accustomed
to the loss of your body and recalibrates
itself in space. But the heart, broken open,
is as full as it ever was.
Did I think it would be parched?
Now I know love as a wellspring,
a continual supply.
Never once has the heart felt empty.
There, every time I look, I find you.
On the Night Before My Daughter Turns Fifteen, I Spend Hours Looking at Old Photos
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, daughter, photographs on July 15, 2023| 15 Comments »
And there you are, eating marshmallows
off the gingerbread house
and sledding down the hill to the pond.
You’re in a frothy pink tutu.
You’re covered in mud.
You’re wearing my hot red dress.
You’re Monsieur Lafayette. You’re a ninja.
A pirate. Chinese take-out. A unicorn.
You’re swimming. You’re swinging.
You’re curled up, asleep in my bed.
So many of these moments
I know you don’t remember,
but I do, and I marvel now
how every moment of your life
has made you into you.
There are moments I would snapshot if I could,
the back of your head as you snuggle into me
on the couch in the morning,
the curl of your fingers
as they reach toward my hand,
the sweet lump of you under the covers
before I try to wake you,
the joy in you that slips beyond the frame.