The whole time I walk in Spring snow and wind
I am prompted by a lovely man’s voice
to repeat many phrases I’ll need in Spanish.
I learn, for instance, to ask how many blocks
I must walk to get to the bank, only to learn
it is closed on holidays but will open
the day after tomorrow. I learn
how to ask if you are good at playing tennis
and insist you are better at playing than I am
(which is certainly true). I learn to say Wednesday
is impossible, but perhaps we can play tennis
Thursday morning because it is a holiday
and we do not need to go to the office.
And, in the midst of learning how to talk about
what our kids are studying in the university,
the lovely man teaches me to say, Es mejor
terminar una cosa antes de comenzar otra—
and I understand I am like the recalcitrant
child in the Spanish lesson, starting out
to be a musician and then deciding to be
an engineer. So often I do not end something
before beginning another. It is not so easy
in this life to draw clear lines. At least
not for me. It seems I am always saying yes
to something new while in the midst
of something else. Like the fact I’m learning Spanish
while still finishing the introduction and end notes
for my next book. Like planning my garden
while still walking in snow. Like loving this world
while I am in the midst of deep grief.
I don’t know how to say in Spanish
there are so many ways to do it right, this life.
What doesn’t live on in matter or in memory?
Doesn’t everything tendril out to touch every other thing?
Haven’t they proven long after a butterfly wing
is done flapping in China it will affect the weather here?
Is anything ever really finished, I wonder,
as lesson twenty five ends and in the snow
has become rain that even now is finding the roots
of the spruce. And all I see as I look around now
are more and more beginnings.
Archive for March, 2024
Spanish 2, Lessons 23, 24, 25
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beginnings, endings, learning, Spanish, spring on March 31, 2024| 11 Comments »
For Easter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, dawn, easter, eggs, happiness, joy on March 31, 2024| 4 Comments »
We drop six small,
bright-colored tabs
into six glass cups.
Add vinegar. Water.
And my girl and I
make plaid eggs
and striped eggs
and eggs painted
with feathery strokes.
We sing along to country
songs, and joy colors me
like dawn colors sky,
a beauty so fleeting,
but while it lasts,
it lights the whole world.
Growing Trust
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, silence, spring, trust, winter on March 29, 2024| 2 Comments »
Inside this silence
with its hum of life
and shush of wind
is another silence,
a pure silence
I have never heard
but trust is here—
the foundation
of all sound—
just as I trust that
inside my imperfect
love with its pride
and its pain is another
love—a pure and
generous love.
Sometimes when
the voices of hate
in and around me
are loudest, I feel
my understanding
of what trust is adjust—
the way trees in winter
continually adapt to keep
their vital cells alive,
the way animals deep
in the dark of the ocean
keep evolving
to make their own light.
Live Performances & Workshops in Denver & Paonia in May
Posted in Uncategorized on March 29, 2024| 1 Comment »
Risking Love!
Hi friends, I am going to have two live performances with my amazing guitar player Steve Law–A solo performance May 5 in Denver at Rag & Bale and May 18 in Paonia at the Paradise Theater as part of the Moonshine Traveling Medicine Show with Goodnight Moonshine.
Flirty. Smart. Electric. Raw. Both performances and workshops will explore how we might fall more deeply in love with the world as it is. At a time when bad news seems to charge the air, falling in love has never been more important—with the earth, with each other, with ourselves, with the divine. Playful and provocative, it’s a strong dose of soul medicine—like whiskey, like honey, like straight-up joy.
For tickets to May 5 workshop, visit here
For tickets to May 5 performance, visit here
For tickets to May 18 workshop, contact hello@paoniabooks.com
For tickets to May 18 performance, visit here
Springing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged melting, rabbit, spring on March 28, 2024| 16 Comments »
I know the rabbits were here
because the snow is melted
where their bodies have been,
small patches of green grass
in a vast field of white.
When winter is gone, their tracks
will again be invisible,
leaving no way to know when
the rabbits have visited our home.
I marvel at how even an absence
can become precious when we
are aware of what is gone.
Like when I find signs
my boy was here. Just today
I passed a narrow smiley face
on a cottonwood trunk where
he once was with a can of blue
spray pain. Here, a dent
in the wall where his anger
has been. Here, a hole in my life
where his life has been.
Here, the place where
the ache is melting and beneath
the ache more green
than I would have ever dreamed.
If It Were in a Book, I’d Write Praise All Over the Margins
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, falling in love with the world as it is, ordinary, sick, treasure on March 28, 2024| 14 Comments »
No day but this day
with its sloppy snow
and the rabbits living
beneath the porch and
the single easter lily
that opened this afternoon,
its too-sweet perfume spilling
all over my thoughts
as I made my daughter
a warm homemade syrup
of lemon and cherry
and honey for her cough
before I snuggled into
her rumpled bed and put
my cheek to her fevered head,
no holier place in all the world
except every other place
where life is honest
and love has dared—
and how is it sometimes
we can be so aware
that every little thing,
from the cold breeze
coming through the open window
to the cat hair that seems
to be everywhere, yes
every single little thing
is treasure.
One While Flying Away from My Mom
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, mom, mortality, sunset on March 26, 2024| 4 Comments »
longing to love you forever
I watch the sun go down
desperately red
Why I Stay Up Late Walking
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emotions, healing, walking on March 25, 2024| 12 Comments »
At night I walk. Because
it is easier then to not
be my story. Easier to be
more flesh and less brain.
Easier to be the one
who is gathered into
the field of darkness
by night’s great hands
and planted there.
Because sometimes
rain and sometimes wind
and sometimes stars
and always the world
so much larger than I,
so much vaster
than a small room
with a narrow doorway
and a tale relentlessly sad.
I walk not so much from,
but not so much to—
more that I walk through—
my ribs and lungs
becoming ladder rungs
that form a path
between earth and sky,
and I am more breath
than blame, more step than
shame, more now than why.
Lessons from a Small Bush
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged enough, joy, mom, mother, quince, sufficiency on March 25, 2024| 6 Comments »
Because it brings her enormous joy,
this pink-petalled flowering quince
that grows just outside
my mother’s back door,
I long to give her a thousand
such quince bushes,
all of them long-blooming,
voluptuous, thornless,
all of them lining her walk.
Though the other part of me
wants to honor how
it takes only one plant
to bring her such elation.
I am instantly stunned
with the wisdom of enoughness,
astonished again at how praise
needs nothing more than a crumb.
Somehow letting go of a thousand
imaginary quince bushes floods me
with a emptiness so great
I fall more wildly in love
with a single pink flower
and the luck-drunk awe of my mother.
Cleaning Mom’s Blue Glass, I Think of My Son
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cleaning, daughter, grief, mom, wound on March 23, 2024| 9 Comments »
Barefoot, I balanced
on mom’s counters
and I handed her
the blue glass
plates and vases
from the highest shelf.
They were dusty,
as all things are
when unused. Now
they shine, draw
the eye upward,
bring beauty to the room.
It makes me wonder
what parts of my life
I have not touched
for too long—
like that wound today
I brushed so tenderly
with my thoughts.
What was dust
now gleams this evening,
has become the only thing
my eyes can see.
And though I might
avoid it if I could,
somehow the wound
makes everything around it
all the more lovely,
as luminous as newly
polished blue glass,
as shimmering as any tear.
Sodden Blessing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blessing, georgia, loving the world as it is, rain on March 22, 2024| 7 Comments »
It’s warm and steady,
this rain that soaks me.
Perhaps all those tears
this afternoon were practice
for walking in this soft
and relentless baptism
that gathers wetly now
in my lashes, my hair,
my pants, my socks,
my shoes, claiming me
in a damp communion
so complete, so shining,
so dripping with soggy luck
that I choose to walk in it
for hours, evermore certain
I belong to the world.
One Reunion with My Mom
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, driving, mom on March 22, 2024| 2 Comments »
while going seventy
we make of the car
a sanctuary
A Humble Aliveness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daily, humble, morning, ordinary, simple on March 21, 2024| 10 Comments »
Someday I will miss a morning like this,
when I rise in the dark to slice apples
and scrape ice from the windshield
so I can drive my daughter to school.
My husband in the kitchen making toast.
My tea warm. Raisins sweet.
The backyard geese a riotous racket
and a black-haired cat who wants nothing
more than to nudge my chin with her chin.
A morning so ordinary it would never dream
of flaunting its gold—no, it just spends it
on the light that streams in through the window
to land on my shoulder as if tapping me
to say, this is it. This. This.
Falling in Love with Life on the Equinox
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged balance, equinox on March 19, 2024| 4 Comments »
Because after the sunshine
slipped under my sweater,
snowflakes teased my cheek.
Because this morning’s silence
became mid-morning geese.
Because waking. Because sleep.
Because after the memorial
for a beloved, wizened man
we watched kids walk across
the stage at school. Because
foolishness. Because truth.
Because buds swell on willows
and still the garden sits untouched.
Because love. Because fear.
Because my heart is here and
not here. Because there are moments
we feel ourselves balanced
between two sides of the same life.
Because balance lasts only a moment.
Because day. Because night.
What the Self Really Wants
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, infinite self, naked, self, story, what is on March 18, 2024| 4 Comments »
When the story of self
slips off like a mask, the sky
is more sky and an apple
more apple and the self
less self and more
what a wind is. How easy
to love then when I’m naked.
And how is it that always
some new story arrives,
solidifies less like a cast,
more like a strait jacket?
I notice because life
starts to fit too tight.
I notice because
I start to think I’m right.
But it’s no failure when a story
appears. Just an invitation
to notice how it feels
to be dressed in a story.
An invitation to pray
to the mystery, please,
once again undress me.
An invitation to be grateful
for the hands (whose hands?)
that loosen the story
and free me. An invitation
to let the self remember this:
how it longs to be spacious,
to be as infinite as what is.
At the Inner Table
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged inner argument, inner voices, parts of the self, presence on March 17, 2024| 10 Comments »
We actually transform the world from within our hearts.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Anita Forrer (January 10, 1920)
“But I need to do something to fix this now,”
says the fixer. And the doubter says,
“What can be done from across the world?”
And meanwhile the woman who reads the news
feels a tear fall down her cheek.
And the fixer says, “I don’t know what to do,
but it can’t go on like this.”
And the doubter says, “It’s been like this
as long as humans have lived.”
And meanwhile the woman who reads the news
feels a tear fall down her cheek.
And the fixer says, “Humans also heal.
And make peace. And forgive.”
And the doubter says, “What difference
could one person possibly make
when presidents and diplomats have failed?”
And meanwhile, the woman who reads the news
feels a tear fall down her cheek.
And the questioner wonders,
is she an olive branch? An open hand?
One more promise? One more fist?
Is she a wall? A rallying cry?
A never-ending debate? A rising tide?
And the fixer says, “I will not just stand by.”
And the doubter says, “It’s hopeless.”
And meanwhile the woman who reads the news
feels a tear fall down her cheek.
And who is the one who, with infinite compassion,
listens to each of the voices?
The fixer can’t let it go. “It’s urgent!” she says.
The doubter throws up her hands and huffs,
“We’ll never learn how to be together.”
And who is the one who, even now,
is making more space at the table of the heart,
a table big as the world?
And the woman who reads the news
feels her heart break even wider.
A tear falls down her cheek.
One Listening to Dvorak
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cello, chamber music, fulfillment, love, music on March 15, 2024| Leave a Comment »
with such fierce tenderness
the bow urges strains from the cello
like that, love, play me
One Alleluia
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged reslilience, singing on March 14, 2024| 8 Comments »
in the ruined chapel
of the heart
not a hymnal to be found
the choir
still singing
What Lives On
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged joy, mariachi, memory, music on March 13, 2024| 10 Comments »
It didn’t last, but there was that afternoon
when we were walking side by side
down the middle of the street,
all four of us straddling the center line,
different musicians every few blocks.
It was Father’s Day. The alpine sun
was hot but not unbearable, and we stopped
to listen to the bright brass of the mariachi band.
My kids were not embarrassed when I hummed along
to Guantanamera—or at least they did not tell me so.
We laughed about I don’t remember what, but
I remember the laughter and the light,
easy feeling I had, a full-body certainty
everything was going to be okay.
I remember how our shadows
stretched out on the street in front of us
like a future I could not read.
I fell in love with the shape of our shadows,
not knowing how soon there would be only three.
These moments of gladness—
like notes in the summer air, they don’t stay.
But they stitch themselves into our being,
a goodness that lives and lives,
sometimes hidden for years until
it sings back to life with joy so real
I can almost feel the sun on my back,
can almost hear all of our voices
join the chorus for La Bamba.
Even now, alone in my quiet room,
my smile is as real as the tightness
in my chest, as real as those trumpets,
real, that blue, blue sky.