Whatever in me feels sodden,
soiled, weighty, it slips from
my body, as if her laughter
is rain until all that is left in me
is sky.
Archive for July, 2024
Falling Asleep to the Sound of My Daughter Giggling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, joy, laughter on July 31, 2024| 6 Comments »
Yellow Coneflower
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged coneflower, flower, light, meadow, metaphor on July 30, 2024| 6 Comments »
If ever I needed
a demonstration
on how to lead
with the heart,
it’s you, coneflower,
that teaches me
how to shine forth
from the center,
how to grow
from the muck.
I am ready to live
the way you do,
wild and abundant,
needing dark and
cold to germinate, but
living to gather light.
Love Letter Sent Back in Time to Myself Three Years Ago
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, love letter, premonition, self compassion, self talk on July 29, 2024| 16 Comments »
Your worst fears will happen,
will happen soon. And you
will crumple. Will wail.
Will not know how to say hello.
Will somehow remember
how to stand. How to open
a door. How to sit on a chair
and listen to the swallows,
the relentlessly sweet chickadees.
You will have no words, but you will have
your attention, your willingness,
your stubbornness, your
devotion to life.
Your heart, though wrecked,
will not be erased. It will beat,
will beat on, will beat on.
And though I do not understand
how this happens, you live.
You not only live, you’re remade,
just as rivers are remade by rain,
just as wind is refashioned
by the cool of the night. Just as
bones become stronger
after the break. Just as
a story resists The End.
Just as the notes of a song
can be reused to compose
a new song. Oh sweetheart,
you will be not only sing
the new song—a song
equal parts haunting and beautiful—
you will be the new song
and the silence that holds it.
Short poem, big invite
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged tears, Van Gogh on July 28, 2024| 4 Comments »
One Life
your tear
my tear
one water
*
Love Letters to Vincent
Monday, July 29, 6 p.m. mountain time
zoom
Dear Friends,
Tonight was the most incredible, terrifying, heart-re-wounding, heart-re-saving, transformative night. Kayleen Asbo and I performed a tribute to Vincent van Gogh live in Telluride in The Palm theater (the stage where my son used to dance and where my daughter still dances), hosted by The Palm and Telluride Chamber Music. If you were not able to join us (and even if you were), please join Kayleen & me online on Monday night, 6 p.m. mountain, for a recording of the evening. One person said it was “extraordinary, healing, alchemical.” and another said “Transcendent! What a triumph. Haunting in the best of ways.” We will, in time, have a fully edited video to share with you–with multiple camera views and the images of van Gogh. For Monday, we will be able to share the wide-lens view with really good sound.
All donations will fund the completion of our recording project, and a tree will be planted for each registration through One Tree Planted. Come with a candle and a journa. As we connect, we wrap our arms around what it means to be human and in a communal ritual of love, loss, gratitude, wonder and a celebration of how beauty and devotion can reach out to transform the world. Sliding scale donations, Zero-$40.00. There will be a recording for anyone who can’t make it life.
To register, click here
Even After We Were Back on Land
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged floating, friendship, memory, pond on July 26, 2024| 5 Comments »
for Kayleen
There, in the middle of the morning,
was a pause in which we floated
on the surface of the pond, floated
as if we were two rocks who, at least
for a moment, had learned how
to be feathers. If they were to write
the story of my life, they would likely
not mention the way the blue damselflies
landed on our legs, the way we drifted
into the reeds, but I hope I always remember
the way your legs dangled in the cold water,
the way your eyes stayed with mine
as I cried, the way we floated, no matter
how heavy the words, we floated,
like daisies, we floated.
How Things Change
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, doubt, hummingbirds, self, summer, transformation, winter on July 25, 2024| 10 Comments »
Between when the hummingbirds come
and when too soon they leave,
we sit in the warm dusk and watch
as broadtails and black chins dart
and dive, defend and chase—
the feeder a loud, competitive zone
where small feathered bodies block
and jostle, crowd and race—
almost impossible to imagine
five months back when this deck
was a still, chilly silent place.
That’s how it is with transformation.
The first thing that must go is the self
who doesn’t believe it can happen.
Let Us Gather in the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, community, food, garden, gathering on July 25, 2024| 6 Comments »
Let us gather in the garden in late July
when the snap peas are fat and sweet on the vines
and the tiny white cilantro flowers charge
the air with fragrant green. When the sunflowers
have not yet opened, but the cosmos are already
a riot of pinks and white and the nasturtiums
have erupted into spicy orange petals
and the heads of lettuce open and open
as if looking for the edges of the universe.
Let us gather when the onions are beginning
to swell and the kale leaves are big as elephant ears
and the basil is lush and vigorous and flourishing
and it’s so good to be here with our hunger,
not to consume but to be opened by goodness,
to know ourselves as part of this generous
plentiful land. It so good to be here
together amongst the ripening,
to share the living blessing, to welcome
each other into the garden of our hearts,
to nourish the seeds of all that is to come
forming even now inside our open hands.
Amidst the Cold of Winter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, darkness, family, ice, light, memory, play, river, winter on July 23, 2024| 12 Comments »
There was that winter day when the ice floe
had cracked the river ice into giant slabs
thick as my open hand, tall as a child.
Our family gathered on the river bank
and played with the fractured chunks to make
sculptures—ice huts and ice caves and
a long ice wall that curved and snaked
through the snow along the river’s edge
like the spine of a giant stegosaurus,
jagged and upright. It’s never happened
again. The ice slabs always freeze together
or crush into bits, but that night,
we went out with dozens of candles
and lit the ice structures from within.
And the glow then, the gold that blazed
through the ice, was the kind of luminous
magic that winter seldom knows. What
was shattered and sharp, heavy and cold,
became radiance, brilliance, a visible hope
I didn’t yet know I would need, some proof
of what might transpire in the winter
of the heart—how broken and frigid,
it still might become a means
to gather beauty, to amplify the light.
When I Was Feeling Alone After My Father’s Death
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, connection, fear, freedom, grief, seamlessness, vision on July 22, 2024| 6 Comments »
In a vision, I knew the universe as seamless—
a place with no horizon, no anchor,
no tether, no foundation. And though
it was beautiful—a water-color wash
of pinks and blues and grays and greens—
I was terrified, feeling myself formless
in the vast sea of space, too free, too free.
I wanted an object, a person, a shape,
a something to belong to.
And Love spoke in words I did not hear
but somehow felt, and said,
The only thing that will ever ground you
is not the object of love, but love itself.
Now, sitting in my kitchen, I feel it again.
Though my feet are on the ground
and I hear the hum of the cars on the highway,
though there is a cat that desperately wants
to sit in my lap and I taste the dark and bitter leaves
in my tea, though I am undeniably in a body,
I feel it again, the seamlessness, the communion
of the great everything that is, the underlying all-ness,
the domain of no division. But in this moment,
I know freedom not as terrifying, but as generous,
as uncontainable love that runs through everything.
The only thing that will ever ground you
is not the object of love, but love itself.
To write this is to touch the truth again,
a beauty that can never be broken or fractured.
Every cell of me disassembles into beauty,
opens with awareness, even as the cat yowls,
even as phone rings again.