I want to bottle it,
tonight’s drive
with my girl,
both of us singing
full voice,
so when I forget
how good it can be
in this world,
I can dab it
behind my ears
and inhale again
the joy of singing
through the dark
that brazenly,
that together.
Archive for November, 2024
Oh! de Perfume
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, daughter, driving, family, perfume, singing on November 10, 2024| 4 Comments »
For When We Greet Each Other
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, greeting, respect, ritual on November 10, 2024| 28 Comments »
I want a new ritual for when we meet each other—
strangers or beloveds, friends or rivals, elders or children.
It begins by holding each other’s eyes
the way we behold sunrises or the first cherry blooms,
which is to say we assume we’ll find beauty there.
And perhaps some display of open hands—
a gesture with palms up—that suggests both
I offer myself to you and I receive you.
There should be a quiet moment in which
we hear each other breathe—
knowing it’s the sound of the ocean inside us.
If there are words at all, let them be formed
mostly of vowels so they’re heard more as song
than as spitting, more like river current and less
like throwing stones, words that mean something like
I do not know what you carry, but in this moment
I will help you carry it. Or something like,
Everything depends on us treating each other well.
And if we said it enough, perhaps we’d believe it,
and if we believed it enough, perhaps we’d live it,
treating every other human like someone
who holds our very existence in their hands,
like someone whose life has been given us to serve,
even if it’s only to walk together safely down the street,
hold a door, pass the salt, share a sunset,
offer a smile, and say with our actions you belong.
Reciting Poems to Each Other in a Difficult Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged community, connection, friendship, poetry, reciting poetry on November 9, 2024| 9 Comments »
It might have looked as if we stayed
in our respective squares—
nine separate rooms made of pixels—
but for an hour the poems we shared leaped
through the screen and into our bloodstream
until all our lines were gloriously blurred
and our wounds were gently tended
by the medicine of Berry’s dayblind stars
and Wellwood’s ferocious dance of no hope,
Hopkins’s shining from shook foil
and Roethke’s wondering Which I is I?
In another time, there would have been
a fire at the center. Someone would play a drum.
But in this time, I felt it inside me, the fire,
as poems blazed to meet the great cold.
I felt it inside me, the human drum,
that reminds me the heart beats
not for itself, but the world.
For an hour we spooned each other
the honey of poetry. Alone now,
I still taste it, unfiltered and raw,
this astonishing sweetness on my lips,
this salt of lyric communion
still feel the warmth of that blaze,
the spark still dazzling in the dark.
For This, I Walk Outside
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged life, nature, outside, service, stellar's jay on November 8, 2024| 9 Comments »
Not to escape the world,
but to be more wholly in it.
Sharp cold stings my cheeks—
not like a slap, but like the thrilling burn
of whiskey as it blazes down the throat—
the kind of wild aliveness
that brooks no choice
but to wake up to life,
to champion it, to know life
as the most wondrous thing
even as I steep in the ugliness
we humans commit.
This is what life asks of us.
I walk outside to be more wholly here,
here the way the Stellar’s jay is here.
Even on the coldest day,
its every fluffing, every peck, every head bob,
every flight is in service to life.
It’s never confused about its purpose.
I want to be in service.
Outside, everything is teacher:
the cold, the snow, the bird, the day,
this fallible, fabulous human race,
this improbable, beautiful planet in space.
To serve life, I must inhabit it wholly
and be inhabited by it, too.
As if it all could end tonight.
As if it goes on forever.
Planting the Questions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dormancy, growth, love, questions, snow on November 7, 2024| 8 Comments »
All day the first snow fell in the valley.
Hour by hour, I watched
the brittle world become new.
All day, I marveled at the human—
equally capable of cruelty and compassion.
Inside me, strong questions gathered.
I planted them in me like garlic cloves.
Every gardener knows how cold
only accelerates their growth,
triggers more development come spring.
I imagine how vigorous, how robust
these questions will grow
into actions I can’t yet conceive.
All day, the snow kept falling.
I imagined it was love.
There was nothing it did not touch.
Inviting Spaciousness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, breathing, connection, self-compassion on November 4, 2024| 21 Comments »
Today when the heart is a small, tight knot,
I do not try to untangle it. I don’t tug on the strings
in a desperate attempt to unravel it.
I don’t even wonder at how it got so snarled.
Instead, I imagine cradling it, cupping it
with my hands like something precious,
something wounded, a bird with a broken wing.
I cradle my heart like the frightened thing it is.
I imagine all the other frightened hearts
and imagine them all being held in love.
And I breathe. I breathe and feel
how the breathing invites a spaciousness.
I breathe and let myself be moved by the breathing
as I open and soften. Open and soften.
And nothing changes. And everything changes.
The heart, still a knot, remembers
it knows how to love. It knows it is not alone.
Ring the Bells that Still Can Ring
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bell, love, ring, service on November 3, 2024| 8 Comments »
Let this darkness be a bell tower / and you the bell. As you ring, / what batters you becomes your strength.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Joanna Macy, from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
Batter me, love, like a bell. Till I ring
and ring and ring because everything
I am, my whole being, is vibrating
with the urgent, pressing call
for love—not the sweet love
of lullabies, but insistent love
that rings through walls,
love that drowns out any voice
not in service to the whole.
Batter me love, until there is no one,
including me, who cannot hear
the pounding imperative to be kind,
to find compassion,
until all beings feel real love pealing
through their bodies—
a resonant command
so true it cannot be unheard.
I have heard other love-battered
bells of humans, and the song of them
is charging me, changing me,
making me long to be rung only by love—
It is not easy to keep asking for the battering.
But worse to be silent.
Worse not to be bell.
Worse not to be an instrument of love.
Once I feared the battering.
Now, I fear it and thrill in the ringing—
love, the only song I want to sing.
*title from “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen
When My Teenage Daughter Stays Home Sick
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged boredom, coloring, daughter, illness, mother, present on November 1, 2024| 5 Comments »
We color. I pull out the only coloring book
we have left, most of the pages already full
of half-finished attempts from years ago.
Blue and pink seals. A resting jaguar
with one purple eye, the other eye green.
We sit side by side the way we have
since she could first hold a crayon
and choose a fresh page to color.
She coughs. I sing with her playlist.
We chatter about nothing important
and fill in the green of the leaves,
make a monkey with orange and blue hair.
And it’s boring. We both agree.
Buy my god, I’m so grateful today
to be bored with her,
so grateful to fill in the lines
because right now, there is no room
but this one, this the gift:
her sniffling, the house filled with midday sun,
my life so tethered to her life,
the pink pencil growing shorter every minute.