As the sweat beads on my chest,
I ask my daughter to ladle water
over the rocks. Steam rises
to fill our lungs and heat our skin.
My lips move to whisper
Ihanaa löylyä, “beautiful steam,”
but it is my Finnish host mother’s voice
I hear. She taught me, too, to crave it,
to love it, to long for the shock
of its intensity, helped me practice
learning to desire what is good
for the body, though it is uncomfortable.
Ihanaa löylyä, I say to my daughter
as she gasps from the heat.
She repeats it in Finnish, in English.
Beautiful steam, though her syllables
lack conviction. The steam is,
I trust, doing its good sauna work—
cleansing the body, relaxing
the mind. Now it’s natural
to want it, even as I struggle
to stay with the heat. Sweat rolls down
my cheeks. I praise it, call it beautiful—
the steam, the feeling, yes, but also
this learning to love what is sometimes
not easy at first to love.
Archive for December, 2024
From the Sauna
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Finland, heat, resistance, sauna, surrender on December 31, 2024| 1 Comment »
Unresolution
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged new year, opening, resolution on December 30, 2024| 6 Comments »
Because after all these years
of focusing on the goal as if
happiness is a thing I attain
or a place I might finally reach,
now I thrill when I see through
the myth of arrivals.
I see where I have grasped
and clutched and clawed
and scrabbled to be somewhere
not where I am. Not that I regret it.
The memory of grabbing
helps me feel how beautiful it is
each time the hand opens
like a morning to what is here,
opens as if the opening itself
is what I am here to do.
One End of the Year
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged new year, openness, permeability, river, thoughts on December 29, 2024| 1 Comment »
these solid thoughts—
the river flows
right through them
Love, Death Desire & Madness: Writing into the Sacredness of our Humanity
Posted in Uncategorized on December 28, 2024| 1 Comment »
5-7 p.m. Mountain Time
Wednesdays in January (January 8, 15, 22, 29)
Zoom, $125, hosted by One Spirit, recorded
We will explore:
*how reading poems can help us explore our own lives
*how writing can be a tool for entering difficult topics in a playful or non-judgmental way
*how practicing self-compassion can change our experience of writing
One of the greatest gifts of poetry is it allows us to explore our humanness with compassion and playfulness, even when the subjects challenge us. Psychologist Michael Brant DeMaria identifies four topics we often shy from meeting openly—love, death, desire and madness—and this four-week class, we’ll circle each of them through reading and writing poetry. Curiosity will be our guide. How might exploring raw, vulnerable states open us to depth, startle us with wonder and invite a more profound relationship with the sacred? In each session, we’ll read poems, write poems of our own, discuss process, and have a chance to share the writing we do together—or not. All levels of writing are welcome.
To register, visit here.
Celebrating Timothée Chalamet’s Birthday … Again
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged baking, cake, daughter, joy, mother, Timothee Chalamet on December 28, 2024| 1 Comment »
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
—Mary Oliver
I could not have imagined
how every year my daughter
and I would bake a chocolate beet cake
for Timothée Chalamet’s birthday—
nor could I have foreseen
how it would thrill me—
this sweet ritual in which we celebrate
the life of an actor who brings
us joy. Joy needs such a meager
door through which to enter and reveal
itself. A door I can’t imagine
with a handle I can’t find
except by loving the world
and the people in it.
I would have thought loving
made the heart more full.
And it does. But it makes
the heart more spacious, too,
a place where anything could happen,
even what is real: a daughter,
a mother, and hours in the kitchen
singing and stirring, the scent
of chocolate, earthy and nutty,
floating in the air like a song.
One Deepening Connection
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged breath, meditation, mindfulness on December 27, 2024| 2 Comments »
each breath
a sanctuary
I carry with me
On Christmas Morning
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, breaking, christmas, ephemera on December 26, 2024| 3 Comments »
It was broken when I opened the gift,
the long ear of the small clay bunny.
The giver apologized, but how could she
have known that in the breaking
it became that much more precious—
aligned with the truth that all things
break, and the breaking makes
them no less beloved. Perhaps more so.
What surprised me was how the break
cleaved a perfect heart shape, a message
hiding inside the whole. I cried then,
not because the figurine was broken, but
because I am gloriously, terribly broken, and oh,
it’s so beautiful to see it, the love in everything.
The Gift
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged amaryllis, beauty, gift, grace on December 25, 2024| 6 Comments »
How does the amaryllis bulb do it,
store so much life inside its thin brown
wrapping? How, from such a small
round package, does such a large
stem continue to rise? I don’t know
how it offers such abundance
from such a small space, but
whatever grace it is that infuses
the amaryllis, I want to believe
it could happen anywhere—
so that a country or a woman
or even a minute could be
a gift wrapped in nothing more
than its own dry skin, a gift
that surprises the world as it
produces extravagant beauty
day after day, perhaps even
surprising itself as, seemingly
from nothing, it begins to bloom.
One Night Before Christmas
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Christmas, mystery, stars, trees, winter on December 24, 2024| 1 Comment »
ornaments for the galaxy
between bare cottonwood branches
hung by what great hand, the stars
Reciting Hopkins by Heart with Peter and Gabriel
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blank verse, friendship, gerard manley hopkins, reciting poetry, sonnet on December 23, 2024| 3 Comments »
The first few words we all knew well, but then
we stumbled, stuttered, reached for precious lines,
our halting voices so unlike the smooth
and sweeping windhover that Hopkins wrote
about. And still, despite our bumbling,
despite our clumsy starts and awkward spurts,
an ecstasy of plume still winged through our
attempts. The language sang, its embers glowed,
its music stirred vermillion. And our eyes
were shining, too. No wonder of it: even
plodding, ploughing fields can make the soil
gleam. With love, we ploughed that sonnet’s lines
until they shined, until the air between
us plumed and swooped, until we, too, were shining.
here, friends, is the poem we were reciting.