There is inside me a field of pink paintbrush,
lush and unbounded—a riotous blush
no one has planted. It’s rooted and spread
in the places where I am most open.
Nodding pink. Waving pink.
Glorious flourishing stems of pink.
Even when I’m walking concourse T. Even
when I’m at the bank drive through.
Even when I’m waiting at the stoplight.
Even when I’m dull, still I am filled
with lavish meadows of dusky pink,
mounds and mounds of soft dusky pink,
great mountainous expanses of deepening,
opening, surprising pink, the kind of pink
that becomes more pink the longer you look.
It survives even the harshest winters,
always returning with wild and unmanaged
beauty. No one tends it, and yet it thrives.
Not that I deserve it. It’s a damn wonder, really,
a meadow of pink so generous, so vast
I’ll never stop finding new paths.
Archive for July, 2025
Inner Landscape
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged inner landscape, paintbrush, wildflower on July 31, 2025| 2 Comments »
Perspective
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anger, field, perspective, scarecrow, widen the lens on July 30, 2025| 10 Comments »
If anger is a scarecrow
then let me be a field
that sprawls across the roads
and beyond the hills.
Sure, the scarecrow
is frightening. But it belongs.
And the field, look, it goes
on and on and on.
Dressing for the Wedding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged arms, body image, dress, mother, strength on July 29, 2025| 21 Comments »
She doesn’t want to wear short sleeves, she says,
because they will show her “old woman arms.”
Sometimes worry is just another word
for wanting to be loved just as we are.
I want to remind her how her arms
have been cradles and rocking chairs.
They’ve been cranes that lifted children
and grandchildren high. Her arms
have been levers and ladders and lifeboats.
They’ve been flagpoles and bridge makers
and chapels. Her arms kneaded the dough of my life
and still hold me when I am tired, broken,
scared, depressed. I hope she wears a sleeveless
dress for no other reason than to show
the whole world how her arms are still
in service to love, and damn, how they can flex.
In the Airport, I Wonder about Enough
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged enough, fear, helplessness, kindness on July 28, 2025| 8 Comments »
Could they ever be enough,
these stumbling attempts
to bring kindness to an aching world?
Enough, this holding the door for a stranger,
this saying I’m sorry, this holding a place in line?
How could it be enough, asks the ache,
when today I saw the photo of the mother
holding the starving child in Gaza,
his brown legs as thin as my wrists.
I am sick with helplessness.
What does it mean, enough?
Beside me on a bench,
a man I have never met is humming.
His tune blooms like a sun in my chest.
The warmth twines with the beat of my question,
How could any small act be enough?
Until the child in the photo and all children
are safe and fed and loved and held by loving mothers
who are safe and fed and loved
and held by loving others who are safe
and fed and loved—until then,
how could anything ever be enough?
The old man beside me has started to sing.
His eyes are closed, and his
low gentle voice braids beauty
into everything around him.
Even the questions that will never
have answers. Even this terrible ache.
How deeply I want to believe
it is not too late to save this world.
One Doable
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged building, enough, house, insufficiency, small steps on July 27, 2025| 10 Comments »
living in a leaning building—
still, she straightens
the picture on the wall
The Uptight Scheduler Writes to James Crews
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged james crews, relaxing, schedule, time on July 26, 2025| 15 Comments »
Remember the morning when you and I
were leading a retreat in the old white church
with the bell that still works and it was nine oh three,
and you turned to me and said,
Let’s give folks a little more time to settle.
And I, who had been longing to ring that old bell
since eight fifty six so we could start on time,
well, I sat down at the gingham cloth covered table
and leaned back and stretched my legs,
let my empty hands rest in my empty lap
and a spaciousness entered my limbs
the way the scent of coffee fills the kitchen.
I felt it all day—a new looseness inside the hours.
There are moments when we are ready,
perhaps, to learn a new way to meet a day,
and you, on that morning, with your quiet voice
and unhurried step, you gave the one-sentence sermon
I most needed to hear. Time went from constraint to gift.
All around us people chatted and laughed.
I didn’t fixate on nine oh four and nine oh five.
Instead, I opened like a clock without a hand
and became part of that happy, eager noise.
Growing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, garden, summer, tending on July 25, 2025| 3 Comments »
for James & Brad
In late July, if you’re lucky, you wander
through the flower gardens your friends
have been nurturing for years—red beds
of bee balm and yellow mounds of St. John’s Wort,
long purple spears of butterfly bush
and thick golden stands of rudbeckia,
and all around you the buzzing, the humming,
the pollinators thrumming, the weaving
of bees and the braiding of birds
and somehow, standing in this thriving place
so lovingly tended and mindfully grown,
you are flooded with admiration for your friends
so great you disappear into the fullness
and emerge with new roots of your own,
one more living thing shaped by the care
and kindness they bring to the world.
New Video Release for RISKING LOVE
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cinepoem, Risking Love on July 25, 2025| Leave a Comment »
It is so surprising what brings us together–not only beauty, but our darknesses, too, both literal and metaphorical. “The Long Marriage” is the seventh track on RISKING LOVE, a spoken-word album that explores how we might fall more deeply in love with the world as it is, even when that seems impossible. We just released the album on July 18, 2025. Audio by Steve Law. Video by Holiday Mathis. Please, watch the video (below) and share it. We made this for you!
To purchase RISKING LOVE, visit here.
To download it or listen on Spotify, visit here.
To download it or listen on Deezer, visit here.
Video and Audio Releases from RISKING LOVE to Date
Safety Net
The Precious Matter of Love
I Want an Interlude with Mr. Clean
Into the Questions
For the One Who Is Gone
In Case You Don’t Know Already
The Long Marriage
The Long Marriage
Perhaps I know you best in the dark—
that nightly shrine
where my belly meets your spine,
where the bend of my knees
meets the bend of your knees,
where my warmth meets your warmth,
the night a vase
in which we place
the stems of our bodies,
in which we flower
through touch.
And nothing must be said
and nothing must be done
except to meet the long familiar nakedness.
Perhaps I know you best in the dark—
these lightless hours when
we sit in the midst of brokenness
and my hand finds your hand,
and my silence finds your silence,
my loss finds your loss,
and together, somehow,
we find a trustworthy peace.
And nothing can be said.
And nothing can be done
to change the past.
We meet in these darkened hours,
with nothing but our willingness
to meet these darkened hours,
these hours we would have pushed away
these hours that bring us closer to each other.
Learning to Treasure What’s Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, garden, gratefulness, life, rose on July 23, 2025| 6 Comments »
I believed I had lost it,
the rose bush I planted last year,
what, with the way it died back
after that hard spring frost.
Died all the way to the ground.
Every stem turned brown.
Was it for hope or laziness
I didn’t dig out the roots?
This year, the rose stayed dead
until one day, green. More green.
Then burgeoning, vibrant green.
And now flowers, so many flowers,
flowers of palest pink. The scent
greets me at the garden gate
every time I enter. How precious
it has become to me, this treasure.
Not because I thought it had died,
but because now I remember
it will.
What Can’t Be Lost
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, gift, lost, mother, spoon on July 22, 2025| 4 Comments »
Again I search the drawer
for my small silver spoon
with the Space Needle
on the handle, the one
my mother bought me
when I was not yet two
and we lived in Seattle.
How I loved that spoon,
bringing it with me everywhere
I’ve moved—to college, grad school,
to the top of a mountain,
to a low river valley. I love
the shape of it, sure,
the way the bowl of the spoon
is pointed and shallow,
perfect for small bites
of vanilla ice cream.
Mostly, what I love
is thinking of how my mother,
who had so little then,
wanted to buy her daughter
a treasure. It’s been years
since the last time I touched it.
It’s disappeared many times,
my own young children as enamored
with the spoon as I, and so
I have found the spoon behind the couch
or beneath their beds or left outside
on the arm of a lawn chair,
sometimes even back in its slot
in the drawer.
So for years, I’ve assumed
the spoon will return.
To this day, I don’t think of it as lost.
How could I, when every time
I eat yogurt or ice cream or oatmeal,
I look in the drawer for the spoon,
which is to say every day I touch the spoon
with my mind, every day I remember
the way a mother bought her daughter
a treasure, I think of the love, and every day,
even when it’s not here, it’s so here.