It was late evening. I was sitting on the couch, the purple one my husband made, when I felt the small tickle traveling from my forearm to my wrist. Not wearing my glasses, I held out my arm for my husband to look. “What is it?” I asked. “A tick,” he said, his voice flat, matter of fact. He pinched it in his fingers, then took it to the counter and crushed it with the bottom of a water glass. I had had a good day, listening to a woman speak about how she could still be compassionate toward her mother after years of abuse. I had gone to a dinner in honor of my husband for difficult work well done. I was proud of him and said kind and true things about how I had seen him grow. The skin where the tick had been continued to tickle. In fact, I felt the light prickle of tick legs walking on almost every part of my body. I had to take everything off. I stood in front of the mirror and saw what wasn’t there. No tick. Nor the body I once had. It was not easy to look. I asked my eyes to remember it is possible to say something compassionate, something matter of fact, something true.
Archive for March, 2026
The Reflection
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, language, mirror, reflection, tick on March 31, 2026| 6 Comments »
True Story
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, history, inclusion, knitting, story on March 30, 2026| 4 Comments »
“What on earth can we do to make this sad and beautiful world a little softer for everyone?” — Shannan Martin, The Ministry of Ordinary Places
Once there was a woman who knit.
She knit the sky and the cemetery,
narrow alleys and the deep sea, the highway
and the willow, starlight and the bare bulb.
It was not easy to slip such things onto her needles,
but she knew she could do hard things.
Of course, she doubted herself.
That did not stop her from knitting.
Every moment of every day, the chance
to add everything she saw and tasted, felt
and heard, into one blanket large enough
to touch everyone. It never was quite large enough,
though, she every day, she kept on knitting.
She could feel herself how silky, how cozy it was.
What makes softness is no secret. It is love.
Sometimes she dropped a stitch. Sometimes
she lost the pattern and had to start a row over.
Sometimes she had to make up something new.
But she knew what she had to do. Something. Anything.
Everything she could to make this sad and beautiful
world a little softer for everyone. There is no end
to the work she does. Every day, she picks
it up, admires the progress she’s made, worries
about the holes, starts her knitting again.
The Arrangement
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bouquet, garden, grandmother, sound on March 30, 2026| 8 Comments »
Because touch is one way we offer praise,
this morning I touch my ears
to the see-sawing song of birds
in the tree beside me. I still myself
to focus on their song, and they stop
singing, as if to tease. I touch my ears
to the silence where the song is not.
Touch the warm tones of wind chimes
stirred by a breeze I barely feel.
Touch the hum of the cars
and the growl of a motorcycle I’d rather
shut out. I think of how my grandmother
used grass, even weeds in her flower arrangements.
She taught me you could make anything beautiful.
I try to stop slandering the traffic noise
and gather it into an audible bouquet complete
with birds, chimes, silence, my breath.
How to make the unwelcome welcome?
How to hold tension in ways that compliment?
All morning, all day, I practice opening
to what isn’t easy to love. I make a vase
of the moment. Add all the sound that’s here.
So much I’d rather not to listen to.
I think of my grandmother. I try to find
new ways to hear.
As We Marched
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged community, democracy, integrity, march, politics, protest on March 29, 2026| 12 Comments »
I imagined every step a step toward integrity,
toward justice. Toward language that respects
diversity. Every step a step toward equality. Truth.
I imagined every step one step closer to peace
in our country, toward peace in the world.
I am old enough to not believe in arrivals,
I am fool enough to believe in love.
I am human enough to believe in community.
I am scientist enough to know we need each other.
Perhaps some part of me wondered what good it did
for a few hundred people in a remote mountain town
to walk together a few blocks, chanting, then walk
back to the courthouse again, but tonight, in my body,
I feel it, the trust in humanity that rises when I think
of how we gathered and drummed and believed
in what our country can be. My heart beats
a new rhythm in time with belonging.
“This is what democracy looks like.”
Tonight, after we’ve all gone home,
I know we’re all still marching.
In Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged failure, garden, parsley, patience, seeds, trust on March 28, 2026| 6 Comments »
In soil not yet worked this spring,
two perfect rows of parsley emerge
in a curly leafed celebration of green,
vestiges from last year’s planting.
Where is not garden?
Good hands, what will you do
with this new trust rising
out of what looked like failure?
Nothing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged canyon, cliff, nature, not doing, nothing, stillnes on March 26, 2026| 10 Comments »
Today, for a time, I am more red rock cliff than river.
I sit and do not do.
Perhaps some part of me crumbles.
I do not resist the crumbling.
I do not resist stillness.
I am weary of resisting.
So weary that today
I promised myself
I would make time for nothingness.
What pleasure I found in not rushing,
not rising, not streaming, not traveling to,
not coming from.
Why have I put off, again and again,
the chance to be intimate
with nothing?
Yesterday, when I heard myself
tell a friend my experience of nothing
is what I think God is,
then I wondered why I fill my hours
with so much everything?
So today I cliff. I rock wall.
I sandstone. I canyon.
I sit still and undo
and meet the great nothing
that holds up everything.
The Phone Call
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, conversation, friendship, phone call, refuge, respite, rest, river on March 25, 2026| 4 Comments »
While all around us the world rushes by,
our conversation becomes a wide flat rock
in the midst of the river where we can rest
long enough to see not everything
is snarl and torrent, rapid and rush.
See how the heron lands in the eddy,
how soft moss grows on rocks in the shade.
Holding up all the tumult, the peaceful.
At the edges of chaos, the beautiful.
This is why, when I call you in the middle
of the day and you answer, I almost cry.
Because the timbre of your voice is enough
to land me. I lie on the solid rock of our talk.
I rest there long enough for my own pulse
to slow, long enough dangle my ankle
into the current and think, yes,
I can swim again.
For What Ails Us
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, connection, friendship, healing, heartache, medicine, trust on March 25, 2026| 4 Comments »
Wini weeps as she tells me “everyone is so broken,”
and a small shrine appears in the tear on her cheek.
I kneel inside it as it slips to her chin.
My throat clenches, my own heart widens,
enlivened by how deeply Wini cares,
and somehow her heartache begins to mend
my own grief for this cruel and callous world.
More than any beauty. More than the uplifting song
of the red wing black bird trilling through the open window.
More than the scent of basil and lemon.
More than the dark silhouette of two herons winging
through the nectarine sunset. Wini’s tears heal me.
Shared ache becomes its own medicine.
No. Not the ache. The medicine is in the love that fuels
the ache. It feels so right, I forget to wish it didn’t hurt.
Devil’s Advocate: The Ruler Speaks
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambiguity, ars poetica, certainty, ruler on March 23, 2026| 5 Comments »
Ask a surgeon if a millimeter matters.
how the smallest measure marks
the difference between a heartbeat
and a silence that lasts forever.
I’ve seen you, poet, take joy in ambiguity,
in word bending, word twisting, word play.
“So many ways to do it right,” you say.
What if, for a day, you tried to speak
as impeccably as I measure?
What would be clearer? What
would be lost? What if you knew
only the most precise word
could save another’s light? Or your own?
You know it’s true because
words have saved you—
Think of Rilke. Neruda. Dickinson. Frost.
Precision matters. In poetry, too.
Even what’s free has a cost.
Oh friends, this poem that began just playing with metaphor got me really thinking… I love the way poems help us challenge what we think we know.
The Shift
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, inner landscape, shift, spaciousness on March 22, 2026| 4 Comments »
She wanted a little room for thinking.
With no room available,
she settled for a chair.
She sat there.
To anyone else, it might have looked
as if nothing was happening.
Inside her, whole foundations
were crumbling. Maps were
unmapping. Paths
were unpathing. A tornado
of doubt did its perfect work.
Somewhere there was light.
No one else could see the rubble
rising all around her.
Also in that wreckage,
her belief in fixing.
God, she was raw.
Now, now
there was room.
Heart Medicine
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, opening, rabbit, refuge, shelter on March 21, 2026| 4 Comments »
To stay open
is what I wanted.
Though winter and war
have taught me
the importance of refuge.
Even then, like a wild rabbit
that is no less soft
and no less gentle
inside its dark burrow,
the heart in its shelter
finds ways to stay open,
if not to the world,
at least to whatever
it is that shines
through the self,
and the deep remove
becomes a chance
to steep in tenderness
before re-emerging again
into the world
with all its threats
and dangers,
with all its green
and radiant beauty.
Celebrate with Me!
Posted in Uncategorized on March 20, 2026| 44 Comments »
It was exactly 20 years ago on the Spring Equinox in 2006 that I began a daily poem practice. On that day, I committed to write a poem a day for 30 days. I thought that sounded impossible. But now it is over 7,300 days later. And the daily practice has completely changed everything about how I meet the world. Thank you for joining me in this daily practice … I’m so grateful you’re here seeing what happens next with me!
This Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, time on March 20, 2026| 4 Comments »
Driving past the graveyard
listening to news
as it explodes—
while we breathe
it’s never too late
to choose compassion.
In a Name?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged destiny, joy, name on March 20, 2026| 8 Comments »
In the moment when a person names a child,
Gail tells me, it is said a sacred wisdom
shines through the namer that connects the child’s
soul to their character, infusing the new being
with what they need for this life.
In these days of heartache and horror,
I think of my mother holding me wet in her arms
for the first time, when she whispered syllables
that charged me with joy—that sincere, love-drenched
moment out of which my whole life has bloomed.
Perhaps this is why I cry when Gail tells me
about the magic of that moment. It’s as if mom
gifted me an underground spring that flows
even when the land around it is dry. Even when
it doesn’t rain. For years. Still, that water flows.
Manual
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chore, daily, habit, hands, sacred, worship on March 18, 2026| 5 Comments »
The hands are churches that worship the world.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Daily”
To pour water over the aloe,
the cyclamen, the jade plant, the cactus,
this, too, is prayer. Prayer in touching
my own dry lips, marveling at the fullness
beneath fingertips. Worship in hefting
the tea pot by its thick black handle.
Worship in squeezing the sudsy warm sponge.
Just yesterday, while we were driving,
Art said to me, “Why not open to the marvelous?”
I equated marvelous with the grand, the inexplicable,
even the strange. It didn’t occur to me then
that gripping the smooth, leather arc of steering wheel
is marvelous, cradling the white paper cup full of coffee
is marvelous, fingering the waffle pattern on the dishcloth
as I fold it is marvelous. Marvelous, flipping through
skin-thin pages of notebooks. Marvelous
and sacred, my palm resting on my husband’s thigh.
Marvelous, these knobby knuckles, how they
curl around the hair brush. Sacred,
the pillowed pads of these fingers, how they
trace the lines of my husband’s face,
how they twist and tug wool around the knitting
needles, how they tap at the keyboard to fashion
language out of feeling, how they rest above my heart
and translate into praise that beat, faithful and familiar.
Places I Long to Go
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, fertile, inner landscape, moss on March 18, 2026| 2 Comments »
Every time we pass this spot on the dusty river trail,
my daughter gazes across the water to the other side,
shaded by cliffs, where moss grows thick and deep.
I would love to sleep on that moss, she says,
as her eyes go gauzy, her voice grows soft.
Living in high desert, as we do, mossy places are few.
As a girl, I had in my bedroom a whole wall covered
with a mural of a Japanese garden, its gray rocks
mostly covered in green. I, too, dreamed of stepping
into in a place so lush, so verdant, so alive even rocks
proved fertile ground. To find that kind of fertility inside me—
inviting what is sensual, vital, to flourish in the barren,
desiccated places in my heart—that is my new dream.
But it is not always easy to let in the dark. Not always easy
to let what is hard in me be broken down so something
might grow. There are places I long to go with my girl.
Some are nearby, just across the stream.
Some, breath close, are much harder to travel to.
So Good
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged community, good, good enough, paradox, poetry reading on March 16, 2026| 6 Comments »
In a world of bests, good is a relief. Best invites an argument; good is just a suggestion.
—Melissa Kirsch, “What’s Good” in The New York Times, March 14, 2026
This morning I slip out of my good bed
into my good green slippers. I drink good coffee
and play a good game of chase with my nephews.
They are good, good boys. I take a good long drive
with my good old friend and we arrive in a town
I have loved for years full of good memories
and good people. There we eat a good dinner
and then spend a night sharing poems.
I’m grateful for the poems that make me ache,
because it’s good to bear what’s bad together.
It’s not easy. But real. Real good. The kind of good
that makes your whole body hum, that makes
your hands clap and your heart stretch wide,
feeling so good, so good, even as you cry.
After the Chickadee Hits the Window
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged boy, caring, chickadee, feeling, grief, love, pie on March 14, 2026| 6 Comments »
for Thilo
To the unmoving body
of the tiny bird in the grass
below the kitchen window,
the young boy brings a plate
of white safflower seeds.
Hours later, when the bird
has not moved, one wing still askew,
the boy weeps. His father and I
sing a death song as we carry
the almost weightless body
in a brief procession across the yard.
The boy and his mother walk
behind. Her fingers lightly rest
where his own wings would be.
There is a tenderness inside us
that knows every life is precious
and refuses to pretend otherwise.
Later, the boy carves a chickadee
into the top crust of an apple pie,
making of grief something beautiful.
I want to protect that part of him—
the part that feels, that respects,
that honors. I want to awaken
that part in us all—the part
that dares to care deeply,
the part that knows every
life matters.
Side by Side by Side by Side by Side by Side by Side
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged constellations, family, love, night, trust on March 13, 2026| 6 Comments »
We lay on the porch in the dark
marveling up at the sky, Orion’s
belt at our feet, Jupiter just up
to the left. We chatted of satellites
and the soft milky way glow; we
named the constellations we could.
And when young Winston laid his head
on my chest and I felt the gentle ease
in his small warm weight, I was equal
parts universe and human—
astonished again by how, in this vast,
cold, expanding world, we have been given
the capacity to trust. And no matter
how bleak it sometimes gets on earth,
there are also moments such as this,
when we come together to gaze into the night
and, lingering in immensity, we feel it,
side by side by side by side by side by
side by side, the gift of loving each other,
dark though it may be.