Dear Finn,
I went for a walk in the dark tonight
and spoke to you as I have since
you first died, which is to say
I greet you, then listen.
What I heard tonight, of course,
was silence, the silence
beneath the rustling leaves,
the silence surrounding each star,
the silence you’ve joined.
I love the listening.
Love these moments of feeling
closer to you simply because I lean in.
I have long since stopped asking
for a sign you are somehow here,
though earlier tonight I noticed
how my battery-operated candle
kept flickering like a firefly—
the very candle I said your name into
to invite your presence into the room.
What if that flickering
was you saying hello in a way
that you can? Part of me
rolls her eyes. Part of me
remembers how to listen
to the language you speak now,
mysterious, unlikely, unknowable.
I guess it would be harder for you
to reach me these days when
I’ve come to trust the silence,
but now, staring at the steady candlelight
across the room, I begin to remember
there are so many ways you return.
Why would I try to explain it away?
I begin to remember how to listen.
Archive for October, 2026
In a Time of Cruelty
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, dream, third eye on October 11, 2026| 2 Comments »
In a dream
the old man
teaches me
to gather
any tears I
weep for another
on my finger,
then to touch
the damp tip
to my forehead,
a way to
open
the third eye.
When I wake,
I begin to practice.
The dream
somehow not gone,
I still see his nod,
his smile, honest,
inviting.
Interwoven
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connected, separateness on October 10, 2026| 2 Comments »
Everything that is in the heavens, on earth,
and under the earth
is penetrated with connectedness,
penetrated with relatedness.
—Hildegard of Bingen
Imagine
red thread
stitched
through the center
of your being
connecting you
to the center
of all other beings.
If we stopped
seeing ourselves
as separate,
what might
change
?
Let it shock you.
—Cynthia Bourgeault
This, Too
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, memory, nourishment, reframe, sunflower on October 9, 2026| 4 Comments »
I once thought love was always open, open the way a sunflower is open, bright and lavish and soft. Today the sunflowers are spent, brown, lifeless stalks, and the Stellar’s jays wrestle seeds from desiccated heads, seeds that nourish them in these shortening days. Sometimes I find in me old memories of you. When I rattle them, I discover inside are dried seeds of compassion, seeds of loss, seeds of devotion, seeds of trust. I take them in like the communion they are. Feel how what is hard and dried grows me. Feel how this, too, is love.
Human Nature
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged growth, hiding, mask, rabbit, vulnerability, wolf on October 8, 2026| 4 Comments »
Somewhere inside us is a rabbit
who has not yet figured out
she’s wearing a wolf costume
that her mom dressed her in long ago.
Her mother, of course, was trying
to protect her from the wolves.
But that rabbit is getting hot
and thinking how nice it might be
to sit out in the field
and feel the sun on her back,
the wind on her whiskers.
If she takes off that heavy mask,
she will learn fear.
If she doesn’t, she will never
learn who she is.
That Impossible Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anger, burning, fear, fire, love on October 8, 2026| 3 Comments »
You were curled into yourself,
a tight lump of a woman,
hiding in the corner of the closet.
How long did you scrunch there
in that small tight room beneath the coats,
that room dark as coal, while tongues
of fury and fear and indignation
swirled inside you like blue flames,
blue flames licking, licking and seeking
more fuel to burn. You burned.
What was it that allowed you
to unclench? Exhaustion, of course.
Exhaustion, and an almost imperceptible spark.
You would never call that spark love. But was it?
Was it love that came and found you and gave
you the will to crawl to the door
and push it open just an inch, another
inch. Was it love that helped you stand,
love that fashioned from the char of you a woman?
Was it love that survived the blue flame
and whispered, I, too, am fire?
Seven in the Lake
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, childhood, death, lake, play, swimming on October 6, 2026| 4 Comments »
after Jim Harrison, “Seven in the Woods”
Yesterday, I was seven, swimming
in the lake. Thin prickly seaweed strands
winding around my legs. I would do anything
not to touch the silty bottom. Bullheads
lived there with their slimy dark skin
and strange thick whiskers. On the surface,
I was sleek and playful, baring my skin
to Wisconsin sunshine, splashing
and being splashed by my brother,
crawling through waves with wild joy,
my arms slicing through green water,
my strokes strong and quick.
Almost fifty years later, I feel it,
the welcoming warmth at the lake’s surface,
the cooler layers deeper below.
I remember the simple pleasure
of the dead man’s float,
a seven-year-old girl playing with how to die.
What did I know of death then,
except that it meant to hold my breath,
to let my body be held, a game,
really, just another way to play,
like Marco Polo, like racing to the raft.
The stakes feel so much higher, now.
Death not a friend, exactly, but
a companion nonetheless.
I channel her back, that seven year old,
remember her fear of the depths.
The bottom’s not so bad, I want to tell her.
You can be playful with death, she giggles back.
Again It Rears Up, This Familiar Worry
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cobra, control, perfectionism, snake, worry on October 6, 2026| 7 Comments »
Again it rears up, this familiar worry
that I am not doing enough to protect
and honor this world and all who dwell in it.
Worry slithers around my chest and constricts,
writhes in me as if my belly has become a bed
of slow moving snakes, all of them hissing,
You should be doing more. Somehow
I had not let myself see they were here.
No shame there—of course they love to hide,
preferring shadows to sun, and now,
this morning, I see they have multiplied—
as if the cobra of perfection and the cobra
of fear have mated, mated often, and now
there’s a vast quivering inside that will not
be ignored. I have read you should never attempt
to touch, catch, provoke or kill a cobra.
I imagine it’s the same with worry.
What it needs from me is not to tame it,
not to destroy it, not even to soothe it,
but to give it space, to keep myself calm,
and most importantly to not pretend it isn’t there.
Oh worry, I see you. Of course, you make me
uncomfortable. I see how you live in a den
fashioned of tenderness and love for the world
so great I want to be in service. All my life
I’m learning to make room for what I can’t control.
All my life, I am learning to trust
how even the unwanted is necessary,
how it maintains the balancing of the whole.
Come What May
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, connection, control, trust, worry on October 4, 2026| 4 Comments »
There she is, sitting at my inner desk,
surrounded by spreadsheets and pink
eraser rubbings. She’s scrubbing at her
temples, running the numbers, planning,
preparing, making projections. I just
want to know things are going to be okay,
she says. She is worried. She is always worried.
I do not try to stop her. Her heart is golden,
and her longing to help is born out of love
that has twisted into fear. Instead, I sit
beside her. I do not hum a soothing song.
I don’t tell her a story that ends happily ever
after. Nor do I chastise her. I don’t tell her
she’s doing it wrong or that there is a way
to do life more right. I don’t tell her she’s
supposed to be grateful for whatever she gets.
I simply show up and breathe beside her
and feel how much she belongs. My love
for her does not make her stop worrying.
There is plenty to worry about. We go
on that way, for a day, for a life. The wind always
messing her hair. The chair never right.
The world too fast, too broken, too painful.
She doesn’t have to face it alone.
In Which I Dream of Being with You and Your Late Husband
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blessing, death, dream, friendship, god, grief, knitting, love on October 3, 2026| 9 Comments »
for LB
In the dream, I hand him a skein
of evergreen yarn. He cups his palms
below it as if receiving communion,
then squeezes the fine wool,
testing its softness, its strength.
Finding it worthy, he nods at me
as I offer you the half-knitted hat,
the yarn still attached to the needles,
the other end of the yarn held in his palms.
He looks at you, so loving, so tender,
looks at the slender green strand between you
and smiles before unwinding the yarn
to give you more length, more length.
This morning, the dream still wrapped around me,
I imagine you not as Penelope, knitting
and unknitting to prolong your time. Instead,
I see you have made of the yarn a swing,
a pendulum tethered to devotion that allows you
to play and soar between realms, and the god
of swings and the god of skeins, and
the god of play and the god of love and the god
of green and the god of dreams are the same
good god, and every one of them is whispering
bless you, bless you, bless you.
Letter to the Man with a Beard Down the Beach
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beach, evolution, humanness, ocean on October 2, 2026| 11 Comments »
It was beautiful, wasn’t it, the gray of pre-dawn,
the way the horizon was more suggestion than line?
And it wasn’t too cold, was it, the Pacific, as we waded in,
together, not together, two humans drawn at the same
time to walk back into the salt water that long ago
our ancestors walked out of. Last week, I walked
with an ocean scientist on the shores of the Atlantic.
She watches people on the beach, notices
how many of them could be anywhere, unaware
of their surroundings as they chat, powerwalk or sleep,
and I decided that day I would no longer be that person
who stays dry. So there we were, you and I, walking
into the water. And I thought of other people I know
in places far away who walk into the ocean each day.
A seal came by, sleeking its brown body right before me,
flipping before slipping back into the depths. And many
small fish came, streaking above the waves like thin
silver stones skipping themselves. My heart skipped, too.
Swam deeper in. As if it always knew my evolution
would be this: belonging to the world.
Did you feel it, too, how the current tugged at our skin?
Did you hear it, too, the call to go more wholly in?
One Reason Why We’re Not Doomed
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged candle, connection, hope, light, miracle on October 1, 2026| 8 Comments »
this candle in my room
lit by the candle in your room
across the world