The more complex the problem,
the more trapped, the more closed in I feel,
the more I learn to trust what is simple,
the way the potato in the cupboard
does the one thing it can do—
it calls on whatever thrives inside itself,
then grows doggedly, awkwardly toward the light.
I want to turn toward the life that lives through me.
Give it all my energy. Offer it back to the world.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged despair, growth, inner resources, potato | 2 Comments »
after reading “The Reassembly” by Isabella Nesheiwat
In the museum of the chest, I find
on a dusty back shelf my old favorite lunch box
with Hollie Hobbie’s picture raised
on one metal side, her big blue
bonnet covering all of her face.
The box is dented from where Donny,
a grade older, kicked it that day
when I walked the shortcut home from school.
He told me Holly Hobbie was for babies.
I arrived home feeling dented, broken, too,
embarrassed to be myself.
I run my fingers over the cool silver latch
and open the lunch box again.
Empty now except for the old story
I told myself about my unworthiness.
Instead of listening to the story,
I listen to the emptiness. Hear my heart
beating true in my blood warm chest.
The heart says, What is infinite in you
survives all brokenness.
I write these words in the dust
on the shelf beside the box.
The museum curator doesn’t chastise me.
She smiles at what I wrote. She nods.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged brokenness, bully, childhood memory, infinite, memory | 12 Comments »
for Kyra
She brought her cello to the desert,
playing long, slow notes to cactus,
canyons, the night, knowing
it matters to bring music
wherever you go. She taught me
to sing in the face of fear,
even when the mountain lion
held her with his amber eyes.
She taught me to plant
a weed in a pot and wait
with great patience to see
what kind of flower might bloom.
To bring something chocolaty and sweet
to share with others wherever you go.
She taught me to share scars,
even when they make others wince.
To use more garlic,
to read poems to strangers,
to dance barefoot in the grass.
I did not want to learn how quickly
a life can go from vibrant to silent
to gone. Did not want to learn
how great a hole one human can leave
in so many lives. But I am grateful
for all that she teaches me still—
the beauty in the ache, how to hear
the missing laughter in the silence,
how to read the letters that
don’t come anymore, how love
is so much bigger than a poem,
how she is no less herself now
than she was when she was here,
how even in her absence
she still teaches me discipline.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged discipline, friendship, kindness, Kyra Kopestonksky, learning, legacy, teacher | 12 Comments »
Every day I tend it again,
this fence around our hearts.
I rebuild it each time I say no
to things that would take me away
from you. I rebuild it each time
I choose to be right here.
I rebuild it and thrill in the rebuilding,
each post of the fence is a love letter,
this fence I once tried to burn.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged commitment, connection, fence, freedom, paradox, priorities | Leave a Comment »
after the killing of Renee Nicole Good
Into the woods I carried
my broken open heart,
knowing it rhymed with millions
of other broken open hearts,
and there, in the silence
of spruce trees and new snow
and cloudless blue sky, the heart
gaped with its relentless ache.
I so deeply loved the world and
I was so terribly upset by the world.
All this. All this. The snow was
impossibly peaceful. It softened
every broken rock, broken stick.
I felt, at the same time,
the raw wound of injustice
and the infinitude of primeval
peace, both of them saying,
remember, remember, remember.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ache, heartache, paradox, peace, politics, snow, woods | 6 Comments »
rubble everywhere
and still growing in the inner ground, how?
these stubborn roots of hope
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged collapse, hope | 6 Comments »
February 12 & 13
10 a.m. – 3 p.m. (MT)
The Decker Community Room, 675 Clinton St, Ridgway, CO 81432
Who would we be if we weren’t carrying our history, our stories, our self-image? What impossible things are possible for us? How do we grow more deeply and thrillingly into ourselves? In this two-day writing and painting retreat, join artist Kellie Day and poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer in a playful, creative revisioning of self in which we let ourselves be led by impulse and transformed through the imagination. Kellie and Rosemerry will lead you through creating a life-size goddess representation of yourself through layered acrylics, poetry, beautiful papers and imagery. We’ll dance with questions and make art and poetry steeped in wonder. A deeply process-oriented class. In the end, you’ll have a six-foot tall representation of who you might become—who, perhaps, you already are—and a poem that explores this wild becoming.
REGISTRATION & MORE (click here)
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after reading “Behave Beautifully” by Moudi Sbeity
Here is a stack of dictionaries
thick with words I never will know.
Here is the pen filled with the ink
of stories unwritten. Here is
the sky filled with stars I can’t name
and clouds that will not last.
And here, unseen, is the bridge
of the moment that links me
to all that was and all that is,
all that is real and all that is dream.
The bridge, as long as forever.
The bridge as solid as rain.
The long, beautiful bridge
vast enough to hold every word,
every story, every version
of what might be. It is the bridge
toward understanding. And here
is you. And here is me.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bridge, connection, present | 11 Comments »
we discover that falling in the canyon is our initiation
—Mark Nepo, “The Life After Tears”
I didn’t land. I fell and I fell and I fell.
At first as I plummeted, I feared the landing,
imagining an imminent crash. Then,
I fell through nights and middays. Fell through
kitchen floors and highways. Fell through
birthdays and Saturdays. Fell until the sense
of groundlessness was so familiar it no longer
felt like peril. I don’t know when I stopped falling.
There was no splat. No splash. No crushing of bones.
No sense of arrival. In fact, I am not certain
I am done with my falling. But I do know now
the falling is not something to be feared.
Not that we grow wings. This is not about flying.
It’s about falling. About meeting the gravity
and feeling its force and letting it carry me
in ways I have never before let myself be carried.
Now I know that the canyon of grief is
just another name for living the fullest life.
The reward for the falling is to no longer
expect a reward. The reward of falling is to
learn to not resist the falling. The reward of falling
is to feel how grace falls with us as if holding
our hand, like a teacher, like a friend.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged acceptance, canyon, falling, grace, grief, surrender | 7 Comments »
I haven’t given up on humans yet.
Though here in America where masked agents
pull women and men from their homes–
people who build our communities, our country–
we are so far from the goodness I imagine.
In second grade, I remember making forts
at recess with small snow balls we’d
squeeze in our hands. So carefully,
so gently, we would place them, one on top
of another to create a small home.
And then, maybe every time, when
the recess bell rang, a group of boys
would linger and at the last moment
they would kick our snow walls down.
It is in all of us, the bully, the one
who enjoys destruction, the one who
wants to feel powerful, strong.
But it is also in us all to speak out
for each other, to stand up for each other,
to say no, this is not okay. It is in us all of us
to gather the way we did in second grade
with our small mittened hands, going out
the next recess, and the next, and the next,
to build together again. Because we can.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bully, community, politics, standing up, voice | 10 Comments »