They will not write
about how, every
night in sleep,
somehow my hand
found your hand,
or how, before dinner
each night we light
candles and then
say something kind
before we eat.
They will not mention
how you would do
dishes for me and I
would do dishes for you,
nor how I never once
needed to ask you
to wax my skis
because it was
already done.
But more than any
title or degree,
these daily moments
are what shape a life—
these moments that
make us, these moments
that no one else sees.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged daily life, long marriage, moments, obituary | 8 Comments »
Please join me for a very special, open-hearted conversation with Ned Buskirk on You’re Going to Die podcast.
- how loss creates community
- how a writing practice helps us show up
- shifting our creative practice from wanting to be good to be true
- recovering from perfectionism
- the difference between pain we must meet and pain we take on
- the power of reframing our stories with new metaphors
- how trust in a creative practice helps us bring trust to the rest of our lives
And then there’s a very special 15 minute conversation at the end of the episode with the folks behind the scenes on the podcast talking about what is happening now in Minnesota–connection, love, inspiration, fear, and showing up.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged mortality, podcast | 2 Comments »
So much radiance
above the horizon—
glowing pink, deeper pink—
I wanted to gather
it all and keep it,
hold it forever,
but where to
store something
that large? I
gathered all that beauty
in my heart,
my heart, a mockery
of a pocket. Of course
it spilled out. I put
the pink glow back
in the sky. It lit
the whole world.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged beauty, selfishness, sharing, sunset | 4 Comments »
I go walking up a backcountry road
and for ten minutes, a crow flies above
and before me, resting in trees along the way,
as if showing me the way to go.
Someone has made smiley faces out of pebbles
and left them on many large flat stones.
And the orange jeep that passes me
pulls a U turn and Trevor jumps out
and says, “I just wanted to hug you.”
If I knew only this hour, it would be easy
to believe the world is only good.
But I carry in me the certainty
that rupture is part of the whole.
I know cruelty lives in us all.
I know, too, the white truck slowed down
when it passed me, as if the driver said,
walker, I will make sure you feel safe.
I know when I turned not just out but in,
I felt such genuine love for the world.
That love was the strongest proof of all.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged good, inner beauty, walking | 8 Comments »
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 »