Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘aliveness’

Cicada

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on October 10, 2024| 4 Comments »

Fear lays its eggs
in the grooves
of my thoughts
where they hatch
and feed on
the juice of my joy,
then dig to my roots
and eat those, too,
till they emerge
and grow wings
and sing and sing
and ceaselessly sing
to each other
using their bodies
as chambers
and I can’t escape
their song—
sometimes
when I listen,
I tremble
and the ache
makes me feel—
how can this be—
impossibly
more alive.

Read Full Post »

Because the Frost Is Late This Year

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 20, 2024| 16 Comments »

The nasturtiums have flourished enough
to escape their bed, and long, round
stems stretch down from the wooden
box and run between rows along the garden
paths, and it’s a freaking insurgence
of blooming, a mutiny of beauty, a
rebellion of splendor and my god if
I don’t just stand here in the paths, stunned
by the unlikely blessing, cursed with my
knowledge of how quickly it all can die, but
today, just look at it, today, I don’t even
try not to praise it, instead I stand in
the midst of improbable glory and fall
in love with all these gold and orange
petals and wide rounded leaves, barely
able to breathe past the ache of how all
we love will leave us—even the wildest
of blossomings, even the most unruly
of beauties, even what looks as if it’s
so alive it could take over the whole world.

Read Full Post »

Not a Still Life

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 23, 2024| 10 Comments »

 
 
As if they’d been waiting for the wild wind to wane,
the mother and father goose guide their goslings
on a walk through the field, a dozen small graylings
bumbling between them, and the May evening light
has not dulled yet to dim so every new birch leaf
and every spring blade and every bright red willow stem
seems to outgleam itself with aliveness, and the air
blurs with hummingbirds, whirls with violet-green swallows,
and it’s spring, my god, it’s thrumming inside me, this life saying
Live, live, live, live, as everything I am unfurls and expands,
even the parts I thought seemed dead, yes even the sticks
now swell into bud, erupt into reckless bloom.

Read Full Post »

Talking with Andrea

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 5, 2024| 12 Comments »


I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.
                  —Anne Lamott
 
 
With every cell, I listened
to her familiar voice,
her thoughtful silences,
her precision with verbs,
and though we spoke
of showerheads and
grocery shopping,
elections, underbellies and
standing beneath the moon,
we spoke only of grace, every
sentence somehow stitched
with the most stripped-down
kind of praise, the kind
that doesn’t sparkle,
doesn’t sing, doesn’t
shimmy, doesn’t offer
sweet perfume, the kind
of praise that is so naked,
so plain, so bare
there is nothing at all
between us and the
sheer magnificent truth
that we are here.
I long to name such aliveness,
at once composed
and uncontainable,
but it slips my attempts—
it’s like trying to fit a dress
on a sunbeam.
But I felt it, how
as we spoke I went
from being stone
to being sky. Oh glory,
with my everything,
I felt it.

Read Full Post »

Naming What Makes a Good Day

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 13, 2023| 8 Comments »


 
 
There’s a moment when I’m touched
by the sky inside the sky, the song
inside the song, the apple inside the apple.
 
It’s as if each bit of the world is itself,
only more so, and it reaches in
to trace the scaffolding of my life,
 
charging me with its utter purity,
its incontestable presence, as if to say
This, this is what it is to be alive,
 
and I hum with it, pulse with it,
glow with the wonder of it—
Rain. Rhubarb. Sand. Blood.
 
This. This. This. This.
This. This. This.

Read Full Post »

Getting Out

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 9, 2023| 11 Comments »




Sometimes there is inside me
a space so great
my body takes itself outside—
as if the house is too restricting,
as if this inner space
must be met by something vast as field,
boundless as sky, immeasurable as interstellar space.
If it is storming, so much the better.
If rain races down the face
and saturates the clothes, this is right.
If wind rips at my hair
or snow stings my cheeks
or lightning makes my hairs stand on end,
it only serves the aliveness.
If it is warm and still,
the inner space expands
into the warm and still.
There are feelings too immense for four walls,
too intense to be trapped in the skin,
sensations that rhyme with the cosmos,
moments when we start to grasp
what we are made of—
more energy than matter,
more nothing than something,
more everything than we ever dreamed.

Read Full Post »

Revelation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 27, 2022| 10 Comments »




After skate skiing on groomed track for months,
following only the preset path, today
I wake early enough to ski on the hardened crust
of spring morning snow. Suddenly,
the whole valley is a playground. And
it’s freedom. Freedom to move in any
direction. Freedom to loop or climb or follow
the river. Freedom that seeps into breath, into smile,
into my understanding of what it means to be alive.
And the whole time I skate and pole
and propel myself over snow
I hear an inner refrain from Romans:
And death shall have no dominion.
Not a still small voice, but a resonant boom.
And I, so alive in this sweet slip of time,
know that though my son has died
and my father has died, here I am,
carrying their love, and alive. Alive!
Alive through the winter.
Alive though I grieve. Alive. Alive as I skate
through willows and aspen and wide open white.
Lungs burning, legs striding, heart beating
hard in my chest. I know myself as breath
and return to the wholeness that never left.
Skating across the frozen world, the sparkling crust,
I live into this life that so wants to be lived,
this life that asks everything, everything of us.

Read Full Post »

Whatever It Means

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 31, 2020| 5 Comments »

Certain I can’t carry

another sadness,

I step outside

and let the shine

of the mid-morning sun

stroke my cheek

like a lover.

And the air has a strange

bright citrus tang,

and I inhale it

again and again.

Whatever it means

to be alive,

it has something

to do with this—

the scent of leaf

and soil and shadow.

The astonishing warmth

of a late October day.

The weight

of loving another,

that weight

without which

I would be nothing.

Read Full Post »

You’ve Felt It Too, Right?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 29, 2015| 1 Comment »

Some mornings, for no reason,

the world is newer. The color

of the grass, the scent of last night’s rain,

the feel of the lover’s skin.

Everything feels charged

and abuzz with itself.

You might say, and

I would not argue,

that the world and everything in it

is another day older.

Yes, of course, and there

is also this: the taste of this peach—

I have tasted peaches before—

but this one is so very peach,

so remarkably peach,

like something I have known

only very, very new.

Read Full Post »