Growing out of the earth
of my own detritus,
this new self, field self,
shedding and emerging,
equally alive with loss
and becoming.
Posts Tagged ‘aliveness’
Trembling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, field, growing, rebirth on February 19, 2026| 4 Comments »
Cicada
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, cicada, fear 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.
Because the Frost Is Late This Year
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, blooming, living, nasturtium 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.
Not a Still Life
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, birds, life, may, spring 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.
Talking with Andrea
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, friendship, grace, language, praise 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.
Getting Out
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, nature, outdoors, spaciousness, weather 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.
Revelation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, death, freedom, life, skate skiing 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.
Whatever It Means
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, love, outside, sadness 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.
You’ve Felt It Too, Right?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, being present, poem, poetry 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.