Today when the heart is a small, tight knot,
I do not try to untangle it. I don’t tug on the strings
in a desperate attempt to unravel it.
I don’t even wonder at how it got so snarled.
Instead, I imagine cradling it, cupping it
with my hands like something precious,
something wounded, a bird with a broken wing.
I cradle my heart like the frightened thing it is.
I imagine all the other frightened hearts
and imagine them all being held in love.
And I breathe. I breathe and feel
how the breathing invites a spaciousness.
I breathe and let myself be moved by the breathing
as I open and soften. Open and soften.
And nothing changes. And everything changes.
The heart, still a knot, remembers
it knows how to love. It knows it is not alone.
Posts Tagged ‘belonging’
Inviting Spaciousness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, breathing, connection, self-compassion on November 4, 2024| 21 Comments »
Bowing at the Feet of the Ordinary
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, blessing, car, daughter, love, mother, self blessing on August 25, 2024| 9 Comments »
Bowing at the Feet of the Ordinary
May I remember this day
with its two-hundred twenty two
miles of pavement and my
daughter beside me and both
of us singing her favorite songs.
Remember this day not because
it was special but because
it was the way it always is,
with us laughing and talking
and sitting in easy silence.
With a stop at the car wash
and her grumbling about vacuuming,
then doing it anyway. With
a stop at the coffee shop
and me grumbling about
cake pops, then buying one
anyway. With the sweetness
of ripe Cresthaven peaches
we bought at the roadside stand—
how the juice dripped down our chins.
With the rich green of late summer
a blur out the window. The day
so infused with commonplace
love I never once doubted
I belonged with my girl, in that car,
in the world, in the universe,
the days getting shorter
but still so luminous, so warm.
Where We’re From
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, Colorado, home, landscape, natural world, wisconsin on July 16, 2024| 8 Comments »
Though I love this high desert,
I am a lake walking amidst
the cactus and the pinyon pine.
I am sunsets on flat water
and waves in the spring.
I bring my white trillium soul
to the arroyo and let dry sand
run through my fingers.
They never leave me,
these Wisconsin summers,
even though I left them when
I was a barefoot girl,
even though I’ve made a home
amongst red rock cliffs and empty
river beds where the gray trunks
of juniper twist in deep curves
and red-tailed hawks spiral
making visible the wind.
How surprising it is to discover now
in my silvering years some new
insight into what it means to belong:
how sometimes we choose,
how sometimes we are chosen.
You Belong
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, friendship, grass, love, meadow on May 8, 2024| 6 Comments »
The way grass belongs to the meadow—
how without it, the meadow
would not be meadow—
this is the way you belong in my heart.
Not that I’ve made a space for you here,
more that you’ve helped make my heart what it is,
and without you, my heart is not my heart.
I cradle you here as in a nest of wheat—
soft home, humble home, ever rewoven
to fit the changing shape of you.
It’s not true our hearts are our own—
they’re symbiotic as meadows in spring.
The heart exists for who grows in it.
Who am I? Who am I?
You, my sun, my grass, my wind.
Afraid My Actions Would Hurt Someone Else,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, belonging, burr, resistance on April 28, 2024| 7 Comments »
my chest filled with anxiety,
as if burrs grew in my bloodstream,
sharp barbs catching on my skin from inside.
I wanted the feeling to go away.
Wanted to know I could make everything okay.
And the burdock dug deeper in,
clinging to my heart as it would
to a sock or a sleeve or a dog.
Inside the burr was a seed of fear:
I can’t protect others from harm.
And my teacher said, her voice warm,
Let the fear of repercussions be here.
But the longing to control kept
digging into me with spines sharp and long.
Include it as part of the whole, she said.
And I thought of wild burdock
with its big soft leaves,
how naturally it grows in a field.
How it’s evolved, a product of life itself.
How the root is used to heal.
And I was stunned by the fact
that burdock belongs to the field
as much as wheatgrass,
dandelion, wild iris, wild rose—
the burr one part of the whole.
And I knew myself as field.
I imagined inside me
the grass, the sunflower, the vetch, the trees,
and the uncomfortable burr of anxiety,
which, though painful, belongs.
I focused on whatever it is
that holds it all. Inside me,
acceptance opened like a song.
*with thanks to Joi Sharp for her words (in italics)
Self-Portrait While Sleeping Alone in Alison’s Room
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, friendship, gratefulness on October 14, 2022| 8 Comments »
Of course, there are books everywhere—
shelves and stacks and bags of books.
Though I would not have guessed
there would be small wooden ladders
with many rungs for the mind to climb.
And the colors on the walls are warm
and the breeze through the open window
is cool. Through one window, some neighbor
is playing their radio loud,
though it’s after one a.m.
And out the back window, I can see
in the moonlight a persimmon tree
laden with hundreds of pale orange fruits.
And though Alison isn’t here,
she is so thoroughly here,
and I feel so very not all alone
as I fall asleep by myself in Alison’s room,
aware of my exact shape and grateful
that for this moment, I know myself
as something else that belongs here,
something chosen, something defined in part
by its presence here, something integral
as the tennis ball, the blue flashlight,
the tick, tick, tick of the clock on the wall.
May Morning
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, bird, morning, red-winged blackbird on May 18, 2022| 12 Comments »
Just after sunrise,
I hear it, the bright airy trill
of the red-winged blackbird—
and before my eyes
are even open,
I feel a wild resonance
with the waking world,
the certainty I belong
to this day with its rising sun
and scent of green grass,
its breeze reaching in
through the screens;
I belong to this day
with my creature heart
that already this morning
longs to hold what it cannot,
longs to comfort others,
even knowing how
sorrow must be felt.
I belong to the song
of the red-winged blackbird
as it calls out again,
belong to the silence
as he waits for an answer.
And waits. And waits.
I belong to the spring
every bit as much
as I belong to winter.
This is perhaps
the conundrum of love,
no matter how strong the ache,
we still belong
to the world of beauty,
this world that calls to us
even in our sleep,
wakes us with a promise
strung like audible garland
across the dawn—
you belong, you belong.
Somewhere You Feel Free
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aster, belonging, hiking, mountains, widlflowers on July 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »
You belong among the wildflowers.
—Tom Petty, “Wildflowers”
Standing alone
in a high and steep meadow
surrounded by a million million
pale purple asters,
a person might be,
at least for a moment,
a many petaled thing,
might know the blue sky
in a new blue way;
might want to visit the self
as curious as a bee
stepping into the golden center
of things. What luck
to climb into beauty,
to stumble into
the self greater than the self,
to forget for a moment that worry,
that burden, that loss,
and simply purple, to wildly
purple, to purple with abandon,
to purple without thought,
to humbly purple,
to purple.
At the Houston Zoo
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, bird, home, nest, pigeon, zoo on July 13, 2021| 2 Comments »
Not the chuckwalla
nor the cheetah nor the capybara,
it was the pigeon
I couldn’t stop watching
as it sat on its nest
in the tall sturdy grass
beside the glassed-in walls
of the chimpanzees
with its fluffy grey chicks
tucked against its grey breast.
She looked as if she belonged
exactly where she was—oh
how I cherish that feeling.
Belonging
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, communion, connection on June 11, 2021| 12 Comments »
And if it’s true we are alone,
we are alone together,
the way blades of grass
are alone, but exist as a field.
Sometimes I feel it,
the green fuse that ignites us,
the wild thrum that unites us,
an inner hum that reminds us
of our shared humanity.
Just as thirty-five trillion
red blood cells join in one body
to become one blood.
Just as one hundred thirty-six thousand
notes make up one symphony.
Alone as we are, our small voices
weave into the one big conversation.
Our actions are essential
to the one infinite story of what it is
to be alive. When we feel alone,
we belong to the grand communion
of those who sometimes feel alone—
we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a pitch of dust
the dust that dances in the light
with all other dust, the dust
that makes the world.