feeling it inside me
tender and tired
your heart
Posts Tagged ‘connection’
One Transposition
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, connection, empathy, heart on May 5, 2022| 2 Comments »
At First It All Felt Like Goodbye
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, goodbye, grief, hello, loss on May 2, 2022| 8 Comments »
Goodbye to holding you, goodbye
to family trips and snuggling before bed,
goodbye to plans and to laughter,
your clothes and your car. Goodbye
to the awe I felt as I watched you
become more yourself, goodbye
to the dizzying map of promise I saw
as you plotted your days. Goodbye to all I knew.
But now, it’s hello. Hello, love that still grows.
Hello as I rise, when I walk outside.
Hello, with my hands in the dirt, when I drive
the winding alpine divide, hello when I light a candle,
hello when the hot tears come. Hello, I say,
hello, aware now I am never alone.
Walking in New York
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, counting, KC Trommer, New York, numbers on March 19, 2022| 2 Comments »
In a city with thirty-thousand restaurants
and three hundred sky scrapers
and thirteen thousand taxis
KC guides us through a garden gate
to the open window
of an old brick church
and greets Father Spencer
in his office. Within a minute
we are sitting in a small paneled room
full of photos and poems
and hands cut out of paper,
and though there are nearly
nine million people
thrumming around us,
for a few quiet moments
his attention makes us feel
as if amidst it all
we count.
Coming Together
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, geology, pangaea, peace, tectonics on March 10, 2022| 8 Comments »
It seems too slow,
this moving toward each other,
toward peace.
The heart is eager for union,
longs for grounding between continents,
longs for connection, for wholeness,
instead of all this fracture.
Do the tectonic plates
remember what it was
to be Pangaea? Can the heart
remember a time before
it was defined by rifting
and brokenness?
I have read that the next supercontinent
will form in 200 million years—
that we’re halfway through
the scattered phase.
Oh, we are so scattered.
They say the pace of the plates
is comparable to the speed
at which our fingernails grow.
Oh, so slow, this coming together.
Yet it happens. It happens.
Let the heart know
what the land knows: It happens.
Though You Are Far Away
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cats, connection, love on January 24, 2022| 2 Comments »
The way two cats curl their bodies
into each other, a yin-yang
of feline, I want to curl
my heart beside your heart,
no space between us. Something
about their connection is contagious—
I find myself almost purring.
When one rises,
the other nuzzles her
until she settles again.
I want that. Your heart.
My heart. An ordinary
communion. A swirl of us.
A whorl of us. And no
matter how far away,
no space between.
Safety Net
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, love on June 24, 2021| 4 Comments »
This morning I woke
thinking of all the people I love
and all the people they love
and how big the net
of lovers. It felt so clear,
all those invisible ties
interwoven like silken threads
strong enough to make a mesh
that for thousands of years
has been woven and rewoven
to catch us all.
Sometimes we go on
as if we forget
about the net. Believing only
in the fall. But the net
is just as real. Every day,
with every small kindness,
with every generous act,
we strengthen it. Notice,
even now, how
as the whole world
seems to be falling, the net
is there for us as we
walk the day’s tightrope.
Notice how every tie matters.
Belonging
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, communion, connection on June 11, 2021| 9 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.
For Brahms on His Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Brahms, communion, connection, darkness, music on May 8, 2021| 2 Comments »
For your birthday, Johannes,
I listened to your first piano concerto,
my heart trembling like a tuning fork
as the ivory keys and nylon strings
conversed about tenebrous grief and loss.
No one hissed in the audience
the way they did when your concerto
debuted. In fact, in my kitchen,
I sighed. I gasped. I thanked you
for the turbulence. What a gift when our sorrow
meets a sister sorrow so beautiful
we forget our own story, our own name,
and we tender what’s left
of our aching hearts to the blooming dark
that even now opens around us, inside us.
How to Reconnect with a Friend
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, fear, friendship, poetry, wall on March 20, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Not by writing another poem
about how much you miss them.
No matter how many red-wing blackbirds
you put in it, the poem itself won’t trill.
No matter how many elephants
clomp through the stanzas,
the poem won’t make the earth tremble.
No matter your skill with language
even the ripest metaphoric blood oranges
cannot quench a very real thirst.
Pick up the phone. Press the button.
Call the one you miss.
I know, I skipped the hours
where you worry about how much time
has passed, how every silent day
becomes another thick brick
in a taciturn wall between you.
Perhaps you’ve started to believe it’s impassable.
But a call is like a wrecking ball.
One sincere hello knocks down even a thousand
days of separation with just two syllables.
What happens next will only happen next
if you clear a space for reunion,
if you pick up the phone.