Sometimes another person knows our heart
so well they offer us a song that becomes,
at least for a moment, our anthem.
In that moment, listening to lyric and melody,
the entire body re-attunes to life,
each cell turning not only toward the music
but also toward the giver,
and we are led deeper into that strange
and beautiful grotto of our heart
with its mosses and echoes,
a place at once strange and familiar,
and the song becomes a shining remover
of darkness, its light bouncing on our inner walls
until we relearn who we are—
the light of a million suns.
Posts Tagged ‘connection’
Soundtrack
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, dark, friendship, light, music on November 12, 2022| 2 Comments »
Big Lesson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged community, connection, kindness on October 11, 2022| 3 Comments »
Today it feels so simple:
we are here to take care of each other.
How could we ever forget?
As if soil could forget
it is here to feed the trees.
As if trees could forget
they are here to feed the soil.
How could anything
ever get in the way of generosity?
How could we ever greet each other
with any words besides,
How can I help you?
As if light could forget
it is here to help illuminate.
As if dark could forget
it is here to help us heal.
A New Kind of Conversation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged absence, connection, conversation, death, presence, speaking on August 23, 2022| 2 Comments »
It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
—Linda Gregg, “The Presence in Absence”
I have no phone receiver to connect me to the other side,
but every day I speak to my beloveds through candle flame.
Every night, I speak to them through the dark before sleep.
I speak to them in the car when I am alone.
I speak to them when I walk beneath stars,
when I walk in the woods, when I walk in the rain.
It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
It is possible to feel what cannot be seen,
to sense what cannot be heard,
to be held by what cannot be touched.
It is possible for love to grow after death.
If there is a secret, it is, perhaps, openness.
The way air lets light move through.
The way a window invites in the scent of grass.
The way sand receives the ocean,
then, rearranged, lets it pass.
This poem was published in ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry on 9/11/22
At Five
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, connection, self, showing up, tree, younger self on July 19, 2022| 3 Comments »
Along the lake and down the hill,
the road dead ended into a meadow
with a wooden fence a girl could slip through,
and slip through she did,
that five-year-old version of me,
slipped through the gaps into the tall green grass
and then wandered to the lake
where the weeping willow hung over the shoreline
and she could sit beneath its shade and disappear—
or perhaps more rightly, she could show up.
As herself. Show up not as a girl who lived up the road
but as shade, as shore, as tree,
as field, as green beyond the fence.
Perhaps it only happened once or twice,
that journey past the dead end,
but forty-seven years later, I remember
the dissolution, how beneath that tree
I was no longer who I was, only more so.
How I knew myself as integral to the miracle.
There were whole decades I forgot her,
that infinite version of me.
Tonight I can tell she never left.
How did she ever fit in my limited sense of self?
What does she have to teach me now
of fences, of shadows,
of sitting quietly,
of the art of slipping through?
One Transposition
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, connection, empathy, heart on May 5, 2022| 2 Comments »
feeling it inside me
tender and tired
your heart
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.