We are laughing, and the sound
is sweet as honeysuckle—
the way it clings to the air—
and even as I laugh,
I’m aware of the many wounds
each of these women
have endured, imagining
how often we have wept,
sometimes with each other,
sometimes alone. Knowing
the ache somehow makes
the laughter all the more sweet—
and the joy of it stitches into me
like a golden thread.
I welcome the pierce
as I feel it connect us,
knowing if I tug on this strand
twenty years from now,
it will bring me back to this night
with its warm summer air
and low summer light,
this radiant night sparkling
with a laughter we nourished
for years by loving each other
through all those tears.
Posts Tagged ‘connection’
Sitting in a Circle of Friends
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, friendship, laughter, Lisa Issenberg, paradox, togetherness on July 20, 2025| 2 Comments »
One When I Least Expect It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, pause, perspective, Wild Rose on July 9, 2025| 1 Comment »
kneeling in front of the wild rose
nose buried in pink petals,
the whole world fitsinto one wild rose
The Night I Fell in Love with the Whole World
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged airport, connection, love, trust on June 23, 2025| 12 Comments »
The Night I Fell in Love with the Whole World
It was the boy at baggage claim who started it.
His elation! Each time a new bag would drop,
he would point at the suitcase and squeal,
then turn to his grandmother with incandescent delight.
His grandmother deepened my joy. How she beamed
at her grandson, praised him in Spanish, her words
a bright blur I interpreted more through hunch
than through certainty. And sooner than you’d think,
I fell in love with every single person at baggage claim sixteen.
Didn’t need to know their stories to know
they were worthy of love. Everyone a grandchild.
Everyone a light. It was like, how on these midsummer
nights, the late sun shines long though the cities and fields
and everything, every whole and broken thing, is beautiful.
Oh, people of Iran. Israel. Palestine. Ukraine.
Russia. Somalia. Yemen. America. I will never know you,
yet I honor how you carry inside you your own strange
and beautiful spark. Each of us longs to belong.
No matter what our leaders do, the light is right
to see how much we all long to be safe, to be seen,
to be kind, to be trusted, to meet on any street,
in any room, all of us slivers of divinity.
1990
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, humility, memory, summer on June 10, 2025| 4 Comments »
That was the summer I picked up a sex worker
on East Colfax, confusing her upturned thumb
for hitchhiking. Imagine her surprise
when she got into my mom’s silver Volvo and saw me,
a girl of twenty in a pink dress I wore
for my theater internship that day.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said, “just down the road.”
This is how I remember it. I warned her
how dangerous that part of town could be
before she told me how her pimp would beat her.
I think we both shocked each other.
She couldn’t imagine why I had picked her up.
To this day, I am grateful she never let me go.
On Waking
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, dream, liminal space, waking on June 4, 2025| 2 Comments »
Do you, too, love the time between dream and day
when we are gauzy and diaphanous,
more sky than clay, more the spiral than DNA,
love those moments before you remember
your name, before you remember the guns
and the bombs and the lines we have drawn
around right and wrong, before you remember the fingers
we point and those pointed at us and the blame
we shove back and forth. Even now, midday,
if, still, we close our eyes and breathe,
we can almost return to the innocence of it,
can almost feel the weightlessness, the wildness,
the generous knowing of being without measure,
without border, without label, without should.
Imagine we could meet in that undefined space,
that liminal, boundaryless place. All of us nameless
at the very same time. It wouldn’t last. The alarm
always rings. But what if when we all emerge,
some of that spaciousness would cling to us
as we make coffee. Open the door. Drive the car.
Say hello. What would we make of the news?
Opposite Sides
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, opposition, relationship, swimming on May 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »
If you were in Europe and I were in Boston,
it would take eighty days to swim to you.
Sometimes it feels as if you are in England
and I’m standing on the Atlantic’s opposite shore.
Sometimes it’s all I can do to dip my toes in the water.
Sometimes I swim out till I start to fear
what swims with me. Always I turn back.
This time, I want to swim. Want to swim eighty days
if that’s what it takes, regardless how big the waves.
Want to swim eighty days no matter how cold.
Though the waves are big as our country.
Though I am exhausted and afraid of what I might find
on the shores of you. What I long to find: you,
swimming toward me. Want to meet you
at forty days, both of us ungrounded,
both of us vulnerable, both of us ready
to swim toward safety together.
Intergalactic Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, galaxy, heart, love on May 6, 2025| 4 Comments »
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you, and if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
—The Gospel of Thomas, verse 70
There is a galaxy in my heart,
a vastness that surprises me
each time I dare look—
my god, it’s so much larger
than I could ever explore.
Filled with dark things that defy
investigation and dead places
where nothing can live and brilliant
places so radiant I’m unable to look
straight on. There is a galaxy
in my heart so expansive it sometimes
frightens me—what does it mean
to not know my own bounds?
What if I never live into my capacity to love?
There is a galaxy in my heart
that knows itself by spiraling,
swirling out from its own center,
and forming new stars.
Did I ever believe it was limited
to hold only so much?
The galaxy in my heart
invites me to remember
I am made of mystery, and
whatever theories I have
of how and who I love
are always being changed.
Even now, it stuns me,
how galaxies sometimes merge.
Imagine, if your galaxy
and my galaxy come together,
my god, how much vaster
our hearts can become.
Two Mothers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged candle, connection, loss, mothers on May 4, 2025| 2 Comments »
lighting a small candle tonight
for your child as you
light a small candle for mine—
from hundreds of miles and years apart
we rhyme
One Interconnectedness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cause and effect, connection, friendship, interconnectedness, legacy on May 1, 2025| 6 Comments »
because
you,
me
The Bear
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, friendship, gift on April 30, 2025| 2 Comments »
for Linda Keetch
In a room where I have never been,
I walk in to find a small brown teddy bear
sits on a couch. Envelope in his lap.
On the envelope, my name.
There are thousands, maybe millions
of ways people show up to say
I am here to help you carry
the weight of your life.
This is how a light tan bear
who sits at eight inches tall
is big enough to embody
a forest-sized compassion.
This is how the soft plush of his belly
becomes a wide portal
through which love can reach
to meet us exactly as we are,
which changes nothing
and everything.