We all live together in a home
in which the rooms are
made of song. Fierce
songs of resistance. Wounded
songs that rise like sirens and
drown out every other song, till
once again, we hear the tendrilled
song of opening. Chants
of freedom. Wild song
of belonging. Sweet lullaby
of trust. What moment cannot
be met through song? Even
the greatest heartache, even
the greatest joy, even
the smallest hope knows
itself not only by its melody, but
by who is willing to sing along and
who is courageous enough to listen.
Posts Tagged ‘connection’
The Great Chorus
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, connection, singing, song on February 18, 2025| 4 Comments »
Steadfast
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, connection, freedom, inauguration, resilience, voice on January 19, 2025| 12 Comments »
Though a cold
wind is howling,
we’re not birds
without wings—
and as long as we
have voices
let us sing together,
sing of freedom,
sing what’s true,
let us sing.
- “birds without wings” is from John Lewis’s speech, January 9, 2005, at the Kennedy Center, at a choral tribute honoring Dr. Martin Luther King
Carpe Diem
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged carpe diem, connection, love, reality on January 15, 2025| 14 Comments »
Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
—Wendell Berry, 1993, I
Knowing today brings the day of my death
one day closer, I decide to love you more.
By which I mean, I decide
to practice letting myself be
exactly who I am and letting you be
exactly who you are and noticing how
love grows in that most rich soil—
not the thick clay of longing for things
to be different, but the good loam
of reality. Our time here is too dear
to be spent with fruitless wishing.
In this generous earth of allowing,
what might grow? Real love.
The kind that requires nothing
but our laughter and tears,
our anger and forgiveness, our frustration
and tenderness. I feel love root anew
in this ground where soon enough
I, too, will belong. Do you feel it, too,
the blooming between us, this love
that asks only for us
to be faithfully ourselves?
How We Are Held
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, broken, connection, held, holding, love on January 12, 2025| 7 Comments »
When my arms were the most empty,
when my hands were unable to hold anything
and I was most unselved,
that was when I felt the most gathered up
by love. An immeasurable and wildly precise love.
Even when I wanted to push love away.
Even when I felt too broken to be found.
I felt love gather all my pieces.
Not to fix them.
Not to put them back together.
Love simply held every shattered thought
and every ruined dream and cradled me
just as I was. Not because I deserved it.
Just because that is what love does.
I am learning to trust this feeling of belonging
to the world, broken as it is, broken as I am,
learning to trust I need not do a thing to belong.
I do not know how it all works
or why I was able to receive it.
But I can’t unknow this unfathomable truth:
how love holds us when we cannot
hold anything, gentle as silence,
fierce as a flood, true as the breaking itself.
The way the ocean forever holds every wave.
The way the shore forever changes to hold the ocean.
Redefinition
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, connection, heartbreak, union on January 10, 2025| 9 Comments »
when I say my heart breaks
I mean it breaks like a wave—
as if exhausted
by its own separateness
it gives itself back to the whole
One Under the Stars
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, losing the self, stars on January 4, 2025| 5 Comments »
stripped of the coat of my story,
for a moment naked enough
to fit into the universe
The Remembering
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, forgetting, grief, homer, odyssey, remembering on January 2, 2025| 4 Comments »
And if I should sit at the table with Helen of Troy,
let me not sip from the drink she offers,
the nepenthe that would make me forget sorrow.
If I know anything now, it is that sorrow
helps us grow. Not that I want sorrow,
no, but neither do I want to forget my boy,
and his story is knit with sorrow.
I choose sorrow so I might continue to love.
Imagine not saying his name when I walk
alone beneath stars. Imagine not weeping
when I think of how he held me.
Imagine not laughing when I think of how
we played. Imagine not smiling
when I hear myself saying words he would say.
Imagine not learning how tenuous it is,
this thread that ties us to life;
how lovely and strong it is, this thread
that ties us to each other, even after death.
Let me not take Helen’s cup. Let the beauty
be not in forgetting our cares, but in sharing them—
connection, the most potent drug of all.
In this epic, perhaps she will offer to listen to me.
And I, I will listen to her.
Request
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, generous assumption, love, trust on December 8, 2024| 11 Comments »
I’m thinking of a woodland chapel
just beyond town standing tall
and straight as it can. Though
the floorboards sag and creak,
its doors open to receive whatever enters,
be it resistance or praise.
Its walls have witnessed
such laughter, such sorrow.
And the songs sung here for years
are now as integral to the structure
as the rafters. This is a place
made of love. I have found my way
again and again into its sanctuary.
I have knelt here to pray in ways
no one has taught me, prayers that rise
natural and primal as moan, as sigh,
never knowing what to expect except
that I will be safe here, that I belong.
Is it possible to make of the heart
such a generous space? A place
that generous, that sacred?
Make of my heart a woodland chapel
just beyond town standing tall and straight
as it can, a place you can enter
somehow certain you are wholly loved
no matter what you do.
I want to offer you refuge here.
Will you trust me to give that to you?
At the Grand Prix
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, family, grand prix, love, race car on November 24, 2024| 6 Comments »
Nothing like walking in the forest,
this gathering in the grandstand
to watch race cars blur past each other,
scent of hot rubber acrid in the air,
not at all like wandering through
a sun-dazzled glade, moss soft
and green beneath my feet,
but sitting near the starting line
with hundreds of thousands of humans
with my daughter leaning into me,
my husband and my stepdaughter
and her husband beside me,
and the memory of my son knocking inside,
the heart proves again how it can fling wide
its gates for many kinds of joy,
many forms of beauty, even those
we’d never considered before.
The heart can sing for them all,
as tonight when it sings along
with the high-pitched roar
of the engines, the deep bass rumble
of the earth. Why should I be surprised?
There are infinite ways to feel connected, alive.
Oh! de Perfume
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, daughter, driving, family, perfume, singing on November 10, 2024| 4 Comments »
I want to bottle it,
tonight’s drive
with my girl,
both of us singing
full voice,
so when I forget
how good it can be
in this world,
I can dab it
behind my ears
and inhale again
the joy of singing
through the dark
that brazenly,
that together.
Reciting Poems to Each Other in a Difficult Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged community, connection, friendship, poetry, reciting poetry on November 9, 2024| 9 Comments »
It might have looked as if we stayed
in our respective squares—
nine separate rooms made of pixels—
but for an hour the poems we shared leaped
through the screen and into our bloodstream
until all our lines were gloriously blurred
and our wounds were gently tended
by the medicine of Berry’s dayblind stars
and Wellwood’s ferocious dance of no hope,
Hopkins’s shining from shook foil
and Roethke’s wondering Which I is I?
In another time, there would have been
a fire at the center. Someone would play a drum.
But in this time, I felt it inside me, the fire,
as poems blazed to meet the great cold.
I felt it inside me, the human drum,
that reminds me the heart beats
not for itself, but the world.
For an hour we spooned each other
the honey of poetry. Alone now,
I still taste it, unfiltered and raw,
this astonishing sweetness on my lips,
this salt of lyric communion
still feel the warmth of that blaze,
the spark still dazzling in the dark.
Inviting Spaciousness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, breathing, connection, self-compassion on November 4, 2024| 22 Comments »
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.
On Waking
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, seamlessness, unself, waking on October 23, 2024| 9 Comments »
In that vast land
that exists between dream
and waking, there is no I
and no other-than-I.
There are no borders,
no citizens, no factions,
no right side, no wrong side,
a realm of pure openness
where I am not aligned
with any feelings or beliefs,
where I am wholly breath and being.
How would it be to bring
such openness into the day?
To fly across the lines
of I and not-I
the way a bird flies
between countries,
across state lines,
across fence lines.
To know the self as unself,
as seamless, undivided,
even as it pours the coffee,
even as it drives past
the signs in the yards,
even as it watches the news.
Three Teachers at the End of the Writing Retreat
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, history, hug, teaching on October 13, 2024| 7 Comments »
for Uche and Jon
In a trio of ecstatic days
measured in boisterous laughter
and hours of impassioned conversations,
there was also that moment when,
at the end of a brilliant night,
we stood behind the stage,
our students still raucous
and basking in each other’s shine,
and we wrapped our arms around each other
and bowed our heads till they touched,
brow to brow to brow,
a moment so brief one could easily
miss it, but this, too, is history—
the quiet breath, the words
we didn’t have to say, the pressure
of our hands against each other’s backs,
the sweetness of standing out of the light,
tired and nodding to the beauty
pulsing all around us.
Looking at the Books Behind Jack and James
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged books, connection, influences, Jack Ridl, james crews, zoom on October 2, 2024| 15 Comments »
for Jack Ridl and James Crews
In the zoom room with Jack and James,
I stare at the books behind them—
books stacked, books shelved,
books slender and thick,
and I think of how we’re all shaped
by words we’ve read. For me,
the wooden love sonnets of Neruda.
The wanderings of Ammons. The wounds
of Olds. The wonder of Oliver.
The playfulness of cummings.
The ravages of Amichai and Darwish.
And oh, how I’ve been touched
by these two men—
their mornings with coffee and tea.
Jack’s dog. James’s flowers.
The ways they fill their hours
with kindness. With silence.
With peeling back the layers
of family and home and self.
If there were shelves inside me,
you probably wouldn’t find
their books there—more likely
strewn about on the heart’s couch,
the mind’s floor. I carry them
with me into each inner room,
Jack’s walks, James’s bees,
and daily, they become me.
And all those books on their shelves
that have formed these men
into the humans they are,
I thank all of those poets, too.
How deeply entwined we all are.
How many lives and poems we bring with us
each time we enter a room.
One Ongoing Dance
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, love, sunflower on September 27, 2024| 6 Comments »
in a field of dried weeds
you the golden sunflower
I the bee
When Augusta Showed Us a Two-Minute Video of Starlings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, interconnectivity, starlings, trust on September 9, 2024| 6 Comments »
Though I don’t have wings
and though I cannot fly,
with my whole body, I felt it,
the longing to be so aware
of all that is around me
that I, too, might move through the world
like a starling, veering and rising,
turning and dropping, whirling
and doubling back in an elegant
response to what my neighbors
are doing. Does the starling
harshly judge its neighbor
when it flies the other direction?
Does the starling worry
it’s not good enough
to be in a murmuration?
Is it jealous of how its neighbors fly?
Does it wonder how
to get out of its own way?
Such human questions.
How would it be to wholly trust
we are all moving together
in some great mysterious dance?
Now I can’t stop thinking
of what Augusta said:
When we move together,
we like each other more.
It takes just one thought
to inspire a change in course.
What might happen now
when I walk out my door?
What if, instead of grief,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, flowers, grief, pollination, survival on September 3, 2024| 13 Comments »
we call it pollination,
a process through which we realize
the gold of our hearts must spill out
and if we are to survive as a species,
it requires we somehow exchange
this gold with each other—all our hearts
splayed open, all our hearts needing
what the other hearts have.
It’s messy. Vulnerable.
And this is how we go on.
Your grief. My grief.
The quiet buzz of conversation.
This splitting open. This spilling.
This sharing with each other.
One While Watching the Film
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, daughter, empathy, film, tears on August 31, 2024| 3 Comments »
my daughter’s tears
find their way
into my eyes
The Unsheathed
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, peach, peaches, tenderness, vulnerability on August 29, 2024| 5 Comments »
Like skinning a peach,
I sometimes want to peel back
the masks of the world and myself
to uncover in each other what is
naked and glistening—
an essential sweetness
that can no longer be contained.
If it is wrong to wish this, I wish
it anyway, wish to meet each other
defenseless, with softness,
so moved by proof of how easily
our flesh is bruised, reminded
how tender with each other we must be.