with the full moon rising
and a large bird of prey
gliding spirals in the sky
and my husband on my right
my sweet friend on my left
and the two-person band
transforming sorrow into joy
just by singing it in harmony
and giving the song their everything,
and maybe that’s what is ours to do—
to give ourselves wholly to a moment
as if we are the singers and life the song,
so I give myself to the low summer sun
and the dust on my feet,
to the pucker of lime
and the tears of my friend,
give myself to the ache that never leaves
and the relentless beauty that ever arrives,
and the more I give myself to the world,
the more the world rushes in
and says home, home, home,
you are home.
Posts Tagged ‘connection’
There Is This Moment
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, home, joy, music on June 20, 2024| 12 Comments »
The Choosing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged authenticity, connection, daughter, grief, happiness, intimacy, love, mother, vulnerability on May 25, 2024| 10 Comments »
Perhaps I no longer believe in happiness
as the goal. Not that I am against happiness,
but being in this very uncomfortable moment
with little light and a vicious chill, my arms wrapped
around my growing girl, both our hearts breaking
from sorrow and fear, both of us too well aware
of what can be lost, well, I would not trade this moment
for any wide-grinned hour of beach and sun,
wouldn’t rather be anywhere else with anyone—
I would choose again and again to be here
on the dark sidewalk with my girl in my arms,
our hearts so raw, the space between us so warm.
Coming Home the First Time after Our Son Died
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, connection, friendship, grief, help, loss, love, receiving on May 22, 2024| 20 Comments »
Someone had taken small rocks and shaped them
into a heart in the center of our drive
so when we arrived, we knew we were not alone.
At the front door, we stepped over
another small heart made of stones
filled with blue petals of larkspur,
golden petals of sunflowers,
the tiny red petals of geranium.
We walked into our home
to find wildflowers in a vase on the counter,
our fridge filled with fruit, soymilk and hummus,
the shelves lined with cans and boxes of tissues.
There were love letters tucked into every room.
The house itself was quiet,
too quiet without the boy who wasn’t there,
but it was not a lonely silence.
Those were the days when I learned
to say okay every time someone offered help.
Can I bring you lavender lotion? Okay.
Can I make you a meal? Okay.
Can I pick up your mail? Okay. Okay.
What a gift to be carried by others,
to learn by heart the sacred bond
between those who are broken
and those who offer their hands
to cradle the ones who are broken.
Years later, those same small stones
still grace our front porch,
though the shape of the heart
has been rearranged many times.
As has mine. I want to remember
how we need each other.
The petals I add never stay.
The love infused here has never gone away.
As I Walked Out the Door
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, friendship, gift, language, resilience, Wendy Videlock, word on May 3, 2024| 8 Comments »
for Wendy
Into my hand, she pressed
a smooth rock she’d painted copper.
In all capital letters, turquoise and navy,
she’d written the word RESILIENCE.
Beneath it she’d drawn a lopsided helix.
I thought of her own spiraling with death.
Two years later, she volunteers
to teach in schools and dances
before breakfast every morning
with her husband in their living room.
She finds compassion for tough neighbors
and welcomes the wayward into her home.
She knows in every cell
the definition of resilience,
and so when she offered me
resilience on a rock,
I felt it, the full invitation
to be both grounded and vital,
to be both solid and springing,
the chance to be both the anchor
and the hand that reaches as if to say
come on, let’s leap, I’ll show you how.
Bringing You with Me
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, Earth Day, eduardo rey brummel, kindness, nature on April 22, 2024| 14 Comments »
for Eduardo Rey Brummel, on Earth Day
I walk on the long dirt road
with fat bumblebees
and dark red rocks,
not to distract myself
from you in your death room,
but to bring you with me
into this miraculous day
with it wild iris just beginning
to push through the earth
like curious green tongues
and its patch of buttercups
blooming right through me
all waxy and yellow and bright.
Far away, your heart is erratic
and your breath is slowing.
Far away you are becoming
less flesh and more mystery,
less the man who wrote
uplifting quotes on the lunch board
and more whatever it is
that drives the willows to blush,
whatever it is that causes the crows
to caw, then hush, then caw again.
You who called me Hermana,
you showed me how to be more kind,
and now you grow within me,
an essential part of my biome.
What gift more precious
do we have to offer than kindness?
I don’t know how it happens,
but the day is more beautiful
because I carry you with me—
even the thorns seem
to call for my honest attention,
even the leafless oaks,
even the dry stream bed
waiting for rain.
Dear friends,
If you know my friend Eduardo and did not yet know about his stroke and his recent blood infection, I know this is not easy news to receive. He responded to almost all of my poems here on this blog with such thoughtfulness and support. One of the most kind, generous people I have ever met.
If you would like more information, you can find it on his caring bridge.
What the Self Really Wants
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, infinite self, naked, self, story, what is on March 18, 2024| 4 Comments »
When the story of self
slips off like a mask, the sky
is more sky and an apple
more apple and the self
less self and more
what a wind is. How easy
to love then when I’m naked.
And how is it that always
some new story arrives,
solidifies less like a cast,
more like a strait jacket?
I notice because life
starts to fit too tight.
I notice because
I start to think I’m right.
But it’s no failure when a story
appears. Just an invitation
to notice how it feels
to be dressed in a story.
An invitation to pray
to the mystery, please,
once again undress me.
An invitation to be grateful
for the hands (whose hands?)
that loosen the story
and free me. An invitation
to let the self remember this:
how it longs to be spacious,
to be as infinite as what is.
One Way She’s Shaped Me
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, foot, friendship, humility, Kayleen Asbo, touch on March 1, 2024| 6 Comments »
for Kayleen Asbo
With hands that have played Bach
on the finest pianos in Europe,
hands that have written poems
and love letters and treatises on art,
with precious, skilled, talented hands
she lifted my foot to her lap
and smoothed oil into the cold, rough skin,
kneading and pressing deep circles
into my arches, squeezing my toes
(once deemed by a boyfriend
“the ugliest toes I’ve ever seen”).
And she made me feel beautiful.
I remember how all of me softened,
even those voices that sometimes rage,
you’re not good enough.
How could those voices stand a chance
against such a gift of touch?
Her hands said, you are not alone.
Her hands said, you belong.
Her hands said, you are treasure to me.
And the day was gray; her hands were strong.
I was less woman, more clay.
With hands that coax music
from sorrow and fear,
she made me into song.
*
Exploring Dante with Guides for your Head and Your Heart
March 7, April 4, May 2 10 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. Mountain Time
Zoom (recordings available)
Oh friends, if you weren’t able to join us today for an ecstatic hour of exploring Dante’s Divine Comedy, don’t worry–here’s the replay. It’s free–a preview of a three-part class that begins next Thursday and runs the first Thursday of the month for three months. The classes themselves with be spacious–with lots of time to listen to composer, pianist and cultural historian Kayleen Asbo lead us through the art, music, history and mythology that informs Dante’s life and writing. Then I will help you explore the truth of your heart and how this centuries-old story might have something valuable for you in times of loss, struggle, elation. It’s a story of connection, of how we help each other, how we become most wholly ourselves. Join the big conversation as we Find Our Way Out of Hell to the Shores of Acceptance (Inferno, March 7); Climb the Mountain of Hope (Purgatory, April 4) and Come Home to Ourselves in Paradise (Paradiso, May 2). Each session has a 30-minute break in the middle. Recordings available to all registrants. Sliding scale. Scholarships available. To register, click here. You do not need to have read Divine Comedy–in fact, we suggest you read it AFTER the class so you have more tools for understanding and appreciating it.
In Conversation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, conversation, identity, language, love, words on January 25, 2024| 12 Comments »
The sound of your voice
enters me and becomes me—
becomes synapse, becomes pulse,
becomes blood, becomes breath.
And in this way, the more I listen to you,
the more I become you.
It is no small thing to converse.
Sometimes I swim in the wild honey
of your words. Sometimes I break
on their jagged shores.
Some words become pillars that hold up
what is possible.
Others are wrecking balls
that turn to rubble all I thought I knew.
How fleeting it is, any grasp
of who we are. This is why,
hour after month after year
I welcome your words—
I like what they do.
Even when they are not easy to hear,
I love who I become
when I listen to you.
On the Winter Solstice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, light, opening, solstice, sun on December 21, 2023| 9 Comments »
Let’s reach toward each other
with gazes gentle
as midwinter sun—
with a seeing so generous
we can’t help but turn
toward the other
to let ourselves be seen.
There are many reasons
to close, to shut down.
But when we meet
with such light in our eyes,
then we open together
like December dahlias,
soft and many petalled,
open like bird song
after a long, mute night.
Paradise Shared
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, Christie Aschwanden, connection, skiing on December 18, 2023| 3 Comments »
And if we have touched paradise,
let’s share it the way Christie did today
when she skied me to the edge
of the snow deep cliff and we gazed out
at the world below. I know how shared struggle
can become connective glue.
But beauty, too, adheres us—
invites us to become like wings,
knowing it takes two to fly.
Trust
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, conversation, daughter, mother on December 10, 2023| 8 Comments »
Sometimes you spill your fears
into the room and there is no place on earth
then more holy as your words unfurl like curls
of incense in fractaled unspiraling,
each sob, each murmur a tendril of smoke
I follow until it disappears.
How I treasure these times
when you let me meet all of you.
When I leave, I look the same,
the scent of truth clinging to my skin.
But I am rearranged within.
In a Circle of Trust
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged circle, communion, community, connection, silence, trust on December 9, 2023| 8 Comments »
I love these fierce and gentle hours
when the silence between us
blooms between voices
as deeply, as profusely
as the pale pink blossoms
that flourish in pavement cracks.
I did not know how much
I longed for this silence,
Did not know how the silence would honor
each voice the way a frame holds a portrait,
bringing value and beauty to the art inside,
didn’t know how shining it could be
with its infrangible truth,
how silence invites a deepening of self
the way a river deepens and changes the canyon,
even as the river itself is changed.
One Traveling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, daughter, travel on November 20, 2023| 6 Comments »
while sitting in 24 E
when my girl rests her head on my shoulder
already I’ve arrived
The Grand Quilt
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, community, connection, quilt, sewing, togetherness on November 7, 2023| 18 Comments »
I don’t believe we can stitch together
only scraps of beauty, squares of light.
I don’t believe in a quilt that doesn’t also
have patches of sorrow, blocks of ache.
Such pieces are, of course, much harder
to want to stitch in. But it matters
that we do not exclude them.
It matters right now that we don’t pretend
they do not exist.
It matters that we sew every piece
into the grand cloth.
It matters, too,
how we sew these pieces in,
perhaps using our finest silk thread,
perhaps with an elaborate stitch
our grandmother taught us,
or perhaps we must use
a stitch we make up
because no one ever taught us
how to do this most difficult task—
to meet what at first seems unwanted, wrong,
and to incorporate it into the whole
and to do this for as long as we can stitch,
that’s how long.
Dactylography
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, fingerprint, heart, love on November 7, 2023| 6 Comments »
Just when you think you know who you are,
you take a closer look at your heart
and notice it is marked
with the whorls and loops and arches
of everyone you’ve ever loved
and everyone who has ever loved you—
those who left you, who broke you,
and those who still charm and nourish you.
As if the heart’s reason for being
is simply to be shaped and reshaped
by the hands of the world.
As if the detectives of love
could visit your heart
with their fingerprint powder
and lifting tape and unfold the mystery
of how you became who you are,
fashioned by the uniqueness of others,
discovering your heart
is not a crime scene at all,
but a rare and incomparable work of art.
Anastomosis
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, daughter, healing, hospital, mom on October 17, 2023| 15 Comments »
It means “connection between two passageways.”
It means “place where two rivers meet.”
It means, “here is where necrotized intestine
can be cut away and a woman can be healed.”
It means, “seam where sepsis might begin
through the tiniest of micro perforations.”
It means, “my mother endured such pain.”
It’s so fine, the line between healing and crisis.
So elusive, the word that means
“I know my own life because it’s connected with hers.”
And I, who never before
had even heard of anastomosis,
I, who even yesterday could not spell
nor pronounce it,
I now know too well the five-syllable word
that means “fallible healer,” “essential danger,”
this word that describes the very place
where a life might be saved,
then nearly lost, then saved again.
In Rhythm
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged amphibrach, connection, daughter, meter, mother, night, path, sundown on September 4, 2023| 10 Comments »
Walking the ridge when the sunset
is almost a memory, my daughter
and I make our way through the dark
and we sing an old tune taking turns
with the words and although we can’t see
the dirt road right beneath us, we trust
the road’s there as we step, step again, step again—
it is like that, this life, we lose sight of the path
but sometimes there’s singing,
and sometimes, a loved one’s beside you,
and how does this happen,
the dark’s no less dark,
and the path’s no less lost,
but your feet stay in synch as you step,
step again, step again.
One Encouragement
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, encouragement, friendship, sailboat, worry on August 30, 2023| 12 Comments »
the day flooded with worry,
I become sailboat—
your words the wind
Holding Your Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, heart, love, touch, tree on August 29, 2023| 7 Comments »
I want to trace the rings of your heart
the way I would trace tree rings—
not to count them
but to honor each season of you.
I want to touch my fingertips
to your scars, want to learn
your heart’s stories, find clues
of how you became who you are.
I want to press my palms
to your heart and praise
how it is we grow,
even in disaster, even in drought,
want to praise the dark center,
the time-thick bark, the record
of the ordinary days. I want
to chart the thin slivers of your wounds
and let my hands speak love,
want to tell you in a language
of quiet touch, I see you.