Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, day, journey, surrender on September 17, 2024| 8 Comments »
—for Hannah
Sometimes a day,
like a mountain,
has no road,
no route,
no trail,
no map,
no right way,
no signs,
no directions,
no guide,
no promises,
no cairns,
no place
to arrive.
Sometimes
the only
step
to take
is not
to take
a step.
How humbled,
how human
we are then.
Naked as birth.
Raw. Unmasked.
So far from
any path
we might
wish to set.
Such a terrible
generous day
to conceive:
when nothing
is asked of us
but to be
the dust
that is
breathed.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, day, paying attention, presence on July 13, 2023| 8 Comments »
There’s a moment when I’m touched
by the sky inside the sky, the song
inside the song, the apple inside the apple.
It’s as if each bit of the world is itself,
only more so, and it reaches in
to trace the scaffolding of my life,
charging me with its utter purity,
its incontestable presence, as if to say
This, this is what it is to be alive,
and I hum with it, pulse with it,
glow with the wonder of it—
Rain. Rhubarb. Sand. Blood.
This. This. This. This.
This. This. This.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, day, night, solstice, summer on June 21, 2023| 6 Comments »
On the longest day of the year,
my mother and I sit on her back porch
and wade into worlds where we disagree.
I watch the surface of the lake—
how the reflection changes as day
becomes dusk becomes night,
every moment of it beautiful.
How quiet it is, this shift,
so quiet a woman could miss it.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged day, exhaustion on June 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »
this day—a sentence
that cannot seem to find
its period
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bliss, day, god, sufi, thirst, wine on January 16, 2020| 2 Comments »
The Sufis had it right—
the day is a glass of wine.
It matters not what kind
of vessel it’s poured into—
chipped clay or crystal
or wooden cup. There
is divinity in it regardless—
the chance to dance alongside
the rational, logical self
and fall in love. It brings
the potential for bliss,
for persuasiveness, for imagination,
for spontaneous and riotous
laughter. And you, perhaps,
like I, are beginning to realize
just how dry the mouth,
just how thirsty the heart.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged breast exam, day, poem, poetry, question on December 16, 2017| 2 Comments »
By the time you wake,
the day is already a question.
Whatever declaration there was
in your dreams has already
curled itself into a question mark.
No matter how you wrestle
with the punctuation—try,
perhaps, to straighten it
into an exclamation or crumple it
into a period—regardless, the day
insists on being interrogative.
And why shouldn’t it
insist on being a curve
like a river bed,
like a nautilus,
like a naked breast
beneath the ultrasound—
nature despises a straight line.
Now what matters
is what always matters—
how will you meet the day?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged day, life, morel, poem, poetry, value on May 27, 2015| 3 Comments »
A day is like this empty wooden bowl
taken into the field for gathering morels.
Some days the increase in weight is obvious,
and harvest spills over the rim. But weight is not
the worth of a day. Some days the bowl returns
empty, carried on its side between the hip and the arm.
But emptiness is no measure of what has been found.
There is, perhaps, an impulse to gauge success
based on fullness. But the bowl can’t hold
the memory of light slipping like an aria between
cottonwood limbs, can’t hold the scent of rain
or the burrs of disappointment. No, it is we
who carry the bowl, the memory, the day.
We stop sometimes to label things good or bad
or lucky or not, when all the while
we, too, are being carried by the same world
we believe we are carrying. We are the work
of the world. In the field, the morels grow,
or they do not.