long ago the door came down,
still I stand at the threshold
of spaciousness, hand raised,
wondering how to knock
Posts Tagged ‘faith’
Still Learning
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged faith, quatrain, spaciousness, threshold on July 10, 2026| 1 Comment »
Instead of Losing Faith
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged faith, love, madness, purpose, singing on January 25, 2025| 16 Comments »
for K., Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est.
After all the hours of dressing up
and combing our hair and trying
to show our best face to the world,
we find ourselves bare, naked,
haunted, and painfully, wondrously clear,
full of visions and limitations, aware
of the great invitation to be kind. And
if we’re lucky, we burn with hope.
It isn’t safe, this life. Don’t let anyone
tell you otherwise. But if you are able,
as you listen to the screaming, sing.
Sing through the walls. Sing of miracles,
healing and light. Sing. Because when
all else is ash, still, we can sing. We can sing.
How
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged divine, faith, transformation, wine on December 16, 2023| 13 Comments »
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Sonnets to Orpheus 2, 29,” trans. Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
When so much is bitter,
it is hard to believe in patience,
hard to trust transformation,
the goodness of time.
How to turn the self
into something it’s not?
The ripest, sweetest grapes
make the strongest wine.
Whatever is sweetest in me
is not me—
is whatever shines through me.
That. I am learning to trust
the sweetness, the ripening
of that.
One Faith
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cliff, faith, jump, love on September 27, 2022| 4 Comments »
at the edge of a wish
choosing to jump—
you my parachute
Short List of Wonders
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belief, death, faith, miracle, mother, wonder on October 8, 2021| 13 Comments »
Years from now,
I want to remember
the way tears
became white doves
and flew away,
the way stepping stones
appeared to help me
cross an impossible
river, the way
a crumpled letter arrived
from the dead
to proclaim
I am surrounded with joy.
Oh woman who lives
in my skin years from now,
don’t try to pretend
it didn’t happen.
It did. A rainbow
blossomed above
your shoulder.
Your head opened up
to receive golden light.
Life wrapped its strong hands
around your heart.
And when you asked
your son, Are you close,
you felt against your ribs
a knocking
from the inside.
Finding Faith
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beets, faith, garden, truth on September 20, 2020| 8 Comments »
While pulling the beets,
it’s impossible to lose faith
in the world. Those tiny seeds
that once fit in the palm are now
large red globes,
dense with dark sweetness
and heavy in the hand.
They are like promises kept,
like small proofs in patience,
confirmations that sometimes
the good that’s growing can’t be seen.
They are like hard truths.
Not everyone will want them.
Some will.
Despite the News
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged faith, heart, opening, poem, poetry, rain on May 17, 2019| 3 Comments »
Again the rain,
and I wander
the tender green grass
of the field.
The hands pull weeds
because the hands
want something to do.
And the mind looks
for morels, because the mind
wants something to do.
And the feet wander,
because they are born
nomads. And the heart
opens. Not because
it wants to, but
because there is something
in the scent of rain
that suggests
so much is possible,
even, against all odds,
beauty. Even, though
it seems impossible,
another day.
Yet the Past Would Suggest
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged faith, garden, poem, poetry, seeds, winter on January 8, 2019| 2 Comments »
Reading seed catalogs
on an eight degree morning,
how improbable they look,
those royal chantenay carrots,
those pink seashell cosmos,
those bright sugar snap peas,
so greenly dangling.
Season
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged faith, kindness, morels, poem, poetry on May 13, 2017| 2 Comments »
Where yesterday
there were no morels
today there are—
dozens of them,
small blond bouquets
in the grass.
I think about kindnesses.
How sometimes
they arrive
out of what seems
an absence.
How in that absence
it seems impossible
to believe that kindness
will ever return.
How delicious
the morels were tonight
in the cream,
so earthy, so rich,
so generous.
This Day Could Use More Roses,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, faith, poem, poetry, wild roses on January 11, 2017| 2 Comments »
not the long-stemmed kind you buy in the store,
but the kind that thrives on neglect,
thrives despite drought, despite desolation,
grows rambunctious despite crummy soil,
the wild roses you find as you walk
through the edges of desert, find them not by sight
but because of the siren song of their scent—
pink and stirring and plucky.
I am famished for beauty today,
the kind that survives
when the world is hostile,
the kind that arrives above thorns,
living books of a thousand petals unfolding,
a wild beauty almost impossible to eradicate,
the kind that sends acres of runners and roots.
I believe in such beauty. It’s found me before.
Just a few days before the new year
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beginning, faith, new year, poem, poetry, seeds, winter on December 30, 2016| Leave a Comment »
the seed company sends their catalog
with 162 full-color pages of vegetables ready
to harvest. From snap peas and bush beans
to shallots and quinoa, plus every shape
and curl of leafy green—red ursa, red ruffled,
red Russian, Bolshoi. This is the same night
my son asks me as he falls asleep to explain
the difference between science and religion.
One, I say, is based on fact. The other,
I say, is based on faith. Though tonight,
as the temperature falls below ten,
and I regard the carrots, dark orange
and almost glowing off of page 29,
I begin to wonder how different
the two really are. I notice how the promise
of a slow-bolting, scab resistant
varietal sounds like a psalm I love—
the Lord, it says, will keep you from all harm—
and I look at the Royal Chatenays
and the Yaya Nantes and say out loud
to the dark kitchen windows and
to the cold winter air, I believe, I believe.
Example
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged faith, hummingbird, journey, poem, poetry on July 4, 2016| 4 Comments »
Above my window
two tiny hummingbird beaks
hover just beyond the edge of a nest
which is smaller than my hand—
this, I think, is what it looks like,
the start of a long, long journey.
By fall, they will be in Mexico.
They don’t even know yet
they can fly.
One Definition of Faith
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged faith, love, poem, poetry, uncertainty on February 15, 2016| 1 Comment »
toeing the edge
of everything
we think we know
building a nest for us
on the other side
Perhaps This is Faith
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged faith, poem, poetry on July 24, 2015| 1 Comment »
My fingers slip
as the hand holds crumble,
but I am so high
and I know there
are others below me
so I climb on strength
that is not mine,
though I cannot see
the destination nor
can I imagine how
I will keep going,
but I keep going,
I keep going,
one hand reaching
higher, then the other.
More than a Feeling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, faith, god, poem, poetry on May 26, 2013| 4 Comments »
So when I said,
God, sometimes
I am just so tired,
she said, (and it wasn’t
really a she, but it wasn’t
really a he, either),
she said, yeah,
not as if she were going
to change anything
more as if she knew
exactly what I meant.
And then I said,
God, I’m sorry.
I guess you’ve seen
all the bad stuff
I have done.
And she said,
yes, not as if
she thought
I’d been bad, more
as if she believed
I were truly sorry.
And then I said,
though it scared me
to say it, God,
sometimes I don’t
believe in you.
She nodded,
though it were
more like a wave,
like a current,
like a swell
than a nod,
and she said
nothing, as if
she didn’t want
to prove me wrong.