walking four blocks with my mother,
every step an arrival,
every step a reason to praise
Posts Tagged ‘gratitude’
One Month Out of ICU
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, poem, poetry, recovery, walking on August 27, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Letter to the Doctors and Nurses in the ICU
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged doctor, gratitude, hospital, mother, nurse, poetry, prose poem on July 13, 2017| 6 Comments »
I know it’s your job, to monitor the heart rate as it rises, the blood pressure as it falls. I know the gray-haired woman in the bed is another set of numbers with a name you’ll forget. She’s my mother. She grows tomatoes on her porch and has a song to sing for every occasion. She loves side stroke and chocolate and Japanese art. She makes the best poached eggs, and she knows exactly how to scratch my head to lull me to sleep. I know it’s your job to find the clot. To bathe the wound. To ease the pain. Thank you. Thank you for your hands as they slip the needle into her arms, the arms that gather me when frightened or cold. Thank you for your feet as they run down the halls to examine her heart, her heart that holds so many. Thank you for your art as you puzzle the why of her body, her body that knows itself as a vessel for love and prayer. She is praying for you, even now, as I do, and though you are just doing your job, thank you.
This Night is Such a Night
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, poem, poetry on July 16, 2016| 3 Comments »
While the onions and celery forget themselves
in the butter and low heat, I walk to the garden
and gather spinach. It’s nearly time to pull the row—
the plants have begun to yellow and bolt—
but there remain enough dark green leaves
for a pot of fresh cream of spinach soup.
The evening is warm, and swallows dart and swoop
through the air. A haze drapes the midsummer sky.
For a moment I forget there is dinner
to make, a burner inside that will not wait.
For a moment my heart is as open
as the first calendula bloom in the garden,
all its many petals peeled back. It’s now I notice
I’ve been living only half open. Sometimes
we unfold just long enough that the world
can rush in and shake us awake
before we bend back in to our daily lists.
The soup has never been so deep green,
so rich. The night has never smelled so good.
Two Marvelings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, gratitude, love, moon, poem, poetry, river on April 21, 2016| 2 Comments »
just another full moon rise—
is it any wonder
I can’t stop bowing?
*
how, I said,
to the river bed
do you make
of yourself a home?
I let the flow shape me,
the river bed said—
flood, current,
shimmer, stone
Right Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, poem, poetry on January 9, 2016| 8 Comments »
I realized I was yearning for more than the riches the blessing of the day had brought.
—Alan Cohen, “Visitations”
Give me the napkins with stains on them,
the ones we’ve used for seven years.
Give me the butter dish with the broken lid,
the sound of my husband lightly snoring
on the couch with the missing buttons,
and the wild laughter of children
so loud I cannot hear the woman
on the other end of the phone.
Give me these wrinkles, this gray,
this softness I used to despise.
Give me exactly this life
that I have, wealthy with messes
I have helped to create, so rich
with nitty-gritties
that some nights I forget
that somewhere there’s a clean,
quiet, unbroken world
I once thought
I wanted to be part of.
Happy Thanksgiving
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, poem, poetry, thanksgiving on November 25, 2015| Leave a Comment »
I wish every one of you a day, a whole lifetime of giving thanks. Here’s a poem from a few months back published online today in Telluride Inside about radical gratitude, the kind that just rises on its own, no matter what … Autumnal
46th Birthday in Lone Tree Cemetery, Dia de los Muertos
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, cemetery, death, Dia de los Muertos, gratitude, poem, poetry on November 3, 2015| 3 Comments »
Past the grave of the baby girl,
past the grave of the beloved mother—
“we loved her,” it says in italic letters—
and past the grave with my birthday on it,
we find a tombstone greened in moss
with its names and dates long since lost.
The grass has nearly reclaimed the stone,
and we sit here together and talk for hours,
joyful expressions of dust as we laugh
and cry and remember just why
it is so damn sweet to be alive, to practice
what it means to love in the face of our impermanence.
All the leaves have left for the year,
but look at what remains—the chance
for sudden, immeasurable bliss
no matter what the season is.
I Couldn’t Have Explained it to You Then
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged evolution, gratitude, poem, poetry, sea on October 15, 2015| 5 Comments »
Some things do not easily
leave the sea.
In an instant they shift
from buoyant grace
to cumbersome weight.
Remember that night
we stood beside the surf
and the whole wet world
stretched shining before us?
We wrestled the wave runner
onto the trailer, and I
felt some kinship with
those first prehistoric fish
who dragged their lobe fins
onto the beach, those fish
who, driven by what?
struggled up and out
and learned a new way to move,
a new way to breathe,
grew a new kind of skin
and a new kind of spine.
For a moment, tugging
on the wet rope,
I knew it, some hint of the drive
bred into my body
over the past four hundred
million years. How I gasped
at the gift of it all—these
legs, these lungs, this upright head,
these biceps burning
against the burden
of emergence, the glitter
of light as it leaves, the scent
of honest sweat.
Digging Up Potatoes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, gratitude, harvest, poem, poetry, potato on August 29, 2015| 3 Comments »
There is no way to know
what we’ll find beneath
the yellowing leaves.
And always I forget
which varieties I’ve planted
and where. And so, when
the Finnish fingerlings appear
just below the surface,
I thrill in their golden
skin and knobby shapes,
and when the dark purple
potatoes emerge from the depths
of the garden bed,
by then, I am already kneeling,
but something inside kneels, too—
oh the russet and red-skinned
and pink-fleshed miracle of it all,
the sheer delight
of running my fingers
through the dirt and
pulling out potatoes,
each one somehow
a surprise, a small reminder
of how beautifully
the world can work,
how the darkness
nourishes such incredible
gifts. Ten hours since
I left the garden, and
whatever inside me knew to kneel
is still enthralled in prayer.
While On My Way Back to the Car
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, gratitude, poem, poetry, queen's crown, wildflower on July 28, 2015| 6 Comments »
It’s not that the queen’s crown changed anything,
not really. All it was doing was growing there
in the field beside the spruce.
But there it was, succulent and pink.
And there I was, not even knowing
how desperately I wanted to find
something beautiful, until I stumbled
on the flower, hiding as it was in the tall, tall grass.
And though it changed nothing,
it changed everything, the day
suddenly marked by treasure,
by luck. There are, surely, thousands
of chances each day for such astonishment,
thousands of openings
I never see, thousands of opportunities
to say, “This, this is why I am here.”
Crazy that finding a flower in the tall, tall grass
could obscure a whole world of troubles.
At least for a moment.
I will tell you where to find it,
though it wouldn’t be the same
if you were looking for it.
No, better to walk wherever it is
you are walking, better to stumble
as often as you can.
Just in Case We Needed A Reason
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, life, poem, poetry on July 26, 2015| 1 Comment »
Because we did not drown today in a violent flash flood
nor contract hanta virus nor botulism,
because we were not tracked down and dismembered
by a mountain lion nor bitten by mosquitoes with West Nile,
because there was no hurricane, no earthquake,
no mudslide, no irate employees in the post office,
because both your heart and my heart continued
to pump rich blood through our bodies,
well, that seems reason enough to sit here
on the porch tonight and marvel at the world—
all those diving and banking green backed swallows
and the way the light shines through crab apple leaves
and the scent of the river and even that strangled sound
that the geese make—wouldn’t you say we are lucky,
my god, blessed beyond blessed to sit here
and fall in love with life not out of any sense that our time is short
but just because the field is full of green and gold
and the garden is free of gophers for now, and
the lawn has been mowed and there are no killer bees
in the yard, and there’s no tsunami, nope, not even a tiny chance.
Just After Darkness Comes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, moon, poem, poetry on April 2, 2015| 1 Comment »
through empty branches
more than just a moon rises—
this full gratitude
Not Wanting to Leave Anything Out in My List of Gratitudes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged evolution, gratitude, poem, poetry on January 26, 2015| 4 Comments »
Just think of all that had to happen
so I could sit on the porch
this clear winter day and feel the warm sun
on my naked shoulders—bacteria
were engulfed by eukaryotic cells,
and after over a billion years,
multicellular organisms evolved
in the oceans before an explosion
of Cambrian life—sponges, brown
algae and slime molds. And then,
of course, the colonization of land
by the plants and fungi, followed
by arthropods and insects.
Some 500 million years later,
my mother and father met on a date,
set up by friends, and my dad, a biology major,
brought Coke instead of beer, which impressed
my mother, a history major, and they sat
and drank it together, seated on a picnic blanket
which they laid out on grass so green, so new
one could almost wring the saltwater out of it.
A Woman Addresses Her Body
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body image, gratitude, poem, poetry, woman on January 23, 2015| 8 Comments »
Oh body, I’ve tried to silence you.
I have told you not to hunger
when you were starved.
I told you to run and ski and swim
when you were tired.
I tugged you long into the dark corridors of night
when you wanted to sleep.
I draped you in dresses two times too big
to hide your angled bones.
And you, you have lured me to the waterfall
to stand beneath the startling shock.
You have lain me down in tall grass
to lose myself staring up at sky.
You have curled into the softness of men
and held the fear of children.
Inside panic, you have found breath.
You have opened to let the new life pass through,
and given milk and song and hum.
And when the tears want to come,
you let them come.
Body, my vessel, my carriage, my curse,
my blessings, my bane, my teacher,
I am still learning how to be a woman.
Joseph, I Know It Is Meant to Be a Comfort, But I’m Tired of Stumbling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, body, gratitude, poem, poetry on January 3, 2015| 3 Comments »
Joseph, I Know It Is Meant to Be a Comfort, But I’m Tired of Stumbling
Where you stumble, there your treasure lies.
—Joseph Campbell
Oh body, this is your real destination,
the fall. The lurch. The blunder.
The stagger. The hobble. The trip.
Though I’ve practiced at grace
and balance, though I’ve rehearsed poise
and lifted weights and risen early to run, to ski,
you are destined to stumble, to teeter,
to drop, to collapse, to rot, and to call it good.
Though I eat kale and spirulina,
though I go to my physical every year,
though I think about taking my vitamins daily,
you are ordained to fail and somehow,
I am to find this failure favorable.
Every day I recognize you less—these wrinkles,
these curves, these aches, this gray—
and every day I treasure you more. Oh damn,
I guess that Campbell was right, then.
Here, at the altar of vulnerability, I have
fallen in love with you, the way you have
carried me through forests, up mountains,
across rivers and into ocean waves.
How you’ve lain in the blood of childbirth and joined
the miracle. You have kissed and fucked
and opened and spilled and arched and
writhed and pressed. You have leapt and swung
and spun and reached and nestled and
lunged and wept. And broken and crumpled, yes,
and stumbled over and over again. Oh what
a gift to have a body, to know it at all, to fall
and fall and fall in love with the falling,
to lose sense of where we begin and where
we are perfectly, terribly, wholly, richly, thank you, lost,
and from that grounded place
to reach out and serve the world again.
Finding Gratitude in the City
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, love, poem, poetry on November 27, 2014| 3 Comments »
square of blue sky
I write your name on it then
fold it into a crane—
in the pocket above my heart
it flutters
Little Lie
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged expectation, gratitude, poem, poetry, relationship on October 11, 2014| 2 Comments »
Today it is blessing enough
that I did not drop the green vase,
did not lose my son’s place in his book,
did not spill the full bottle of wine nor trip
on my own feet while running, did not fall into a puddle.
So much that didn’t happen to be grateful for.
We did not get lost in the corn maze for hours
without our warm coats. I did not drop a baby.
The river did not overflow its banks. The raspberries
were a little sour, but at least they had no mold.
And as for that sweet thing that you didn’t say
that I wished you would have, well,
that detail seems so small amidst all these other
wonderful things that didn’t happen
that it’s no big deal you didn’t say it.
I barely noticed it was missing at all.
Though Sometimes It’s Hard to Want to Believe It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, gratitude, miracle, poem, poetry on September 9, 2014| 2 Comments »
In the same breath that I curse the world
I praise it. It is impossible not to see
what a mess we’ve made, and yet … how
relentlessly beautiful the rabbit brush
blooms in the ditch, all yellow and vigorous,
growing out of the busted up asphalt
and Marlboro boxes and twisted beer cans.
It’s no miracle, you might say. It’s just a weed.
But I know a miracle when I see one.
It looks a lot like whatever is happening
outside the window right now.
Such a Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged desert, falling in love with the world, gratitude, poem, poetry on August 31, 2014| 1 Comment »
On a day when the desert potholes
are full of pollywogs and tiny
red-speckled frogs and the blue sky
is dappled with pink-bellied clouds,
and the San Juan is running muddy
and warm, well, you don’t have to have almost just died
to realize how lucky you are to be alive—
nope, it just comes natural, this wanting
to kiss your children, even though
they are whining all day about how
the desert is just full of rocks
and it’s so boring. Yeah, it just kind of happens,
this flash flood of gratitude, this falling in love
with everything dust can do.
Thursday Evening 911
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emergency, EMT, gratitude, parenting, poem, poetry on August 9, 2014| 3 Comments »
for the Placerville Volunteer Fire Department and EMTs
Within minutes after the ambulance leaves,
the girl who swallowed the ring
pulls out her toy doctor kit.
She fits the pink cuff onto my arm
and pumps until the little plastic dial changes colors.
What seemed like an emergency forty minutes before
has become a game. Only it is not a game.
She is replaying how we serve each other.
Our drive way, how small it seemed
flooded with red and white lights.
Nearly a dozen neighbors and strangers
rushed from their homes in response
to the terrified call.
Yes, my daughter says, I think you will be just fine.
Her voice is calm and reassuring. She speaks in the same
smooth tones that the EMTs used
as they sat on the floor beside her.
Now, she says, let’s check your temperature.
I marvel at how once the fear is gone,
it is gone—moved through, like the ring
no longer trapped in her throat.
What remains is relentless gratitude—
wave after wave of respect—
for all people who devote their lives
to meeting neighbors and strangers
in their most vulnerable, fragile, fearful states.
And what remains is deepening love
for the girl who even now
is reaching into her doctor kit
and pressing the button
on her pretend pager to say
that everything is going to be okay.