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Posts Tagged ‘growth’

At the Center of the Garden

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on May 2, 2026| Leave a Comment »


 
 
When no one
is looking
she touches
the wound
that hides
beneath
her smile
where the scion
of acceptance
was grafted 
to her rootstock
of stubbornness.
Most people
don’t notice
the scar,
focused as they are
on the fruit,
but she 
remembers
the cut, 
the tissue exposed.
How tenderly
she traces
that place
where the union
was formed. 
Since the wounding,
her fruits 
have become 
vibrant, complex, 
so sharp, even tart, 
and so sweet.
 

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Illogic

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 28, 2026| 19 Comments »


 
 
deploying bombs
to achieve lasting peace—
like planting barbed wire
and expecting to grow
a rose bush

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When It’s Just All Too Much

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 14, 2026| 2 Comments »


 
 
The more complex the problem,
the more trapped, the more closed in I feel,
the more I learn to trust what is simple,
the way the potato in the cupboard
does the one thing it can do—
it calls on whatever thrives inside itself,
then grows doggedly, awkwardly toward the light.
I want to turn toward the life that lives through me.
Give it all my energy. Offer it back to the world.

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We could say it took me my whole life

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 16, 2025| 4 Comments »



 
 
to grow a heart from lake water and an old
junk yard, from an empty classroom
and cheap novels bought at the second
 
hand store, two-liter bottles of diet coke
and a dusty dead-end road. There was more,
of course. An old plaid couch with a squeaky spring.
 
The spiraling cord of an old telephone. A rusty pan
with cornbread made with Mavis’s fresh eggs.
The breathing weight of my newborn girl.
 
What hasn’t gone into the growing of this heart?
An old red truck. The pinnately compound leaves
of Jacob’s Ladder. But it is the unpetaling
 
that astonishes now, how all the stories
of my becoming—all the particulars
that seemed so essential—begin to drop
 
No, not drop, exactly. It’s just that I nourish
these stories less as I turn my attention
toward the vastness from which all arose—
 
and in this turning, discover how the more
the heart is undone, the more
the heart can grow.

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Enter Here

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on August 25, 2025| 4 Comments »

 
 
At the same time
a tree grows
in two directions,
toward darkness,
toward light.
Come, look through
the door of the heart.
Do you see how you,
too, are made of roots
and leaves?
The door opens and opens.
Do you see how you,
too, are a tree?

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Driving Back to the Orchard Where Once We Lived

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 1, 2025| 10 Comments »


 
 
I realize I am no longer a slender sapling.
No longer a pink cherry blossom in spring.
But I am not done with my blossoming.
I am not yet done with serving
sweetness to the world.
I am so grateful for all those years
that taught me the importance
of tending to soil,
how to meet drought, how to prune,
how to thin, how to plan.
But I am no longer a sapling.
Nor am I a workhorse of a pear tree
grafted decades ago.
I aspire to be more like purple mustard,
a weed growing exuberant and thick
in the long orchard rows—
grown to suppress all other weeds,
intent on improving the dirt,
a pest control, good for tilling,
a natural biofumigant.
But most of all, there is no stopping
that deep, sweet, surprising
and beautiful scent.

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What It Takes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 25, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
I say I love you, but what I mean is
there is deep sky between us I don’t know
how to travel, and there is no map, no path,
and it’s cold, and I don’t know how
to fly, but when I say I love you, I mean
somehow despite these too solid bones,
a raven-sharp wisdom is clawing through me,
and though it hurts I feel them swelling
beneath my skin, these determined wings.

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Planting the Questions

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 7, 2024| 8 Comments »

All day the first snow fell in the valley.
Hour by hour, I watched
the brittle world become new.
All day, I marveled at the human—
equally capable of cruelty and compassion.
Inside me, strong questions gathered.
I planted them in me like garlic cloves.
Every gardener knows how cold
only accelerates their growth,
triggers more development come spring.
I imagine how vigorous, how robust
these questions will grow
into actions I can’t yet conceive.
All day, the snow kept falling.
I imagined it was love.
There was nothing it did not touch.

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Allium sativum

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 8, 2024| 8 Comments »


 
 
Not unlike the garlic
bulbs pulled today
from garden soil,
the heart, too,
is lumpy, misshapen,
filled with strong
and good intentions.
Never quite what
I dream—but hey,
it’s not nothing
to grow where
there is no light.
It’s not nothing
to grow at all.
 

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When It Looks Like the End

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 1, 2024| 11 Comments »

            for Stumpy, and maybe for you
 
 
To survive. To not only survive,
but to bring joy. To bloom despite
our own hollowing.
 
To bloom despite the erosion
of the world in which we grew.
I speak of a cherry tree, but
 
I also, perhaps, speak of you—
how you have made of your life
not just a stump, but a story.
 
How in hostile conditions,
despite brackish odds,
you’ve found the drive to grow.
 
How your words and your actions,
like cuttings, might take on a life
of their own—a legacy
 
of resilience that finds a home
in the soil of the lives still here.
In this way, you continue
 
to flourish and be known.
In this way you are not here
and ever here. Gone
 
and never gone. In this way
one life is a blossom that disappears
and returns on a branch not its own.
 
None of us live forever.
Still the chance to give the best of ourselves
away. This is how we go on.
 
for more information about Stumpy, the beloved cherry tree, visit here

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