In the garden, fill a hole with water,
eventually it will drain. Fill it with trash,
with poor soil, nothing—or weeds—
will grow. But fill the hole with topsoil,
intentional seed—is it any wonder
something beautiful eventually thrives?
Consider the hollow left when a loved one
is gone. Nothing will ever be the same as it was.
But if I protect the hollow, allow into it,
more feeling, more love, more honest connection,
if I sow there whatever goodness I grieve,
then how deep the roots might go. How true,
the sapling, its leaves so verdant,
so heartachingly new, so unashamedly green.
Posts Tagged ‘growth’
Intention
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, growing, growth, intention, loss on May 22, 2026| 10 Comments »
Over Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communication, connection, flower, garden, growth, lily on May 18, 2026| 2 Comments »
The way my grandmother tended
to her daylilies, that is the way
I want to attune to your words—
knowing how each utterance blooms
only briefly, but when cared for,
the plant itself is hardy, long lasting,
abundant, able to survive both
heat and chill, both loam and clay.
Come love, whisper to me.
I cherish every petal. And when
there is no bloom, I have learned
water and fertilize anyway, to honor
the place where the bloom will be.
Self-Portrait as Seedling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged becoming, growth, self-portrait on May 17, 2026| 4 Comments »
To know the self as seedling again.
To push against the home I’ve known
before launching into ecstatic stretch.
To trust again how the slenderest threads
will anchor me to the world.
I had become so enamored with blooming,
I forgot the joy of initiation,
the thrill of not knowing,
the startlement of reaching through
darkness into light.
I’d forgotten the earnest striving
that comes before bud, before petal,
before effulgent perfume.
To be held by it again,
that sacred uncertainty.
To feel the flush of becoming
what I already am.
At the Center of the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apple, garden, grief, growth, orchard, tree, wound 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.
Illogic
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged growth, logic, peace, war on February 28, 2026| 19 Comments »
deploying bombs
to achieve lasting peace—
like planting barbed wire
and expecting to grow
a rose bush
When It’s Just All Too Much
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged despair, growth, inner resources, potato 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.
We could say it took me my whole life
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged growing, growth, heart, particulars, unlearning, vastness 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.
Enter Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged growth, tree 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?
Driving Back to the Orchard Where Once We Lived
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blooming, growing, growth, nostalgia, soil, sweetness 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.
What It Takes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged disconnect, growth, love, separation, wings 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.
Planting the Questions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dormancy, growth, love, questions, snow 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.
Allium sativum
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, garlic, growth, heart 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.
When It Looks Like the End
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cherry tree, growth, inspiration, mortality, stumpy, tree 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
In a Time of Little Hope
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, grief, growth, hope on December 23, 2023| 18 Comments »
In one day, the paperwhites
surge into life—
this heart, too,
has been forced to grow quickly.
Is it any wonder I thrill
to see this leaping up
toward light?
Any wonder I’ve begun to believe
in impossible things?
Mycelial
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, grief, growth, mushroom on August 19, 2022| 4 Comments »
Now I understand how grief
is like a mushroom—
how it thrives in dark conditions.
How it springs directly
from what is dead.
Such a curious blossoming thing,
how it rises and unfurls
in spontaneous bourgeoning,
a kingdom all its own.
Like a mushroom,
most of grief is never seen.
It grows and expands beneath everything.
Sometimes it stays dormant for years.
Grief, like a mushroom,
can be almost unbearably beautiful,
even exotic, delicate, veiled,
can arrive in any shape and hue.
It pulls me closer in.
Like a mushroom, grief
asks me to travel to regions
of shadow and dim.
I’m astonished by what I find—
mystery, abundance, insight.
Like a mushroom, grief
can be wildly generative.
Not all growth takes place
in the light.
This poem was published in ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry on 9/11/22
Unfolding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flower, growth, infinity, support, unfolding, universe on August 18, 2022| 7 Comments »
In a vision, I saw the self
as white flower—
a many-petalled ranunculus—
a flower that opened and opened
and infinitely opened, reaching
beyond borders, beyond atmosphere,
beyond our beautiful spiral of galaxy,
its petals unfolding and unfolding,
a timeless, unending unfolding.
It comforts me to know
there’s no edge to the universe,
no way to fall off, no way
to accidentally go beyond.
There was a moment when
the green stem snapped and I worried
the blossom had become too big.
Then I felt it, how completely
the great bloom was held by the world,
and in that moment, I trusted that holding.
The flower kept growing.
Now, back in my body,
I’m still opening into that trust.
After Their Trip to Guatemala I Watch My Daughter and Her Friends
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, girls, giving, growth, travel on July 2, 2022| 6 Comments »
The smallest change in perspective can transform a life. —Oprah Winfrey They return arm in arm, linked by elbows and laughter, linked by memories of women weaving and warm fresh tortillas and the girl who begged them to bring her home with them. They are the same girls who left, only more spacious, filled with vast lake and tropical rain and the generosity of the people who live with little. They are more citizens of the world, now, having sat on the earth and around tables with children and elders so different, so the same. Having left in service, they return the richer— oh sweet paradox, how in giving of themselves they are beautifully changed. |
Giant Bouquet
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blossom, desmond tutu, flower, growth on June 1, 2022| 6 Comments »
You blossom because of other people.
—Desmond Tutu
Because of you,
I know heady,
honeyed perfume,
I know countless
petals, the flutter,
the thrill in opening—
because of you,
this long-stemmed
laughter, this
unashamed blush.
Because you
are sunflower,
cosmos, hyacinth,
I am iris, lavender,
larkspur.
I am only me
because of you,
and the gift of you
is so beautiful,
even in this time
of sorrow, I am
lily splayed wide,
white peony, red poppy,
I am blooming wild
with the beauty
given to you.
The Opening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, growth, loss, opening, surrender on March 23, 2022| 5 Comments »
If the day is a hinge,
then loss is the hand
that swings the door
so that what I would never choose
becomes my opening.
What I would never choose
becomes the thing
that makes me need to be
a better person.
What I could not choose
becomes the spring board
to devotion.
So let me open.
In this time of broken hope,
love says to me,
Be the yes.
And if you cannot be the yes,
then stop trying anything
and let yourself fall
into to the opening.
On Discovering I’ve Grown
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beaver, growth, personal growth, tree on December 15, 2020| 2 Comments »
It’s not forever.
When we fence a tree
down by the river,
some slender tree
that a beaver could easily
gnaw through, the fence
only stays up until the trunk
grows big and thick,
wide enough to discourage
any who would try take it down.
Just today, I realized I’d built a fence
around me. Noticed it
only because, while routinely
clearing out,
I dismantled the fence
and took it away.
How invisible a wall can be.
What amazed me:
how enormous I’ve become—
vigorous, robust,
sturdy enough not to worry
about little bites.
I remember how, not so long ago,
I was so vulnerable.
You could hug me now,
now that the fence is gone,
though your arms wouldn’t quite reach
all the way around.
Perhaps that’s as it should be.
Part of me belongs to you.
Part of me is still growing
into the world.