Wini weeps as she tells me “everyone is so broken,”
and a small shrine appears in the tear on her cheek.
I kneel inside it as it slips to her chin.
My throat clenches, my own heart widens,
enlivened by how deeply Wini cares,
and somehow her heartache begins to mend
my own grief for this cruel and callous world.
More than any beauty. More than the uplifting song
of the red wing black bird trilling through the open window.
More than the scent of basil and lemon.
More than the dark silhouette of two herons winging
through the nectarine sunset. Wini’s tears heal me.
Shared ache becomes its own medicine.
No. Not the ache. The medicine is in the love that fuels
the ache. It feels so right, I forget to wish it didn’t hurt.
Posts Tagged ‘healing’
For What Ails Us
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, connection, friendship, healing, heartache, medicine, trust on March 25, 2026| 4 Comments »
Grace
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grace, healing, light, reiki on December 14, 2024| 9 Comments »
while receiving Reiki, with thanks to T. V.
For a moment,
there appeared a circle
of golden light,
the way sunlight
sometimes streams
through a gap
in the forest canopy
to form a small shining pool
on the ground.
It wasn’t that I
stepped into this light.
More that the light found me,
and for a moment
I knew what it was like
to be found.
This is perhaps
what grace is like—
when we wander
in the dark, cold, lost,
and the light finds us,
not because we deserve it,
not even because
we have asked for it.
It simply arrives,
and it is ours to receive it,
to know gratefulness,
even astonishment,
and to let it inform
what we do next.
One Impatience
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, healing, impatience, patience on November 21, 2024| 8 Comments »
like asking the peach
to ripen before it has even flowered—
this longing to be healed
After Difficult News
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aftermath, healing, mountain, woods on September 22, 2024| 7 Comments »
It’s enough to wander
alone in the woods
while the aspen
turn their leaves
into shimmering light.
This, too, is aftermath—
the brilliant red
of rose hips,
fat and sweet.
The clean scent
of rain. Holy fluff
that was once
yellow flowers.
The vast gold
field of grass.
Before Turning Toward Light Again
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged altar, friendship, healing, light, shadow on September 14, 2024| 6 Comments »
for K
On the altar of healing,
I would place a blade
of grass to represent tonight
lying in the fresh cut lawn.
You in the cooling shade.
Me in the low, warm sun.
The late summer green.
Distant hum of river.
Your tear as it slipped
toward the grass.
Our laughter about
I don’t even know what.
The way the earth held us,
asking nothing in return.
Your knees on my knees
as we curled in for warmth.
Your fear. My fear. Your trust.
My trust. The way we could
say and hear anything—
anything at all—as the world
turned slowly toward dusk.
In the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cacti, domes, healing, memory, pain on July 1, 2024| 12 Comments »
for Jen Meyer It was innocent to start, how Jenny and I gathered the dried bits of cacti that had fallen on the trail in the desert dome in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Inside the dome, it was hot; outside, snow, and at eight years old, we had never before seen anything so prickly, raised as we were amongst trillium and violets. Perhaps the docents had told us not to touch. Surely we knew better than to take something we found, but we gathered the strange and spiky rounds like the treasure they were and carried them in our knit hats. Years later, I can’t recall how we were caught. But I remember the sting of thousands of hair-thin spines in my scalp, my skin. That was how I learned something unusual and beautiful could also be cruel, that some things will hurt you simply because that is how they are made. But oh, how I love that girl, the one who wanted so badly to touch and be touched by the world. Keep touching, I want to tell her. Even when it hurts. There is so much you will never know any other way. |
While Hiking on Lizard Head Pass
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, grief, healing, hermit thrush, hiking, mountains, music, natural world, song on June 23, 2024| 15 Comments »
I forgot, today, to be sad.
Perhaps, more truly,
the song of the hermit thrush
ringing through the alpine meadow
gathered me into its echoing
and lifted me out of myself
and landed me fully in the field
where the green corn lilies
reached up to my waist.
While listening to the thrush,
I forgot how things fall apart,
held as I was by the long
whistled song, haunting and rich,
flute-like and clear as it pealed
through the spruce, honest
as any church bell, urgent
as a gong, holy as a woman
set free by a song.
Why I Stay Up Late Walking
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emotions, healing, walking on March 25, 2024| 12 Comments »
At night I walk. Because
it is easier then to not
be my story. Easier to be
more flesh and less brain.
Easier to be the one
who is gathered into
the field of darkness
by night’s great hands
and planted there.
Because sometimes
rain and sometimes wind
and sometimes stars
and always the world
so much larger than I,
so much vaster
than a small room
with a narrow doorway
and a tale relentlessly sad.
I walk not so much from,
but not so much to—
more that I walk through—
my ribs and lungs
becoming ladder rungs
that form a path
between earth and sky,
and I am more breath
than blame, more step than
shame, more now than why.
Loving You No Matter What
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, healing, helplessness, joy, loss, rainbow on March 3, 2024| 10 Comments »
for Dan
Still, this longing to help.
I want to write the impossible poem,
the one that would make what is terrible
less terrible, want to give you
something useful as a tool belt,
practical as long division, hopeful
as the grace that rises out of our losses
as surely as sunshine rises
at the end of our valley.
There was that cold March morning,
years ago, when you grabbed my hand
and pulled me toward the street
to see a rainbow of ice crystals
glowing bright in the east.
An ice rainbow! you shouted,
your joy so feral, so real it became my joy.
God, how I needed it.
That. I want to give you that.
*
Still Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, healing, survival on February 11, 2024| 18 Comments »
After I did not die the first minute,
I lived the next minute.
More truly, life lived me.
More truly, the thick air,
infused with lake scent and
rosemary and late summer
insisted I breathe. More
that the sun did not let me
not see my beloveds still here.
The thick green leaves
of August reminded me
life pushes through.
There was not a half second
I forgot the horror.
And still I did not die.
After I lived the first day,
I lived the next day,
opened the door and
drove the car and held close
the people I love.
Rain fell and a rainbow
bloomed and the night
was sleepless and long.
And longer. I lived the next week.
The next. The next.
I lived the next year.
And the next. More truly,
the same life that lives
through mushroom, tulip,
magpie, worm, eagle, you,
that same life keeps living me.
The horror, no less real.
And love continues to sprout
like new trees after fire.
Slow, and indisputable. A gift.
What seemed gone is still here.
The way light and dark and
air are still here. Another
day. Another year.