When my arms were the most empty,
when my hands were unable to hold anything
and I was most unselved,
that was when I felt the most gathered up
by love. An immeasurable and wildly precise love.
Even when I wanted to push love away.
Even when I felt too broken to be found.
I felt love gather all my pieces.
Not to fix them.
Not to put them back together.
Love simply held every shattered thought
and every ruined dream and cradled me
just as I was. Not because I deserved it.
Just because that is what love does.
I am learning to trust this feeling of belonging
to the world, broken as it is, broken as I am,
learning to trust I need not do a thing to belong.
I do not know how it all works
or why I was able to receive it.
But I can’t unknow this unfathomable truth:
how love holds us when we cannot
hold anything, gentle as silence,
fierce as a flood, true as the breaking itself.
The way the ocean forever holds every wave.
The way the shore forever changes to hold the ocean.
Posts Tagged ‘love’
How We Are Held
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, broken, connection, held, holding, love on January 12, 2025| 7 Comments »
Humbled by Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forgetting, love, remembering on January 9, 2025| 4 Comments »
Often I love best what is in front of me.
In summer, I forget I love snow, love cold.
In winter, I forget I love green.
Given green beans, I forget I love carrots.
Given a warm dark night,
I forget I’m entranced by summer light.
Perhaps sometimes, when reading,
or skiing by the river, or singing, there is an hour
when I forget I love you. Then, when
I think again of your voice, your you-ness,
there’s a rush of remembrance
and I fall in love all over again,
my whole body vibrating like a bell,
wildly amazed you exist at all
and that I, somehow, against all odds,
not only know you but love you,
love you in a way that makes me feel
I could effervesce, could bloom
right through my skin. And I am
the luckiest woman in the world then—
lucky to feel it again, the humbling joy
of knowing love is so much bigger
than my attention, so much greater
than my capacity to hold.
Lucky to be at the mercy of love.
Lucky to have thought I lost you,
if only for an hour, only to find
love holding me, cupping my chin
in its gentle hands, turning me
toward you again.
Because It Matters I Say It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged i love you, love, speech on January 8, 2025| 10 Comments »
I remember in Finland
I lived a year without once
hearing someone say the verb
for love, rakastaa. As if it were
too precious to squander.
And it is precious. And still,
this longing to spend the word wildly,
as if there’s an infinite store of love.
As if I could say I love you
a thousand thousand times
and there would still be
a thousand thousand more
whispers of love left to give you.
Sometimes I worry I say it too much
so when you hear it,
the words enter your ears
like footsteps among a crowd,
unable to be discerned
amidst the noise of the world.
Even so, I continue to say it,
I love you, as you answer the phone.
I love you, as we say goodbye.
I love you as we stand at the grave.
I love you as we buy peaches.
As we walk in the parking lot, I love you.
I love you, as we sit on the couch.
I love you as I worry I say it too much.
I say it because it’s impossible
not to say it. I love you.
Because you are my canoe
in the rapids of the world.
Because each time I say it,
it feels like planting a seed
that will bloom for the rest of our lives.
Because there is nothing
more important to say.
Request
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, generous assumption, love, trust on December 8, 2024| 11 Comments »
I’m thinking of a woodland chapel
just beyond town standing tall
and straight as it can. Though
the floorboards sag and creak,
its doors open to receive whatever enters,
be it resistance or praise.
Its walls have witnessed
such laughter, such sorrow.
And the songs sung here for years
are now as integral to the structure
as the rafters. This is a place
made of love. I have found my way
again and again into its sanctuary.
I have knelt here to pray in ways
no one has taught me, prayers that rise
natural and primal as moan, as sigh,
never knowing what to expect except
that I will be safe here, that I belong.
Is it possible to make of the heart
such a generous space? A place
that generous, that sacred?
Make of my heart a woodland chapel
just beyond town standing tall and straight
as it can, a place you can enter
somehow certain you are wholly loved
no matter what you do.
I want to offer you refuge here.
Will you trust me to give that to you?
At the Grand Prix
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, family, grand prix, love, race car on November 24, 2024| 6 Comments »
Nothing like walking in the forest,
this gathering in the grandstand
to watch race cars blur past each other,
scent of hot rubber acrid in the air,
not at all like wandering through
a sun-dazzled glade, moss soft
and green beneath my feet,
but sitting near the starting line
with hundreds of thousands of humans
with my daughter leaning into me,
my husband and my stepdaughter
and her husband beside me,
and the memory of my son knocking inside,
the heart proves again how it can fling wide
its gates for many kinds of joy,
many forms of beauty, even those
we’d never considered before.
The heart can sing for them all,
as tonight when it sings along
with the high-pitched roar
of the engines, the deep bass rumble
of the earth. Why should I be surprised?
There are infinite ways to feel connected, alive.
Matriarch
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birds, family, love, mom on November 17, 2024| Leave a Comment »
From the hallway, I hear her
growl her disappointment
when my nephew’s football team
fumbles the ball. And by the time
I enter the door to find her
riveted to the livestream,
she’s squealing, whooping,
calling out his name,
her voice a bright wing
that careens through the room,
a raven let loose from a cage,
and I can’t help but fall
more in love with my mother
who crows with wild, unparalleled joy,
a noisy, exuberant ecstasy,
and I realize I am sky—
as if the wings of her love
shape the terrain where they fly.
She cheers louder for my nephew;
that love makes the space inside me
even more vast, even more beautiful.
After the Barely There Snow Storm
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged joy, love, snow, whole heart on November 14, 2024| 16 Comments »
It happened. The tiniest perfect stars
fell from the sky and into the yard.
Dozens fit on a single brown cottonwood leaf.
There were millions of them. Millions!
An uncountable cache of crystalline stars.
When the sun rose, I ran from shadow
to shadow to witness them before they melted,
joy rising with every star I saw.
Within minutes of morning, they were gone,
but no sorrow came from the loss.
There is no name for this kind of love.
All day, it has lingered, the thrill
of bringing my whole heart
to the moment without ever once thinking
of holding anything back.
Though It’s Messy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brother, election, love, oppostion, sibling, sister, surrender on November 13, 2024| 4 Comments »
I don’t know why we were fighting,
my brother and I, we were always fighting,
but he was already bigger than I, stronger, too,
so I did what I could and yanked hard
on a hank of his hair, twisting my fist
to increase the tension and cause him more pain.
He howled, and I delighted in his howl,
loving my cruelty, wanting to hurt him
as much as I felt he’d hurt me.
Even now, though I cannot recall
what he did or said, I remember the rise
of indignation, that hot flood of righteousness,
that cruel joy in feeling I was giving him back
what he deserved. Oh young version of me,
you would not believe me now when I tell you
you will both surrender your battling to forge
a fierce and loyal love. Not that you don’t disagree.
You are still so opposite in almost every way,
every way save one—your certainty
you can love each other through anything.
Through elections, through divorce,
through the death of a child, through the death
of your father, the loss of your hope.
You can love each other even when
you’re furious with each other,
when you both know the other is wrong.
Believe me, sweetheart,
the world only gets smaller.
The stakes only get higher. God, it’s messy,
so much worse than mean words,
so much more than pulled hair.
The story only gets larger.
We are all each other has.
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.
Ring the Bells that Still Can Ring
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bell, love, ring, service on November 3, 2024| 8 Comments »
Let this darkness be a bell tower / and you the bell. As you ring, / what batters you becomes your strength.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Joanna Macy, from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
Batter me, love, like a bell. Till I ring
and ring and ring because everything
I am, my whole being, is vibrating
with the urgent, pressing call
for love—not the sweet love
of lullabies, but insistent love
that rings through walls,
love that drowns out any voice
not in service to the whole.
Batter me love, until there is no one,
including me, who cannot hear
the pounding imperative to be kind,
to find compassion,
until all beings feel real love pealing
through their bodies—
a resonant command
so true it cannot be unheard.
I have heard other love-battered
bells of humans, and the song of them
is charging me, changing me,
making me long to be rung only by love—
It is not easy to keep asking for the battering.
But worse to be silent.
Worse not to be bell.
Worse not to be an instrument of love.
Once I feared the battering.
Now, I fear it and thrill in the ringing—
love, the only song I want to sing.
*title from “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen