Tuolomne Meadows, Yosemite
The meadow is a vast embrace for light
and does not prepare for predicted rain.
White slabs of granite gather warmth
in their mass with no thought
of storm, and for a sun-drunk moment,
unshackled from purpose,
I’m undone from myself,
more becoming, less someone,
less trajectory, more field,
more attention to cinquefoil, dragonfly,
thin sweetness of mountain air.
In loving the world that is, I am exactly here
Buzz of fly. Beat of heart. Path of ant.
Beat of heart. Dry needles. Dry moss.
Beat of heart. Beat of heart.
Sage. Beat of heart. Stone. Beat
of heart. Deep spring. Tall pine.
Beat of heart. Beat of heart.
Posts Tagged ‘nature’
The Day Before the Hurricane
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being present, nature, yosemite on August 21, 2023| 4 Comments »
For Four Hours
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hiking, nature, smiling, trail on July 3, 2023| 2 Comments »
Not that I was lost
as I climbed through
the rocks and meadowrue,
I just didn’t know
where I was going,
but every step felt
like a small arrival
and no one step
felt like a place to rest;
the trail was sometimes
too faint to trust
and my legs were tired
and dusty and I was
sweaty and sticky,
while on my face,
I could feel it,
the truest smile
opened like sky
above the horizon
as I moved higher
through each switchback,
the town below
smaller and smaller,
then gone.
Letting Go of Knowing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forest, knowing, nature, scent, unknowing, walkiing on June 13, 2023| 14 Comments »
Walking in the sweet honey
and musky scented woods,
I keep searching for what smells
so good, until finally I let
myself be content to walk
in the woods with a honey scent,
and I give up for a time
on naming the world,
and let a step be a step,
let a scent be a scent
and know only I am lucky,
lucky to walk in the musky woods,
the air so refreshing, so sweet.
How Sweet It Is
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, community, goodness, nature, wildflower on June 9, 2023| 9 Comments »
They’re small, the flowers
of mountain mahogany—
little white and red trumpets
with barely a scent, but
today, on a trail lined
with millions of tiny blossoms,
the air was hung with sweet perfume
and I breathed deeper,
as if with each pull
I could bring beauty into my lungs.
When I lose faith
that my smallest actions
make a difference,
let me remember myself as one of millions,
remember the wonder of walking today
through the bushes in bloom.
Hours later the scent is long gone,
but I can’t unknow
how sweet it is.
When Everything Is Field
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, Earth Day, field, love, nature on April 24, 2023| 13 Comments »
Again I fall in love with the field
as if for the first time—the first time
I ever saw a pair of geese land there
then waddle through tall dry grass;
the first time I ever watched it transform
from drab ocher to brilliant green;
the first time I ever felt its spaciousness—
how it becomes a basin for light.
Every day I fall in love again with the field,
many times a day. Every day, I marvel
there are new ways to fall in love.
Once, I didn’t know how intimate it was,
this relationship to the land.
Now I know it as the truest thing.
Inevitable, this love affair with color,
texture, change, scent, the sound
of grass moving against grass.
Inevitable, the love that rises
out of dew, out of frost, out of vastness,
out of wholeness, out of loss,
and reteaches me what it is to love, to be loved.
On Earth Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Earth Day, letting go, nature on April 23, 2023| 2 Comments »
We walk on the back road
through ponderosa forest
laughing and singing for hours,
and the sky comes down
in tiny white balls
shaped like flowers
that land in our hands
and melt into our gloves.
We don’t get to hold anything
for long—not the snow,
not this fabulous day
with its freedom,
its braiding streams, its mud.
We don’t even get to hold
each other, not forever,
though we try—
but for these hours,
surrounded by trickle and trill,
I feel how surely we are held
by the scent of spring,
by the shadows, by the deer,
by the jay’s bright squawk,
by the sun breaking through.
Getting Out
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, nature, outdoors, spaciousness, weather on January 9, 2023| 13 Comments »
Sometimes there is inside me
a space so great
my body takes itself outside—
as if the house is too restricting,
as if this inner space
must be met by something vast as field,
boundless as sky, immeasurable as interstellar space.
If it is storming, so much the better.
If rain races down the face
and saturates the clothes, this is right.
If wind rips at my hair
or snow stings my cheeks
or lightning makes my hairs stand on end,
it only serves the aliveness.
If it is warm and still,
the inner space expands
into the warm and still.
There are feelings too immense for four walls,
too intense to be trapped in the skin,
sensations that rhyme with the cosmos,
moments when we start to grasp
what we are made of—
more energy than matter,
more nothing than something,
more everything than we ever dreamed.
After Attending the Conversation on Awe
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, awe, friendship, nature on September 30, 2022| 5 Comments »
for Jay
We stepped into cool autumnal air
ripe with the red scent of tiny crab apples
and charged with the darkling promise of storm.
We were well-armed with studies and stories
on why we might want to choose awe—
but awe chose us the way gold chooses aspen,
the way love chooses friends,
the way shorter days choose fall,
the way beauty chooses what will die.
And aspen leaves whirled all around us
and caught in our hair, and we knew ourselves
as small essential beings in a wide, astonishing world.
*Hey, friends, just saying that the Original Thinkers Festival program on the Power of Awe was AMAZING!!! If you have never checked out Original Thinkers in Telluride, well, it is great for people who are curious and like to engage in conversations about paradox, science, emotion, the natural world and community.
Real Time in the Uncompahgre River Valley
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged moment, nature, time on August 27, 2022| 2 Comments »
An hour means nothing
to this rivulet
unbraided from the stream.
To the towering spruce,
what’s a day?
What know these red cliffs
of a week? A month?
To the deep meadow,
what’s a year?
But for those who give themselves over
to the wind-kissed field,
the quiver of grass,
the great rise of Mount Abrams
and the quieting,
for those who linger on this timeless land,
a moment could mean everything.
At the Potter Ranch
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged nature, open space, silence, sitting, solitude, spaciousness on August 25, 2022| 8 Comments »
Ridgway, Colorado
On a day when the human world feels like a fist—
when it clenches and squeezes,
fierce and relentless—
I leave the four walls and sit
on an old fallen cottonwood tree,
long and silver and smooth.
There, in the center of a wide river valley,
I sit. And sit. And sit.
And the tall green grasses
and the graceful white yarrow don’t refuse me.
And the murmur of waves
and the musk-yellow scent of sweet clover
replace any thoughts, save being here.
The ring of red mesas
with their vast crowns of spruce
form a vase great enough to hold it all—
and I am gathered into spaciousness
along with dark green sedges and white butterflies,
with the tantrums of brambles
and the tangled flight patterns
of thousands on thousands of dark tiny flies.
A flock of birds rise all at once from the river
and my heart and my eyes rise, too.
A long time passes before I am quiet enough
to hear the chorus in the willows,
the bright clicking of insect wings,
the silence that weaves through everything.
Then the flickers come close
and the dragonflies draw nearer in.
And I current. I cloud. I leaf. I wing.
I leave unwalled, un-selved.
The spaciousness comes with me.
After the Memorial
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aloneness, grief, loss, memorial, mother, nature, pause on August 7, 2022| 7 Comments »
The mother walked
in a deep river gorge
forged by water and time.
She knew herself alone.
She moved with no urgency.
She stepped as if she’d forgotten
what time was.
She paused at the wild currants
and pulled the small red fruits
into her mouth.
She paused on the bridge
and watched the water
continue its forging.
She paused on a flat rock,
removed her shoes
and slipped her feet
into the cold water.
She did not mind
the hem of her black dress
spilling into the stream.
She sat.
She didn’t weep until she did.
She wept until she didn’t.
She sat until she forgot
she was sitting.
She sat until
there was a clearing in her
the way the river will eventually clear
after it’s been muddied by the rain.
There’s no magic number
for how many minutes
or hours or years
it takes to clear.
It is, perhaps, sufficient to know
clearing happens.
At some point, she rose
and walked toward home.
She was not alone.
There was nothing that was not beautiful.
Nearing the Time When
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, loss, nature, season, summer, time on August 2, 2022| 9 Comments »
Even without a calendar,
I would know it is nearly a year
since you left this world.
I know by the angle
of sun in the trees.
Know by the way
I need a sweater at night.
Know by the peas ripe on the vine
and the carrots just now long enough to pull.
I know by the scent
of afternoon monsoons
and the daily threat of mudslides
and the regreening of the field before the gold.
The whole world seems to remember
what it was doing the day you died.
The hummingbirds were swarming
the sweet water in the feeder.
The blue dragonflies were landing
on reeds near the pond.
And the sunflowers in the garden
had just begun to open.
I am pierced by an awareness
of what is not the same,
how the rhythms of the heart
have wildly changed,
even as the river sings red and low
as it always does in August,
even as the mushrooms push through the duff
as they do, as they do, as they always do.
Small Stuff
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged joy, nature, small things on June 21, 2022| 8 Comments »
It can be so small, what saves me.
Like the crow that arrives every day
in the same green spot in the yard.
Like the baby bunny that lives
beneath our porch who locks eyes
with me every morning.
Like skinny dipping with Corinne
in a frigid alpine lake. Bite of radish
just picked from the garden.
Scent of wild roses on the trail.
It does not make sense that pleasures
so small could somehow stand up
to a ransacked heart, and yet
when I hear the whir of hummingbird wings
or see the tiny purple of a Lady Slipper
rising out of the dirt,
I notice the dogged joy in me,
how it glimmers against the dark
like the shooting star I saw tonight,
long and brilliant and red,
or like the owl in the spruce trees
that with only a handful
of low and sonorous notes,
redefines the night with song.
Eight Months Later
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, language, nature, walk on April 22, 2022| 17 Comments »
Sometimes when I’m buying glue
at the hardware store or looking at books
in the library, someone will come and,
with so much love, invite me to dive with them
into the eddies of articulate grief. Or sometimes,
also with love, they’ll say something neutral, like,
“Nice weather,” and I’ll nod, though meanwhile
we wade in thick currents of all that goes unspoken.
Every day, I leave for a time the world of language.
I walk in the woods or along the red cliffs
where the only conversationalists
are the creek and the squirrel, the crow
and the magpie, the sharp scent of spruce,
and the burgeoning leaves.
I let myself speak only in listening.
The grief listens with me. Hours go by.
Words find us soon enough.
On a Clear Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hold, life, nature, shadow, trust on March 1, 2022| 6 Comments »
The way the field holds
the shadow of the cottonwood,
this is how life holds me.
Holds me, no matter my shape.
Holds me with no effort.
Holds my darkness and knows it
as weightless, as transient,
as something that will shift,
disappear, return, and shift again.
It never says no to me.
I am still learning to trust life, to trust
no matter how I show up, I will be held.
Trust that my life is not a problem.
Trust that as much as I am the shadow,
I am also the field.
Finding My Calling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged animals, busy, Jack Granath, nature, spring on March 10, 2021| 2 Comments »
with a line from “After the Japanese” by Jack Granath
A warm March day
and the blue sky
slips itself
into the list
of things to do,
and I would have to be
deaf or just plain stubborn
to not hear the call
to play outside—
and damn, but
I’m stubborn,
so the world
sends a bobcat,
a red-tailed hawk
and a whole herd of elk
to the yard.
What’s a busy woman
to do
but surrender?
I don’t.
Head down, I get
the work done.
I put on the blinders
of responsibility
until a poem says to me,
You do the right thing,
citizen, and my chest pounds
in urgent code:
that. means. you.
and I put down
the work and walk
into the day
to do my duty,
which is to meet the world
that will never
send an email,
the world
that will never knock,
will never call,
but will always
say welcome,
citizen, welcome.
Home
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged arriving, home, nature, river on March 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Even after all these years
of wandering this twisting path of self,
how is it I am still surprised
to find a new home inside the rush of river,
as if I haven’t been here
in this song of melting many times before?
How is it I forgot my home
inside the brittle brown grass of March,
home in the sweet moldering scent of spring,
home in the sun soaked day—
as if the great star of beginnings
is saying again to me, Come, friend.
How is it I sometimes forget to arrive
exactly where I am, especially in these days
when forgiveness arrives like the cranes
on great wings that charge the air.
These days when love comes crashing in
like western wind, breaking branches
and rearranging the yard, as if to say
it is here to change everything.
Sometimes I forget the world will find me
wherever I am and insist in the language
of willow and trunk and hawk and noon,
home, home, you are home.
Concurrent
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, nature, praise, snow, wound on December 12, 2020| Leave a Comment »
On a morning
when the snow
falls and drapes
everything in shine,
it is not that I don’t
feel the wounds—
raw and throbbing—
it’s just that it’s
so beautiful,
this tender world,
that I want
to praise it
forever.
Surrender
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grace, nature, peace, surrender on April 27, 2020| 6 Comments »
Some mornings I wake and the peace
that I tried to find yesterday finds me—
arrives in the open palms of the river scent,
in the erratic path of the warbler,
in the low golden angle of sun as it slants
through the gray knuckled branches of cottonwood trees.
Even the broken watering can seems to bring me
news of what’s been here all along—
the peace that holds up the turmoil, the mess.
And the dried grasses in the field
and the tiny new leaves on the currants
gather me into them. They’re like old friends who say,
It’s okay, make all the mistakes you want
around us. Some mornings, through no effort
of our own, we are gathered into the peace
of the patient lichen and the still pond.
It’s the difference between breathing
and being breathed, between asking for grace
and finding that grace has been asking for us.
Wanting a Fractal Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Corona Virus, fibonacci sequence, golden spiral, humanity, love, math, nature, pattern on April 5, 2020| 7 Comments »
Eadem mutata resurgo
Latin motto: Changed, I rise again
Sometimes in spring
I can still find the dried seeds
of the mountain mahogany
clinging to the ends
of the branches—
feathery golden spirals,
logarithmic and light.
How the universe
loves a pattern,
an elegant mathematics—
this same spiral is found
in spider webs, sunflowers,
snail shells, cyclones, the arms
of galaxies, the human ear,
even in the nerves of my cornea
that help me to see
the very pattern that
gives me the ability to see.
I want to find the self-similar spiral curve
that informs kindness and strength
as it spreads through a people. I want
to find the equation that calculates
an exponentially growing radius of love.
I want to find the dynamic beauty in us
that amplifies as it moves out
with ever increasing speed
from the infinite center.
I want to embody the trustworthy constant
that inspires our species to be better,
want to know the recursive courage that drives us
to thrive in difficult times.
Our potential, endless, yet humble
as last year’s seed in my hand, ready
to be planted, to sprout, to grow.