By night, the mountain gentian
closes the dark purple vase of its petals,
tightening around its most vulnerable parts,
protecting its nectar from cold night air,
from heavy dew. Everything is at stake.
Oh woman who longs to stay open,
to ever unfold, to widen your arms
in an ever expansive reach,
what do you have to learn
from the wisdom of wildflower,
from the natural systole and diastole
of open and close, open and close?
How might your own growth
depend on learning to wrap
those well-intentioned arms
around your own center
and tuck in to that primary,
essential embrace?
Posts Tagged ‘opening’
On the Fourth Day of the Retreat at Omega when Noah Hoffeld Played Cello and We Wrote and Spoke Poems for Three Hours
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cello, Noah Hoffeld, Omega, opening, retreat, sharing, vulnerability on June 18, 2026| 6 Comments »
You may not believe me, but
the building was floating.
Well above its foundation.
Right there in the middle
of the Hudson Valley woods,
surrounded by oak and locust,
squirrels leaping from tree to tree.
You may not believe me, but that building
not only lifted from the ground
and hovered in the air like a hummingbird
might hover above a Hosta or honeysuckle,
it glowed. The building glowed. A soft, golden
hue that radiated through the gray
cocoon of the day, as a lighthouse beacons
through fog.
And if you had been there in the building,
you might have felt it, too, the fluttering truth
of what happens to a body when,
layer by layer it opens and opens,
resists and opens, meets shame and opens,
meets fear and opens, meets ache and disgust
and exhaustion and opens and opens until
all that is left of a person is the opening itself.
You may not believe that we,
who were in that floating building
became the glow, but I know.
In my cells, still glowing hours later,
I know. I know.
Heart Medicine
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, opening, rabbit, refuge, shelter on March 21, 2026| 4 Comments »
To stay open
is what I wanted.
Though winter and war
have taught me
the importance of refuge.
Even then, like a wild rabbit
that is no less soft
and no less gentle
inside its dark burrow,
the heart in its shelter
finds ways to stay open,
if not to the world,
at least to whatever
it is that shines
through the self,
and the deep remove
becomes a chance
to steep in tenderness
before re-emerging again
into the world
with all its threats
and dangers,
with all its green
and radiant beauty.
One Reflexive
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eyes, loving the world, opening on January 21, 2026| 2 Comments »
the way the pupil knows
to widen in the dark
in these darkening days, this heart
You, the Light
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, hand, light, mother, opening on October 10, 2025| 7 Comments »
I thought the way
to hold you
was by folding
myself around you,
gentle but tight,
the way the hand
wraps around pebble,
acorn, coin,
and now that
you’re not here,
the love no less great,
I stand outside
with my empty,
upturned hands
and understand
opening them
is the only way
to hold light.
When We Argue
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged arguing, opening, relationship, tension on October 7, 2025| 2 Comments »
I do not love it, the tension
between us, dark-viscous and thick,
or red-spined and prickly. I don’t
love the way a fat fist forms
in the softness of my belly,
then fossilizes into righteousness,
or unravels into something fetid
and festering. I don’t like when words
feel like sandpaper on my skin,
or worse, when silence feels
like a moat, like a wall, like a sword.
I don’t like feeling like a tree in November
with not a single leaf, barren, stark.
But maybe I love the way meeting tension
eventually teaches me to loosen
my certainty until I am less cement,
more soil. Maybe I love how it
acts like a neon sign that blares
inside me with scarlet all caps:
WHAT YOU THINK MATTERS TO ME.
Maybe I love the way wrestling with tension
invites me to ask more questions of myself,
of the world. This gift I don’t want to unwrap.
How alive I am then as the fierceness of it
fades, leaving me opened in ways
I didn’t know to explore, and feeling
again into how deep they are, these roots.
The Clearing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged clearing, corn lilies, giving self to the world, mountain, opening, summer on August 11, 2025| 2 Comments »
I want to give myself to life
as completely as the corn lilies rising
from the floor of this clearing.
All summer they have practiced
growing from tightness
into an ecstasy of green unfolding.
Where have I yet to unfold?
So often I clench around my fear
so long I no longer notice I’m clenching.
But here at tree line, there is not
one corn lily still trapped in its tightness,
all of them, now unfurled,
beginning their push toward goldening,
toward falling back to the earth,
toward moldering toward nothing.
That utterly, I want to give myself.
Want to become the clearing.
Right in the Middle of the Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fawn, opening, prayer on July 17, 2025| 8 Comments »
There, beside the willows,
two white-spotted fawns
clumsily stepped through
tall summer grass,
and what rose in me
then was such intimate
prayer—not the kind
where I praise or make
requests, but the kind
where my whole being
becomes a deep green field,
wide enough anything
can enter, not only
the fawns but the mountain lion,
not only the willows
but the ones I call weeds,
and all that is asked of me
is that I notice what it’s like
to be, even for a moment,
that open.
Let the World Have Its Way With You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blooming, brokenness, daisy, flower, garden, opening, rain on June 9, 2025| 12 Comments »
Today it’s the daisy that teaches me
about opening. How lovely it was last week.
I praised its yellow, sun-gold petals
reaching out as they were from the bright center.
After last night’s fierce rain, the flower has been trashed,
stripped of its petals. Every. One. Bent and bruised,
they lie splayed in the dirt. And the daisy
goes on with its growing. New leaves.
New roots. New buds. Nourished
by the rain that tore the flower apart.
How often have I, too, lost all my petals, only to learn
that was not the end of the story of opening?
This world is a world of both beauty and loss.
Did I ever really believe one opening
would last me forever? It’s always a lifetime
of learning. Today it’s so clear that when
I can bring presence to loss or resistance,
this act makes pain itself luminous,
is how the heart grows roots, and buds and leaves.
Always it returns to this—offering the broken world
my wonder. In return, oh, the opening.
The Opening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, love, opening, paradox, salvation on June 8, 2025| 6 Comments »
There is a terror that claims us,
that snaps its strong jaws around us
and thrashes us till we are limp.
Who could guess such a maw
is a portal to grace?
There are wounds so great
no amount of salve or prayer
or kindness or care can heal them,
and through them we find gateways to love.
It is after the wailing and howling with ache
that we hear, as if for the first time,
the almost inaudible song of our breath
and know it as home.
How is it that what saves us
feels so far out of reach
but is here, bone close?
There is an infinite blooming inside us
we come to know only as we wither.
Even now, in this chill,
it is opening.
Ways to Open
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forgiveness, opening, stuck on April 22, 2025| 10 Comments »
There’s the lilac way, impulsive,
shrugging out of hard bud scales
while the nights are still cold,
then flooding the world
with the sweet perfume of vulnerability.
Or the way a housefly opens its wings,
almost mechanical,
prompted by a pulse that triggers
marionette-like pulleys and hinges.
There’s the wine way, sensual, responsive
to air, like how a glass of sauvignon blanc
opens into a meadow with a fresh cut path
through tall green grass with wet stones,
flanked by asparagus and nettles.
I am thinking now, of how tightly I’ve closed
my mind around a certain thought.
How impossible the unclenching seems,
though all around me are proofs
of how naturally things might open—
open the way a child will open his hand
to his mother when he desperately wants to be held.
Open the way a sky does when afternoon clouds
evaporate and all that is left is blue.
Open the way a life does when,
through what grace, we learn again
we can forgive.
Self-Talk
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, opening, self-compassion, self-talk on February 22, 2025| 10 Comments »
Because I know in my body
the power of spaciousness,
I command my heart, Stay open.
Stay open, I growl,
as it clenches and hardens
and granites and steels,
but my terrified heart
keeps clenching anyway,
tighter and smaller and stuck.
I said, Stay open,
my voice a demand,
as if with intensity
I could force a release.
And the heart curls in,
intent on survival, like a pill bug,
like an armadillo, like a heart
that has learned before
it is not safe to love.
And it hurts to be small.
And it takes so much energy
to clench, that finally
it’s exhaustion that helps me
to hear the softer voice
beneath the command,
the quiet voice that arrives
like the slightest of waves, the voice
that arrives like low morning sun,
and the voice enters the clench of me
like gentle rain meeting dry earth,
and it says, Of course, you’re afraid.
For now it’s enough to remember
the possibility of opening.
Love Poem to the Things I Never Dreamt I Could Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, love, opening on February 15, 2025| 4 Comments »
Here’s to the eggplant that once made me retch.
I would never have believed I would crave you.
And here’s to skiing. I remember the concussion,
the night train, and now, in my blood, the elation.
Here’s to ranch dressing, which for years I called goop.
And here’s to black licorice, which I now I call bliss.
And here’s the to the night, which once frightened me.
Here’s to fiction. Coffee. Country music.
It feels good tonight to remind myself
how completely things can change.
Like how a woman who thought she could never
wear patterns now wears striped socks
and polka dot gloves. Sometimes what we love
changes so completely we can’t imagine our minds
and hearts were once so small. Tonight I dream
of what else might change. For me. For you. For us all.
Unresolution
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged new year, opening, resolution on December 30, 2024| 6 Comments »
Because after all these years
of focusing on the goal as if
happiness is a thing I attain
or a place I might finally reach,
now I thrill when I see through
the myth of arrivals.
I see where I have grasped
and clutched and clawed
and scrabbled to be somewhere
not where I am. Not that I regret it.
The memory of grabbing
helps me feel how beautiful it is
each time the hand opens
like a morning to what is here,
opens as if the opening itself
is what I am here to do.
The Opening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, light, night, opening, opposition on October 25, 2024| 6 Comments »
I feel it before dawn—
the longing not only for light
but for the vast embrace
of the dark,
the way it links me
to the farthest reachings
of the universe,
the way it holds
each dull planet,
each luminous star,
holds me with no question,
no reservation,
holds all I love
and all I have yet
to learn to love.
With each breath
I bring it into my body,
small sips of dark,
great gulps of dark.
Inside me it swirls
with my love of light,
and this is how the certainties
of the heart are erased—
when I love and ache
in two directions at once—
and what’s left
is so raw, so open,
so alive.
What the Gardener Knows
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cantaloupe, garden, love, melon, opening on September 5, 2024| 7 Comments »
When I say I love you wholehearted,
I mean the whole cantaloupe, sweetheart.
I mean the strange webby skin and
the sweet, firm flesh and the absolutely
freaking messy center. I mean the way
we have to wait so patiently until it’s ripe.
The way I can smell it across the room.
The way it bruises so easily.
I mean I am speaking of love. I mean
I am well aware there’s no word in the world
as delicious as the sticky juice as it dribbles down
the chin. I mean I understand the potential disaster
in underestimating the need for warmth,
how quickly a frost can end it all.
I mean this is no kohlrabi love, sweetheart,
but I don’t know if you’re the melon
or I’m the melon or we both are, I just know
there’s no way to know what we’ve got
until we both split open and break so
completely there’s no knowing which
goop is mine and which is yours
and this is the way we survive—
not by staying whole, but by opening
wide and giving it all away.
On the Winter Solstice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, light, opening, solstice, sun on December 21, 2023| 9 Comments »
Let’s reach toward each other
with gazes gentle
as midwinter sun—
with a seeing so generous
we can’t help but turn
toward the other
to let ourselves be seen.
There are many reasons
to close, to shut down.
But when we meet
with such light in our eyes,
then we open together
like December dahlias,
soft and many petalled,
open like bird song
after a long, mute night.
Ten-Dollar Bouquet
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, compassion, feeling it all, grief, opening on September 24, 2023| 12 Comments »
The woman at the farmstand
with the smile in her eyes
sold me a vase with pink dahlias,
pink zinnias, white daisies
and two stems of mint.
Even with all that beauty
waiting for me in the car,
I cried in the grocery store
when the woman I hadn’t seen in years
asked how my son was doing.
When I told her he had chosen
to take his life, she cried, too.
And the stranger who overheard
our conversation cried, too,
and pulled us into her generous arms
and we hugged by the checkout,
laughing and crying in an unlikely
knot of compassion.
I don’t want or need
to be freed from grief—
don’t want to forget the loss
or pretend it didn’t happen.
I want to live in a world
where the broken heart
might meet other broken hearts,
a world where pink dahlias open
in extravagant loveliness,
a world where I, too,
might open, might know beauty,
despite the fact I have been cut.
When It Rains
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cloud, opening, prayer, rain, unease on August 27, 2023| 9 Comments »
When a cloud follows me
as if we are tethered,
can I find peace with the shade?
It’s easy to wish it away.
Can I wish it away
and at the same time
tilt my head back,
keep my eyes wide
and breathe?
These are the days
I learn to pray—
pray not for what I want,
but to be opened
by what is here.
What Silence Did Not Say
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged letter, opening, silence on March 4, 2023| 8 Comments »
Silence did not say come sit with me.
Did not say I miss you. Did not wonder
where I have been. Silence did not
call me sweetheart, did not make
me promises, did not scold me
or scorn me or bid me closer in.
The invitation it sent was blank,
the most beautiful letter
ever not written.
I responded right away,
though it was, perhaps some time
before I noticed every part of me
was splaying like a lily, petal soft
and open beyond what the bud of me
dared to dream. And all around me,
the silence did not say good job,
did not say please stay, did not whisper
a word as I opened into it,
wider then wider.