for Donavan Dailey
The heart perhaps thought it was open
until a moment of silence is followed by fingers
flying across nylon strings and then, with no warning,
the heart breaks open as a high alpine meadow in June,
splays wide as a snow-deep cirque midwinter,
is exposed as a woman sitting in the first row
with tears spilling down her cheeks.
The heart does not question why,
it simply opens, wider, lets the secret tango
move through its channels as only
a secret tango can do—dancing the heart
ever closer to the moment until, beating wild,
the heart forgets it could ever be anything
but spontaneous as jazz, honest as the man
being played by his guitar, expansive
as the silence that shimmers in the air
just after the last note rings.
Posts Tagged ‘opening’
When Donavan Plays Classical Guitar
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged guitar, heart, music, opening, spaciousness on January 25, 2023| 2 Comments »
Open Eyed
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged broken heart, flower, opening on January 5, 2023| 12 Comments »
The more we open our eyes,
the more the heart breaks.
Still, the invitation to open our eyes,
to choose to live broken heartedly,
as on this day when I hear again
of the greed and cruelty of humans
and the heart breaks and breaks
and I feel how it is in the breaking
the heart stays open.
On the windowsill, the amaryllis
has opened two enormous blooms of red
and I am so rich with the gift of it,
as if this one flower is teaching the heart
how to unfurl its lush petals
as it moves from tight bud
to spaciousness, dusting
the world around it with gold.
The Prayers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratefulness, grief, opening, prayer, waves on September 25, 2022| 14 Comments »
When I asked the world to open me,
I did not know the price.
When I wrote that two-word prayer in the sand,
I did not know loss was the key,
devastation the hinge,
trust was the dissolution
of the idea of a door.
When I asked the world to open me,
I could never have said yes to what came next.
Perhaps I imagined the waves
knew only how to carry me.
I did not imagine they would also pull me under.
When I asked the world to open me,
I had not imagined drowning
was the way to reach the shore.
The waves of sorrow dragged me down
with their tides of unthinkable loss.
The currents emptied my pockets
and stripped me of my ideas.
I was rolled and eroded
and washed up on the sand
like driftwood—softened.
I sprawled there and wept,
astonished to still be alive.
It is not easy to continue to pray this way.
Open me.
And yet it is the truest prayer I know.
The other truest prayer,
though sometimes I long to run
from its truth, is Thank you.
The Bidding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged humanness, mortality, opening, time on August 13, 2022| 3 Comments »
Again, I am ruled by it, this invitation to be wildly open the way a day is open, this invitation to be porous the way birdsong is porous, this invitation to feel it all the way skin feels it all when I slip into a blue alpine lake. Again this urge to fall all the way into the mystery and refuse any rope thrown in an attempt to rescue me. Morning comes with the scent of autumn, charged with ripeness and rot and the kinship of everything. What an honor to be mortal, to know the value of a day, to know how vulnerable we are and then give ourselves away. |
In Crepuscular Light
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, bird, nighthawk, opening, summer on August 12, 2022| 7 Comments »
These warm summer evenings
I take in the nighthawks
looping above the field.
I take in their fast and agile flight,
take in their long and pointed wings.
Come winter, I will be grateful
to have stored such things.
When the nighthawks are gone
and the world is dim,
I will want to remember them—
their aerialist displays, the way
they make of the dusk a playground,
the way the whole night
seems to hang on an angling wing—
Oh summer is such a generous thing.
Even the dark is charged with the thrill
of living. Even this heart, wounded
and bruised, can’t help but open
to the wheeling of nighthawks,
how they arc and sweep
as the sun disappears
and then continue their swooping
long after the light is gone.
By Chance
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, friendship, love, opening, saxifrage, wildflower on June 30, 2022| 4 Comments »
for Andrea Bird
A person, once a stranger,
can slip into your life,
unplanned, of course,
as if brought by the wind
in much the same way
a seed of spotted saxifrage
can slip by happenstance
into a crack in a rock
then root and grow.
Eventually, the saxifrage
will split the rock open.
By then, it will be full,
its flowers prolific
and beautiful.
If you are lucky,
this once stranger
will do in time
the same to you—
will be alive in you,
crack you open
with their beauty,
make you grateful
to be so broken.
In a Difficult Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged difficulty, eye, heart, love, opening on June 28, 2022| 4 Comments »
If the eyes
can adjust
to the dark,
the iris expanding
the pupil
as wide
as possible
to open to light
and enhance
sensitivity,
then dear
heart, how
might you,
too, adjust?
Serotinous
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awakening, effort, fire, lodgepole pine, opening on May 22, 2022| 6 Comments »
Even the word surrender
suggests some agency,
but perhaps
what is asked of us
is zero. Perhaps
we are like the seed
of the lodgepole pine
that opens through
no effort of its own.
It needs the heat
of a wildfire blaze.
Then the seed is released
into the very blackened,
desolate world
that seemed hellbent
on destroying it,
but it is the carbon-rich
soil left by the fire
that feeds the seed
and helps the tree grow.
No surrender.
No effort.
Who could ask
for the fire?
The seed did not.
It did nothing at all.
And now, the pine,
how green, how tall.
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.
The Opening
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, honoring, lily, opening on January 11, 2022| 18 Comments »
Like this lily on the table
giving its everything to the world,
that’s the way I see your life.
For seventeen years, I watched you
open and open and open—
watched you hurl your body
off cliffs on skis. Watched you leap
on the stage more gazelle
than boy. Heard you weep
when your friends broke your heart.
Full on, my love, that’s how you lived,
the way so few others dare.
I saw you fail and try and fail and try
and fail and try again—every morning,
your petals outspread as you learned
how to be in this world, this world
that does its best to close us down.
You were the perfume of the wide open lily—
in every room you entered,
even when you were quiet,
everyone knew you were there.
Your presence. Your presence.
I honor the way you lived,
splaying wide, then wider,
your heart on full display until
you could no longer live this way.
I want to give myself
to this opening, though it hurts,
though I am left with the absence
of your bloom. I want to honor
the way you charged every room
of my heart with the beauty,
the pain of your being.
I want to open
to the every memory of you—
to the memories where you shine,
to the memories where you
say goodbye to this world,
this world that asks for everything—
though the opening makes me weep,
though the opening asks me,
oh please, god, oh please, no,
not this,
the opening asks me for everything.
Is
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged is, koan, opening, service, treasure on November 7, 2021| 2 Comments »
The storehouse of treasures opens by itself. You can take them and use them any way you wish.
—from Pacific Zen’s Miscellaneous Koan Collection
Even in deepest sorrow,
the storehouse of treasures
opens inside each moment—
I needn’t even knock on the door.
Nothing is asked of me.
I come to the storehouse
pockets empty, but feel
no need to fill my pockets.
All I want is to live in the opening.
All I want is to be used
by the treasure.
I want to be the treasure.
Thank You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged door, gratitude, opening on August 7, 2021| 3 Comments »
It’s not as if the door can decide:
Open. Closed. Locked. Unhinged.
The door is ever at the mercy
of the hand on the knob,
the shoulder that smashes it,
the wind that abruptly slams it shut,
the smile that swings it wide as noon.
Long ago, I learned every moment
has a door, and that those doors
never open themselves. That is why,
standing here, I am astonished
to see, through no effort of my own,
a door swing open. And how sweet
the surprise when I see
on the other side of the knob,
your hand.
One Way to Do It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged letting go, opening, reading on June 14, 2021| Leave a Comment »
not reading the book
on letting go—
she opens her hand
Ode to Opening the Door
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged door, opening, practice on March 9, 2021| 5 Comments »
Every day, many times,
I push down the lever
that opens the door
from the room to the house,
from the house to the world.
Such a simple gesture,
grasping, then pushing,
then letting go.
Sometimes quickly,
as when I am trying
to keep the cat inside.
Sometimes slowly,
as when I am trying
to quietly enter
a room where someone else
is sleeping.
To open a door
is to move from one space
to another, perhaps a space
where dark rye bread is baking
filling the room with its midnight scent,
perhaps a space where a single
bare lightbulb is swinging,
perhaps a space filled with birdsong
or gunfire or stars or a final breath.
My whole life
I’ve been practicing
how to enter a space—
how to meet what is there
on the other side
and still be true to myself.
My whole life I’ve been opening doors,
some I immediately regretted,
though there is no going back.
The room I left is never the same
when I return,
nor am I the same.
My whole life
I’ve been opening inner doors,
always surprised to find
another, always surprised
how big the worlds are
in a space the size of me.
Every door I open
I practice how it is
to move through,
to move into,
to offer my attention
to what is new,
perhaps a gust of wind,
a lullaby being sung,
a spacious grief or an expansive trust
I never dreamt was there.
Despite the News
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged faith, heart, opening, poem, poetry, rain on May 17, 2019| 3 Comments »
Again the rain,
and I wander
the tender green grass
of the field.
The hands pull weeds
because the hands
want something to do.
And the mind looks
for morels, because the mind
wants something to do.
And the feet wander,
because they are born
nomads. And the heart
opens. Not because
it wants to, but
because there is something
in the scent of rain
that suggests
so much is possible,
even, against all odds,
beauty. Even, though
it seems impossible,
another day.
Cultivating the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cultivating, daughter, garden, ideas, opening, parenting, poem, poetry on May 14, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Why do we have to do this,
asks my daughter, hoe in hand,
and I, hoe in hand, reply
that it’s good for the soil
and helps it to breathe.
I think about how my own thoughts
crust over, how quickly
they become impenetrable.
And then hoe of loss. Hoe of hope.
Hoe of disbelief. Hoe of shock.
Again and again,
the world breaks me open,
allows the new to come in.
Again and again, I resist
the change. And then marvel
at how essential it is,
the new ideas so green,
so persistent, tender as
a girl asking why.
Job Description
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged opening, poem, poetry on March 19, 2019| 8 Comments »
My work is to be the student of the buds
that have been on the birch all winter—
tight and red, they know when to clench,
when to wait, when to swell,
when to burst, when to green.
My work is to open like the scent of juniper
when stroked by afternoon sun,
like the gong when rapidly rapped
into a shining explosion of resonance.
And when I am wall, my work
is to add hinges and become door.
And when I am lock, my work
is to find the lost key.
My work is to be baby bird,
to open my beak and take in
whatever the world has to feed me
and then
learn to fly.
One Bewilderment
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, opening, poem, poetry on November 7, 2018| 2 Comments »
my heart a red fist,
beating, intent on self-protection
when, despite itself,
it opens, astonished, to find
it’s a peony, a sunrise, a wing
More Opening to Do
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged god, opening, poem, poetry on January 12, 2018| 6 Comments »
But I took the door
off the hinges,
I said, knowing
I had more opening
to do. Yes,
said God, before
tearing down
the whole house.
One Landing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged opening, poem, poetry on July 2, 2016| Leave a Comment »
climbing the stairs
only to find they don’t end anywhere—
the heart closes
like butterfly wings, only to open again,
why? because that’s what wings do