When, in the middle of the night,
you wake with the certainty you’ve
done it all wrong, when you wake
and see clearly all the places you’ve failed,
in that moment, when dreams will not return,
this is the chance for your softest voice—
the one you reserve for those you love most—
to say to you quietly, oh sweetheart,
this is not yet the end of the story.
Sleep will not come, but somehow,
in that wide awake moment there is peace—
the kind of peace that does not need
everything to be right before it arrives.
The peace that comes from not fighting
what is real. The peace that rises
in the dark on its sure dark wings
to meet you exactly as you are.
Posts Tagged ‘peace’
With Astonishing Tenderness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged failure, peace, self-compassion, self-talk, sleeplessness on January 14, 2024| 14 Comments »
One Wish
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged peace on January 5, 2024| 4 Comments »
bird of peace—
make of my heart
a nest
A Blessing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blessing, Christmas, love, peace, river on December 25, 2023| 11 Comments »
Dear Friends,
This one is for you. And for everyone. May deep peace find us–even in places it seems impossible. Even when it’s beyond our own capacity, may it grow in us, surprise us again and again.
Rosemerry
A Blessing
And if there is peace to be found,
may it remake you
the way the sunrise
remakes each morning,
the way birdsong
remakes the air,
may peace find you
again and again,
and may it shape
and reshape you
the way the river
creates its bed
simply by flowing.
Here, Too
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged peace on November 28, 2023| 9 Comments »
Everywhere a starting place.
Every room. Every street.
Every line in the sand.
Every hand extended.
Every door that’s locked.
Every loosening dream. Every knot.
Every choice. Every crash.
Every triumph. Every touch.
Every word. Every window.
Every loss. We are always,
always starting, re-starting.
With this breath. This unease.
This flow. This wild pouring
of self into the moment.
This resistance. This lack.
This uncertainty. This flaming.
This stuck in the rain.
This complaining.
This clap on the back.
This shake of the head.
This French kiss. This fuck this.
This stumble. This leap.
Every(single)where
the true starting place
for peace.
Perspective
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, mountain, peace, perspective on October 15, 2023| 13 Comments »
And the mountains rose
and eroded completely
and the great sea flooded all
and the great sea left and
the great sea flooded and left again
and the land was forced up,
and then pulled from both sides
until the center broke
and slid down to create a great rift
and the volcanoes spewed lava
and the ash covered all
and the glaciers scrubbed
and the rocks avalanched
and the earth slumped
and today I sit in the valley
and stare at the mountain
with a dusting of white
on its wide shoulders
light gathering in its clefts
and think, my god,
isn’t it peaceful?
Peace in the Middle of It All
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, feelings, paradox, peace on September 12, 2023| 13 Comments »
Memories pile on each other
like leaves in autumn,
each one charged with sweetness
or sorrow or worry or bliss.
Soon, the stack is over my head.
I fall in, the way a child might fall
into the pile—letting gravity take me
with no thought of catching myself
from the fall. What surprises is
that even as I am buried in memories,
I am not crushed by their weight.
Even as I roll in all the feelings they bring,
there is a peace that does not leave,
a peace that stays and asks nothing of me.
I once believed I could only know peace
when there was no tumult, no upheaval.
Now, in the wild chaos of it all,
I feel how peace is also here—
a peace so constant that while I tremble,
while I struggle, it breathes me.
Eternity in an Hour
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Joi Sharp, love, nothing, peace on February 16, 2023| 13 Comments »
with gratefulness to Joi Sharp
Not just to know the self
but to know the nothing
that surrounds it, to feel
how vast that nothing is,
how inside that nothing
is more nothing, and
inside that more nothing
is even more nothing.
To know that. To feel
the self held by infinite
nothing, to feel the nothing
held by the self. How quiet
everything is then. How
easy it is to believe
peace is not only possible,
it is already here. How
beautiful to meet this
truth with another.
Sweet paradox: imbued
with all this lavish nothing,
the moment overspills
with love. It’s everything.
(title from “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake)
Marvel
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged election, Marvel, movie, peace, villain on November 8, 2022| 6 Comments »
On election night, Thanos grabs some popcorn.
Adds extra butter. Gets cozy in his sweatpants
and sits on his throne of stone. Feels no urge to snap.
He knows he need not do anything but watch
as humanity destroys itself with righteousness, with blame.
He chuckles as he follows the polls, the news.
How the humans cry. They shout. They attack.
What’s a villain to do but sit back and enjoy?
He sips Jack and Coke, keeps an eye on the cosmos.
If there is a song of peace rising in the hearts of some,
he doesn’t hear it beneath the scowling, the jeers.
But I hear peace swelling as if it is necessary, inevitable.
In fact, I am singing it, the way a star sings
hidden inside an apple. And I am not alone.
Syntax Lesson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged noun, peace, spring, syntax, verb on June 11, 2022| 6 Comments »
Spring is a verb.
—Jack Mueller
Ache can verb
and curve can verb
and riot and burn
and break can verb.
We face. We care.
We scheme and swing.
We charm and fool
and do the dream.
We war. We praise.
We gun and raise.
We blur ourselves
into a busy haze.
Even hope can verb.
So does skin. And kiss.
We verbify
delight and wish.
But peace is a noun
that seldom swerves
into the class
of action verbs.
Peace just is—
an unchanging thing
that bids us not
do anything.
But who can resist
the spring?
Coming Together
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, geology, pangaea, peace, tectonics on March 10, 2022| 8 Comments »
It seems too slow,
this moving toward each other,
toward peace.
The heart is eager for union,
longs for grounding between continents,
longs for connection, for wholeness,
instead of all this fracture.
Do the tectonic plates
remember what it was
to be Pangaea? Can the heart
remember a time before
it was defined by rifting
and brokenness?
I have read that the next supercontinent
will form in 200 million years—
that we’re halfway through
the scattered phase.
Oh, we are so scattered.
They say the pace of the plates
is comparable to the speed
at which our fingernails grow.
Oh, so slow, this coming together.
Yet it happens. It happens.
Let the heart know
what the land knows: It happens.
That Passes All Understanding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged church, dad, daughter, death, family, hospice, laughter, peace on November 21, 2021| 14 Comments »
from our birth … to our death … the wonderment …
—Dr. Charles Henry Wahtola, Jr., November 19, 2021
And so as the priest leads us
in the litany for the time of death,
and though we are sincere
as we pray, Have mercy on your servant,
we laugh as my father tells Father Keith
the sermon can only be as long
as the pole at the entrance to the building.
We pray, Grant him your peace,
and I weep for the impending loss,
and then we laugh as I tell Dad
for the first time he has a front-row seat
for the service (he strongly
prefers the back row).
And mom delivers an impromptu sermon
and the priest steps back and listens.
And we fondly remember how my childhood priest
would sing the longest rite in the book,
and my brother and I look at each other
and recite in unison, this fragile earth our island home,
and we break into irrational joy.
We pray The Sursum Corda, The Sanctus,
The Lord’s Prayer, my voice
barely a whisper through tears,
then we’re laughing again as we remember
how Dad and my brother would escape
the service as fast as they could to go cast
in the river behind the church, and
there in the hospice room, we keep the feast,
Alleluia, alleluia. And all day long,
though perhaps we speak of football
or grilling or ducks, with every word, every tear,
every laugh, we are saying, Peace be with you.
With every hug, every kiss, every
touch, every breath, we respond,
And also with you.
Physics of Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, igbo, mother, peace, physics, son on October 10, 2021| 8 Comments »
Before I could feel grief’s full weight,
love came to meet it, and though love did not
take away the grief, not even a picogram,
it dispersed the grief into its smallest bits,
as if to increase the surface area interface
so now every single atom of grief
is surrounded, is cushioned by love.
My friend offers me words in Igbo.
Udo diri, he says. There is peace, somehow.
How, when my bright beamish boy is dead?
Yet here in the unlikely physics of grief,
love holds so tenderly each smallest bit,
and somehow, my boy, can you feel it? peace.
Making the Most of Peace
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chickadee, holiday mathis, morning, peace, waking on February 9, 2021| 5 Comments »
Make the most of peace.
—Holiday Mathis, horoscope February 9, 2021
This morning I wake to notice
that nothing hurts. I notice
I am warm beneath the comforter
and the air in the house is cool on my face
and the only sound is a chickadee at dawn
singing its two-note “sweetie” song.
There are mornings I wake already stunned
by the pain of the broken world,
but this morning, I lie for a while
in quiet and savor the thin trace of first light
as it develops grays in the room, savor
the rhythmic rise and fall of my own chest,
savor the feel of my palm on my belly,
welcome its slight weight, its small warmth.
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.
On an Evening When I Am Troubled
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged meditation, peace, quiet, solace, trees on April 12, 2020| 2 Comments »
I try to see myself
the way I see the trees
far off beyond the field—
something not at all singular
but a tiny part of a whole
that extends beyond sight,
beyond knowing.
It is a long time
before my thoughts
are airy as the silences
between their dark trunks,
quiet as the leaves
that are not yet there.
This Is No Slap Dash Quiz
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged answer, friendship, peace, poem, poetry, question, solution on November 18, 2019| 4 Comments »
Part of me wants to give you
the book of answers, the solution key,
to help you know which decision, A, B, C or D,
will bring the most healing, the most happiness.
I no longer believe in such a book, such a key.
Instead I wish for you the peace
that comes only with surrender—
a word that sounds beyond reason
until it becomes beacon, becomes
north star, becomes map.
May you know for certain
that in every case, you are beloved.
May you know beyond doubt
that no matter what happens,
you always become more essential, more you.
I Finally Understood Why I Meditate
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged meditation, peace, poem, poetry, silence, stillness on February 14, 2019| 4 Comments »
Nothing happened today
as I sat for five minutes in the dark,
but all day I could feel the everywhere of it,
even as the car was sliding sideways down the hill,
even as my daughter wept, even as my singing group
laughed until we cried, I could feel it still there,
the silence that holds up all sound, the stillness
that cradles all motion, the peace that supports
every disaster, the blue sky behind the clouds.
Love Poem
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fight, love, peace, poem, poetry, snow, storm on February 14, 2019| Leave a Comment »
A Passing Truce
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, fire, light, peace, poem, poetry, warmth on January 4, 2019| 5 Comments »
Beside the fire, inside
the dark, and lost amidst
the tide of thoughts,
there is a momentary warmth
that steeps into our every inch
and make us doubt
that we could ever feel
sharp cold again—
the mind, thus warmed,
forgets to quarrel and simply
nestles closer—and the dark itself
comes nearer by and we
lean in together.
Dear __________,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, conspiracy, joy, peace, poem, poetry, unity on October 18, 2018| 4 Comments »
You are warmly invited to join our conspiracy of joy,
a growing cabal of strangers and friends who collude
to create delight, who initiate random acts of bliss, who
scheme of ways to help all others find authentic jubilance,
who tear down walls that would separate us and them.
If you enjoy such subterfuge, there certainly is room
for you. To be clear, you may be charged with pleasure,
ecstasy, and truth. Next meeting, now. And now. And now