All of humanity’s difficulties stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
—Blaise Pascal, Pensées (first published in 1670)
Let me learn this quiet art
of being still in a room alone.
There is so much I cannot do
to help the world,
but this—
let me learn to metabolize
silence as the alga in lichen
metabolizes light. Let me learn
to root and grow
in the sparest of places
as the fungus of lichen attaches
to the barest of rocks.
Let me learn to let the vastly different
kingdoms of myself serve each other
instead of warring,
the way alga and fungus
live together in lichen,
a symbiosis so stable we see
the two as one. This is how
I come to believe it is possible.
I have been sitting with lichen.
The quietest of sermons.
I cannot stop listening.
Posts Tagged ‘peace’
On Peace
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged biology, lichen, peace, silence, solitude, symbiosis on March 28, 2025| 5 Comments »
One Persistence
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged peace, persistence on March 26, 2025| 14 Comments »
these dreams of peace
fistfuls of tiny seeds
I toss every day to the wind
After Years of Seeking Peace, I Stop
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged peace, presence, worry on March 5, 2025| 7 Comments »
right where I am
and find the peace
that is already here,
notice the way
peace is what
holds all the tension
in the same way
silence holds noise,
in the same way
the dark holds the sun.
Right here. Right here.
An infinite peace,
an unwavering peace
great enough to hold
all agitation, tender
enough to hold
even the most
shattered heart.
For When I’m Rushing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged busy-ness, peace, stillness, sunflower on September 8, 2024| 5 Comments »
Amidst the sunflowers
in full flagrant flowering,
I, too, begin to sprout
fat orange petals
and feel my head heavy
with growing seeds.
My mind becomes sun-drunk
and I gold and I spiral.
This is why you might see me
standing still in the garden
amongst the thick stalks,
though there is much to do.
Some animals freeze
as an instinct to survive,
and that may be true of me, too,
but I am not still out of fear.
Stillness saves me
not because I hide,
but because peace
seems to find me more
easily then and the body
unclenches and becomes
a blooming thing that lives
for the sake of blooming
right here where it’s planted.
The Moments Between Mosquito Bites
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awareness, mosquitoes, peace on August 16, 2024| 7 Comments »
I am learning to notice them. Easier
to be attentive when I’m being bitten;
easier to focus on the sharp, quick sting.
Harder to observe the spans of time
when my skin feels nothing but air.
How is it moments of ease disappear?
I want to practice witnessing peace,
to fully inhabit the time between slaps,
want to rest in the gaps when all is well.
There. I will build a nest there.
I wrote this poem based on a prompt from James Crews in his Weekly Pause. You can find his poem, the prompt (and subscribe) here.
PLUS, James and I will be doing a program together next week:
Stubborn Praise with James Crews
Tuesday, August 27
5:30 p.m. mountain time
Zoom
Please join beloved poet and anthologist James Crews and me for our next conversation and reading around the theme of Ripening Into Being. The event will be recorded. There’s a small cost. Sign up here, and we hope you’ll join us for this heart-centered and soulful conversation!
Toward Peace
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belief, change, peace, reality, transition on June 10, 2024| 5 Comments »
Perhaps some part of me still believes
peace is a destination,
a place we arrive, ideally together.
I notice how shiny it is, this belief,
like a flower made of crystal,
beautiful, but lifeless,
devoid of the dust and scuff
that come from living a real day.
Meanwhile, there is this invitation
to grow into peace the way real flowers grow—
in the dirt. With blight and drought,
beetles and hail.
Meanwhile this invitation
to live in the tangle of fear and failure,
to be humbled by my own inner wars
and wonder how to find a living peace
right here, the peace that arrives
when we take just one step through the mess
toward compassion and notice
as our foot rises our heart also rises
and in that lifted moment
still scraping along in the dirt,
there is a peace so real we become light,
become the momentum that is the change.
On Memorial Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fighting, goodness, memorial day, peace, war on May 26, 2024| 7 Comments »
after watching Porcelain War
I think of every human
who has given their life
to fight not for war
but for peace. I think
of every mother and father
and son and daughter,
every baker and painter
and teacher and builder
who has learned to use
a weapon to save
the people and places
they love. I think of love—
how the Ukrainian woman
said tonight she had
never been more aware
of how good humans can be—
and how she’s learned this
midst bombs and blood
and broken trust and shattered
glass. I think of how peace
is a choice we make with
every smallest action we take.
I think of the pen in my own hand.
What will I do with it?
Self-Compassion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged parts of self, peace, self, self-compassion, war on May 19, 2024| 16 Comments »
On a day when I am at war with myself,
when I battle my own humanness
in a longing to be good, to be better
than good, to be perfect,
when I point to myself with a snarl
and a sneer as if I am my own enemy,
then I notice how my whole body contracts
and I’m a crumpled up map, a gray lump in the throat,
a stone in the gut, a crumpled wing in the chest.
And it’s hard to breathe. And it’s hard to move.
That is when I’m grateful to have a body,
grateful for the way it helps me remember
I have a choice to meet this moment with kindness.
It’s as if, mid-combat, I’m delivered a postcard
with a forever stamp sent from my wisest self saying,
Dear woman who thinks she is not good enough,
I see you. It’s okay to feel this way.
And what looked like a battlefield a blink ago
now looks more like a vast green meadow filled
with low golden light where all parts of me
are welcome—the one who makes mistakes,
the one who judges, the one who longs to be good,
the one who thinks she shouldn’t have to learn
the same lesson again. There is no part of me then
that is not welcome, that cannot be loved,
and my body expands like a great alpine basin,
unfurls like an unending white flag.
How easy it is then to stand with all of my selves
in that field and know what it means to be home.
Beyond Quiet
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged kindfisher, noise, peace, quiet, surrender on February 24, 2024| 6 Comments »
From bare branch to bare branch
Clark’s nutcrackers weave the dry tick
of their call through morning—
as if sticks are rattling,
as if stones are clattering—
and whatever part of me
that is longing for quiet
is invited into the racket.
I say I want peace,
but what the heart really wants
is to know itself
as part of everything,
to belong to the world
of grinding and trilling,
scolding and chattering,
to knit itself into this raucous day,
strident and so alive.
With Astonishing Tenderness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged failure, peace, self-compassion, self-talk, sleeplessness on January 14, 2024| 14 Comments »
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.