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Posts Tagged ‘praise’

Praise Song

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 19, 2025| 2 Comments »

I went outside to sing a song to the thunder
as the thunder sang through the graying sky,
and while I was singing a secret song,
the thunder sang through me.
I went out to sing a song to the thunder
as it rumbled through the expanded air
and the thunder entered the rain and the earth
and the thunder entered me.
I went out to sing a song to the thunder,
and I was also the thunder.
And the thunder was also the branch and the pond
and the thunder was also me.
I went out to sing a song to the thunder
and there was nothing that was not thunder—
not even the silence, not even the song,
yes, even the longing to sing.

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After All This Time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 19, 2025| 4 Comments »



 
 
my heart still leaps up
for red rock cliffs
that rise from the river,
still thrills at the way
spruce trees grow
(how do they do it?)
out of near vertical walls,
their evergreen branches
bearing the silver
weight of snow.
The older I get,
the greater my wonder.
The older I get,
the more grateful I am
to rise into morning.
The older I get,
the more I want
to offer my breath
in praise of what is beautiful,
resilient and strong.
The turmoil is all around us,
and yet there is so much
that finds a way
not just to survive,
but to shine.
 

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Nocturnal Hyperhidrosis

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 24, 2024| 15 Comments »

I do not love it, the way I fall asleep cold
only to wake in a flush of heat.
Do not love the soaking, the drenching
the damp, then the clammy.
Not once in those small dark hours
have I thought to praise the eccrine glands,
the aprocine glands that secrete the sweat,
so much sweat, the sweat that makes me
shove down the covers and seek
a dry towel to lie on. The cool
night air never quite cool enough.
I don’t love it, the way the warmth
steals me from dreams and returns me
to the demands of body, a body
that’s changing, that’s aging,
a body with an exquisitely sensitive
hypothalamus that worries my body’s too warm.
How quick I am to complain instead of praise.
How hard to remember in these hot and sodden
hours that I admire the wisdom of the body.
Let me now remember I’m a being made of water,
a pond of a woman returning herself to the air.
I am at the mercy of evaporation.
How natural it is, though I do not love it,
this teacher in what comes next.
This is how I practice how
to disappear.

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Amen

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 17, 2024| 8 Comments »

When I forget that the whole world
is holy, even the tiny dark bugs
that slip through window screens
and flock and stick to kitchen lights,
even the charred black remains of forest,
even the river as it floods bright red,
even when my cheeks are tear-stained
and my body tightens with fear,
that is when a kind letter from a stranger
arrives in the mail, or the rabbit will stand
on his back legs to nibble on mint,
or the meadow will blaze with the day’s
last slant of sunlight and my heart opens
so wide that inside the fear rises praise.

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Talking with Andrea

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 5, 2024| 12 Comments »


I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.
                  —Anne Lamott
 
 
With every cell, I listened
to her familiar voice,
her thoughtful silences,
her precision with verbs,
and though we spoke
of showerheads and
grocery shopping,
elections, underbellies and
standing beneath the moon,
we spoke only of grace, every
sentence somehow stitched
with the most stripped-down
kind of praise, the kind
that doesn’t sparkle,
doesn’t sing, doesn’t
shimmy, doesn’t offer
sweet perfume, the kind
of praise that is so naked,
so plain, so bare
there is nothing at all
between us and the
sheer magnificent truth
that we are here.
I long to name such aliveness,
at once composed
and uncontainable,
but it slips my attempts—
it’s like trying to fit a dress
on a sunbeam.
But I felt it, how
as we spoke I went
from being stone
to being sky. Oh glory,
with my everything,
I felt it.

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Another Reason to Marvel

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 6, 2023| 6 Comments »

The average color of the universe
is not blue, as they thought, but beige—
or so they say after studying
two hundred thousand galaxies—
a fact that makes me stand longer today
beside this tulip as it shamelessly splays
its statistically unlikely yellow and red,
a living manual for possibility—
in all of deep space,
the chance to show up in this garden.

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Dark Praise

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 4, 2022| 16 Comments »




In each of us thrives an inner world
that does not love the light.
An inner world of womb and breath,
the most essential dark
where blood moves and lungs expand,
where neurons fire and cells divide,
where the heart pulses and muscles build,
where all words form, where all thoughts nest,
the secret world of humanness—
the dark we are, the dark we need,
this secret dark we cannot see.
For all its wounds, its rest,
its miraculous repair,
I praise this living dark
we carry everywhere.

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Three Unlikelihoods

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 26, 2022| 6 Comments »




crushed by rusted weight
stalled by my own brokenness—
still this urge to praise

*

despite cosmic odds
that tend toward vacuum and void,
this pale flower, these buds

*

even in cold darkness
hear the growing rush of snowmelt—
somewhere it is warm

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Concurrent

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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.

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The Snow People, Three Days Later

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on November 30, 2020| 2 Comments »

Their hats are cockamamie.

One has lost its carrot nose.

Stone buttons and eyes

have long since succumbed

to gravity. But there is

something yet dignified

about the snow people in the yard,

their knobby stick arms raised

as if, in their declining state,

there’s still so much to praise.

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