for K., Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est.
After all the hours of dressing up
and combing our hair and trying
to show our best face to the world,
we find ourselves bare, naked,
haunted, and painfully, wondrously clear,
full of visions and limitations, aware
of the great invitation to be kind. And
if we’re lucky, we burn with hope.
It isn’t safe, this life. Don’t let anyone
tell you otherwise. But if you are able,
as you listen to the screaming, sing.
Sing through the walls. Sing of miracles,
healing and light. Sing. Because when
all else is ash, still, we can sing. We can sing.
Posts Tagged ‘purpose’
Instead of Losing Faith
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged faith, love, madness, purpose, singing on January 25, 2025| 16 Comments »
What We’re Doing Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, meaning of life, purpose on February 14, 2021| 2 Comments »
This is why we are here—
not merely to survive
but to fall in love
with the white-breasted hawk
and the rainbow fish,
with the lonely sidewalk
and the shadows of ourselves,
fall in love with the hands
of the woman wearing yellow
and the girl who loves chocolate
and the boy who loves cars
and the man who makes us want to be
a better version of ourself.
We are here to fall into unmanageable love—
to love beyond reason, beyond
fact, beyond certainty. We are here
to lose all our ideas about love
and know it as the next choice
we make, the next word
we say, the next invitation
we offer ourselves.
We are here to love
the world and each other
the way whales love water,
the way blue loves a peacock,
the way night blooming jasmine
loves night.
Editor’s Choice for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ekphrasis, purpose, Rattle on January 30, 2020| 6 Comments »
Today, Rattle.com featured my poem, “Seeking Purpose,” which I wrote in response to Natalie Seabolt’s beautiful image, “Bound,” as the Editor’s Choice for their Ekphrastic Challenge! I love this practice of writing poems for images–this one explores our purpose, and how it might be nice for the world to give us just a little clue about what that might be. You can download a broadside of the poem and image right there on Rattle’s page.
Beside the River with My Daughter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, fairies, mother, poem, poetry, purpose, river, rocks on November 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Hundreds of smooth red stones—
we gathered them that summer
and spent days carefully laying them out
into a wide and winding red path.
It had no real starting point, no destination.
We tucked white daisies between the rocks.
We said it was for the fairies.
I wouldn’t have said it then, in fact,
I hesitate today to say we didn’t believe in them.
They gave us so much purpose.
Even now, I’m following that path.
Two Things I Would Give You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, giving, poem, poetry, purpose, sleep on September 18, 2019| 7 Comments »
Sleep, of course. Long,
uninterrupted hours of sleep.
For a week. For a month.
For a year. You’d just put your head
on the pillow, and sleep
would come meet you
like a devoted friend, or like
a dog that will come whenever you call,
and snuggle with you all night.
And then, when you woke,
I would give you the certainty
that life is worth waking for,
that you are beloved,
that everything you do
makes a difference, and
by everything, I mean everything.
Not If, But When
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged end of the world, lunch, parenting, poem, poetry, purpose on September 20, 2018| Leave a Comment »
In April, the Harvard
Department of Physics
issued a study suggesting
the universe will end the way
it began, with a bang. in fact,
they say, there’s likely a bubble
of true vacuum “barreling
toward us at the speed of light.”
The moment we see the bubble
will barely precede the moment
it destroys us.
And still, despite their findings,
I rise every morning in the dark
and make my children lunches.
Evenly spreading the butter
onto my daughter’s bread.
Slicing the cheese thin as hope,
just the way my son likes it.
As if making their lunches
really matters in these moments
before our demise.
Yes, I select the firmest apples.
Toast the walnuts
with maple syrup and salt
so they sing in the mouth,
both savory and sweet.
As if they will eat the food
and taste love. As if
they’re important, these
things that we do.
While Trying to Decide What Comes Next
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged clarity, poem, poetry, purpose on February 26, 2018| 2 Comments »
There is clarity in the three-hole punch,
the way it is made to receive the paper,
always the same every time.
How it punches the holes always
equidistant from each other. It never worries
it’s not doing its job good enough. Never
worries it isn’t worthy of the pages it meets.
There is clarity in the way it flexes beneath
the hand, how it does the one thing it was made
to do. And you, with your hand on the black
length of it, you with your thousands of choices
inside every moment, what is it that needs
your precision? Maybe you’re making it
too hard. Maybe it’s your turn to do
the one thing you were made to do.
From Dust
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, purpose on February 6, 2017| 4 Comments »
Nothing More Wonderful, Really
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, poem, poetry, purpose on September 8, 2015| 1 Comment »
Usually for a man. Or a woman. A someone else.
You get the feeling you could fast for a year.
Or run Everest. Barefoot. With a hundred pound pack.
In a blizzard. Uphill. Both ways. And the rest of the world
would sigh, and say, “Ah, love. Makes people crazy.”
And though there would be a lot of head shaking
and tongue clicking, the world would be jealous.
But sometimes it happens that you get the feeling
you might just do the craziest thing, not really for anyone else,
not really for you, either, in fact, you do it for no reason
at all except that it rises in you that this is The Thing To Do—
sure, run up a mountain. Or swim the Atlantic.
Or crawl the Sahara. Or even, imagine it,
dare to wake up and drink coffee, then walk
out the door to the car like the unlikely hero you are,
drive the speed limit down the highway to the office, where
you do whatever you do and give it everything
you have, crazy as it seems. Oh the stapler! The paperwork!
The phone calls one after the other! The sun on your face
when you step out the door. Oh yeah, the people
of the world will be shaking their heads, thinking,
“Dang, that is crazy,” but they will also be wondering
as you walk down the street as if the world is walking with you,
“Wow, how do I get me just a little bit of that?”
Though I Seldom Remember to Sit
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged meditation, poem, poetry, purpose, what are we doing here? on July 18, 2015| 1 Comment »
How soon I forget
the reason I walked into this room.
It is not hard
to walk back to where I was
moments before
and usually I remember.
Sometimes I forget
the reason I am here,
and I do not know where
to go back to, wherever
we came from,
to retrieve the purpose,
though sometimes
when I sit very still
it arrives, not as an answer,
not as a word, more
as a sense that I am being breathed
and that I have not
travelled so far,
that whatever I have come here for
is right here.
That Question, the One With No Answer
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged alphabet menagerie, fear, identity, poem, poetry, purpose on October 7, 2014| 6 Comments »
In a snowstorm, the yaks know to huddle together,
calves in the center. They press the bulk of their bodies so close
to each other that their breath forms a column of visible steam.
Elsewhere, in burrowed colonies, the yellow jackets
work in concert to forage for food, to feed the larvae,
to expand the nest and defend the queen.
It’s hardwired in us, this will to survive. Just look
at the yucca with its cascade of lemony petals
surrounded by tough, sword-shaped leaves.
Just look at you. Just look at me. See how we
like to hide behind our identities—lover,
loner, baker, runner, singer, prayer, biker, child.
As if we could use the list of our interests
and roles as a shield against our greatest fear—
the fear that we don’t know what we are doing here.
So we shout to each other like yodelers—here I am,
this is me, who are you? And we hold up invisible yardsticks
to ourselves, to each other, in an effort to learn our value.
And our egos rise and fall like yoyos in the hands
of a child who’s just learning to play. We think we’re someone.
We fear that we’re not. And what are we doing here anyway?
Is this why some choose solitude? Choose to live
beyond the shoulds and masks? Live like the yeti—
unknowable, unseeable, known only by stories and tracks?
Today, the hummingbirds are gone, and the waterfall is thin
in its plunge. The hours are warm though the sun is low—
and I can’t say that I know what we’re doing here,
but I think it has something to do with noticing the missing birds
and the thin waterfall and the timber in your voice when you tell me
you don’t know who you are. Me neither, friend, but whatever I am
fell in love with the way that the first morning sun today glanced
the frosted grass, and I could see dozens of columns of steam rise across
the whole field before the yellow jackets emerged from their nest.
What Difference Does it Make
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged attractors, loss, math, poem, poetry, purpose on January 8, 2014| 2 Comments »
Look out the kitchen window
into the night, and all you see through the pane
is a vague version of yourself,
not quite transparent,
but substanceless.
Perhaps car lights pass
through the shape of your head.
And then it is just your reflection
imprinted on darkness again.
*
I wanted to write you a letter
about the dream I had last night.
We were talking on the phone.
This is how I knew it was a dream.
*
A chained male dog
will strain his leash
when he can smell
a bitch in heat.
*
Try to listen beyond the window.
Beyond the refrigerator hum.
Beyond the sound
of your own breathing in, breathing out.
*
There was a necklace in the dream,
a strand of green diamonds,
one I lost long ago.
There it was in my hands again,
and I thought to myself,
as I balanced it in an armful of things,
you are going to lose it again.
*
What do you hear?
*
One can measure it,
the dog’s desire,
by the force of his tug,
the direction of his pull.
In modern mathematics,
in the language of dynamics,
we call this an attractor,
a purpose or motive that connects us
with our virtual future.
*
The point: it is not
the past that drives us.
Not even the greatest loss.
We are pulled toward that
which has not yet happened.
The future yearns for us.
*
The phone rings,
the plot thickens.
The woman in the window
reaches toward the receiver.
The voice on the other end
is not yours.
*
You have prepared
your whole life for this moment,
the one you let go
right now.
*
Machines do not have internal purpose.
The typewriter writes what the poet types.
The car goes where the driver goes.
The refrigerator chills what is put inside.
But everything that is alive
is pulled toward certain attractors
that help with growth, survival,
continuation of the species.
The honey bee moves to the flower.
The mud wasp digs a funneled nest.
The black widow spiders will eat
the other offspring in the sac.
So who could explain why,
though a letter will never arrive at your door,
I watch as the woman in the window
takes out her pen, consider how much
she must long to write you a letter,
watch her as she stares
at her empty page.
Where We Are
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, goal, path, poem, poetry, purpose on July 4, 2013| 1 Comment »
The path is the last impediment to the path.
—Lama Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
The path had not ended.
We had not arrived
anywhere except in a stand
of spruce where a new path
sprung to the left, and another
narrower path led to the right.
The main path curved up and
around the corner. I did not want
to turn around. I wanted to
arrive somewhere—to have
a marker of some kind. A view,
perhaps, or a giant stone.
Or a field of pink Indian paintbrush.
As it was, we turned back down
at the spruce glade where the paths
criss crossed. We all know we can never go back.
But this path gave the impression
that all was the same, that nothing
had changed between the time we
hiked up and the time we chose
to hike back down. But everything
had changed in the way that everything
does. And we didn’t notice it.
As we seldom do.