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Posts Tagged ‘reality’

Now It’s In Me

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 30, 2025| 4 Comments »


 
 
Dawn light not yet arrived,
and the dream still so alive in the body—
 
the astonishment of flight
still rising like a tide in the blood.
 
Are the blankets real?
Or the weightlessness?
 
How is the wind still tangling my hair
even as the cat curls warm at my side?
 
What is this gravity?
 
For a while, I lie between worlds,
one steady, the other wildly free.
 
Even grounded, my body can’t unknow it,
ecstasy.

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Carpe Diem

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 15, 2025| 14 Comments »


 
Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
                  —Wendell Berry, 1993, I
 
 
Knowing today brings the day of my death
one day closer, I decide to love you more.
By which I mean, I decide
to practice letting myself be
exactly who I am and letting you be
exactly who you are and noticing how
love grows in that most rich soil—
not the thick clay of longing for things
to be different, but the good loam
of reality. Our time here is too dear
to be spent with fruitless wishing.
In this generous earth of allowing,
what might grow? Real love.
The kind that requires nothing
but our laughter and tears,
our anger and forgiveness, our frustration
and tenderness. I feel love root anew
in this ground where soon enough
I, too, will belong. Do you feel it, too,
the blooming between us, this love
that asks only for us
to be faithfully ourselves?

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Toward Peace

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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.
 

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Midnight Storm

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 27, 2024| 4 Comments »

 
 
heart thumping fast
as windshield wipers
attempting to keep 
the vision clear
in a hurricane,

oh love,
lay your sleep-warm hand
on my sleep-warm leg,
remind me what is dream,
what is real

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So Real, the Dream

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 23, 2022| 6 Comments »



In the dream, it was clear,
I am the cable car
and love itself is the cable
beneath the streets,
that pulls me along
up the steepest of hills,
requiring nothing
except I hold on.
Though I can’t see it, it’s there.
Though I must sometimes let go,
I must always return to holding it.
When I woke,
the dream was fuzzy,
but the truth no less clear:
love has carried me.
All day I marvel
at the strength of the cable.
All day I am grateful
for love beyond understanding:
invisible love, powerful love,
a continuous unbroken loop.
Even now, I hear it
singing in its motion,
song of constancy,
song of trust.

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One Feeding

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on May 30, 2021| Leave a Comment »

and if I dare dream

let it include the facts—

the bite, the open hand

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A Letter to the Woman in My Calendar

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »

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Dear Other Version of Myself,

 

In my calendar, it’s April second

and you are going to an event tonight

at a bookstore in another town

where the people will gather

and hug each other and taste

each other’s wine. You live in a world

that no longer exists, and every day

I try to reconcile it—how you

had plans to go camping next weekend,

how you were going to go to the theater

with no mask, no gloves,

no sense of your body as a weapon.

 

Every day, your life, which once was my life,

seems increasingly impossible.

Every day, these two worlds are farther apart—

the one in which you were getting on a plane

to visit your mother

and the one in which I put on rubber gloves

to go to the post office box.

I remember how seldom you washed

your hands for fear that someone you love

would die. I remember what it was like

to hug my friends with no worry

of harming them, to go to a restaurant,

to plan for a day past tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dear Moment That Wasn’t What I Thought It Was,

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 4, 2020| Leave a Comment »

 

 

Thank you for blessing me with reality,

for showing me when I’m guilty

of what my friend calls cognitive slippage.

It’s like stuffing a big scoop of wasabi into my mouth,

thinking it’s guacamole. The mind believes

what it wants to believe until it’s shown otherwise.

 

Thank you for demonstrating how sometimes

I disconnect from the facts—especially when

emotions are involved. Like when I think

I’m a pool of warm soothing water

another could enter, but really, I’m a woman

made of bone and corpuscles. Little can I hold.

 

I always thought imagination was a gift,

but not, perhaps, when it puts me at odds with what’s true.

Dear moment, I want to be attentive. When you pull out the rug

from beneath my thoughts, I want to be the rug.

And when you poke my theories full of holes, I want

to be the hand that pokes, the fresh air that rushes in.

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While Stopped at the Intersection, I Consider

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 4, 2018| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

and we will go

to the haiku cottage

in the mountains

where there are no roads

and there are no pens

and there we let ourselves

be written, the seasons

will shape our syllables,

the moon shall be

our cutting word,

and every time we think

we know what line comes next

we will thrill at how new

the world can be, sliding,

escaping, unswirling,

and calling follow me,

bring only wonder,

follow me

 

 

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One Blood Test

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 13, 2018| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

staring at numbers

hoping to find, hidden in percentages,

a trap door

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