Posted in Uncategorized, tagged concrete poem, garden, glen velez, gong, music, silence on May 7, 2026| 5 Comments »
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged desert, hiding, listening, silence on February 23, 2026| Leave a Comment »
inside the prickly silence
a generous silence—
in the desert, a hidden spring
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, silence, worry on September 8, 2025| 4 Comments »
with thanks to Karly Pitman
There is this stark moment
when I see I am not my worry.
When I do not chastise
myself for worrying, nor
do I demonize the worry.
I do not imagine the worry
as a snake or a tick or a nail.
I welcome it into my lap,
uncomfortable teacher,
and pause here
on the hard chair of curiosity.
Softness arrives with conscious breath.
In and around me blooms
spaciousness.
Silence is the tenderest lullaby.
It holds both the worry and me.
It has no tongue, yet the lyric is clear,
There is nothing here you cannot meet.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged isness, night, silence, sitting on August 30, 2025| 6 Comments »
A blue cup. Lemon tea.
Scent of rain.
A drove of stars.
A silence so vast
the mind forgets
to reach for meaning
or purpose and
for a moment
each thing is
exactly what it is.
A cup. Lemon tea.
Scent of rain.
A woman who
does not remember
if she’s a woman
or a star.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death anniversary, grief, love, missing, river, silence, talking to the dead on August 13, 2025| 12 Comments »
Then comes the moment
when not one thing is more important
than walking to the river
and finding a wide rock in the middle
of the flow where I can sit
and speak to you.
There’s not much to say
these days besides I love you,
I miss you. So I say the paltry words,
six inadequate syllables.
As always they are sorry translations
for the infinite songs of my heart.
So I sit on the rock and listen;
silence the language you speak now.
I’ve been learning its tender
conjugations—you were. You are.
You have been. You will have been.
Is it true they all sound the same?
I practice silence long enough
the river moves through me
touching all I cannot say.
I don’t know how I know
when it is time to rise.
The silence holds me.
I teach the silence your name.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged biology, lichen, peace, silence, solitude, symbiosis on March 28, 2025| 5 Comments »
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.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, silence, song, winter on January 18, 2025| 8 Comments »
in the barren cottonwood tree
dozens of birds, all of them still,
as if, like me, they are enthralled
doubtful they could ever improve
on all this glorious silence
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birth, garden, grief, language, silence on September 12, 2024| 15 Comments »
I dug in the garden. For hours.
Hands deep in the dirt
where once your hands
dug, too. Pulled carrots.
Potatoes. Onions.
Held them up to the air
and marveled at what grows
in the dark. Asked you questions.
As always, you didn’t answer.
Or perhaps it’s truer to say
I do not know how
to interpret the language
of rain, the message
of the white seed that landed
in my hand, the significance
of the hummingbird moth
drinking from bright red nasturtiums.
But I am learning the language of silence.
Same language the earth speaks.
Same language we spoke while you
were still forming inside me. Such
an intimate tongue. Such generous
conversation. All day I practice
speaking it with you. All day
I practice listening.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, harmony, silence, singing on September 6, 2024| 10 Comments »
for D
I spent years
practicing how
to make my voice
disappear
inside hers
so we’d blend—
and though
it’s been a year
since we sang,
it’s only weeks
since she’s gone,
and how strange now
to open my mouth,
to listen for her,
to hear only
myself. And I
can’t stop singing
because it makes
me feel closer
to her to hear
where her voice
would be,
almost like
silence
is now harmony.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged listening, silence, sonnet on August 21, 2024| 4 Comments »
Emptying my eyes.
Opening my hands.
Not answering the phone.
Not answering the door.
Not even stroking the cat
when she nudges her nose
against my neck.
Not trying to answer
any question of why.
Rising of chest. Falling
of chest. Listening to the tide
of breath. Listening.
Attending to silence. Noticing
how silence attends to me.