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Posts Tagged ‘silence’

At the Potter Ranch

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 25, 2022| 8 Comments »


Ridgway, Colorado


On a day when the human world feels like a fist—
when it clenches and squeezes,
fierce and relentless—
I leave the four walls and sit
on an old fallen cottonwood tree,
long and silver and smooth.
There, in the center of a wide river valley,
I sit. And sit. And sit.
And the tall green grasses
and the graceful white yarrow don’t refuse me.
And the murmur of waves
and the musk-yellow scent of sweet clover
replace any thoughts, save being here.
The ring of red mesas
with their vast crowns of spruce
form a vase great enough to hold it all—
and I am gathered into spaciousness
along with dark green sedges and white butterflies,
with the tantrums of brambles
and the tangled flight patterns
of thousands on thousands of dark tiny flies.
A flock of birds rise all at once from the river
and my heart and my eyes rise, too.
A long time passes before I am quiet enough
to hear the chorus in the willows,
the bright clicking of insect wings,
the silence that weaves through everything.
Then the flickers come close
and the dragonflies draw nearer in.
And I current. I cloud. I leaf. I wing.
I leave unwalled, un-selved.
The spaciousness comes with me.

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Though I Would Converse with You

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on July 6, 2022| 8 Comments »




I can be the silence
that touches your skin
like raw silk,
silence soft as a lover’s hand,
silence that holds you
when you have pushed
everyone away, even me.

I can be the silence
that leans in to know you,
silence that opens
like the scent of peonies,
silence that opens
like troughs between waves.

I can be silence
that wears clunky boots
and the silence
of the phone that does not ring.

Though I want to give you
the gift of my arms, the gift
of my ears, the gift of now,
I am learning to be the silence
that gives you the gift of yourself—

silence of patience, silence of time,
generous silence, tender silence,
silence that falls like the softest rain,
silence of sunshine, silence of soil,
silence of leaf, silence of bud
as it grows into what it will be.

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I Want to Listen to Your Absence

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 26, 2022| 7 Comments »




I want to listen to your absence
the way I listen to the night—
the way the dark somehow
invites a deeper listening.
I want to hear, for instance,
the way silence fills in
where your voice has been,
or the way the room seems to know itself
by the pound of missing footsteps,
and in this way, I find you
where I cannot find you.
I am thinking of how the night opens up
between the calls of the owl
and how I listen in that interval
not only with my ears, but with my skin.
I want to listen for you with my lungs—
as if every breath is attentive
to the syllables of grief, of love.
I want my heart to angle in
to hear what the silence has to say.
I don’t want to hear what I most want to hear—
I want to hear what is really here.
I want to listen and learn from the listening.
I want to hear what is true.
I want to listen into your absence
and lean into it the way I lean into the night—
something so much larger than me,
something familiar and always new,
something so present, yet unable to be touched.
Something I am still learning to love.

*

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Quiet Connection

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 6, 2021| 10 Comments »

Any morning is a chance

to walk the same path

I have walked before

and listen. Listen

to the silence between

steps, between breaths,

inside joy, inside loss,

the silence that sometimes

fills in the cathedral of thoughts,

the silence that holds

all that is. Sometimes

the silence clings to a moment,

sticks to me,

like the lingering scent

of rabbit brush on the fingers,

like a favorite song

that won’t leave the ear.

The same path

is never the same,

and listening to silence

is always new.

Sometimes my own silence

helps me to hear

the silence of my loves

who are gone.

I could not have known it before,

how intimate it can be,

the communion of our silence.

how in these quietest of moments,

filled with nothing

but listening, open,

we meet.

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On a Quiet Day, I See the Future

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 29, 2021| 4 Comments »


 
 
One day, I will walk into the quiet,
calm of the empty home. No TV.
No pinging of phones.
No one asking what there is to eat.
No one wondering if I can drive them.
No one telling me their dreams.
I will hear only the sound
of rain, of thunder,
of the wind rattling the inner doors.
Perhaps I will hear my own pounding heart,
the heart I thought belonged to me.
But there, in the dim light of the storm,
I might at last know for certain
the heart is made for giving away.
There are many ways to love.
Some of them are clearest
when I am most alone.

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Mid-Conversation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 17, 2021| 4 Comments »




Sometimes
in the silence
between
the small talk
a whole life
is lived—
a life
in which
you are
exactly
yourself
only more so,
a self without
name, a self
of no
where, a
self unselved,
which
is to say
that sometimes
in the silence
of a minute
you find
some vision
so vast
so true
that you weep
before saying,
And how are you?

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Listening to the Wind on Mars, I Consider the Unsaid

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 23, 2021| 3 Comments »




Just because I can’t hear the wind on Mars
without the sound being raised two octaves
doesn’t mean the Martian wind wouldn’t open a sail—
doesn’t mean it wouldn’t blow off my hat
or fly my kite or create thick swirls of red dust.

Just because I could barely hear the wind on Mars
with my human ears doesn’t mean
the wind wouldn’t flip up my skirt. So many forces
just beyond our senses have powerful effect—
like the words that just today I didn’t hear you say,

yet I know by the way my skin shivers they’re true.
I know, just as sure as the wind blows on Mars,
it takes just one gust to make a thousand seeds go flying.
And I am a weed with ten thousand seeds.
And those words I didn’t hear today, they’re the wind.

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Spell for Ending Well

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 7, 2020| 5 Comments »

Who’s ever heard

of a silent spell?

Isn’t it supposed to rhyme?

Shouldn’t it contain

the eye of something,

the tail of something else,

some leaves, some poison,

a cauldron, a fire,

and a whole lot of stirring?

But this spell can’t be manufactured.

All it wants is your attention.

All it wants is for you to feel

how it feels to end.

It wants you to lean

into loss and let it do

its slow work on you.

It doesn’t offer a magic word—

no word is magic enough

to do what must be done.

Which is to trust

the vanishing nature of things.

Which is to let the body

grasp and grasp and grasp

until at last it is ready

to release. Any spell

for ending well

knows its own uselessness.

It knows the importance

of silence. It knows

that anyone who would look up

a spell for ending well

already has exactly what they need.

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Suggestion for a Day

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 3, 2020| 4 Comments »

And if today we speak at all,

let us speak in golden leaf.

Let’s converse in low clear stream,

whisper in rose-hip pink.

And if we speak at all today,

let’s slip mulch between each word,

aware that what we say will grow—

how powerful the words we sow.

And if we speak at all,

let’s speak in mountain, speak in field,

speak only words that lift and heal,

speak only words that lift and heal.

And if we speak,

let’s listen for the quiet in between—

plant tulip bulbs in the silences.

And crocuses. And grace.

And any words with thorns in them,

let’s set them down. Let’s lose them.

And if our words don’t open like sky,

let’s let the sky do all the talking.

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Why I Garden

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on October 31, 2020| 2 Comments »

Digging in the garden,

hands deep in the dirt,

I have no beliefs.

I have soil for a pulse

and soil for lungs, soil

for hands and heart.

I don’t have thoughts

about who should do what

or how, instead

I have dirt thoughts—

loamy, rich, crumbling thoughts

that sometimes, if I’m lucky,

have a potato in them.

I speak the language

of mineral and listen

for organic matter,

but the only word

they seem to say

is listen, listen.

And then, they say

nothing at all.

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