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Posts Tagged ‘sound’

The Arrangement

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 30, 2026| 8 Comments »


 
 
Because touch is one way we offer praise, 
this morning I touch my ears 
to the see-sawing song of birds 
in the tree beside me. I still myself
to focus on their song, and they stop 
singing, as if to tease. I touch my ears 
to the silence where the song is not. 
Touch the warm tones of wind chimes 
stirred by a breeze I barely feel. 
Touch the hum of the cars
and the growl of a motorcycle I’d rather 
shut out. I think of how my grandmother 
used grass, even weeds in her flower arrangements. 
She taught me you could make anything beautiful.
I try to stop slandering the traffic noise
and gather it into an audible bouquet complete
with birds, chimes, silence, my breath. 
How to make the unwelcome welcome? 
How to hold tension in ways that compliment? 
All morning, all day, I practice opening 
to what isn’t easy to love. I make a vase
of the moment. Add all the sound that’s here. 
So much I’d rather not to listen to. 
I think of my grandmother. I try to find 
new ways to hear.  

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Sound Bath

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 1, 2025| 12 Comments »


 
 
Even now, imagine, we could step through
one of the infinite doors of the moment
and find ourselves in another life—
repairing a net on the banks of a vast river
or herding cattle down a two-lane highway.
Standing in line a block from a soup kitchen
or guarding the entrance to the Forbidden City.
Instead, we are here in the lives we inhabit
But press your ear to the other doors. Hear
the traffic. The sobbing. A swelling of symphony.
Gunshot. Thunder of feet. The whimper of an infant.
The world enters us in waves, waves that seep
through the doors and we wade in them.
Wading, we come to know there is no way
to not be touched by every other life,
no matter how distant. If you put your ear
to the moment, sometimes you can hear
every other ear listening for what you will do next.

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Right Here

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 30, 2025| 2 Comments »


 
 
Not easy to hear the soft chant of my breath
with the rumble of river nearby.
Even the low water hymn of late autumn
is loud enough to cover the small,
familiar song of inhale and exhale.
Further out is the sharp thwack of hammer
head meeting nail. Another nail. Another.
An elated whoop from the man with the hammer.
And further out, the growl of semi trucks
migrating east on the highway. If I close
my eyes, do I really hear better? Can I hear
into the distant pinion forest, the silence that gathers
there in spiraling trunks? Can I hear
past that into the vaster silence of mesa?
To the vacant sound of sky?
More than the sounds themselves,
something about the reaching stills me,
brings me present until I am more ear
than mind. Not a single thought brays as I follow
soundwaves to the shores of presence.
Such simple practice, attentiveness,
and yet how often I wander away
on paths of should and want. But now,
attuned, I hear it, even with the river,
this small luff of breath, a living metronome
beating here, here, here.  

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Creatures, All

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 18, 2025| 6 Comments »

I love the small sounds of pleasure
people make when taking the first
sip of coffee, or when sitting at last 
after standing for hours. That soft 
hum of delight that escapes the lips
when someone presses a thumb
into the arch of our foot and makes
small circles on the sole. That sigh
that flies out when we step into shade
on a relentlessly sunny day. Bless these 
moments when the mind can’t outbrain 
the small animal living inside us, when
our untamed self slips through the cage 
of decorum and groans or purrs 
or moans or gasps and reminds us 
beneath all our fancy syntax and
pretty words, we’re creatures,
and the body is so much more
than a carrier for intellect.
Every delighted roar and ecstatic howl
is a common language, a reminder
we are all native here on this earth,
all fluent in grateful whimper
and satisfied grunt, all of us eloquent
when we praise in our primitive tongue.
 

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One After the Sauna

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 11, 2024| 13 Comments »

 
in deep, new snow
a naked angel makes wings—
her song, how it soars

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On Prayer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 19, 2023| 12 Comments »


for Mark Primavesi
 
Prayer is what happens when we listen, and wait, beneath words, for the outline of heaven and earth to emerge.
            —Wayne Muller, “Nourished by Prayer”
 
 
Today prayer is the silence
in the snow-deep meadow.
It’s the gurgle of the ice-choked river
that cannot be heard unless
I am completely still. Today,
prayer is not to, it’s not for,
it’s something I am
more than something I do.
Prayer is even the sound
of the logging trucks on the highway
as they brake rounding the corner.
It’s the rapid shush, shush, shush
of my skis in the track as I climb the hill.
It’s the sizzle of onions in the oil.
It’s the hitch in my breath before I cry.
I’m astonished, today, to find
there is nothing that isn’t prayer
when I am aware it’s an invitation
to be completely here, to open;
it’s a call to meet it all
with the love that asks nothing from me
except that I give it and receive it.
Every single thing can be prayer.
Even the siren blaring by.
Even my own familiar voice
as I listen into the silences
for whatever words come next.

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Ode to the Sigh

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 20, 2022| 13 Comments »


 
Smallest of songs,
you give voice
to the breath,
a wordless expression
of sorrow or happiness.
You seem to say,
Yes, that’s how it is,
a quiet doorway
that leads to acceptance.
You soften. You smooth.
You signal a feeling
that’s moving through.
You change silence
the way moonlight
changes a room—
so slightly, and yet
from the edge of perception,
you say to me,
Sweetheart,
pay attention.

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Ode to the Echo

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 4, 2022| 10 Comments »


Sister of silence, you give back to the world
the shadow of every sound you are given.
You reshape the air to unsharpen the shout.
You unshrill the scream until it’s quieter,
quieter,
then nothing at all.
There is no sound so harsh you can’t soften it.
And come song? You re-sing the melody
so beauty will linger like the rich shimmer inside a gong.
Not once have you said your own words.
Not once have you intoned your own tune.
Not once have you heard your own voice
or spoken your own truth.
Not once have you lied.
Not once have you made a promise
you could not keep.   
Sometimes, when I am brave,
I try to echo you, which is to say
I let silence enter my inner walls,
where it bounces in me like sound in a cave
until all I hear is the resonant repeat
of the most ancient of languages you speak—
silence, silence, silence.
There is no part of me uneroded,
no part your waves don’t touch.

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After We’d Been in the Cave over an Hour

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 25, 2022| 4 Comments »




Long after our eyes adjusted
to the small, round beams of light
that shined on thick white columns
and reflected the rings of drips into shallow pools,
after we’d become accustomed
to the resonant dim,
at last we found a place to sit
and turned off our lights
and listened to the dark.
The only sound, the astonished heart,
persistent breath, and the drip,
drip, drip of stalactites doing their patient work.
How I longed to bring us all
into the cave where we are forced to forget
any differences the light might suggest.
How I loved the way my senses stretched out
to feel the other beating hearts.
Imagine we could do this every night—
could feel the other hearts in the dark,
all of them beating like our own.
Imagine no storms could touch us.
Imagine we forgot it could ever be any other way—
your heart, my heart, beating wild,
listening for each other.

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One Rev

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 2, 2021| 1 Comment »



 
 
roar of the highway
beside it in an evening primrose
a bee, thunderous

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