Sit with the freedom in your heart.
Feel it expanding into your palms—
in this moment whole galaxies
seem to fit inside your fingertips. How?
When did you become this vast?
Was this spaciousness always here?
Could you have felt this way yesterday
if only you had gotten out of your own way?
Sit with the freedom in your heart—
more beautiful than any story—
feel it surge through you
until your body forgets any limits
and knows itself as infinite.
Freedom will do what freedom does—
invite you to touch the source of the universe,
replace, for this moment, your fear with awe.
Posts Tagged ‘spaciousness’
This
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged freedom, spaciousness on January 24, 2024| 8 Comments »
Freedom Night
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, shame, spaciousness, speaking, truth, words on August 23, 2023| 4 Comments »
All those words
I was afraid to say,
I gave them wings—
dark ink black wings—
and watched them
fly away, watched them
dive and circle,
swoop and soar,
enchanted by their flight.
The cage of shame
I’d kept them in,
it disappeared,
till all that was left
in me was sky.
Above Treeline
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged sky, spaciousness, transformation on July 23, 2023| 4 Comments »
Everywhere I turn,
the measureless sky,
wild open sky,
deep bluing,
unencumbered sky,
and how is it
it enters me
and fills my lungs
with vastness,
steeps my mind
in spaciousness,
slips immensity
into my cells,
and I, who
have been stone,
who thought I knew
something of
what a life is,
I feel myself dissolve
into blue
as if it’s the only
thing I could do.
When I leave,
the blue comes
with me.
To Everyone Who Beamed Me Love, But Felt Apologetic for Not Writing or Calling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, grief, love, silence, spaciousness, support on January 30, 2023| 22 Comments »
Now I know there is a sacred cathedral
made of unspoken love,
a most beautiful cathedral
built of generous silence,
a healing sanctuary created
by open hearts that reach out wordlessly.
I have been living in this cathedral
that your love built, and I am changed.
Now I trust loving silence
is a generous response
to another person’s pain.
When I am alone, I am not alone.
When you, in your own home,
open your hands as if in prayer,
I feel your hands holding me.
Your compassion touches me
the way light slips in through stained glass
to touch a face.
The pure hush of your hope
arrives in my heart like plainsong—
more breath than voice, as holy as any syllable.
Thank you for the ways your thoughtful silence
has lit in me thousands of candles
as I meet the darkest hours.
Now, I can’t unknow this: I trust love,
how it flourishes in the vast spaces
across miles, across time.
Such sweet, intense healing perfume—
like lilies on an altar—
the scent of your loving silence
as it opens me.
Scale
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged anger, fear, meadow, spaciousness on January 29, 2023| 12 Comments »
When anger enters your body
and swells in you, expands in you
until you don’t fit inside your skin,
when fear enters me
and grows like a virulent weed,
its new shoots propagating
with alarming speed until
its tendrils escape through my throat,
when our voices escalate
to try to express in volume
how big our feelings have become,
then I want to meet you outside
in the center of the meadow
where we are humbled
by the ponderosa pine that stretches skyward,
dwarfed by the red mesa walls,
held by the crystalline airiness.
I want to remember in my body
this capaciousness, this generosity,
so that when I am not standing in the meadow
but in our kitchen or on a street corner
or watching the news,
I can remember the meadow with my whole being,
can remember the scale of sky and stars
and the vast reaches
of the ever-growing universe.
I want to hold you with that kind of openness,
want to relax into knowing we are held together
by the same forces that hold the constellations.
Imagine us all together now—comets, supernovas,
your anger, my fear, and all those countless suns.
When Donavan Plays Classical Guitar
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged guitar, heart, music, opening, spaciousness on January 25, 2023| 2 Comments »
for Donavan Dailey
The heart perhaps thought it was open
until a moment of silence is followed by fingers
flying across nylon strings and then, with no warning,
the heart breaks open as a high alpine meadow in June,
splays wide as a snow-deep cirque midwinter,
is exposed as a woman sitting in the first row
with tears spilling down her cheeks.
The heart does not question why,
it simply opens, wider, lets the secret tango
move through its channels as only
a secret tango can do—dancing the heart
ever closer to the moment until, beating wild,
the heart forgets it could ever be anything
but spontaneous as jazz, honest as the man
being played by his guitar, expansive
as the silence that shimmers in the air
just after the last note rings.
Getting Out
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, nature, outdoors, spaciousness, weather on January 9, 2023| 11 Comments »
Sometimes there is inside me
a space so great
my body takes itself outside—
as if the house is too restricting,
as if this inner space
must be met by something vast as field,
boundless as sky, immeasurable as interstellar space.
If it is storming, so much the better.
If rain races down the face
and saturates the clothes, this is right.
If wind rips at my hair
or snow stings my cheeks
or lightning makes my hairs stand on end,
it only serves the aliveness.
If it is warm and still,
the inner space expands
into the warm and still.
There are feelings too immense for four walls,
too intense to be trapped in the skin,
sensations that rhyme with the cosmos,
moments when we start to grasp
what we are made of—
more energy than matter,
more nothing than something,
more everything than we ever dreamed.
Lumbricus terrestris
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, density, patience, porosity, spaciousness, worm on November 13, 2022| 15 Comments »
On a day when the world is weighty,
dark and dense with need,
I want to be the earthworm
that gives itself over to tunneling,
its every movement an act
of bringing spaciousness.
And when minutes feel crushed by urgency,
I want to meet the world wormlike,
which is to say grounded,
consistent, even slow.
No matter how desperate the situation,
the worm does not tunnel faster
nor burrow more.
It knows it can take decades
to build fine soil.
To whatever is compacted,
the worm offers its good worm work,
quietly bringing porosity
to what is trodden,compressed.
So often, in my rush to repair,
I end up exhausted.
Let my gift to the world be
my constancy, a devotion to openness,
my willingness to be with what is.
Let my gift to myself be patience
as I tend what is dense and dark.
Three Poems in ONE ART: Spaciousness in Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, ONE ART, spaciousness on September 11, 2022| 4 Comments »
How might openness, connection and compassion grow from grief? That’s what I explore in three poems published today in the wonderful ONE ART: a journal of poetry. In addition to our country’s history with 9/11, it would have been my son Finn’s 18th birthday today. For all who are grieving, my heart opens to yours. May we find spaciousness in our hearts for ourselves and each other.
After a Year of Grieving
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, spaciousness, time on August 30, 2022| 14 Comments »
Not that the sorrow became smaller.
Not that I stashed it away.
Not that I moved through it.
More as if a spaciousness grew,
as if the lens of life had been zoomed in tight
and slowly, slowly it widened.
Or as if I’d been cupping my hands
around something precious
and finally I trusted I could open my hands
and that precious thing would not fly away—
or perhaps it would, and I would still be fine.
All I know is today, I feel it,
not only the sorrow, but also
an inner vastness, a capaciousness,
an ability to breathe, to be opened,
as if my own back has turned
into a window. As if my heart
has become clear sky.