The whole time I walk in Spring snow and wind
I am prompted by a lovely man’s voice
to repeat many phrases I’ll need in Spanish.
I learn, for instance, to ask how many blocks
I must walk to get to the bank, only to learn
it is closed on holidays but will open
the day after tomorrow. I learn
how to ask if you are good at playing tennis
and insist you are better at playing than I am
(which is certainly true). I learn to say Wednesday
is impossible, but perhaps we can play tennis
Thursday morning because it is a holiday
and we do not need to go to the office.
And, in the midst of learning how to talk about
what our kids are studying in the university,
the lovely man teaches me to say, Es mejor
terminar una cosa antes de comenzar otra—
and I understand I am like the recalcitrant
child in the Spanish lesson, starting out
to be a musician and then deciding to be
an engineer. So often I do not end something
before beginning another. It is not so easy
in this life to draw clear lines. At least
not for me. It seems I am always saying yes
to something new while in the midst
of something else. Like the fact I’m learning Spanish
while still finishing the introduction and end notes
for my next book. Like planning my garden
while still walking in snow. Like loving this world
while I am in the midst of deep grief.
I don’t know how to say in Spanish
there are so many ways to do it right, this life.
What doesn’t live on in matter or in memory?
Doesn’t everything tendril out to touch every other thing?
Haven’t they proven long after a butterfly wing
is done flapping in China it will affect the weather here?
Is anything ever really finished, I wonder,
as lesson twenty five ends and in the snow
has become rain that even now is finding the roots
of the spruce. And all I see as I look around now
are more and more beginnings.
Posts Tagged ‘spring’
Spanish 2, Lessons 23, 24, 25
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beginnings, endings, learning, Spanish, spring on March 31, 2024| 11 Comments »
Growing Trust
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, silence, spring, trust, winter on March 29, 2024| 2 Comments »
Inside this silence
with its hum of life
and shush of wind
is another silence,
a pure silence
I have never heard
but trust is here—
the foundation
of all sound—
just as I trust that
inside my imperfect
love with its pride
and its pain is another
love—a pure and
generous love.
Sometimes when
the voices of hate
in and around me
are loudest, I feel
my understanding
of what trust is adjust—
the way trees in winter
continually adapt to keep
their vital cells alive,
the way animals deep
in the dark of the ocean
keep evolving
to make their own light.
Springing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged melting, rabbit, spring on March 28, 2024| 16 Comments »
I know the rabbits were here
because the snow is melted
where their bodies have been,
small patches of green grass
in a vast field of white.
When winter is gone, their tracks
will again be invisible,
leaving no way to know when
the rabbits have visited our home.
I marvel at how even an absence
can become precious when we
are aware of what is gone.
Like when I find signs
my boy was here. Just today
I passed a narrow smiley face
on a cottonwood trunk where
he once was with a can of blue
spray pain. Here, a dent
in the wall where his anger
has been. Here, a hole in my life
where his life has been.
Here, the place where
the ache is melting and beneath
the ache more green
than I would have ever dreamed.
On the Night I Learn (Again) We Are Doomed
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged doom, falling in love with the world, lilac, spring on May 30, 2023| 18 Comments »
And if it isn’t deep sea mining
it is drought, and if not drought,
it will be mobs incited by memes,
and if it’s not mobs it will be
our own fear. And
the lilacs that have been here
for a hundred years are blooming
more beautifully tonight
than I have ever seen them,
every branch heavy
with sweet purple blooms.
It is all falling apart, love.
That’s what the river sings
as it carves the canyon,
as it breaks down the boulders,
as it carries the detritus, the logs.
Just tonight I heard an estimated
eighty years left for humanity.
Still, tonight the scent of lilacs
meets us with faithful beauty
and an old song of spring
rises on the lips.
How is it, despite the trouble,
I feel so much love
for this disappearing world,
so much love for this doomed race
as I begin to sing.
Yin
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, quiet, receptivity, spring, still, yoga on May 21, 2023| 13 Comments »
after an hour of yoga with Erika Moss
Curled on the earth
like a small animal,
I bury my nose in the grass
and breathe in the surprising sweetness
of spring green and purple bloom
and soil still damp from last night’s rain,
and though my eyes are closed
the desert sun enters anyway,
infusing my inner world
with radiance, with red.
There are so many ways
I work to hold myself up,
but in this soft moment,
I notice how nothing
is asked of me and how,
when I am still,
the world I might ignore
invites itself in.
There is such a thing,
says my friend,
as the back of the heart.
It is, she says, like the dark side
of the moon.
I honor that dark side,
that quiet, shadowy terrain
that is no less necessary,
no less true for being dim.
There will be a time to unfurl,
to open, to shine, to rise,
but in this charmed interval,
I sink deeper, deeper
into what is cool,
what is quiet,
what is beyond my knowing.
The interval builds a nest around me.
I do nothing and feel
how I am held.
Springing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birds, geese, innocence, joy, spring on May 17, 2023| 18 Comments »
All fluff and down,
the goslings bumble
in the damp green grass
and whatever was hard
in me softens and whatever
was clenched becomes loose
and I give in to the unruly joy
of watching baby geese
just learning to move.
How many other small moments
of triumph do I miss?
Oh heart, remember this.
All of It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blossom, paradox, scent, spring, vulnerability on May 15, 2023| 5 Comments »
Broken,
bare-hearted
naked in the catastrophe,
I smell it,
the sweet perfume
of apricot blossoms
wafting across
the leafless world.
Traveling to Scandinavia in Spring
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Scandinavia, spring, travel, winter on April 17, 2023| 3 Comments »
After the long winter,
we choose to travel north,
choose to move deeper into winter
to wander fjords and cobblestones.
We choose again the gray,
the ice, the snow, the cold.
Now I know there is something freeing
about choosing to explore
what isn’t easy.
There’s release, somehow,
in being on the path less warm
when it’s a path
I feel I’ve selected.
So I don again the coat,
the hat, the down.
I wander the streets
with their chill winds
and think, I want to be here.
And it’s true.
There is joy then,
in the bite, though some days
it goes deep.
Joy in being so present
in winter I forget
I could choose something else.
Syntax Lesson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged noun, peace, spring, syntax, verb on June 11, 2022| 6 Comments »
Spring is a verb.
—Jack Mueller
Ache can verb
and curve can verb
and riot and burn
and break can verb.
We face. We care.
We scheme and swing.
We charm and fool
and do the dream.
We war. We praise.
We gun and raise.
We blur ourselves
into a busy haze.
Even hope can verb.
So does skin. And kiss.
We verbify
delight and wish.
But peace is a noun
that seldom swerves
into the class
of action verbs.
Peace just is—
an unchanging thing
that bids us not
do anything.
But who can resist
the spring?
Almond Blossom
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bloom, blossom, ekphrasis, hope, Kayleen Asbo, spring, Van Gogh on May 28, 2022| 6 Comments »
inspired by Almond Blossom by Vincent van Gogh and music by Kayleen Asbo by the same name
I want to hang a painting
of almond blossoms
above your bed
so when you wake
the first thing you see
are delicate white petals
and a sky a thousand shades of blue.
I want you to wake every morning
into an ever-emerging sense of spring—
wake into sunshine,
wake to a world of splendor
and extravagant blossoming.
Of course, the fall.
Of course, the struggle.
Of course, the difficult days.
And of course, the almond blossoms,
painted in creams, pinks and greens
each one an insistent grace note
that lingers beyond its season,
promising something improbable
and utterly necessary,
like ever-blooming beauty,
like the light and airy perfume of hope.