Today
more fen
than stream,
I draw
my source
from depths
unseen.
No need
to move,
how still,
how clear
am
I.
Posts Tagged ‘stillness’
After Years of Rushing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged clarity, fen, river, stillness on August 9, 2026| 2 Comments »
Moment
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bee, clover, connection, moment, movement, paradox, stillness on June 17, 2026| 7 Comments »
The woman sits on the bench
in the field of clover and watches
the bumblebees clamber
from flower to flower. What goes on
goes on all around her. Something
inside her is infinitely still.
It invites her to enter.
In this moment,
everything is door.
She is both clover and bee,
both air and wings.
She is what is still
and all that is moving.
Is one who is sung
and one who sings.
Self-Portrait as Cat Pillow
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged achievement, cat, comfort, stillness on February 15, 2026| 9 Comments »
Each time the cat leaps up
onto the bed, she makes
a small bright sound.
I love this sound. Love knowing
that soon her warm weight
will curl into or on top of my belly.
It’s addictive as the chime
of an incoming text.
Seductive as short sleeves
and the firm curve of biceps.
My greatest achievement—
more prized than title or degree—
is when my cat finds me
worthy of being her resting place.
I soften then. Allow. I thrive.
Become creature. Become
purr-being. Trust-cushion.
A reverent stillness. I become
one who will still for love.
After Reaching for You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, grief, memory, stillness on December 20, 2025| 6 Comments »
for Finn
There was a list. We were laughing.
This is all I remember as first light
enters the windows, slips
somehow through closed lids.
I keep my eyes closed in hopes
that if I am still enough I can grasp
an image tendril of the dream
and tug it closer.
For hours, it doesn’t work.
When I stop reaching, what is here
are real memories of you—your
head bent over the table doing math,
how jealous you were of your sister’s
snowman stuffy, the way your feet hung
over the end of almost every bed.
Is it true all I had to do was stop reaching
for the dream so that whole skeins
of memories could unravel and wrap
me in their long, faithful strands?
Is it true being still is now the best
way I can hold you? I am still.
Somehow in the softening, I don’t feel
your hand here in my open hand, but I do.
Six Weeks After I Break My Foot
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ache, pain, stillness, teaching on May 24, 2025| 2 Comments »
It still hurts. Not like it did at first,
of course. But still. One slight change
in angle can cause a sharp zing
that brings me to stillness.
Perhaps this is the day when
I don’t resent the pain.
Perhaps this is the day
I embrace how pain belongs
to this life as much as joy,
I imagine pain is like the strict
third-grade teacher I didn’t
love at the time, but years later,
I thank for holding a line.
If there is a way to appreciate struggle
in this very moment and not wait
for the future when I see the struggle
has been good for me, well, I don’t
yet understand it. But I do know
that stillness has never come so easily
to me as it does today when, again,
I feel the ache and discover just how
lovely it is to sit here, to not move an inch,
to watch the green swallows as they fly.
Inner Acreage
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged inner world, intention, stillness on December 20, 2024| 3 Comments »
There are caves there where
I can rest without light
and radiant meadows
with room to expand
in every direction
They’re not real, of course.
Nor is the wasteland.
The glorious abyss.
Which is to say nothing
could be more real
than these inner landscapes
that always receive me,
whether I’m on a bus
or in line at the market
or lying in bed before dawn.
Sometimes I forget
the inner world is there. I start
believing only in the outer world.
How exhausting life is then.
But when I remember
to live through the gate
of intention, when I still,
it’s as if I am being breathed,
being lived. I’m out of the way.
Then everything is the way.
It may not always be pleasant.
It’s always exactly as it is.
There are no words there,
but look at me, trying anyway
to explain this nothing to do
and nowhere to go
and nothing to experience
which is everything.
I’m like a traveler trying to take
a dozen photos to represent
a whole country, only to discover
they’re all blank.
Like a child in a fairy tale
trying to leave a trail to get back,
only to have the crumbs
disappear.
Inner Dance
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, dance, paradox, stillness on October 26, 2024| 8 Comments »
Dancing inside me is the one
who has spent her whole life dancing,
the one who leaps up
the moment the music begins
and starts to twirl and leap
and give herself over to moving
in any way her feet
and arms and shoulders and spine
want to move. Sometimes
she needs no music at all,
just moves for the wild joy of moving.
She is just starting to notice
the other woman inside,
the one who looks more
as if she’s standing still.
The one who whose movements rhyme
with limestone, whose eyes are clear
as deep mountain lakes.
Only recently has she
begun to see
this, too, is
dancing.
For When I’m Rushing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged busy-ness, peace, stillness, sunflower on September 8, 2024| 5 Comments »
Amidst the sunflowers
in full flagrant flowering,
I, too, begin to sprout
fat orange petals
and feel my head heavy
with growing seeds.
My mind becomes sun-drunk
and I gold and I spiral.
This is why you might see me
standing still in the garden
amongst the thick stalks,
though there is much to do.
Some animals freeze
as an instinct to survive,
and that may be true of me, too,
but I am not still out of fear.
Stillness saves me
not because I hide,
but because peace
seems to find me more
easily then and the body
unclenches and becomes
a blooming thing that lives
for the sake of blooming
right here where it’s planted.
Impossible Task
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged stillness, tree on July 21, 2024| 8 Comments »
For two hours this morning
I practiced being a tree.
Sat in one place in the sun
and did not move. Offered
shade to ground below.
Did not speak. Did not plan.
And though no bird chose
to nest in my lap, was not
averse to such nesting.
Imagined eating light.
To anyone else, it looked
like a woman sitting on
a wooden chair. Need
to keep practicing before
even coming close to
the proficiency of that
spindly crooked spruce
over there.
The Day You Took My Picture Was the Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being with, happiness, pond, stillness on March 9, 2024| 7 Comments »
I sat by the pond and watched
the blue dragonflies land
on slender green reeds.
And the sun was warm and
the air was still as I was still,
which is to say the air pulsed
with aliveness and so did I.
If someone could see the picture
from that day, they might think
I was sad. No slip of a smile
touches my lips. My glance
is far off, unfocused.
But I was in a place beyond
happiness, a place of being with,
a place that asks nothing of me
except that I forget everything
but sitting beside the pond
and marveling at blue dragonflies
as they weave and land,
the reeds so slender, so green.
Still Changing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, grief, move, stillness, story on December 19, 2023| 7 Comments »
How seldom he was still,
more humaning than human,
more aliving than alive.
Mostly he was running
or jumping or lunging.
Mostly he was spinning
or flopping or dodging.
Even as he sat,
which he seldom did,
his leg was pumping,
his fingers fidgeting.
But there were times,
like when we snuggled on the couch
to read books,
when his whole body quieted
as if to better listen
to the story,
as if he was captive
to the characters’ struggles,
every cell of him rapt
to know what came next.
Now I see how active
a stillness can be,
how far he was moved
when he was motionless,
how even now as I sit here
still as his tombstone,
I am spellbound
by the still changing story
of his life—
how because I am still
all of me is moved,
until I’m a new woman
sitting in the same place.
Sitting Quietly in the Night for Twenty Minutes while Nothing Happens
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, nothing, quiet, sign, stillness on September 11, 2023| 8 Comments »
Perhaps I wanted a sign—
an owl call. A meteor.
The brush of an invisible hand.
Instead, I got a sky full of stars
and an ear full of riversong
and the certainty that no matter
what happens or does not happen
in the world outside of me,
there is always, inside me,
a love that grows and changes.
Is it strange now, I am grateful
for nothing—the nothing
that teaches me
the most important thing of all.
Returning to Stillness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged earth, paradox, perspective, stillness on July 17, 2023| 16 Comments »
I can’t unnotice this fist
that has grabbed my chest
and squeezes it hard, this prickly balloon
that seems to have blown itself up
in my belly. To be still today
is to notice that so much inside me
is writhing, squirming, thrashing.
Hello discomfort. Hello agitation.
Hello wishing that stillness
could be more still.
Eyes closed, I watch myself
as I sit in the middle of the empty room,
sunlight stretching across the floor
in bright and angled shapes.
I zoom out and see the whole house.
Zoom out farther and see the yard, the trees.
Zoom out until I see our small town,
then a blur of green and brown,
then the familiar blue and green curve of the earth.
As it spins and orbits, the earth is anything but still,
and yet such spaciousness surrounds it.
Oh, sweet woman sitting still in your room
with your hand on your heart
and a world of thrust and upheaval
spinning inside you,
right now, it’s like this.
You’re being moved. You’re still.
It’s like this.
*
Um, yeah … so if you read yesterday’s poem, I have to laugh… yesterday being still felt so easy, so simple, so open, so, well yummy. And then today??? Oh friends. This is one of the great gifts of poetry–every day the chance to notice what is here. And every day, the same thing feels so new.
On my daily program “The Poetic Path,” I use the tag “Seeing the same world in a new way … with poems.” If you haven’t checked out this other daily offering, perhaps consider it. It’s an app for your phone, found on the Ritual Wellbeing app. Unlike the daily poems, i curate them … and it’s a chance to hear the poems aloud. I always talk a little about where they came from and how they were written, then read the poem again, and then offer an optional writing/thinking prompt for you. There is a monthly or annual fee for Ritual–and there are MANY other programs available on it. You can try it out for free. If you’re interested, from your phone visit HERE.
On a Day When Stillness Seems Possible
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged contentment, ease, stillness on July 16, 2023| 6 Comments »
and the river is a long white stroke
of roiling and continuous surge,
and the grass, gone to seed,
wavers in the wind, then stills,
wavers, then stills, and the swallows
spiral, the leaf shadows spangle
and the ants braid a path
across the stones.
But I rhyme today with the cottonwood trunks,
my own body unmoving in the breeze.
It feels good in this moment
to be more tree than cloud,
more silence than song.
So easily, the stillness opens me,
softens me. How simple, really,
to do nothing. How is it I so often resist?
If there is no in me now, I do not notice it.
Stillness has made a home in me
and there seems to be nothing
the stillness refuses. Come,
it seems to say. There is room here
for everything. It opens me wider.
The world rushes in.
In a Time of Much Doing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged busyness, pandemic, remembering, stillness, time on February 22, 2023| 8 Comments »
Teach us to sit still.
—T.S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday, Part 6”
How soon I seem to have forgotten
how to be still, how to not plan,
how to step out into the day
and let the world itself write
the story of how a morning becomes
an afternoon becomes a night
becomes a woman.
How soon I seem to have forgotten
the value of not doing,
the gift of unscheduling,
the blessing of dipping my toes into the stream
of no time, then wading in full body,
where I remember I am part of an infinite story
at the same time I relearn how fragile it is,
this life.
How soon I forgot I could change it all.
Even now, I could be still again.
I could choose silence.
Even now.
The Teacher I Never Could Have Wished For
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dance, grief, stillness, teacher on February 6, 2022| 6 Comments »
I am still learning how to dance with grief—
it leads me through strange sequences,
intricate steps I have yet to master.
Just as I think I have learned
what comes next, I stumble, I step
on my own feet, I trip, I fall. I never
ask myself if this is a dance I want to learn.
It’s the dance I’ve been invited to dance.
If asked, I might have said no. But
today, grief holds me tightly, as if
to keep me from falling. Then loosens
its grasp as I let myself be led.
I am a student in trust. And we glide,
and I’m spun, and sometimes
we just stand, this stillness
its own kind of dance
I am slow to learn.
All that Dances Through
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dance, grief, mirth, stillness on January 30, 2022| 6 Comments »
Though grief prefers a solemn shuffle
and mirth prefers to shimmy and skip,
they often come together
on the dance floor of the heart.
They’re not picky about the music.
Really, all they want from me
is a dance hall spacious enough
where there’s room for them both
at the same time—
a place where mirth can whirl
and grief can shamble.
When I’m small,
they push against the inner walls
and kick me in the ribs,
and they dance, and they dance.
I feel every step.
Is it true I can hold it all?
And I am what is still
as grief lumbers and mirth leaps.
And I am what is still here
long after the dancers leave.
Apricity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged miracle, presence, stillness, warmth, winter on January 22, 2022| 12 Comments »
The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Today the miracle is to sit
in the sunlit room and be
in the sunlit room,
to be here and only here,
here in the bountiful silence,
here in the shifting shadows,
here in the hands of midwinter,
not in this same room five years ago,
but now as the tulips
drop the soft curls of their petals
like lingering pink praise.
So seldom in these grief ridden days
do I feel a feeling so pure
as this peace that arrives
on the low-angled light
when I am quiet and still
and the world invites me
to show up for whatever
slim warmth there is, and
know it is enough.
So Many Ways to Do It Right
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being right, falling, path, stillness on March 13, 2021| 6 Comments »
This longing to get it right—
to not only find the right path
but to walk it with grace,
without stalling, without stumbling.
But the forest is dark and deep
and the paths are many—
and I fall, and in falling,
I stop.
So this is what it takes
to notice the beauty of being still,
to see how staying in place, too, is a path,
how falling, too, is a grace.
How much easier it is to walk now
when I trust any path I’m on is the right one,
even this one where I fall,
even this one when I don’t move at all.
One in the Center
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged stillness, wind on July 8, 2020| Leave a Comment »