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Posts Tagged ‘tree’

At the Center of the Garden

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on May 2, 2026| Leave a Comment »


 
 
When no one
is looking
she touches
the wound
that hides
beneath
her smile
where the scion
of acceptance
was grafted 
to her rootstock
of stubbornness.
Most people
don’t notice
the scar,
focused as they are
on the fruit,
but she 
remembers
the cut, 
the tissue exposed.
How tenderly
she traces
that place
where the union
was formed. 
Since the wounding,
her fruits 
have become 
vibrant, complex, 
so sharp, even tart, 
and so sweet.
 

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Almost Effortless

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on January 2, 2026| 4 Comments »


 

A humble contentment.
Because blue green spruce
by the creek bed.
Because ancient red
of sandstone cliffs.
This almost forgettable moment
not forgotten.
This small seeing.
This ease in being, unearned.
Because the tips of the spruce
are more silver, softer.
Because afternoon mist
somehow mingles it all.
Because sometimes when I try,
I cannot feel the connection.
This moment when trust is.
This sinking of my foot
into slick, wet earth.
This small thing.
This everything.

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The Layers

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 6, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
Furrowed and runnelled and rough,
the gnarled bark of this old cottonwood.
The dead thickness protects living tissue
from cold, from wind, from flames.
I, too, am older, but somehow survival
shows up for me the opposite.
Any shields I would build up as barriers—
life keeps peeling them away.
 
What thickens around me now are layers
of dynamic compassion—vital, vulnerable,
ever-growing. They do not protect
against wounds. Instead, they seem to say,
Be with what aches, my dear. Trusting
discomfort is the only way.

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Ginkgo in Downtown New York

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 24, 2025| 10 Comments »


 
 
They live a thousand years.
This, alone, is enough to
invite admiration. Robust.
Unfussy. They survive drought,
disease, pollution, pests.
They thrive in the midst of sirens
and car fumes, gridlocks and
garbage cans, concrete and horns.
 
And all across the city today,
a golden fluttering, a radiant trembling
on even the darkest streets. As if
to endure is not enough. As if we are
also here to burn bright, to shine, to offer
to the world every scrap of beauty we can.

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The Mirror

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 17, 2025| 12 Comments »

Overnight, every red leaf on the maple tree
has fallen to the ground and formed
an imperfect pool of red around
the solemn trunk, the dark bare limbs.
This is how it was the day you died.
In an instant, the tree of me went
from radiance to nakedness.
Impossible to hide.
Years later, I see what I couldn’t
see then—how beautiful to be that bare
when all that is lost is still so close,
when the limbs of the body
still remember the exact texture
and weight of what they once held.
How sacred that nakedness,
that opens us to the world.
I have grown so many new leaves.
That sacredness has never left.

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Enter Here

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on August 25, 2025| 4 Comments »

 
 
At the same time
a tree grows
in two directions,
toward darkness,
toward light.
Come, look through
the door of the heart.
Do you see how you,
too, are made of roots
and leaves?
The door opens and opens.
Do you see how you,
too, are a tree?

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Permanent

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »

 
 
The way beetles 
have carved their way
into the bark of the pine, 
that is the way you carved
your life into my life.
Beneath my skin
where no one can see,
there, every surface of me
is marked by your life,
the ways you burrowed
into everything I thought
I knew and rewrote
me into questions.
I admit I cannot read
the markings, though
I have tried.
Perhaps it is enough
to know this is true—
I’ve been forever changed
by the story of you.

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Evergreen

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 12, 2025| 8 Comments »


Skiing up the railroad grade
we pause to catch our breath
and from somewhere in the woods
a tree speaks to us in a spruce language
we can’t interpret,
and I am again a young girl
at the edge of the forest,
believing I understand the trees,
the way they call to me,
primal and true.
How did I ever forget?

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Impossible Task

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , 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.

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When It Looks Like the End

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 1, 2024| 11 Comments »

            for Stumpy, and maybe for you
 
 
To survive. To not only survive,
but to bring joy. To bloom despite
our own hollowing.
 
To bloom despite the erosion
of the world in which we grew.
I speak of a cherry tree, but
 
I also, perhaps, speak of you—
how you have made of your life
not just a stump, but a story.
 
How in hostile conditions,
despite brackish odds,
you’ve found the drive to grow.
 
How your words and your actions,
like cuttings, might take on a life
of their own—a legacy
 
of resilience that finds a home
in the soil of the lives still here.
In this way, you continue
 
to flourish and be known.
In this way you are not here
and ever here. Gone
 
and never gone. In this way
one life is a blossom that disappears
and returns on a branch not its own.
 
None of us live forever.
Still the chance to give the best of ourselves
away. This is how we go on.
 
for more information about Stumpy, the beloved cherry tree, visit here

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