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Posts Tagged ‘winter’

Walking at Night after the First Big Snow

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »


 
 
I want to live
my life like
a night made
bright by
moonlight
and snow—
there is
nothing I can
hold onto,
nothing I can
even touch, but
there is no
doubt how real
the light is,
no denying how
that faraway
light reflects
to hold me.

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Why I Go Nordic Skiing in the Woods

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on February 2, 2025| 4 Comments »


 
 
Because the world.
And then, with one step,
I slide into snow-mind
in which I am glide,
sun-bright and crystalline,
field-vast and drift-found,
a boundaryless being
of sparkling immensity
moving inside a glittering realm,
and whoever else I might be
in the small world of rooms
and stoplights and
screens and keys is not lost
exactly, but is too little here
to not see beyond as I become
soft meadow, receiver
of birdsong, inhaler
of evergreen, an ecstatic
point in infinite space
sliding from grace
to ever expanding grace.

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And Then, All at Once, Song

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 18, 2025| 8 Comments »




in the barren cottonwood tree
dozens of birds, all of them still,
as if, like me, they are enthralled
doubtful they could ever improve
on all this glorious silence

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One Night Before Christmas

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 24, 2024| 1 Comment »


 
 
ornaments for the galaxy
between bare cottonwood branches
hung by what great hand, the stars

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How Things Change

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 25, 2024| 10 Comments »


 
 
Between when the hummingbirds come
and when too soon they leave,
we sit in the warm dusk and watch
as broadtails and black chins dart
and dive, defend and chase—
the feeder a loud, competitive zone
where small feathered bodies block
and jostle, crowd and race—
almost impossible to imagine
five months back when this deck
was a still, chilly silent place.
That’s how it is with transformation.
The first thing that must go is the self
who doesn’t believe it can happen.

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Amidst the Cold of Winter

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 23, 2024| 12 Comments »

 
There was that winter day when the ice floe
had cracked the river ice into giant slabs
thick as my open hand, tall as a child.
Our family gathered on the river bank
and played with the fractured chunks to make
sculptures—ice huts and ice caves and
a long ice wall that curved and snaked
through the snow along the river’s edge
like the spine of a giant stegosaurus,
jagged and upright. It’s never happened
again. The ice slabs always freeze together  
or crush into bits, but that night,
we went out with dozens of candles
and lit the ice structures from within.
And the glow then, the gold that blazed
through the ice, was the kind of luminous
magic that winter seldom knows. What
was shattered and sharp, heavy and cold,
became radiance, brilliance, a visible hope
I didn’t yet know I would need, some proof
of what might transpire in the winter
of the heart—how broken and frigid,
it still might become a means
to gather beauty, to amplify the light.

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Growing Trust

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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.

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From Where, This Inner Spring?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 21, 2024| 14 Comments »

Midwinter, the snow on the roof is melting.
Not just a trickle, but a steady pour.
Inside, I feel it, too, a thawing,
a surprising liquescence
as stories about myself
I thought were true
become less solid, less icy,
more current, more flow.
I didn’t even know I was frozen.
I didn’t know I’d created walls
until this unexpected inner spring
arrived out of season
and offered me a glimpse of freedom.
How vast a day is without those stories.
Was it always possible, this openness?
Perhaps we cannot know it
without first experiencing constriction.
Outside, it is melting,
though I know soon the cold will come again.
Inside me, it is melting,
a whole world of ice turning to rivulet.
I fall in love with the sound of melting.
Drip. Drip. Drip.

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Skiing into the Storm

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 8, 2024| 10 Comments »


I love the days when it feels right
not to turn from the storm
but to move deeper in,
when the body doesn’t shy
from the cold and wind,
when the smile arrives
as the storm magnifies
and a whoop rises from the lungs
like a fierce and hardy bird.
What is it in us that feels more alive
in these moments?  
Is it the part that rhymes
with instability,
the untamable part
that knows chaos, too,
is holy? And the gusts
swirl and the chill bites
and the smile
incredibly widens.

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Letter to Myself in the Future

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 11, 2023| 6 Comments »

I want to give you this quiet hour
spent outside in the winter sun,
the slipknot of the breeze almost not there,
the sky an incandescent blue,
the river a murmur in its growing ice,
the dried grass barely a rustle.
How warm it is, even midwinter.
What I most want to give you
is not this hour, but the memory
of how you said yes to it,
how you set aside the phone,
how you turned off the screen,
how you let the book stay on the shelf
and did not touch the piano keys.
Remember sweetheart, how it felt
to slip between the cracks of the day
right into the fullness of being,
how you were so welcomed
by the air, by the light.
You could do it again,
slide out of your self.
Become wind.
Become the light.

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