garden metaphor exhausted

5 May

I’m letting the root rot open to the air.

holding the shovel at bay,

not ready (yet) for the tender hug

of mulch.

Dirt under the fingernails for days.

The smallest of shifts felt

while I trace a line

between self-indulgence, fertilizer,

and truthful, detached seeing-

walking the rows at sunrise.

 

The birds’ songs and chirps

an invitation to now

to breath

to exposure of even the slightest

inkling of maladjustment,

browning leaves

wilting old growth –

(loved

even so

on her way out).

Meeting needs

as they arise

in the garden outside

and the garden within

is enough.

The world is allowed to die back,

so paradise (undergrowth) can be exposed.

 

 

too too much (or as my daughter says, extra)

13 Apr

In days of distancing,

my body still

leans in.

Even though the space

is not breached,

I bridge the gap.

Forgive me

as I wonder

about you

at the edge of your shell,

counting the rings,

rolling you over,

tapping your belly

with a stick.

It is no use to tone it down;

the desire is too strong in

the ease of shared moments

while this body

at this time

today, every cell tingling alive-

breathing easy!

For us all.

My reach is forming still

in the field where we meet

beyond any possible harm

except love, that destroyer,

uncompromised

by any contagion.

Bless my forward heart

and join me as soon as you are able;

I’ll still be here,

grinning like the fool,

waiting–ready lava

here to there

magma joy joining us.

Found we are in sameness

recognized

amplified

into motion

in these hands.

Clarity on the Mission of this Seedling

29 Mar

Oh learning,

may it never end;

how could it?

There is a sudden clarity this morning,

that I was made to confuse the most literal

beauties that god created.

It is very very good

to give creative writing assignments

with vague directions

to STEM students.

My clarifying emails

only confuse them further

because with good reason

they try to check the temperature

of the water

before jumping in the deep end,

unlike me, who flings myself

into confusing mystery

before the instructions are done.

We have so much to offer each other!

Love me in my frustration

when I have to start over

after leaping too soon.

Also love us

who shiver at the threshold

of just give it a go, rolling our eyes.

Together we fill the color wheel

meeting where somehow

purple bleeds into red.

The Sweetness of Invisible Comfort

17 Feb

longing is a secret door

8 Feb

We only need to long

from our lower bellies

and our furnace hearts,

not from the jumpled frenzy of our thoughts.

Each moment

is the longing for breath,

and blood in veins

to carry what the breath brought in –

to keep us alive to long some more.

However, we are thinking animals

who have wallpapered over desire

with complex patterns.

We’ve forgotten where

impulse

comes from.

At the bottom of all complexity,

we can codify.

Tell me, is this list accurate?

Humans desire:

  1. to keep on breathing
  2. to pleasure the flesh
  3. to distract from the horror that comes from knowing we will die
  4. to keep on breathing

However,

breath will end; it will.

(enormous, this!)

Then and only then,

desiring the air of another realm

will pull us out of this life —

and though I can not prove anything to you,

I practice breathing and ending breath both;

for when my moment comes,  I desire ease.

I imagine our work on this larger breath can be gifted

to whomever needs it ~ when.

Use it with my blessing,

for I love you

in this breath

we share.

now that my tongue knows no blue

5 Feb

a salty song

around my shoulders

wraps me in a harmony

of thirds.

Love like the wind

needs no introduction,

no permission from my parents

to bow on a knee

with a ring.

I’m sniffing yellow

bursts of instant knowing.

I can be entered by the sun

in penetrating ways –

the passing through of each photon

registers on my richter spine

of sway – I offer my belly for a rub.

Hear this felt truth —  I know no bounds.

What enters me

is entered by me

as it passes on,

an exchange without end.

Ever echoes the fervored beat

I dance

eternity

for now

a textured shadow on my retina

curve

later thinning out on the curve

of expansion

among other all-

perceiving BEings

returning

to our agreed

upon spot

no one

need know

but love.

 

 

somewhere along the way

1 Feb

instead of keeping on

with the human interaction experiment,

I started saying no

and dropping out of the game.

It was so gradual,

I didn’t notice when self-care

turned into hiding.

Separate became a theme song,

playing on repeat

on the radio in my head.

Prone felt better than upright,

cozy felt better than cold,

alone felt better than awkward,

and predictable became a slow slide.

The blood began to thicken.

I told myself that I was refusing

to be food for the energy suckers.

What’s new?

I’m ankle deep at the surf’s edge

where

the water is cold,

the air is worse,

but the alternative is only for the bears,

and only in one season.

Spring seasons return,

and probably will again,

but I won’t wait

for it to come to me.

Motion is required

for the body,

but more so, for the mysterious heart,

which can’t be met

until I show up.

 

 

 

Backsliding into the Rave Party of Mercy

26 Jan

There were years of grace, so much so, that I couldn’t imagine that walking in the world without this flow was possible anymore. Grace seemed to begin flooding into my moments when I walked out of my old life with my daughters in tow, and set out to make life from scratch. While those years of trying to make ends meet, burning my fuels to EMPTY most days, scrambling to meet needs while every next remained uncertain were so challenging, there was a background air of abundance, love, and support in the unseen forces that exist just behind a veil of the material. I was gifted guides and loves some steps ahead who cheered me on and reminded me of the larger view. Through all these years, I longed to create more certainty and stability in the seen world, but while the scramble was on, grace and trust seemed to ease the way and light the path. Grace period!

Fast forward to the wider expanse of today, with kids launched for the most part, and financial burdens eased a bit, I have become aware that identification with the smaller self has crept back  – in hindsight – in small increments, so slowly as to be unnoticed. In the past month, I have been shown and I see the energetic dissonance that had taken hold. The other side of grace perhaps is the way reminders come in, incrementally as well, to say, “Hey, you! It is going to get stranger and more painful until you look up and see – you are back in Kansas again, playing out old stories. Wake up!”  I have been getting grace’s kicks in the pants 🙂

Thank you grace, who knows how to take us and shake us for our own good. I think that when the space that I had sought for years finally arrived, the oldest wounds and defenses, that finally had room for examination, arrived center stage. People do all sorts of things at this point, it seems, to avoid sitting, listening, really looking truthfully at the deepest rooted identification with the small, hopeless self. Have a baby, get a dog, jump into an ill-conceived romance, begin a time-consuming hobby – everything called to me, well mostly, but at least not a baby! BUT what is on the table instead, if I am brave,  is the uncomfortable re-boot of seeing, allowing space for clearing out old conditioning, patterns, protections, pretense. Grace gave me a taste of what’s possible, and slipping back gave me a whopping, and grace rolled up her sleeves to help me with the clean-out.

It strikes me that the most private and complex experiences that we have as humans occur with very few knowing anything about them at all. It isn’t pride or saving face, mostly, that keeps so much of the truest twists and turns of the human journey private. I think it is our inability to leave a trace at all of the subtlety of the way life goes down and grace arrives. Each tiny moment provides such voluminous information-feedback internally and externally-that writing, speaking, dancing, painting, singing- all our tools- do not have enough space for the real deal of every moment. Every story is watered-down and biased – and we can only reveal so much without yelling soliloquies from our cardboard houses in the alleys of main human thoroughfares to no one but rushers-by.

There can be no real bread crumb trail for how each soul goes from blindness and suffering to grace filled truthful awareness. The lightbulb goes off, the alarm, and the work ahead is clear. Grace enters. She fills the stage. There is no way to explain. Someone holds up a flower, another one smiles – and the transmission is complete, while someone else fumbles the ball and lets the whole team down, never able to explain what went wrong. Grace is here too, in the fumble and disgrace, from a later view, as it all plays out; failing was just right in order to see what was/is always real.

I assumed that when shifts occurred from the grace period on, conversations could be had. I assumed one could touch base, get feedback, check-in. But the mirrors are often perplexing when we are being guided to look at our blindspots, our conundrums, our hopeless-seeming patterns. Sometimes all we can reach is the heartbeat sound in our own ears from our own blood pumping and the gracious silence of distant, firm love.

It seems an important balance in the flow of grace that I learn again how to flip the switch on identification without any condemnation of the self that forgot. In an instant, the confusion can be seen and laughter is appropriate for the elephant wearing a tutu, crouched in the corner. The grace of self-love here is startling because it is watered with the salt of sorrow and purity of forgiveness. There is a certain inevitability, too, of the fall from grace. It was felt coming on for months, yet no strong-armed resistance could keep the shift away.

From here is remembered the years of largesse,  in-and-outward love. The pathway is marked, the memory beckons from the future, and the stepless steps appear in the deepest stopping, listening, shoulders down, breathing into the forgotten furnace within; astounding how the consistent, loving, and distant sun burns within each of us unseen until we are ready, again. Grace, the final executioner bearing our last meal, whistling down dark corridors to our self-created cells. Freedom, a whiff of salty water in the distance, then suddenly a flood. Let’s get to the dance party again as we allow ourselves to be washed back into the ocean rave, going on all of our nights and days. We’ve got the wristband to enter already!

glowing on

24 Jan

 

Joy arrives in the smallest corners

without a script to find it.

Think a bird tilting its head to you in curiosity,

a cat curled up in your pine straw, allowing you close,

a deer pausing mid-munch to size you up

before bounding its fluff tail bum deeper into the woods.

Agenda toward joy can look alright to start with

but it soon becomes a grocery store cake in the mouth,

leaving you wondering how to spit it out with grace.

Grasping at joy is revolting, a fake laugh, an insinuation,

a glomping on – vicarious to the actual fleeting glimpses

we are gifted without neediness.

Don’t grab the kitty by the tail,

try not to join in when you haven’t heard the joke,

allow your own joy to arrive outside the attainment of others,

without needing to announce it to the imagined view of the world.

The original intention that you came here with

is still flickering – and it will not go out until you are gone,

even if you are in jail, or cast out, or inebriated

on the most common drugs of: figuring things out,

escaping your pain, making yourself important,

making yourself small, just

getting through the day, busy, busy, busy…

you know them all.

Even here, joy still visits, and fans your fractal candle.

Thank God, it is one of those trick candles, so blow away,

test it out; it will be here as long as you – waiting to light you

from within – and your inferno will be all your own.

My bonfire on a distant hill

connects the dots toward yours,

making the view overhead of all these fires a truer map

of who is down here,

remembering joy,

no matter where.

 

 

good kind of paradox

20 Jan

life goes by so incredibly fast,

and still there is no hurry.

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