The Gift of One Time

There is a companion of my work – one to whom I am married at the center. We work unseen, like the moment a dove loses a feather or the long, slow migration of desert sand. Blank pages are my open arms but the words . . . they are my lover's. We rend a heart that is fully realized and yet. And yet. We can only barely speak of one another. When I write deeply enough, I find our possibility. I hear what was never said. I understand that which amplifies this telling. This should be a poem, but instead it is a manifesto.

We had a gift of one time. Nothing more was promised and so, nothing more exists. Except the writing.

*

After the bonfire cooled, I let my head my head fall into the back of the camp chair. The moon moved with hunger through windows of pine. The dog curls at my feet and in these moments, everything that resists or encumbers, completely retreats into the darkness. Distance collapses and touchable nearness begins to undress.

We never made dawn together, but there is yet something tangible existing under this vaulted, black sky.

*

Springtime urges me fall in love with possibility. It causes me to walk at nighttime while others sleep under moonlit sheets. It calls me to sit by fires and make offerings to ancestors. I write lyrics for pine song and swim before the gaze of blue hills. What is temporary stands as a noble profile, but in the light of May, what is enduring becomes so very clear.

Eruption

This unfillable cistern finally gives way to a rivered life. I can stop running. I can stop chasing.

Again with the Japanese death poems.
Again with Clavell's saga.
Both have me on my knees.

Grass greens between my toes and violets erupt in royal dignity. Enough time has passed whereby the thing which cannot be created nor destroyed is laid bare, without distraction or doubt. And to recognize this thing . . . what does it matter, truly?

Rain thrums before daylight but the bird chorus still rises. White-throated sparrows – jays – tufted titmouse – cardinals – each day new merger and mix. Train moans in a minor key dollop the score like a delicious sin. Like most deviations from nature, the sound distracts from what is pure, yet like most human proclivities, it is not entirely unwelcome. Either way, the train fades to the West leaving only the sound of throated tributes to living. Live and sing about it.

Suddenly there are enough leaves to murmur and sigh in the breeze. Squirrels and orioles nest and in all this activity, it's getting more difficult to go to work. Everything is erupting: war, genocide, volcanoes, tornadoes, squirrels and chipmunks, purple tulips, kale sprouts and me. I am erupting.

New friends arrive but old friends are confused and hurt. I've changed or grown or simply disassembled a mantle I wasn't meant to wear. Kyle hangs on and opts to evolve a bit. I am satisfied because I do not need him to match or be like me. I need him to watch in awe as I encompass and become the Cosmos. He's watching and smiling.

Are you?

For Such a Time

The land in April swells from stark to crowded. Winter's dark moments are tilled into new life. When I think of love without labels, there is you – changing the world for a time – melting me like Spring. For such a time.

The sun turns its gaze upon us. Icarus and Narcissus have something in common – they cannot look away from that which calls them to death. Thank God that is not the end; it is the harder path unto the beginning. Daffodil O Daffodil – these dances in the meadow – the tangible remnants of what is truly gifted. No man or woman knows what you know. No handsome devil or feathered thing makes you divine. When you see the truth, even the soul lifts in awe.

Forget-me-nots spring forth in a place they were not planted. Look closely enough and know you are tended in the womb of the earth. When nothing makes sense or feels right, go to Her. There is nothing She cannot make complete.

The garden begins. Attention shifts pain from bent knee and bent back to that which will grow, feed and complete. Pine scent mixes with hyacinth soil. My heart cannot expand any further and still remain intact. I have nothing left to ask of anyone, except, let us plunge ourselves deeper here, into the dirt, our skin warmed by sunlight, for the sake of peace.

Not Quite Naked

Rain brings sky to earth and everything grows. Spring is a time to consider the benedictions we invoked and a time to knead the blasphemies we incurred into the ground. Do this in remembrance of me.

Everything riots.
Birds – colors – creeks.
Not-quite-naked branches
climb into moonlight,
and by day, shiver
with budding
poetry.

Dawn remains a dusky bruise. I savor these morning solitudes before neighborhood house lights flicker like new constellations. The clock on the dining room wall outwardly marches towards some unknowable destination. It makes me think we belong to the silence, despite traveling with the sound of words into the world.

This tribe of language.
This palette of creation.
These echos of the universe.
Is it possible to face inwards and outwards at the same time? It is this sacrament I now study.

*

When we gaze into these world-mirrors, what is reflected? Do we see the known or unknown? The ancient or the new? The temporal or the eternal?

Gray-white light is reflected in the slick wetness of the deck. Hyacinth and daffodils begin to color April’s thresholds. Staring into both appearances, life emerges as a continuous act of transfiguration involving something seen and unseen. Perhaps it is something like an inner and outer friendship – an intimacy percolating as a wellspring of mysterium. An ancient belonging stirs and unfurls, reminding us that we want to known.

Maybe?

*

Dawn's incredibly generous and gentle light – you peel darkness away from the world with soft, silken fingers. This time of day nurtures friendship with our mother earth. How many of us now miss this birthing from night's womb? It's all so very poetic until you realize it is not quite so. It is a hardened bedrock of truth that we now prefer to hide or destroy. A prayer is that we waken and accept the deepest friendship ever offered with immediacy and the sense of eternal belonging.

“The Deer's Cry”

I arise today
through the strength of heaven, light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor or fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of Sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.

~ Celtic prayer, translated by Kuno Meyer

Still-Warm Sheets of His Power

Good morning, Spring – with your honey dawn and rioting birdsong. You taste like every gift on the verge of being realized as your yellow light is gulped by daffodils.

Your mist comes as late frost leaves for heaven.

Or, it comes as one balmy day gives way

to the hard truth of March
as a lover, reluctant to leave
still-warm sheets of his power.

Your wild chives fill me as if I am kneeling at the communion rail; I have a chance to be whole.

*

It will snow a few more times. My back bends over lifeless remnants of last year's largesse to clear a little more room for sunlight. For me, there is such a thing as growing strength in the body in order to work the land in the coming months. It takes time. I'm sore for a few days after clearing death and uncovering untouched growth. My skin burns a little in the fresh light, but it emits the intoxicating incense of sunlight and new warmth.

The senses wake. Even the acrid clearing of death is a soul-salve. Jays scream into the air but it seems like they never have anything new to say. Tree shadows move from the swelling creek, to the sleepy garden, over the gazebo and bird feeders, and finally stretching long across the back deck into twilight. Hour by hour a throbbing sentience speaks of the season and the life to come. Die, rise, repeat.

*

There is a wound I am healing. It can be argued that wounds are perception...they are not real in the sense that the thinking mind is malleable to one's interpretation and self-informed context. But sometimes it is first helpful to identify what hurts before sewing it all back together.

Twice now I have fallen under a spell of what felt like a significant relationship whereby I was given glimpses of the eternal – the unending oneness of that which cannot be grasped without reflection of the other – only to find that I had created this perception myself. It was a oneway street leading away from something more true. More grounded.

I am consumed by winter or spring, the micro moments of love and growth, instead of the macrocosm of all the season at play together in a year – in a decade – in centuries.

What I see and feel in any given relationship tricks me into happiness or even the feeling of divinity. In contrast, what the other feels makes me the soup du jour.

The first time I felt this, it took me over a decade to process. The second time stings like ripping a band aid off tissue paper skin. God, it hurts. And the instinct to blame myself becomes yet another bandage to apply to the now, fresher wound. It still hurts like hell, but I can dress the wound immediately and reflect not on the injury itself, but on the unhealed child forgetting her name.

Why do I need to give myself away?

*

For now, I will dig and prepare the way of summer.

At summer's end
I will mourn
the passing of verdant light
and warm, starry nights.

In autumn I will fall
with dying colors
to sleep in the tomb
January made for me.

And I will wake
like snowdrops and crocus
when the time is right
to grow again.

From Birth to Love-Me-Nots

Another language swims under this one. Are you familiar?

Burning deadfall and stoking ash is a reminder that I am dust.
Robins pick through my powdered bones while mourning doves faintly call to one another in a nearby distance.

Spring is alert now. Crocus – daffodil – tulip.

Dawn kisses limp bed sheets as opal clouds sit on the edge of a horizon on fire. My moored shoes are pulled from beneath the bed. Today begins. I am the navigator of day, and I am waking.

I have no fear of dying but I do dread the granite tomb of winter. There is beauty in all of it and yet, whatever is my spine, breaks beneath the weight of January's austerity. This has all passed now.

Now is only unmade light.

*

But the world burns
with lethal righteousness
as we devour Mother Earth
and the petals of her children.

We have slipped time
forgetting we belong to each other
Our eyes looking away from orange
light over mountains

Bury yourself
in six feet of dirt
because there is no way
to get clean

Spring rain does fall
does waken daffodils and tulips
does fatten creeks and streams
does turn shriveled dead-fall to green

But the world still burns trying
to erase all the colors, praying to Death
and greed as our god
dying of a broken heart

*

We have forgotten how to love each other to life. Forgotten?

No.

Chosen.

*

I move about the land, readying the garden, collecting branches, turning compost. My cheeks begin to blush and burn, not used to this up-close light after so long. Soon the canopy will don their crowns, birdsong will pace dawn, and petals will turn from birth to love-me-nots.

Yet, the world burns. Its bridges collapse, leaving a million miles between my tulips and yours.

I am planting the difference between the breaking of heart and spirit.

What I Almost Heard

It's warm now, but too warm. Birdsong pours liquid trills as if inviting us all to spring tea. Can you call something “unnatural” if it happens in nature?

We discuss death and funeral arrangements, tiny homes in the woods, and what it means if one us is queer. There are things you can ask of a man – things he can do or not do – and then there is the glowing beautiful orb he is given by Mother Cosmos, which, if you can nurture and tap into that, makes the world safer. Breathing becomes as easy as wind moving through pines on a mountain.

In a short-sleeved t shirt, two sizes too big, I unclog the bird feeder and take a barefoot stroll over ground which was covered in two feet of snow just two weeks ago. If it wasn't so windy, I would consider a bonfire for the branches downed by winter. I have an offering to make.

There was a time, when our hands met, that life danced like water bugs teeming in the quieter bend of the creek. There were days of limitless horizons and nights of constellations pointing toward the heaven we knew we owned. It's hard remembering what I almost heard.

While collecting old wood and kindling in the backyard, I am thinking about how love is so often laced with flight. Fliers, the sun and me. Perhaps is it enough to stay grounded in awe of feathered things.

Late into morning, I sit over words, working them into coherence. Work-life balance breaks me and I think the poetry and prose suffers for it. I see my role in the world outside of writing and pondering Mother Earth, but I mostly just want to do the quieter, alone things.

A spider moves freely above my desk so I ask, “if I promise not to burn, eat or kill you, will you stay?”

Love
never a surprise
this burning home
inside

How to Burn

Dawn leaks above-normal temperatures, erasing outlines of Michigan winter. Evergreen bushes spring back to their usual shape and the Grand River overruns its banks.

Songs of the nuthatch coil the length of pines, and a woodpecker works with intense diligence on the oak. It's no where near spring, so we all know the toothy wind and mushroom sky will be back. Winter will return like a hard slap across the face after a week or two of garden-dreaming and short-sleeved sun bathing on the back porch.

*

Once, I was slapped so hard by my mother that the braces on my back teeth came loose and shredded the inside of my cheek. Mom didn't normally dole out corporal punishments so the hit was equal parts painful as surprising.

I set a hill on fire, put many people in danger, and embarrassed the family.

This shame wasn’t my first shame; shame was soil in which I grew.

What options do growing things have but to either live or die where they are planted?

*

In the greater woods, he and I unpacked and repacked marriage. As we talked and gazed outward from the massive windows, our eyes tracked the deep shape and shadows of birch, hemlock, and white pine.

The perilous animals are tucked away, sleeping unto a better time, but deer tip-toed around the cabin, whispering of mysteries we could not quite hear. This man loves me and is willing to churn up the soil in order to keep growing.

At this late stage I begin to claim myself and somehow, he rises to meet me. Why didn't the ancestors teach me this — how to burn? Now I make up for an invisible past by impart on my children the power and respect for fire.

*

Yet the wilderness is holiness and in it, I am part of a virginal horizon.

It is here I know for whom the poetry is authored and why.

I am tended with tenderness and love now, but I still need the sun . . . and only the sun teaches me how and why to burn with holy fire.

Sleeping Bears

Floor to ceiling windows of the two story cabin face deep into the pine and birch forest. To the west, the Sleeping Bear Dunes tower above Lake Michigan. To the north and east, lush, dense forest rises and falls along the glacial paths of ancient water.

This is Ojibwe land. Her legend says that there was a great fire on the western shore of Lake Michigan, driving a mother bear and her two cubs to seek shelter. They entered the great lake and swam for many miles, trying to reach the other shore. The twin cubs began to lag. When the mother arrived on the eastern shore, she was alone. She climbed the high bluff to wait for her cubs, but they never arrived. The Great Spirit, moved by the mother bear's faith and determination, created two islands to honor the cubs. Winds eventually buried the waiting mother under the sands of the dune where she waits and sleeps to this day.

At dawn, a family of deer feeding near the cabin notice me, noticing them. We watch each other for a long time. It was so quiet, I could hear their hooves stamp through wintered leaves and piles of lingering piles of snow.

At night, a hundred million blazing stars surround the cabin, something surely unseen in the summer foliage of this place. Around 3 a.m., the waning moon hangs low, seemingly caught in an impossible wooded cage.

Deer, bald eagles, and sleeping bears – that life is more than enough – and yet – it is not my life.

Kyle sleeps in, wakes to coffee, and kisses me on the forehead as I write. For a quarter of a century, we have grown together, loved one another, and after wearing a hundred different masks, finally learned share the kind of honesty that saves.

My cubs have made it to shore; the mother can be the woman awake on the hill; the woman can honor the Great Spirit and begin to move about the land, following the deer deep and deeper into the wood.

Birdcages at Night

A migration of attention.

There is a loneliness kept in mirrors, something covered in the image, like birdcages at night. I'm trying to tell you about this but my mouth is full of thistles. Speaking of – too many broken pine branches revealed in the melt – too many dead skunks in the road.

What is not complete in me? My mind tries to crawl from oasis to oasis instead of enduring the desert. Do you remember that time at the river? The water made no promises, and the love on the banks had its own language, whispering stop dying.

January sky piles hueless ribbons of light but yesterday, a robin's song took my prayers to heaven and hung them like keys at the door. I smelled the earth for a moment and forgot about the wars and plagues. Deaf politicians and hungry men decomposed. Music of the earth shimmied a little. Wake now.

*

I'm no longer bowing. These garments I wear are confusing to those who are losing power over my life. I suppose this was inevitable after I felt truth of autonomous power. Stop calling me names. I will never be any of those things.

*

No one walks along my inner mountains. No one hears my diminishing echos. One lover knew; one lover stayed.

Fingering Tidemarks

Snow melt runs through the eaves. I struggled to surface from an unending dream at the bottom of the sea. I can hear morning – the dog's nails clicking along the wood floor – the coffee maker gurgling as it finishes the brew cycle – school buses coming to a clamorous stop. Yet I can't shake the dream.

nothing to claim
this ageless dream
fingering the tidemarks
of the ebbing
past

Fields and hills darken in the melt. The Grand River overruns banks, bike paths and highway barriers. It is not spring. We are the nameless source ruining the world. Have you seen my wars all over the world? The cartography is a ruse. I'm almost begging you to stop falling for it. Sit back. Swig from your cask of milk and honey. Your comfort makes the stars tremble; your insistence parts the seas of peace. We've damned it all.

Crushed evergreen bushes begin to regain shape as snow withdraws. Small birds find their way back to the feeders and rabbit trails disappear with the melt. When the earth reappears I test it with my bare feet. Do you still love me?

Look back on Time, with kindly Eyes -
He doubtless did his best -
How softly sinks that trembling Sun
In Human Nature's West -

~ Emily Dickinson

I can't seem to picture our West, but perhaps that inability is the last gift we are given as humans before we fall asleep one last time at the bottom of the sea.

Melting, Angel Dust and Heavy Doors

Ice encases rabbit tracks leading away from the front door. Above freezing temperatures compresses the remnants from last week's blizzard. Time is lacerated and measured between drips from the eaves. Each momentary slice of life is scooped and slipped into the old jacket pocket. Melt from the trees travels down trunks, staining the surrounding snow like an accident or a disease. It is not close to springtime so her hints feel apocalyptic. Out of place.

For the first time since I can remember, I slept the entire night – waking with oils of holy blessings and angel dust in my hair. Morning came with a sense of cooperation and wellness. May it be so.

I woke not wanting to go to work and wrestling with the urge to spend the whole day writing. To whom to write and why? That's a really good question, one I can only pretend to articulate. Perhaps most writers do not require a worthy recipient or muse for writing; I am not one of them. Maybe that is not true of poetry but it is certainly true of these sentences. And not without cosmic humor, the poetry does not arrive without the sentences. So for now, this, here, to you. Please read. Please help me with the heavy door. It is together we save the world and ourselves.

No Waiting at the Mouth

In a strained breech of leaden sky, sunlight turns tiny flurries into dancing diamond motes. Each pine reveals its diadem as halo – illuminated – holy – revealed.

Snow
without footprint
or ripple or blemish
welds wounds of the land
with immaculacy.

For a few moments, any sound is heresy.

My gaze is heresy.

Winter buries what dies and for the first time in decades, there is no waiting at the mouth of the cave, weeping for daffodils. I clear bird feeders and feed people. I gather dark hours as bounty, grieved not by various despairs and calamities, but instead, nibble at rayless edges until I digest them into light.

I've gone beyond Calvary.

It's the only way.

Pain's successor brings January to pass under billows of curling woodsmoke. After midnight I pace throughout the house, needing sleep more like a bear than a human. It's an honesty hour, somehow easier to face ill-fitting truths. One truth is that Love has no womb or grave. It reveals Itself as present and alive, and one can merely soften into it or not. Dance with It or not. Love It back or not.

'Tis Customary as we part
A Trinket - to confer -
It helps to stimulate the faith
When Lovers be afar -

'Tis various – as the various taste -
Clematis – journeying far -
Present me with the single Curl
Of her Electric Hair

~ Emily Dickinson

With a healed heart, I think of Love often, and as often as I do, the River in my chest brings to surface all the trinkets shared.

The River reaches to my Mouth -
Remember - when the Sea
Swept by my searching eyes - the last -
Themselves were quick - with Thee!

The God Inside

On Christmas morning, a coyote stood in the middle of the dirt road in front of a great, stubbled field. The field stretched westward across from the casino construction on the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band land of the Pottawatomi Indians. The coyote stared through me, not confessing any signs of concern. Not long after, a great hawk descended to eye level, and then, three deer. For me, no other gift is worthy.

Gray rain falls instead of snow. Behind the misted veil, I am seeing a few important things for the first time.

My eyes are ravished by the god inside. ~ Kabir

The tangle and tumult of modern life takes and takes. Libra scales tip this way and that, without consideration for center. Everything happening outside of me was just that – outside – and not me. Much was taken, but I blame myself for giving beyond the marrow. No matter how it felt or seemed, I was never the one. Who was the enemy? Fantasy – romance – hope. In other words: me.

December's Oak Moon gives maximum light around 7:30 p.m. Night air is too soft to bite – too lonely to keep foxes in bed. The neighborhood is silent for once. If there is anything to appreciate about the holidays it is that.

Forgiveness is a gift for the cosmos, an act capable of keeping spiritual threads untangled. I am not the hungry witch; I am Gretel and I can save myself, thank you very much.

Geese and woodsmoke
rising Christmas mist
no longer beholden to mankind

Matriarchy

winter sky
do you carry a gun
or umbrella

Gray keeps the whole day muted and dull. Nothing pulls attention outward, so deep dives and shame spirals continue. A sense of mourning, further down than I have ever been, rises to greet me. No longer can I be your lover but maybe I can be your friend? I've learned a few things in the dark.

The homescape changes with re-entry of the grown son. I had become accustom to the sediment settled at the end of the day – quiet talking, simple supper, maybe even a poem or two if energy allowed. It's not good or bad, yet the homecoming does somehow squeeze or pressurize any time left for writing or processing. It will be harder to hide my pain now. My role as comforter and healer in the family has been compromised.

The neighbor, not much older than I, becomes a grandmother. My daughter discusses marriage. My mother weighs the death of friends against her own mortality, and my grandmother turns 101 years old. I am here and I am between. My sister and I begin to understand the matriarchy – where it has been weak – where it has been strong. The earth and land reflect the condition of the Matriarchy and if one believes in such things, there is more work to do than you can imagine.

The deaf dog becomes more vocal in her old age. She too has a lesson to share. I teach her some sign language to help make the widening gap between this realm and the next a little less scary. “For her or for you?” Good question.

Tending the Gathas

Hope builds towards winter solstice with an eye on dismantling it. The shortest day means light to follow. This unworthy sentience I am! I pray away sunless days and beg for the ending of night's suffocation. If I were instead golden dust falling from a daffodil, I would be fully redeemed on the bodies of dancing bees. Engaged Buddhism, indeed!

Lex runs into our arms at the airport and for a moment, the embodied convergence of parenting, love and our role as humans brings peace that surpasses all understanding. Sense of a separate self is mankind's scourge upon the Mother. Children become mothers of our society, a role we adults share. In this way, we have to nourish one another; re-root the uprooted; tend everything with wholeness in mind. It is better to take peaceful steps not simply for oneself or one's children, but for the world.

Beck graduates this weekend; another chapter both ends and begins. He moves home and in doing so, presents another chance for us to model or tend a certain reintegration into the world's greater environment. Sometimes we go a very long way to find ourselves. Yet even upon a realization one was never lost, a gatha may help to bridge what we experience in the world. Maybe as parents we can tend the gatha.

Where are we going?

Thich Nhat Hahn: before starting the car, I know where I am going.

For a long, long time, I haven't known where I was going. Yet, all this time, I didn't really need to go anywhere.

But I can say one thing with a peaceful certainty, this vibration of “forever home” came from illumination by headlights of another car.

All of whomever I am is grateful this doesn't happen alone.

At the Guillotine

William Blake: Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.

The Devil tarot card tells you not to guillotine the rational head from the body's drives. Make a marriage of impulse and control.
Marriage.
Control.

*

Getting high more than I don't. The Plant has mercy on my pain. Meditation is great but eventually one has to rise and walk in the world. Why not fly? I'm going to be honest with you: everything would have been fine; better than fine; joyful even.

These sentences, these lines – they don't exist without a place to moor. They are never not a letter sent. And if I ever stop writing, I will die at sea.

In this cosmic ocean, every poem, lilt, and jot barely discerns itself from nothingness. And yet, to what these words moor, is everything. The whole thing.

*

Green pine whispers.
Remember when I had fireflies
in my hair?
That was a long time ago.
Green pine nods
to our ascent.

All We Could Swallow

Writing into dawn – sunlight finds the right side of my face. East; always east. Warmth and prism light melts away a restless night. I finish yesterday's coffee to make a new pot.

Some gifts come with a sting. Is running out of time a gift? Fantasies, dreams, and desires fill space with possibility, but also cause confusion and delusion. May we continue to dream and follow such untethering with the wake of work and openness.

The holidays loom. Excessive colored lights and inflatable Santas shred darkness all night into day. Our Judeo-Christian heritage looks a lot like consumerism and colonization. Let's go back further.

Before Jesus – before Adam and Eve and Steve and Lilith – before the sea drank all the stardust it could swallow.

Maybe cosmic wind rippled what was deep and pure.
Maybe the moon sent orgasmic energy deep into Mother Earth.
Maybe we were one cell before we were many.
Maybe that is the Good News.

The azalea leaves curl up tight like fighting fists. Grand Rapids sk turns to granite as we all try pretending we are at least half way through winter's cold kiss. Speaking of kissing . . .

Fall Back Further

This place carved of cliffs and stone. Row houses crowding the street and dilapidated businesses stacked vertically upon each other. We walked the streets of this tiny enclave and it felt like a Bruce Springsteen song. Before turning back, a record shop. My money ran out before I finished looking through Dylan bootlegs.

Do you have time to linger?

Consider behavior as language. Sweet, gut-wrenching words can be spoken, but what are the actions? Treat me like an object and you'll have to lose me. Do you think that is true and if so, am I lost?

If I write by hand it's on yellow legal pads, like my father. My very first poem dissected food and my body – all neatly stanza'd on yellow paper – in the voice of my father.

*

Prepping ginger and turmeric root for storage. New-old ways of relieving pain and quieting suffering. The old ones say, “Don't take a pampered cat for your teacher.” Buddha Nature is no longer on the outside of things; I have found the hut and here I will stay.

*

The awareness of Christ surely is an advent but what He pointed towards has always. . . been. Fall back further. Before our feet knew the earth, the Mother carried, writhed and birthed Home. What we perform in December makes us fools.

Dream It

Waking to dense fog, semi-trucks shifting on I-80, the sounds of hotel doors slamming. Heading east always becomes a temptation – to keep driving, to “fuck around and find out,” to live life differently. Yet, in the calm of mediation, fantasy does what it does best: disappears.

Well that's not the truth exactly.

Where is my collaborator – the lion who challenges the challenges and questions the questioners? Where is my dreamer who says, “Go ahead. Dream it. Break the norm and challenge the status quo.” Perhaps wisdom lies with the lamb and not the lion. Perhaps peace is the only answer we have left.

*

Body pain flares, recedes and flares again. I'm tired of pain as a teacher and have only myself to blame for not learning the lesson. My spiritual path becomes crystal clear – like prismatic- snowflakes-falling-onto-fresh-snow clear. My body will melt away one day, yet I will continue in every moment. If I think I am only this body, then I haven't seen me. I can already see myself in others. Do you see me too?

*

On to Pennsylvania. We will split a bottom level apartment for a few days as we sew together our sisterhood. I asked her if she brought coffee grounds and she says, “what are we even doing here if we don't have coffee?”