Every Step A Seed

This place used to be a way to write soul letters – an outward flow laced with the desire to come home at last. Words built the corridor and it worked. I saw and tasted Homecoming. Yet, the bridge got hot and it wasn't long before I felt like I was walking on the hot coals of restlessness. Energy shifted from an unrestrained stream to ravenous desire. Who did this to the purity of Godlight? I did, for there is only me.

I destroyed my own bridge but in doing so, I brought consciousness home to my body.
I remembered Buddha in my breath. In the country of the present, I don't need a map or an overpass or a tunnel.

Then why am I here? I am here now because I am here. At home in myself, existence is the magic.

I'm still walking. I carry Home with me, every step a seed for happiness and peace.

I don't know how long I will be here – this body – this walk. The notion of life and death fades into the truth of continuance.

But I do know I am already Home.

And if you only see this body, then you are not here with me.

Are we together?

Gathered at the Sill

Let go of you.
Discard me.

To be two entities is to forget. It is to stare at the river and see division instead of unification. It is to neglect how west eventually meets east.

One seeks pleasure and another self-mortification. In both cases, the temperance of coherence is neglected. To seek at all is to forget allowance. To hold onto either is to live in opposition.

*

Sunlight slants towards the sleeping dog and tickles the shoulders of houseplants gathered at the sill. The din of leaf blowers is constant now, only ending hours after dark. For that reason, the silence of snowfall becomes my impatient wish.

icy moonlight
shaping uneven shadows
this snowy moor of jewels

Poetry is something you release or unearth while writing it. You meet it when it arrives on the page. Our lives are like that – our relationships – our grounding. I think sometimes we write the poetry or chase the relationship instead of opening unto what is already alive and flowing.

You don't do the writing; language does.
You don't create the relationship; Love does.

*

The red bird steaks away from the feeder with a snappy flutter, barely above a whisper. How I now prefer the quiet unity of hope in all living beings.

This Wake

When the veil of pain finally lifts, life takes on a reborn quality. Pain as both noose and teacher.

It blazes and separates.
It schools a certain softness and empathy.

Happiness used to be stolen – a certain slant of light every 9th day in winter – an occasional trip to the ocean's edge – the unexpected gift as proof you are seen and beloved. After crippling soreness and agony, a sense of becoming fully alive rises with fire and balance. Restoration. And in this wake, happiness. Happiness for being alive. Happiness for the freedom of heart.

*

Night gives way to dark rains and biting wind. The sun is blocked today, so I will operate in the world without shadow. Holiday plans unfold – homecomings.

Windows now instead of mirrors. Do you know the shape of your soul? Mine has the shape of peace and with this clarity, I accept no substitute. How can I do otherwise and live in freedom? What is boundless includes all and therein lies true happiness.

There is no need to take anything more from me because everything is already given.

Cold rain – hot tea – I am alive for this.

That Last Sip

The Pain overtakes everything. Sure, meditation; let it go; don't suffer; stretching; Advil; ginger tea; cannabis; CBD; walking; sleep; so much sleeping. This unmovable thorn. These impossible days. How many times must one start over in order to live? The answer lies in an infinite strip folded upon itself forever.

Cardinals begin to winter in the bush outside the kitchen window. Yes, thank you for that. More light comes through the living room this fall after the trees were taken. Prisms throw rainbows in remembrance.

It took a long time to realize our connection means more than words or bodies. I had too many unmet needs; too much loneliness in my skin. But recently, I sat straight-backed against my towering pine. My bare feet nested in softened needles and black dirt as the last of the yellow leaves let go. The slanted sun on my face, pine at my back, dirt under my heels all culminated energetically to tip the chalice a little higher for that last sip.

I had become a turtle carrying my house on my back – slow and weighed down by attaching too much to imagined happiness.

We may have held our conflict as a war as opposed to a musical duet. There was order in our chaos – a pattern of governed by hidden laws. There were countless chances to smash old forms in order to reveal something new built from the shards.

My body, these relationships, the world around us – the stress we swim in can more deeply reveal ourselves and this revelation must certainly be central to creative change.

Of Moans and Stones

The dog's bark hangs in morning air and behind her, sun bursts through for the first time in days. I wonder: what would I say if I were not afraid? Half of speaking is silence; half of the truth has not been said. These and other aphorisms at the surface.

Body pain as a point of empathy. Gone are the days of elastic weaving through space. I used to be all legs and flow. Nowadays I am a strobed image getting from one point to another in stutters. J secretly recorded me dancing at the ska show, so I have image of all the reasons to just… not.

This weathered porch covered in downed leaves.
This season of falling and staying down.
These bones being milked of moans and stones.

When I am high, I don't want to wear my glasses which is no big deal until I'm not high and I need to find my glasses but what I also like is how I can still see, whether I am high or not, or whether I have my glasses on or not, the rainbows my prisms throw over the walls and couch and plants and sink and bed and face and heart.

There is a creative fire that comes from friction that I miss. In friction, two things cross, like kindling or a crucifix, but where they cross, the two become one. Sometimes I need permission to strike out, set fire, rekindle. William Blake said, “Opposition is true friendship.” I think I know what that means. And I think it has something to do with fear.

If I had no fear, I think I would say: again, yes.

Flourescence Easily Overlooked

A bright star beckons, high to the right. This chalice of sky shaped as a womb; this cupful of dreams dipped into the stream. The desert blooms and I am opening all the way. Whose gazing eye can hold the universe?

Cabbage soup and hefty bread. Tarot and meditation before dawn. Tarot said that some gifts come with a hidden sting. It is the Celt in you which leads to the divination of stones. Is that the lost light? Stones hold a fluorescence easily overlooked.

pocketed stones
carried from home
quiet like falling leaves
between us –
we can touch it
if we want

*

In the summer it felt like I didn't sleep for months. I couldn't; I had to follow the river to the mouth before winter. I thought we were walking together.

*

November sunsets ignite a fierce magenta if you are lucky enough to witness. Apples finish and wide-eyed owls take over the night watch. Stews and oatmeal replace watermelon and grilled vegetables. All things die back, but the rituals remind one of where they are from, now that they are not from here.

I cook in this quiet house, make a fire, unfold and refold quilts, and read books off my shelf. Where I sleep is a mystery to everyone but me.

Flower Sequence

“Inflorescence” – the order in which flowers bloom on a stem.

Do you know our flower sequence? On the surface it may seem that we bloom(ed) from top to bottom, limited by constraints of historical DNA, or by the world's ability to label everything as “this” or “that.” May I suggest that in truth we are in the act of blooming from bottom to top; unlimited in presentation; an energy of what seems concrete and logical towards abstract; secular to sacred. In our search for what we are, we keep forgetting to allow.

I have done the work. I have slept in the soft cool muck at the bottom of the depths. I have both learned and unlearned a few things. Veritas veritatum.

I am no longer dragging words or poems through myself; instead I am watching them flow through me. And in watching the words, all the words, I see that they give voice to us, as opposed to us giving voice to the words. And these words give voice to that which cannot be spoken.

At some point along the way, this became “wrong” or incorrect or immoral or... ?

When one watches and waits, what does one see? What path does poetry make for the flow of words? I have come to believe it is our job to make naked contact with the language. So yeah, write everyday. Allow.

And in doing so, those of us who write, we will see and find the truth indiscriminate inflorescence. The truth of us.

All Around the Hush

The texture of change.

In the end, all is impermanence. How deep is your keel; how tall is your mast. Can you open a little more? At one hundred turtles down there is stillness and yet, it is not static. Water moves all around the hush. Nothing is impossible.

The old dirt road is through pain – its many ruts – the washboard nature in spring. When it also bends and rises with pleasure, one struggles to come to rest at the final crest. Yet Love's urging feet. Yet the birds' translation from the crown.

*

November comes fresh with snow, dawn spilling pink over the army of rooftops. Diamonds of frost, our daytime stars. I'm lifting us all with my breath. I don't want anything anymore except to join. Words don't count. Enter me and no more mistakes will be made.

Last golden leaves peer through new lace. I am here and so are you. Sunlight breaks through the treeline. How we walk the road is up to us. I'm reaching out my hand.

Let's go?

"Look Up"

In Gaza, some of us cannot completely die.
Every time a bomb falls, every time shrapnel hits our graves,
every time the rubble piles up on our heads,
we are awakened from our temporary death. ~ Mosab Abu Toha

Lives shattered under showers and skies of stone. What will be left after the appetites of power and war? Bend closer to the torso of trees. They will tell you how we are guilty for all of this. Why don't the me consult poets and music makers for a way to peace? Why do they not turn to the Mother?

The sky turns black with cold air. Snow falls in a way that looks like ash. The heat kicks on at 3 a.m. but I do not go back to sleep. Now is not the time for sleep. I think of the bartender in Austin who confessed in hushed tones that he was from Lebanon. He said, “it seems like I can trust you” . . . indicating some are not to be trusted. I wonder about the bright grace heating the upper branches of the tallest trees. Will he ever know it? Will any or all of us rise?

I cannot tell you about single tree I saw in Texas, though I know they must be there. Dust and drought yawn over the absence of tenderness. This cleft into which we all have fallen bends and turns as a maze, more vast than desert or dark. “Look up! Do you see the sunlight?”

"Hold You in My Arms"

In each other's arms, we sank closer to a truth previously ignored. Will you ever want me that way again? Maybe; but you need to see me.

Our mouths so full of questions.
Our hearts refusing to prophesy.

The lover is gone or out wandering the woods or in the monastery stacking wood for winter. So I am asking: have you ever noticed how tarot cards zing in your hands when you've paired with right deck? I mean, other decks work and tell truths. But the RIGHT deck takes you to a whole new level. Do you know that feeling?

I might have drowned in the Jordan River. I might have washed up on the banks in the middle of The Great War. I might have turned into a dove and flown into the sun. I saw Icarus on the way. The question is, did we land?

November comes into being. Darkness pawing at the last of golden light. Can we hold each other again?

"Rainy Night House"

Leaves and rain fall and festoon as Joni Mitchell croons farewell to October. Oh October! You leave everything on the table.

He meets me at the airport with flowers but later tells me about the time he has been spending with another woman. It's okay, I say, and mean it. We grow closer together and further apart, and we are both . . . happy?

My tanned and freckled hands fade back to porcelain. I sort kindling and stack wood despite the ever weakening pier of my body. It's still warm enough to open the window at night. The owl visits, sings a bit, and disappears before dawn. One sings without lyrics these days but have you ever noticed how good it feels to hum?

Bickering jays. The din of a thousand leaf blowers. Sometimes I sleep, but sometimes I roam around the encapsulated night, writing, thinking, guessing at poems. It is during this time I weigh my love for rivers against the more unhurried lapping of lake water against the shore.

A celibacy remains in which no one complains. We all grow too old to wear the masks and yet, the men all still mow bright lines in the lawn and the women shuffle tarot asking: what now?

Summer gold ends and distant moonlight glitters on pine.

We fall asleep
in the earth while
the one who lives
listens to the nothingness
of falling snow.

"God Bless Texas"

Westward landscapes.

Gold falls from the sky, covering the ground to a degree which makes the world seem as if it is suddenly healing something very deep. A memory of certain birds sinks into another life while other birds remain present. A cardinal's redness cuts through the depth of pines and rusted leaves moving side to side in descent. Soon enough, snow like shivering moths.

Off the plane in Austin, one is immediately hit with heat giving way to bare earth. Thistled fields lined with cacti and low shrub expands like a shoreless sea. Everything IS bigger...trucks, highways, longhorn bulls, and sky. Everything looms. The sun shines every day but the only birds I see are crows and vultures. A billboard shouts for Biden to “stop buying oil from terrorists.”

My adult daughter falls into my arms and our tears brim unto each other's cheek. My god, letting go is hard and my god, reuniting is the communion from which we are all formed. We explore her new life and show each other new ways of navigating. She takes me to Austin's music scene at night. I take her to see the bat migration from Congress Bridge. All is beautiful and all is impermanent.

We walked along the Colorado River and held hands. We smiled for selfies as a way to hold onto moments. But I am old and getting older; and she is young, finding her miraculous way.

There is no extra mile or last first kisses or one more dark sleep into winter. Beloved You, there is only this.

"Tahquamenon Falls"

At first it was pine tree steeples rising from banks of exquisite color. Trees were ablaze in the northern light and it felt like my being couldn't take it all in. Yet the further north I pushed, the more green began to needle the sky until finally, all the eye could take in was miles and miles of evergreen sea. This land, this place . . . it has the power to crush rib cages with its unmolested beauty. No billboards or street lights. No sidewalks or people our developments. Only the great exhale atop a ravaged country.

Sufan's Tahquamenon, Longfellow's Hiawatha. I see it now. I know it.

Hiking Tahquamenon, there is an adjustment required in breathing cypress air; there is a re- calibration of one's sense of place and autonomy. The falls annihilate you, but if for some reason they do not, the overlapping density of pine, cypress and birch will. In a few deep breaths, I remember every thing I have forgotten. I remember everything I have ever needed to know. Moose, elk, and black bear. I know now how to be alive.

The rain was an icy drizzle but in the heart of the forest, I didn't feel it much. I wanted to keep going but my body's limitations begged me for a wiser decisions. I also now know why people die in the forest or on the trail.

The spirit of Objibwe grows in these trees and earth and can tell you about the sunrise long before any of the world's wars or man's plot to rule. How old do you think I really am?

"Many Rivers to Cross"

The loft overlooks pines but mostly stares deeply into their midsection. Through the V-shaped space in the Northern Cedar, Lake Michigan sparkles and spreads for hundreds of miles. White caps – white pine – white tails. On the ground, between two trees and flanked by two red kayaks, a tiny path carries you over a sand dune unto seemingly illimitable, sequestered shoreline.

At 3 a.m., the stars seem to scream against the backdrop of total darkness. I make the short hike out to the beach and find myself contemplating the difference between making love and being love. I can hear nothing but waves breaking against bone-cold sand. Afterwards, coffee at sunrise for just me. Toast with peanut butter for just me. Moving and stretching and humming around the loft for just me.

Later, I trek down a steep gorge feeling tiny against living walls of the ravine. And yet, almost simultaneously, I lose all sense of borders to the point of unlimited expansion. Coming upon the Cut River I disappear. An old fallen oak as thick as a school bus bridges the narrower part of the river. A beaver dam slightly upstream diverts the flow of water near a shallow point. I realize what I had wrong is the fact that I cannot bring you here. I can't bring anyone here. We are either here as one or not.

I am brave to cross over the river and I do not fall. I'm done merely trying to survive. I want to live.

"Enjoy the Silence"

I finish
in moonlight
praising impermanence
author of silence
and beauty

In daylight, the moon chases me to work like a filmy ghost. Chicory and goldenrod ending. My deaf dog adapts and so do we. Silence and a new flow.

Is your moon purple too? As it turns out, the owl was not simply passing though. At 3 a.m., he is a monk reciting prayers. I am no longer a penitent child nor am I the adult given to stubborn pretending. The monk, owl, and I are one, enjoying the silence.

I make coffee for Kyle before he wakes and tea for myself. As an early morning rainstorm builds, Kora and I sit beneath the overhang absorbing the spicy-sweet balm of October's first fallen leaves. Tomorrow is my solo trip, maybe pushing frontiers of sorts. A cedar loft, the great lake, pine trees and a million ways to say nothing at all.

It has been futile to say, “first I need to do this or work this certain thing out or live this certain way, then I will be free to live in peace.” So many excuses; so many ways to delay.

Too much noise passed between us on the air and in image. Love too, but peace? It couldn't stay until we left ourselves for dead.

"October Road"

I offered both hands across the desk when he spoke about his diagnosis and treatment. The speed at which he grabbed them startled me, but the warmth and softness melted surprise to compassion. His eyes said see me clearly or not at all. He spoke about time on the streets, jail and the irony of getting clean only to have terminal cancer. At the center of a hurricane or a tornado is an eye; it is safe there if one can move with the storm. He showed us bullet and knife scars in the side of his torso and I thought of Jesus being stuck in the sides by soldiers.

Death and birth are the same thing. So easily we look birth in the face and yet, we struggle to gaze directly into death. To accept life is to accept death because they are two faces of the same flow. To know this is to end suffering. I will still cry at his funeral, which begs the question, what does it mean to know.

Flowers will blossom from our lips and the next generation of trees shall hold us tightly within their roots.

Assuredly we have reached the last of amenable weather.

October I love you.

Cardinals in surround sound. Black walnut trees drop nut pods from fifty feet high, crashing through branches and hitting the ground like baseball sized cannon balls. White-tailed deer lope and graze a stone's throw from the picnic table in Palmer Park.

Poetry meets Tarot meets tribe in the most holistic and loving way. How long I waited and yet, we were always here, together.

Apples, oatmeal, sunlight for breakfast; everything elongates unto ending time.

“Am I Blue”

The blue you pick.
The blue you leave behind.

Forget-me-nots and chicory.

Ripe blueberries nestled in hand.
Michigan sky after a snowstorm.

Blue as home
at least
for a season.

The waters of Lamu or
New Zealand's glacial gleam.

Humming night's bluest hymn.

A blue that almost killed
me but saved me
after all.

Am I sad was asked –
answered I am blue.

*

The last mosquitoes worry in my ear through another moon meditation. I lost my religion to moonlight during the choicelss choice to embrace living. Now I am watching time run out of hands and faces. I have learned to mother the mother and become a grandmother to myself. Red hair doesn't really gray but it does stiffen and eventually lean towards white. The aging body doesn't concern me but the suffering which comes along for the ride can sometimes refuse its destiny of impermanence.

Curled leaves skitter to rest on the pebbled walkway to my front door. The weather report reads like a poem:

fall takes a break
summer-like weather
ushering October

The fields begin to empty into the vast autumn sea and chrysanthemums are all the rage. Geese overhead point towards sanctuary for coming storms, and apples soften and brown before I can eat them all.

Soon enough the glow of nighttime snow will blanket me in the for the winter and I will long towards remembrance of my “slash of blue.”

"One Fine Morning"

Tripping to the Upper Peninsula – a birthday trek – half a century put to bed.

A dirt road through thick pines leads to the lake and a loft of windows looking down on the entire state. Michigan is magic. Ask the mushrooms if it is so.

What if our bodies and mind could be at peace together? A serene encounter of reality calling. Bill Callahan sings about the mountains bowing down like a ballet in the morning sun. And the water is clearer. The grass greener.

In the past when asked what I wanted, I said I wanted it all. The reason is because I am the flowing river; I am the altar and the knees; I am the pebble and the mountain and the trail leading both towards and away from the summit. Inside of everything is the chance for peace and the promise of healing. I want it all because all of it is us.

What I lacked was true compassion. I have acted out of knowing instead of acting out of love.

Dipa Ma opened me: when you're really present, aren't you also loving? And when you're really loving, aren't you also present?

*

The garden rests after a difficult growing season. Offerings are made under the Autumn Equinox in gratefulness for the soil and the chance enter the dirt, no matter the yield.

wildflowers ending
I can no longer name
most of me

It's Like This

I am a part of this – never beginning – endless.

Lately, star meditations at 4 a.m. are my jam. Autumn air begins, still smelling like summer's gestation with hints of crispness to come.

To come.

Acorns fall like stones or hail, echoes cracking like one-off gun shots in an unobstructed night. I am not so zen that I forget the gunfire forcing us to the interior of the house in Kenya. I don't forget the bodies or the screams. I remember the sounds of machete violence and the panic and dread deep in the throats of women giving birth in a camp of 8,000 displaced people.

To allow, hold loosely, forgive – is it the same as forgetting?

Sun rises first on my left shoulder. John Denver says we don't forget entirely. And yet, the thoughts, awareness and feelings rise only to be let go.

Giving once important things to the river becomes more than symbolic. Soon we shall lie down in the shallows along the bank and float back to the sea. Maybe we already have.

*

I am my mother and father, my grandparents, and their parents. I am colonizer and colonized; queen and peasant; volcano, glacier, and sea. It all lives in my body and I am responsible for our healing and peace. It is now my only work.

This is like this; that is like that; our happiness depends on each other.

Burned at the Stake

A boy broke up with me when I was sophomore in high school because I didn't know Stevie Ray Vaughn, and I certainly hadn't heard that he had died that day.

My father knows a lot of things. He cares about how many points Jackie Longstreet scored in the Hastings High School basketball game and he will tell everyone that his mother graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan back when women didn't go to college. He can diagnose things that 99% of physicians miss.

A photographer from National Geographic while in Kenya told me I was a “little girl” who didn't “know anything about life” after I opened a dialogue about colonization in the region.

Before Kenya, I stood in front of the church board for over four hours to answer questions regarding scripture and the biblical mandate to “go and make disciples of all the nations.” By the end, I retreated to the women's bathroom to cry.

Knowledge in the bones of the feminine is overlooked at best and burned at the stake at worst.

At home I am never tested. It's why I won't leave this place carved from a temperate heart. I refuse to follow flames to my death.

The masculine tries to define love but the best it can do is allow love's safe passage.

*

An airplane skips through openings in the tree crown. I know fliers gotta fly but they also have to land.

At 3 a.m. a barred owl's distinct vocals lure attention and awareness westward. These thin hours. This time floating without barriers. I am soothed by his calls and pray he is not simply passing through the remnants of this forest. By sunup he is quiet, giving way to early train moans and morning commuters.

October pending – northern lights with or without mushrooms – this starry conversation.