A Wink and a Whistle

In a faint rain, on a trail rising from the ravines, I passed a graying man and his young Great Dane. Our dogs met, which is also to say that the man and I met in the common custom of dog owners. In a unexpected lumbering leap the Great Dane put his paws on my shoulders, slathering my face with mud and white frothy slime. Dropping his pipe and then with great tenderness, the gray gentleman pleaded with the giant to pick on someone his own size. Eye to eye, light to light, the man leaned into my space, wiping what he could from my jacket. His sand-papery voice said, “If I were on a island and destined to die there, I might rather choose five dogs than five people as my last companions. Please forgive my friend's need to hug you.” And with a wink and whistle, he and the Great Dane carried onward deeper into the gorge.

At home, I eat out-of-state raspberries and try my best to manage a tangerine with manners. Is it possible to keep the juice all in? Friends text to say that they heard the sun might break through tomorrow: happy dance, smiley face, #michiganwinter, #grayisthenewblack, lol. I will celebrate today and let tomorrow find me both wanting and happy.

Emily's Letters, ginger snaps and a house full of silence. It isn't until letter three that I notice my naked ring finger. Letting it breathe means some times forgetting. I retrace my steps to the edge of the bathtub and find the wedding band resting in the ablution of water and dog shampoo. One wonders how long it takes for the impression to refill itself.

But I don't want to write about that. I want to take a nap and see something other than haylofts and strobing dust motes hanging in the filtered light. I want to wake and think of something other than the warm hand placement and fingered bookshelves and looking up at the ceiling from the shivery wooden floor.

At times Eden is a desert and at others it is the sign pointing a way around the sand. In either case, I saw this person staggering barefoot in the hot sands and I thought: yes, this one is yet alive.

Leaking Towards Lower Ground

The 4 a.m. crack of winter thunder interrupts the rain's whispery conversation. I thought of the stroll the nurse and I had through the hospital's sterile labyrinth. We talked about the weather and she laughed satisfyingly hard when I describe this winter as “hormonal.”

Dawn gives way to islands of snow, fading. The dog's toys have surfaced and the walking paths are free to snake around the entirety of the yard. Patterns and cycles and cadences all make sense if one is allowed to zoom out far enough. I wonder how often we've met – January and I.  How many times has it melted when the world was meant to be frozen?

Water with lemon and black bean soup. In the comfortable cabin of my woods, I would live on soup and bread. Only the one who wants to be there is there – to read and walk and play into the cedar-scented sleep. We walk the whole way. Thus this softer, sweeter place. The mind leaks towards lower ground.

These days hang. How full and broken a heart becomes when discovering the missing piece has wings! What I long to hold, even but for a moment.

write / light / flight

All day my fingers talk a mean game. One day there will be nothing to compose because It will have passed clean through. Touched. Felt. Believed.

The rain has lasted all day. And I am grateful. For all of it.

All This Water

We watched each other in the rain, the hawk and I.

There is a certain infinity to things. No singular glance is merely a passing fact encapsulated in a moment of glass. Nor are we pawns moved about in some colossal game of chess. Every grain of existence is moved by the crests and troughs of a universal sea. To love but not touch. To walk but not fly. To exchange the words tethered to a truth that cannot be wholly given away . . . it matters little because at some place in the ebb and flow of this current, we converge in totality. At some place, we never left. 

The rain gurgles and hums all day, filling frozen depressions with more water than is manageable. Well if it isn't snow, it's rain; my watery core feels compensated. One does tend to think of cresting rollers when joy rides itself this far into shore.

Sparrows startle from under the wheel well. My own giggle and the flutter lifts as I offer my truest apologies for disrupting the hidden meeting. The smell of fish and worms rises from the pavement because that is how Michigan rain smells. I'm surrounded by water and it's a wonder to me why I haven't begun to build the ark. Where is there to go?

All this rain is like the cold curtain of mist and unrelenting showers that fall for three months straight in the highlands of Kenya. There is a sodden story to share – a crafted telling of how the impoverished feeds the starving. She hovers over my shoulder as I wash the dishes, and she watches me bathe. I feel her heartbeat falling into sync mine. Her voice no longer soft and soothing, instead she is now ready to be heard.

Perhaps it is time to go again – to write towards still.

The snow is going.

As am I.

Cleopatra, Judas, and a Woodpecker

pine trees at midnight –
a darkness hiding
what I want

 . . . and books in the bedsheets. It is logistical and comforting to feel words at my fingertips when sleep becomes indented.

With eyes closed, the restriction of “either – or” tassels out to “yes – and.” A slow boat up the Nile from Aswan High Dam kept me physically between the two banks of presence. Yet history can press in and lure one beyond the papyrus sway towards the expansive desert throne of the ancient everything. So, it's like that: a drift between there and here on the way to the Red Sea.

The softest pink ahead of sunrise. Coming out of the woods I could hold the morning moon in the left hand and my Sunday God in the right. I talked it over with Judas and decided that I want the kiss of annihilation.

Predawn air crackles in my chest but returns to freedom as virginal utterance, an ejaculation of unadulterated life. It disappears accordingly but I keep watching because as long as I am alive, I know what comes next.

A woodpecker breaks the glassy silence. I adore his echo and give praise. In me, kneeling before desire is a certain equality – a non-dual union of reverence and correspondence. One must be present to win.

In all of this, I am not heedless. But I am knowing myself in the discovery of the peace that has always been. One must step fully in: to winter, to history, to mistakes, to love, to betrayal, to forgiveness and most of all, into who one is. Goddess of the Nile. A beguiler of Christ. The unbidden monk, tapping out his sermon on the old oak as dawn has her way . . .

Choosing the Glass Paperweight

In the bowels of the one hundred year old hospital, each physician's office has a “turkey pen” to be used for the storage of items pertaining to his or her practice. My father's pen was a 5 by 15 foot galley, quite literally walled by chicken wire with a small, roughly hewn door frame as a gate, swinging outward into a narrow pathway. The ceiling is low enough that I have to crouch a little when dodging the expansive grid of heating ducts, pipes and wires. One drab fluorescent light hums and buzzes as it works overtime to show me anything.

Down here, time lumbers ahead only in once-a-year search missions or in maintenance calls. The paper lives of thousands of patients are entombed in the din of boilers and compressors. The embalming incense of archaic equipment and sweating concrete walls invades the nostrils with a slight sting.

It was down here that I spent an entire Saturday sliding banker's boxes of insurance records and doctor visits and overinflated dictation notes from the pen to the hall, the hall to my father's darkening office, and from his office to my grandmother's pole barn on the lake. Mom and I unloaded the orphaned boxes and stacked them in front of lake things. They didn't belong there and they really didn't belong anywhere.

Mom asked if I wanted anything from the forty year old practice, a career that denied me a lifetime of paternal presence. She offered bandages and drug samples and books such as: Topical Fungal Infections; The Color Atlas of Oral Pathology; and Prostrate Health.

I used to make rounds on patients with my father when I was a little girl. All the nurses knew my name and always made a point to tell me how my father saved many lives. He was a rock star of healing and human compassion, sacrificing a major role in the scenes that played out at home so that he could love and be beloved.

Reading the story of Rumi and Shams, I used to easily slide across the centuries to idolize their sacrifice of family and the ordinary for the everlasting mystical legacy of spiritual profoundness. Yet, who did the twin flames leave behind? How did Rumi's family fare while he whirled and turned towards God?

I chose the glass paperweight that kept my father's stacks and charts from disorder and chaos. It sits on my desk, weighing down memories of how it feels to be the lesser choice.

There are many days where I sit alone and write alone and beg and whine and maneuver to be alone so that I can in turn write alone. Maybe one day, a book or a collection of poems that will mean something to a hungry traveler long after I am dead. And, what wordsmith hasn't allowed a few moments of grandeur and ego to sneak into the altruistic, banal need to simply write by imagining the healing impact of her words that saved the world?

Sometimes, my family gingerly knocks on the door. They joke about me emerging from my “hidey-hole.” I leave them behind on long stretches of solitary travel or hotel stays so that I can write. I get frustrated and angry when I can't read or spend time writing. The calling calls and doesn't stop.

Yet, fathers and daughters. Apples and trees. I hate his choices with the power of embodied proof on my side, yet I become the odium I mean to destroy.

There is no one to heal – no impoverished wanderer in need of words, no spiritually lost needing a lighthouse on the pier of time.

There is only the universe inside, expanding itself against a futile, yet holding, gradient of the perceived world.

Foolish thinker, it is not you who longs to meld into pine-scented sky or to rise and play with the birds who attend! It is they who knock on your painstakingly hand-carved wooden door, disregarding the ornate beauty for known promise of home within!

My father is not dead. Maybe there is still a way to forgive his reflection in the soul's ever deepening lake, a way to swim to the bottom of the self to leave it all behind. 

You know not / how you show me / to swim.  

Wrecked at Sea

Thunder bounces off the frozen river in a halo of rumbles not customary to January. Winter has its watery way with me despite all that must turn to stone. Like the dead buried in her mounds, the river valley holds ashen secrets offered in attrition. I heard the sinner's prayer murmuring in the night wind; it isn't my fault that the syllables get caught up in the ragged branches. This and other lies exposed in the gashes of winter's storm.

My god – the way Chopin waits a little longer to give the notes away! Tonight's hymn lays our dreams discreetly under my pillow. There, there . . . even a moment's sigh in the shape of a yes is enough.

In Springfield,  a voice broke my dreams every night at 3 a.m. for 3 months. On the last day of the 3rd month, I shouted: OKAY! FOR THE LOVE OF . . . oh . . . God.

And the voice said “go.”

In Africa, in the 1st hour of the 1st day and every day following for 1 month straight and many months after, the tears from my eyes ran into my mouth and down the sides my neck. No hearable words tossed their benevolent life raft down from the heavens. No manna fed my children. No burning bush kept us warm.

Yet our prayers were buried in the red earth.  

And the sacred ibis crowned our efforts to survive.
And the colobus welcomed our arrival with the guttural roll of his throat.
And the Kenyans said: we will help you.

The poetry of existence began here.

after Jonah's song
I left God to his fishes –
a faithful servant wrecked at sea

Lately by Way of Always

born
and belonging to the blue –
October sky

Instead, January. The snow rises and surrenders to invisible breath, swirling off the roof like smoke aiming to be some where. One can be lifted by it – the chin, the eyes – but isn't. Air below zero from the north keeps things buttoned-up. Quieter.

Have you considered the magnetic orientation?

Lately – by way of always – the dreams that kiss.

The rare arrival of a few moments of direct sunlight undoes it all, like emerging out of a movie theatre, blinded to the world accordingly. Of course we would flinch!

Too cold to walk. Too dark to dream. Too close to look away. January takes the proverbial cake.

Sometimes the pews in Kenya were painted blue but they were really more of a bench --  weathered turquoise feet unattached to the floor. The men sat on the right side and the women and children on the left. Though, as missionaries, we could sit together as a family on the men's side.

A choice of goliath and generational consequence always seemed to be hovering over how to do things – how to do life – when living as a minority in a foreign land. Every moment of every day was a wrestling match of thought and action, race and tribe, privilege and poverty. Do I put all the wash out on the line in a potentially ostentatious display of abundance? Do I flee when genocidal violence erupts around my compound? Do I wear a disguise when driving my kids to school to deter carjacking surveillance? Do I hire a house-worker like all the other expatriates, both reinforcing a stereotype and providing a paying job to someone who wouldn't be able to feed their children that week?

In winter's white-wash that kind of blue is hidden; the faded, cracking, worn-out color is tamped down and forced to reconsider.

From the chair facing east, I watch for dawn's Prussian gradient, tilting towards Sunday. Sure, I pray for sun.

And I miss the sea and the way the breeze brings water to my pores. I miss the erasure of cartography when my feet sink into serous sand. Those are the things I think of sitting here.

Alone. And not alone.

Unbinding Even Love

Snow-thunder breaks the silence.

It's hard to settle into defeated ideas. Every season has birthed a renewal of “what-if.” Years have passed and I have been held back due to the lessons not learned. What-if is now being buried by each frozen expression, piling higher and higher into what-is.

Maybe it isn't the stars that lead lovers to croon and wail. Perhaps is it the darkness between the them that pulls the heart, thread by cardiac thread, into the endless blackness of being.

We walked around in millionaire's shoes for the day and it was revolting. My fingers traced the gold leafed wallpaper in the bathroom and the decisive judgement would not flush. The filmy taste of rich republican rot coated my mouth, and now their monied sentiments hang like ghouls in my dreams. Trump knows our language. Trump will not spend where it isn't necessary. Trump will militarize our borders and keep us safer.

Like the Degas on the wall or the blue, Jasperware vase with Greek figures pouring water and playing harps, we couldn't approach anything in the home. So we sat in the round sipping exotic tea as I swirled thoughts about how much I have yet to let go.

Winter is good for letting things go. Seasons often rob one of choices by freezing the river or covering the verdant vines with the purification of Now.

And it is on this white page of immediate snowfall that I am unbinding even love.

January, it is you I have been lost within for an entire existence.

Your fresh tracks constantly reveal the magic of living.

Yet now, I see my own prints sparkling in the blue dawn.

Alone towards together.

At last.

Rosin the Bow

Sparrows resting like staffed notes on a wire.

Saying what one means might be beyond the scope of existence. We try to word Love, spinning letters into golden seams and silvery stitches. And we fail. Yet, one knows how to wear it; to spin around in it; to cut a piece of it for a ribbon to tie back the wild hair set free by it.

The wind hisses all night, and 3 a.m. is colder than expected. Even in the dark I catch my image rising in the giant mirror recently moved to the dresser. It can't stay. The visual manifestation of the dissonance between what I see and who I am is a disease that putrefies the guts. I dwell in the house of covered mirrors.  

Dickinson's kitchen twine, calling. Her countenance spreads through the vascular ink as if I know her. The cellular response finds delight in the hunger for more. There is one who could teach like the first days, but we both know how that will end. Rivers and cabins and wine-flavored surrender to what-is . . .

Water moves below the surface. Air whisks the ice with momentary eddies of loosened flakes. The Earth rests before spring begins to rosin the bow. Yet fire remains in the mouth-to-mouth – in the touch – in the familiar notes of gingerbread and Chopin and hieroglyphic line breaks in poems hand written in New England gardens and hills.

And in the elemental embrace of landscape and breath, I ask that you hold still, Maestro – the benevolence of the seasons mean to deliver all the right notes soon.  

The Epitaph of Our Relationship

Listening to Christmas crows under cedar eyes. Winter retreats in an unexpected fog of warmth; how his playful deceit brings a shrouded joy. I hear rain but the watery care is a collective melt instead.

A cardinal, Argentinian wine, and holly berries. Red is unavoidable as a gift and as life. One feels the heat of his back as he turns to face an alternate direction. Yet, depending on how far into the horizon one sees, they only ever end up bent in a circular face-to-face. Can you see me yet?

Two feet of snow has returned to the sky but the ground is still hidden. I remember when Dad threw my George Michael tape out of the car window on our family drive from Michigan to Florida. To keep the driver awake through the treacherous mountain cliffs at night, the co-pilot was allowed to choose his or her own music as a certain compensation. I and my music was offensive. The epitaph of our relationship suddenly became visible in that exchange. The sun blushed over the shrinking foothills that morning with John Denver's plea for home. But it was too late.

Perhaps it isn't about the reflection of image or the prophetic acknowledgement of the jockling other – and by “it” I mean It. I watch the first yellowing light frost the shrinking ocean of snow from my place. My chair. My time. It lasts for but a moment but I begin here. And here.

There is nothing left to claim. But can I just say this? I've heard the song and it has played through these fingers since the day you offered the very first notes.

I just gotta have faith-a-faith-a-faith.

Two A.M. Cartography

Without North Star light, a certain bereavement finds its way into the interstitial facia of my breath.

Winter Solstice brings the shortest day. Dark days, dark nights. The cartography of 2 a.m. indicates a familiar dream whilst wide awake. In the silence one can hear whispering trees and sleeping sheep and the sounds of hushed lips pleading into the slight hollow of this almost known cheek.

Write. Just write.

The creek freezes. Potable water held hostage to what is. Yet I hear its idiolect babbling in the microcosm of life. The aggregate of the world sinks to the bottom; this and other clues while panning for gold.

What happens in the world interests me less. My pride used to laud all over itself for being aware of the global condition of humanity. These days – this day – even malfeasance barely brings my stomach acid to roil. Instead, the realm of my devotion has the borders of butternut squash and washing wood floorboards and soothing the hurts of those who find me near.

but there are always outliers
destined convergences
coils of care
adrift
in the moonlight sonata
played for me

Maestro, again.  Again.  

I Ate My Lunch in the Quiet

Will I write if no one reads – the question steals oxygen and light from the room. Will I read if no one writes – a deadening suggests, no. Perhaps Finnegan's Wake is not the best litmus test for detecting the reader's soul.

I ate my lunch in the quiet, watching the snow pile. Draft from the old windows cooled my cheeks and nose. There is no lake here, yet I can see clearly the deep, black layers of my childhood waters freezing from shore to center. I can hear the men hammer and bolster their ice shanties for the long hours of sitting in anticipation. Every year someone falls through or a shanty is swallowed whole. One doesn't miss waiting for that day.

How many times will I bury and exhume the bones facing east? My one hundred lives lived, unremembered yet familiar, moan through cornflower hills. They creak through the aching sentinels of the winter forest. Did she leave me any clues? In the beautiful utterances I recognize what I cannot touch. In walking the fine line between hibernation and death, one lets her body do the work.

The coldest day of the year so far.
An uncovered rose bush at the front of the house reminds me of where I've fallen short, like a dead body hanging from town centre.
And no birds; I have nothing to offer them.
They say the sun will peak through around lunchtime and so it is that hope continues to hinge upon what others share.

I am trammeled for now.

Please send birds.

Flamingo Pleas on Broken Knees

In the breathless blue morning, a train sighs in legato notes. The stillness breeds a sense of hyperawareness worthy of rabbit sneezes and feathers falling. Can hating oneself be the same as loving – a variation from the neutral nothing that is universal and all? The dark spiral breaks the heart in the same emotional vibration as joy. Barriers subservient to a force more energetic than peace. More meddlesome. Sure, lessons and all. But how painful the ice is when kneeling on broken knees!

The ego alights as a source of heat, always building on the coldest morning, the moment before drowning in my hypothermic lake. Illusion as survival then? My bare feet recoil from the gelid bedroom floor but eventually they shuffle a path into morning. There does come a point when the eyes swell over and the tear ducts can produce nothing. The mirror and camera lenses do not lie.

If not the sea, then a cabin warmed by cut logs and stoked fire. Coffee. Blankets. The Authors of my life. Perhaps it is time to go.

Today though, to dress the sorrow with earrings and scarves. Jeans and blackness. Dawn, please be flamingo silk beckoning the dear girl forward one more day.

God's Eyelashes

Under a serrated night I dreamt of a fox for the first time. He saw me. He was me. He passed through me on the way to the wet woods.

The moon and his quicksilver gaze! A muzzled light, blushing through wax paper. In a thieving air, I remember I haven't seen the stars for ages. This and other truthful entanglements of time.

Aleppo and snow falling. We are the executioner's wife watching the systematic extermination of innocents. Remember whose bed you warm, wives; the nightmare honors no quilted sweetness or pristine sheets. Speaking of sheets, in another dream we almost made love while the rest of the commune was gathered for the hegira ceremony. We decided to play a game of cards first.

God's eyelashes fall onto my cheek. Winter this way. We are close but there is still room to lose lashes upon radiant faces.

In single digit temperatures, I fade under five blankets, drifting into the trackless shallows of summer's lakes. May I hibernate until spring, or at least until the sky mellows to rose milk sometime after 9 a.m.? And I miss the birds. It may be time to take things into my own hands.

A Love Affair Without Disciples

I play the sentences aloud. Maestro's words, my voice. Skilled hands becoming warm breath, lilting into existence and floating forevermore as diamonds.

When I am played, Jessica breaks – bending towards the earth like the arms of a colossal pine under white weight. It is the third way. The song I've never heard. My Lord's embrace.

Before bed, toast with honey and a cup of cooling tea. Ritual as a love affair. A love affair without disciples.

The words beget me. I turn and dip my shoulders in between as to avoid collision. But I've already been undone. There is nothing to gain here. Nothing to lose. My tea and eyelids slip down.

It is not hunger; I am full. The abundance of my pliancy has everything to do with what I can give (she says as she eats every word).

Somehow in the moving process the new neighbors have left their outside garage lights on day and night for the last ten days. The light shines into my face through the bedroom window and ripples an already delicate sleepscape. Until we meet, there will be this light between us. That is one way to filter what is.

Yet the sun arrived today, Maestro, and every piney branch danced. The remnant of fall's Tibetan flags waved in the light and I was blessed accordingly. Slipping or sleeping. Praying or persevering. I can only ever fall into your tempo.

My Lake Effect

Ginger tea to settle the truths my stomach cannot handle. When the past shook my hand it felt delicate and more worn than I had remembered. I used to speak of how history no longer exists and therefore, it only has residence if the mind allows. It all sounds so very comforting until the present moment, the-this-is-all-there-is now, contains the convergence of what was and what is – a living, breathing moment with the DNA of a million years and eight hundred tons of stardust. Now and not just now.

At 4 a.m., raging whispers of snowfall spill the secrets of a sleepless night. Our rot now rests under two feet of unhurried suffocation. The tree limbs weaken and camber. A steady march of tiny flakes changes the landscape into pristine treachery. My lake effect.

What if there is only ever words? Does not the river flow with or without them? Yet another metaphor beginning a trail that it cannot finish. One wonders if wanting ruins the moment. Leftover cake sits on the counter because apparently one really can't always have cake and eat it too! Please send coffee, won't you?

Icy daggers hang unemployed from garages with no sun to refract. No point to reach. The birds don't visit anymore on account of the motor that used to keep the creek running has been removed. I'm pissed about it and add the affront as another proof that desires call after their lost twin of suffering. The awareness of the futility of want reteaches the lessons I was born to learn.

Today, a fire and cooking and the assembly of homemade hot chocolate to give as gifts. And I cloister under the storm and find a hundred ways to give thanks. But I miss the warmth of sea-sand at dawn. And the birds sharing a drink and bath outside my window. And eating cake.

The Elephant Sky

December is finally summoned by winter's dawn, delayed and darker than expected. I pace the cold timbers with the struggle for light ahead of breath. How happily evergreens hold all the cards now!

Days arrive in a certain scarcity – a dingy sky holding the ashes of waiting. On call for sunlight, patience is folded into coffee and velour. The family gathers in the living room to share heat and a few songs during the power outage. Guitar and candlelight. Hallmark in action. Which other place sinks love so far in? Yet, the star in the east beams on clear and clouded nights alike.

The wind tears at the remnants of autumn and throws its carnage about. All night something was heard scraping and running and dragging on the roof. When the neighbors mentioned the same experience, an exorcist was mentioned.

During the discussion of racism he asked if I had ever noticed how outside of privilege, white Americans don't have a narrative. They are afraid to lose their story. I wasn't sure if that was meant to elicit compassion, but the question still snakes about in the cochlea of my days. It joins up with the wormy thread that asks what one's role is in the matter of injustice. Where is that mountain top shack built upon the peace that surpasses all understanding? One starts to wonder if the climb is a retreat from madness or an ascent straight into illusion.

The storm pushes the village into alertness. Grocery lines are long and clerks keep asking if we are ready for “the big one.” Maybe the squall will save me from his retirement party whereby I will surely drown in gushing adoration for a man I do not like. For he's a jolly good fellow . . .

At 4 a.m., how soft the snow. How barely heard. How helplessly kept. The unwelcomed necessities, a teacher. From my window, I try to imagine a way through the snowflakes, but I fall into the seduction of just a few, every time. There isn't knowing or not-knowing, only the ordinary measure of clouds. This is my lesson: the perfect season exists in every breath.

And today, under the elephant sky, the student transcribes the heart as happy.

(h)ours

Inner space offering a new coherence. When it is shared, what emerges? This and other questions that spin time into silver threads. The teacher asked if human beings are a function of the past making love to the future. In this way, the evolutionary potential of crises sends a message to Jessica. Collective intelligence is at work.

I hear chickadee notes skip across November's end as I work for (h)ours in the cold. The call to critical questioning manifests. Exertion can be noisy. Pulling everything out of the shed so that I could put it all back in a different way produced grunts and clanging and swearing and heavy breaths. Yet the bird song pierced the work. I knew I would avoiding writing about this bird; it is the “why” that rearranges the clutter.

The train sighs at 3 a.m. – my first awareness of another world trying to get somewhere on time. A child coughs in her sleep and the dog's collar gives away her anticipation of an early meal. At 4:30, the rain returns. What I read in myself begins to count less as the work of the previous day washes away under the deluge. Tea and its perfect timing.

The intersection of vertical space and the grounding of embodied structure. How my body as a service to the surroundings is something to consider. Our wedding bands no longer match, which isn't that big of a deal unless one is into symbols and such. We meet in the morning and part at night to make room for true sleep. It is love that calls me in and out . . . and love that brings me back.  

Wishing Upon Raindrops is Better

A kingfisher resting in the rain. Gazing heavenward, the congruence of oxygen and love reaches the interstice of my cells. Royal birds and their faithful subjects . . .

The rain continues for seven days. I don't want the snow or its temperatures, so complaining really has more to do with awareness than wishing for a change. This and other graying stories.

Lately, my embodiment seen through another. A healing happens all at once when the synchronicity expands life's loose-leaf container. Sometimes it is these words and sometimes others. But underneath every letter is an integrated flow that has touched every single part of whoever I am.

One moves through the inseparability, finding more space than expected. They scoffed at the minimum wage hike and the taxes taken from my daughter's paycheck. Can that which one cannot see still be a teacher? It's not my rodeo, so I bow out in deference to the many things I do not know.

The night air off the back deck smells of skunk and rain. Wishing upon raindrops is better because your heart drops into the soil and becomes the surroundings in which you live. I have a thing about smoke, and it felt like a good night for a cigarette. Coffee instead, whereby steam is a proxy.

Curiosity to wisdom. The unicursal path with no dead ends. To walk is to exist and so far, that is the only sense I can make of this life.

Rain, rain, stay another day.

This Way

Lace on the windows suggesting an everyday sunrise. Mostly I am sure of the monastic arrival – the quiet presence of light creeping as a prayer held beneath the breath. Yet other days, I am not so sure. I sing myself a druidic tune which asks – begs really – for more light. More sentences. More proof that there is no “I” in “I am not alone.”

I remember the time he asked me about being a feminist. This and hundred other conversations to explore in a another way. Instead, pillow talk and Tchaikovsky's letters in a lonely bed.

As the enlightened ones would say, there is no other way. This way.

Hiccups and a headache. The letter I didn't write. Hours pass watching the afternoon grow black. We are all liars. Around here, the churchy faces of tolerance and love. Love the sinner hate the sin...or some crap like that. Yet as soon as the crack of permission is granted, a leakage of the primary colors in fear and hate. And what about my lies? Sitting across from dissenting lenses I hold my tongue, hiding from those who don't deserve to know.

“Be like water,” and other Bruce Lee advice. It rains just above freezing, almost ice. Almost dangerous. With each fracture in justice, a recognized closing. Regression. The temperature of the collective is asking to be monitored.

But when I am still in the folded silence, I become aware of the future in my eyes – a transpersonal knowing of the power to heal. Love, my lovely, is the only coherence that settles the turbid flow. Yes to darkness. Yes to hate. Yes to violence. But also, yes to love. Yes to water in motion. Yes to the mystical science of reality.

a love affair unending
because it always is
this way