Asleep Behind Borders

Is our purpose simply to be at play in the unbearably exquisite fields of the Lord? I fall asleep behind borders of Black-Eyed Susans, chicory, and milkweed going to seed. Behind the dream, everyone fades – but not you. You . . . happy in your intimate toil; your New Englandy valley; your giving gardens.

I tuck two prisms under the bandana knot which secures tarot cards. I could hang them or carry them together or wear one. Or . . . one wonders why they are both still here in the first place.

Allergies on overdrive. Cicada clinging to summer. Green acorns falling more frequently now, hitting glass tables with an echo like gunshots.

The weather woman says “tropical-like.” Mosquitoes agree.

Crickets and traffic weave a song through unharvested corn. A few more dips in the lake. A few more jacket-less nights. To delight in feta and balsamic is to savor summer and me. Are we there yet?

The old woman up the street pulls an even older chihuahua named Sugar in a stroller. We share a smile and sweat in the 90 degree heat and go about our day. Is the desire to extricate oneself from this town a judgement on my brothers and sisters? Tell me there is room in Vermont.

Warming to Skin Temperature

A single strand of spider silk takes on the color of my own hair in August lateness. Heat swells keep building but the garden doesn't seem to mind. The hydrangea have had enough though.

and Lake Michigan
lapping as if exhausted
my feet

Green-for-now maple leaves overlapping each other with gradient light. I am in love and I love and I am love.

With you, with us, going beyond the personality needs. When one is not afraid of losing something, everything changes, no? No longer working to hold onto to that which cannot be lost.

The heart as an intimate doorway to God.

Maybe for me there has always been a sense of Love as a river but it was my heart a the helm, navigating the eddies and rapids and stills. Now, it seems as if my heart was merely an invitation to arrive – allow – admit.

lady flicker
unconcerned on the park path –
savor what remains

Cool crystal against my breast, warming to skin temperature. It reminds me who I am – love incarnate, light-bearing healer, and perfectly nobody.

And yet . . .a beam of purple light mingles with the love of all our iterations to reveal a possible answer for “what if.”

At River-Level

Strawberries are still coming on and peppers abound because with attention and tenderness, the garden gives everything it can. Once the harvest is over, does the garden reach a point where attention and tenderness is no longer required? Does it get what it needs, then saving up whatever nutrients are left over for the next go around? Retracting into itself? Retreating underground? Readying for the deep sleep?

So what I am asking is, with no point of crises, no destination, no drive or need to cross the river to the other side, when do we experience the happiness and beauty that rockets us past worldly understanding unto the realm of what is felt as home?

Every morning I made my way down a steep embankment to the river. The same fallen tree was there on which to rest. The same stones were arranged in a small circle on the bank as if to designate a fire, yet offering no proof that a fire had ever been burning there. There was nothing to hear but the rushing water and despite looking for clues to the contrary, every morning the scene was almost exactly the same. But on the last morning, the very same morning I had danced with the black bears, something was very different at the river side. Cairns were stacked here and there in the river and I felt . . . transgressed.

The river is not mine, nor the banks or the stones, nor the small poustinia created for the briefest of time. In fact, it is right to consider whose land I had transgressed morning after morning. And yet, I was startled into realizing at the river-level, that it was indeed time to leave that place.

There is a sorrow in that, a clinging to that which changed everything. There is a desire to make that life real and not this one. There is a happiness that I never knew I could know, but now I know it. So there is heartsong Beloved sings to me and it sounds like the silence of two, coming lip to lip, becoming one.

Baez Wanted More

For the first time in our history, I am not awake when he returns from the airport.

Guthrie, Seeger, Dylan – a moment when there was something to say. Shamans sigh from another time zone, a few eras back. Serious consciousness, purely unveiled. Yet Baez wanted more and said so.

Glorious summer mornings, despite all proper appreciation and gratitude, cannot remain. Karmic lessons about partners and the perceived other. What am I missing here – asked and answered.

Squared, dead soft, 20 gauge copper wire to hold the most delicate of stones. Securing an idol I don't mind wearing until the death means I may have turned into a jewelry maker.

Suffering means clinging is involved.

A bee sting changes my momentum and the gulping of a cornflower sky must wait.

Intellect at play. A subsystem that must bow to the meta system.

What depth does my light allow? She visited Neptune's Cave, found her way out to Afghanistan and had to ask, where can one stand in awareness?

Who dies when you cannot bear the unbearable? I know the answer because I was made for such a time as this.

The process of life, deepening being.

Mother, help us all look into the eyes of those close to the earth that we may know the grace of suffering as a gift.

Sooner than Desired

Screech owls whinny into lavender mist. Cricket pulses are out of cadence with one another and yet, perfection rises. Acorns pelt the roof at unexpected times and in these ways one knows summer must give way sooner than desired.

How we understand each other in our in-most heart. How sweet that fragrance! How luscious those words!

from loving
to being
love

I no longer feed sorrow and loneliness to the hungry ghosts that show up at my table.

Lover and Beloved merged. Your key unlocks the place where love lives. In love with you or in love with love? Personal pronouns must expire! How glorious this sunlight! How beautiful this meeting of lovers living in love.

Method vs. essence?

Rest in the love because it no longer needs. We can celebrate!

Zucchini breads: lemon, blueberry, chocolate and plain.

But sweetheart, something like: I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours. Dylan knows it all.

Prepared to Burn the Proof

Pickling jalapeños and canning salsa. Library books on self-sufficiency and mini-farming. Mom and Dad's 51st Anniversary is this week and Kyle returns from Dallas. Two distinct pulses of consciousness occupy the same stream and finally I am starting to get my bearings.

Invest, be aware but attach not. Even the happiness of my own reflection in your eyes?

My obsession and adoration of weathered clothespins. Seeds drying on a kitchen cloth. Sure, I can change things a little but perhaps these perceived restrictions are my svadharma.

As night curls a thieving crook around hopes for sleep, maybe I could read to you a poem. How do you feel about Bly? “A man and woman sit near each other . . .”

A life consecrated. Now I have fallen in love with the universe because of you – you who awakened in me the place where I am love.

Yet, add my attachments to the aging scroll for I see them now and am prepared to burn the proof.

Changes, not in our doing but in our being.

I know the light and love that I am now and I can only be this.

Imagine; this whole time, a dialogue with myself!

Return to Love.

We –
rivers rushing
into one sea

Storms and Iron Corsets

As a woman, I cannot abide a caged bird – or a caged anything.

Mom was beaten with Grandfather's leather belt which meant she left home early. He didn't come to her wedding but he lived with us as he died a slow, suffocating death. Does she hold a grudge? Yes and no. Does she remain caged? Yes, though she only glimpses the gilded skeleton of her cell on occasion.

It was not my father who taught me to fish. It was my grandfather, struggling to breathe in the thick mist of a lake morning.

Together we have known the river, my love. Now what about the sea?

My body didn't exist in Vermont, let alone, hurt. Ankles didn't turn or get sore. Ribs didn't feel as though they were being crushed, tighter and tighter, by an iron corset. Yet the moment I returned to Michigan, so too the pain. I hobble back from walks too long and my back feels like the day after a car accident. I never told you about that, did I? “Next time” gathers and grows, yet with no promise.

A second and third round of storms bring down nests and branches and power lines. Well one good thing is that I find myself humming “Shelter from the Storm” and smiling about all that you've given.

Who Else is Worthy

Kale, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and summer squash. Broccoli keeps coming.

Mosquitoes harvest my arms and legs.

Suffering shows you where your mind is still clinging.

Daisies are ending but milkweed pods are ready to open. I take a small bag with me on my walks so that I can collect the pods when they open from the giant milkweed field behind Rush Creek. I have plans.

Beneath the pine black mulch gives way to circular stepping stones which butt up against all manner of wild weeds. Violets are tall enough to hide rabbits until they move, and then, the leggy canopy betrays their direction.

I shall not renunciate nor fully integrate the passions and desires, foibles or neurosis, proclivities and bents, joys or sorrows.

Death-birth-death-birth.

And yet, he wrote, “The air smells of thunder and torn clover.” To die and be born again in a single moment is the fate of this dance. And that soul....that writerly expressive God-hewn soul, cannot help but collect his brothers and sisters like wayward sheep.

The shepherd-mystic, hunter of lost men, kingfisher above the busy world of water and life . . . I see you there.

You honored Shiva and won her respect. Who else in this life could be worthy?

The storm gathered power as it marched over Lake Michigan in the night. We are powerless now and in many ways, that is what we need to know.

All Sacrificing Ended

Delicate Morning Glories blooming fresh and wild like dawn along the dirt road. A fine mist took us by surprise but its cool softness was not unwelcome. Sometimes wind in the pines picking up vim makes me think that I can still hear the river rushing down the mountainside. Water, always water – but who knew the brooks and streams of your beloved Vermont would be deeper than my oceanic lakes? No turtles but trout. No moose but bears.

I made him Kenyan coffee and was pleased with the robust taste at altitude. How height translates at the bean level. How your delight meant everything.

Mom calls and along with all the other texts and messages, I decline to connect. They will worry soon but I'm not ready to let anyone in. Sure, love is shooting out of my pores like a glitter-bomb-rave-detonation. And yet, to speak the answer of “how are you” would mean sharing something that prefers soundless knowing over the clang and driving beat of the world.

A collection of stones, flowers and a hawk feather. Altars as decoration now that all sacrificing is finished. I know the kiss of God. And it has made me more human. Drop the reigns and watch me run!

I forgot to drink the river water. Now I must return.

A Black Bear Dream

A reckoning. I can't work this life, this way. Instead, it works me.

You hid your hands from me and now I try to join them under a pure, white sheet.

The drop to my death. Cliffs and mushrooms. How many lives do we get?

I've never felt more like a woman than I did that day.

Mary Magdalene burned with radiant fire and light in her Lord's gaze, not as fangirl or acolyte, but as a feminine equal to his masculine ordination. I feel her now, in the presence of your mystic path, coming alive in a way that brings love and holiness to all. Mary's lessons have almost come to completion in me. In us? Come closer, beloved. There is yet another step to take.

I wake a 4 a.m. from a black-bear dream. One wonders if she isn't getting the message or if the past is just saying, “hey, do what bears gotta do.” Just be. Here. Now.

Winter is coming, my love, but I shall fight to stay awake as long as possible.

Another Emptiness Coming

Standing in front of a sink full of dirty dishes, the overwhelming urge to sob climbs up my back. Now what, indeed.

When we moved back from Kenya, everyone was so happy to see us – relieved that we were finally “safe” – demonstrative with allayment. Yet, we were forced into the labor of sewing together two halves of a heart, one in Kenya and one still at large. We could not join the swell.

It's like that now. How I was missed! Children cling to my neck. Kyle watches me move, his love tracking temperatures and degrees. Oppressive heat and screeching blue jays put on the play of opposites from Vermont. Oh Vermont . . . let me return. Invite me to your home of homes.

Well, the garden grew while I was gone and needs tending. So many weeds in the landscaping but as I look at them, really look at them, I'm like, “why bother?”

The first acorn falling lands in the crack of the deck boards. Another emptiness is coming. Beckett gathers courage for campus. Lexi rehearses her senior recital. My tethers break.

Is there grieving in heaven?

Vermont Is

Compassion.

Watching Earth fall
willingly into the river.
Saying yes
to the sacred
nearness.
Heaven streaming
beams through guardian pines.
Jack rabbits,
beavers and black
bears.
A way of seeing the world,
not single act strung together
as pearls on a necklace.

Wisdom.

Being in the world,
but emptied.
Footsteps of a child
no longer exiled.
One dish,
one bowl,
one cup
to share
with all.
Dawn
on a dirt road,
sand and stones
soaking in the dark night,
leaving something new
to bear down upon.

Grace.

Following love
to shoulders,
rivers,
and picnic tables.
Kindness and vulnerability
of chipmunks
curious to connect.
Cabin zafus unmerited.
Sanctified regeneration
from embodied
elevation.
Hand size paw prints
from ancestors saying
a blessing.

Love.

But What If

Drinking dawn from a jam jar.

Pine trees cradle the view in such a way that I feel both home and transported unto an existence that needs no home. At 5 a.m., I make coffee in the French press, light 3 tea candles with matches from a matchbook and arrange my stack of books for the day. The dog remembers the walk to the river yesterday morning and tries very hard to change the posture of my heart on the matter. I speak to her as if she is a child, even though she is elderly now, “I will take you, puppy, after I pray.”

Maps of Vermont and the study thereof.

Throughout the night, animals build empires in the ceiling and walls of this old cabin. I remember sleeping in the loft as a child, listening to bats make a life for themselves in the attic. And in Kenya, the rats would become as strong as humans, often sounding as if they were moving furniture or having a dance party. Sometimes it is hard to tell whether they are all trying to get in or get out.

This visit, the temporary way of life, this simplicity. There is no extra. Every item in the cabin serves at least one purpose and often, serves many. The pine floors and cedar walls are unfinished and rough-hewn. Open stairs to the loft have penciled trace-lines still marked on them from their birth. The screens on the windows are stapled around the frame and even when closed, the windows seem slightly ajar. A visitor's cabin, indeed. But what if.

The river rushes without ceasing within earshot of every step I take. This and other ways the flow is impossible to ignore.

Beyond Saints and Mystics

Dawn now blooming in a commonplace haze. Your side of the pines, luminous – my side, damp from overnight rains. Gathering to head east and wondering what, if anything, will be left behind.

Horses I will never know. Fox feet. Animals migrating. My walk has been chosen.

Sometimes my shadow startles me! Like, what are you doing here?

Along side the trail behind Rush Creek, cornfields become a new forest. Blushing tassels now rise higher than my shoulder. Red-winged blackbirds trill and trifle but also, wrens and sparrows dart about as if playing hide-n-seek with the world.

My wall of windows open east and I am never not facing that way. That means different things at different times but always, love. When Fran was killed, the family clung to her favorite phrase and made it a mantra. Her eyes would become like radiant jewels in mid-morning sun when she used to exclaim, “I just love, love!” I miss her.

Love has never changed but my understanding of it blooms in many different colors. As of late, it has returned to the color of my earliest childhood memories – before I knew about bodies and sex and marriage and happily-ever-after – before evil or sorrow or slavery or apartheid – before God and church and the awareness of saints and mystics.

Love as the color of light
bouncing off the lake.

Love as the deep green of August pines
offering incense unto the Kingdom.

Love as shadows in the deeper woods
where one can be both hidden and seen.

Love as hues of dirt on the gravel road –
dark with dampness after rain,

and light as beach sand
after rainless July weeks.

I have a feeling I will outlive you all and spend my last embodied days alone on a back road, shuffling along, talking as I go, to the bees or the Monarchs or the little rabbits hiding in the brush. The color of home is the color of love.

And I just love, love.

Bobbing in the Shallows

Emptiness as plenitude.

Summer skips across the lake. Later, jet boats throw “rooster tail” walls of water from their sterns. The display stops all attempts at conversation. Women may own and drive jet boats but . . . c'mon man, I see you.

At Reunion, new moms ask if I am vaccinated and then lovingly hand over their babies to bounce. My shirt is soaked with sweat and the heat is broiling my brain, but I still love cooing and smiling with the babies.

All the sudden, studying my grandmother a little more closely. Her fair and thinning skin is my skin. Her red hair has faded to a yellowing white. Her rosaries come consecrated from Rome and each one belonged to someone she loved with fierce devotion. She prays for hours and everyone at church knows her by name and vice versa. I sat next to her and what is seen by earthly eyes felt older and yet, what is internally pulsing felt ageless. She prays for my conversion back to Catholicism every day. I told her I am fully in God's embrace and feel more loved than I ever felt possible. She smiles and stares out at her great grandchildren bobbing in the shallows.

Plans to collect milkweed seeds from the field to replant in my care. Is that stealing? Well, if I sit still long enough, they will land in my lap, so there is that.

Vermont on the eastern horizon and rising at dawn, that dulcet, familiar voice wafts: child, what is taking you so long?

Just Home

Listening to sunrise, more muted than yesterday. Something is riven in overcast gray.

Intention and surrender.
Beheld and let go.
And now, theology of the interior.

A Sabbath Bride, re-souled.

One follows the fragrances of longing, and with the inward turn, finds Love. A mysterious landscape gushing, like wine rushing in, poured to overflowing. Drink and be merry.

Yet I am inseparable from the one who beholds me. This is no mistake because we are made anew in another. The question becomes one of constant renewal, moment to moment, until the end of lifetimes. Ending is near.

Soon, home in the rains.
And within the icy tombs of winter.
Through the celibacy of the fading world.

Just home.

The sun peeks from a broken cloud and for a moment, the world is gilded in light.

When you have a loving relationship with the earth, you can no longer violate her. That's what I see in you; that's why I love you.

Come to Morning

Turkey hens and chicks pattering through the yard, and robin songs rising before the sun. Did you know that blue jays can mimic the sound of other birds? Jay feathers in driveway cracks, on black wood chips and one beneath the giant fern.

Birds as acharyas. Blue as home.

This morning a ghost knocked a hot cup of coffee out of my hands, making me laugh out of respect for a move well played. This and other ways to come to morning.

Softly stepping around garden edges to snip herbs – rosemary, chives, dill. A knowing pools around the edges of my eyes:

Women are reorganizing the conversation, beloved. We have no desire to wear the robes or mantle of a khan. We are shunning restrictive coverings and would prefer to operate naked.

Daisies for gems.

Fires for warmth.

Freedom for our soft frame.

No more poisoned apples and instead, we sip nature's sweetened nectar, pollinating as we go. All holy houses are opening. We've waited eons but we are now on the move. Accept the invitation to witness our gardens.

Come, disrobe and know joy.

Hold Nothing Back

Let love decide.

Tiny Bun-bun is always alone, nibbling clover and taking shade beneath ever growing violets. One realizes giving is never reluctant but cannot say if that is a law of God or not. Sure, give always – hold nothing back. But even a child knows to hold onto at least a little in order to move to the next stage. Food for thought.

Re-homing 41 hastas, planting butterfly weed and some other kind of perennial with purpling spires. I clear a section for a better crop of milkweed next year. The yard has become a place to experiment and play, craft and love, tend and be tended. It is alive and asks to be treated as something different than the day before. It's hot and I sweat through my bandana, shouting from the porch door to the boys who are deeply engaged in a 4 hour board game, for a water refill and another sweat rag. After the work, I shower and soak in eucalyptus epsom salts to head off assured pain. I move about the house stilted in grimaced steps.

But happy.

Ibuprofen, ice, cannabis – the salve of age – old and getting older.

Vermont waiting. Generating. Entrusting.

To grow and yet disassemble. I reach out my empty aging hand in the willingness to receive.

Moonlight Tea

Rose-gold lamp light glows through the pine like a low hanging moon. One remembers being taught to capture moonlight in a teacup – a gift from beloved – yet a cairn to grandmothers and their mothers. I've been moonless for a while now. But great, great grandmother Sheehan says one need not worry about such things.

Love.

Detachment.

Humility.

Let this be enough.

Let this be all.

*

Cerulean hydrangea blooms. Dead earwigs in dog bowls. Summer enters the senses through the spirit of two worlds.

In the book on her life, Grandma refers to her children as her “Baker's Dozen.” She writes a paragraph for each child, my father's being the most abridged. She is the apple of his eye, but perhaps he is simply her firstborn of thirteen, “family physician, now retired.”

What is passing is already gone.

*

An angst to write, which feels like a ablation upon silence. Stillness. Quiet.

We have a meeting place as outlined in the Book of Life; do you think it has a moon to behold?

Refusing Full Blue

How I haven't seen the moon for too long – that kind of awareness – that kind of ache.

4 a.m. might be named a scared hour by insomniacs to help with self-soothing. Just saying.

Rain finally passes but sitting on the ground a few days later will still soak your shorts and legs.
Air tinged with hints of smoke and pine.
Sky refusing full blue.
Bun-bun growing in the protection of her suburban oasis, though not without a few terrifying chase scenes with Kora.
Summer goes about its way of breeding excruciatingly deep gratitude for life, warmth and rays.
What birds do you think I will see in Vermont?

A dream feels a little further out of reach which is a good reminder that dreams uphold illusions and the time has passed for that.

Lately I don't sleep enough for dreams but there was this one a few mornings ago that yet lingers in the sacral chakra. She and I shared one kiss, more tender than Heaven had ever known in all of time. And that was that.

And you, my brother, he who allowed himself to be a guide back to truth, what if we put our feet in the actual river together? Trees would overlook that communion and we would invite them to partake, of course. Would you read to me or tell me that secret poem you hold so dear? Could we sit on a blanket and nibble like rabbits on the yield of growing things?

Discalced monk, show me your feet and I will show you mine.

We are steps away from the hermitage we never left.

Well, our footprints in the sand show a bit of dancing was involved, but at the end of the day, with legs and feet happily weary from joy, we all shall rest.
In peace.