3 a.m. With a Side of Ramble

We dwell in a humanity of appearances. What is observable is smoke and mirrors, subject to interpretation and imagination. We form a fictitious world of loves and hates, desires and longings, hopes and fears, secrets, aversions, and a million other invisible assessments. The only truth is oneself and only you can know yourself. How is that for 3 a.m. coffee with a side a rambling?

S and I head west, road-tripping to see a few bands. I've unintentionally left my favorite hoodie at work after letting someone borrow it, and I am not at all comfortable having to travel without it. Its lightweight flexibility and all-black sensibility is comforting in most situations. I'd make us stop at work to get it before leaving but it's in entirely the wrong direction of our destination.

Our direction is correct but it requires leaving a few perceived comforts where they are.

There is another way to see and I'm guilty of building up a picture of the world which only exists to me. Light is merely one octave of vibrations out of at least fifty other known octaves of vibration traveling in the ether at the same speed. From this one octave I have masked myself; I have carved my own restrictions in the name of hiding from something more true.

What vast coherence do we miss because we allow our senses to split the totality of things?

In last night's dream, I was rescued from a gruesome and violent situation by someone in a mask. He said a recognizable code word so that I would know to follow his lead to freedom.

I've been intoxicated behind my mask, distracted by riddles, forgetting that I began as a connected and unified being.

We are invisible, really, and we are not we. We are this. And it's about time I started living in the manifestation of both idea and cause. Let us now look behind the curtain, fellow travelers.

Beams of Wood and Light

Now I know.
I fall in love with eternity, minus all bodies.
Call your priest because this is a spiritual situation.

Hiding behind metaphor.
Hence this falling without landing.
The truth is, perhaps breaking the rules makes the most sense.
I'm trying to be more clear but this way of being is a hard habit to break.
So now I must ask, who is hollering home?

At 3 a.m. I rake the sheets with insomnia.
Rise – read – write – repeat.
For a moment I dreamt I fell asleep in a winter barn, lofted with abandoned nests and held strong by beams of light and wood.

Wicker baskets of zucchini and squash.
Tomatoes cradled like Christ in the length of my shirt.
Watering both before daylight and as it departs.
Soon we will be blinded by blizzards and truth.

The gorgeous symmetry of heartbreak does not escape me.
It's about time to kick the ladder away from the aging muscle keeping it all alive.
My faith and trust lives, but my hope of understanding flies towards those purple mountains her breast always longed for.
Lost in poems is not the worst fate to befall a woman in a man's world.

Lost in you, is another story altogether.

Happy Because We Love

Shadows of trees leaning toward what comes later.

I am taken in by late day bursts of sun rays through the pines. Leaves larger than my hands are beginning to grow heavy in summer's sharpening fold. I lie in the wake, wanting. Shall I roll over and touch the ancestors waiting so very deep?

I no longer wear my mother or my father's mask. Yet there may be at least one more front to dismantle.

I remember taking a bar of Coast soap down to the end of the dock on summer mornings to bath in the lake after swimming laps. Youth's Shangri-la shimmered as the beginning of my love affair with water.

Now, Queen Ann's Lace and roadside chicory. A woman talks to weeds and spends her purse on seeds. Mourning doves with layered coos. This cemetery of summer collects her dead and awaits the autumn haunting.

Farrokhzad writes:

Alas , we are happy and serene.
Alas, we are heartsick and silent.
Happy, because we love.
Heartsick, because love is a curse.

This woman knows the words “I love you” come from a world of futility. The last lover was right: we have no words. Let me be filled with the silence of a wordless stream. But for God's sake, please sit on the banks with me.

Delicioius Sleep

Dark holiness rolls into Monday morning on the pointed bow of thunderstorms. Just before rain, rabbits graze on wild violets and frogs nestle in the pit of a mossy stone.

The thing is, I was born when I met you and was sentenced to lap your freeze-and-thaw for as long as I am allowed to abide.

I thought Dan was my first love; the first to make me feel alive; the first to set my world on fire. He laid me down on his brother's waterbed and I thought that was as close as I would get to a bed of straw.

As I grew older, I thought love was safety, security and comfort. It was nights of quiet possession and days of tranquil seas.

Now all bets are off. Love is higher and more down deep than any mantle built and worn by the living. No translation is available. No river crossing safe enough. Nothing is left to do but to float towards the sea.

Blueberry pie at breakfast. French toast, sausage and peaches for dinner. This rain-soaked afternoon is like a woolen cape on my shoulders. There is definitely a point in the day when it is too late for coffee. I am a pupil of what can be done – like climbing apple trees, bruised by branches, to see from the inside out. Oh won't you let me see from inside?

It could be true that we have overlooked the benefit of the poisoned apple. Such a delicious sleep filled with hundreds of kisses. Such a resurrection when love says it is right.

Swimming the Deep

dawn breezes
natal stillness kissing
this bird bath hush

Toasted cumin seeds rest in the mortar and pestle. My apple skin core against your wooden teeth. We enter and leave the cathedral of trees without yet finding a way to remain. Who is the vine; who is the branch?

Sun ascending the eastern trunk and later, sinking into western branches. Our reins will never entwine the sun. And yet, and yet; every day sunlight gallops into our rotation again.

We were not made to be lonely, despite our best efforts. Yet seasons come and go. Late summer is upon us. Night coolness wings over luxuriant gardens. The silken sleeves of spiders catch midnight tears and hold them for all to cherish at dawn.

There is a saying: A heart at peace is easy to please.

What do you know about an effusive lover? I can swim the deep that keeps you.

The old dirt road widens at the bend and yet the trees along both edges are able to lean in to form a cool, green tunnel. This is part of the way to the lake. I was thinking of driving with you most of the way there and then parking the car a mile out or so and walking the rest of the way.

Where you go, I go – do you not yet see?

And one last thing, beloved. I was wondering, would you, could you, carve for me a walking stick? The journey is long and I could use a little help.

Treacherous Teachers - Turtles and All

Who is invited and who is not.

He cornered me in the bathroom and tore the wet bathing suit from my skin. The choice to avoid the word “body” here is deliberate. Few choices are available these days. Lakes can be a treacherous place, turtles and all.

The author wrote, “the art of crises” and I knew exactly where she was headed and where she had been. The feminine understands how the earth is fractured, and she also knows how the trails of life require attention with love. We tend broken waters. We speak on behalf of the Mother.

No longer need we look for god's footsteps in sand or elsewhere. Just have a conversation – with the water, with land – she speaks. Watch the spider weave the world into being. Take a breath and look in all directions.

Disrobe in the rain.

What is tattooed on the inside of your skin?

Make no more mistakes: it would arise out of my own power if I chose to kneel before you.

Another storm overnight; another blessing of rain for the withering.

Indra's Net, indeed.

As long is there is light, there is love.

I’m only sorry that it took my so long to know.

Octopus Trap

Fireflies flicker after the storm.

I realign with my love, with what I really know to be true. This is ultimately not a moral or ethical effort, for what is right today may not always be right tomorrow. Yet when meeting Shadow, take a moment to pour tea from the being of divinity. This connection lives as one's deepest reality.

In the morning, remnants of last night's rain falls through sunlight. A handful-sized rabbit startles in the clover. Rosy and Lucy, twin puppies next door, escape the fenced yard to come play. These mythic stories one tells, mirror awakening, even when one resists. Go deeper yet, and act from there.

Drinking from bowls of moonlight.

Have you read my letter to the past? My top dresser drawer left open – blue underwear, purple shirt, black bra. It's what I was wearing when I was burned at the stake. But don't look away just yet, beloved. Spoiler alert, I live and love still.

Angel halos as a free pass.

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is known as “broken-heart syndrome” or in Japanese,
“octopus trap” and when I read that, I knew we were two cats stalking the same mouse.

Silence as an axe.

Yet now, I know when I am a guest and when I am home.

Touch the Mystery

Campfire essence hangs in predawn air. Cardinals bring daylight's first song, followed by robins and a few warblers I have yet to identify. The world is so ordinary and thin on one hand, and on the other, more grand, more opulent than my human perception deserves.

In the midst of it all, this cage of pain. My embodiment no longer moves without barbed tendrils digging into all the usual places.

From the window a sickness on the the trunk of the great pine is acutely visible. Why am I alone in seeing this? My hand on its bark, the great ancestor whispers.

One can absorb the deeper story, become it. The mystery is touchable, shining through space and time. How shall we act when we consider eternal being? Why don't we rest here in the unification of psychology, spirit and will?

Instead, friction.

Yet like a long summer day settling into starry visions, our elongated actions do find stillness. We are June on the rise and October on the fall. We are Jesus bringing wine to the party and crying out to our father in the throes of torture.

And have you ever noticed how ground becomes sacred and things tend to burn when up on the mountain? Transfiguration leads to spiritual autonomy, and our egoic state of consciousness has no capacity to understand or agree with it.

Allow and relinquish.

Find the place without center.

Let us no longer feel forsaken.

No Exactly

Sunlight momentarily breaks free of clouds and I pause accordingly before heading into the house. My true god. My unyielding beloved.

A man once said, “you will die in the prism of your life.” And a woman said, “all mothers are sinners.” What measure are words, exactly? All this to say that there is no “exactly.”

Days already begin to slip into a shorter version of joy. Cicada rattle in the westerly distance. Certain plants seem to grow tired of reaching. I'm never ready for this. Maybe someday I will again live where things grow all year long.

A partner as a safety pin, keeping things from exploding. A library of missteps and yet, mercy. Light attaches to compassion in a way which is only barely distinguishable from the light itself.

Monarchs few and far between. Yet, an abundance of lavender! A few blossoms go a long way. Can we ever do anything but take? I am bored and utterly exhausted from taking.

A Turtle Story

Turtles are their shells.

Sunlight dries lake water from my hair and begins to weave in golden highlights of summer. On my swim, water rims my lips and pushes along my cheeks. Light sizzles off the surface and a lake girl feels free for a time. Old Man Lou yells, “Well, hello, Freckle Face” as I make my way up the dock.

Boat cuddles with nieces – sunburn shoulders – mirrors on mirrors.

Singing Happy Birthday to Dad felt like a dirge. This and other ways one celebrates the hedgehog in a metal cage.

Lately, the purification and benediction of incense. I'm not opposed to a few good chants under the moon's lantern.

Lagoons at my feet.

Floods around my shoulders as a shawl.

Old yard waste rotting in the metal wheelbarrow festers in last week's rain. Its putrid tang takes me by surprise when tipping the barrow. There is the smell of death done right and the smell of death done dirty.

But why not donkeys? Kyle makes the joke, “it's not enough that she wants chickens. Ask her about her dreams of a donkey!”

And yet, when I reveal my most tender underside, he gently stays with me until it is time to turn upright.

Though turtles find peace in the deep, perhaps breathing at the thin compassion of the surface is okay too.

Eating Your Own Heart

Interior sunrise.

Last night: three punk rock concerts in a building with a black octopus painted on the entirety of the floor. The percussive drive of the beat forced itself into all my cells as this culture communed with its god. No person was surprising or unwelcome. Yet, there was something beautifully unique about the lead singer of the first band who joined the crowd after her set and simply, quietly, swayed. What I'm trying to say here has to do with music as sorcery. A new place is created in the creation itself.

To bend as willow.

I've been thinking about witches again – who they are – how they are given meaning. As an archetype, witches are typically “she” with power on her own terms. She is not defined by anyone else, unlike wife, sister, mother, virgin or whore. And her gift is transformation, conjuring worlds out of words, creating things other than children. Witches are alchemists connected to words: spelling and spells, grammar and grimoire. Female writers as witches.

Seeds, urging us to do better.

Nighttime is a secret wood where witches, writers and musicians eat their own hearts. How else can one fully arrive at sunrise in true kenosis? My legs as two kissing women carry me into the lighthouse of dawn. Pacing – writing – blessing. Moon lanterns are dowsed as no longer are their rays visible in the brighter warmth of another day.

Time to plant.

I Moored There Once

Sunset unspools ribbons like warm silk cooling on a lover's departure.

Overnight rain gathers in camping chairs and settles in low spots near the garden. Narcissus lives here. How deeper truths will arrive in a subtle richness of experience if one can forgo the more linear forms of language. The river of spirituality is like that – a myth that cannot be conveyed by facts.

Poor Narcissus and Echo! They will never find the love they desire if they continue to look with eyes only. In fact, they are cursed to die alone and heartbroken.

Who writes the truth?

What story will you tell now?

By mid morning, humidity broods upon itself to create layers of suffocation. Water: a certain giver and taker of life. It's July and I haven't yet been to Gun Lake this summer. The lake means people and while I miss the way one lives in communion with the lake, I do not miss the people. But oh, to swim! To float with the coolness of depths at your back and the heat-energy of the sun on your front. All sensory input muted save the heat and coolness meeting at the bridge of your body.

I was moored there once – dreaming of a dance on the dock – skinny dipping into the reflection of the moon at midnight. Now it is known, as surely Narcissus must know, that there is something beyond himself, beyond the reflection and beyond even love.

Life is death, we're lengthy at
Death the hinge to life.

~E. Dickinson

Through a Cooling Wood

Burying birds behind the shed.
Such light little things laid in the ground.

A last look at day falling into night.
No constellations or crickets – only gunfire and fear.

Storms roll in before midnight, dowsing man-made calamities.
The land needs this. I need this.
Love may exist as an instrument or tool one might not always need.
How blasphemous it feels to write such a thing.
How not like me.
And yet, I am not unhappy.

Cranes cry in the far field with the glow of fading light peeking through a cooling wood.

Honesty and fairness is what justice looks like.
Where is the justice in not allowing honesty?
The world around me is unjust because I, myself, am unjust.
I see that I have been lied to because I, myself, have lied.
How can we expect more from the world than we are willing to give?

I begin to confess in a slow yet deliberate unveiling of that which must decay.
Ash and smoke rises from the crumbling façade and just before settling into its afterbirth, an outline of hope burns through the loess.

She is in no more need of torches, beloved.

She is.

The Last Sacrament

Sometimes it is a tree one remembers most about a place.

acacia
on the lip of the Great Rift
god as thorns

Sometimes it is broken voices of those we have internalized which remind us that all choices carry responsibilities and consequences.

clover
splitting open for urgent bees
I am not enough

Sometimes we forget when viewed from far away, arcing rainbows are actually complete circles.

broken glass
1,000 guillotines calling –
light begins the end

And sometimes it is easy to get stuck in the doorway, resting too long on threshold as support.

to split kindling
insistent pain as catalyst
equanimity

*

Now I know: no man is worthy. It will always be my choice who to gift what only I can give. No esoteric jargon. No wordy distractions. Soul as journey rests on what can be known only without what can be said. It was never peace I was after. It was harmony. Therefore, I can speak lovingly on a landscape of pain. I can be sent stripped naked into the wilderness to be feasted on by the elements and beasts because I have accepted the last sacrament.

cheerful birds
rising from daylight, throat and bone
unspoken mercy

Ashes are not Dead

I'm a moth on a one-way street.
Our shadows and patterns have been laid bare in the light.
Now there is nothing left to say.
And like scar tissue built and layered over itself, I feel less.
Less than?

Not enough rain falling into the mouth of June.
Grasses begin to stiffen and rustle like snake's forked-tongued secret in your ear.
Flowers contract in order to tend to inner devotions.
Blue jays have even retreated into some kind of muted blue haze.
Drought has a sound like everything else.

A rafter of jakes and jennies cross 40th avenue with their mother and it occurs to me that I might not have ever seen turkeys with their babies before now. How odd that they too live in suburbia. And how odd that I live here too. I pick at the back of my earring, clipping it on and off it's post as a way of trading the rhythm of how I got here for how I might go.

In the end, what does any of that matter?
I fall instantly as ash from a flame I never saw coming.
In the charred dream, I lie down next to a determined river to sleep for 1,000 years, waking to learn that I have become a fish.
No longer a night pilgrim, I swim into rippled sunlight with the ability to jump into breathlessness whenever I choose.
Whether moth or fish, ashes are not dead, beloved.

Yellow for the Win

Melatonin dreams.

A rain storm overnight brings dusky softness to dawn – a reprieve of sorts, if I am honest. And am I honest? Honestly, it is hard to understand how you do nothing in the face of my inequality. There is violence masquerading as peace in the slow erosion of who I am allowed to be in this life. And honestly, I think you have severely mistaken a poetic nature as charming and innocuous.

Yesterday I was gifted bronze-like elephant bookends. The giver, “...saw them and just knew” she had to get them for me. Intent versus impact.

Around each elephant ankle is a decorative band indicating to me that the elephants are not free. They were captured and dressed for men's folly or usefulness. The giver saw this not and acted only on the first layer of impact. Woman to man, is one thing; woman to woman is another.

More toads than I remember leap from invisibility to intellection out of mulch, from under tipped wheelbarrows and around garden borders. Daisies, Buttercups and wild Sweet William growing along the back fence line feed yellow Swallow Tail butterflies and a few drowsy bees in late afternoon. Am I being too obvious when say, “Yellow for the win?”

The roof of the gazebo is entirely covered in moss and its white paint peels off like birch bark. This backyard focal point is used only by squirrels and sheltering jays, and I don't really know how to fix that. It lacks us.

My knee-prints remain in the soft bed of pine needles, beloved; tell me, are any dreams worth keeping?

Watching Jesus from Behind

Why shouldn't downturns finish what they start? To dig in and fight is one way to go but in the end, yielding hurts so much less. Sifted light as scripture. Heat as lamentation. Church begins at dawn where I am from, mister.

Lately, crossword puzzles with coffee replacing meditation and yoga. Anytime I stop moving or thinking, I am transported back to the moments of transfiguration. We held hands and melted into the damn the river and for the life of me, I cannot wrap my head around how we literally walked away from everlasting life. When one is all-in on love, one cannot predict or save or mitigate. And yet, it seems this is exactly what has been accomplished.

Black-eyed Susans, butterfly bushes, tiny tea roses bursting in concert. Just after daybreak, dozens of hot air balloons breathe like dragons above a waking canopy. Rainbow zigzags, a cartoon character, the Captain America symbol . . . all floating overhead in silence except for exhalation. I take it as a sign to cancel my plans, eat chocolate bars, and bury my head back under the blankets. I ask Jesus to join me because I don't know what else to do. The force of illusion knows no bounds.

Sifted, surrender, symbols. Watching Jesus from behind, I witness trial after trial. From what place inside did he respond or act? From which deepest realization did he dwell and move and save?

Though both are flyers, the Aviator is not the same as Icarus. However, no matter which way you slice it, I am the one on the ground looking up.

Toad as Teacher

Immovable heat anchors like an elephant near death. The plants and I are flattened accordingly. We are together.

Swarthy toads move from invisibility to beheld over and beyond garden borders. They are not as skittish as the creek frogs, thereby allowing for longer periods of presence and awareness. Crossing realms and worlds is in the eye of the beholder. We are only limited by our own ideas of death, life and love. Toads as teacher.

Dawn comes through as sifted light – here but filmy – instructed yet mysterious. My attention moves outdoors in nontrivial ways and yet, a sense of being hampered pushes in on the periphery. Heavy pine boughs droop towards the earth. The foliage after days of rain and sweltering heat amplifies as if taking up double the space. It's hard to breathe when swimming through the sea of violets. And every action produces sweat, stinging and blinding the eyes. Mosquitoes land and bite in under 2 seconds and with their need, it feels as if everything that is alive is screaming at me to go back to bed.

But work.

And family.

If you don't get what you want or need, do you simply change what you want or need?

Daisies, buttercups, wild phlox.

To open to peace means finally giving up, no?

Are They Even Wildflowers

Your daybreak is not my daybreak and the science of this shoots off like an arrow in the opposite direction of the sibylline. We meet in this separation and briefly forget we need not leave home. This morning-dream reminds me of when I was home in an embrace on the banks of the West River. Lover, body and world disappeared into an exacting center point. I was righted for the moment, fully healed and oriented toward Heaven.

At home we cannot defile.
At home we cannot be defiled.

Listening to the oriole's lush, liquid song at sunset gets you more than half way there. A mated pair sings a duet and their notes rise to a higher center. Language can only get in the way by expressing impressions of plurality received in subjective states of awareness. Sure, it is enough to listen and enjoy the birdsong song. Yet it is also so much more.

If I've planted my own wildflower seeds and they grow, are they even wildflowers? Whatever the objective answer, bees visit in the morning, butterflies in the afternoon.

K. referred to her “colonial work life” and the phrase serrated in a way that only lightening can. When we were young, Travis climbed the 80 ft. oak in front of his house, lost balance and fell into telephone wires. Electricity passed through is hand, arm and torso, finally leaving the body from his thigh. After a lengthy hospital stay and many skin graphs, his parents cut down the offending tree branch. Everyday until we graduated our school bus passed by the sawed off reminder of his fall.

Even the palpable, electric sound of truth is just a symbol on our trail's oaken signpost; let's go home.

A Skater, Mechanic, and Muscian Walk into a Bar

Yesterday I couldn't think of the word “rigging.” Words disappear and then what? Mourning doves coo within an envelope of mist. Light deepens as rain-but-not-rain falls from pools held in the crowns of oaks. Make the coffee; write the thing. Honesty returns as bellwether.

And, begin.

I am an imposter. The question is, what role am I playing? One person sees the witch, another sees an ordinary suburban woman, and still others see Little Red Riding Hood making, collecting and delivering food to her grandmother in the deep woods. Some days I wake and know that I am Mary Magdalene's kin, maybe even her modern day embodied self. Other dawns break open upon a liar who puts on make up and does her hair in order to present as acceptable. There are so many stories a shapeshifter can tell. In the dream, beloved says, “choose one.”

Growing up, I dated a skater, a mechanic, a musician, a few jocks, hot heads and a few quiet boys. I married an aviator. Dating boys shifted my attention and awareness away from who I was as a whole person; I was venerated for melting into the form of whomever was required.

It is no small task to undo what has been done all these years. The outline of a red haired, hippy child breaks the lone sunbeam in woods of memory. She and Joan Baez wink at one another as they realize they love the same way.