Our Rounding Dance

The deep quiet of winter morning – a resonance billowing like the folds of a rose warming to sunlight. It is the only time with enough solitude to be generative these days. I am on my knees for it. This and nothing else.

My reflection in the window pane seems foreign. She looks beyond form out into December and sees what exactly? Everything is an example of what she created or is in the process of becoming. One thing has become sharply clear: separation is learned. What do you think?

Teacher says
be good to each other
be God to each other

beyond that, I can't really find the footing to head in any direction in particular.

They said they would need to move the septic tank from the front to the back yard, directly under my garden. When awareness is allowed in every situation, it is astounding to see how many times doubt and fear come between you and your intentions and desires. Can I respond to emotional pain with trust? No more plans can be made, with the exception of planning for the unexpected. Maybe put on some Dylan and track sunlight across the floorboards for a few hours. Maybe sit with the dog who wants nothing more than to know you are with her.

The moon glares on a crystalline, winter night and a lone dervish leaf skitters across an empty side street. Anything illumined by moonlight seems as slick as glass – even a midnight kiss – even the words of Christ. All these images behave as Kachinas, presenting us a chance to see everything with new eyes. We are in a rounding dance, our circles widening outward, again like the rose, expanding what we remember and forget.

Wind and Wedding Rings

Trying to remember.
Trying to forget.

Landscapes dull and barren.
Snow from a slate sky floats off rooftops like frozen dust.

A sense of internal purging comes to the surface of which I hardly know how to process. In the meantime, friendships are dismissed, holidays neutered, and vinyl records donated.

The true dark night of the soul is when you are forced to clean up confetti after the party.

Roasted butternut squash and Brussels sprouts, apple chunks and champagne vinegar to make a hash.

Here but not here. Wind and wedding rings. December drifts downward as residue from a sun too distant to care. Ice is forming no matter which way I frame it.

The strange thing is, I have been fighting so hard to say and do my own thing. Imagine waking up one day to learn, despite all the images, events or covenants asking you to constantly make a choice, there is no choice. What feels like a long leash is no leash at all, which paradoxically, feels like a very tight leash. The systems, world and people I am fighting against are actually a shared Beingness. Imagine learning how to see with the eyes of the Soul and finding out that we cannot own or accomplish anything as a separate person. Ideas, possessions, desires, fears – all attachments are surrendered to and embodied in, the One.

This should feel like freedom.

Ego digs in as I dig out, but I think I've had enough.

Lights, Lasers and Inflatables

In the dream, bodies instead of thoughts separate us from one another. We identify ourselves by the thoughts we agree with about ourselves. The thoughts we don't agree with, we reject or discount, labeling them as belonging to someone else. My experience of Jessica shifts everyday according to my choices. I limit myself and can see this by looking at how my self-image may change from day to day.

What I see of the other is but a personal creation stemming from a composite of thought frequencies. I see the perceptions of an other's world manifested in their thoughts.

Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Buddha were One with Source and saw the same Self in all – men, women, leper, beggar, prostitute and priest. If I walked around doing all the things they did, I still wouldn't become them. Yet, if my thoughts merged with their thoughts, whoever it is I am would merge into the Cosmic Mind.

“May the mind be in you that is in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 2:5)

The only reason we do not experience this state of fullness is because we have severed ourselves from unconditionally loving both ourselves and everyone around us; we have detached our thoughts from the thoughts of Love.

On our walk, Kora disappears under a giant hemlock. A breeze blows open my jacket and the cool-down is not unwelcome. We pass houses and lawns decorated in Christmas chaos – lights, lasers and inflatables. My non-judgment work is still everywhere. I have the power to change everything with my mind, ushering heaven by experiencing the One.

No doors – no deep turtle layers – no maps or trails.

There is only a call for inclusion and love, a way of seeing the mundane as miraculous, a final understanding that the love you feel in any manifestation is you.

Maybe instead of flashing lights and pine-scented candles for Christmas, let's own the idea that it is only our own thoughts that ever keep us separated or alone.

New Old Light

Black crow on the barbed wire asks: were you falling or flying? Around 4 p.m., the bruising sky begins to spread. Afternoon leaves as quickly as it does on the Serengeti. On the equator, sun up is at 6 a.m. and sundown at 6 p.m. – sharp. There is no negotiation.

I watch every dawn these days. Shadows rise from the last syllables of night and spread across rooftops, church steeples and fields of snow. Faint rabbit tracks spoke outward from evergreen bushes in the new, old light and the dog's breath hangs longer in the air. Ice-fallen branches send out prismatic missionaries into this wordless world. Something I've always known is coming home to roost.

At M.'s, a way of being in the world, of which I have only secretly dreamed, manifested in front of me, down to the most minute detail. Her dwelling is a portal to a truth I never dared to claim. Her dogs draped themselves across my legs and chest and I could feel the heartbeat of the entire cosmos. I want to be the woman who has need of a pocket knife or a doorless shower with plants all around it or a wood-burning stove in the middle of the room.

In the waiting room, setting light slants across the backs of uncomfortable chairs. A few ornamental trees just outside of the windows have strings of white lights curling around the skinny trunks and up into bare branches. Every one in the room, with the exception of a rogue knitter, is on their cell phones, swiping away nerves or killing time. When K was taken back for surgery it was very hard to ignore the vibration of chattel directed to line up, be processed, and pushed through at a hurried pace. There is another way to heal, no?

Off Trail and Off Book

Frozen moon over frozen roads.

The neighbor's wind chime sounds off in the dark morning. It always startles me a little. It's too slippery to walk the dog and she is not happy about it. Mondays: it's a mood.

Poets pickax their words inside and out of temples and forests. Nobody spills ink anymore but if they could, maybe we would know a poet by the stains on their hands. Though no proof is usually necessary. When two poets orbit one another, seas roar in excitement and the gods gather to send their messages through us for mortal translation. We drink from wooden bowls and dream about the hermitage off trail and off book.

Lovenotes are sent up the bloodstream and indictments are thrown from breakwaters and cliffs. Who made me who I am, She asked and answered: I did.

I go to the gym so early that later in the day, it almost feels like a fever dream. It's mostly men using a lot of space, so I had to learn how to own and claim my own compass and land. I can see they forget about this joint ownership. I now enjoy reminding them.

To grow in honesty is reclaim some sort of lost or hidden member of my body. I'm flexing it every where I go now and the effects are remarkable. So I ate the poisoned apple and so I slept a while; maybe I needed it. But I'm awake now and Demeter shares her closet of dresses with me.

Flyers, Migration and May-Days

Sunday morning ease. James Taylor croons about hay tucked away in the barn. I'm cooking breakfast at the stove, occasionally glancing out the window to watch snow covering itself with affluent quietness. The music opens wide spaces for my hips and shoulders to sway. These are grateful, humbling days.

Kyle turns 50, so I make him a playlist of the eras we have tumbled through together. We played cards and games with the kids until 3 a.m., laughing, dancing and taking in a few impromptu saxophone duets on the living room stage. What exactly has been forfeited to end up here? The answer used to matter, maybe even more than the question. There is a peace now, but it comes with the acknowledgement that I have walked over that which would not lie down.

Goldenrod, thistle, milkweed all returns.

There is a poem that goes like this:

Advice For Those
Facing The Coming Flood (T. McGrath)

Swimming won't help.
Drown.

Or learn to walk on water.

I have been thinking of getting a tattoo and it will have something to do with the Cosmos. That poem may be talking about some kind of flood but to me, it is flaming with the unstoppable Love, which is also the Cosmos, which is also Us.

Another heron flies over as I walk in the early morning dark. It is below freezing which makes me wonder why he hasn't migrated. I don't always get to know the answer, and that is now okay.

Icarus comes to his faculties mid-flight and cries out: Take me now or May-Day May-Day. Both options leave him drowning. What if the myth was rewritten to say that Icarus, in the face of all consuming, cosmic Love, learned how to walk on water? I like that one best; tell it again.

Poems for the One True Lover

Autumn was bewildering in its beauty, yet so brief. Its changes filled the forest with voices from every direction, all at once, speaking of a new way to proceed. Rain – leaves – frost – gunshots – geese – roadkill deer – prickly cornfields – snow – silence.

East became a quieter vestige of sunlight. West shifted the gaze with the birthing of wintertide winds. Red-winged blackbirds and geese took their campaigns south. And True North? He peered down through the night sky, confident in his belt of stars. He drew back his bow and hunted everything he would need to survive the winter. He constructed the heavens for our shelter and he was done, he composed a poem for his One True Lover.

In Kenya I remember hosting a pot-latch meal of many cultures instead of celebrating Thanksgiving. Baba Tony brought maize and Mama Joanne made sikuma wiki. There was a goat from up the street and a turkey ordered from South Africa. We shared ancestral traditions and bursts of warbling laughter. We communed in the work, next to the fire. For the life of me, I cannot understand why that is not the way we break and bake bread every day.

It's Thanksgiving time again in another colonized tillage. We bring abundance and harvest to the table, yet we are descendants of the Puer Aeternus – living the provisional life, never really digging into the accountability of the land and people we abuse.

Black ice everywhere. As the snow falls and falls, I eat a bowl of popcorn, snuggled into my bedroom nest. I am a colonizer too, eating food I didn't grow, in a bed I didn't trade for or build, in a clan who doesn't know from whom they stole the land.

Epistles of Breezes

Thomas McGrath wrote about the bones of his horses whitening the hillsides where he lived, and I wondered what that would mean to be surrounded by bones. There are still places where people do not leave the land of their ancestors. How that must change the relationship to the earth beneath their beds.

asleep
with tulips
and bears –
affection for first
snowfalls

An urgent invitation to share more love, all the love, rises even before our kindled sun. Lakes fall asleep. Geese chase the moon. Yet the epistles of breezes roaming deep in the woods reach my missionary ears. Reclaim the collective and individual purpose of the power in your life. Extend Love and become the Living God. Choose to see the beauty at play by erasing the distance.

One of the can lights in the kitchen ceiling randomly flickers. Sometimes it makes me think of the story of Samuel, stirred by a voice in the middle of the night. He thinks it is the old priest Eli, whom he serves. Yet, when moving to Eli's aid, Eli says, “I did not call you. Next time you hear the call, you should reply 'speak Lord, for your servant hears.'” When the light flickers in the kitchen, I hear no voice but my own. But I know this voice now. It is the voice of I Am, extending Itself naturally to create All That Is.

Accept – allow – acclaim.

Part-Time Ghosts

Fog and mist freezes on the road towards dawn. Moonlight overhead adds depth to the shroud and I am here for it. I'm really not sure what the word “God” means anymore but the lesson is: you cannot love God until you love yourself and similarly, you love God by loving your brother – as your self. My spiritual rib taught me this and now I will figure out to how to teach others.

P. Raymond Stewart said, as a reminder of how little effort or grievance is necessary when we live in the kingdom at hand, “we do not need to grasp for air: we simply need to breathe.” So it is that we do not need to strive or work anything out in order to know God or Love or peace. We must only allow.

I've been partial in my allowance. In my partiality, I have hurt others which means, I have hurt myself. All the narratives, myths, missteps, and reframes were prayers already answered.

Just past noon, sunlight breaks the leaden sky like a golden laser. Settled snow falls off high branches to fill the air with glittering light. Juncos gather at the base of the evergreen bush as the nut hatch paces the grooves of furrowed trunks. I wonder if hunger has now gone to sleep like my beloved October. Come sit at the table for some wintertime soup – let us see.

missing midnight's mountain
runoff and cold camps
of bears –
we are part-time ghosts
to the past

I am no longer gyved to the whispers of what-if, for I trust the path that Love has made of me. Aum and the silence that falls from our lips.

Right Now is All

Witnessing the exact moment snow begins to fall is the same as seeing the birthplace of peace. What has been cradled in the center now moves outward – without attachment – ripe with immediate intimacy. The silence of snowfall is an unpredicted perfection.

An ushering is at hand, or rather, has been in motion forever. Yet now, with clear sight, the I Am behind every eye is not only recognizable but is known and fully seen.

In a vision, I saw myself sowing seeds in one field and reaping harvest in another. The impartiality of hearts tends roots, waters soil and exhales her warm breath of sunlight on whatever is hungry. Creation must create, and yes, a bee has got to sting. But are we making choices from loving intent? Therein lies the answer to every question.

Snow unhurriedly erases color, leaving the impression of something new. Do you think we chose the pain of separation so that we might simply know the cosmic elation of atonement? Perhaps we now have wisdom from pain. Perhaps we now know compassion. We left home to experience once again what home truly is. Of course, we never truly left but that might be a sentence for another day.

We have chosen to experience every snowflake that falls, every smooth seed in the hand, every grain of sand on either shore and, we have chosen the illusion of time and separation. We exist this way, I think, so that the One Self can meet the many and the many can meet the One. God is, and we are, All Right Now.

Mundane as Miraculous

Pesto on warm noodles. Sourdough bread, softening butter topped with honey. In slow consummation it is uncovered that Jessica is a pseudonym. We All write this. The error was in seeking outside of myself. When boundaries dissolved, I saw the sun rising. We are all different beams of the same light.

Dawn stays gathered behind November's curtain and yet, a sacred fire burns just beyond the shadows. Humility is oxygen when one goes beyond nobody. Who would I leave? What would I destroy and rebuild? Go farther than words, even these. For we were made to give a living expression to that which exists free of logos.

Fences fall apart. Highways break up into gravel and dust. The distance does not exist.

A stemless leaf spins in the numbing creek. It turns left, right and around, but remains held and carried. The mundane is miraculous; the little red bird chirping in the pines tells me so.

Now I see who looks at me behind the eyes – mine and yours – anyone's.

Now, nothing is hidden.

Everything is Fire

Saffron edges give way to gray. Fletchings of a new day guide ever forward. I still don't understand how it is that my body does the betraying. Ankle, back, shoulders, skin – pain tells me everything is fire.

I burned a few offerings and transplanted the ash to a dozing garden. Blood moon, rose quartz, ruby leaves. Help me hear what the land wants. I toil and rake so emergent growth will have a way in the spring. Yet, it is so unnatural! With each passing year, this senseless work turns from comedy to anger to the realization of futility.

I'm thinking about form but only because form is thinking about me. Lately, walking by moonlight, I grift the silence. Once upon a time, we had an inner certainty of our Being. We didn't need the poor path of words to know the reality of the ineffable. As a prayer, I am asking us all to go beyond the limitations of our own doing. There is a vein of existence that will not be confined to logical reasoning. Can we now agree that sometimes feelings are a holy dispensation deeper than thinking?

The first snow falls as tiny flakes, barely heavy enough to reach the ground. I am no longer afraid of winter in its dull gray uniform, but that doesn’t mean I will stop yearning for the light. In this new way, I have begun to sense the essence behind each form; it encompasses everything.

Zero Distance

Who is Narcissus without supply? Only Love can answer that question now. No more fairy tales, for we have reached the end of the collection. Speaking of myths, God has me at zero distance and I am not moving. Even turtles cannot go down this far.

A fox glides across the 4 a.m. street. Behind him, a monstrous orange moon barely clears the treeline. How hard it is look away! Neither one needs my gaze. Neither one can be faulted for that. I've lost my appetite for anything that is not real, and the shit in this story has just gotten really real.

I remember learning how to be afraid of bodies. What they don't tell you about being a survivor is that you also learn how to be afraid of your own body. The struggle for power is fought in her body, over her body, through her body. When she adapts and learns to live in her mind as an effort to understand worth and joy and love, she thinks she is making herself stronger. She is not. For when the predator comes for the mind next to feed, she is left with the nothing she actually knows. I mean, that's one way of looking at it.

Finally arthritic trees rake a stony sky. November's spine straightens before winter; mine too.

It is Very Lost, Sir

Windows smudged with nightfall.

I lie in the dark listening to thunder roll around like a worm working its way through the sky. The hard rains only occasionally remind me of the rainy season in Kenya. There, rain falling on the metal roof would make listening to music or watching TV impossible. When the rain would stop, flying termites would rise out of the ground by the millions and slip with ease into the house. They would cover all the lights and terrorize those of us unused to cohabitating with that many insects all at once. After the spotting the first invader, someone would yell “TERMITES!” We would all scream and rush around to douse lights and cover our heads and bodies with blankets. In the morning, the termites would be crawling around the floor everywhere, having lost their wings in the night. The good news is that they are quite harmless and even better, edible. Raw or thrown into a hot fry pan, one could dine on a smokey treat.

I suppose it is to be expected that I am gradually forgetting the names and places I thought would be permanently seared into my pores. The security guard at the library tries to speak Swahili with me, but so very little of it finds its way out of the catacombs of my brain. The best I can do is tell him “imepoteza sana, bwana” - it is very lost, sir.

It has been twelve years since we fled but honestly, it was a lifetime ago. Her green tea winds and red dust still blow through the doors of my heart, only now, more faintly. I won't return until my ashes are loosed upon the Maasai Mara, but it's okay to let go. Life is a sea, roiling and singing her song on every new tide. Be present to what is gifted and all will be well.

It is well.

On Loneliness

Nobody is awake when I start my day.
Nobody is with me when I end it.
In the middle, writing, work and family.
I am not lonely.
Until I am.

I am beginning to consider the idea that writing – the act of it, the space it gives and takes, the heart of it – is a lonely thing. It connects you with One, and if you are giving attention, by definition, there are no others. Yet, that is not exactly true, is it? All the others are the One. And if we are One in the writing then surely we must be the One in everything else.

At 5 a.m. I started up the dark road and began to see stars through the canopy break. At first, I thought perhaps I had lost my wonderment of the display. Maybe it wasn’t as dazzling as I remembered or as infinite. But as the walk deepened and my eyes adjusted to mapping darkness, suddenly the stars burst into millions of sparks. My question is: was I more lonely when the stars were boring or when the stars were on fire?

Recently I told a friend that it is a tiny miracle when one can choose love over fear. Later that day, back in the circulation room at the library, everyone was talking about how cheating in the context of relationships was bad, “disgusting” even. I looked at their young faces and knew they needed the rules. I thought of how I have needed rules – rules for a good life – rules to break for freedom – rules made for equality, and I think maybe it is important for me to say that many of these rules are a choice for fear. It is time to understand love as the only rule.

Lover of Ash

I guess it all comes down to the fact that I have always had a secret life.

Once, I was my father's whole world. He took me to the hospital with him to make rounds on patients. Pride oozed from him when I charmed nurses and entertained patients. He would leave me in rooms with the likes of old Mrs. Callahan to play Go Fish or Rummy while he checked on the more delicate or infirmed.

At 2 or 4 years old, I was as he saw me – easy going, generous of spirit with others, enamoring even. Yet I was also already someone else – someone he didn't see – or maybe he did see – maybe he did see something witchy and divine deep within – something that scared him or at the very least, allowed him to set me on his shelf like a memento or an emblem.

He gazed upon me at one time but then, I disappeared.

Perhaps my mother saw me and still does. I threw her by the throat against a slated closet door once and told her to back off my sister. She comprehended most of me that day. She didn't put me on the shelf; instead, she entered my truth as best as she could.

The difference between the two of my parents is what I am asking for. I am not the doll or an emblem of an angel you thought you knew. Nor am I a monster to be feared. What if people could see all of me and still find life or be warmed by my fire?

It could be true I married a man who put me on the shelf. Or it could also be true that I married a man who has been shoved too hard yet opts to stay. Either way, I do not have a lot of confidence that my totality is palatable to any one consumer.

And yes, I was made to both consume and be consumed; which is the lover of ashes?

Love as Law

On the way to Vermont I remember the many church spires rising out of foothills like gleaming ice picks. On the way back, a nun recited the Rosary at noon on the local radio station. In my mind, I try not to return to that trip because I know, one of these times, I won't leave. I didn't want to leave in the first place.

October ends and there is no more hunting flowers. Instead, a different way of writing brings the life and death of seasons. Jim Harrison's fiction and McGrath's non-fiction – I think I'm set for a while, thanks. Stocking up for the winter in one way or another.

I was thinking about how crucifixion and resurrection happen every day. Are we aware of what dies or what rises in its place? The lover mentioned Love as a law and I can't get the phrase out of my head. It is the only rule that does not bend or break. And therefore, it is the only law.

In a heartbeat, we press in so close that we cannot be separated by the naked eye. Saving ourselves by pulling apart is one way to look at it. Saving others is another. This is what it feels like to fall for a few seconds and then black out; we don't know where, how or if we will come-to.

November enters in a great hush. I crack the window to listen for owls but so far, nothingness instead. I don't think the universe holds its breath but sometimes, it sure does sound like it.

Coming in for a Kiss

In all my Michigan Octobers, I do not remember one as sublime and tender as this. Affectionate air and the bursts of calico descend slowly enough to catch sunlight in their spiral. It is personal yet expansive – intimate like a lover.

For a few hours, I rested my back against the pine and buried my bare feet under the leaves, making contact with the dirt. The sun lifted my face and tilted my head back as if it were coming in for a kiss. I asked Earth Mother how I could reciprocate, as if I even could. I was urged to collect a bouquet of the beauty around me as an offering: red and gold maples leaves, the last few springs of lavender, a dying purple kale flower, the rusted sedum bloom, two of the last marigolds from the garden border, and two amber fern fronds. I'll dry them a little before burning and in the meantime, they fill the back room with the sweet and spicy breath of October.

In many ways, I feel like I have tended my marriage and family the way I have tended land I borrow. It has been a learning curve instead of an innate set of unbendable convictions guiding my role and thoughts. Yet I have been confused about who I am in marriage. I am not Earth Mother, and I am not the land. Am I the gardener? If that is so, am I always the gardener? Am I a plant, needing the earth AND the sun to exist? However it is that this analogy works out, my only prayer now is that I truly see, with love and clarity, the fullness of Love offered and my role in the concurrence.

The sun barely clears the treeline now and its light slants shadows long and dark. Whatever answer I am looking for is right in front of me and it always has been. October helps now, not as a precursor to the long death of the winter, but as a celebration of the marriage of all the senses. And in this, I am letting go.

On Witches

On the way home from the Emergency Room, he sincerely thanked me for making him go and for driving him. I said, “it was nothing, but making that home made mac-and-cheese and sides took a bit of work.” To which he smiled and said, “thank you; I can't wait to eat it.”

Can I tell you something about witches? They are beautiful and unafraid of their complexity.

Stones from a river, resin from a tree, herbs from a garden or forest – such things are honored as medicine and magic for one with a witchy countenance. She holds the secrets of nature and is willing to share, help, and heal. Growth and decay, give and take, seen and unseen; her currency is life as an equal exchange.

Drink her tea to learn how your ancestors are rivers, mountains and elk. Inhale her incense to learn deeper truths about bones, dirt and trees.

Her divine compass is inlaid upon celestial bodies and she cherishes and calibrates the balance only the stars and moonlight can project.

Why are you afraid of her?

Patriarchy and fear changed the witch narrative in the same way it did to Mary Magdalene “the repentant whore.” On the lighter side of this coin, people fear what they don't understand. On the darker side, men in particular are afraid of the power they lose when the witch knows things they don't know or when she elicit desires that dis-regulate their world.

She doesn't eat children but she may consume you if you wish it.

She doesn't interfere with free will or the mind of others, but she will show you how to look beyond what you think you know.

I know a man who married a witch.

He may not fear her but he certainly does not know the depths of her gifts.

He may love her more than life but he does not know how to open to her Cosmos.

Falling from Groundwater

Leaves fall despite the absence of wind to make a pile of gold. Evergreen shrubs become royalty. I watch leaves letting go every day and, as cliché as it sounds, this scene triggers in me a personal, human dance of letting go. Past, future and present all play a role in assimilating the times I didn't let go quite enough or I let go too much. At times I did nothing and yet at others, I felt myself on the precipice wanting with every fiber of being to let go; to jump; to die in that moment and become something new.

I think some awaken early to whom they are and to whom they will manifest most beautifully as in the world. For some, the narrative has been a bit scripted, force fed, or demanded. The freedom to even imagine one’s true self can be terrifying or even impossible. This results in a thousand little deaths. Scrolled up in the barn jacket pocket of our corpse is a note which explains the relief of giving up.

This is not the same as letting go.

There is no taking or giving of life with letting go. There is only love. There is no possession or ownership, no over-thinking or delay. And you must fall, giving in to what it feels like to be both fully present in your decision and powerless in the results.

Talking with other women, I am realizing how our existence in this world has largely engendered an emphasis on gravity – an outside force causing us to either stay inert or fall too swiftly, even unto death. Not having full agency can often parade as consent, which complicates the awakening process.

What does it mean to awaken unto the true self – the goddess – the queen? Perhaps one way is to give oneself permission to imagine any possibility, any outcome, any circumstance or way of living . . . and see what kind of images burst forth from the beautifully pure groundwater of your roots.

Maybe for me, that is what this writing is for.