Abeyance

A Tom Petty tune plays over a mostly empty McDonald's on a Sunday night. The road is a good place to think because the world passes by like movie scenes, as if to say, hey, you can look here if you want but it's already past. Everything is spiritual but my practice has become too thin. I am grateful to all who have shown me this lately. I make a decision to clarify my path; too much is at stake if I do not.

A wolf is dead on the road in a very busy area of the city. They are not normally this far south. Reading Aldo Leopold and Terry Tempest Williams leads me to believe I should revisit Thoreau with more vigor and intent. It is possible that the love affair of my life is more with landscape and nature than any one human. To do it all again, I do not know if anyone would partner with or join me, but the cabin would be small and the scenery would be grand.

Tarot, cannabis, and life's roiling poetry. I have exhausted myself refusing to face what is too hard or too murky. Time's up. Today's lilac dawn looks like spring despite freezing temperatures. I hear a bird song new to me, so naturally I make a blood oath to the path which brought her here.

He said “abeyance” in a way that told me it wasn't about separation or leaving, but in actuality, about finally coming together the way in which Christ calls us. It is time to stop investing in that which does not matter. The mask of altruism must fall away from my deep and abiding selfishness and fear.

I woke up this morning at the feet of Christ, clothed, and in my right mind. (Luke 8:35) The Morning Star poured down purple light and suggested that perhaps one need not project oneself out of Heaven any longer.

Defer – remit – allow; my prayer now is guidance and healing.

In a Bowl of Pine

Women and landscape; men and mining.

As a child, spirituality made sense in its pure simplicity and it wasn't until I tried to find my feet in the world that a veil dropped. I couldn't make the innocence fit; I couldn't make myself fit. Until I did.

On summer mornings, the lake glistened like a cut sapphire, dazzling in a bowl of pine, oak and maple. Birds by which to gauge my life danced ahead of my path. Kingfishers, chickadees, cardinals and red-winged blackbirds. I would walk as slowly and lightly as possible to the end of the dock as to not disturb the bass and bluegill living in the sunken cement blocks under the dock. When startled, they would dart from the shallows into the mysterious deep. Before the boats – before my siblings tumbled out of bed – before basketball, soccer and sleep away camp – there was the ever vibrant, life-giving elixir salve of nature.

Winter was different. It was dark going to school and almost-dark when coming home. The walk to the rural bus stop was a march through unplowed, snow-covered roads and various cuts through dense woods. Everything seemed to be asleep and I began to want to sleep too. School was not nature.

School began the alteration of spiritual clarity. I entered a system I didn't sign up for and actualized the indoctrination of how to lose one's self for the good of the machine. I learned there are terminal lakes, shifting shorelines and that men have to do what men have to do.

At mid-life, the rocks and trees cry out to me, begging remembrance of the simpler, clearer way. Thank Christ for the tribe illuminating the path.

My Sacred Sorrow

Trees as nuns keeping watch – praying – going about the work of servanthood. I am complicit in what is about to happen to them. We rip the seams trees have sewn since the beginning. This deeper ground of existence, this antidote for fragmentation. A movement on my part is needed to honor this fertile ground of existence. To atone and commune. I won't be here when they cut down the trees. They will be standing tall and strong in the morning and be gone when I return from work. There will be a little less silence when they are gone. I'm so sorry. I am so, so sorry.

Douglas Christie speaks of silence as a field of energy which grounds one when descending into it. Yet, we are the noisemakers. We add the machines and employ the words and enter social scenes. I'm suffocating at times, like I cannot take a deep breath.

What is the deepest thing in me? How empty can I be?

Along with sorrow, a sense of urgency has entered my bloodstream. The long nightmare of being separated from my own body and its connection to nature needs to end. We are not just passing through.

One Way Street Sign

He said, “That's ballsy – going 10 mph over the limit in front of the police station.” To which I responded, “Not really. It's about patterns and flow and finding my space in the parameters.” We agree to disagree. Which is to say, nothing changes. Hence the question: where is the flow?

How much time or mental exercise is spent rearranging the world's circumstances or following the world's rules? How guilty am I?

January begins the lengthening of days. Even at 4 a.m. darkness feels charged with awakening. Snow will cover the ground again but for now, the sight and moisture of naked earth stirs what is typically asleep. I smell soil and hear chickadees. Last season's bent and broken cattails form a golden crown around the wetlands. Ghosts of red-winged blackbirds catch my eye.

A corner of our land will newly have more sunlight in the spring. Kyle suggests a greenhouse there someday, an idea I love until I ask, why a greenhouse before a chicken coop? Please understand something: I know I can have anything I want in this situation. Yet I also know I am a helpmate and partner. Both things can happen and the impetus to help and give is a one way street sign pointing to the fact that there is nothing to forgive.

Not in you, not in anyone.

Into Rain

Sometimes I imagine you imagining me. In a dream, lemony daffodils pushed through the snow too soon. Their voice, too dim; snow, too deep. I might have made a monument out of that moment. I might have had to wake to tend seeds yet to come.

Less spectral conditions, okay? Sudden snowmelt in warmer temperatures creates a thick winter fog. Dickinson at dawn and other beautiful ways to turn calendar pages. Remember when we drank tea together? Do it like that.

For now, small pockets of lampglow. The sky remains as a blanket of dim ash with rain and more rain. Sleep gathers more easily at all the wrong times. I'm tired. But this is Michigan and she'll have her way.

Cannabis – Christmas cookies – cinder on the hearth. Kora asks to be let out into the darkness. Into rain. The idea that I have not yet poured it all out, turned it all over, or given it all away, spreads across my shoulder blades, around my rib cage, and squeezes hard.

Begin again.

Another Kind of Kiss

I am beginning to miss the fragrance of emergence.

January enters as a softer force than usual, or at least, it feels that way in these curious days of melt. Neighborhood Christmas lights still blare through the night, offsetting the awe of a throw of stars or the vigilant eye of the moon. I remember the night sky in New Zealand. Zero words are available, poetic or otherwise, to describe absolute dark cut by a riot of the cosmos.

Remembering is not the same as being, is it. What am I present to here? The grow lights pop “on” predawn – a solitary weapon against continual sunless skies. Although, the towering shadows of trees become visible slightly earlier these days.

We can grow forever; if we allow it; if we help each other.
We can be unending.
We can be Love.

It's our wedding anniversary. Our love is a kiss in a crowded place. A reminder of safety. A outward display of affection and gratefulness.

There is another kind of kiss. I melt at the idea of it and will die a thousand deaths the day it is allowed.

Please kill me. It is time for this to finish.

An Invitation

Earth's suffering is related to the feminine body's sanctification or lack thereof.

The masculine God has been an operating force in a separate realm – somewhere like heaven or within the forces unseen or deeply unknowable – disembodied – transcendent.

Meanwhile in the womb of women, wholeness of life has been kept like small flame, tended by We who have been suppressed and oppressed, waiting for night to pass. We've given our own body and blood to that which will be born.

Because of our bodies, the feminine knows suffering, and through our abuse, we know separation. Through these bodies, we long for the reunion with the masculine in supreme equality, together, unafraid, naked in darkness AND light.

This is the bridge we are all meant to be building – the connection and bond between Masculine and Feminine.

The masculine will need to become vulnerable and brave in order to endure the justified wrath and consequences of his hostages kept all this time. The feminine will need to remember and believe in Her gifts of awareness of mystery, relationship patterns, and direct access to Soul.

I think, without the union of masculine and feminine, nothing new will be born. Our existence will repeat patterns of the past and the earth Herself will continue to express disease, disrepair and death.

Can you endure my anger and pain from past abuses? Can you enter the reckoning and reconciliation for the sake of universal Oneness and true Love? Maybe then, the feminine will no longer feel the urge to project their hurt and anger unto the masculine. And maybe then, the masculine will no longer feel the need to keep safely distanced from the fires and flow of the feminine force.

In my sincerity to work through personal problems or the world's problems, I have come realize, perhaps they are not all MY problems. In fact, believing in my own power to overcome, nurture and fix has actually been a hindrance to understanding the work absolutely needed to be done by the masculine.

We women know at a cellular level that the physical and spiritual worlds can never be separate; we tend a deep, living knowledge of the feminine nature of the soul's relationship with God; we nurture the wisdom of receptivity and of holding a scared space, both with our bodies through childbearing but also, through the actual movement of our bodies through space and time in relation to others; we can hear the cries of the earth and her creatures, and we know there is a better way.

It is women who can heal the world, but we must first forgive the masculine, let the anger go, and believe in our sacred abilities to know, hear and heal. Men, are you willing to protect us in this work, step into this shared space of healing power, and start again?

A Closer Distance

Eight swans lifted with white grace carrying an almost-frozen lake with them. I tracked them until they were out of view and realized only then I was holding my breath the entire time. In a closer distance, chickadees at play. The storm has passed and life slowly begins to return to its loud sea. How long can I remain in an outstretched silence?

A frozen and bloodied black cat lies dead in the neighbor's driveway. As far as omens go, I'm not sure what to make of that but it's heartbreaking and harrowing to behold. I light a candle for it which no one will see, but in my deepest knowings, I am certain it matters. It would seem, to grieve the death of every living thing is an awareness no one can bear without the paired and equal celebration of what lives. The equation in the end can zero-out if, in actuality, none of it is held at all.

blank sky
pouring it all
in urgency –
fall away and apart
to meet

Black ice – black cat – black oak. Six trees are marked for removal in order to relocate the septic tank and drain field to the back of the house. Six. Trees.

The sun breaks through for the first time in weeks. There was a time when the language of the cosmos was a part of our daily lives. Sun, moon, mountain and river – they spoke from the same soul and as we felt the wind on our faces or the cool waters of the lake, we heard everything they had to say.

How much longer can we afford to live on the surface of our own lives?

Sons on Christmas Day

In last night's dream, Jeremiah, the prophet as a young adult, visited me and my life. He had no message but instead was there to see. I showed him a yurt in the woods I found the day before his arrival. I shared with him my surprise of its warmth and spaciousness. We got along well, shared a few jokes and knowings with each other, but it was clear, he was observing with intent.

I woke Christmas Day to my son, still up from the previous day, writing a letter to his sister. He said not to worry – he only needs 4 good hours of sleep before any Christmas activities. I kissed him on the forehead and told him I loved him.

An updraft carries almost imperceptible, lake-effect glitters towards the porch light. The entire view is white, even tree trunks, from being blasted with blizzard snow and wind for the last 48 hours. The world could turn upside down and it would look entirely the same.

As day breaks, the most slender insinuation of lavender differentiates sky from ground.

white paper
and the blank wake
of blizzards
this barge
of hush

The neighbor's icicles grow longer than the window and I wonder if she looks out from her bedroom as a prisoner might. After only a few hours, very little proof exists of spending hours clearing the roof, driveway and deck. Mote-type flakes turn into fat pieces of confetti, weighing pine branches down to almost vertical.

I miss the sun.

I miss a lot of things, even though I am not supposed to.

Before anyone wakes, I put on a jazz vinyl, still utterly baffled by the lack of Dylan albums in the collection. A blue jay squawks and it registers with me that I haven't heard this sound in a very long time.

Coffee – Coltrane – Christmas chirrups.

This new terrain, with the face of love, is actually the oldest.

The Work of Lovers

The absolute authority of a sovereign blizzard.

Wind howls without taking a breath as the roads entirely disappear. Lapping waves of snow push up against the windows and with abysmal temperatures, the main hope being the heat holds.

I remember Christmas in Kenya. While the West's version of consumerism infected the wealthy of this area, the religious aspect still played the bigger part in celebrations. The Rains came to an end in December which marked the declining danger of mudslides traveling down to Nairobi from the highlands. Those who migrated from tribal lands to the city for work were finally able to make the long journey home to family and friends upcountry.

Christmas was community, food, and family. It's all that could be afforded and yet, it was deeper and richer than what I have experienced in my home culture. We've moved so far away from the earth and all She teaches. A sorrow older than this body eats the whole of me this time of year.

As snow piles, deeper than my thighs, it insures a healing silence. Cars and people have been made to rest. Animals are tucked away in winter poustinias. The hush reminds me of Love – no power structures or hierarchies – it is not for sale. Such true gifts are free and are passed from heart to heart unmentioned. It is how the Light of the world is seen and known.

This work of lovers, giving everything unto the moment in order to be awake in the eternal.

This is how we name each other.

This is why we are here.

Time to Redress

The blizzard arrives, lashing and roaring as some kind of retort from the divine feminine when denied her sacred power. Blowing wind slips under door frames and sculpts unmolested snow into the manifestation of what longs to reawaken. Everything else stops. She is no longer playing the games of the masculine or imitating his thinking. She is no longer putting aside her own wisdom on relationships and her deep, untouchable sense of patterns belonging to creation. There's been an imbalance of epic proportion and it is time to redress.

Before turning on lights I stand at the wall of french doors in the dark. I can feel the polar chill pulsing from the glass to my bare arms. Stalwart oaks and pine bend like long, black fingers waving in the dark. There are no tracks anywhere. I remember the time when I first discovered the power of a fully balanced feminine and masculine union and frankly, as I stare out into the darkness listening to the storm devour the landscape, I know in every cell of my body that it is said balance that will right the world we navigate.

Life isn't about me or you or other. It is, or could be, the celebration of deep, ancient, eternal connectedness. But reader, you need Her. Blessed are they who have seen the truth in this mystery, for they will lift her many veils and be rewarded.

The dog instinctively knows it is too cold to go out and remains curled up in her bed. Coffee brews and the automatic grow-lights click on for all the plants at the bay window. In this predawn dark, I do more than remember the one who showed me I was alive in my own right, complete and perfect and brimming with the power of creation and mystery; I crack open my rib cage and invite him in for a long, nurturing rest. I've got this now.

Who We Try to Forget

Intra-being.
Within-ness.
Conciliance.

Recently I read about Pando, a place of over 40,000 trunks of the “Quaking Aspen Tree,” spanning 108 acres in Fish Lake National Forest, Utah. Roughly 6 inches below the surface, this clonal forest shares the same root ball. When testing the DNA of individual trees, it was found to be exactly the same tree.

Even for us, as perceived individuals, there is a deep unity below the surface – an existence of pure potentiality and possibility, which is the generator of the diversity we use as a framework in our lives.

Before imprisoning ourselves on a plateau of form (manifesting as individuation) we exist as the formless Whole, or Source, or Love. When we empty and let go of our idea of form, we are free to exist, taste, and know a state of Awareness. We remember who We Are.

The Whole is formless and yet, it is the source of all form. It is full of every possibility and is the generator of diversity. This plane of possibility exists before, during and after form. When we empty of form or pour out all that we think we are, we align ourselves with the plane of possibility – with Source – with Cosmos – with Love.

*

With every step I take, I am as the quaking leaves of Aspen. When I see my neighbor hurting or experience their rudeness, I am looking upon an appendage – a trunk or stem emanating from my very Being. When the earth is disregarded, desecrated, and stripped of its true worth, it is a part of me which is cut down or abused, which is to say, it happens to us all.

I believe our collective psychosis in this era of time is a manifestation of how we are failing to drink from or even acknowledge the fountain of Awareness. We have forgotten who we are under the surface.

We have forgotten how to love other as our self.

Wildflowers, Weeds, and Waxwings

Lawns as an exercise in wealth and colonization. We grow what we cannot eat. We waste resources for the approval of passersby. Winter pauses the taming of wildness yet we have not learned to value what is real. I am trapped by what I have allowed and created. Whichever way the river bends next, I am all in.

Wildflowers, weeds, and waxwings.

My father wears an angry suit which is to say, he is a hurt man, meaning, his fear and guilt are the tailor of his khaki pants and button down shirts. My mother never stops moving because if she does, she will drown. She is an abuse survivor but if you call her a victim, she will gut you. They go to Mass and kneel ahead of 50 Hail Marys and a cross with a nailed up man, bleeding out for the sake of proof.

Saints, sacristies, and sins.

A fissure of light grows in the distance between your west and my east. The peaceable kingdom claims more land, but beloved, there is still the horizon! Well, to the North Star, there is no horizon, so how about them apples? The stars dance like fire, asking us to join by simply tilting our heads back. Let me see your neck. Let me see your lips part.

Green, blue, black.

Whenever people ask what color my eyes are, I never know how to answer.

A Christmas Card

The wilderness of you. I look deeply in and see a million pathways. So, of course there is a cabin in the woods. Where else would my poems live? My finger strokes are in the hearth cinder. My clothing drys on the rack.

I read once that women create a beast to know the depth of desire. Perhaps that is how the witch in the woods is born. Allow Her to manifest who She truly is so that She may never know the need to eat you. She is no ouroboros. She is you, calling the slivered self back into wholeness.

Separated, we are consumed with altars and churches, sacrifice and worship, hymns and prayers. To whom are we really giving gratitude and praise? To whom are we confessing a splintered trail? Prisms indeed! Though beautiful in all its fragmented colors, it is the gilded white light slicing darkness which leads us all to safe harbor.

It is in these terms of Light that each day, each breath, each moment begins anew. In this way, there is nothing to forgive or forget. There is no one to worship or despise. To bathe in the brilliance of One is to know Love; it is be Love; it is to love “other” as oneself. This is the Immortality of Us.

She Had to Say Yes

On metal plant hangers nailed into trees, squirrels perch under the s-shaped hat of their tails. Snow has been falling hard since yesterday, matching ground to sky in whiteness. My god, where would I exist without trees? Evergreens reach emerald arms for embrace. I will fall into it every...single...time. Tell me this isn't as far as we go.

I remember watching Dracula on TV as a child and recognizing that I had recognized my first villain. It was the first time I felt the burn of desire, watching him needing to feed to live and eventually doing so in a sensual way. He couldn't help himself, yet his victim had to give her consent for the union to occur. Knowing the outcomes and risks, she said yes. She had to say yes. At this young age, I knew her. The villain was me.

Potato bacon soup simmers on the stove for the sick ones. Couldn't soup be enough to celebrate Christmas? Everything slows down with the storm and Covid and the exhaustion that comes from constantly swimming life's river.

seed packets
on an expectant stack
of books –
these minor saints
reminiscing again

Silos begin to empty a little while deer and turkeys cover sleeping fields. I sit and wait on dawn alone with my coffee and drowsy ghosts. Welcome I say. I have nothing left to hide.

She Tore It Up

In the overnight hours I received a newsletter from Tesni about the children’s center in Kenya I almost gave everything to create. Yet just after the groundbreaking, I pulled out of the project. I knew I wouldn't live in Kenya forever, which meant, one day, I would be like all the well-intentioned white people who come, build a church, school or an orphanage, then leave. I think I broke Tesni's heart, but she dug in and did the work and is still doing the work 12 years later. She is doing the work of living in community. Rubber met road and she tore it up.

After a carjacking situation forced us to return to the States, the idea of community was terrifying. All I wanted for a time was to live in a place where I didn't have to dodge hijacking traps, corrupt police with AK-47s, rogue gangs who beheaded bus travelers and put their heads on sticks. My family needed to heal but we needed to learn how to trust again. We landed in West Michigan with more than half of our hearts in Kenya. Despite everything, Kenya is truly a wildly breathtaking and humbling place to live. Back here, we were broken for a few years, tending to each other, and looking outside of ourselves unto the world around us with judgement and sorrow.

The kids are grown now and we are acclimated back into western culture. Yet aside from friends and family, our embrace is stunted.

I am stunted.

I am faced with how to build or enter community alone. Kyle and I will care for each other and our family until our last breath but for me, something roils. Something hums up out of the ground, begging for knees in the dirt. I am alone in this “other” way of living which makes me think I have a few more lifetimes to go before I get it right.

To those who have shown the way, I weep in gratefulness for your gifts to the world.

Literally.

I Was Nobody

When I was around 14 years old, I fell in love with a priest.

Father Don wore jelly bands on his wrists and Vans under his robes. His hair was spiked in the front, longer in back. Every other Friday night, he deejayed a youth group dance, which grew to legendary renown in the area. Kids and young adults flocked to the old white barn on the side of the rectory for a night of 80's angst and disco lights. A priest who deejayed was swoon-worthy for young and old alike. However, it is in Father Don that I first saw beyond body and personality to recognize Love Itself.

The priest was soft spoken, smiled often and wept over his flock. His homilies were fresh baked bread broken for the starving. His favor fell on none in particular – his arms opened large enough to embrace all.

Going up for Communion felt like going on a first a date. Slow step by slow step, I would approach the altar, my anticipation exacerbating a full-body nervousness. His hands held the host in front of my lips as his holy whisper melted the flimsy veil between a child's world and God's: Jessica, the body of Christ.

It some ways it was a confusing time. Never before had I imagined heaven on earth and yet, this portal – this flesh and blood man – stripped away everything I saw with my eyes and thought with my mind. In his presence, I knew where I was; I knew who I was.

When Father Don left the Catholic church altogether shortly into his post to our tiny parish, I left too. On his last day, he sobbed as he administered the Eucharist to each of us with a hug and a blessing. When he held me, I was Nobody.

This embrace left me with the ability to feel and see Christ, the true living Love, in those who carry it like a hot orb, close to the surface of existence. I have felt this one other time since then, and like before, in that moment, I died the true death and rose again.

Troublesome Rhyme Schemes

Darkness stabs late afternoon causing the day to bleed out long before supper. Roasted butternut squash, warm brown rice and black beans. One of the problems is that I allow myself to imagine something other than what is. What if I came home from work to warm soup on the stove? What if my garden was in a clearing, along side a small cabin up in the foothills? What if we got high and read Emily Dickinson aloud, laughing at troublesome rhyme schemes? This started out as a poem but quickly fell fully clothed into inky waters of the turtle's manse. There is nothing to fear here but I am more than grateful for a fairly gifted breast stroke.

Christmas feels like a speeding train I am not allowed to deboard. The circus moves from the decorated houses to turmoil in my stomach. Somewhere along the line I have accepted responsibility for the celebration of this Christian event and I don't want it anymore. Everything is loud. Nothing is attached to the earth.

4 a.m. black lace
pressed against
a tired pane –
snowless December
has no secrets

Tepid coffee, cold bare feet, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. So we are all One, of one Soul. What then do we do? I stare out at shallow scars in snowless fields. My only longing now is to be alone, to find solitude, to allow the noise and static to run over me.

Newly hatched spiders hang out in the crease where the wall meets the ceiling. What even matters after awareness?

Somewhere In The Middle

In the middle, no opposites exist. Equal respect for all perspectives flows outward from Center. No choices exist with the exception of choosing All.

Cave paintings of old cast spells into the future. Where we there? Did we choose the sacred partnership while on horseback or after drying skins in the sun? Chalk figures smeared and etched onto stone refuse to speak directly of the spiritual intimacy which grows love outward. A long time ago, we confused sexual exclusivity and monogamy for the harshly revealing mirror of spiritual intimacy. Did she show you the places you were withholding love? Did he bring forth in you the adoration of Love Itself? Will they refuse to cover the mirrors in order to become the reflection of the same Divine Light?

Who leads you to the awareness of unity? With whom did you merge to transcend duality and glance the Light of God? In the Middle we come to see that it is not the last-first-kiss of the beloved that we merged with, but the non-personal Oneness of I Am.

And yet, and yet. To love this other is to move intimately with All That Is.

It is true that I have sown a seed in one field and reaped a harvest in another. I've created a place for love to grow out of the expansion of my green heart, which I carry everywhere I go. I am the creator of my own way Home.

But I didn't create it alone.

Of Past and Pending

grandfather
smoking an army
of cigarettes
taught me to fish
and how to drink vodka
neat

We of past and pending.

My grandmothers never gardened.
My grandfathers were in the military and worked hard with their hands.

Did they think about collective psychosis or consciousness? Do they think about it now? Of course the answer is “yes” because I think about it now; we are not separate.

Wherever you feel you come from, that is where you are going. I think of the relationship I have with my parents – how they see Source or God or Love – and how they do not – how they see the world. I think of the relationship they have with their parents and in doing so, the absence of healing becomes jarring. How does this discord taint the way one relates to the world? Though I process and think on such things often, it is also clear there have been times I have given another person or situation the responsibility for creating part of my life experience. I have unconsciously accepted “other” as my source. My energy aligns with their energy and the qualities they embody.

A call to examine how I see the world matters, for how I see the world shows what I am in the process of becoming. We are individual expressions of the One Self. We can choose to be conscious of different things but we share the same consciousness. The only boundaries are the ones we choose to see.

The only difference between me and Jesus or Buddha or Abhishiktananda is my thoughts about who I am and how I see the world.

Be Love and you be God.

A wholeness realized.

The way truly is straight and narrow because it only accommodates One.

My brothers and sisters, enemies and friends, dead and undead – we are the One.

If my focus remains on the One, than I shall be the One.

“The light of the body is in the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, then thy whole body shall be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22)