"Tahquamenon Falls"

At first it was pine tree steeples rising from banks of exquisite color. Trees were ablaze in the northern light and it felt like my being couldn't take it all in. Yet the further north I pushed, the more green began to needle the sky until finally, all the eye could take in was miles and miles of evergreen sea. This land, this place . . . it has the power to crush rib cages with its unmolested beauty. No billboards or street lights. No sidewalks or people our developments. Only the great exhale atop a ravaged country.

Sufan's Tahquamenon, Longfellow's Hiawatha. I see it now. I know it.

Hiking Tahquamenon, there is an adjustment required in breathing cypress air; there is a re- calibration of one's sense of place and autonomy. The falls annihilate you, but if for some reason they do not, the overlapping density of pine, cypress and birch will. In a few deep breaths, I remember every thing I have forgotten. I remember everything I have ever needed to know. Moose, elk, and black bear. I know now how to be alive.

The rain was an icy drizzle but in the heart of the forest, I didn't feel it much. I wanted to keep going but my body's limitations begged me for a wiser decisions. I also now know why people die in the forest or on the trail.

The spirit of Objibwe grows in these trees and earth and can tell you about the sunrise long before any of the world's wars or man's plot to rule. How old do you think I really am?

"Many Rivers to Cross"

The loft overlooks pines but mostly stares deeply into their midsection. Through the V-shaped space in the Northern Cedar, Lake Michigan sparkles and spreads for hundreds of miles. White caps – white pine – white tails. On the ground, between two trees and flanked by two red kayaks, a tiny path carries you over a sand dune unto seemingly illimitable, sequestered shoreline.

At 3 a.m., the stars seem to scream against the backdrop of total darkness. I make the short hike out to the beach and find myself contemplating the difference between making love and being love. I can hear nothing but waves breaking against bone-cold sand. Afterwards, coffee at sunrise for just me. Toast with peanut butter for just me. Moving and stretching and humming around the loft for just me.

Later, I trek down a steep gorge feeling tiny against living walls of the ravine. And yet, almost simultaneously, I lose all sense of borders to the point of unlimited expansion. Coming upon the Cut River I disappear. An old fallen oak as thick as a school bus bridges the narrower part of the river. A beaver dam slightly upstream diverts the flow of water near a shallow point. I realize what I had wrong is the fact that I cannot bring you here. I can't bring anyone here. We are either here as one or not.

I am brave to cross over the river and I do not fall. I'm done merely trying to survive. I want to live.

"Enjoy the Silence"

I finish
in moonlight
praising impermanence
author of silence
and beauty

In daylight, the moon chases me to work like a filmy ghost. Chicory and goldenrod ending. My deaf dog adapts and so do we. Silence and a new flow.

Is your moon purple too? As it turns out, the owl was not simply passing though. At 3 a.m., he is a monk reciting prayers. I am no longer a penitent child nor am I the adult given to stubborn pretending. The monk, owl, and I are one, enjoying the silence.

I make coffee for Kyle before he wakes and tea for myself. As an early morning rainstorm builds, Kora and I sit beneath the overhang absorbing the spicy-sweet balm of October's first fallen leaves. Tomorrow is my solo trip, maybe pushing frontiers of sorts. A cedar loft, the great lake, pine trees and a million ways to say nothing at all.

It has been futile to say, “first I need to do this or work this certain thing out or live this certain way, then I will be free to live in peace.” So many excuses; so many ways to delay.

Too much noise passed between us on the air and in image. Love too, but peace? It couldn't stay until we left ourselves for dead.

"October Road"

I offered both hands across the desk when he spoke about his diagnosis and treatment. The speed at which he grabbed them startled me, but the warmth and softness melted surprise to compassion. His eyes said see me clearly or not at all. He spoke about time on the streets, jail and the irony of getting clean only to have terminal cancer. At the center of a hurricane or a tornado is an eye; it is safe there if one can move with the storm. He showed us bullet and knife scars in the side of his torso and I thought of Jesus being stuck in the sides by soldiers.

Death and birth are the same thing. So easily we look birth in the face and yet, we struggle to gaze directly into death. To accept life is to accept death because they are two faces of the same flow. To know this is to end suffering. I will still cry at his funeral, which begs the question, what does it mean to know.

Flowers will blossom from our lips and the next generation of trees shall hold us tightly within their roots.

Assuredly we have reached the last of amenable weather.

October I love you.

Cardinals in surround sound. Black walnut trees drop nut pods from fifty feet high, crashing through branches and hitting the ground like baseball sized cannon balls. White-tailed deer lope and graze a stone's throw from the picnic table in Palmer Park.

Poetry meets Tarot meets tribe in the most holistic and loving way. How long I waited and yet, we were always here, together.

Apples, oatmeal, sunlight for breakfast; everything elongates unto ending time.

“Am I Blue”

The blue you pick.
The blue you leave behind.

Forget-me-nots and chicory.

Ripe blueberries nestled in hand.
Michigan sky after a snowstorm.

Blue as home
at least
for a season.

The waters of Lamu or
New Zealand's glacial gleam.

Humming night's bluest hymn.

A blue that almost killed
me but saved me
after all.

Am I sad was asked –
answered I am blue.

*

The last mosquitoes worry in my ear through another moon meditation. I lost my religion to moonlight during the choicelss choice to embrace living. Now I am watching time run out of hands and faces. I have learned to mother the mother and become a grandmother to myself. Red hair doesn't really gray but it does stiffen and eventually lean towards white. The aging body doesn't concern me but the suffering which comes along for the ride can sometimes refuse its destiny of impermanence.

Curled leaves skitter to rest on the pebbled walkway to my front door. The weather report reads like a poem:

fall takes a break
summer-like weather
ushering October

The fields begin to empty into the vast autumn sea and chrysanthemums are all the rage. Geese overhead point towards sanctuary for coming storms, and apples soften and brown before I can eat them all.

Soon enough the glow of nighttime snow will blanket me in the for the winter and I will long towards remembrance of my “slash of blue.”

"One Fine Morning"

Tripping to the Upper Peninsula – a birthday trek – half a century put to bed.

A dirt road through thick pines leads to the lake and a loft of windows looking down on the entire state. Michigan is magic. Ask the mushrooms if it is so.

What if our bodies and mind could be at peace together? A serene encounter of reality calling. Bill Callahan sings about the mountains bowing down like a ballet in the morning sun. And the water is clearer. The grass greener.

In the past when asked what I wanted, I said I wanted it all. The reason is because I am the flowing river; I am the altar and the knees; I am the pebble and the mountain and the trail leading both towards and away from the summit. Inside of everything is the chance for peace and the promise of healing. I want it all because all of it is us.

What I lacked was true compassion. I have acted out of knowing instead of acting out of love.

Dipa Ma opened me: when you're really present, aren't you also loving? And when you're really loving, aren't you also present?

*

The garden rests after a difficult growing season. Offerings are made under the Autumn Equinox in gratefulness for the soil and the chance enter the dirt, no matter the yield.

wildflowers ending
I can no longer name
most of me

It's Like This

I am a part of this – never beginning – endless.

Lately, star meditations at 4 a.m. are my jam. Autumn air begins, still smelling like summer's gestation with hints of crispness to come.

To come.

Acorns fall like stones or hail, echoes cracking like one-off gun shots in an unobstructed night. I am not so zen that I forget the gunfire forcing us to the interior of the house in Kenya. I don't forget the bodies or the screams. I remember the sounds of machete violence and the panic and dread deep in the throats of women giving birth in a camp of 8,000 displaced people.

To allow, hold loosely, forgive – is it the same as forgetting?

Sun rises first on my left shoulder. John Denver says we don't forget entirely. And yet, the thoughts, awareness and feelings rise only to be let go.

Giving once important things to the river becomes more than symbolic. Soon we shall lie down in the shallows along the bank and float back to the sea. Maybe we already have.

*

I am my mother and father, my grandparents, and their parents. I am colonizer and colonized; queen and peasant; volcano, glacier, and sea. It all lives in my body and I am responsible for our healing and peace. It is now my only work.

This is like this; that is like that; our happiness depends on each other.

Burned at the Stake

A boy broke up with me when I was sophomore in high school because I didn't know Stevie Ray Vaughn, and I certainly hadn't heard that he had died that day.

My father knows a lot of things. He cares about how many points Jackie Longstreet scored in the Hastings High School basketball game and he will tell everyone that his mother graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan back when women didn't go to college. He can diagnose things that 99% of physicians miss.

A photographer from National Geographic while in Kenya told me I was a “little girl” who didn't “know anything about life” after I opened a dialogue about colonization in the region.

Before Kenya, I stood in front of the church board for over four hours to answer questions regarding scripture and the biblical mandate to “go and make disciples of all the nations.” By the end, I retreated to the women's bathroom to cry.

Knowledge in the bones of the feminine is overlooked at best and burned at the stake at worst.

At home I am never tested. It's why I won't leave this place carved from a temperate heart. I refuse to follow flames to my death.

The masculine tries to define love but the best it can do is allow love's safe passage.

*

An airplane skips through openings in the tree crown. I know fliers gotta fly but they also have to land.

At 3 a.m. a barred owl's distinct vocals lure attention and awareness westward. These thin hours. This time floating without barriers. I am soothed by his calls and pray he is not simply passing through the remnants of this forest. By sunup he is quiet, giving way to early train moans and morning commuters.

October pending – northern lights with or without mushrooms – this starry conversation.

Ashes at All Costs

An owl surprises me with a sudden swoop from the backyard oak, dipping low for just a moment before merging back into arriving night. I hear them more often than I see them, so I consider this convergence a portent. Endowment and essence is everywhere.

To what shall
I liken the world?
Moonlight, reflected
in dewdrops
shaken from a crane's bill.

~Eihei Dogen

Morning mist hovers in fall fields. What I cannot see becomes mysterious – a seed of potential discovery. One could say this about the abyss too, no? One is boundless in the falling, subjected to the unknown, and yet, the potential energy building towards that which has not yet been discovered. Writing is like that – moving towards the unknown – potentially revealing what was truly known all along — maybe just hidden for a while.

Sometimes I am afraid of the unknown. I forget that I am without edges; that I, too, am constantly unfolding and entering the mysterious. In fact, I am the mysterious.

Sipping pu'erh tea as sunrise slants over what is left of the garden. The smell of ash and dew in the fire pit reminds me of that Leonard Cohen quote, “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” The smell also lingers in my favorite sweatshirt and reminds me of how his shirt smelled when I buried my face in his shoulder for the first time. I spread ashes over the garden, planting love at all costs.

Poetry club – cabin in the U.P. – mushrooms. Mediation on the rotation. Finding my people. Finding my tribe. Every moment starting again.

One For the Road

Over campfire and smoke, bats make figure eights against vanishing light. I sit at the fire alone, but not lonely. The idea of contentment, even in the face of fire, is now totally familiar and inviting. Embers begin to die as I take stock of spring and summer. I offer poems and posies, watch pain go up in smoke and collect seeds of joy left behind. The poison ivy rash across my neck mocks this seasonal soliloquy as if to say here's one for the road, beotch.

Night comes on like home. Stars reel across the sky and I don't even think about making a wish. Yet, I do wonder if I found you in the stars – a template wheeling across heaven – gathering wishes and sorrows. Light seen but already gone.

meditation
goldenrod shoulder
high

The boardwalk through the marsh was slick with morning dew. Cattails by the hundreds, going to seed. Red-winged blackbirds linger a little, but like the wedges of geese overhead, they have to get a move on. My grown children call me every spring when they hear their first blackbird trill. L. now lives in Texas so, maybe no phone call this year.

Sliced apples in the wooded park – tarot and poetry at the picnic table – monarchs touching down and taking off with sunlight beaming through their wings. The doe came eerily close but moved back when her baby stirred in the brush.

Back home, the seedum blushes between mauve and bright purple. Autumn and her swan songs offering yet another chance to be grateful.

Desire for Desire

Morning moonlight meditations. Tree-crowns sway in silence, fanning cloud puffs into the moon. Dawn breaks on my left shoulder while the moon skims my right. Crickets – a lone barred owl – and the first birdsong. Acorns crack the neighbor's metal roof like a gunshot and it is never not startling. Even so, a sense of samadhi erases all things “this” or “that.”

A red bird on an old pine examines the link between attendance and attention. He is a priestly presence while I am the priestess of nothing, rightly happy with this poverty. We can go beyond paradox, for paradox exists only in the words and ideas which describe the truth. There is no parcel of information saving the day when we realize we cannot cut what is real into pieces.

I am not troubled or dismembered.

*

The last of summer's flowers grow heavy. Bees have entered crazy-mode, foraging for winter. They've taken up residence next to the dryer vent, spilling out in irritation whenever clothes are drying in the machine.

As life goes on, I have fewer questions and even fewer answers. There is freedom and peace in that.

I've relaxed the driving desire for comfort – and the driving desire for desire. I only want to embrace reality without illusion or fantasy. Even that wanting will eventually go.

Ready?

I've Got the Moves

Let's be honest.
I probably fell
in love a little bit.

I can't help
it when someone proves
they've seen the thing.

It's not
about attention
or gaze.

It's not
about mommy or daddy
issues, or power and sex.

That would require
a body and we all know
naked minds is where it's at.

No – we touched
gin colored waters
far from the surface.

We heard
ancient hymns called back
from oblivion.

I think
we were just we –
beginning and end.

*

When minds meet at that ineffable place, ego burns beyond ash to no thing. No we. No listening to strings while getting high. No “in sickness or health.” No quantum physics or eco-spirituality dialogue until 4 in the morning.

But then, so what?

Late August sun drops into Lake Michigan like a stone. Tail lights headed south. Another close encounter reminds me that I have been dancing this dance one hundred million times. It's not about passing or failing the lesson; it's about finding out how many times I'm going to play by every one else's rules.

At least one more time, it seems.

After Truancy

The way we practiced paradise – scattering seeds in the breeze – opening mystery beyond every word or silence. That was the only real thing I am going to remember about this life.

*

Chickadees return to the pines after summer truancy. I missed them more when I heard their song out of the blue. Out of the green?

Abba Antony recommends: in whatever place you live, do not easily leave. Michigan – Kenya – Suburbia – to what end, Abba? I think Merton would ask us to become a stranger. Root into homelessness.

At the library, I met a woman living with cerebral palsy who was taken in by Mother Theresa at birth, adopted and brought to the United States. She lives in wheel chair and has been experiencing homeless for three years. I felt the paradox of her relinquishment of all security being utterly tied up with what it means to find the way home. She is home in no place and yet, in the heart of our encounter of one another, I suddenly knew home.

This on repeat.

*

Cresting lazy hills on a longer drive. Moving into sunrise seems entirely different than driving into sunset. Yet it is the same sun – same earth – same confluence of light and darkness parading as “my life.” How long has humanity been obsessed with purpose? The practice of living free from care echoes the depth I knew in that short paradise we tasted beyond.

The distance makes a difference only if there is insistence; I made that up a thousand lifetimes ago.

Sipping the Whole Thing

Cookbooks on my lap, this dawn thunderstorm, tea losing steam.

Everything and everyone loses steam; we move towards entropy. I can feel it happening in the decisions I make or the judgements I forgo. Tea cools towards room temperature and we act like we are losing something – some great flavor or zest – some vital comfort or knowledge. Yet when one arrives here, at this no-where place, this lake of cooled tea, we sip the sobering temperateness and realize we are at peace.

*

Some one I care about deeply is leaving my orbit. Sadness rises like elegant exhalations from my tea. As it all cools, I am left with who I am.

I am the immaculate flower, dying. Petals meet ground. Roots constrict. My decomposition returns to the loam, giving way to life another day. And so are you. The process of life needs all the parts – life, death, and regeneration. I am not just me. I am everything which contains everything else.

The horrors of the world are me.

The elephant on the Savannah giving birth is me.

Can you see the inter-being?

Look deeply and share the pain and joys of the whole world in order that all are healed.

From Where I Come

Mudding for a sense of self
toes sifting and sinking
into turtle lands.

The land holds its breath in the heat and waters warm in an unsettling way. From here I scan horizons and borders – borders and hand drawn threads, sealed with blood – horizons born out of the personal wisdom of sorrow and darkness. All measures that matter now are internal.

I think I came from a hollowed out place – mom emptied from abuse and mental illness – dad reduced by responsibilities that were not his. The men were fliers and military. The women were stalwart and unflinching, unless they were raped and tried to kill themselves. Then, they were locked away and told to hush.

I need to go back further. My Irish eyes have roots so far down I have lost my fingernails digging to find them. From what land am I? What do its rocks and rivers and trees have to say? What I know is that the land was sculpted by sea and sorrow, yet it also bore healing and power. The water, be it river or lake or falls, carries one neither here nor there.

What is man-made ends. Get back to what lives and breathes. Swim the lough.

Hindsight is a strange dance partner but perhaps one step forward and two steps back gets one where she belongs.

Written Long Ago

What lesson is repeating itself?

At times I am a stone, still and hidden for lifetimes. At others, I am found, pocketed and saved as a relic or remembrance of a lovely walk. When do I dance in the center of it all, full of gossamer grace, not held but beheld, as healing filtered light? Well, that is the lesson – her answers found in songs written long ago.

*

Melancholy air sits at the top of August. Despite the way land holds this heat, I can feel the change of seasons. One waits on the threshold with grass goddesses and hushed dunes. Let us sway. Let us pray.

*

My latest teacher was a storyteller. Kerri ní Dochartaigh in Thin Places said, “good seanchaidhthe – storytellers – never really tell you anything.” My teller's stories came as close as my own breath to changing everything. What did I hear? The stories are gone now. They spilled out of his mouth, danced with my soul, took a last spin around the room, and went up the chimney as ash from our fire. Yet these lines – here – speak of him. I can't tell you anything else about this except, now I am just here, pen in my hand, writing my own story.

*

I'm ready to feel something other than my past – to know something other than the space between heaven and earth.

I think my teacher told me a story about going to hell; I've been there already and now realize how very tired I am.

Against White Pines

July nightfall
hints of dying embers
witness the edge of summer

There is no need to wait on death or to give oneself over to the pain of this world. The fireflies said this to me at this late stage of the game. Rise and fall, light and dark – the deepest way exists only in this very moment.

A makeshift lunch by the river can last a lifetime. Decades of chronic pain can fade into the briefest of moments. Everything is impermanent. If one holds that truth up high into the sun or even sets it way down into loamy remains of the finished garden, they might find the open gate of peace.

We live to know joy. We die to begin again and find joy anew.

I am reminded of this most acutely when I water seeds or press my cheek against the white pine. How deeply the entirety of the cosmos knows these truths and yet, how quickly we overlook.

*

I've changed the way I walk and the way I touch. I still do the dishes and laundry. I still park my car in the suburban garage and put my garbage out at the end of the driveway on Friday mornings. My body still aches, gets sick, experiences pleasure and shares words and feelings with others.

But now when I close my eyes on the forms of this life, I am carried by the river which feeds itself.

I float instead of swim.

Turtles keep the depths. Eagles keep the sky.

I am neither here nor there.

Totally Everything

St. Catherine of Siena said: all the way to heaven is heaven itself. I am coming into awareness of this, even with these mountains in me; even with wildfire smoke in my lungs.

Did we ever make love? We recognized it; we followed it; yet we were scared of it, too.

The nothing we made is all gone now.

No together and no alone.

Only this.

*

What if this sentence is the first or last real sentence I ever write? Cosmos asks us to enter the still-point, a mirrored pond which regards each thought or movement as totally everything. Stillness says: practice attention and be free. Give up every thing and know what you do not know. In this way, the heart of who I am is lost.

*

Who am I now?

*

Fireflies drift and sink as tiny alms to moonlight. Musk from damp pines lingers in a reminder of place and circumstance. When moments are perfect, attention is called to them, thereby rendering such moments the object of attention. Said more simply, the moments become imperfect when noticed to be perfect. In this way, it seems more honest to allow every moment to be what it is – without label – without perfection.

Whether waiting for life to be perfect or striving to make it so, I blemish the perfection inherent in every moment.
All the way to heaven is heaven itself.

Eliminating Me

Residual rain tips from delicate cradles high in the oak and maple.

The stillness of dawn builds a church in my chest, supporting my body as soul ascends. The me I see myself as breaks apart into infinite tiny glints of light and disappears into nothing. The world doesn't hold us. So I wonder, why do we remain?

Misty stillness dampens the sounds of wakening.

When I slept, he visited me and briefly held my hand as we floated in another realm. He said this is place where we are unified; not earth; not bodies. He spoke and I understood. Then I woke.

It is love that keeps us
naked to the bone.

It is hate that keeps us
dressing for the world.

As I ready for work, I lay out my clothing and ask: am I dressing or undressing?

I, I, I.

Is it possible to write and leave the I behind?

Maybe the absence of I is why the poetry says more with less confusion or error.

For now, the sentences are asking something of me.

Me, me, me.

The knot of distance unravels once again because the truth is: there is no otherwise.

Eliminate me and be free.

Against Gray Light

“We are searching for boats we forgot to build.” ~ Barry Lopez

Rain arrives after two months missing, slow and shy at first, then like a hard cry. Green things begin a long sigh. For all that has turned to straw it is too late. We are a land of lakes, yet so thirsty.

The landscapes of light have changed. Without the balance of water or rain, it has all been too much – too bright – too blazing and brilliant. Earth and skin are scorched.

Now heal.
Now grow.

green
pine and oak
against gray daylight
the release of a thousand
sorrows

To love a pine tree is to love North and all other arrows pointing that way. I drift disembodied over hills and cliffs while also growing roots deeper into the place I am.

Teacher learned this lesson first and now must I. There is no choosing one over the other. There is flying and rooting, nesting and wandering, peace and love – opposites on one hand, marriage on the other.

The day I met him never ended but looking back, I see it never began either; somehow I kept forgetting that part. In this way it is safe to say that I will always wonder the color of his mornings – if he watches bats circle at dusk – if he ever really wanted to walk the trail with me at all . . .

This and other ways to avoid happiness.

In this rain, at this time, I savor sips of tea in the back sun room, writing these lines into the shape of a cure for this life.