I Wish You Knew
In the Garden Imagine if you will, dear one, dear one and all, that you are sent to manifest something unique and quite vital to the world. You arrive as rich seeded earth, landing in just the right geographic location to support your eventual yield. The trees and the flowers and the shrubs in […]
Saved
It is a blessing to find those things that save us in small ways. At the checkout counter a teenaged boy offered to carry groceries for an old couple. They said yes, and I was quietly saved. Last Tuesday, late morning, a brief shaft of early winter sun reached down between sooty clouds, illuminating […]
Everything is a Sign
Of all the offerings, a thousand possible signs, the Spirit Messengers chose poop. A pile of it, excrement of vague animal origins, arranged in a circle too perfect for random, dead center on my front step. And I, lover of beauty, faithful to poetry and all that sings cannot make sense of the leavings; what […]
Integration
It has been almost a month since my mother passed. It wasn’t unexpected. She was old and ill and tired. She wanted to go, was impatient with the way those final months seemed to drag and throw more miseries her way. I was able to mark 60 of my birthdays with her still in the […]
WALKING HER HOME
Adrift. That’s the word that floated into my teary vision as I sat in my car outside the facility my mother has resided in for the past seven years. These after-visit pauses have become part of my ritual in the past few months. There is always someplace else I need to be, fitting in my […]
What Do You Know?
What do we know for sure? I find myself wondering, lately, if we mostly hold the beliefs that suit our ease. For some, self-contempt can provide a kind of familiarity which becomes belief. For others, there is ease in what’s left after all the anger—which is really a mutation of pain—gets bored and leaves, or […]
Conversations with a Ghost
A Dead Friend Speaks Almost a year into my exit from flesh, what we call, when embodied, death, You talk to me, wonder if I help when you struggle and worry, soothe when you rage and grieve. You ask if I’ve retained shape and color, if my long and wild hair, blonde with streaks of […]
Look up! The world is out there.
Reckoning Inside, just shy of sunrise, all over the land people awakened, reached for their small screens, hungry for the tiny words and pictures, memes and videos designed to amuse, entrance, distract from stress and angst of bad news streaming 24/7. The people found ways to laugh, or groan, and see themselves in the scowls […]
Little Altars Everywhere
My home is host to little altars everywhere honoring lives lived, seasons arriving and leaving, the hundred sparks of grace and wonder, sorrow and understanding that pock and foliate hours and years squeezed into the dance of this body, my particular, grand, unbearably blessed and gratefully transient human experience. On good days I go bowing […]
Notes from a Parallel Universe
I’ve written a fair amount about life with my adult child. As I plod ever so slowly towards creating a book about the journey, it occurs to me that the pace at which I’m working on that is in sync with the overall pace and rhythm of our life together. Bink will turn 28 this […]