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 […]
Medicament
Medicament This morning’s waking, tight and tender to the touch, felt like neck ache, and all along the spine of this day my heart climbed and slid, ridge-riding the grief and uncertainty of these past months, pushing up towards bone-like pinnacles, vertebraic protrusions of more bad news— illness and violence, economic cancer, people hating their […]
Gifts and Visitations
It’s been just over a month since my dear friend and soul sister Marina died, after a quick and nasty tussle with appendiceal cancer. She visits my consciousness daily, in ways both fleeting and substantial. We talked a lot about the afterlife in her last months. She told me clearly that, when she visits me […]
Dragonflies
As I write this, my dear friend Marina lies dying in a lovely room inside the oldest house in an historic and pretty New Hampshire town. A wonderful woman who worked with her in the local general store has taken her into her home. Hospice has set her up well with a hospital bed that […]
Collateral Sorrow
It’s been a time of times, a steady landslide of uncertainties. Yes, the Covid, the shutdown. Yes, Bink and so many other adults with disabilities being home all day every day for many weeks, with all the usual programs and activities canceled. Yes, the mass suffering and loss that has accompanied this pandemic around the […]
When all this is over…
WHEN THIS IS OVER Bring bread, chewy and warm, wrapped in that red checkered tablecloth that always sings picnic, which is short for happy family, easy friendships, peace and plenty in our town state country planet. We never went on one, a picnic, not once in all our together years even though we had that […]
Tender
Tender. Unless I am speaking of meat, which I mostly don’t, the very word owns its ness, as in, what is tender evokes tenderness, and what calls that forth in me is that which I am drawn towards, or s/he whom I draw close, or want to. Draw close,touch, be connected with, and to— it’s […]
Our small eyes
Perchance Perhaps nothing begins or ends, not exactly. The field mouse knows the tall grass to be her world. We say morning comes, and yet it is always somewhere, just not in the very front of our small eyes. The trees are wise. They know everything cycles, seed to sapling, strong trunk reaches skyward,, and […]
Love is a Rendering
Love is a Rendering Telling you how I love you is like trying to find things that haven’t been said about the ocean. My hands prefer to paint it— affection, water— sweeping, striped backgrounds, turquoise and deep salient greens, silvery whites frosting every liquid peak, and there’s the sky hovering above the seas like […]
Receiving the darkness
The word solstice was born from the Latin sol ( sun) and sistere ( to stand still). Solstice, winter This darker interlude could be a meditation, a reckoning with the deceptive nature of time. The exacting practice of being present is to show up for each round moment as if it were everything. This is […]