The Viewing

his nose hadn’t been that big.
his face had been round,
not sallow and oval.

his hands alone were
recognizable; their rough
strength knew the way

of the soil and also
the Gardener’s secret:
casement broken,

the seed is the sapling is
the tree is the blossom is
the apple is a glass of

spiced cider or Nana’s
last jar of preserves.
of these nothing is lost

but it’s not understood.
we step forward unsure,
are unconvinced

by the makeup.
of the two, death
is the greater deceit.

departures and arrivals

Why do I keep ending up where I am not? 

the spins

This morning, even after a long, deep sleep I find I awake still trapped in circular thinking. Taking a closer look I find this process is one that's purpose is twofold: 1. to decide how I should act according to what others might need or want from me, 2. to decide how I should feel about it. This is a land of hypotheticals and imagination, of clumsy paper-mache replicas and connect-the-dot drawings. There is a feeling which is tangible when you've hit upon something real. Something recognized by the body - maybe in the chest or solar plexus. None of these half-asleep, half-awake musings have that quality. The real question begins to emerge. Why this need to problem-solve? Especially when people aren't equations and no matter how much circumstantial evidence I put in, the answers I get out are largely based on my own past, disconnected from the present, dead. Just as dead is my attachment to outcomes outside of the moment. I want x to happen and y not to. How can I engineer this future for myself? What a tangled mess! Untangling however is thankfully, miraculously, mercifully simple. Be here, be honest, be brave. 

stone soup

I forget I have a choice, always, to be present and engage with others. I don't have to wait for them. Intimacy is a food. Sometimes it comes easily and naturally, sometimes it gets lost in the constant onslaught of day-to-day preoccupations. Sometimes I'm so hungry for it I lose perspective and, in my impatience, begin to blame others. But there is one thing I've learned and keep learning: you cannot wait for others to give, to be brave, to initiate, to move towards you - you must step forward yourself, and do it again and do it again. It's not a matter of taking what you need, people fall into that, but quite the opposite. It is stone soup. It is all of us in the kitchen together, giving from who and what we are, present to what it is we all essentially need - each other. 

33 years

Today I received a phone call from my Dad who received my letter. This was THE letter. The letter that took me 33 years to write. The one I believe we've both really needed. I don't know of anything you can understand a moment before you're ready, but sometimes readiness requires work and in this sense we haven't time to waste.

right and good cont.

Tonight 'right' won over 'good.'  Why don't I feel better for it? People, somewhere not too far from me, are kissing under a crimson and white peony sky. Not all of them hate each other. I don't envy any of those people as individuals. I am my self. I have tiger lilies and words, ants too - a random one blazing its way across my desk or waking me with a tickle at the elbow or up the forearm. These tiny visitors are softer and kinder than a hair shirt, but not warmer.

good and right

"Doesn't it feel good? I mean, doesn't it feel right?" Someone said this to me not too long ago. While it was more a suggestion than a question, I took the time to consider it. The assumption is that the answer to one will be the answer to both. It's convenient to lump these two together indiscriminately. It is decidedly inconvenient to lump these two together indiscriminately. The unnecessary is costly. Not everything that feels good is right. Conversely, not everything that is right feels good.