Look Up!

I walk in beauty

Now

So much! These fine spring days

Always had done
Always had done

Face turned toward the ground

Beauty went unnoticed

This beauty everywhere
This peace in every step

Let's call it spirit
or human spirit
if that suits you, soothes you, better

In the midst of battle
and filth
in refugee camps
and on our city streets
in the wards
at Juvenile Hall
and San Quentin

Like a lamp
that was always there
in the midst of darkness

Light that one

That one is You.

Look up!

Apology Accepted?

I want to apologize now,
this instant!

For every wrong
I have ever committed,
every last slender feeling
of yours,
anyone's!
I may have hurt
And to apologize for every
betrayal and abuse
ever inflicted by one human being
upon another
from the very dawn of homo sapiens
and into the future ...

Furthermore, I accept!
all the unspoken and still perhaps unseen apologies
perhaps due
to me
I forgive you on my own behalf
You, me and everyone else
for

Every snide remark
or forgetting to listen, or driving too fast,
Every lie and misunderstanding
Every slight or monumental
transgression
against the tender
and unshakable
Truth
of Who We Are.

One Thing.

I know that your delicate
and tender heart,
solid, liquid, gas
was born from the Self same
womb
as mine.

That beneath all our
preposterous exteriors
we so simply want
to Love
& be Loved.

As vulnerable,
as new born as the
damp unfolding
Monarch

How many kisses,
words of truth,
hours of listening,
sweet smiles,
firm "No's"
and shared silences

...

will it take
to restore you to
your Monarchy?

If I do not touch
you roughly
If I warm you with my breath
You may still fly

We may all still fly and

I believe

it is our

destiny

to do so.

And so, I will try,
again and again
to surrender to Love.

I may look
like an ordinary housewife
but every evening
for years and years
this has been my
wish upon a star

So be it.
You are loved.

And in the end, you may find you never needed me at all.

(Oh, but I do need you so!)

Mirror in the Sky, What is Love?

We drove to Yosemite, strained, bickering--husband and I--and over the dry, surreal 152, a thousand thoughts, like all these dry, twisted, lonely Oaks, dotting the hillside, running, running, running alongside the car.

In Yosemite, we found silent majesty, amazing grace, happy children, cool waters ... it was Almost Independence Day (thank you, Van Morrison.)

Silence.

The mystery of endless stars.

During the ride home, once again, strain and tension. Now husband is in a hurry, I am not--who is deciding directions? Who trusts who to get us home? Who is overly worried? Who is being most obnoxious?

Then, Explosion! ... (from husband)

Explosion! ... (from wife, that's me)

Mind whirls into how to fix this, what we should talk about, what is the underlying issue here, guilt & remorse, whose fault and why?

Then, there was the invitation to Stop! ... Husband not talking to me anyway. Guilt, remorse, second thoughts, disastrous future-thinking ...

Who cares???

Just stop!

And we are back over the 152, and the gnarled, money-green oaks look so much more beautiful than before. It is hot. It is Independence Day. We have been to Heaven and back. We have been to Hell and back.

And it is all O.K.

And the radio played: I took my love and I took it down. I climbed a mountain and turned around ...

Chrysalis

Your anger is a veil

Like Spiderman shoots a web at the world,

So you spit and seethe your Fury

But this web keeps you from seeing, changing, moving, growing

It binds you tight.

Who knows if your victim has been damaged, or hurt

Or made stronger?

Have you evoked fear

Or Love?


Only one thing is certain.

Like a cocoon wound too tightly,

Or the spider's sticky shroud


Anger will kill you, first.




Unless ...

Unless you emerge from your chrysalis

Free!

and beat your sudden wings

damp with your second--& most significant--birth

into Newness, the vast & tremulous Unknown



Now ...

you are

full of tenderness,

full of rhythm

In ecstatic flight

through the Infinite night.

Welcome!

Hot and Sour Soup

During a week in Yosemite, schlepping along a toddler, a baby, half the contents of our house, enough food to feed all the bears in the park, and a few ground squirrels too, I had the epiphany to begin a blog. The epiphany came somewhere around Tuolumne Meadows--one of the many heavens here on Earth, here in the actual Garden. So many large hearted, giant spirited others have had their own epiphanies in Tuolumne Meadows--John Muir, Ansel Adams and Elizabeth Stone O'Neill (author of "Tuolumne: How the Runny River Ran") among them. I consider myself to be, then, in excellent company.

This blog is my entirely free creative outlet. For many years, I was a journalist and essayist, staff writer and freelancer ... and then, after writing an investigative article on depression and the use of medications (see "Club Meds" at www.MetroActive.com) I abruptly answered a calling to work in the helping field. I now run a non-profit organization, write self-help-ish books, funded by foundations.

But my poetic spirit has also called, again, to be let loose in the world of language and ideas--to be free to speak of God if I so choose (and not a co-opted, defined God, just that word--the creative life force ... that which cannot be named, but always is.) To be free to speak of apple butter (where did it go?), Israel, babies and belly dancing. To use words like: tumescence and crepuscular, bedraggled and abscond.

So here I am. I wish I had an editor, of course. I do not have the time--with two children and a full time job running a "start up" organization, as well as various other funded writing projects--to do a great deal of research and fact checking here. This will be just rough and ready prosetry from me. Hot and sour soup. Spicy. Colorful. All mixed up. Ideally, fresh and nourishing.

Always a good way to begin.