Love doesn't exist to meet your expectations.

I write a lot of poems in my head while I'm walking in the woods and too often, lately, I neglect to ever write them down. At the same time I am growing more comfortable with allowing things--moments, experiences, feelings, ideas, (poems)--to be fleeting. To be there and then to be gone. I may never again think about the sunset over the river today, how the sky flashed gold behind me, startling my eye such that I thought, for a moment, I was being followed.

On change and the status quo

Of course, I make the choice every day by living it.

"Work Shy" by Alex Phillips

To be poor and raise skinny children.

To own nothing but skinny clothing.

Skinny food falls in between cracks.

Friends cannot visit your skinny home.

They cannot fit through the door.

Your skinny thoughts evaporate into

the day or the night that you cannot

see with your tiny eyes.

God sticks you with the smallest pins

and your blood, the red is diluted.

Imagine a tiny hole, the other side

of which is a fat world and how

lost you would feel. Of course,

I'm speaking to myself.

How lost I would feel, and how dangerous.

 

 

 

 

 

hunting vest

Nearly every day I wonder if I am ready to say goodbye to you, or to him, and I don't know about you (or him either) but I remain hopelessly unsure. the comfort and the agony of intellectualized paralysis. all these false equivalencies, the consummate absurdity of this choice I've created for myself, which I am not making.   



I returned to the valley floor today, determined, this time, to be less afraid. When I first wrote that line in my head it went like this: I return to the valley, this time unafraid.

But that would be a lie. As I descend the tension in my chest constricts, constricts, constricts as I work to remind myself, over and over again, to be brave. It's something about being that close to the water, I think, two miles spent criss-crossing the creek via slippery stones, all those dark crevices behind and underneath boulders into which a woman hiking alone could so easily go missing, all those deep pools in which she could so easily drown.

In defense of framing a piece of art

I didn't eat for so many years. It was no way to live.


I am learning, once again, how to feed myself.


I think art is important. 

"The Thrush" by Edward Thomas

When Winter's ahead,

What can you read in November

That you read in April

When Winter's dead?

I hear the thrush, and I see

Him alone at the end of the lane

Near the bare poplar's tip,

Singing continuously.

Is it more that you know

Than that, even as in April,

So in November,

Winter is gone that must go?

Or is all your lore

Not to call November November,

And April April,

And Winter Winter—no more?

But I know the months all,

And their sweet names, April,

May and June and October,

As you call and call

I must remember

What died into April

And consider what will be born

Of a fair November;

And April I love for what

It was born of, and November

For what it will die in,

What they are and what they are not,

While you love what is kind,

What you can sing in

And love and forget in

All that's ahead and behind.

Heron sighting

One thing I am learning about faith is that you can't have faith in things happening in a certain way, only in that they will happen.


Speaking of which last night I drove out past the hotel where that coworker got married to a church, which is unusual for me these days, or at least I started driving there but then I followed a yellow schoolbus in the dark to a brick building near the end of the development I lost the schoolbus went inside went to the bathroom laughed with the woman who accidentally walked into the men's bathroom sat down in the auditorium got comfortable took some deep breaths then a man stood up to talk into his microphone headset and I grabbed my coat ran drove off like a maniac in pursuit of that yellow bus, screaming into my cell phone careening down a darkened road alongside a gated community.

I thought I might miss her.

Instead I sprint to the doors of the church this time, the yellow schoolbus is in the parking lot, I slide into a hard pew and stretch my body over the armrest so I can see around the pillar. Her hair is grey-dreadlocked and her pink scarf looks just fine with her new blue sweater. She speaks and I am confronted by my expectations, stiffened, and then she makes me laugh.

It takes what it takes.
Hope inspires the good to reveal itself. 
Forgiveness is where almost all of the miracles reside. 
Just feed each other and get each other some water.  

I am a spiritual person, "yes" I write on the college students' survey, and last night was a spiritual experience. Still all that lofty talk didn't prevent me from looking down during our hike today, kicking at grass alongside the road until he mentions the herons and sure enough in the sky there are two of them, right above me great blue. All that cawing from God, all those great big yellow buses, and I nearly missed them for needing to look up.