Succession

The alder tree, its limbs broken in the ice storm, resprouts soft green stems from the smooth empty middle of its trunk;

Takes on a new shape in order to begin again, continue capturing light to fuel life.

I have watched it from my upstairs window all these years.
Now I too shed my old hopes and the idealism of my younger days as I adapt and grow where the light continues to break through and touch me

But I am not a tree- rooted here for all of my life, sending my pollen and seeds as far as the wind can carry them.

I have a body that travels wherever I point it, and the world is vast. For an animal, adaptation is also our behavior- we sense danger and we move on.
I am a mother and so I find a safer patch of earth for my young.

But first I give my thanks to this place for sheltering my family and my life.
I give thanks to the earth where I have planted, and have found what other beings share this space.

The alder tree outside this window will continue here, enriching the soil and giving more than it has taken.

When my body makes its final return to the earth, may I too have given more to this world than I have taken.

Still point

Exhaustion arrives

Like a receding wave, revealing the barren belly of the world;
Smoothed over
by the weight of the water
and its ceaseless movement.

Surprised creatures burrow and flee their sudden exposure,
But the sand, no longer caught in the changeable waves
Settles deeper.

Gravity is the friend of the weary.
Its subtle power makes itself known
in the presence of unbearable mass.

It speaks- feel me now.
Not to rest, not to recover-
Just to witness the vastness of the sky;
Just to find the still point 

in the storm's shifting eye. 

Bridger

The dearest sound I know
is the light rhythm of my son, now 10, as he breathes.
I linger here beside his sleeping shape
knowing all too soon that he will outgrow
quiet moments like this one.

This moment contains so many others within it-
The countless nights rocking him to sleep,
through fevers or nightmares.

The very first swish of a heartbeat on a monitor, how his father and I sobbed such deep gasps of relief.

I cannot keep the sorrow of the world away from you,
But I promise you that somehow, the pain can be a doorway
to something sacred beyond words.

It connects us to all things.

The tenuousness of a life on this planet, the intensity of parental love. The finality of the passing of time.

How precious, how painful, how good it is
to be.

Wellspring

I have fortified my spirit 

with stones

In order to withstand the sorrow of being 

alive, sensitive, and aware.

But each rock was placed carefully as a cairn

on the ruins of my dreams.

An homage to their beauty and the color they added to the world.

They are with me;

like friends left behind on distant continents. 

And I have doggedly resisted the panicked voice inside, advising

 to build it up into a levy

so as to keep the world’s pain apart from mine.

Such an act would sever the human sacrament 

of bearing witness.

Instead it has become an aquafer, 

whose bedrock is steady even as 

the groundwater of my grief permeates everything.

When other sources run dry,

this deepest well sustains the resilient ground 

of generosity.

A riffle is springing up 

across the center of my being.

It is a space that everything must pass through.

There is refuge here;

wild things may shelter here

for a time;

and breathe.

And when I am still, I hear the rough waters

singing.

Homeostasis

We are held together by the smallest things,

The osteoblasts and myocytes,
keratin and collagen.

Nothing that is alive can grow
until it splits apart;
nor mend without a multitude
of unseen actions that come together exactly 

 right.

The intricate synergy of our own self-organizing;
The cellular orchestration of its own volition.

As long as we breathe, we evelope,

 reincarnate, and repair.  We flow with the

endlessness of order and chaos.

The healed places are knit together most

tightly, and yet they are a liability. Less

yielding, unforgetful.

Bodies are as dynamic as lives.

To rebuild is not simple nor guaranteed. It is 

fraught
with errors easy and incalculable. 

The process lasts as long as we are willing

 to continue it, or
as long as the microscopic labor 

can be sustained.

It is by those unseen cellular deeds 

that we are made alive each day. And by their grace, 

we heal.

In the forest

 In the forest I am a child.

There in the moss, I laid the weight of everyone’s tears.

Breathing in the sweet tilthy floor,

its spongey small tentacles and sharp snaps,

I was enveloped in her playful goodness.

Amidst the song sparrow and red-legged frog,

the world is still and alive.

There, the large world of my young life is smaller, but also wide.

There are no monsters to stare down. No children to save.

No one to rescue but me.

Like an elder, she surrounded me with her quiet power and granted me a stoic sanctuary.

In the forest I did not need to be brave, or strong, or good.

In the forest I am a child.

Co-evolution

Truth is intrusive, like an exposed screw that catches my loose threads,
and unravels what seemed so solid, so mendable.

We once had a dog that would fetch until it’s paws were skinless. We’d discover the wounds in shock, there was no indication he was in pain.

You say it’s like you’ve been running and discover your leg had been broken the whole time.

I think of Dr Margaret Mead explaining how a broken leg was a death sentence for our wild kin. A fossil of a healed femur shows the branching off- from a species that had to survive alone, or die; to one that was helped.

We cannot heal alone. When I say I love you, I mean that my mirror neurons fire freely at your joy and your pain.

Grief and gratitude are not a duality. They are a perfect dialectic.

Each breath is a gift, yes, but also a tether
to this fragile and tentative existence.

My best teachers taught me to return to my breath and find its softness; to let it spread through me.

To cease to breathe can also be a gift, a freeing, a small death.

We die not at once but in starts- the punctuated equilibrium of change within one lifetime,
and over eons. Each extinction we survive is a doorway
as life inexorably reinvents itself.

We can only see such a small piece of the story
to which we are inextricably bound, long after our time ends.

We can move back and forth, leaning into the uncertainty or fighting
the changes, bewildered and raw-knuckled. But one day, all that we have accumulated will be dust. Recycled, reimagined, conserved in the story.

What can we do, but meet what comes with humility, and the courage to want it all?