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Come with me into the expansive gift of poetry to experience a disruption of habitual ways of thinking and perceiving. The magic of poetry happens when it is spoken, heard and felt as vibrations in your body.

In this blog I offer you heartfelt, homemade recordings of some of my favorite poems. I invite you also to spend time with their pulsing vibrations and pregnant pauses, to savor the luscious sensual syllables on your tongue, and to feel the subtle changes in your being as you play with the poems.

Listen, read and then slowly speak them out loud. The medicine of poetry will endlessly surprise and delight you as a portal into your own wild multidimensionality!

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Dear Human

10/13/2024

 
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Art by Autumn Skye

​Dear Human:
You've got it all wrong.

You didn't come here to master unconditional love. This is where you came from and where you'll return.

You came here to learn personal love.
Universal love.
Messy love.
Sweaty Love.
Crazy love.
Broken love.
Whole love.
Infused with divinity.
Lived through the grace of stumbling.
Demonstrated through the beauty of...messing up.
Often.

You didn't come here to be perfect, you already are.

You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous.

And then to rise again into remembering.

But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.

Love in truth doesn't need any adjectives.
It doesn't require modifiers.
It doesn't require the condition of perfection.

It only asks you to show up.
And do your best.
That you stay present and feel fully.
That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as YOU.

It's enough.

It's plenty.

    - Courtney A. Walsh

This sense that something went wrong

8/18/2024

 
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Eve and Lilith
by Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales, 2020

​This sense that something
went wrong.
The sense that we have fallen
and taken the world down with us.
The sense that all
might have turned out better
had she not made some
colossal mistake
in the beginning.
The sense that nature
disapproves, and every
flower is shouting about
the impending cataclysm
because a dark mother
tasted the fruit of
unbearable joy.
Dear friend, don't you know
that humans hesitate and
cower before uncertainty
age after age, inventing
this story again and again?
It's how we feel when we
don't know how to breathe,
when we don't know how to
pause between heartbeats,
to savor the delicate bouquet
of this moment.
Some say heaven will appear
when this tribulation is over.
I say heaven is an infinitesimal
grain of silence
at the tip of your exhalation,
just before you receive
the gift of another breath.
Meet me here.
We'll dance barefoot
in the garden where nothing
ever went wrong,
and there was only
one tree, whose roots
went deep into the loam,
whose branches bent down
with clusters of ripening
sweet stars,
and a sparkling serpent spiraled
up the spine of the Goddess.
The serpent was Wisdom.
The Goddess was Eve.
She marveled at the dust
in the palm of her hand,
blew upon it,
and created a Man.

​-  Alfred LaMotte

Any fool can get into an ocean

5/19/2024

 
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Eternal Waters by Autumn Skye

​Any fool can get into an ocean   
But it takes a Goddess   
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming   
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
    water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

    - Jack Spicer

burgundy and oak

4/28/2024

 
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Photo by Christian Lue

​as a boy
i heard the muses
Calliope and Melpomene
whispering
their voices bubbling up
from the thick
burgundy carpet
in my grandfather’s
living room

we told Homeric tales
with plastic figurines
exploring caverns
beneath an oak end-table
the darkness
beneath the sofa
was an unknowable
otherworld
beside which we waged wars
with marbles
and matchbox cars

that small temple
of burgundy and oak
is lost to me now
yet in quiet moments
of forgetting myself
i still feel
my muses near
silently brushing my cheek
like scarves of raw silk
reminding me
to awaken back
into more innocent ways
of understanding

and so
under a cool
spring moon
i press my ear
to the earth
soft and yielding
after a generous April rain
and listen
to remember
​

    - Dimitri Papadopoulos​

The Purpose of Your Life

3/24/2024

 
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Solitary Refinement
Painting by Duy Huynh

The purpose of your
Life
Is to be
Confronted
By a problem
You cannot solve
This problem
Is your soul's
Blueprint
It haunts you
And finds you
Again and again
You will try
Relentlessly
To resolve this problem
And in your trying
You will deepen
Into the primordial
Waters
Of wisdom,
Beyond understanding.
This problem
Is the Beloved
That won't let you
Get away
This problem only asks
That you live into her
This koan with no
Meaning
This mystery school
With one student
This repetitive question
This unsolvable
Problem
This riddle
Is your path
It is the way you walk the earth
Your life itself
Is the answer

- Maya Luna

Where Else Could I Go?

11/5/2023

 
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​Ma Kali, having You
Is like having a tiger
For a Mother. I don't
Mean the kind who
Pushes her child to
Become president,

Or an egomaniac, or
Both. There are tigers
And there are Tigers.
Your tongue could lick
The varnish off the world
With a single swipe.

It's not comfortable
Lying next to You
At night, but honestly
Where else could I go?
Who would lie elsewhere
When they've lain

With Kali Ma? Best not
Ask such questions
Anyway. There's no road
Back to the world
From Mother...when no one
​Wants to come back.

​    - Clark Strand

The River of the Dead

10/29/2023

 
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Awakening Venus by AXEL

In an early morning vision, Mother
Carried me to the river that marks
The boundary between the worlds.

There I saw three women who faced
Away from me--respectfully, I thought--
For their backs were naked, and to gaze

Upon them when they turned carried
Certain inevitable obligations.
I would know things that could not

Be known, for these were not ordinary
Naked women a man might stumble upon
And remark later, "I saw these beauties,

Just there by the water!" To see them
Was to submit to something irrevocable.
But then one of them spoke and said,

"Only ask and we shall turn, and you may
Look upon us, but we would not force such
Knowledge upon the living." To Kali I said,

"Mother, what am I to do? I haven't even 
The sense to know what is being offered me."
Said Kali Ma: "They have offered the truth

In a false world. Would you presume
To come by that knowledge another way?"
It was enough. I gave my consent.

They turned, pale and silent and beautiful,
And led me with soft words and caresses
That pulled the flesh from my bones like

Well-cooked meat, and I left it there beside
The waters to come back for later, when I passed
Once more over the River of the Dead.

​    - Clark Strand

To Lay One's Heart Upon the Ground

10/22/2023

 
Picture
Kali on Shiva from a Tantric Devi Painting

Mother, tonight I have taken my heart
From its cage and laid it at Your feet.
The rapture of this was indescribable.

For one thing, I didn't die as I thought.
I discovered that hearts were for giving
And not for having. This was the first

Lesson of the night. The second came
When I understood what it felt like
To lay one's heart upon the ground.

I wept to think how many years of life
I wasted not knowing where a heart
Belonged. Those were lessons enough,

But then You rested Your foot upon me
And I saw the Universe from the bottom up
The only way it could be witnessed.

That was as much as I could bear,
And there was no lesson in it, for it was
More than anyone could learn.

In the end I've decided to leave
This heart in Your keeping. Do with it just
What You do with the Universe,

And that will be good enough for me.

​    - Clark Strand

The Threshold of This Life

10/1/2023

 
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The Madonna and Child
Oil on wood, around 1520 AD, possibly by Sodoma

I was not aware of the moment
when I first crossed the threshold of this life.

What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery
like a bud in the forest at midnight!

When in the morning I looked upon the light
I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world,
that the inscrutable without name and form
had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother.

Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me.
And because I love this life,
I know I shall love death as well.

The child cries out
when from the right breast the mother takes it away,
in the very next moment to find in the left one its consolation.

    - Rabindranath Tagore

Keep Me Fully Glad

9/24/2023

 
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Photo by Rodolpho Sanches Carvolho

Keep me fully glad with nothing. Only take my hand in your hand.
In the gloom of the deepening night take up my heart and play with it as you list. Bind me close to you with nothing.
I will spread myself out at your feet and lie still. Under this clouded sky I will meet silence with silence. I will become one with the night clasping the earth in my breast.
Make my life glad with nothing.
The rains sweep the sky from end to end. Jasmines in the wet untamable wind revel in their own perfume. The cloud-hidden stars thrill in secret. Let me fill to the full my heart with nothing but my own depth of joy.

​    - Rabindranath Tagore


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  • Home
  • Services
    • Mentor, Muse, Consultant
    • The Emotion Code & The Body Code
    • Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy
    • Breathwork Intensive
  • About
    • About Xochitl
    • Spiritual Midwifery
  • Cost & Connecting
  • Wild Words Poetry Blog
  • Ecos de la Marea Cave Ceremonies