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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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From Which It All Began

5/8/2022

 
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Tell me, what
would you do today
if you knew your life
to be a celebration
of this world?

Would you stop
to gather sunlight
dropping soundlessly
upon pines
beyond your window pane?

Would you court
dreams too wide
for the container
of consciousness?

Would you linger
in the terrible beauty
of uncertainty
as if the fullness of the world
depended upon your presence?

Would you cast your hopes
upon possibilities that abide
only in departure?
​
Would you become the motion
of your song,
losing itself in overtones
of delight
or despair
and returning, finally,
to the stillness
from which it all began?

    - Bernadette Miller

Hawks

3/13/2022

 
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​for Luna

It was late afternoon and we were standing
on the deck overlooking the gray swath
of the Pacific, when my friends’ daughter,
then four, turned to me and pointed at the hawks
flying in the distance. I can call them if I want,
she said, tilting back her head to let out a long,
fierce caw, which floated up over the marsh
and above the trees. At first, nothing. Then--
a slash in the distance. And in the next moment
there it was—nearly above us, wings spread wide,
the color of rust. And then, another, the two floating
in silent circles while she sounded her cries.
The primal cry of the human, raw and plain.
The call to prayer, the weeping at the wall,
the singer’s highest, most broken, note.
Whatever it is we send up into oblivion, waiting.
Haven’t I, too, called out? Haven’t I beseeched
something winged to do my bidding?
And here she was, calling, and here they came,
in answer, this hinged assembly, hovering
toward us on the wind. Ten? Twenty?
Enough to darken the heavens above
where we stood, weighted in place, pinned
by a cover of raptors. Bone swallowers,
snake eaters, sharp-sighted angels of prey,
their scaled feet clutching the empty sky.

​    - Danusha Lameris

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Lead

1/16/2022

 
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Photo by Duane Roy

​Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.

I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

​    - Mary Oliver

The Dakini Speaks

11/28/2021

 
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Painting by Kirsten DeBoer. Used with permission.

My friends, let's grow up.
    Let's stop pretending we don't know the deal here.
Of if we truly haven't noticed, let's wake up and notice.
    Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It's simple - how could we have missed it for so long?
Let's grieve our losses fully, like human ripe beings.
    But please, let's not be so shocked by them.
    Let's not act so betrayed,
As though life had broken her secret promise to us.

Impermanence is life's only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.

To a child, she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
    And her compassion exquisitely precise. 
    Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.
This is the true ride - let's give ourselves to it!
    Let's stop making deals for a safe passage - 
    There isn't one anyway, and the cost is too high.
We are not children anymore.

The true human adult gives everything
    for what cannot be lost.
Let's dance the wild dance of no hope.

    - Jennifer Welwood

* in Sanskrit a Dakini is a "sky walker", a Tantric priestess of the ever-changing flow of energy, a force of truth who presides over the funeral of self-deception.

Funeral for a Future

9/12/2021

 
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Painting by Colleen Koziara, www.mysticalwillow.com

I held a funeral for a future
I had always thought was coming,
and buried the world's face as yet.

The silence then
turned me so tiny
the only way forward was to dream
downward

to an early day on earth
before a single heart beat.
The atmosphere filled
with an abiding, cataclysmic knowing-

that if everything
could be born,

every
thing
could
be
born.

Love promises no less.

But a future is gone now.
All we are is this.

Our way could be
to fall toward the medicine
seeded right inside
the untamable, fertile grief
remaking things.

-  Brooke McNamara

Bearing Witness

9/5/2021

 
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Art by Andrew Ferez

Sometimes we are asked to stop and bear witness:
this, the elephants say to me in dreams
as they thunder through the passageways 
of my heart, disappearing
into a blaze of stars. On the edge 
of the 6th mass extinction, with species 
vanishing before our eyes, we’d be a people 
gone mad, if we did not grieve.  

This unmet grief,
an elder tells me, is the root 
of the root of the collective illness 
that got us here. His people
stay current with their grief--
they see their tears as medicine--
and grief a kind of generous willingness
to simply see, to look loss in the eye, 
to hold tenderly what is precious, 
to let the rains of the heart fall. 

In this way, they do not pass this weight on
in invisible mailbags for the next generation 
to carry. In this way, the grief doesn’t build 
and build like sets of waves, until, 
at some point down the line--
it simply becomes an unbearable ocean.

We are so hungry when we are fleeing 
our grief, when we are doing all 
we can to distract ourselves 
from the crushing heft of the unread 
letters of our ancestors.
Hear us, they call. Hear us.

In my dreams, the elephants stampede 
in herds, trumpeting, shaking the earth.
It is a kind of grand finale, a last parade
of their exquisite beauty. See us, they say.
We may not pass this way again.  

What if our grief, given as a sacred offering, 
is a blessing not a curse?
What if our grief, not hidden away in corners,
becomes a kind of communion where we shine?
What if our grief becomes a liberation song 
that returns us to our innocence?
What if our fierce hearts
could simply bear witness?

     - Laura Weaver

Don't Surrender Your Loneliness

8/8/2021

 
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Sculpture by Victor Hugo Castaneda


Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly
Let it cut more deep
Let it ferment and season you as few human
or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft,
my voice so tender,
my need for God absolutely clear.

    - Hafiz, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky

We Have Come to be Danced

4/4/2021

 
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Cerridwen Dances by Colleen Koziara


​We have come to be danced
Not the pretty dance
Not the pretty pretty, pick me, pick me dance
But the claw our way back into the belly
Of the sacred, sensual animal dance
The unhinged, unplugged, cat is out of its box dance
The holding the precious moment in the palms
Of our hands and feet dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the jiffy booby, shake your booty for him dance
But the wring the sadness from our skin dance
The blow the chip off our shoulder dance.
The slap the apology from our posture dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the monkey see, monkey do dance
One two dance like you
One two three, dance like me dance
but the grave robber, tomb stalker
Tearing scabs and scars open dance
The rub the rhythm raw against our soul dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the nice, invisible, self-conscious shuffle
But the matted hair flying, voodoo mama
Shaman shakin’ ancient bones dance
The strip us from our casings, return our wings
Sharpen our claws and tongues dance
The shed dead cells and slip into
The luminous skin of love dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the hold our breath and wallow in the shallow end of the floor dance
But the meeting of the trinity, the body breath and beat dance
The shout hallelujah from the top of our thighs dance
The mother may I?
Yes you may take 10 giant leaps dance
The olly olly oxen free free free dance
The everyone can come to our heaven dance.

We have come to be danced
Where the kingdom’s collide
In the cathedral of flesh
To burn back into the light
To unravel, to play, to fly, to pray
To root in skin sanctuary
We have come to be danced

WE HAVE COME

    - Jewel Mathieson

The World Began with Yes

1/3/2021

 
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Trinity Seay, "First Breath"
​
One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born
.
- Clarice Lispector

It was always yes, si, da, ja
the sibilant sound of assent,
the slippery tongue in the mouth 
of the lover, the da dawning,
the ya yelling,
the si, si, si, sugary & sweet
between jagged teeth.

It was always yes,
come in, welcome, eat me,
merge with me, love,
let’s join to make another 
little bubble of us 
who will seem like us combined 
but turn out to be another.

It was always lust 
not to be lonely,
lust for the apple, the pomegranate,
fruit of desire,
dense on the tongue,
making another you,
another me.

Oh love, eat me, I am yours,
fill my emptiness with joy,
with yes, da, si, si, si
let us begin that way
to make a new universe,
soulful, sad, silly,
& full of seas,
seas that are salty 
& full of the stuff of life,
me, you, every wriggling creature
we can & can’t name
with alphabets as of yet unknown,
with letters that twist & turn 
& try to escape the page, the scroll, the rock,
life beginning again
with only a word 
of affirmation--yes!
Let it begin 
& Be.

    -Erica Jong

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (excerpt)

11/22/2020

 
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Flinging open my heart’s gaudy maw,
Bodega Headlands, California


...thank you zinnia, and gooseberry, rudbeckia
and pawpaw, Ashmead’s kernel, cockscomb
and scarlet runner, feverfew and lemonbalm;
thank you knitbone and sweetgrass and sunchoke
and false indigo whose petals stammered apart
by bumblebees good lord please give me a minute...
and moonglow and catkin and crookneck
and painted tongue and seedpod and johnny jump-up;
thank you what in us rackets glad
what gladrackets us;

and thank you, too, this knuckleheaded heart, this pelican heart,
this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw
to the sky, oh clumsy, oh bumblefucked,
oh giddy, oh dumbstruck,
oh rickshaw, oh goat twisting
its head at me from my peach tree’s highest branch,
balanced impossibly gobbling the last fruit,
its tongue working like an engine,
a lone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle
into my mouth like the smell of someone I’ve loved;

....and thank you the way my father one time came back in a dream
by plucking the two cables beneath my chin
like a bass fiddle’s strings
and played me until I woke singing,
no kidding, singing, smiling,
thank you, thank you,

...and you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend.
I know I can be long-winded sometimes.
I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude
over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,
the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems
slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over,

which is precisely what the child in my dream said,
holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
hurtling our way like so many buffalo,
who said it’s much worse than we think,
and sooner; to whom I said
no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
this singing and shuddering is,
what this screaming and reaching and dancing
and crying is, other than loving
what every second goes away?
Goodbye, I mean to say.
And thank you. Every day.

    - Ross Gay

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    Hazel Xochitl Trout
    Bodega Bay
    photo by Leyla Nobatova
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