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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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Astonishment, for Equinox

9/22/2024

 
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​There is a silence in the beginning.
The life within us grows quiet.
There is little fear. No matter
how all this comes out, from now on
it cannot not exist ever again.
*
The present pushes back the life of regret.
It draws forward the life of desire. Soon memory
will have started sticking itself all over us.
We were fashioned from clay in a hurry,
poor throwing may mean it didn’t matter
to the makers if their pots cracked.
*
On the mountain tonight the full moon
faces the full sun. Now could be the moment
when we fall apart or we become whole.
Our time seems to be up—I think I even hear it stopping.
Then why have we kept up the singing for so long?
Because that’s the sort of determined creature we are.
Before us, our first task is to astonish,
and then, harder by far, to be astonished.

We come to be astonished. To be reminded that the world—this life—is still full
of astonishing things: unexplainable acts of goodness, stunning beauty,
impossible hope.

We come because we need—every one of us—to fall to our knees from time to
time, in wonder. In awe. 

​    - Galway Kinnell

Take Love for Granted

9/15/2024

 
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photo by Duong Ngan

​Assume it’s in the kitchen,
under the couch, high
in the pine tree out back,
behind the paint cans
in the garage. Don’t try
proving your love
is bigger than the Grand
Canyon, the Milky Way,
the urban sprawl of L.A.
Take it for granted. Take it
out with the garbage. Bring
it in with the takeout. Take
it for a walk with the dog.
Wake it every day, say,
“Good morning.” Then
make the coffee. Warm
the cups. Don’t expect much
of the day. Be glad when
you make it back to bed.
Be glad he threw out that
box of old hats. Be glad
she leaves her shoes
in the hall. Snow will
come. Spring will show up.
Summer will be humid.
The leaves will fall
in the fall. That’s more
than you need. We can
love anybody, even
everybody. But you
can love the silence,
sighing and saying to
yourself, “That’s her.”
“That’s him.” Then to
each other, “I know!
Let’s go out for breakfast!”

​    - Jack Ridl

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

To Learn From Animal Being

7/28/2024

 
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​Nearer to the earth’s heart,
Deeper within its silence:
Animals know this world
In a way we never will.

We who are ever
Distanced and distracted
By the parade of bright
Windows thought opens:
Their seamless presence
Is not fractured thus.

Stranded between time
Gone and time emerging,
We manage seldom
To be where we are:
Whereas they are always
Looking out from
The here and now.

May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.

May we enter
Into lightness of spirit,
And slip frequently into
The feel of the wild.
Let the clear silence
Of our animal being
Cleanse our hearts
Of corrosive words.
​
May we learn to walk
Upon the earth
With all their confidence
And clear-eyed stillness
So that our minds
Might be baptized
In the name of the wind
And the light and the rain.

    - John O'Donohue

Still Point

7/21/2024

 
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photo by Kirill Mikhaylyuk
​Leaving home
for work
each day

I hear the trees
say "What’s your hurry?"
Rooted, they
don’t understand

how in my world
we have to rush
to keep in step.

I haven’t even time
to stop and tell them
how on weekends, too,
schedules wait
like nets.

It’s only on a sick day
when I have to venture out
to pick up medicine

that I understand the trees,
there in all their fullness
in a world unpatterned

full of moments,
full of spaces,
every space
a choice.

This day
has not
been turned yet
on the lathe

this day
lies open, light
and shadow. Breath
fills the body easily.
I step

into a world
waiting like
a quiet lover.

​    - Max Reif


Joy Chose You

7/7/2024

 
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​​Joy does not arrive with a fanfare
on a red carpet strewn
with the flowers of a perfect life

joy sneaks in
as you pour a cup of coffee
watching the sun
hit your favorite tree, just right

and you usher joy away
because you are not ready for her
your house is not as it should be
for such a distinguished guest

but joy, you see, cares nothing for your messy home
or your bank balance, or your waistline

joy is supposed to slither through
the cracks of your imperfect life


that’s how joy works

you cannot truly invite her
you can only be ready when she appears
and hug her with meaning

because in this very moment
joy chose you

- Donna Ashworth

The Thing About Dying

6/23/2024

 
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The thing about dying is
I won’t get over it.
I can’t say, well
that sure taught me a lesson–
let’s go home and have a drink.
Impossible to believe
in my own ending.
I’ll continue on somewhere, find myself
in the barren halls of Bardo
waiting for a spare embryo,
eager to curl up inside some woman’s belly,
ready for the next round of traumas.
My turn for famine. Or torture.
Payback for those things I did to my sister.
I really don’t think I’ll come back as a snail
or a flea, I’m almost sure
I’ve got that sort of thing behind me.
But suppose it really is absolute
darkness descending and nothing
to follow. Not even silence.
(Silence needs someone to notice it.)
Never to see the high-flying blue
and white sky again.
Or the sea.
The sea.
That powerful wide-winged old woman.
Every time I look, she’s there where I left her.
When I die, I doubt
she will stay on very long without me.
The waves rolling in
without my praise to assist them.
No, if there’s nothing
after I die, if it really is the end,
I’ll have to take the sea with me when I leave.
Forgive me.

​    - Mildred Tremblay


You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book

4/14/2024

 
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Art by Jeya Chamanisme
www.artbygaia.com

​Just get up from your desk
and open the window,
keep silent until you hear three
sounds you've never heard before,
run your tongue around your mouth,
smell the air.
I tell you what, put down this book
and do this one thing now:
let your hands drift out and touch,
then drift again;
run your fingers
over rough wood, then let them fall
against your own soft skin. I met a woman once
who told me to touch her jumper,
Expensive, she said. It bobbled
under my hand so she told me
I wasn't feeling it right,
and for too long I believed her
because she said quality spoke.
I didn't see how beautiful
the world is
with its only wish
that I belong,
and how my touch,
my smell, hearing, sight,
so different from hers
is the only one that matters.

​    - Sarah Salway

Sweep the Threshold

3/31/2024

 
Picture
Riverbed Comforter
Painting by Duy Huynh

Sweep the threshold,
unlock the door,
put the busyness away--
what comes is far
too important.
Build a fire,
quiet the house,
all your sensing is required.
Hear the hoof beats?
The full horse breaths?
Mice may scratch in the walls,
spiders rattle the roof,
you've nothing to do
but be home.
Movements beneath your skin,
flashes of thought,
quickening heart,
allow them.
This is a welcoming.
You don't know who approaches
only that they must.
Freedom blooms
as we set
a place for everything.
What you carry in your blood
has voice--
Let her sing.

​    - Willow Annan Rose

I am soft today

3/10/2024

 
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Photo by Jeremy Bishop
I am soft today. Soft as shortbread dough fresh off the mixer, liquored by an extract
of vanilla and spun with siftfuls of powdered sugar. And salt. Because when I say soft,
I don’t really mean sweet. I mean the feeling around a streetlight on a quiet road,
that miasmic halo that reveals the season’s lingering winged things aiming
for the bulb’s muted warmth. Or when the market vendor, handing me a sheaf of kale,
said it was so much better because of the frost. I’m not saying I am the frost, or the leaves,
purple-green and pliant, spread across the palms of our half-gloved hands, but whatever
middle it was that we met. Palm-soft. Air-soft. Truth-soft. Soft as whatever the sky
is doing right this minute, shedding the day behind it. And in-betweenness where
what’s next isn’t here yet. Or it is, and if I keep my breath soft enough, I’ll see it.

​    - Maya Stein


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  • Home
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    • Mentor, Muse, Consultant
    • The Emotion Code & The Body Code
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  • About
    • About Xochitl
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  • Wild Words Poetry Blog
  • Ecos de la Marea Cave Ceremonies