Come,
sit a while
in the seat by the window--
near the birds, who have shaken off
their dreams and opened themselves
to this never-to-be-again day.

​Today we won’t be asked
to bumble along the beaten byways.
For Uncertainty has come;
she is our unexpected houseguest.
Put on the water, set out the homemade jam.

Uncertainty will listen with us
as our bagels pop
from the toaster’s dark mouth.
As the teakettle wobbles
on her deep blue flame
and the coffee grounds weep
their pungent bittersweet sobs. 

The truth, of course, is
that although she’s Mystery’s Child
with no history and no proper name--
she has always been with us.

If you wake in the night,
you can hear her hum as she busily
prepares our day. She is the one
who wakes us each morning,
to drizzle new questions
into our imagination, new stories,
new colors and light.

The wind is her breath.
Her body is the water
we bathe in and drink.

Uncertainty, with the soul of a gypsy,
knows the unpaved roads
to gratitude by heart.
She is our barefoot dancer
come to show us a multitude
of ways to bless the ground.

But of certain things--
like tomorrow--
she knows nothing,
and because of this,
her love knows no bounds. 

Come close now…
she waits, like she always has,
to give all she has--
a love for each of us,
as silver as tomorrow.

​    - Prartho Sereno

There will come a time when you know
you cannot be understood.
And you will open your hands,
curled fingers sliding into grace,
and you will let the wind blow away every seed
that wanted to be good.

You will know that to speak up,
to own your preferences, silliness, brilliance and delight,
it will cost you everything
you've known so far.

This is sure.

Take heart,
you are becoming real.

The goal is no longer to make certain the boat doesn't take on water
because you've rocked it a bit too much.
You are the ocean, for god's sake.

There will come a time when you know
the vines grown around your throat must be cut,
when you must unbind your pelvis and thighs
and unleash your wild no.

You will know that your hair cannot be 
compliant and well behaved,
a feral mane moving in waves,
straight lines denying the holy ruckus inside.

Nice no longer works.

What have you said yes to in this lifetime?
What is yours to be?

Great Mother holds your warm, round face in her hands
and says, "Free."
And you know it has always been true.

There will come a time when fear will be a too-small shoe
and being misunderstood
right-sized.
All your gold-plated judgments will fly away,
birds that fathom nothing of bad or wrong.

You will know that slow, deep and in
is the unsung path, the only way left after all the
trying to be shiny.

This will turn everything to tears or fire. Mostly both.

The womb of the oak is down.
Roots and soil, blood and bone.
There is no mountain, no method, no modality.

This is the slow gestation of Love.

    - Jessica Browning

So I can’t save the world--
can’t save even myself,
can’t wrap my arms around
every frightened child, can’t
foster peace among nations,
can’t bring love to all who
feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart
right here in this room and being gentle
with my insufficiency. I practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth,
about trust. I want to invite compassion
into every interaction.
One willing heart can’t stop a war.
One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry.
And sometimes, daunted by a task too big,
I tell myself what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To race up to the world
as if I were a puppy,
adoring and unjaded,
stumbling on my own exuberance.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.

    - Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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

​Up ahead it’s white. Snow animal,
I’m running at your back. I’ve failed to tell you
I’ve been hungry all this time, to tell you
I’ve been searching for you, like meat,
like water. All my life, I’ve distanced
myself. As if to know you was to drown.
As if to find you I’d usher myself further
from what is real. I’ve been adrift along
the threads of time leading me out
beyond an imagined frame. I’ve untied myself,
uncuffed the arms and neck. I didn’t know
I was hurt like that. I didn’t know
there was a force pulling me downward
toward a bedrock, lulling me to sleep.
You are the one escaping, you are the one
breaking free. I understand your astonishing
dash to freedom, done with the estranged wind,
done with frost and storm, orchids curling
outward beyond grief. The road widens
to glory. The road disappears.

​    - Tina Chang

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

​You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn't need any more of that sound.

So if you're going to do it and can't
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't 
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

    - Mary Oliver

​The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly--
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

    - Billy Collins