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Showing posts from May, 2015

Nurtured by Nature

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Back there, I walked barefoot through broken down barns where moss grew in blankets across cracked cement floors. I was told to wear shoes should rusty nails sprout instead of muddy water between my toes, but all I ever got was dirty. I never cared much for shoes and my feet will never fit into slender glass slippers now, but any prince who hopes to win me will not care for such dimensions. I had to feel the earth under my feet to keep my head out of the clouds that my heart reached for. Back there, lucky horseshoes grew on toppled brick walls and cinder blocks held secret treasures to humble shipwrecks. Back there, the brightest colours I've ever seen were lights that danced in the sky on a cold night. I lay on the roof of a great hall and watched as my heaven turned to stained glass. Back there, what it took to be a hero was to battle demons in my dreams and rescue my mother from milk snakes, even if I was the one who brought them in. I built grand museu

Face into the wind

What is it in a cool spring breeze that carries the sea with it across continents? There is something of adventure wrapped up in a contentment, Perhaps like a daydream in that. Clouds carry me away. I feel a called out into that newness, the paradoxical freshness of something so cyclical as Spring. My body seems as willing to bud as the fruit trees and there is almost a tingling underneath my skin that suggests maybe, one of these years, I will myself sprout with the daffodils. It always seems so sudden despite the consistency of time, And yet suddenly, there is more sunshine. More birdsong, more scents, more senses, And yes too, more sensuality. There is a little more swing in my hips, a little more life in my eyes, There is energy to stand up straight and let the wind in. My body speaks a little louder of its appetites; fresh greens, floral teas, the tender touch of lover. The very spirit of Creativity is awake and rowdy It reaches through me into my stiff finger
Sunk into an overstuffed couch in a room not quite cozy. Hot tea and Arabic poetry speaking politics and loneliness. Crescent moon outside, turned upward to refill not quite illuminating the snow, though doubled by the plastic winter window. The house plants and I and these yellow walls are hungry for sun and some warmth to paint all the little hairs golden against our skin. My heart feels tenderly here in this place, not quite yet home. 2.24.2015 - Folsom Farm
As sure as Spring softens the soil. Walking into a warmer night that the one before, with a cool breeze that I don’t raise my collar to. Let it kiss my pale winter skin, like moonlight does new leaves, and they glow. The scent of lilac. The sound of trees. My heart softens in tune to the season, and some tears, like the rain, bring blooms. Spring evenings whisper the promise of Summer nights. The promise of wistful sighs, and the sweet longing for a lovers embrace, a hand to hold, another pair of footsteps to walk beside. Warm skin to graze against, silently, like lightning in the distance,  similarly charged. 
When did I accept the identity of an object waiting to be claimed? or a victim, waiting to be saved? When did I learn to define my worth by what I do? or whether I am witnessed? I knew a rage once that used to claw upward toward my throat, desperate to meet whatever wizard or poet there that could give it a voice. Where did all that anger go? The anger of every woman preceding me recognizing the beginnings of shame taking root. The anger of a deeper, wilder, freer and truer force, that first held witness to these lies and struggled to lift my hands into fists. What would my Grandmother tell me? The one who claimed the only power she found left in her own ashes and flew from her body? How would one who chose death, suggest life? I do not speak lightly or with ill intent but with earnest gravity. I wish I knew my Grandmother. A woman who is now being defined by her youthful poetry over her last action. A woman who fought for her beliefs in a context which preferred she no
We don't know monuments like the river knows. A more enduring stillness and still... more fluid sense of time. A sometimes violent vein of life in the landscape we, with little imagination, call arid. And leave to the cows and coyotes. Possessing a patience and faith that shapes landscapes, water carves ever deeper into stone until canyon walls tower overhead, blood red and beautiful. Iconic, silent and fragile. Red canyons seduce something in my soul. I am drawn out of myself as I am drawn in. Something familiar in them if not familial. The rocks rebound with stories that still echo from an age past, but alive here. Those stories, both soft and sinister will tell you the histories since before history. They will tell you the secrets that only stones can keep. They will sing you songs if you can find their rhythm in your own heartbeat. And they will weave your own mythology into theirs until you know no other belonging. We don't know change like a mountain d

Small adventures

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I went West, as humans often do, onward and upward as it were. I had a hankering for some solitude and the scent of pines and maybe, if I was lucky (and I was) a little mist to reconnect me to my mystical roots. It had been a number of years since I was up in the Estes Park area, not since before the flood and it was apparent to me as I wound up the road from Lyons to Estes… either my memory failed me or the geography was much changed. Perhaps a bit of both. Just me, the dog, my trusty rusty truck and the mostly open road. It was a rainy weekend (snowy up higher) and the usual weekend mountain crowd was scarce. I couldn’t tell you exactly where I was, other than on the East side of the Estes Park Valley, because I wasn’t paying attention to the road signs. I was in one of those “in-the-moment” moments and my decisions to turn here or there were made in a flash and guided more of less by observations of “This road looks less busy than that road”. The roads got less and less busy, mor
I want to hear the story of you, falling in love with me. I want to feel it alive in me even as it changes subtly into the myth of our beginnings. We have begun to reminisce from within. A couple winters of cold. And afterwards work to do at softening what had found reason to harden. To open, what wanted to close fearful of the dark and the light, fearful of tomorrows and all they entail. There is romance in remembering too. A time to highlight the seeds and the Springs: first notes exchanged, climbing a tree, forested nights, untethering, anxious hopes, a hand First kiss. I've encountered crossroads where love meets perspective and found the altars where offerings of peace are given. But those paths never seem to run parallel. Sometimes the road seems so undefined I wonder where I wandered off it? And I start staring at the sky again looking for a sense of direction. Our journey hasn't led us into summer quite yet or borne the fruits of fall, though we have