Experience

A hallway of doors
Each one closed
Upon a life experience
That awaits us
In darkened rooms
Our pockets fashioned
Of curiosity and longing
Hold a growing fist of keys
Markers of experience
Doors that have been opened
And others yet to be

Happiness and sadness
Anger and fear
Pride and jealousy
Embarrassment and joy
All ingredients of life
Colors of lighted rooms
Each door unlocked
By an open heart
That fashioned keys
On a cutting wheel of longing
Pockets that jingle with intention
To use if we choose

To open a door is easy
Once we hold its key
The rooms rest quiet and unlit
So that all we can do is smell
The universe that lives behind them
Then choose to enter or leave
Each threshold is the same
Fashioned of a wood
Hewed from the forest
Of our own vulnerability
Each door leads
To a new and deeper place

Some of the rooms may lie
Beyond our own mortality
Yet if we find the courage
To grasp the lesson of that place
To know the truth that lives within that room
It will belong to us forever
And travel with us always
To light the world we walk in
Some experiences are pleasant
Some are not but each one shapes us
As a chisel fashions rock

How many keys
Our longing fashions
How many doors
We dare to open
And how many rooms
We choose to enter
Is always up to us

Anxious

Anxious

Anxious to be calm
I just seek a place to sit
And to rest here on a seat
That seems so safely settled on the ground
But something I can’t see
And something I can't know
Just grasped me where I stand
So now I know I am found

What is missing
What has changedHas it always been this way
No familiar point of reference
As my compass simply spins
And the light is quickly draining from the day
Somehow I know I’ll follow
A moon of intuition through the night
Letting go of an old and storied past
To embrace an unknown future
That waits shining in the stars

Excited

I don't know
Where I came from
I don't know
Where I am going
But my whole heart knows
That I am here
Now
Standing
In the middle of a miracle
It sparkles in the air

Salmon

The River carries silt
In her belly during freshet
Hiding the fish
She holds as children
Until they cross
Their natal threshold
And enter a darkness
Between the worlds
Of fresh and salt

A fresh water past
May be lost for a lifetime
Unless the salmon is lucky enough
To survive and find and follow
The sweet thread of its river
That can lead it back
To the gravel bed
Where the salmon emerged
Into the fresh and clear water
Beneath a mother's belly

Just as silt filters
Through her fingers
And settles onto muddy banks
At freshet’s waning breath
Most of the river's fish are lost
Before they return to spawn
And so, circle back into life
In some other way

We so often fail to see
That most of the fish
That seemed to slip
Through life’s fingers
Still fulfilled
Some other purpose
And honored their river
In some other way


Just as there are a thousand times and places for a particle of silt to settle from its river - there are a thousand ways a soul can honor life

Flowering plum

Today
Is one of those
Warm sunny spring days
That spills on the ground
Around
The waving shadows
Of flowering plums



Plum blossom's
Gentle fragrance
Gathers
To perfume warm sunny air
As cool smelling shadows
Rest below
On freshly watered grass

Self comfort

Rest your head on my arm
Close your eyes
Don’t let your silky breath
Catch on the rough edges
Of past experience
Or on the jagged fears
Of an unknown future
Neither knows this moment

I am here to hold you
To let you feel
Your own love
To let you know
You are not alone
To help you want
These moments of breathing
The sweet breath of my words

You are loved
And the rawness you feel
Guides you back
Toward an older
And higher family
That loved you enough
To let you come here
In the first place
And tread on a slippery
Surface above your pain

The beauty
Of this world
Lives in the freedom
That we hold
To deny its existence
Or to visit it if we need
Or to live in it every day
With every breath
In joy and in pain

Life will not judge our choice
And no choice must tilt the pan
More or less than any other
And no choice holds the will
To only be wrong
But after a time
Refusing to choose
Is like holding our breath
Just to spite the sweet wind
That caresses our face

A soft voice says
You will know
When it is time
To lay down
Your breath
So for now
You must practice
Living and not dying
For just as long
As your wind whispers