A voice calls me back. I don’t want to go. I just got here. I have just started to see. It’s calling me back to standing form. Just as I see you looking up from your mountain nook, I am rushed back through your window, your portal of light, air and sound.
I hear myself ask, “Did you take all of these photos?” Already knowing what the answer will be. I am brought back to the order of now with my feet in the present and my wings in spirit. I turn to you as we continue to make breakfast. You tell me stories of other photos. Your body brushes against me and I wonder if these two worlds would be allowed to collide…spirit and form. I have felt your form. The colorful reel of your spirit self still plays on the wings of this flying bird with an eye cast toward the window of your soul.
Unfurl
I watch you open to the sun-
then retreat into a ball
at first sight of your shadow.
When you fan your leaves, you reach for the sun
and all the light that it brings,
Nourishing every part of your being.
But when the dark thoughts come,
you retreat back to the ball.
Wrapping your leaves around yourself.
I see you ripping parts of
yourself off-
Just to try to find yourself.
Your darkness is hard to hold.
Your darkness is hard to hold up.
It’s too heavy for me.
Curled up in a ball
The sun cannot shine enough light
To coax you to unfurl
Into the beauty that lies beneath.
Flickering Light
Our eyes lock and people notice. We can’t help it...I know I can’t.
You pulled your hair back. That makes me smile.
I am loud and silly.
I watch you.
The lights dim and you are cast in shadow
with the dance of flickering candle light.
I watch your hands and how they hold your wine glass.
I feel them move across my skin.
I watch your body language and your head roll down as she tells the story (you can’t save her) and then sings “Soul Lover”.
I watch you with your back turned.
I see the light as it bounces off the side of your face.
I watch you and gaze at the woman I want to kiss so desperately. I want to feel your skin against mine. I want to feel your hands on me...in me...pulling me forever closer.
The waiter catches me in my bubble- entangled in a daydream.
I cried at the table tonight.
My bomb shelter is being sprayed by metal shrapnel
from the exploding box in my chest.
I want you close.
I want to hold you tightly to me, but sometimes, it isn’t enough.
It isn’t enough.
I want all of you
Roots and Tendrils
Your love pierced through the soil of my heart
Each word, each look, grew quickly
The shoots, the roots, the tendrils
Pushed through and held tight
A feeling of connectedness for the first time
But the weight of water drew you away
The final word you uttered was love
Leaving the haunting grasp of the tendrils of your heart
I don’t know where to look
My words just melt into the earth
You were the last
To take up root
You have to heal your own heart
and then the right things
will come into your life.
The Observer
There is a heart that holds all of the answers I am seeking.
Not just some commonplace heart,
but my own.
I used to plunge into the depths of other hearts
seeking knowledge and love.
Watching, listening, cataloguing other people’s pain and joy.
I took it all on as my own,
while searching for a love of my own.
I lived inside a world where all I saw and felt was the outside world.
The outside world became mine.
I lived in a world where I felt too much.
I felt it all, a bleeding empath
unable to distinguish my own feelings from those of others.
I was the observer of every life and
feeler of every emotion including my own.
To seek happiness and love from everything outside of me,
It was all that I knew.
That way of living has passed.
My heart found too much heartbreak with that kind of living.
My new life finds me diving headfirst and deeper into my own heart.
Into the unexplained chambers.
Into the depths of my divine, authentic and messy self.
Seeking my own truth and knowledge.
Freedom comes with this way of living.
Squirrel
Today, I watched the squirrels in my yard.
I watched one in particular.
He chased his squirrel friends.
He was chased in return.
He was busy.
He had trees to climb, new leaf buds to eat, food storage to keep up and tree hopping to perform.
Never once was he worried about being loveable or being enough for his mates.
He was just busy being a squirrel.
Today, I want to be a squirrel.
Heartbreak
Dear universe and all things heavenly, I request a cease and desist on the heartbreak. While I know this is an impossible request, I ask anyway.
We often don’t talk about our heartbreak because we are afraid of letting someone see behind our masks, afraid to let someone see our shadows, afraid to dive deep and be open and vulnerable. Afraid to let someone witness us in our most raw and authentic form while exposing our tender hearts. We are afraid of being hurt.
Today, I am opening up. I am opening up to all who are feeling heartbreak at this time.
I know many of you.
I have been on a journey of loving wide open…loving in a way that exposes my heart and keeps me vulnerable to all I must experience…loving wide open and being witness to others heartbreak and joy.
The journey has culminated as a test into the realm of heartbreak. I’ve had the pleasure of being given many gifts of love. Unexpected.
Some stayed; others were rapidly hauled out of my hands. Unexpected.
Now I find myself in this place of sheer grief and loss. Unexpected.
It’s a struggle to feel defeat, and I just sit in this place. It’s a fuzzy place, one I don’t understand. Why am I here now?
Then dear universe, you took my dog. There are no words. Low blow.
Unexpected.
I sit here in this vast, quiet space feeling tired. My heart is weary.
I sit here feeling a little lost, not knowing what I need and all I can say is, “I surrender”. I surrender to whatever you bring on the day, whether it is joy, sadness, laughter, amazement, wonder, challenge, gentleness, synchronicity, creativity or just this extreme quiet.
I don’t know what to do. That may be the point…
to sit and to be witness to myself.
To sit and love my own heartbreak and loss, while witnessing our universal heartbreak and joy.
I am grateful to feel it all.
Love wide open.
Heart Cleanse
When I throw my heart into the ocean, I always feel clean.
Clean in a way that only a hard bashing and scraping
against the rocks can provide.
They don’t just clean you,
they rip off things that couldn’t possibly hold on.
You’re left with nothing but a raw place. Just raw.
Raw in a way that w
ill take several scabs to heal over.
Continuous peeling and healing
of a wound that is deep.
A wound that still plagues you.
A wound that is so deep you don’t know if it will ever truly heal.
It may just slough a scab for the rest of your life
never fully forming a scar.
Some wounds never quite heal and you are
forced to carry them around with you.
They lay dormant
and sometimes they bleed.
The wound clings close, like a child, struggling to find wings
A part will always remain
Unhealed.
Floating
Time moves quickly when you aren’t paying attention.
The spring thaw brings eiders to the ocean’s edge to
play in the waves, swimming in pairs.
A female perches on a rock to preen herself,
as the tide makes its gradual advance.
She waits until her feet can no longer hold on-
the waves lift her,
she looks outward
and floats away
Adrift without a mate.
Owl Speak
If I correspond at midnight, I will most likely wake you.
As I lie here, I want to fall into the wonder of words and imagination.
What pearl gets shared with the outside world?
Will anyone understand my love of light and dark
Or the texture of sinew, flesh and spirit?
Who understands the distance, in footsteps,
to get to the bare maple tree ahead?
Who questions the depth of what I feel when I look up to the sky?
Who?
After months of wondering, I received the answer.
I have known all along.
There is no magical who.
There is only the wonder deep within.
I am the who I have been searching for.
Life
Today I watched a dragonfly rest its wings on the dock.
Looking through its transparent wings, I realized how precious life is.
Its lifespan, so short, yet so full of vigor and vitality.
People often do nothing with their lives for years, or if ever.
If we were fully alive like a dragonfly, we would live differently.
We would live each second carefree and as if it were our last.
Flitting about this way and that.
Moving quickly and then coming to a standstill
while we idle for a mere moment.
Zipping off quickly in a new direction chasing after our dreams
with sheer delight.
We would move with no true hesitation or stop.
Just a pause before moving forward without fear of our demise.
Excitement for what lies in our path at each turn.
Excitement for the journey ahead.
Linger
How do you measure the time of a touch, a hug, or a stare?
What is too long? Does time reveal the thoughts inside my head?
Sideways glances and a peaceful understanding of who looks back at me.
I have shared so many conversations with you that have never been spoken aloud or heard.
Who is your favorite author? Have you read Mary Oliver’s poetry? Can you feel the energy that flows between us when we touch? Can I tell you more about the moon, the mountains and the silence? Do you feel me as I sit behind you? What would happen if I touched the nape of your neck?
The bass line pounds in my ear.
Do you know that I crave conversation with you? People watching, observing, and cataloging. Words. Cerebral stimulation, please!
I remember and now deliberately hold you longer. I want to linger here.
Beware that fire you speak of.
It attracts, takes hold and eventually burns you down.
True Match? Flash point.
Scales out of balance. I crave love as you do...necessary for my survival.
Droplets speckle the floor.
Tame?
Never.
I want to meet someone brave enough to love me;
brave enough to let down their walls
and hold space for us both to flourish.
Radiant
It is only after leaving that I realize completely your presence.
With a sudden smile and shared interest,
your radiance emits a searing heat,
a brilliant green and glittering orange heat.
This radiant heat comes in vibrant color and waves.
Fire behaving as water.
Water behaving as fire.
It is lustrous, dazzling and deeply penetrating.
I hear my words outside of this realm, for I have lost my voice for a moment. A loss of words caught up on a fiery light that encompasses your being.
You smile again and take me to {Bali, Italy, Scotland}
anywhere your colored dreams want to go. Where will you take me?
What do you want me to see? A glimpse has been given and I seek more.
I seek all that is light, all that glows. What is ablaze inside of you?
What burns?
What from your resplendent radiance will I see again or be asked to explore?
Will you ask the same of me?
Cave of Fear
It takes courage to come face-to-face with your soul.
Be brave.
There will be things along the way that you will have to encounter alone, but you won’t actually be alone.
Others before you have walked this path on the quest for freedom.
Along the way, you may doubt yourself.
You may think you have gone crazy.
You won’t know who you are anymore, but don’t worry.
You will find yourself.
You will heal.
You will learn things about yourself and why you tell yourself
the things you do.
You will become someone new, someone who steps outside of the pain
in search of the truth.
A truth bigger than what we make up in our heads.
A truth bigger than our false beliefs.
Everything will be okay.
You will find the people that belong to you.
You will find your heart again.
You will find your purpose when you come out the other side.
You will step out of the cave of fear into the bright light.
You will step out into freedom.
It takes courage to come face-to-face with your soul.
Be brave.
Her Alchemical Heart
She has no idea the beauty of the silver that shines like flowing rivers throughout her heart.
The shrapnel melted over the years to create lines and beautiful highways of road art.
These are not scars or wounds anymore.
They have woven their way to become transformed into reinforcement and expansion; rivers and oceans of silver in her red pounding heart.
Alchemy has taken over and mixed the two elements together.
Blood and silver combine to form a radiant, glowing orange flame that flickers and flits with speckles of green fanning it from below.
An alchemical blend of darkness and light.
Love lives here in her expanding heart, growing with each silvery shard.
Islands in the Mist
Out there, somewhere, within the shrouding mist, rests an island
An island we all seek out
The one, the only
The one that holds all of the answers within its rocks and
held tight by the sea
Yet we are the ones that hold the answers to the beckoning questions
Deep within our souls, we house many islands in the mist.
As I sit here on this rock with you, I look ou
t and do not worry
what the day will bring
I cannot see the islands, not even with my bird’s eye
The mystery of what lays ahead is presented and you invite me to step through your framework, through the gold leafed frame
of your childhood and love of this land and water
I am guided through the framing by your words,
creating snapshots that fit each frame
There are islands in the mist, moss on the trees, waves lapping the shore and a breathtaking vista that is within reach.
The only thing that matters is the sharing
The sharing of the human experience
The sharing of what we hold dear
Asking of curious questions
Revealing without fear
My heart is happy that the physical islands were hidden
in the dense cover today
For the journey through your aesthetically pleasing framework allowed us to create our own island
It’s a beauty worth hanging on the wall
Clear of the mist and with 1000 strands to grab onto
Muted
A soft light casts its way into the room
I wake in a strange land, yet all feels familiar
There is a faint sound of a trickling brook that echoes into the room and gives way to the rise and fall of breath.A breath that is not mine, yet just as rhythmic
As I turn my head and gaze slowly to the left, a form comes into view in the shadows of the bed
This form, this spirit, this woman is not just beside me, but touching me.
Our hands are intertwined and as consciousness overtakes me,
I realize that we have been lying this way for hours.
Legs wrapped, hands intertwined and breath rising and falling in unison.
Sleep is elusive as dawn breaks. Black, white and grey shift to color with the rising fire in the sky.
I can see the vapors of heat rise in the room, your aura sitting just atop your creamy skin.
If you open your eyes, they will cast a light onto my watchful gaze.
Roots and Tendrils Page 2