Quotations

...The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age...

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too,
and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us...

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows:
by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

...there are at least two ways to understand what it means to have our hearts broken. One is to imagine the heart broken into shards and scattered about — a feeling most of us know, and a fate we would like to avoid. The other is to imagine the heart broken open into new capacity — a process that is not without pain but one that many of us would welcome. As I stand in the tragic gap between reality and possibility, this small, tight fist of a thing called my heart can break open into greater capacity to hold more of my own and the world's suffering and joy, despair and hope.

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you...

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life...

On the brow of the hill, behind a silent chapel,
two windmills spin new soundscapes over
the land, cart-wheeling alleluias.

Cloistered granite holds an orchestration
of birds, and eerie whirr, tremulous sounds
of curlew and lapwing. The wind

through the metal gate is a speaking in tongues
with the broken feed-hoop tuning in:
other-worldly, intimately insistent.

All this music to attend to, to slip into:
an old organ droning, an uproarious lullaby.
Up over da hill, arms turn, the heart lifts.

On my way back from Alabama, the birds were on their way wherever.
Their bodies, so many strewn in long lines across the sky, looked like
the words I wrote as a child before I knew how to write words.
I thought my thoughts would simply announce themselves to the page
if I pressed my pencil to it. And still, as I write this poem, I'm waiting
to see what I'm going to tell myself. The birds landed in an empty
field, gleaning for whatever it was they'd find. The clouds, so whipped
by wind, turned the sky a milky blue, pouring down fast and thick as paint
as I drove under it. There is so much missing in the world I try to write about:
I don't know what kind of birds or what had been planted or what to call
a cloud that does that. I'd like to say I don't need to know to love them,
but why else did I spend a lifetime looking for my name? I promise myself
I will look into it later so for now I look at their bodies, try to remember.
For now, a correction: the field was not an empty field. It was so full of birds.

...The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets...

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you.

Keep room for those who have no place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

...with thanks to James Crews

My friend James calls it the rough blessing,
the blessing that rubs, that chafes,
that scrapes. Perhaps I wanted blessings
to only feel good, to be gentle. But the word itself
comes from the practice of sprinkling blood
on an altar. Why should I be surprised when
the blood for the rite is my own? I am thinking
of how today when I was hemorrhaging fear,
my friend comforted me when I called her in tears.
I felt so loved when she listened and soothed.
Such luminous intimacy grew from my wound.
Oh, ache of being human. Oh, the blessing.