Age of War
The earth will rise, seas will part, across the vast land winds of change turn day to night and night to howling dark. Animals take shelter in the highland wood, birds in every brush and thicket. A moment comes silent and serene when clouds open and memory resolves. The voice that sounds rings upon the […]
Guarding the Door
A big city crow sagged the power line, giving me a one-eyed stare of dark caution. I saw a few birds, dogs on leash but nothing else spoke from the wild. At the party there were chances to stumble and fall, letting the wine talk instead of my better angel, but the outline of crow […]
Last Call
Down is up the final call when the great ship of mediocrity slips beneath the enveloping sea. The engine of geology moves the continents, biology cleanses the land, breathing life back into the ocean and the creation of sadness departs like an eclipse. From behind the shadow a new sun and moon appear looking down […]
Begging Bowl
Loss, grief and chaos advance; the desperate fall adrift as structures buckle under mounting pressure. Dispossession, ravaged land, and children lost to the flood, reckoned on the delicate scales of your tender heart. Breathe in the wounding, then breathing out, offer your begging bowl of gratitude for healing of this aching world. […]
Messages of Silence
Rising from inner earth, slender stalks of peace push against the hardened soil. Seeking open air of what may yet be, they sip on drunken light with the sobriety of darkness, their tiny uncurling arms sending out messages of silence like lightning in the sky.
Grubstake on the River
I have a small grubstake on the river where she breaks out of the high mountain sauntering like an unfettered horse, wild, unbridled and reckless, washing over gravel beds and stone outcrops, telling her own story before she drops into the cut channels of the towns and cities. She’s a woman how she flows falling […]
Makeshift Altar
Body and mind accept the peace of slowing down, as needing to do retreats in silence. Dismantling the throne of self the makeshift altar of being rises from the dark, satisfied as the evening sky with the joy of returning.
What Waits to be Born
The wind is sharp this morning, the few warm days of summer crowded like sheep into a small pen by the ocean air, cool off the Pacific. Clouds lower the ceiling, pressing down on the high hills, the channel stirred, covered in small wind driven waves, the grass bent over and yellowed as the rains […]
Mark of His Love
There’s only so much a man can affect, the cut of a board, a wayward child, perhaps so grand as the outline of a city but whatever he does if it is to bear his mark must be done with care, with thoughtfulness and the quiet expression from the slow spring flowing of his love. […]
Ancient Bark and Branch
I don’t recognize myself in the mirror, this profile of an old man; not the one I think I am or feel in the bones of my face. He seems to be sinking back into the earth. I love the earth but I’m not going down, not yet. My roots go down; I know them […]
Winter Turnips
I furrow the ground for a few words, turning them up like turnips plumb and round and white from the dark, waiting for this moment of cool air and green leaves to awaken into light and rise with desire; food for the soul in the last days of winter. […]
Green Earth Prayer
Let me rise with the morning to join the day as it begins, the long cover of night pulled back with a prayer, lifted from the green earth of my own body to life, once more to life.
Robin’s Egg
When the noise becomes too great and the strain of divisions multiply return to the silence, the spring of renewal. Let the cloth of ambition fall away, the armor of protection and attack become a robin’s egg, blue and trusted to the world on a spiraled nest of slender grass, the paper thin shell holding […]
Order of the Golden Ball
In their last great meeting, medicine chiefs rode down from the mountains, bears crossed the wide rivers, eagles left the coastline, beavers their dams, trees pulled up roots, birds took wing, whales swam upriver and salmon walked the shore. From the furthest horizon Incas, Aztecs, ageless monks, Sisters of the Silence, and the Order of […]
Circle of Two
We live within a circle of two, not straying beyond our home for a night and a day and another night; the intimacy of life enough to feed us, the food of our camp what we’ve gathered from the clearing of our hearts. Holding to each other beneath the arc of sun and stars, in […]