______________ The testing ground of love is how we help each other through suffering and loss without robbing each other of the chance to feel and grow. This poem bears witness to such a time for me.   Nesting Last week, I was on a pier in Charleston. There was a pelican, very close. I remem- bered that pelicans make their nest by pluck- ing feathers from their chest. The water kept lapping and I felt illumined, for a moment.... Read more

______________ The longer I’m blessed to be here, the more I realize (make real) the wonder that poetry is a state of being and not a craft of language.   YOU ASK ABOUT POETRY You ask from an island so far away it remains unspoiled. To walk quietly till the miracle in everything speaks is poetry. You want to look in your soul and in everyday life, as you search for stones on the beach. Four thousand miles away, as... Read more

______________ Throughout history, there has always been a dissonant conversation between those who feel we as humans are dark creatures who need to be controlled and those who feel that we are born with and innate goodness that allowed to blossom will heal the world. Of course, it’s both. This passage is part of my own inquiry. Natural To say there’s a moral order to the Universe is to speak of physics as if it were nature and not our... Read more

______________ Our first encounters with love shape us and have a lasting impact on how we meet the world. Triggered by a young couple in a café, this poem helped me look back and understand the gift we give each other as we’re just beginning to form both inwardly and outwardly.   Without Knowing Lifting my second coffee to my lips, I see a young couple near the window. They’re falling in love. I can tell by the way he... Read more

______________ It was in a dream in my sixtieth year that I realized that for all my efforts to protect my inwardness from a brutal world, my inwardness is the source of my strength and resilience. Turn Around I’ve spent too much time protecting my spirit from the world, close but with my back to it. Now, when I’m too old to remember what I was afraid of, my spirit rises behind me like early light to move the dark... Read more

______________ This poem speaks to a lifelong journey with my oldest friend Robert. We have known each other for close to thirty years.   In the Interior When you let me in your life, all the way in, we took this walk that turned into a hike that I didn’t know we were on, until it got late, and you said, “Let’s camp here and go on in the morning.” That night I sensed we were in the interior and... Read more

______________ During my father’s slow avalanche to death, my brother was a tireless advocate on his behalf, a bodhisattva in the way he cleared debris and made things easier for everyone around him. I was in a plane over the Pacific Ocean when I finally wrote this poem for him. For My Brother You were there when I had cancer and now you’ve carried Dad through the rickety bridge of his bones to what- ever time is left. And somehow... Read more

______________ That our heart can receive and hold anything and that we feel that the intensity of living is too much to bear is a paradox we can only live into. Under what is both unbearable and endlessly uplifting is the murmur of life.   The Murmur of Life I hear this murmur wherever I turn: when sweeping the grains of coffee from the counter, when picking up the stray bottle in the parking lot, wondering about the one who... Read more

______________ Kindness and suffering are wordless teachers, ready to bend us and soften us until we accept that we are here; that, try as we will, we can’t build our way out of existence or dream our way out of being human. Once opened in this way, we come to realize that the only way out is to love being here. Out of the Way Kindness bends us, the way the strike of a bell bends the smallest leaves.  ... Read more