______________ To dilate means to widen or open more fully and the purpose of experience, both through ease and pain, is to widen and open us more fully. The normal way we meet the world is full of bumps and bruises and noise that scratches up the heart. And yet, if we can endure and lean in, we are widened and opened to a depth that weaves the tissue of the Universe together. The Dilation of What Seems Ordinary Just... Read more

______________ An old friend died several years ago. At the time I wrote this poem. I don’t know why but I still can’t delete his phone number from my contact list. Oh, to do so would seem so final, but I also still feel in contact with him.   Heartwood My friend has died and the grass is growing as I watch the logs dry and crack in the garage. Yesterday, I saw a lone worm leave the heartwood as... Read more

______________ Wonder is one of the arts of reverence. It is always very close to the surface, just behind the eye, below the tongue, in between the beats of a waiting heart. It’s a subtle resource that requires our welcome to show its full strength. To Cultivate Wonder As a teacher, parent, partner, friend, even as a stranger meeting other strangers, our noble charge when meeting another is to cultivate wonder. We have only a few seconds to love the... Read more

In the days after my father died, there were many quiet moments and many stories told. It was a small thing my mother said while crying over tea that allowed me to connect these small stories of my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father. I never realized that they form a legacy I’m a part of. Legacy My great-grandfather was a leather smith. He made saddles for a feudal baron in Russia. Chased by Cossacks into the Dnieper River, he... Read more

______________ I’m always humbled by the way life appears when I think I’m in control. It’s then I always feel less than, as if I’m falling short, as if I’ve let things slip out of my hands. When I remember that I’m one small part in a very complex and numinous Whole, I may feel frustrated but I feel engaged in an ongoing process of aliveness that keeps demanding my cooperation. This set of feelings led to this small poem.... Read more

______________ Part of everyone’s journey in life is to arrive at precipice or fork in the road or at the end of a path and to realize we no longer know our way. Hard as this is, this is where the inner journey begins, when all we’ve carried has served its purpose and now we must burn it for warmth and to see what’s next. This is when the soul shows itself, if we will listen. This is when we... Read more

______________ My father used to quip that old is always ten years out from wherever you are. I’m sixty-two and to think of how old I once thought this was! What I’m learning is that age is not the distance from the beginning of our lives but the distance at any moment from the heart of our aliveness. Aging What if aging is just another labor like the one that brought us into this world? What if this life with... Read more

______________ No matter what we’re going through, the opposite is happening somewhere else at the same time. This awareness doesn’t minimize our own experience but adds context and medicine to the truth of any given moment, the way a rip in the curtains we have drawn seems like a violation of the privacy we so wanted though it is only letting the light of the world in. This poem tries to understand this paradox. SOMEWHERE As something is breaking, somewhere... Read more