scattered

 

"perception alters not only the past, but landscape itself, and landscape in turn, shapes consciousness" 

                    --Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land

A long road reaches its wispy arm through a desert, extending into the distant mountains.

 Clouds gather but dissipate. The wind whips flecks of trash into barbed wire and tosses tumbleweeds across the road. 

Here bits of me are scattered: a bone there, an old Toyota pickup burned out in a fire rusting in a dune of sand, a dead dog. Lizards scutter across a dress I once wore to a wedding (not mine), and a snake coils beneath the shade of a pile of lumber--what's left of a home I tried to build with my own hands. 

Do we collect or leave ourselves forgotten in the dust? 

I keep walking toward the western mountains, objects dropping off into the dirt in my wake. At the end of this road, when everything has fallen away, I will step out of my skin as if stepping out of a nightgown. I will be nothing but air. I will rise on a thermal, I will circle the sky, higher and higher, and then, I will be stars.

a land

From the sky, the land below stretches out in memory. The Colorado etches her serpentine path through a landscape both familiar and far away. Below the grama grasses, little bluestem, mesquite, cottonwood and juniper whisper in the hot wind as night falls over a land as known to me as my own body.

What is it to know a land?

To love its contours and fissures, its smells and colors.

Is it possible to be so utterly familiar with a place, an Other place, as I am with this one?

My heart aches for lake smells and cicadas droning into the summer heat.

This land is no longer a place I call home, but it will always be the blood coursing through my veins. 

The Devil's Mare

 

Super excited to share the launch of our recent screenplay, The Devil's Mare. A great collaboration with my co-authors Christopher J. Oglesby and Patricia Zamora. 

Check out the Story: https://thedevilsmare.com

1.28

fracture

 

here

the sage flies by,

blue-green clouds along the edge of the road 

until

you Stop.

shut off the engine. 

roll down the windows

open your soul to the 

nothing

but wind and the

Whoosh, Whoosh

of giant wind turbines.

here

the red earth fractures, opens like a vein

emitting whispers shushing up from the cool sand of ancient riverbed below.

like spells.

hold still

and no one might notice the crack

that has suddenly opened

inside you.

the red earth

of your heart

gaping beneath the sky

a long line of eighteen wheelers

surge forth like a Norther'

howling the whispers of the earth into a fugitive memory

the windows close

the engine hums to life

the wound is sutured 

and you travel on.

lovesong at 432 Hz

 in the end

I walked away

after you had turned all the dials

listening 

within my many, infinite frequencies

for a channel 

where I bathed in all my selves

naked, and powerful

and alone.

like a tuning fork

you forged me into a sound

that was at once both familiar and strange

and then

you shattered the stillness of me

by plucking, as if they were tiny guitar strings,

needles from my skin

I will not leave (I said)

not this Time.

You said (take everything that has happened here today with you)

and I did

into the searing light 

vii.

how to mend broken things

I once knew a man

whose profession it was to mend

precious objects, broken

intentionally or unintentionally.

he devised

all manner of concoctions:

epoxies, resins, glues,

to conceal from the eye

the rifts, the fissures, the cracks.

how we mend broken things

is not a recipe.

it is an art,

much like divining 

water coursing unseen beneath the surface, your wedding ring, a stone someone touched recently, your reading glasses.

how we mend broken things

must come with the profound recognition 

that not all things

can be

mended.

it depends on the material: your great-grandmother's crystal, a favorite porcelain tea pot, an ancient tree, a beloved home torn from its roots by a hurricane

flesh

a heart.

some things cannot ever be mended 

and while you may be tempted to reach for the glue, sometimes the only way

to mend certain things, is to leave something else broken

fashion the shards into an expression of the pain of loss

make something beautiful 

from the fragments

of the destroyed world.

 

labyrinth iv

IV

Every stone around your neck you know the reason for

at this time in your life      Relentlessly

you tell me their names and furiously I

forget their names    Forgetting the names of the stones

you love, you, lover of stones

what is it I do?

--Adrienne Rich, Sleepwalking Next to Death

"I would have done anything to avoid the pain of transformation. I would have stayed in that dull, aching pain for as long as I could. But I was forced in another direction--the absolute last direction I would have ever chosen for myself. And all I can tell you is how lucky I was to have been so totally messed up, to be sick and in so much pain that I had no choice but to confront it, and challenge everything I knew about myself. 

Most people go through this world clinging to what's safe, having an idea of who they should be to pass through life with the least amount of friction. This is what we hope for--this is what we think means success. When this happens, we can cling to what feels safe and try to construct a socially acceptable version of ourselves, or we can jump into the void, risk everything we think we are, swim far from the safety of the shore for the unknown horizon, answer the call of every wild, bleeding desire we have buried in us, and use this one life we've been given to vault every edge, limit and wall we've constructed."

--Holly Whitaker

image 2602

I arrived.

where I arrived, the "there," is ...still to be determined...

"Trinitarian thinking is more spiral, circle, and flow than pyramid."

                                                        --Fr Richard Rohr

 

lovesong from the past

labyrinth 2

            for k.m.

 

I find myself here

again and again

 

here being always slightly changed

and yet the same

as if I am looping back on myself

only to find

myself, within

neither from nor towards

 

a circle of stones

 

every moment is irredeemable

Eliot said

the still point of the turning world

and yet

walking barefoot in a circle that is endless

and yet ends

I can only say: there we have been

But I cannot say where

 

and suddenly I understand

why numbers

are the only language

capable of deciphering Fibonacci’s poetry

 

but explanations are not what we are seeking

we

want. to. know.  why.

why

we spiral around one another like galaxies

(every circumnavigation placing us

yet another magnitude of space apart)

and still alone

like stones

still

beneath the snow

waiting

for the walker to come

and wake us from our slumbering

 

 

 

love song at second snow 4:44pm

 

                                        for ian.

Snow Moon

I awaken amidst a blanket of white and dreams

casting a circle of salt, and words

I do not recall

beckoning you--

but you

are someone I never knew, but played radio tower for

at ten thousand feet to hear an

Italian song throbbing over the clouds and through my blood.

Maybe because

I have left bread crumbs

of myself everywhere.

Maybe because 

I felt the tendrils, invisible but deep 

reaching down and through everything to you.

I open...

walking the rim of the canyon to the faraway trill of Sandhill Cranes.

And then

I close and I close until I do not know

if I am flower or stone.

I would be water, the ocean,

and whales and sea turtles my bones 

washed up on an island

only reachable 

by boat.

I would be storm and lightening and wind

to find you

but I am a desert--

sand dissolving, becoming nothing but your song.

Wild love for the world 2

 

I awake before dawn. Venus is blazing over the mountains, seeming to move spectacularly fast up into the sky. But it is we who are moving, passengers on this Earth that is spinning toward some far celestial horizon that I will never know. 

Beauty both aches and brings joy. Time escapes like the breath, each one a reminder that nothing, no matter how exquisite, or especially how exquisite, lasts. 

The smoke from small fires rises like wisps as the light bleeds into the vastness over the mountains. How do I learn to sit still with it all? To both hold it and let it go at the same time.

If I could learn how to rest in each moment would I cease to grieve for what passes before my eyes like an exhalation of dawn, and then is gone? 

finding the sacred in nature

"Mystical experience in nature—those moments when you sense your interconnection with all things—are more than just interesting encounters. They are invitations into relationship. Beyond caring for creation or stewarding Earth’s “resources,” it is entering into an actual relationship with particular places and beings of the living world that can provide an embodied, rooted foundation for transformation. The global shift necessary to actually survive the crises we’ve created depends on a deep inner change."

                                                    --Victoria Loorz, co-founder of the “Wild Church Network"

 

Little Tesuque Creek part 2

 where to begin

awake in the dark

a luminous aurora-like light dancing

along the skirt of the mountains

where to begin

the astonishing quiet

but for the shush of the Cottonwood trees

the creek

the top of the peak 

where

my heart burst open to the sky with joy

here

alone in this Place

my breath mingling with heaven

nothing between me and infinite space

where to begin

begin here

"How we love one thing is how we love everything."

                                        -Father Richard Rohr

to look well at the creek

 

Sometimes it is so hard to be present. Even alone on the Little Tesuque Creek Trail with the creek burbling beside me I find my head rushing forward in time. Stop. Be here with this moment. The shivering cottonwoods kept whispering “hello, hello” as I hiked by. I keep forgetting to acknowledge them, having decided after listening to the Secret Life of Trees how poplars speak to one another, protect one another, nurture each other. I recall how once both my sister and I found ourselves mysteriously called to stand on the back deck of our house in the middle of the summer. We just stood. We did not speak. And then. A 100-foot pecan tree fell completely over onto the back fence and the roof of an apartment building behind our house. She looked at me and said That was weird, and went back in the house. I think those may have been the only three words she spoke to me the whole year (the only year) we lived together our adult lives. When I think back I can only think that the tree had called us out of the house to bear witness, or maybe to keep us safe.

 

When I was at the ashram in the summer I was sitting by Little Bear Creek at dusk. The cicadas hummed in rhythm and the wind rustled the leaves of the trees along its banks. I suddenly had this deep realization that everything in nature is singing. The falling boulders—the roiling water of the rapids, the birds, the whales the frogs, everything participating in a symphony of sound that somehow makes sense to some listener—the Earth? Does she shiver with delight at the song?

These are odd times. If you are reading this then perhaps you are in the close-knit circle of readers who know I have not written in a very long while and will forgive me if anything I say here lends itself to a sense of tone-deafness. 

But since life has slowed down a lot, working from home, going almost nowhere except the grocery, and that only occasionally, I feel the need to say a few things about this time that we are experiencing. First, I hope that each one of us, in our albeit (hopefully) limited interactions with other members of our species, try to interact with each other in a way that leaves the other person better for that interaction. We should all be nice, love one another and have empathy for the fear each one of us may feel, the uncertainty and the recognition of the fragility that is this existence. My heart wants to burst that people are out there showing up for one another, whether they are front line emergency or medical care workers, or grocery checkers--there are some who are risking so much to keep things going along as normal as is possible. Thank you for this every day heroism of showing up. 

I have been walking more. Here there are Huisache and Redbud trees blooming, Mexican Buckeye and Dogwood, poppies, lantana and verbena. I will reiterate something Annie Dillard write that I have often quoted, advice that seems timely:

 

"My God, I look at the creek. It is the answer to Merton’s prayer, “Give us time!” It never stops. If I seek the senses and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek."

Now we have the time. I want to look well at the creek. Really see everything around me as if for the first time. 

I remind myself to pause and be thankful for this body that has worked so hard for me, carrying me over mountains and through childbirths, this body that has no choice but to go along wherever this brain wills it, regardless of how healthy the choice is. 

This world is a miracle, nothing less. We are blessed to walk a moment in its forests, swim in its oceans, laugh and love beneath its stars and sunsets. I hope if nothing else I learn from these difficult times to take nothing in this fleeting and exquisite life for granted. 

colorado

at 4am I cross the bridge

over the black water

the one that, like a vein, has carried

molecules of longing to our  hearts, 

etching the map of

our coming both together and apart,

winding east, then back upon itself as it carves

southward to the source

where water comes together with other water.

the wings of sand hill and whooping cranes

draw a line in the sky

tracing a path

from where we lay on our bellies

at secret beach, watching the fishing birds,

to the mouth of the bay

where at night the stars bore down

with fire

aching to be seen,

where once 

we beheld the slick backs of pilot whales

in the surf

illuminated by the moon.

here

is where I will always find you

searching for the wild part of yourself

that somehow remembers

what is was like breathing

the water.

lovesong at 6pm

it is just dusk

and my crazy heart is filled

with love for the flitting of birds about the yard

not noticing

me,
here in this chair

bursting with desire

the screech owl awoke me at 4am; I swooned.

over coffee the wren, concocting a plan

to build a tiny nest on the porch.

sun set the blue of the jay and the cardinal on reddish fire

who am I but some lovesick

schoolgirl

mad with longing for the settling light in the leaves

the barely perceptible breeze,

the birds,

the night

poem at 9pm

Roatan, 2013

the moon's slivered crescent

rises and the light puddles

 on the surface of the water

quiet except

for the breath

steady and calm and

comforting

 in the liquid ether

that is more home to me than air

why

can't I stay here

forever?

a mermaid

with tangled hair

and a mournful underwater song

trailing 

in a wake of sorrow

sometimes I miss you

but here in the deep cold

no one can see the tears

chrysalis

shannon halley, oil and ink on paper

4,  finally sadness creeps in

I dreamed about you last night,

as usual, driving too fast

in an anger that only found its expression in traffic

I awoke relieved

not to be tangled in your quiet traffic rage any longer--

Am I happy now?

I think so, yes.

I feel alive, and the wanting pang of desire,

and the vast breadth of Being

that I had ceased to feel

with you.

Yes,

there is sadness

but it must be much like the sadness

a chrysalis feels 

when emerging, with wings, 

and leaving behind

 its shell

abiquiu

 herman pipkin, palo duro canyon, c. 1935



cool light slanting through dust

early morning Abiquiu

 silent but for

faraway thunder

piñon, red earth, and stones laid out along the sill like prayers

and bones--possum skull, blackbird wing, the twisted horns

of a mountain sheep

I have heard the whispered "bruja!"

exile does not translate otherwise

and you alone know why I have sought refuge

here in the desert--

 that my heart is aflame with love for things both fragile and wild

and that
each day requires a ritual of quenching the heat with the cool hues of canyon and water

You write, Come back to the City

and I wrap my shawl more tightly around my shoulders

strike a match and watch the parchment burn, your words shriveling like a spell

only here can I be what I am

a woman on fire