O dim sky. O constellation of voices. Let us lift our hearts to the liminal. Praise be to the sorrows, the confessions,  the despair disrupted by draining  the personality-reflection pool. What am I learning here? How to blaze out in tears? How to watch my days fade? How to depart life empty  of everything but grief? How to be like the rock I sit on: may we mark each other’s graves, this stone and I. may we watch over each other until all else fades. What I want is not possible, is as reckless as my species – so let me lie back  and breathe the sky into song  and weave ..read more

My body in recline contains a chamber housing monks draped in saffron robes chanting OM as one. (The first time it happened I got out of bed, curious to hear which note my body hummed. According to my keyboard –middle C.= I tapped it repeatedly to be sure  Some part of my mind deciding “How appropriate”) I tried to explain to my spouse,  “It’s a kind of adoring” His reply, “Like a Taylor Swift fan catching sight of the star?” I rejected the giddy bounce of his analogy. “More like swinging a door wide finding my best friend on the other side.” Or that moment in the grocery store disco ..read more

One morning I climbed out of my shell and decided to face the climate emergency. Having been active in peace and justice circles, I wondered why I felt so much reluctance regarding the greatest threat our species has ever faced. Then it became clear. Old-fashioned prophets stand on the corner preaching doom. I know it is important to listen but I want something else. I long to welcome another kind of prophet: the trickster, the court jester, the magician. They are capable of turning the world upside down and discovering hope under disaster, even joy in the corners of our collective psyches. Th ..read more

It is all so close to nothing this morning,  the long hours of teaching, the coming home  to plant in thunder and heat lightening  until the sky breaks open and I’m soaked.  Inside, I bathe, dry off, then go back  to grading essays for the thirtieth year in a row.  I taught all July, students from Sudan,   Germany, Palestine, Syria, Korea, the UK.   I am at home among my students. Among  the semesters that pass like a nomad’s tents,   folded and unfolded, another mile   walking the dog, another poem.  My own histor ..read more

“I did something terribly wrong, I just know it,” I sputtered between sobs. It was a Saturday in early January 1960, I was nine years old, living in Passaic, New Jersey, and sitting in my best friend Patty’s living room. She had convinced me to tell her mother my problem. “Did you commit a sin?” Mrs. Ingrassia asked, handing me a glass of water and a fresh white embroidered hankie. I wasn’t sure what a sin actually was, but I knew what I had done was against the law. I had just become a brand new citizen and read all about the laws in the handbook I needed to study ahead of time. “I think I mi ..read more

A single consciousness fills the universe flowing through what appear to be different forms, like light through magnificent stained-glass windows, giving each “thing” its unique qualities – rose distinct from the swallow, willow from a butterfly, rock from a fountain, but in the end, all one Creation. Understanding this to be reality, an amazing opportunity materializes: intimate relationships with extraordinary beings all equal, all divine, all different yet one. None considered inferior or inanimate. They become our teachers, friends, guides, and consolers. The cosmos waits for us to take ou ..read more

For much of my life, a lot of what Jesus said made zero sense to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I believed it—I knew you were supposed to believe it—but did I understand it? Not really. I just kind of assumed everybody else knew something I didn’t, or maybe that you were just supposed to give it your best shot and let the pieces fall where they would. Let’s take some of his greatest hits: “If your right eye causes you to lust, pluck it out and throw it away. For it’s better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna.” Matth ..read more

I start near dusk with my simple chore, with this mundane pull of oars across early moon-spill. My oars barely disturb the shallow water, less than a splash-swish among creek-groan from the oarlocks. My oars find the music of rowing. The wooden oar handles are smooth and cool, dipping oars lightly, quietly, into the calm water. The push-thrust of oars is steady breath. Soon, I won’t even make that. Soon, less than even that. The post A River is as Wide as a Responsibility first appeared on Braided Way Magazine ..read more

She had said it years ago, in jest and maybe to try and make a connection with her young niece, something she didn’t understand but found intriguing. Or maybe to appear wiser than she felt.  They walked along the river that ran through town. The spring water high, the current flowed with a gentle burble. They stuck to the path in the woods, muddy in spots from the recent rain, their boots squelched and stuck at times releasing the aroma of dirt and mold.  “What if there are parallel universes,” she said. Her niece, in characteristic teenage style said nothing. Was she trying to creat ..read more

What runs through me could hardly be called piety. It’s not patience either, at least not by that name. The pasture’s dissolution into darkness, the cow gnawing obediently without notion of infinity and stars—God, you know all about them. Those evenings I was sure I’d die, you were teaching me to live; I see that now. And the gravity of all you did not say but left me like a map for the intuiting. Slowly, I saw the world for what it was, or was it I who grew familiar, that long habit of me? These were the pains I was granted in this life: my face in cold weather, a thrumming near the temples ..read more