PDX ➔ SFO ➔ SJO

To the wage slave,
vacation is reprieve —
letting go of alarms
and responsibilities
feels like blessed freedom
from the quotidian game

Oh, to fly to sunny places 
and cavort in jungles,
get a sunburn at the beach
and try to avoid falling ill!

Is this the dream
I was meant to harbor?
Are we meant to work
and work and work away
only to steal back life
in 3- and 5-day increments?
Whose invisible hand is
wrapped around our throats?

Ready to call it quits already. 

Paraiso de Cielo Sunset

Plant watering day,
the Thursday, whether
home or away —
tending the garden
is food for the soul,
rewarding with life
bursting from grass and bud,
leaf and branch —
the mariposas flutter by
as the birds visit too,
paying homage as the sun
sets, a chorus of insects
now alight as the sky
darkens, clouds sweeping
down the valley to
course over the bay below...
harmony in myriad sounds
swirls through humid air.

On the Secret Tour

Tidepools keep safe
things of the sea
in little pockets of water
rising and falling
in the surf
Sea slugs move slowly —
crabs scuttle quickly —
fish dart about —
and our feet get wet
as we slip among
the black rocks,
sharp, uneven,
pocked with holes

My dad would have loved
to explore this
particular corner of
nature's bounty...
I hold him in my
heart, as I hold myself
together for another
day in paradise.

Returned

What does it mean
to come home again,
standing in spaces known
to balance the forces
between chapters unfinished
and stories completed?
Will the memories hold
weight beyond the pictures
of sunlight and palms,
green leaves wavering true?
Who shall I become
in the wake of this voyage
awakening the soul
among dreams, fictions,
truths, and new horizons?

I fold up the map,
neatly, and coalesce 
concepts on my brow —
we traveled well,
and quietly, finding something 
to help us grow. 

Artist’s Note: Traveling always kicks up new thoughts. Two weeks of vacation in Costa Rica refilled the well. Or, did it?

Artist’s Note: Over the weekend, I reconnected with creative friends from my college days in the San Francisco Bay Area, where this beauty was visible from a friend’s yard in San Mateo. I will be making it a regular practice to share my arboreal encounters with you all. Please, take the next chance you have to appreciate a tree you meet, and return here to share your findings.

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in”

- Leonard Cohen, in “Anthem”

My late husband, JLH, deeply loved the artist Leonard Cohen. For him, Cohen comprised a musical Holy Trinity along with Tom Waits and Nick Cave. And this line of Cohen’s about “a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” gave JLH deep comfort, since for much of his life he had felt himself to be broken: broken by his childhood, broken by adversities, broken by his first marriage, broken by depression….

JLH even broke his own heart, and mine too along the way.

Yet my heart, I have found, has great capacity for repair. I practice sound meditations regularly that lighten and strengthen its field. My heart more often sings than sobs. Still, my durable heart will break anew on March 4th this year, as I mark the inevitable return of the date on which JLH died, seven years ago.

Today I enjoy life with my partner AM, whose heart projects an energy that makes me feel cherished. AM is a builder, a constructor, the polar opposite of somebody who dwells on brokenness. A few weeks ago, he took us to visit the Portland Japanese Garden. There, we came across their exhibit on the art of kintsugi1 as practiced by Naoko Fukumaru.

One of the helpful docents wandered over while I stared slack-jawed at the piece of Egyptian art transformed by kintsugi, shown above. She offered up the information that Naoko was born into a family of antiquity dealers. How convenient to grow up surrounded by a plethora of fragile and oft-fragmented objects on which to practice this delicate art of restoration!

Kintsugi as an art form transcends the Japanese culture. Everybody on the planet knows the experience of having a treasured thing break, whether it was the stick you were playing with as a kid at the park, or the favorite mug you liked to use at the office, or the relationship you thought would last a lifetime. The only constant is change, and entropy is an immutable law of nature.

Ah, entropy! We artists and builders, we dreamers and makers, we will fight tooth and nail to thwart you!

As a human, I’m starting to get on in years. This fact regularly surprises me in the variety of its presentation, and sometimes my fragility makes me laugh out loud. Having experienced my share of drops and scrapes and rough handling, I move through the world sporting my own visible lines and scars. Honestly, I wouldn’t know what to make of people who don’t have scars, or who’d claim not to have scars. Scars are a vital part of healing. Scars make us human.

I’m determined to accept the wrinkles and cracks that lie in my future. They are tangible evidence of how my body can sustain itself, how my soul keeps on, how my heart heals itself while ever holding the memory of love’s myriad hurts. For how can we ever know true happiness if we have never known true despair?

Artist’s note: Do you have a favorite scar on your body? Can you trace the scars in your heart? What happens to our consciousness and the world we inhabit when we make the choice to elevate our brokenness to the level of a story, to the level of a piece of art? Tell me a story about how you too are broken and beautifully restored…

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Artist’s note: I painted this work around 2010 (although I very cleverly didn’t put a date on it) during an, ahem, tough time in my life. It’s been stored in a box for the last ten years, and I’m happy it gets to see the proverbial light of day at the start of what may well be a trying new year.

Hey also, my dear readers: I’d love to know what art forms you’re most enjoying in this publication. Please take a second to respond to my poll here! 🙏

Artist’s note: I drew this pen and ink composition a very long time ago, and today it’s one of the rare works of mine that holds space on a wall, in my art studio. From this vantage, I find it conveys our freedom when we’re connected to nature. Nature is a sacred force, one equally supportive of contemplation and play. This artwork inspires me to keep making, keep dreaming, keep dancing on the edge. What feelings does it inspire for you?

I have this mental experience visually: a moment reappears, where I might see the particular pattern of light on my cat's fur again, dappled in the light from the open window she lay next to. Or I see my hand and my friend’s hand reaching toward the game piece.

These short seconds from the past naturally arise from time to time in my mind. (The mind is just another sense gate, like our eyes and ears.) Lately, I seem to be remembering more random, smaller moments. I honestly can't tell why they're triggering, flashing up again on the internal screen of my consciousness.

At various points in my life, I've experienced déjà vu. The words are French, and mean "already seen." You may also know this feeling, that sudden sense in a given moment that you've been here before, done this before, seen this before. There's something familiar yet eerie about the texture of the action, like it’s something I’m repeating when that exact situation can’t have previously occurred.

Have you ever wondered what déjà vu was, really?

I have a bizarre conjecture.

What if, each memory of the past that pops into our heads has us re-experiencing our life on a sort of time loop? These memory flashes I experience today via my capricious consciousness have me visiting my past self, voyaging across time.

As living beings, we always exist in the here and now, even as the scene around us changes. Yet mathematics allows for the arrow of time to move backward and forward, while debates about what consciousness is are endless and as yet undetermined.

If time is malleable and our consciousness exists above or independent of time, then what if we are hopping back and forth in our own life’s timeline via our consciousness?

So then, perhaps the feeling of déjà vu is a sort of echo, a felt sense of my future self remembering this moment I’m now in?

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Author’s Note: I told you all sorts of weirdness might emerge in this publication! Now, I don’t necessarily believe everything I think, although it’s enjoyable to entertain oddities. I also want to acknowledge that last week’s poem about Political Weather was probably too soon for most to get on board. Let’s keep fighting the good fight, friends — which includes maintaining space for creative possibilities.

Author’s note: This poem was written on a motorcycle ride out to Mt. St. Helens in Washington state in September 2018. My husband had died at the beginning of 2018. We rode motorcycles together, and for a while after he passed I wasn’t sure if I would stick with motorcycle riding. Then I realized I truly, deeply love to ride motorcycles, especially out in nature without too many people around. It’s an act of trust, an act of living. I have a whole little journal of motorcycle trip poetry and drawings that this one comes from. A second journal is in progress — and I’m excited to add to it this next week as I’ll be in the wilderness on a motorcycle camping adventure! Would anybody ever be interested in a coffee table book of this nature…?