Do you feel it?
There is magic in the air tonight.
A raw and palpable sense of potential.
I want to cry, because I know that every sincere striving toward awakening is met
with the touch of something wonderful, mysterious, and tender.
I want to open my mouth and have music pour out.
I don’t want to keep speaking words.
I want to sing.
To gather the air’s rainbow droplets and place them in my hair.
To remove my shoes and step onto moss spongey and wet with the kiss of underground rivers.
I want to step into the sky with the ease of childhood dreams
and walk over the city tonight, as over an ocean of floating candles.

And would you join me in this serious endeavor?
Would you companion one daring enough to re-open the treasure chest,
to forego years of jadedness and recall the way it feels to live
as if each moment were an eternal horizon and you had all the keys
and all the friends a girl could wish for?
Would you bravely trade your certainty
for the mystery of seeing
with your real eyes
a fairy?

Like the one I saw that summer many years ago, as I sat at river’s edge
listening to my friend tell a story
A kind of listening as if hearing the orbit of planets
in between the words as they leave the mouth.
My friend was listening to me in the same way,
a rapturous listening as if the cells inside were bowing
at the space between,
And I swear to God in Heaven and on the name of my mother who still goes to actual church
that we both at the same moment saw an orb of light flash between us
and a stunned silence overcame us.
​
It was so fast we almost second-guessed our eyes, but we had BOTH seen it.
And we both stared out over the water where it had disappeared
filled with the same kind of magic that is in the air tonight.
A kind of invisible glow under the edges of things,
a kind of anything-could-happen-including-your-long-dead-grandfather-could-knock-on-the-door-and-no one-would-bat-an-eye-as-if-your-neighbor-were-coming-to-borrow-an-egg kind of feeling
somehow as simple as it is miraculous,
as just-right
and as mind-bendingly ridiculous
as trustworthy as being tucked into flannel sheets in winter as the moon glows on falling snow outside the window
as shocking as the bedposts suddenly shaking in the turbulence of dreamy ocean waves
as assuring as the wheel that readily appears in your hands to steer the ship across the Milky Way
as nebulous as the ache in your chest which some have named “awe,”
as blissful and as piercing as melting, as dissolving as surrendering
into the feeling
until there is no more edge between you and the stars
no more edge between you
no more between
no more
you

It sounds mythic,
or possibly Frankensteinian (is that a word?)
but it's true:
I know how to regrow a body.
This is not a metaphor.

The cells inside us are ecosystems
as vast as the Milky Way
(imagine them falling from the sky
& planting themselves in Earth's soil,
like seeds of fire);
They carry the complex intelligence
of deep wild jungle (remember Amazonia?)
the majesty and electrical charge
of geysers, cascades, craters, storms
and the purity and sensitivity
of an infant, newly born
in the middle of winter
(yes, like Christ)

and so
while there is so much
I could say
about feeding
and nurturing
and watering
and oxygenating
and cooing
and loving
and stimulating
and invigorating
and sending into the world with a big fat lunchbox full of super-charged powers
one's miniature galaxies
and tributaries
and millions of suns
around which spin
trillions of planets
all with their rhythms
and cadences
of ancient
and timeless wisdom,
instead I'll just say:
You too can regrow a body.

Start with your elbow,
or a strand of your hair,
or your belly button.
Know you are a miracle
and that this is not a metaphor.

​Sink deep
and down
into the loam
of your body
and you will rise
beyond each horizon
that comes to your shore
like waves
of light
waves
of light.

Collective alchemy is underway.
Dark Nights are portals.
Listen, offer yourself as kindling to a sacred fire burning in the hollow of the Great Tree.
Become incense.
Your lips and tongue and the hairs of your ears, the cell membranes of your lungs are like fish swimming in the quiet pond under moonlight here...
What is eternal cannot be harmed.
What pulses with the Great Heart has a cadence that is never outside of anything that happens in the journey called life.
Take the Hand of this knowing.
It is warm and wide, spacious as the starry sky.
Bless yourself with this water, the sacrament of witness.
Let your heart be a flower whose deep feelings gurgle into colors that are true.
As you allow this inky movement, remember the stem, the holy rain, the black soil, and the stillness.

Tell yourself that this is the most potent form of activism,
this gentle swaddling and tucking in,
this sighing out the extras of summer,
this simmering of broth,
this spooning and sipping to warm the belly,
this tender massage of hips, of root,
of flower that has spent the warm season casting its pollen,
now ready to fold, to sojourn into dark interior,
where light is gathered from tide, from moon and stars.

Tell yourself this only feels strange because it is radical,
and radical only because it has gathered dust
under trauma of recent decades.

Tell yourself that the ones alone in their houses without food and water
are listening to the same invisible music 
and that if you dream of them found, they will be.
That they are.

Tell yourself that when there is more pollen to share, that you will share it,
as you have always done,
but that when you have reached the body's limits,
then the next kind of magic resource must be summoned,
and that it is real,
as your care is real.

Tell yourself that your care is as weighty as gold,
as hydrating as oxygen,
as big as a helicopter
sweeping its lights over the swamp,
​as sturdy as the ropes pulling up the bodies
of strangers whose Autumn began like the leaves-
shocked by cold, and floating
upon mysterious waters.

Tell yourself that the waves are not random,
unless prescribed to be.
Remember the crystalline structure of water droplets
changing shape under vibration of music and emotion,
and tell yourself you too can encode this moment
with a prayer as powerful as a hurricane.

Tell yourself that the hurricane of your prayer
has an eye the shape of Love.

Then let it sweep the earth,
let it flood every unbelieving cranny,
let it devastate hopelessness,
let it obliterate isolation,
let it do what warm broth does
for a cold belly.

Like bread rising in the oven, it arrives quietly, generously.

That moment when, gently rocking in the bathtub, the bones of your spine align.

That moment when, brushing your teeth, 
an entire archive of memories within you becomes suddenly saturated with color,
​as if touched by the aurora.

That moment when your feet on the bathroom tile flex, 
and the ground beneath you unfolds like a flower,
to become the step from which you could float up 
like a bee or a butterfly.

That moment when you smell the incense burning, 
and you realize that weeks of grief and illness, 
alone in your apartment,
have become a private ecstasy,
that the love poems being written in your blood are too beautiful to capture.

That moment when the miles behind you sound
like bells on the mountainside,
as the temple door appears before you.
The temple you've been dreaming, and which carried your feet
through snowstorm,
boulder,
and howling winds.

Only it's not a temple: it's you, 
standing on the mountain, having found yourself capable,
having learned to hear those bells in the miles.
You: alone, standing before the mirror,
humming like the bees.

That moment, when you can see the true shape of you,
as sunlight through colored glass.

That moment, when the coffer from which everything that streams to you is revealed,
and it is boundless.

That moment cannot be hurried nor forced,
only caught,
like my late father caught trout in the canyon, 
years ago, while I watched.
The way, at sunset, his hands listened for the fish,
loose but steady on the rod,
the way his elk-haired caddis glided on the river,
just at the edge of the bank where the shadow touched the light,
among the rippling tracks of water skippers.

The way I sit now at the edge of my desk to catch this poem,
the way I imagine myself gathering this moment
like cottonwood blossoms
to be a balm or a bath or holy incense,
to be a bell on the mountainside
or a bee floating beside whomever wanders
through the wilderness alone, with a heavy heart,
for whomever waits at river's edge,
wishing on a dandelion to be kissed by Grace.

For whomever might need to hear
what the fish told my father with its eyes 
as it pierced the evening like a silver arrow:
"You are Light."

Mary Oliver says leaves dazzle in Autumn
because life lives strongest before it dies.

There is also the death that grasps the branch even as it falls through air,
or that lets go even as the branch remains.

A child asks "What will happen?"
This kind of death answers, "Here's what,"
and looks at what the leaf is doing.

Mary Oliver's death looks at the tree and the leaf, to see
how they respond to wind, to forest, and sky.

And says, "Let's see."

Once I lived my life knowing everything.
It saved me from despair, which was good for me then.

Now I live my life sometimes knowing,
and sometimes not.

How is it possible to hold on and to let go?

There is a pulse kept by monks in many temples around the world.
It is a pulse the Earth herself keeps.
Like the heartbeat, it closes, it opens.  

Everything that ever was, is, and shall be
emerges from the eye of that needle.

Where is the needle?
Seek, and ye shall find.
Find, and be found.

This kind of death roils through the blood,
but there is a kindness in its burning.

This kind of death is like the windows of my house:
drawing in brilliance of afternoon sunlight
from wind-tossed leaves that glitter the walls,
my body, my eyes.

​

Gather together
curls of dignity
fallen to the base of my spine.

Gather together
what hid to make way
for necessary functioning
in a loud place whose
anger drowned out wee whisps of becoming.

Remember the older woman who walked with me in springtime through grasses,
who listened, who said
she'd be there for me if I needed. 
Remember her hand on my braid in the dark
the night we sat around an unlit fire (to keep the land safe 
which had burned).

How true love stands up in every circumstance, untarnished by what, or who, or how, or when.   

I'm making a pocket of dignity here.
A space in which to care for me.
Not against but simply as.
an imprint.
a realness.
a me.

If I want to give away, it begins here. 
​By giving up the chains that have kept my  me-ness bound. 
My gifts arise freely from this place of unabashed dwelling.