recent

My kitchen window looks out on a church. At this hour, it is baked in sunlight and glowing a nice rust color between reds and browns. There are several long windows that glow blue and yellow when the church is alive past dark. Its tower is red again, with open windows displaying a large brass bell, and the cerulean sky again. Then, a green sharp cone atop the steeple and a beautiful bright cross as tall as anything I can see. Red, then blue.

The autumn winds roll leaves along the alley, and my weary soul dreads with its humanness. Breaths, settling. I clasp my hands and gaze at the warm church and pray with the big blue sky.

Tobacco Root Mountains, Montana

The colors of winter are a pallet all its own. Blues, yellows, whites, a Montana landscape untouched. As the world slows, I long to see the horizon fade into the gold sea of the plains. Every year I am brought to tears by this grandeur. Two mirroring poles of the earth, blue and yellow, colliding. Their severity tells of the winter to come. Those who brave it know this well.

Where the plains meet the mountain line is where I would run off to in my youth. Stare wildly as far as I could and sit silent. No faults or feelings of mine took shape beyond worry here. I would watch them pass down the slope and dissipate as they hit the prairie, knowing I or anyone would never fill it up.

As summer rounds itself, the first cool winds shoot up the valley and across all the rosy cheeks in town. It moves in haste, like a child hearing their mother calling. The rippling air greets the Great Plain that begins just east of town and seem to stretch on forever. Only during family trips would I see the way rivers meet the ocean like a homecoming. Creeks into rivers, and rivers into lakes. The air soaring off the plateau of the Rocky Mountain Front down into the unending expanse of plain is my ocean.

I grew up right at the edge of the tallest mountains in the state, a great lodgepole wilderness that keeps the snow in its peaks year round. Each summer, they would brim with soft greens and vibrant shoots of flowers. Cooing and trills sing in all directions from migrant birds thankful to share in the wealth. The streams roar down their drainages and flood out the roads. Living in the seasons is an art all its own. The magic at this time is unlike anything, a child’s mind can wander the ends of human thought, watching our mother earth wilt, molt, and grow again. Us kids sit out under the great willows and cottonwoods, watching the osprey flutter and dive, follow suit and take on the churning river with neighborhood friends. We would shiver and laugh out our jitters when making it to the other side. Life and death are close together out here.

And slowly, summer would taper itself and the great plain of green below the rocky mountain walls would follow the wind current, leaving a gold expanse in its wake. I long for this time, each year. The light stretches thinly over the world, and the skies appear themselves to have ice crystals forming. The forests that begin like hair at the base of the mountains darken. They amass a single deep blue color, so perfect in its compliment to the yellow you can’t help but pray. Brown animals move slowly out across the swath of land like ants. This landscape is abrupt and harrowing, it teaches me the depth and grit of our world. The birds who do brave the cold soar high, scanning the windswept grasses like an ocean.

I have always been a fan of contradiction, of containing the unalike and embracing the abyss between. Plain to the Ridge is representative of this chasm. Mountains leaving young me without words, standing as the face of God above. The softness and stillness of the plains brimming with bounty and life; how quiet and cold it turns in winter. Great torrents of clouds moving overhead like battleships or a circus brigade. The ridgeline and the expanding plain oppose each other, yet I am met with their equal and extreme severity, their mirroring beauty.

Traveling up the Rocky Mountain front is a great teacher. The contrast all consuming, like a glacier in the desert. You think they might swallow one another, but instead the greet in firm embrace. Climbing peaks to escape the monotonous plain and finding relief, seeing so far your eyes falsify an edge. The cathedral of trees and streams and craggy peaks overwhelms with its splendor and its cruelty. Then, upon returning to the flatland and feeling your heart release, we begin again. That is really all there is, this cycle painted so purely before me.

The great plain meeting the great ridge, and back again.

my paternal grandmother gives me my namesakes earrings. Her adoptive mother whom I wrote to last week.

Returning to our roots, truthfully, with intention beyond comfort. We live in a world that is seeking, constantly, for the next next next, a different way to do what we have always done. Not a better way, just a different, unnatural approach to the God-work of our Mother Earth. This is a crucial distinction, for as they mutilate beautiful young bodies, as they grow children in tubes for the sake of doing so, they make easy for us knowing ones not to keep silent.

I will not stand idle and let the grandeur of my female body be placated or used. I will not turn blind when asked banal questions of truth, nor will I be complicit in the erasure of all that is good mirrored to us in the mountains and streams. Echoing, you will hear the tremors of the land as we demand justice for all the children and all the mothers being cast aside. The families being reaped upon, Men never to know true strength. I will see to it to heal my mother through my own kin.

I will not venture to the edge and slacken my grip, for holding my grandmothers hand, and hers beyond that, we create an impasse that shall not be thwarted. The spirit of what is true is not up for debate or reconstruction. It is the very blood that beats us all alive, the movement of wind under each young birds’ wing. Indisputable as the pleasure of a mothers sweet first kiss. We live in a world now of babes who did not receive the tending they ought, and these cast their suffering onto the next. I see proof around me this is a cut deep and begging to be mended.

For some time growing up, my sister was cold and strange to me. Her hard and deep blue eyes, her sharpness and grief. As a child, she embodied what I envied and later what I would chase. Her coolness and apparent suffering like a mirror of the human experience. This ought to be the way. Beyond me and a few others, she did not know how to be close to people. ‘I love you’ is only now a common phrase.

As a babe she was shoved off and put on her own, in a room far off from our folks. The house was large with tall ceilings and spirited drafts. Three months old and alone in the dark, self-soothing, as they call it.

Our mother too, there is a hollowness. She took strides in parenting and gave my sister and I so much of what her and her own mother lacked. Still, when my sister and her sit in a room together, it is most obvious, like a giant pit with no light emerging. Across my life, I have begged to be the bridge. This is my own cross to bear in suffering.

She is a wonderful mother in so many ways, but lived in a world that told her mothering was a useless orientation. A husband who lacked strength and commitment, a first daughter who pleaded for nothing but her undivided love. I was only around in spirit by this point, but can sense the coldness in that empty house today.

The birth between the two of them was putrid and brought about a lengthy distrust. My mother no longer one with her own body, her capacity and innate nature stripped and folded as a broken flower before her. When people recollect, my sister was silent and slept often. A ‘good baby’ she was remarked as the slightest sense of danger sent her into a twilight sleep. “Not much personality” they too would say, hard to imagine in the face of my sister today. Where did she go, all that time?

My sister bore a child with integrity a year and some months ago. In her kitchen of the home they rented before the current, she squatted and huffed and stared up into me and beyond my eyes. I was silent the whole 14 hours, her lover paced with worry and excitement. He climbed into the pool with all his close just before her babe arrived earthside. They have slept together every night since.

Her daughter, the light of all our lives, says “wow” in the way it is meant to be said. She listens aptly and hollers for her mother when spooked. She pushes buttons and demands what she needs. My sister breastfeeds, and the times I share a room I am near overcome, for as her babe meets her eyes and pats her face all the hurt leaves her. My mother and my mother’s mother, up the line through unbelievable brokenness, they embrace one another and weep with this tender moment. My sister and her daughter have struck something so deep, well beyond a single lifetime. They sleep warm and in love, and I have never known my sister so soft.

She believes her pain, the separation from what is good and true in her childhood had to be this potent. Otherwise she would not have known. She might have stood idle by and listened to the echo chamber of sufferers, she might have let her baby be taken away for testing and listened to the lies that breastfeeding is nothing but grief.

“I have never seen a baby with such secure attachment,” they chuckle off, as if a child’s temperament is so random. My sister smiles and nods, for even if they were to applaud her commitment and trust to what is right (rarely they do), such bounty compares little to the looks her daughter and her share. I see my sister holding, hugging, kissing herself in the arms of that baby. And my mother, and my mother’s mother. I too, one day, will ease the sobs of my babe and she will be alright. She will calm and ease and soften too. She will sit in a car and gaze out the window, not overcome with grief and pain and cries.

To say I am proud of my sister does very little. I thank her for her wisdom and her willingness, I thank her daughter for holding me when I am weak. I thank all the mothers I am and hug them in myself.

These years have brought forth this confronting gift. I will not be idle in the pursuit of what is plain and good. It is louder than gunshots or fame or understanding or malice. It is as simple as holding and loving a babe when it cries.

“Dirty Lil, dirty Lil

Sittin’ on top of the garbage hill

never took a bath and never will

*Spit, ting* (spitting into spittoon)

Dirty Lil”

This was a song sang about my grandmother’s mother. She was a big, jolly woman with an outpouring laugh. She was also a nun and my namesake. Everyone adored Lil who knew her. My grandmother was adopted by Lil following a mishap pregnancy in an intimate Vermont town some 80 years back. I remember hearing this song as a child and flushing in the cheeks. Despite, it seems I live up to the tune.

Today I was told I am stinky. Enough so to send one to a window. Now it has been some time since my physical (ethereal?) character has been challenged in this way. It has sat me back in my seat. I felt soiled enough to shower!

This comment came way to me from a mentor, in some case. From the get go, our differences were abundant. She is small and beautiful, old and full of plastics. She embodied the life of a crone, her own words. She has a face of sincerity that is tightly pulled back. She knows many things in the world of the metaphysical and brought about conversation intentionally. She has a big house filled with theological garb where she feeds dear and lives her unique way, with a husband of a decade and change, and also some plants.

There are so many things to say, alas…

Her and I met at a time very poignant for my development. I was making bounds toward the life I want to lead. I was engaging in biblical texts that had never before stirred me, and trusting the current changing ahead.

Unorthodox, a Jew in her upbringing, she is a woman of what appears New Age, but not that alone. Honoring and challenging all things, ever generous in her contribution to me, she is haunted I beg to believe. She gave me all the codes to her house, and trusted me in a space that is valuable to her beyond belief. She has never been a mother.

Now to be clear, I do stink.

Riddled in expectation and grief,

Alice descending the hole

unending

the body thrusting is stress through the skin.

I am a lady still, and such a thought

might shake down to my core.

Do I know how to clean myself?

Yes,

deeply too, many years of stripping and stripping

the layers of love, picking at dots

and bleaching them off.

I gave up on this system though,

didn’t leave a lot of room for love.

I have a scent, and it is my own

in the woods, all would know

who lives in the hillside,

smiling toward the sun.

Maybe it is the sorrow

still held in my bones now,

knowing the horse would collapse

and thrash, and his death

let me loose into a well

so deep I see a young girl at the bottom.

She reaches up, scowling with her big brown eyes.

I grab her dirty hands and pull her to my body

and hug her and kiss her cheeks,

she giggles and pushes against me

and yanks my oily hair in her little fists.

Today I took a shower and washed myself very well

more than I had in some time,

I am not afraid to look myself in the eyes.

Scent is many, many things.

The hair on my body

and my bare face, did they tell you

I am unwell and unfit to be seen?

I tame my hair and tend my skin, chronic acne resides in times of unease,

but I do wonder, in all these parts, if one might cast me off and away,

put me back in the woods and pray I don’t return.

Doors open and close all around, I am watching, watching.

I do smell, I tend to think a living soul should.

Just like them, I need a kick in the ass from time to time.

The woman who read my chart

told my I have something to teach,

a truth that will not be silenced.

The girl and I walk up the street,

she leaves fingerprints on all the windows

and points to my legs smiling.

Years pass along like sails

and murky water

dilutes in rays of sun

,

A human soul is built only

on compassion and love

torn down in fear

,

What a more beautiful exchange

than a smile and shake of hand

by men different in all ways

‘

Patiently in whisper

one passes on a loving prayer

to those hurting, and those hurt.

Offering prayer to others

as I have just learned it myself

like a long game of catch-up.

The sun is hot and dries the day out

snow melt cricks hardly ease.

It daunts me, faith

in my own capacity, faith

to relay on You.

Come to face all I’ve longed

an entire life for, face

the parts less than desirable,

parts I shirk off in haste;

am I the peach tree,

am I the plum tree?

writing with lots of ‘I’s…

It does seem, in so many places I look, not a soul will dare and submit to love. They are lonely because, void because. Perhaps I can boil this down to the root of modern woe. Symptoms of facelessness, divisiveness, physical and mental health on the decline, a world wrapped in to a small small screen. Where is the root though?

Love is a blank canvas of an infinite pool of sensations, actions, connections. I reference my own commitment to love, the pursuit of something grand and expository. My man and I struggle and bear a stern cross, but we walk the hill together. No words can express love better than it has already been written. I put that pen down now.

A friend who was once a true testament of love, now I worry your fear to sink in to it bury you. The reflection of the love we let ourselves receive mirrored all around. Will you love yourself so deeply that no one’s energy shall entangle you if it does not support you? Will you love yourself so deeply that you will let others in as witness, not as audience? You are glowing in love always, but so often giving all of it away. I do not think love breeds as such.

I do no suggest in greed. Perhaps I, in my life, have contended love with greed, love with pleasure, love with obsession. All sensations exist in poles, merging and layering. Love is no one of these. Love connects and explores on, love is intended.

A child has no such. My niece, a beautiful, potent, silly young miss. That love is intended by merit of God. Her mother and her, a love forged of the dividing body, dividing soul. Seedlings passing in the creeks and breezes bear flowers on an untouched hill. Who grew you, seedling?

Years back, I fell in love with a place and faces I likely won’t touch again. I relished in minds unlike my own and simple conversations that strung a web of a future I reckoned only in dream.
I saw one day, as my first true fall set in, a tree that held every color. Top to bottom, life mirrored before me. I wrote a 40 page paper of autumn for the Romantics, and forged my first connection with the cycles of earth. Strange how it surfaced among the concrete world, and clear as day now.
As time pressed on, and passion in social connection wilted, my grief took hold. First I was thrilled, challenged by the ranges of my peers and their intellect. Though within months, conversations ebbed and slackened into youthful lust. As life shifted from warm tones to winter, through the new year and again, I isolated.
A lonesome sensation I could not identify, for people rattled around me more than ever. One day, as I laid on a bleak lawn, my solemn mind was met, and I wrote my void of sensation into existence. Perhaps there are souls who can thrive solely off human connection, but anxious that must be. Our world today tells of this disparity, I find.

To my loves long and lost, stretch to the sun. Rest assured in the palm of our Mother’s hand.

2020
The Grass Here Doesn’t Listen

There is something about the air,
how it holds the echo of words
and hums
all times.
Do the people here know how quiet
alone can be? All the air sucked
from a bag till it pops
from nothing
into all,
just one magpie in far flight over
the woolen yellow plains
stretching east
to eternity.
Do they know a greying day
sweet in her sorrows, only
you and the pine
may console?
The grass here does not listen.
Autumn rumbles among distant
voices while I sit
alone.

As a late onset of winter,

as a thick husk, peeling,

as a veil,

I open the door again, and bright sun

blinding and harrowing

washes me over, I have taken the first step

toward a life.

/

The wet season pulls me from me.

Winter is the blood for us women

the steeping of self, our body

yelling so loud we can not hear

anyone but her and again,

we are her, with her of her,

the dam is filling

the dam is breaking.

/

Remembering my body and the thousands

of wombs that held me before

is the most rich and deep blessing.

I see again, mirroring in all things around me

the mockery of this truth, smiling like pansies.

As waking in the morning

as the small shoots

as washing the blood from

my hands

each season a different shade,

as sleep once again.

Moon passing onward and over, black again, no moment to decipher from the next. Outside the weather itself regresses and halts us here, “you missed something,” she bellows. Yesterday, there was no opposite we could properly fit across from stagnation. Today, an excavation unexpected, making sense of idleness of my company, myself rather.

What is all this to say, that I have lost the time? Seems arbitrary in the scheme of it all, as losing and having do not truly mirror one another. Some things do not have opposites. I am moving through a world with gazes blank set forward, breathing from their mouths. A soul across the abyss writes a poem to celebrate and remind of our humanness, our loss of wisdom and guidance, at the toil of love, for their is no other righteous point to die for. Simply this, I embark on the hollows and question the footholds. Questioning, for the first time with that plea alone, and not rooting blindly for a voice to ring out yes, decision made, the path is lit up now.

Just as opposites, two things might be true at a time, even unthinkable twos. Two loves abundant and curious, though I can’t say acted upon. A simple woman’s heart would beat to extinction. Lonely and love, another two that has made great strides in my life over these years. Nestled and unsupported, there is a theme painting itself before my eyes. Down the rabbit hole, I am still teeming for answers. Unlucky and unlearning. Another two.

I read again, and pull from my selfishness.

Put forth a stance of courage, and blind eye from the murking waters, I am of man not of fish. Clear waters, an internal figment, and the suspension of all that is good.

Months of quiet or disservice, what have you, I fell victim to the plague of our kind. Out stretched finger, long in the winds to come, the black hull of a ship does not tell of its master. So much violence and confusion plumes across our lands, and feebly the body goes limp, cloudy. I to myself and to all have done no service in the journey of wisdom and of perseverance, not as of late.

Here I stand, on new land under the black and beached hull, for the smallest whisper of truth has guided a new course. I am impressed and both silly, as the wise men do not grip my mind so absolutely until it is one from my own labyrinth. The miracle of man, harrowing and spinning, the dilemma proof of our being.

I shall venture on, faceless, guiding and being guided, even as we cast gaze behind, even as we quiver and slacken grip.

The sea is in black rapture now, yet we are on the sands looking up toward the summit. I remember now, as I have since, the sea does not leave.

The question of the beach, echoing in all places, What would we be without such a sea? Summitless journey indeed. I grip the rope again, eyes closed and facing up.

Again press forth on the journey

of a Common Individual.