Letting Go of Before This Now

I untie the drawstrings and shake out the dreams (one by one). 

A series of soft thumps on the bedroom floor. 

They look so naked and unkept in their unwrapped state. 
Like baby possums, eyes shining, teeth bared, squirming on the cold tile. 

I pick them up (one by one) cradle them in my hands, sing songs of grief and longing, whisper of love and wonder. Into dust the dreams dissolve (one by one). 
Empty palms, the soft fur of hope and memories falling between outstretched fingers. I inhale, purse my lips, blow into the nothing that was never more than a slippery thought.

I shake out the old promises next (one by one) and they slink away, knowing of my resolve, knowing of their fate. 

I fill the velvety chambers of my heart with the Now and tuck it back in between waiting ribs. 
The room is quiet and empty. 
My mind dons a top hat and lays out a welcome mat for my heart. There is dancing to do in All This Space between the words and sighs, All This Time between the blood beats and synapse firings. 

Can you hear the music? That is my body singing in the elegantly autonomous and forever amorphous edge of the ocean’s arms in the very second where we stand, drawstrings undone and blowing in the salty wind. 
It is all breath and freedom. 
It is all shadow and release.

Sea sponge Heart

My heart is a sea sponge pushing against the salty ribs of my chest, a flood of brackish red floating through memories and age. 

The rings of felled trees ripple out like this heart of mine, like a drop on still water, like the singing of a whale from the deepest blue. 

There is an ocean inside of my heart and beneath that lies a forest and inside that rustle my fingertips picking up stones and twigs and driftwood on a walk through this endlessly chambered world. 

My sea sponge heart soaks it all in and seeps out and up and through. 

Squeeze. 

And release. 

Porous crevices breathe in deeply to fill the negative spaces, to free the empty.

There is no end to the swelling, the bursting, the dripping in and down and over. 

The rings of this tree stream outward, my voice carries into the deep. 

37 ripples through water has my sea sponge heart. 

The salty ribs of my chest heave and give and out it flows.

Into the 38th. 

Into this all. 

A Radical Heart

There is a seed in my heart.

There is a seed in my heart waiting to be radicle, 

waiting patiently to root and burrow and sprout fire-hued leaves, 

jagged yellow dandelions, a thick-barked sequoia. 

I will fruit into this radical seed, this web, this way of being. 

The seed waits inside me 

but the word is not wait when there is no such thing as time. 

When minutes and days are a construct of my mind. 

The seed knows no waiting:

it only knows nourishment and growth and life. 

 The seed is planted in my heart, warm and germinating.

My broken ventricles will be its bed, 

my freckled arms outstretched its trellis,

my song its rain.

There is a seed in my heart.

I am planting the world with its purpose. 

Fiction: Storied rocks

In case you have been wondering, the whistle I carved out of a willow branch has yellowed and dried into a stiff carcass of what was the notion of a tree. I keep it on the mantle next to the heart rocks and autumn leaves and smooth river stones that you I we collected on this journey. 

I am weighed down with the heaviness of hearts broken out of granite and shale. 

You are my heart and I hold your weight in my hand, craggy and cold, warming to my touch. 

If I could skip these stones over water, over the bay where we sat, feet in the sand, faces shining up to the full moon overhead, would the rocks sink to the bottom? 

Would they find a firm place in the muck and seagrass or would they toss along with the broken beer bottles and baby shoes and lost wedding rings? 

Would they become sand? 

The stories they could tell of warm pockets and well lined hands, of being witness to lovemaking in tents under the stars, of hawks screeching overhead and tiny ants crawling over imagined backbones.

All these stories crumbling into fragments, each grain a word, a sigh, the flip of a hand as you walked away. At the bottom of the ocean, all our stories mix and mingle, our worn heart rocks become a shifting solid ground. 

A home for Others in the darkness. 

Finally home.

Before I go...

My stomach tightens and churns.
I am going to sea.
I pull my hood over tangled hair, wrap my neck and feet with wool, pull on rubber deck boots and worn purple gloves.

My heart tingles and leaps.
I am going to sea.
I am in love with the idea, the action, the motion, the creatures, the deep dark mystery. I am elated and terrified. This happens each time I pack my sea bags and stumble down the dock. I imagine all those things you don’t want to imagine: the ship sinking in a storm; falling overboard on a night watch; knocked in the head by the boom; appendicitis 1000 miles out; fingers, arm, leg yanked off wrestling a line. These are things I should not think on, should not say or write lest they come true (knock on wood, spit over your shoulder, turn around three times).

Death follows me as flying fish skimming over the waves and swallows fluttering above the boom. That is why I sail. Not because I want to die, but because I want to live more fully, experience each breath with gratitude, savor each step on land or boat. I feel death’s whispers mingling with salty air and I respond with a quiet reevaluation of my life. What are my deepest longings? Who would I want to talk to as the ship was going down? What dreams have I neglected? What haven’t I done that I would like to do? Who are my people?

I have time out here to think and process and dream. Sometimes it hurts as scenes are played and replayed and no matter how much I try I can’t change the script. Sometimes I come up with ideas that make perfect sense 500 miles off shore but seem ludicrous back on land. Sometimes on dark nights I create strings of words and the stars help me garland the heavens with my stories.

I am a mere inch of fiberglass away from the dark and murky depths of the sea. I can feel her breath casting the boat over her back. I want to explore the depths of my own dark and murky soul, to meet her at the edge of dreams and tumble through the world together.

I don’t want to conquer mother ocean, or the wind, or death: it is not possible. I want to explore the things that frighten me down in my core because I know it will cause me to love them, the world, myself, more deeply than the deepest grains of sand at the bottom of the most remote canyons in the sea.

We motor into the river and the fear drops away. We raise the sails and I whoop in joy. I catch myself smiling and laughing and dancing across the deck. The wild dark waters swim across the hull and welcome us in a frothing confluence of salt and fresh. My belly is calm. My heart is light. With this movement forward, with this action of raising cloth to the wind, I find a piece of my wild self raised to the sky.


We have not left the river, we are not in danger yet, these waters are swirling but calm. On the ocean we will face bigger waves, bigger winds, bigger challenges, but we will be held by the seas that shake us. We will be exactly where we all need to be, reaching or close hauled or running on the perfect course, as crooked as our wind-dictated path may seem. Death will holler through the rigging during squalls and tuck us into our bunks, our eyes red and fluttering after four hours on watch.

Death and life, night and day will dance with the dolphins and whales off the bow. They will sing with us to the stars. They will steer us to the islands through our salty hands.

We will be wild, we will be peace, we will be alive as we are cradled in all that is and was and will be.

Fiction: Expanding

She grabbed his hand and led him from room to room, her fingers loosely coupled around his, tension between thumbs and fingertips falling away with each subsequent step.
She wanted him to follow, unled.
He slowed his pace as she raced through the memories of each doorway and plank, every window a story within a story.
She told them all. Like an accordion, the memories expanded in sound and movement. Her voice reverberating and then barely audible down dark hallways and up carpeted stairs. Her free hand fluttered into the past and reimagined the future the house would hold. She touched her belly round and hard. She touched the soft lines around her eye. She stopped and pulled his shoulder towards her chest, kissed his cheek shyly as if his DNA was not swirling within her belly too.
Every day was new with this thing this alien this person forming just inches from her heart. That was why he had to know the history. In case she swelled so large the house didn't recognize her anymore and erased all the memories (of her) in its walls papered with mahogany smoke and gravelly laughter. She had to do it quickly before the inches betrayed them and he too recognized her no longer.
At least he would have the memories of the house to hold him and remind him of the girl he once knew.