Barn craft

The planks are soft beneath my feet. Bits of sunlight scrub the splinters and wash the webs underneath a crumbling slant of roof and sky. Smoothed through decades, painted with wind and dust, the barn exhales into my breath and leaves me bathed in silence. 

Needle and thread, fabric and bits of the land. I stitch, I sing, I tie knots in string, tugging to secure every emotion to golden brocade, burying the loose ends in indigo and cream. There is love in this work, in this lack of thought, in the rays of warmth on happily worrying hands and weaving heart. There is closure in this craft, the spill of place into folds to take. 
It is done; it is now in a motion of its own.

I tuck away needles and brush feathers from jeans. I stand into the possibility of rain, the closing curtains of sky. I amble down a ladder, walk barefoot through the brambles to a house that has howled for my body. 

Meet me here, I say to the emptiness surrounded by wood and earth and water (full, content, infinite). I hold fabric and intention in my hand. Be my everything and let me go. Be my art and my tension. Be the dream and the now. The work is being stitched and loved and pulled taut in these gently calloused hands. I promise: though I walk, I will not leave.

Freewrite Fiction: Stars

In case you’ve been wondering, we have sailed through skin and sky. 

We reach up to where the two meet and cannot feel the difference. 

You hold a star in your hand, fingers cradling dust and light, waiting for me to blow at the universe, waiting for me to create a new milky way against the dark path we have traveled. 

Instead I lift my other hand to meet the first and cup the brilliance in my palms. 

 I don’t want to let go. 

You put your arms around my waist, tell me drop it all. You know it won’t last. Or it will burn through my fingers the older it gets, the longer it sits and invokes what we thought we would never say. There is a silence in the night that we can’t wrap ourselves around and so we walk on, afraid to be still, afraid we will disappear in the nothingness we have sewn from the sky. 

Where else can we go? We ask over and over as we fall down hills and run down valleys. Past the old cabin where you loved me so deeply, rough against pine floors and cobwebs, black widows watching us from clouded windows. 

You held my hand, fingers intertwined, you lifted me up and over the threshold and led me over the beach, mussel shells crushed beneath our feet. 

 It all seemed so easy then. 

You whisper to me: Let go of the stars. Stop reaching so high. 

All that you need is right here around you in perfect constellations for your happiness.

Red and Splinters

A flash of red.

A pile of splintered wood.

A memory of a young girl hidden in the branches, of rough bark and fishing poles, of grasping a finger with tiny ones of her own while stomping over pine needles and dusty trails. 

The smell of burnt pancakes and smokey bacon.

A flash of red, a pile of splinters at the base of a calico-ed tree.

The branches are gone, the heart is soft and tunneled, patches of faded gold naked to the rain.

He said it would kill the tree, all that pecking, as he traced a scar on his cheek.

Afraid to fall apart, fearful of being riddled from without, the core of this one died within.

The woodpecker finds the life inside, chips away at rotting rings, crumbles wood into earth. 

My hand falls from his to cradle the splinters.

And to let them go.

Mama Tree

Roots scratching towards the sky, fistfuls of soil clinging to softly wooded fingers. 

Those in the ground still hold out for hope, 

hold on to water, 

hold off this trunk from the forest floor. 

From her horizontal pose springs trees down the line. 

A dance of branches and solid trunks following a path that was once up up up. 

Now the lineage soars towards the jagged (firs, hemlock, mountains) horizon. 

The smaller trees queue up in their sky bent pursuits, business suits of bark and moss, briefcases of needles and dirt.

Are they young trees rooted into a dying elder? Or is it the mama tree fighting back against fate and gravity, not ready to give up on this being, not ready to decompose into the web of life below, sending out shoots? Are those young trunks her prayers to the Universe for one more shot at this being a tree thing? Is that what all young mamas think, unable to differentiate between the seed and self?

Branches tangle and confuse themselves as roots. 

The sky goes crumbly dark to match the tone of the soil. 

I reach up my hands to feel the rough skin of her back against fate-lined palms. 

There is no end, just roots and sky and branches and soil and the heartbeat of this giant forest within me.

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.

A story of a seal

In case you have been wondering the bones called to me first. 

I wouldn’t have found him if it were not for the rock to wake me in its insistence of another form. 

I caught my breath, a seagull overhead screamed down to me: That is not the truth! That is not what you seek! 

I kept walking, stepping over the carcass of stone and kelp. My breath returned and I weaved through driftwood and shells to the detritus far up the beach. I did not gasp as I nearly stepped right through the ribcage and onto the heart. There wasn’t time. 

I almost crushed the gut under well-trod boots.

I caught my breath again. How did I know there would be a body? Was it the scent rolling down the sand? Or the bones pulling me towards the rock-like body melting into the tideline? 

Clavicles bright white in the dying light of the day. 

Pools of saltwatery crimson between the ceiling beams of the heart, those ribs half thatched in nubbled grey. 

The weight of the belly sank into the sand but held its form. 

How was this not strewn every which way? How were the guts so intact with the skin so not? Yes the intestines began to spill onto the driftwood cradling the skeleton, the skin flailed towards the earth in tumbling waterfalls of what it used to contain, but the guts lay in the center of this undecipherable creature (save for the possibility of wings or fins) undiminished. That belly glowing and shimmering lavender and the faintest of blues. 

I wanted to touch, to wrap myself in the folds of this life, but the perfection of decay and untouched insides- vulnerable and resilient to the outside forces- I could do nothing but whisper gratitudes down those bones, into that gut, into the sand absorbing the life ebbing between its grains. 

There is life. 

There is death. 

There is all that intact, vulnerable beauty that lay between ribs and fins.

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.