Author Archives: katie

Heart rocks

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The heart can be as cold as stone.  Yet it can crystalize stories, faces, places and hold them clenched inside.  My heart wants to stretch out, hug the unhuggable, reach the unreachable–as well as use hands for helping.

But not everyone really wants help.  Not everyone sees they need help.  The diseases of denial, addiction, despair and self-loathing keep many tough and rugged like worn out leather.  Clearly change will happen, with or without my help.

Detaching with love is a bizarre phrase, thankless practice and essential surrender.  Don’t do something, just stand there.  After a life of running and helping and finding myself sinking backwards into muddy black dead swamp, as I stand still I can be fertilized.  It will help that I stop digging deeper.

I call upon the mother gods today: Juno, Mary, Miriam, Pavarti, and the compassion of Kwan Yin to stand for me, as I help others by doing nothing.  I hold my heart within my own chest and let the light shine out.

Honoring Uncertainty

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Sometimes I just can’t decide…yet.  There are days that precede a turn in the road and it is still foggy ahead.  Which way will I walk?  New experience or a newer experience of saying no thank you?  You can see the fork in the road come closer with each step–no matter how tiny, no matter how I shuffle.

How to honor this time of indecision–how to allow the unknown next right action to show itself.  It will be clear, it will be done, I will survive (or not).

At the same time, listening to an old friend on the phone awaiting news of terminal disease taking over his slight life-beaten body.  Nothing to do but to hear the train roaring towards us in the distance.  We will all leave this world with a body that is done.

Today I open open open once again, practicing over and over the mystical exercise of brilliantly embracing every minuscule moment of grace on this thrilling planet encased in this perplexing mix of clay and cosmic spiritual dust.

Awakening

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Sometimes just a phrase catches my heart, other times it is a constant practice of retraining my brain that wakes me up.  Many metaphysical mornings I am sluggish to see the clarity.  Even when the sun shines on my fingers over the keys.

I still see Diana’s deer standing tall and simply proud in the soft endless Michigan fields and gentle scattered forests.  Gazing into Her doe-soft eyes, I affirm my trust in the path toward being more of who I am.  My heart has to open more, my arms need to rest out instead of closed tight around my chest.

May I be a heritage tree in Your forest, deeply rooted in Your cycling seasons of affection, nourished in rain and sun, branching out as I am called.

Flat roads and fields

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Last week I was in Michigan.  It is flat compared to the northwest.  It is hot, humid and the landscape is endless fields.  Corn was as high as my shoulder, deer stood still watching me speed by, careful to freeze unless I slowed down to say hello.

This trip reminded me of the endless landscape of a family–continuous fields of the same, hot and humid intensities, and dark clouds of cool rain showers.  Grandma sat and enjoyed the show from a high perspective of soon releasing all bodily limitations.  Little kids explored tiny cannonball jumps into the richness of a pool in hot summer.  Fancy dresses on little and big girls revealed the dreams of the young.  Men in fancy suits strutted their strength and power to please.

The sad scenes of addiction, victim, emptiness and frantic hiding were there, are still being caressed as reflections of true human life.  I am practicing not to suck on them, but allow them to drip out, tear by tear.

I prefer today to see Diana standing near the purity of a doe beside the Path.  She stands for me, clear and content.  Her eyes remind me that I am safe in Her forever forest of true love.  Right here, right now.

You can’t hide

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Again with the old man drunk on the Divine.

You are the Sun in drag.
You are the Divine hiding from yourself.

You are a divine elephant with amnesia
Trying to live in an ant
Hole.

An elephant with amnesia, trying to live in an ant hold.  That does sound so familiar.  We try to live small and deny our greatness.  The brilliance that lives inside of us is the Divine that created the cosmos playing with clay.

What would She do if She were you today?  How would He live and breathe if He came to play on the earth in your tender human body?  What wild laughing dance would we be swirling if we knew that the Divine were living in my heart today?

What I really want to do

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Hafiz said it first:

All
These words
Are just a front.
What I would really like to do is
Chain you to my body,
Then sing for days
And days and
Days
About
The Divine
One.

But the words are so tiny, and the Divine is so big.  So many believe too big to touch or feel or hear or smooch.  Smooching with the Divine is better than honey butter on fresh made bread.  Caressing the closeness of Her soft Presence is only available to those who believe in the unbelievable.  Aren’t we the lucky ones?!

Mystic Morning

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This is how a mystic spends his day (Hafiz):

Slipping
On my shoes,
Boiling water,
Toasting bread,
Buttering the sky:
That should be enough contact
With Her in one day
To make anyone
Crazy.

Love makes every simple movement a cherished and celebrated event.  Waking with your lover, the unmade bed is rumpled like a queen’s velvet cape resting at her feet.  Opening up the door for the day’s fresh sun reminds me of galaxies I could have chosen.  But right here, right now, there is no place but Your Love breathing me.  The day dawns and my wedding feast awaits.

Humming Hafiz

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More to give you from another time and another place to here and now.

I wish I could speak like music.
I wish I could put the saying splendor
Of the fields into words
So that you could hold Truth
Against your body
And dance.

I am trying the best I can
With this crude brush, the tongue,
To cover you with light.

Imagine fields from the 12th century that he sees: golden waves of soft hills in ancient sunset.  Just listen to the tingling jingling music from the dancing feet of young veiled women swaying circles among spirals with handsome men inebriated with the heat of the desert night, swirling in ecstasy with Her Love breathing so close to my ticklish throat.

Time travel

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I like time travel.  Actually, I am not here now.  I am in another state, warmer weather, and not (as I am now) clicking on the keys.  Of course, I am never really here when you read this.  If there is indeed readers to this tiny human heart ramble rumble.  While traveling, I will be listening to the timeless crystallized love of Hafiz for the One he loved.  The same One I love.

Here is one for today:

Write all that worries you on a piece of parchment;
Offer it to the One.
Even from the distance of a millennium

I can lean the flame in my heart
Into your life

And turn
All that frightens you
Into holy
Incense
Ash.

May I be the sacred dust that gathers at Your feet.  May I be the tiniest flame on the smallest candle in Your heart.  May I burn with love unceasing that lights my day.

She lifts her skirts

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Again, thanks to Hafiz:

Sometimes I say to a poem,

“I just don’t have the strength
To wring out another drop
of the Sun.”

And the poem will often
Respond

By climbing up onto a barrom table:

Then lifts her skirt, and winks,

Causing the whole sky to fall.

May the sky fall on me every moment.  May Her skirts swirl around me and Her laughter fill every bit of the morning air.  Let me stay up all night and stare up at Her flashing rustling Love.