you are a miracle walking

i greet you with wonder

in a world which seeks to own

your joy and your imagination

you have chosen to be free,

every day, as a practice.

i can never know

the struggles you went through to get here,

but i know you have swum upstream

and at times it has been lonely

i want you to know

i honor the choices you made in solitude

and i honor the work you have done to belong

i honor your commitment to that which is larger than yourself

and your journey

to love the particular container of life

that is you

you are enough

your work is enough

you are needed

your work is sacred

you are here

and i am grateful

—adrienne maree brown

Things that are perfect

are dead things.

Empty things.

A silence beyond change or challenge.

An endpoint.

A blank page.

You are a wonderful messy thing.

An impossible thing made of salt

and rainwater.

Meat and electricity.

A dream with teeth.

You’re too good for perfection.

- Jarod Anderson, The Field Guide to the Haunted Forest

I awoke

this morning

in the gold light

turning this way

and that

thinking for

a moment

it was one

day

like any other.

But

the veil had gone

from my

darkened heart

and

I thought

it must have been the quiet

candlelight

that filled my room,

it must have been

the first

easy rhythm

with which I breathed

myself to sleep,

it must have been

the prayer I said

speaking to the otherness

of the night.

And

I thought

this is the good day

you could

meet your love,

this is the gray day

someone close

to you could die.

This is the day

you realize

how easily the thread

is broken

between this world

and the next

and I found myself

sitting up

in the quiet pathway

of light,

the tawny

close grained cedar

burning round

me like fire

and all the angels of this housely

heaven ascending

through the first

roof of light

the sun has made.

This is the bright home

in which I live,

this is where

I ask

my friends

to come,

this is where I want

to love all the things

it has taken me so long

to learn to love.

This is the temple

of my adult aloneness

and I belong

to that aloneness

as I belong to my life.

There is no house

like the house of belonging.

- David Whyte

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
 some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!


Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
 empty of its furniture,
 still, treat each guest honorably.


He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
 as a guide from beyond.

- Jelaluddin Rumi

There is no controlling life.


Try corralling a lightning bolt,
containing a tornado. 

Dam a
 stream and it will create a new
channel. 

Resist, and the tide 
will sweep you off your feet.


Allow, and grace will carry
 you to higher ground. 

The only
 safety lies in letting it all in –
the wild and the weak; fear, 
fantasies, failures and success.


When loss rips off the doors of 
the heart, or sadness veils your
 vision with despair, practice 
becomes simply bearing the truth.


In the choice to let go of your
 known way of being, the whole
 world is revealed to your new eyes.

- Danna Faulds

I am weaving the tapestry of my life. I am spinning the threads of my past,

the odd and knobbly strands, the smooth and soft ones, it is all flowing like silk through my hands once I sit down at my loom.

Only when it all blends together, I can see the unfolding pattern I was blind to see before. When bits and pieces seemed like bitter blocks before, they now turn into a manifold ornament, to enliven my life on a tapestry of experiences.

The more I weave, the more I trust. Though sometimes I will bleed and blister, it is inherent to the weaver’s work and weave I must.

My tapestry is unique as yours, not better or worse, simply mine and as my tapestry grows, so do I.

I weave and I weep, I weave and I laugh. I weave in darkness, I weave in light.

This weaving never ends.

- Vera Agnes

Cure yourself, with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon.
With the sound of the river and the waterfall.
With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.

Heal yourself, with the mint and mint leaves,
with neem and eucalyptus.

Sweeten yourself with lavender, 
rosemary, and chamomile.

Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a touch of cinnamon.
Put love in tea instead of sugar and take it looking at the stars.

Heal yourself, with the kisses that the wind gives you 
and the hugs of the rain.

Get strong with bare feet on the ground and 
with everything that is born from it.

Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition, 
looking at the world with the eye of your forehead.

Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier.

Heal yourself, with beautiful love, 
and always remember… you are the medicine.

~ Maria Sabina

Look, the trees
 are turning 
their own bodies 
into pillars

of light, 
are giving off the rich 
fragrance of cinnamon
 and fulfillment,

the long tapers 
of cattails 
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
 and every pond,
no matter what its
 name is, is

nameless now.
 Every year
 everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime 
leads back to this: the fires
 and the black river of loss 
whose other side

is salvation,
 whose meaning
 none of us will ever know.
 To live in this world

you must be able 
to do three things :
to love what is mortal;
 to hold it

against your bones knowing
 your own life depends on it;
 and, when the time comes to let it go, 
to let it go.

- Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

— Mary Oliver

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—

The size of it made us all laugh.

I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—

They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,

As ordinary things often do

Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.

This is peace and contentment. It's new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.

I did all the jobs on my list

And enjoyed them and had some time over.

I love you. I'm glad I exist.

- Wendy Cope

Let a joy keep you.

Reach out your hands

And take it when it runs by,

As the Apache dancer

Clutches his woman.

I have seen them

Live long and laugh loud,

Sent on singing, singing,

Smashed to the heart

Under the ribs

With a terrible love.

Joy always,

Joy everywhere—

Let joy kill you!

Keep away from the little deaths.

- Carl Sandburg

In the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, even more than I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noise that makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable.

But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that -- but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For the time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty

of lives and whole towns destroyed or about

to be. We are not wise, and not very often

kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this

is its way of fighting back, that sometimes

something happens better than all the riches

or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant

when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the

case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid

of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

- Mary Oliver

Enough. These few words are enough.

If not these words, this breath.

If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life

We have refused again and again

Until now.

Until now.

- David Whyte

What’s gone has made you what you are

So don’t fear what’s ahead

Put trust in what will be, will be

And choose to live instead

Don’t live in the now worrying

What may or may not be

Take this moment in your time

And live it totally

There’s no time like the present

Breathe deep and feel alive

Living in the here and now

Will help you rise and thrive

Now is all there ever is

It’s the only time that’s real

Let the future take its course

And leave the past to heal

- Vanessa Hughes

I

I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I fall in.

I am lost ... I am helpless.

It isn't my fault.

It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I pretend I don't see it.

I fall in again.

I can't believe I am in the same place

but, it isn't my fault.

It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I see it is there.

I still fall in ... it's a habit.

my eyes are open

I know where I am.

It is my fault.

I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.

- Portia Nelson

One day the sun admitted,

I am just a shadow.

I wish I could show you

The Infinite Incandescence

That has cast my brilliant image!

I wish I could show you,

When- Hafez you are lonely or in darkness,

The astonishing Light

Of your own Being!

- Hafez

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,

coming back to this life from the other

more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world

where everything began,

there is a small opening into the new day

which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough

for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible

while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world

is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,

you are not an accident amidst other accidents

you were invited from another and greater night

than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window

toward the mountain presence of everything that can be

what urgency calls you to your one love?

What shape waits in the seed of you

to grow and spread its branches

against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?

In the trees beyond the house?

In the life you can imagine for yourself?

In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

- David Whyte

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

There is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

The world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

Doesn't make any sense.

- Hafiz

It only takes a reminder to breathe,

a moment to be still, and just like that,

something in me settles, softens, makes

space for imperfection. The harsh voice

of judgment drops to a whisper and I

remember again that life isn’t a relay

race; that we will all cross the finish

line; that waking up to life is what we

were born for. As many times as I forget,

catch myself charging forward

without even knowing where I’m going,

that many times I can make the choice

to stop, to breathe, and be, and walk

slowly into the mystery

- Danna Faulds

Start now.

Start where you are.

Start with fear.

Start with pain.

Start with doubt.

Start with hands shaking.

Start with voice trembling,

but start. Start and don’t stop.

Start where you are,

With what you have.

Just… start.

- Ijeoma Umebinyuo

Don't be fooled by me.

Don't be fooled by the face I wear

for I wear a mask, a thousand masks,

masks that I'm afraid to take off,

and none of them is me.

Pretending is an art that's second nature with me,

but don't be fooled,

for God's sake don't be fooled.

I give you the impression that I'm secure,

that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without,

that confidence is my name and coolness my game,

that the water's calm and I'm in command

and that I need no one,

but don't believe me.

My surface may seem smooth but my surface is my mask,

ever-varying and ever-concealing.

Beneath lies no complacence.

Beneath lies confusion, and fear, and aloneness.

But I hide this. I don't want anybody to know it.

I panic at the thought of my weakness exposed.

That's why I frantically create a mask to hide behind,

a nonchalant sophisticated facade,

to help me pretend,

to shield me from the glance that knows.

But such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only hope,

and I know it.

That is, if it's followed by acceptance,

if it's followed by love.

It's the only thing that can liberate me from myself,

from my own self-built prison walls,

from the barriers I so painstakingly erect.

It's the only thing that will assure me

of what I can't assure myself,

that I'm really worth something.

But I don't tell you this. I don't dare to, I'm afraid to.

I'm afraid your glance will not be followed by acceptance,

will not be followed by love.

I'm afraid you'll think less of me,

that you'll laugh, and your laugh would kill me.

I'm afraid that deep-down I'm nothing

and that you will see this and reject me.

So I play my game, my desperate pretending game,

with a facade of assurance without

and a trembling child within.

So begins the glittering but empty parade of masks,

and my life becomes a front.

I idly chatter to you in the suave tones of surface talk.

I tell you everything that's really nothing,

and nothing of what's everything,

of what's crying within me.

So when I'm going through my routine

do not be fooled by what I'm saying.

Please listen carefully and try to hear what I'm not saying,

what I'd like to be able to say,

what for survival I need to say,

but what I can't say.

I don't like hiding.

I don't like playing superficial phony games.

I want to stop playing them.

I want to be genuine and spontaneous and me

but you've got to help me.

You've got to hold out your hand

even when that's the last thing I seem to want.

Only you can wipe away from my eyes

the blank stare of the breathing dead.

Only you can call me into aliveness.

Each time you're kind, and gentle, and encouraging,

each time you try to understand because you really care,

my heart begins to grow wings--

very small wings,

very feeble wings,

but wings!

With your power to touch me into feeling

you can breathe life into me.

I want you to know that.

I want you to know how important you are to me,

how you can be a creator--an honest-to-God creator--

of the person that is me

if you choose to.

You alone can break down the wall behind which I tremble,

you alone can remove my mask,

you alone can release me from my shadow-world of panic,

from my lonely prison,

if you choose to.

Please choose to.

Do not pass me by.

It will not be easy for you.

A long conviction of worthlessness builds strong walls.

The nearer you approach to me the blinder I may strike back.

It's irrational, but despite what the books say about man

often I am irrational.

I fight against the very thing I cry out for.

But I am told that love is stronger than strong walls

and in this lies my hope.

Please try to beat down those walls

with firm hands but with gentle hands

for a child is very sensitive.

Who am I, you may wonder?

I am someone you know very well.

For I am every man you meet

and I am every woman you meet.

- Charles C. Finn

After carrying the weight of all this damage

for over thirty years, I wanted to be rid of it.

And not just the smell of it—all of it.

To remove it from my body like a malignant

growth or parasite. To deposit it in into

something: a jar, a forgotten account,

someone else’s body. To throw the shame

away. Into the trash. Into the ocean. Into a fire.

To archive the pain like slave schedules or

census records that no longer spoke of my

existence. This poem is a scar that reveals the

onceness of a wound, a curated show in which

joy, bitterness, and unknown patrons attend.

It is an elegy to mourn the parts that were

shamefully discarded like scraps and a song

to celebrate the vibrant parts that still remain.

It is unsolicited advice stuffed back into the

throat. It is a how-to book misplaced on the

shelf. It is an old family map passed down

from great-grandmother to grandmother.

My father told me to go this way. I didn’t

listen, thank god. What can one do when it

was her own father who once used the same

map and found only the weight of all his

damage at the end of the road? Too tired to

turn back, he built his house there: a wife in

the kitchen, two children at the end of a

leather belt, a small dog crying in the yard.

I ran away from home and found men who

ate deliciously at the good corners of my

body. I ran away from home where we were

predators and weapons and the wounded.

We became fluent in the small-necked

language of control, our house illuminated

with gaslight. Was it because we were the

daughters of a mother who told us, “At least

he provides for us”? Was it because we grew

up wishing that one day he wouldn’t come

home? Was it because men took us and ruined

us, and our parents—reminded of their own

taking and ruin—turned away in shame?

Rather than chew on the answers, rather than

revisit that house, I will lay it all here, in this

poem, and pretend it never happened: my

body, my parents, the men. I will bury it

under the fruit filling—I am mother now.

Everything must be sweet. Everything must

be perfect, clean. This poem, too. Still,

I hope my children read it. I hope they see

themselves reflected in the fine print. I hope

they know it’s not their fault.

- Wendy Thompson Taiwo

There will be bad days. Be calm. Loosen your grip, opening each palm slowly now. Let go. Be confident. Know that now is only a moment, and that if today is as bad as it gets, understand that by tomorrow, today will have ended. Be gracious. Accept each extended hand offered to pull you back from the somewhere you cannot escape. Be diligent. Scrape the gray sky clean. Realize every dark cloud is a smoke screen meant to blind us from the truth, and the truth is, whether we see them or not – the sun and moon are still there and always there is light.

Be forthright. Despite your instinct to say, “it’s alright, I’m okay” – be honest. Say how you feel without fear or guilt, without remorse or complexity. Be lucid in your explanation, be sterling in your oppose. If you think for one second no one knows what you’ve been going through; be accepting of the fact that you are wrong, that the long drawn and heavy breaths of despair have at times been felt by everyone – that pain is part of the human condition and that alone makes you a legion.

We hungry underdogs, we risers with dawn, we dissmissers of odds, we blessers of on – we will station ourselves to the calm. We will hold ourselves to the steady, be ready, player one. Life is going to come at you armed with hard times and tough choices, your voice is your weapon, your thoughts ammunition – there are no free extra men, be aware that as the instant now passes, it exists now as then. So be a mirror reflecting yourself back, and remembering the times when you thought all of this was too hard and that you’d never make it through.

Remember the times you could have pressed quit – but you hit continue. Be forgiving. Living with the burden of anger, is not living. Giving your focus to wrath will leave your entire self absent of what you need. Love and hate are beasts and the one that grows is the one you feed. Be persistent. Be the weed growing through the cracks in the cement, beautiful – because it doesn’t know it’s not supposed to grow there. Be resolute. Declare what you accept as true in a way that envisions the resolve with which you accept it.

If you are having a good day, be considerate. A simple smile could be the first-aid kit that someone has been looking for. If you believe with absolute honesty that you are doing everything you can – do more.

There will be bad days, times when the world weighs on you for so long it leaves you looking for an easy way out. There will be moments when the drought of joy seems unending. Instances spent pretending that everything is all right when it clearly is not, check your blind spot. See that love is still there, be patient. Every nightmare has a beginning, but every bad day has an end. Ignore what others have called you. I am calling you friend. Make us comprehend the urgency of your crisis. Silence left to its own devices, breed’s silence.

So speak and be heard. One word after the next, express yourself and put your life into context – if you find that no one is listening, be loud. Make noise. Stand in poise and be open. Hope in these situations is not enough and you will need someone to lean on. In the unlikely event that you have no one, look again. Everyone is blessed with the ability to listen. The deaf will hear you with their eyes. The blind will see you with their hands. Let your heart fill their newsstands, let them read all about it. Admit to the bad days, the impossible nights. Listen to the insights of those who have been there, but have come back. They’ll tell you; you can stack misery, you can pack despair, you can even wear your sorrow – but come tomorrow you must change your clothes.

Everyone knows pain. We are not meant to carry it forever. We were never meant to hold it so closely, so be certain in the belief that what pain belongs to now will belong soon to then. That when someone asks you how was your day, realize that for some of us – it’s the only way we know how to say, “Be calm. Loosen your grip, opening each palm, slowly now – let go.

- Shane Koyczan

“It isn’t as easy as being ‘something that happened to you,’

A package you opened once,

You will wake up in a new zip code,

Have to wander your way home,

Carry a few of the things you love to this new place you live in now,

So, you buy throw pillows,

You put up twinkle lights and have a big celebration,

Point at the open windows and tell everyone who has ever see you crying,

‘Look! Look how I have not caged myself! Look what I have built out of two paint buckets and the blessing of my still here body!’

But trauma leans into the bar cart,

Spills a drink on the new rug,

Breaks off the door handle on his way out,

Trauma sends you letters without warning for the rest of your life just so you remember,

Trauma knows exactly where you live,

Who did you think built the house?”

- Brenna Twohy

The pain that made you

the odd one out

is the story

that connects you

to a healing world.

- Tanya Markul

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

- Mary Oliver

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

- Emily Dickinson

Come new to this day.

Remove the rigid

overcoat of experience,

the notion of knowing,

the beliefs that cloud

your vision.

Leave behind the stories

of your life. Spit out the

sour taste of unmet expectation.

Let the stale scent of what-ifs

waft back into the swamp

of your useless fears.

Arrive curious, without the armor

of certainty, the plans and planned

results of the life you’ve imagined.

Live the life that chooses you, new

every breath, every blink of

your astonished eyes.

- Rebecca del Rio