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November 26 - November 26, 2024
Poetry is an odd creature.
you can miss the point of anything.
How many generations have you hosted? What do they name the wilderness of you?
They say cut all the wood you think you will need for the night, then double it. Cut it during the daylight when fuel seems irrelevant.
The night can be longer than we expect. The wind can be colder than we predict. The dark beneath the trees is absolute. Gather the fuel. Double it.
Our bodies speak of contradiction. Bones and soft tissue. Teeth and lips. Sensitive resilience.
Wind and stone. Rivers and oaks. This old dance of opposing forces creating a unified whole.
You can’t think your way out of depression any more than you can think your way out of drowning. Asking for a life-jacket is more important than knowing the physics of buoyancy.
The Text You are a unique sentence built from the alphabet of our universe. The letters were here before you and the story will march on long after you’ve been read, but you will forever be a part of the definitive text of existence. It’s too late for you not to matter.
I wish I could know the whole, so I could love it more completely.
When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself. And then writes about it.
You are the flame racing down the fuse.
You can be still while the world is whirling.
You can live forever in the span of a moment. You can grow kindness in the soil of hatred. You can decide purpose. You can decide victory.
Our years are seasoning, but the meal is meaning. Our task is to become our truest selves and to smile at the knowledge that we will not succeed.
Limits You won’t see most of this planet. Under each rock. Beneath the water. Secrets of air and soil. Can you feel the joy behind this limitation? That there is always a new thing to discover, a new way to grow, is one of the sweetest parts of living, and it’s free and inexhaustible.
Unwritten 50,000 years ago, an elk was struck by lightening and lived. The ache of it stayed in her bones the rest of her life. There was no human there to see it or record it in words, yet it’s just as much a part of earth’s essential history as any song lingering in a billion human minds.
They let us tame an ancient, devouring force of nature, older than life, and stick it in a little jar on the shelf. A candle is a pet god.
Seriously Though If you can make peace with the unlikely fact that squids the size of school buses patrol the dark oceans at a depth that would crush you to paste, then I have faith you can also make peace with the unlikely fact that you are worthy of all the happiness you have imagined.
It’s an easy fact to forget. It’s easy to shrink your world to what you can see.
Words are jewels. Precious to us, but small and finite.
Pour a new word into the sky and see it fade like smoke.
Soft Our fingers are built more for feeling than fighting. Nerve endings prioritized over talons or claws. Our relatively modest strength. Our long, vulnerable road to adulthood. Our species’ success is the story of betting on understanding over brutality. It’s the wise, patient bet.
Your matter recalls cosmic explosions and you tasted oblivion before you learned your own name. Fear nothing.
“Love is just chemicals.” Yeah? So is the churning inferno of the sun. So is the bedrock of the earth. So is the living fountain of a blooming cherry tree. If you need to call upon the word “magic” to fully appreciate the beauty of all that which is vivid and real, do so. Truth and fact are sisters, not twins.
This world is not here for us. We are simply fortunate to live here.
Every memory is a ghost and the house they haunt is you. 27-year-old me is gone from the world, but echoes of him remain. The same is true for 17-year-old me and 7-year-old me. Those people no longer exist. But I hear their footsteps in the attic, walking where I can’t where I will join them in the memory of a future me.
Your moments deserve the same careful attention as your years.
Shuttle the old you outside in a mason jar. Let it climb onto the lilac in the sun.
You are the mountain, but awake. You are the rain, but breathing. You are the forest, but unanchored. You are the soil, but with choice. You are the sunlight, but dreaming. Soon, you will be these things again. Mountain. Rain. Forest. Sunlight. So, what will you do until then?
most of the matter that has worn your name is already spread throughout the world. We bury our remains in the soil of our lifetimes.
The substance of your form is not fixed. It flows like a river to and from the wilderness.
Death has no place in the vocabulary of nature.
