Flying with purpose, of service
Protecting sacred Life
The Spirit’s natural flight
Brought to the edge
Of existence
By humans poisoning human food.
But today — she soars
Above the ridge
Of the rescue effort
Made by people who joined
The Spirit’s natural flight
To honor Earth Day, this year I am sharing two poems to show the beautiful and devastating reality of being a human on this planet right now. Both of these poems are remixed excerpts from my book Varanasi Sage.
“She Comes to Me”
I am soft and humble, yet unafraid
To share space with Titans,
Entities Unfathomable,
Spirits born from the depths.
I am a guest in their great hall.
Quietude surrenders me,
Dissolving me into the air,
The empty space.
Here
She comes to me,
The truest part of me, for
I am made of Her living body.
My heart turns over to Hers,
And our sacred Oneness,
Endlessly present in time.
“Where a Temple Once Lived”
Ghosts stand visible with
Charred, barren limbs
Naked arms reach for mercy
Bodies no longer breathing
No longer creating clouds
Nor home for animals and insects
Burned alive
Electrical wires cross the hills
Like music lines forming
Measures of a strange and deadly song
A transmission tower’s guilty buzz
Plays the melody composed by
Corporate greed
Man wasn’t exiled from the Garden
He chose his depraved separation
Life-bearing molecules, thank you, for falling
Each drop: an answered prayer
Animals and plants rejoice with relief
For more days in the company of green hillsides
For more flowers and frogs and bees
May the heavens continue to hear our prayers
And send dark clouds filled with hope
On a boulder, beside the ocean —
an emerging canyon —
beneath a waterfall and crumbling cliff,
I listen.
Faithfully creative, guiding the way,
waves and boulders collide in foamy syncopation,
painting bubble mandalas in the sky.
As the reclining sun made dense fog glow, I walked the path I had walked like a thread through my years. Memories returned a child, in these same feet, on this same path to the bus stop, imitating the red-winged black bird’s melody with her newly-developed whistle.
With my first steps, I realized my pocket computer remained on the nightstand. Breathing the mist that merged land and sky, I didn’t miss a step. I didn’t need it — that taker of presence — I knew this path by heart.
Along the creek, where we made movies with my father’s camcorder, and across the highway that never was this busy, I entered the forest. Owls lived in those trees, but now, only morning birds sang. Their notes brushed past the silver, camphor-scented leaves. Our mother accompanied them from a quarter mile away. Her watery voice now hushed; her soul now quiet.
A narrow trail of sand through sap spikes took me from the forest to the cliff’s edge. The sun, unable to break the clouds, allowed the sky to hug me beside the Pacific’s expanse. Water and heaven: indistinguishable at the horizon. Ferocity made soft.
Nothing between us, no dark window in my palm to disconnect my heart, nothing to take me away. In the salt air, I slowed to enjoy my solitary humanness and my awareness of each now.
My eyes embraced the world.
I stopped for a sparkle. With dew in diamond beads set symmetrically along each finger, a lupin leaf extended its palm to touch the day. Color called out and my eyes drifted to magenta muffin cup petals. Inside, on the yellow puff pillow, a bumble bee dozed.
I reached for my pocket to document the sight, immortalize the memory, grasp and clasp at this now. To share it with my friends and receive heart-eyed emojis — each one a chemical thrill. I shook my head at the addict within and her insistence to go back and fetch the screen.
Instead, with nothing between us, I sat and observed the bee’s bottom rise and fall as it napped in its flower bed. Royal palms stretched to me, asking me to stay beside the ocean, held, as mist strung glittering beads in my hair.
My heart, a seed within soil, calls the heavens to coax me out of dormancy.
My arms, oaks on drought-afflicted land, ache from the lost embrace.
My outstretched hands, messengers between earth and sky, cast pollinated prayers to the wind:
Beloved, do not allow your creations to wither. Without you, we are not whole.
Nourish our roots with your abundance; bring forth the flowers of our soul.
Deliver us to ourselves, and let our purpose grow.
Shifting, bending, building her heart
Exhaling incense, honoring grace.
When efflorescence comes to Lavender’s branch,
She bows her head in devotion.
With warm fingertips, the benevolent sun
Lifts Lavender’s chin and says —
It’s your divine purpose to fully express
The depths of our soul.
Passing life through bees,
Scattering seeds like words to the wind
For Gaia to choose
How she will live forever.
Musty perfume rises from sage and transformation
My boot squishes red earth
Mycelium parade on storm-felled branches
Their fabric assimilates my own
Harmony in exchange
Balance in giving
Crochet lichen wave to me from leafless branches
Unified in rhythmic pulse
Ferns reach, offering bright hands after pulling back in fall
Death becoming life never dies.
As the earth moves to the degree that aligns with my first breath, I am whole, having learned to tend to myself as if for the world.
I journey to a reminder of my origins. Crumbling orange bluffs, salty air, and windswept cypress trees. To the mother who knows my deepest truths and cradles them in nonjudgment.
Her winter spirit redecorated with remnants of trees carried down river, turned into benches and sculptures. An unrecognizable shore, aside from the turtle back rocks, gives me permission to see.
I am the sand, shaped and molded. Done and redone, uncovered and recovered. Swept away and built again.
I am the rock who has remained through every gale. Etched and refined into tide pool homes.
I am the wave, it’s lifetime unmarked by revolutions around the sun. Returning to the sea it never left.
Awakened on a new day.
Fresh spirit, eyes clear.
The weight lifted, a landscape bathed in gold.
Air fresh from the season’s first rain, perfumed with fragrant sage.
Leaves cleaned of summer’s dust, Autumnal sparkling.
Moss revived, reborn, like my spirit, soft and green.
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