Category: Northern California

Between Earth and Sky

~ Chelsea Lynn ~ Leave a comment

Pour your rain upon me

Until my rivers swell

And creeks appear on every path

Race through my forests

With your gusts and gale forces

Fell the dead towers

That no longer serve me

And stand in the way of our

Evolving Dance

Crash them onto my soft, supple body

And I will transform them into new life

While we sing of our union

Our balance and harmony

That’s greater and more powerful than time

Two Poems for Earth Day

~ Chelsea Lynn ~ Leave a comment

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

The Sleeping Bee

~ Chelsea Lynn ~ 2 Comments

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. 

Death Becoming

~ Chelsea Lynn ~ Leave a comment

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.

Aligned with My First Breath

~ Chelsea Lynn ~ 2 Comments

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.

I Carry Him

~ Chelsea Lynn ~ 4 Comments

I carry him on my back uphill. A broken pelvis, healed without intervention, disabled his body long before he was mine. Cool green manzanita leaves and prickly pine needles shake off their snow like birds in a bath. Beside them, I march; enjoying each boulder, each seed-bearing cone, each sage brush adorning snow. I slouch under dull pain in my shoulders. I had thought for years to train for backpacking, but never enough to start — until this disabled body showed up wanting the adventure as much as I. 

Behind gauzy clouds, the sun moves through a sky that morphs from bright to dark almost without warning. I check my watch. We’ve arrived at nowhere-in-particular and must return downhill. I relinquish my body from the backpack, careful not to tip him. 

His feet, wrapped in miniature booties, make miniature crunches on the snow-turned-ice. Perfectly timed to my pattering heart, evermore delighted with each mini-crunch. His steps a staccato. My strides: the baseline. Sloshing where snow and earth made mud. In one bright streak — a comet’s trail — still water reflects the sun that warms our backs, both covered in fleece. He looks back at me, checking on me, flashing his wide, toothless smile.

When I wonder too long, his mystery past roots sadness in my heart to guess. The only certainty: a guardian angel plucked him from death row. And here we are now, his steps and mine, crunching ice in booties and boots. Living our destiny.  

The Waters Who Raised Me

~ Chelsea Lynn ~ 2 Comments

I appear at her door with footsteps speaking homesick words

And pour world-weary troubles into her waves.

Longing for innocent longing.

She sings to me, just as she used to —

Soothing indifference, pulling my words into her crashing whirlpool,

Sweeping them out with her undertow

Tumbling and polishing them with salt and sand.

And in the space of my empty wordlessness —

She keeps my polished rock words and gives me her song.

✨ New Audiobook Now Available on Audible! ✨

~ Chelsea Lynn ~ 2 Comments

✨It’s here!✨

After months of recording and fine-tuning the words, the Varanasi Sage audiobook is now available on Audible! Varanasi Sage is a series of vignettes that describe the deep connection we can feel with nature and celebrates the ordinary miracles of everyday life. Click here to check it out!

“Walk through nature’s bounty in lyrical, nonfiction prose. Each sensory, rich, hypnotic step illuminates time and place, navigating nature’s creation in contrast to man’s destruction. Written in a series of vignettes, Varanasi Sage honors our sacred existence and ancestral communications through the unseen power that connects all. Varanasi Sage explores life, death, and the ordinary miracles manifesting on earth. Journey the depths of self-discovery to find the truest self, connected and whole.”

Soon, it’ll also be on iTunes!

If you want a quick sample, click play on the icon below to hear one of my favorite chapters, A Call to Vision.