Hard rain and potent thunder
Posted: May 14, 2015 Filed under: Kindness, Meditation, Mindfulness, Yoga | Tags: Body Image, compassion, Hard rain and potent thunder, kindness, love, Marge Piercy, may, nature, Poetry, Spring, yoga 3 Comments…
An elephant herd of storm clouds
trample overhead. The air vibrates
electrically. The wind is rough
as hide scraping my face.
Longhaired rain occludes the pines.
This storm seems personal. We
crouch under the weight of the laden
air, feeling silly to be afraid.
Water comes sideways attacking
the shingles. The skylight drips.
We feel trapped in high surf
and buffeted. When the nickel
moon finally appears dripping
we are as relieved as if an in-
truder had threatened us and
then walked off with a shrug.
Morning in May
Posted: May 7, 2015 Filed under: Kindness, Meditation, Mindfulness, Yoga | Tags: blogging, compassion, freshly pressed, kindness, love, may, Mindfulness, Omaha, passion, Poetry, Prose, Rosalind Brackenbury, Seva, Seva For the Heartland, Spring, weekend, writting, yoga 2 Comments…
Grass grows in the night
and early the mockingbirds begin
their fleet courtships over puddles,
upon wires, in the new green
of the Spanish limes.
Their white-striped wings flash
as they flirt and dive.
Wind in the chimes pulls music
from the air, the sky’s cleared
of its vast complications.
In the pause before summer,
the wild sprouting of absolutely
everything: hair, nails, the mango’s
pale rose pennants, tongues of birds
singing daylong.
Words, even, and sudden embraces,
surprising dreams and things I’d never
imagined, in all these years of living,
one more astonished awakening.
First Yoga Lesson
Posted: April 30, 2015 Filed under: Kindness, Meditation, Mindfulness, Yoga | Tags: blogging, compassion, First Yoga Lesson, happiness, health, kindness, life, love, Mary Oliver, meditation, Mindfulness, musings, natural, nature, Omaha, passion, Poetry, Seva, Seva For the Heartland, yoga 13 Comments…
“Be a lotus in the pond,” she said, “opening
slowly, no single energy tugging
against another but peacefully,
all together.”
I couldn’t even touch my toes.
“Feel your quadriceps stretching?” she asked.
Well, something was certainly stretching.
Standing impressively upright, she
raised one leg and placed it against
the other, then lifted her arms and
shook her hands like leaves. “Be a tree,” she said.
I lay on the floor, exhausted.
But to be a lotus in the pond
opening slowly, and very slowly rising–
that I could do.
For What Binds Us
Posted: April 14, 2015 Filed under: Kindness, Meditation, Mindfulness, Yoga | Tags: Earth Day, Jane Hirshfield, life, love, nature, Omaha, passion, Poetry, yoga 4 Comments…
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
April 5, 1974
Posted: April 9, 2015 Filed under: Kindness, Meditation, Mindfulness, Yoga | Tags: compassion, faith, hope, kindness, love, Mindfulness, natural, passion, Poetry, Richard Wilbur, Spring, yoga 4 Comments…
The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law,
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.
CultFit 