I wanted to be good.
I needed everything.
I conducted ceremonies.
I climbed up, even as I dreaded falling off.
I made myself jump.
I wanted wholeness.
I came across myself many times over.
I knew I would always be leaving a version of myself behind.
I lived anyway.
Category: Ordinary Days
Leaning into humanness
Can I sacrifice my pull towards gathering power in order to lean into my humanness? There is poetry in this, if I stop believing that I have to be perfect. If I slow down and unplug for long enough to hear myself feel. There has always been poetry here. I can feel my beating heart, puffy eyes, my warm toes. I lie in content, open to my unfolding.
butterfly
Saw a butterfly today
Could not tell if mating
Or if carrying a dead comrade
The weight and stillness of the other
Made it impossible to tell whether it was sex or death binding them together
What is the difference, really?
To orgasm is to die for a second
To die is pure bliss
Sometimes it is hard to tell if one is being violent
Or protective
Loving or destroying
have I written this haiku before?
sweet cream treats melting
dreams of young summers smiling
so simple it hurts
PS. Have I written this haiku before? I think I have.
keeping them alive
it takes me two hours
to water all of our plants
keeping them alive
collapse is okay
I had this whole plan to write a long, well thought-out blog post today about emotional labor. I even started early in the morning, writing a paragraph before feeding the chickens or watering the seedlings. But now I’m collapsing into bed, a day full of writing for clients, teaching young piano students, strategizing about upcoming live shows, and home care tasks. I’m going to do a Tara Brach meditation and then sweet, sweet sleep will overtake me. Tomorrow is (hopefully, and, based on previous experience, always) a new day.
the end and the beginning
yellow burlap stretched over a wooden frame
turquoise earrings arranged piece by piece
too many nails in the wall
a work of art rather than a domestic task
the end and the beginning of an era
A word on entropy
Ok, I’m just gonna say it: fuck entropy.
is this what motherhood will be?
Dusk at the campground. Mother and daughter. Mother calls Daughter’s name once, twice, three times, four times. Daughter finally answers, “I’m here!” from behind us. Woodsmoke is thick in the air. In the city, this would be concerning. Here, it simply calls attention to the impact of concentrated numbers of humans on small plots of land. Mother turns around in her hammock, interrupting her reading for the thousandth time, to reason with her daughter. “Stay where I can see you,” she pleads, “please, stay where I can see you.” Daughter rides up and down the paved hill, over and over again traveling far out of Mother’s line of sight. Mother cranes her neck. I wonder if she is able to read even a single sentence of her book. Is this what motherhood will be?
getting lost on backroads
Top down, blind man navigating, high 70s, ice cream dripping onto overalls, sunburnt lips, skin touching accidentally on the stick shift, laughing at nothing, no radio, the man who never married, the woman who is newly engaged, the old and the young, getting lost on backroads in upstate New York.
Siena Rose 