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about

I’m a writer, artist and designer who thinks way too much, and tries to see the beauty in the world.

To the pond

To the pond

Yes, I’m boiling over
I’m stirring the pot,
I walk, listening

for the howler monkeys
their silence echoes
across the silver sky

A red-tailed hawk and a flock of sparrows
whisper in my muffled ears:
to the pond, to the pond, to the pond

words skipping like stones across water
like a needle, stuck
on vinyl that shines like black ice

To the pond, to the pond: insistent
like a tic, like the pot, stirring me
to the pond, to the pond where

three bubblers describe three circles,
liquid centers with white-lipped borders
ice edging dark water

A man is on the ice
walking slowly along the radius
as if walking to an altar

as if on a pilgrimage
he’s tracing an invisible labyrinth
trusting the ice to hold him, or not—

maybe foolish,
but I see only fearlessness
as I watch, breathing cold air

on the frozen edge
under the silver sky
alive
Alive like a stream

I wish I had red boots.

Alive like a stream

When I was Lainey
I played with iron shavings—
scattered them all across
the Formica countertop

Mama handed me the big magnet,
lucky horseshoe-shaped.
I gasped as the slivers danced,
alive like a stream, drawn to me

I felt magical
God-like, even.
Delighted, oh so
powerful, but then:

I developed a tiny crack
my power faded
my magic leaked out, powdery, invisible:
on my bureau, my bed, my scarred desktop—

I was scattered.
No magnet in this world
powerful enough to
pull me together.

Powerless,
I drank poems to survive
dug up feelings sweet as
winter carrots, strong as

hurricane winds stirring up
long-missing particles
suddenly magnetic, moving fast
dancing home

in torrents, laughing
the way running water laughs,
the way Lainey laughed, magnet in hand,
so long ago
Influence

Influence

Early stargazers coined the word
influence to describe how
ethereal fluid ‘into us flowed’
changing destiny: starlight, steering us

think of starlight flowing, think of it with me:
a glimmering river of it flowing,
washing into black velvet voids
filling the endless emptiness

changing darkness to insight—
pixie dust of healing
invisible oftentimes but— Oh!
how caring words can be forever felt

an ache in the sunny yellow kitchen
of my heart, where loopy cursive poems
were crayoned on construction paper
while soup bubbled, a brightness like

the stars the night of our first shared smiles
shining still, even on this dark January night —
beaming through time, flooding the bottomless
hollows of my heart, helping me steer
Running into a new year

This morning while reading and reflecting, I came across a favorite Lucille Clifton poem:

i am running into a new year

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me
–Lucille Clifton

“Yes, Lucille! Yes!” I found myself talking aloud to the book. (Okay, I know, I am crazy.) But she struck a nerve. It is so hard to let go of what I said to myself when I was thirty-six, (and forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight…) It is hard, sometimes, to love yourself enough to forgive yourself for not being who you once thought you might be.

It’s hard to accept your weaknesses as being part of who you are. But sometimes, your weaknesses contain important messages. Running from what I rejected in myself led me into deep confusion. And yes, I’m still confused, maybe I always will be. I’m accepting that as a weakness that helps me question the status quo.

I’m running into the new year, and it feels good. I’m focused on forgiveness and healing, within myself and in the wider world, too.

Wishing you peace and joy in 2015.
On the edge

Tamarack frond suspended in ice, Burnet Pond, December 2014

I lie on my belly on the asphalt sidewalk. It feels cold, even through my down jacket, but the pond has frozen overnight into such beautiful swirls and filigrees of ice, and the morning sun is skimming the frosty patterns in a way I cannot resist. And so I lie down to get a good look. This is a benefit to being older. When I was younger, I was stupidly self-conscious. I’d have worried about what a passerby might have thought, how dumb I’d look. But now I’m at that wonderful age, an age I am trying (when not terrified) to appreciate. Middle age.

I don’t care anymore what people think when I’m taking my daily photos. I contort to get the right angle, I twirl to get motion effects, I regularly lie down on sidewalks if the shot requires it. Luckily, I’m not old enough yet that getting up again is hard. Though I’ll admit my knees groaned in the cold today, and hey—who am I kidding? Odds are good that I’m past the middle, maybe well past.

The clock that runs like a crazy squirrel in my head sometimes runs away with me. I count down backwards. It’s less than 10 months until I hit the age my father was when he died. Or, more hopefully, in thirteen years and eleven months, I’ll hit the age my mother was, when she succumbed. Or it could be tomorrow.

I count the other way, too, to counteract the gloomy final ball-drop thoughts.

Lying on the freezing cold sidewalk, studying the tamarack frond suspended near the icy edge of Burnet Pond, I think of how life’s edges are always so sweet, and how maybe instead of thinking of being in the middle, it’s better to live at the edge, in a place of wonder and appreciation. I’ve been to the edge. If I focus that direction, it all comes into sharp focus. Every new season, every morning’s perfect slant of light, every shared smile, every ached-for kiss — fills me with light.

Two years and eight months ago, my light nearly went out for good, and just a stone’s throw from this pond.

I rise up from the sidewalk and stretch my cold legs, remembering. As I take one last shot, my iPhone dies in my hand. Right then, the light in the treetops across the pond flashes, catches fire—the morning sun is reflecting off the top-floor windows in the tower at Good Samaritan, just over the hill. I know from memory that the light is streaming through the wall of plate glass at the end of the hallway on the Cardiac Telemetry unit, where I stood not so long ago, wired up and monitored, gazing down at the greening canopy of Burnet Woods.

The day I didn’t die, but might have. Every sunrise since has been a bonus. Even so, frozen within me are ancient worries, hard-wired worries about death. But I’m alive. I try to stay right here on the edge, feeling this sliver of now.

Now. Here, and alive.

Burnet Pond, December 2014
Singing to the sky

Singing to the sky

On Christmas, I give Annalee flowers, and she tells me how
her friend’s husband shot himself, how she found his body—
she tells me how it looked, but I won’t say

At the nursing home, Jo Marie tells me her son doesn’t visit anymore
her eyes shine like marbles when she says
he plays piano, he sings, like a bird—but he won’t come to see her

Later I’m walking home alone, singing, and the sky swallows me
like I’m a lost bird, like I’m Jo Marie’s son, singing but no one can hear
I fly away into dark blue

deeper and wetter than Lake Michigan on a summer Sunday;
I’m sucked up into blue, lost in blue, blue is rippling in the wind
silky blue sky like a scarf in the breeze, tight around my neck

I can’t sing anymore, it’s so tight, but I keep flying, can’t stop,
wondering how high, until I escape the world—escape myself?
How high until I become something else

become an arrow flying straight, flying true, into blue—
graceful, locked on a path, at last—a path, at last—
a point, a target, an aim, a place to rest

I’m flailing, trying to fly through this wobbly altitude
the flowers and the bread, delivered; but me? I feel weightless, unheld—
Even gravity has slipped away
Shavasana at noon

Shavasana at noon

Feel the golden light, he said
and I felt it, spilling over me
golden as sunlight through the honeybear
on the kitchen windowsill on a bright
October morning

You are held, he said. Let yourself go.
I let go—
sink into the waiting arms
of my mother, who sinks into warm earth
pulling me close, pulling me in

I go, go, go — into an opening
that yawns wide until I am twelve,
and I smell the honeysuckle air
tickling goosebumps along my
freckled arms out behind the white barn

weedy lawn and cemetery patch
Queen Anne’s lacy heads nodding in the wind,
corn stalks sighing in unison, I am there now
stretched across red plaid, watching the terns
high above me, on their way to the sea
My morning walk

An intersection, not far from the zoo.

Howler monkeys howl
sing lonesome songs in the rain—
carry me away
High tide in yoga class

High tide in yoga class

Now it’s time to let go of anything that
does not serve you, she says
I sink into the stretch

Breathe in peace
Breathe out pain
Harp music: a lullaby melody

Hush a bye, don’t you cry…
I hear my long-ago self crooning,
round baby latched to my breast

Blacks and bays, dapples and grays
All the pretty little horses
When you wake, we’ll have cake…

Oh, I feel such an ache
Joy and despair, inseparable twins
Brightness paired with brackish dark

Time to curl up, like a fetus
a reminder, she says, that we can always
begin anew

Anew floods me. It’s high tide in Ohio
deep-etched patterns melt as awareness swells,
crests—suddenly, I taste salt
Raking leaves

It is the last day of Autumn, a cold, thick-oatmeal gray day, and finally: I put on my rubber boots, and I’m raking leaves. It’s the first time since mid-October that the sleeping leaves have been disturbed, and I quickly realize it’s a bigger job than I thought it would be.

I live on a beautiful street in a center-ring suburb, one of my city’s first suburbs, with century homes and century trees—both the houses and the trees are big and sturdy. Maples, oaks, sycamores, beeches, mulberries, pears—their leaves fell all fall, layering up, narrowing the front walk until suddenly it was just a forest footpath. The decaying leaves built up along the edges of the walk, damply clinging and narrowing it like plaque in an old artery.

So I rake, scrape, pile and gather leaves up on an old blue tarp. Pile, lift, carry down the drive way and across the backyard, heave-ho up over the fence, letting the leaves cascade into the ravine. The heaviest clumps of wet leaf mold settle in the folds of the tarp, reforming into a mass with heft, like a body. I know now how it feels to lift and dump a body.

Over and over, I rake and repeat, dumping body after body into the grave of the old stream that used to run through here. All the while, I play a Patty Griffin song in my head. The song is “Making Pies,” but I have reworked it to suit my task.

You could cry or die
Or just rake leaves all day.
I’m raking leaves
raking leaves
raking leaves
raking leaves

This song makes me smile, on this, the nearly darkest day of the year. I can’t carry a tune, but I’m singing aloud because it feels good. (And also because no one else is outdoors! The neighbors all use lawn services, and I’m sure they will be thrilled to see I’ve finally decided to reclaim my yard from the wild woodland drifts.)

It strikes me, on this shadow-less day that is soft-lit and diffused, that there have been brighter days when I’ve been unable to see the very sharp shadows right in front of me. The shadows that are part of me, and of all of us. I was afraid of my own shadows, my long, looming shadow side that I now know is there to help me understand the light.

What joy there is in sharing darkness, in holding it up instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. I tried that—‘thinking positive thoughts’— and while I’m all for gratitude journals and happiness projects, I now see that you can’t dump the shadows like bodies. You need to hold their hands and embrace them and honor their existence. And then be grateful for their lessons.

I am so grateful for every beloved fellow traveler, my dear friends, both new and old, who showed me their shadows, and gently helped me see that mine are just part of me, and nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to run from. I thought pain was something I could or should try to skirt. Your shared darkness brought such bright light.

Darkness is as beautiful in its way as light. It is a sharp thing, brittle and bitter and raw and rough and dark and painful as wet bark scraping your skin when you are running from things and you fall into arms waiting to catch you, and you feel held, and warm.

That’s when you see the light in its brightest form: when you are so cold your teeth are chattering and tears are freezing on your cheeks and you are enfolded in a hug that feels warm, like a blanket straight from the dryer, wrapped around you, and you take a breath, and know you will be okay.

Even when the arms that hold you are your own scraped-up arms, and even on the second-darkest day of the year.

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