remains.
If there was an unanswered, unanswerable question, it would be this; how can you lead, how can you work and live as well as you can on any given day, without losing people you love(d) because they turned their opinion of you from one of apparent care and interest into one of derision and dislike?…
burning.
I believed in god my whole life, until I didn’t. I loved religion, ritual, jesus, easter, apostles and the long fantastical history of bearded holy men in long robes and the women who suffered them. When I lost all of this and so many more filaments of belief that strung me equally into hope and…
way.
I weigh 160 pounds. I want to weigh 155. There is not a day that passes that I don’t think about the equation of what I wish to weigh and what I do. Not a day that I don’t wonder if I go to bed a little hungrier can I wake up a little thinner,…
all.
I sat in a bar, inside a restaurant once, with a drink in front of her and none in front of me, because I was driving us back and forth from the nearby hotel where we both got the federal rate because we both worked for a federal program. She had driven here from a…
anyway.
It is possible, that the answer to a question of what to do, has a simpler, easier, almost impossible answer of what not to do, and that is why it is harder to hear. For any decision there is a risk to be wrong, to be clouded by the judgement of the voice in our…
paved.
I lived on county roads when I was young, dusted in the summer from farmered pickup trucks hauling hay to cows over the next hill. I rode a faded blue bike with no gears down our graveled lane way, leaning at the end into tree lit back roads, no lines, no lights, waving past black…
her.
To be loved be her. To hear her say ‘my love’, ‘my dear’— is a thread that weaves us then and still, my middle aged heart warmed as well as if I was a child. I look like my mother, young pictures of her sitting on docks and by pine trees, I see myself there,…
flight.
I accidentally felt happy. For days and weeks after the visceral, physical breaking out of the cocoon I was bound up in, a feeling kept flitting in my side view. Brief and effervescent, blue and bright and entertaining. What was this? It was familiar and fleeting and then swooped back up and out and I…
transfigured.
Folded into the wings I’ve grown are the ghost of legs I used for years. Legs of belonging, agreement, attention and finding what was outside me have lengthened into wings of belonging to me. Agreeing with me. Attention from me. And finding me. In all the loops and whirls of unchartered flight I learned for…
transformation. part three.
Is the end of the cocoon like the falling off of a scab? Wanting to be healed, pulling off a scab before the skin underneath is strong re-injures, re-reddens the skin underneath, flaming it back into the need for another growing temporary tough covering. Does the cocoon fall away when the butterfly becomes bigger than…
transformation. part two.
“It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.”Cheryl Strayed I wonder what the first thing a caterpillar does when it winds it’s last sinuous thread, closing its senses off to the world of leaves and rain and birds looking for crawling things.…
transformation. part one.
I am fascinated by life cycles, transformation, changing from one into another, shifting shapes and forms into something better, cleaner, finer. The idea that if you work very, very hard in one stage, you will earn the next, a graduation of a lesser self into a higher one. Safer. Less predatory. I believed that action…
holding.
“Letting go is a death to holding on.”Adyashanti When we have stayed still longer than is comfortable, when the chafe of life wears a ringing in our ears from listening too hard, too focused. When we have sat on our hands instead of deciding, as if the decision is out there, something external pulling it…
collect.
There used to be a time, when some of us of a certain time, moved away from home, and called collect. There were operators then, mostly women in my memory, who would come on the line when you dialed 0, asking what you needed. A collect call, please. Connecting the call the operator waited while…
transfiguring.
I was a caterpillar who talked of butterflies. I could see them, winding through air streams and lighting buttercups to dance with their winged hellos. I watched them, forever lilting while I stretched and arched along the ground, ungrounded. I was a caterpillar who dreamed of butterflies. The dip and draw of yellow dusted flowers,…
fold.
Sometimes a cycle can end with the folding. Even though it feels like the winds are pulling away the basting from the cloth, when the rains soak the pinned edges, all waiting for the moment when the sun comes out, the wind dries, and clean corner meets corner. So much of self improvement, self awareness…
you.
In so many ways I sought myself through other people, searching for someone to mirror back some understanding, acceptance, a place for me to rest for a few moments. Blending into another is hard to notice, hard to capture why I didn’t feel settled at the end of a shared day. What I found was…
new.
New moons are dark. No light found to guide a path or direct the way, no reflection from windows to see where the barns are, the dusted storage of past hopes and hurts kept alive and still. No wind shuttling clouds to the side of a giant lit circle of possibilities. No, the new moon…
dad.
You went somewhere I could not find you. That last year, on the phone, I would say your name as many times as I could. Hi dad. Thank you dad. I love you dad. Bye dad. Every time I said it another tie to who you had been to me, who you had always been,…
stay.
The things we want to stay, wish to stay, hope to stay the same, are the very things impossible to keep. Someone else’s attention, fleeting and fierce, wanes in the natural course of their next thing. Pointing in a new direction for them feels like a loss of direction for us. Unknown and unkept, the…
canada.
I was born, by luck and design, in a country that was free. I lived in frog soaked fields and drove in a bus to school past yellowed farms, wash on spinning laundry lines, and birds making homes in trees solid and sweet with syrup. At night, when the crickets sang their shared symphony, I…
grand.
30 years ago my friend Kris and I left our classes at BYU to go on a road trip to Cedar Breaks National Monument three hours away. We started the trip with cassette tapes falling off the roof of the car where we left them as we packed our Birkenstock sandals, hers real, mine fake,…
nice.
Recently, watching a reality show where a man chooses women each week until one is left, my daughter noticed that a woman was being nice. In the midst of an unfair and painful exchange this beautiful girl remained caring, sweet and received the main characters condemnation and stayed. It was an opportunity to talk about…
found.
Several years ago, in a closed off street festival, celebrating local art in the slowing down mining community I live, there was a necklace. It was simple, long, with a word stamped circle and a small meteorite stone hanging beside it. I held it in my hand, turned it over, switched hands. Showed it to…
own.
Which part do I own? Which question, sent, now belongs to me? What narrow pathway is mine to navigate, simply because someone else did not? There is a time when we believe a question becomes a command, that the act of sending on a sentence, with a lilt at the end, is the hook that…
unsaid.
The weight of unsaid words pulled my throat, tightened the smile that stretched across the history of what I had not said. The agreements I had made in my life, to fit into the world in a million small adjustments, meant that what I needed to say waited. Sometimes when I was alone, I would…
born.
On the day I was born, fireworks sketched the sky as my mother came back to her room, the bands of sleep that held her from the pain of this last delivery releasing her to see the shooting lights celebrating her new life as a mother of five. I would have been somewhere close, bundled…
ache.
What I’ve learned from talking to so many victims of traumatic events, abuse, or neglect is that after absorbing these painful experiences, the child begins to ache. Oprah Winfrey Being tired might not come from what you do in a day’s work, it might be what you work not to do; in a day, a…
wild.
There is a part of me that wants to be controlled, measured, predictable choices and responsible ways; I have believed there is safety there, no offense too large, staying under the thin line of expectations that will cover the most social rules. Clean, less need to reflect and reorder what I did, what I said.…
ground.
This is hallowed ground, the space I live now. It has seen, absorbed, reflected, cried, and held the living of a life myriad and vast, endlessly new and achingly circling back on itself. One more chance to say the thing I haven’t said the other go rounds. One more pass by, not quite yet, the…
undoing.
I’ve tried religion. For a good portion of my life I followed the prescription of fast, pray, read your scriptures. I wanted to know what it felt like to feel the spirit and then, caught, wondered how to stop repenting. I stayed on that road until it became a path littered with my own failure…
happy.
Are you happy, someone recently asked me. Sitting still for just a moment head turned to think that through I answered, no. That’s not a word I believe I am. You’re not happy? No. Then what are you? I’m not happy because I’ve tried that. I’ve done the dance toward something that feels uphill for…
begin.
My life has been lived in third person, so much of it a retelling of what has happened, a foreshadowing of what might happen, and all the winnowing ways I have gotten here, to avoid there. This kind of living leans forward and back, unsure of whether something happened that way, or did I retell…
end.
At the end of my life, what will I remember? Will it be what I think about now, the echoing distance of people from my life as its lived ever forward? What about those coming in? —their fresh eyes not holding me to my past selves, no old hurts held in hands I couldn’t quite…
note.
The last note of the song I sing you will be love. Never mind the other notes, the high and sharp ones, the instruments tuning their swelling chaos, the flat tones lost in the rush to be complete, finished. Never mind the dropped sheets of well crafted verses of all the ways I wished it…
gone.
I have learned a few things lately, some lived, some lost, some dreamed. I have learned that I love wholeheartedly who is in front of me, and am just now learning that those behind me lighten that love, instead of darkening it. The ones behind, those I have lost, through the turns of the earth…
hear.
I didn’t know you weren’t listening, that in all my talking and talking, you could not hear me. But on I kept, talking, explaining, justifying, rationalizing, convincing, pleading and pleasing my way to this moment of seeing. You weren’t listening. There was a bell being rung in your life, turning you away from the hum…
burnout.
Being burned out in this world as it is, feels like the last slow steps of a march that has brought me to stand in front of a tangled map, the ‘you are here’ emblazoned in the middle of winding ways, no clear path to get out of the maze of quick fixes offered in…
stop.
It’s difficult to stop when you’ve never stopped, hard to slow the thinking down in a brain that jumps ahead, weaving in the traffic of collective thoughts in any room; finding the way over and under the subtext of a shrugged shoulder, an inflection in a voice that blames and then denies equally, the sore…
free.
There are times, slow in motion, soundless, no memory of time passing, where a change can happen from one clock tick to the next. A truth, forever before hidden, steps forward, gaily dressed and obvious. The slow trudge of sameness over in the pause of clicking on a small square on a small screen; this…
cure.
I hold medicine in my hand, but I don’t want to take it. Read about better living, habits, and ways but don’t do it. I buy products and don’t use them, the promise of them working more valuable than trying it to see if they do. The next step remains hopeful by not taking it,…
forward.
I had a dream last year, during the time we were losing our soft and loyal black lab, Max, the end of his days a braced denial of what was coming, all of us willing him to stay. I dreamed I was on a high cliff, scary and sheer heights ahead of me, I took…
unwell.
I’m fine, I say, so good, no complaints—smiling, leaning forward, laughing back. Yes, for sure, I agree, how are you? me too—making sure the light is on, the vision blurred, the veil adjusted. Under it all I am unwell. You don’t seem yourself, I hear, and I’m caught—do you feel okay? No, but I can’t…
remember.
Part of finding the way back, to the place we left that girl, is to remember. To see her, to recognize her in the listed doings of every exhausted day; and when you find her, to stop, wait and listen. There are tales to tell of when she lost the way to who she dreamed…
listening.
I have headaches lately, the top of my head and forehead hurts, heavy and unclear, cloudy with remedies and wondering why. Wouldn’t there be a reason a headache comes back, a cure hidden under the tin tapping bones that knit my mind together. I live my life leaning into the next thing, like a car…
rules.
There are rules we live by, gathered in storms of uncertainty, handed down in dusty books of last names and grievances, rules of order and always to avoid suffering, chaos. The rules are unspoken but obvious, each of us bound to the codes of conduct we have signed, both for ourselves and others around us.…
freedom.
When you leave something, anything, anyone, there isn’t a replacement for the space it left for the first while. Habits, movements, settlings are upended when the space that holds them dissipates. The beliefs I held for so many years were gone in a two week period of tightening questions and unbelievable intuition. I hadn’t looked…
leaving.
The moment I began the deliberate slide away from the Mormon faith that brought me out west is a memory, visceral and clear. The sun bleached doubts held on high shelves kept up by my denial of anything faintly resembling a question lived together, harmonious in their agreement to look away at the first hint…
solstice.
Mid life has been an interesting turn of the needles, moments of stark honesty knit one and avoiding them, purl two. A darkening storm of truth in a coffee shop, eyes across a table saying ‘I’m okay’, hands reaching back over words thrown on a telephone line. This hat created to cover my eyes, until…
alone.
If I stood on my own, truly alone, would I be aware of the silent contracts I made to be someone for each someone in my circular life? If I were alone, really alone, what parts of me would stay and which would leave, dissolved in the altitude of not having to stay the same…
over.
There are places in a body that tell hidden tales of sadness, the fallen fragments of bending to fit another, the pain lit conflicted parts with warring stories. There are places I hold the weight of light things that held longer and together are made heavy; tight with the worried bracing of another day. This…
whole.
There is a place I have not yet gone, the last home I moved from, a few miles from here, Utah homogenized and church silent, I lived there. The pictures from that time are of a growing baby, my baby, adored and life filling, in a small miners cottage on a road between two unloved…
perseverance.
I am beginning to understand the weight of wild things, why someone else’s all is never enough for the endings we seek. The end to our suffering, the end to believing we do not fill up the skin of our life in ways that make us stretch toward the beauty that lands on the swirled…
solace.
On every flight, as the engines roar their assault on quiet skies, I lean my head back in the stick straight seat and let something go. I take my chance while I’m being moved, far faster than in my real-time days. This burst into thinner air feels easy to leave what weighs me behind on…
tenacity
The next year I began to live again. There was a girl, blond and fast and funny, and the day she mentioned she needed a roommate, I spoke up, and then went in the back of the restaurant where we worked together and cried. The rest of that year I laughed, we laughed, at everything…
grit.
I moved in next with the person who did not love me, who promised to forever, the tiny space not big enough to escape the strain of my continued presence. I spent days at the large storied library downwind of this despairing house; walking home in the dark, unaware, unconcerned and inconsistently fearless for my…
beauty.
After one year of the school run by the religion I relentlessly followed, I spent the summer on red blasted eastern cliffs, a place of stunning earth and sky meeting on a sanded horizon; the blue heron murderously still in the glass lined bay, held fast by the hunt for the next distracted fish. I…
speak.
I moved out west, driven by tailwinds and trailing lists of who I could become there. I went back to my birth certificate name, wore my dad’s suit coat as a jacket and scheduled all my classes for later in the day so I could stay up at night, dark windowed wondering with eyes dried…
strength.
The day I left the farm, my things packed in my sisters borrowed car, there was no one to wave to. I had a small studio apartment, rented when the time came for me to move, the only uncoupled one in a family that had recentered. It was fall, the violent colors of aging leaves…
peace.
The farm. We still call it that, the group of us, huddled under the warmth of what we believed it to be. What we knew it to be. It was quiet, green and rested, part of it a century old, the other part built close to it’s wise bones, newer, but integral. We would have…
belonging.
Sometimes I think about the stone I put by the tree in the yard of the first house I remember. I think about it sheltered under bare branches now, winter coming, snow not yet covering the gray rock sneaked there that sun spring day. Does it sit the way I left it, or has the…
go.
I wondered what did it mean to let go. I have saved endless quotes about releasing, leaving alone, detaching and letting go of everything that weighs us. But still, I didn’t know how. The things I sought, the tense ache of togetherness and the shrugging shoulder of independence fought a cloudy war that had no…
love.
How snow muffles the sounds a regular woods make, that is what I wanted, always. I sought solace as I leaned towards 50 by talking, words bouncing in between hard and soft spots in me, in those around me. I thought the answer was the volume; higher, lower, more bass, more treble, more balance. Turns…
anger.
I spent my lifetime changing by learning, perfecting, growing past the scars and making meaning even as they were healing. I traced my wounds into mandalas of enlightenment, repeating patterns deeper and tighter. And then, one push too far, one day of too much, one too many times, and something unwound into bright anger. This…
heavy.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t hold it. It was that I couldn’t carry it. I could hold it static, talk myself into the value of its weight. But to take a step and then another. I could not find the strength to do that. So I thought it was just the latest thing. Whatever it…
forgiveness.
‘Like all explorers we are drawn to discover what’s waiting out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it’ Pema Chodron There are quotes on each page of the journals I kept, words to guide the way to somewhere I believed others had found. The elusive graceful space of calm and…
forget.
I hadn’t not been whole, I guess. I had all the parts, had put them together in different ways, knit two ends into a circle, held in one palm. I had manufactured togetherness, believed in otherness, and held fast to my aloneness. The plan for me was to finally figure it out. Once and for…
name.
There is a time each day, that I did not always know had a name; the blue hour. When the sun has set, or has yet to rise, when the earth is still, and the pause of what’s happened and what’s to come holds its breath. In that very space a few days ago I…
beginning.
It was almost 30 years ago I wrote that fable on the beginning page, and read it in front of a large group of classmates I did not know at the university so far from my home. It was important to me to stand and say those words out loud, words that were written in…
blue solstice 