Say ‘pomegranate’ in French

the anger is there, it’s always there

like a glint on the slide of a knife blade

thinner than a fire pin running through a grenade

(have you ever noticed, by the way, a grenade shape?

curved in like a fig leaf, wired with veins of a maze)

you know, you could hold them both in your palm

I once asked someone, “can you imagine? Holding a heart?”

he said without blinking, “as long as it’s still beating.”

What if a heart had seeds? could bear fruit,

die and be reborn in its own acorn and own accord?

the fruit of the seed is the fruit

the fruit of the grenade is the blood

the fruit of the heart is the same

“People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.” Barbara Kingsolver

Bhakti Yoga

Saturn Lessons

A pic of me when I was sick, under-slept and accidentally put hand sanitizer on my lips thinking it was lip gloss. Saturn lessons are fun. Just kidding, but you don't forget them.

Saturn is the six of swords,
waking up in a cold heat,
the kaa of the carrion crow –
solitary, slow with swift wing-beats

the guttural growl of a Viking
returning from war, with nothing
but a flag held loose like a sapling

It’s you on your knees on the cold earth,
iced grass cutting into your skin through your red skirt

It’s iron-nickel, metallic rock,
negative 8 degree wind-chill shock
in between buildings on a city block

It’s the worn horned hoof of a stallion,
the peak of a mountain, viewed from the top

Little Musings

Picture I took of some sunbabies and peep the heart cloud

Every day I walk to 16th and south to see the wild city garden that grows in a 5 ft. wide, city-block-long crevice space – in between the brick wall of the parking garage and a sling of tiny row homes all packed together like cakes in a glass case. I am not sure who keeps the garden, perhaps the row home owners, but somehow the not knowing is part of the allure. This little slice of magic. In the summer it throbs and drips with color: lavender rose of Sharon, hot pink and orange sherbet hibiscus, full-bushy-blushing pale pink peonies, rainbow colored zinnias, simple Shasta daisies, poker pineapple lilies, blood red dahlias, magenta ruffled irises, violet lily of the Nile, stiff and proud orange gladiolus, light coral trumpet-looking things I don’t know the name of, fluffy aslan marigolds, pure white anemones with polar bear black pupils – all of it grows here, side by side. Like the city itself, filled with a Thai restaurant here, an Italian pizza place there, the Israeli bakery and the Indian food cart all happily coexisting as if the continents never divided anyway. The bees buzz in between the flowers, who, if not for some careful gardener’s hands, would never have known the taste of hydrangea so close to frangipani. But what I come for every day is the water lily. It floats in a small man-made pond, no larger than the width of an arm chair. It peaks its lemon yellow face out of its white flame petals as if to say to me, “hello. I have been waiting for you.” And I smile back and whisper, “thank you for blooming here. Through the soil. In the water. In the city. On this street. In my eyes.” 

Links I Love

Been a minute, but it's back...

Toni Morrison quotes (rest, rest, rest in your powerful peace) also this article about her and this one written by her

What is non-violent communication? Probably the answer to everything

How to suffer like a champ by comedian Pete Holmes (also love of my life)

Why 99% of us don’t fill our true potential… (and no, it’s not because we don’t have Beyonce’s genes... or this girl's)

This Instagram account. That’s it, that’s the description. 

Gems from "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" by Joan Didion

“It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.”

“Of course we would all like to "believe" in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, thing have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with "morality." Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.”