The Music of Fireflies

Your song

Catches me in the front row

Voices bounce around like fireflies

Lighting up a note, now here, now there

And right in front of God and everyone

Your fireflies squeeze fire from my eyes

After It Ends

Yoga class, late sun in the window, glowing onto my face. I’m at work, of all places, in a bright conference room with chairs pushed to the walls. The instructor’s voice is quieting now. Lying back in Savasana pose, a screen of sunlight across my lower eyelashes is more blinding than enlightening. Squinting, I see the Sycamore trunk outside is dappled with patches of color like an oil painter’s melancholy palette.

It’s an ending, he is saying, every new beginning is. Yoga is the balance of opposites, and there is no moment like this one. As this practice ends, the rest of the evening begins, he says, and think about how you will live it.

To me, it’s bigger than an evening. I’ve been told I have just three months

Breathing Still

Back from vacation, with my brain as slow as a lime in an oceanside cerveza.  Only now can I see how much my mind works overtime.  Like the 405 freeway every brain lane is full, with thoughts honking and swerving to pass each other, overloading themselves to get into that carpool lane and move.

But now, clear air.  Wide open country lanes are few but free, ideas fueling the engine to get things in motion.

The freedom comes NOT from multi-multi-multi-tasking, not from getting it all done so that it would be all done.

Instead:

Walking the Sidewalk

From a skyward Seattle hotel room, I watch strangers walk in the rain, past a McDonalds drive-through painted into the parking lot like a toy playset.  The gray and drizzly afternoon is filled with people going about their business. They move on, oblivious to the cartoon duck overlooking the “Duck Rides” touring company, an old relic now penned in by modern high rise buildings and greyish-green hills beyond.  People on the way home from work, looking neither left nor right, not knowing who they walk amongst, stepping unconsciously from one block to the next.

They don’t know she is about to hear her name called

The Writer’s Hammer

Some days I want to stay inside the house, inside myself, like Emily Dickinson.  It’s all too fuzzy to bring out into the light.

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To Tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

But somehow tucked away inside that 1860’s Massachusetts home she dared the gap between herself and her paper.

Sparking from the paper to the world, was for her, too wide a gap, and I can quite see why –

The Hovering

It’s been a stretch of formlessness creatively, waiting for change to spark.  More creative input than output.   After writing about and for change, it’s been good to drop the agenda and just breathe.

It could seem empty unless I close my eyes and see the change already at work, hovering over the waters.

Inhale, exhale.

Ready or Not

Ready or not:

The restless waters

Seep the rocks of mind

Clean the clocks of time

 

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