Yes, hooray for poetry readings!

A comment to my last post suggests I put some poetry up. I am so fed by your comments posted to this blog and hope you are all appreciating each other as well. Wish I had more time to celebrate last night's reading as an event -- the setting, the kind-hearted and lovelyworded folks I met -- but there are so many other beautiful pursuits begging for my attention just now. I am writing with the kids, preparing for 2 classes I am leading today (NVC), cooking dinner, lunch, and always and forever the dishes... I am awash in wonder. So here are a couple of poems from this year:

Birthing Love Song


This is just
the journey of birth,
the labor that brings life
into light.
It is a natural process
unfolding.
Stay with it.
Breathe.
Do not be afraid.
There are mothers and
lovers here before
you.
There are those who
will come after, each
to hunker down into her own
labor,
spilling her blood,
the sheer sensation of stretching open wide
and open wide
to let life through.
This is the sacred center of
love unwinding.
Breathe through it.
The contraction expands,
tightening to release.
And this I know:
you will have enough strength
in you to do this work.
Enough courage.
You will have just enough.
You will forget everything you ever
knew about birthing,
about love.
You will forget your
nakedness.
In the heart of all sensation, you
will forget even
yourself
and your breath will be carried
forward from your ancestors
through you
to the next generation.
You will know nothing and
it will be more in that moment
than you have ever
known.
Breathe into it.
And remember:
there is no promise that you
will ever birth or love
again.
Let that inform your attention.
Labor in love,
not fear.
Trust in the pain to
guide you.
It takes time.
Savor it and hold
it gently, this work,
even when it screams.
And it will change you.

************

Flash Flood


this pale dream is laid open a thousand
miles wide, all
sagebrush and sand stretched
thin under
blue.

if i could sniff a storm coming, i’d
hightail for tall places,
wrap my coat around me twice,
thank my inner weather
vane.

i wonder how they’d clock me if i
could run so fast as
that – pushing wind to
gravity, two breaths before
the flood,
cracking sky to
let me in.

***********

And thanks for the request!

Persistence and Letting Go

Did I say, "the sun came out and we headed for the garden"? Some modernday mother wagoning off into the sunset with cute kids? Did I give you the impression that the garden is a peaceful place where tension melts with the spring rains?

Well, maybe for a pansy.

The anxiety is wound only in me, and the earth is one of the few places that pulls that tiger by the tail in a way that sends me spinning. Yesterday afternoon, I dug into my bed of greens with thoughts of transforming it into carrots.

The topside mess of cleavers, mache, sprouting broccolli, kale, and other green unidentifiables went to the bunnies. I discovered a couple of heads of lettuce buried in there, too, which I took out for us. Then I started digging.

What roots! Where was the dirt? Spade after spade turned up a tightly laced matrix of fine hairy root mass (oh, tightly wound, like me!) and the turning created... lumps. I cast a glance at the carrot starts my friend, Nick, had passed to me and remembered my solemn vow to have them in this week. Planted into... lumps?

Now, this is a little embarrassing. I've been gardening for years, and still I'm stymied by these little adjustments to my vision. I could have straightened my glasses. But no. Instead I looked around my yard. Twenty trees and bushes in a holding spot in the earth waiting to have their beds dug. A patch of grass slated to be obliterated while daily it steals into every other bed around it. A tree to come down. And then, again, the grasssssses, insssidiousss grassses creeeping into everythingandall.

Sigh.

Some days you just want to throw down your shovel. What would a Good Gardener do? He** if I know. But I'll tell you what I did.

I kept digging. It got a little less lumpy.

And I'm thinking: maybe I can get my orange food from something other than a root crop. I eat too dang many carrots, anyway.

Conflict resolution ad infinitumumumum

Reciting the months of the year, Trinidad (age 7) is angry that Sam (age 5) wants his own turn without "help" from his brother. He storms out of the house. When he returns, Trinidad says the only support he would like from me is some help in "killing" someone (doesn't everymother quake to hear it?). I ask him how he is feeling and we move toward playfulness in saying it louder and louder, giggling a little, but still "frustrated and annoyed."

Clarity surfaces about Trin's needs to be seen for what he knows but a desire to be "invisible" around what he does not. He only wants to be heard reciting the months he can successfully put in a line. With Sam's help, we come up with a solution that works for all. Trin will "help" me by saying the ones he knows. Quickly he realizes that he knows almost all and feels relieved, his confidence returned.

Then Sam shows how the stuffed bear can do yoga on my ball. His older brother takes the bear, saying he is afraid that if he does not just take it, Sam will not offer or be willing to share it. I take a breath and glance furtively about me for the nearest Deep End. The previous conflict, only moments under our belt, took about 20 minutes to work through. And now we're 7 minutes into this one.

How long will I last?

I connect with my own feelings of exhaustion, really longing for ease in this moment. Peace. Connection. I find relief in this self-empathy. And I realize that the overwhelm I felt a moment before had to do with the thought that the challenges might go on and on, be more than I could stay present for. But only this is the present. Only now.

And I am doing it.

Then comes the sweet reality that my children don't enjoy conflict either. While we prefer the resolution process of NVC to simply duking it out and dividing ourselves into different rooms (not that any of these are entirely abandoned, mind you), we would all still rather find the places we do connect with joy. We prefer the ease of harmony to the tension of dissonance, every one of us.

And I know that my greatest support lies here. In being human -- all of us, not one with an infinite capacity to stay present for conflict, nor the slightest inclination to spend more time here than would meet needs.

We get through the challenge of The Bear on the Ball, the boys agreeing to turns, hearing each others' frustrations, needs for autonomy unmet. And then I ask, "Can we all take a break from conflict for awhile? I'm feeling tired and needing some rest and the simple joy of connecting with you both. How does that sound to you, guys?"

"Yeah, no kidding, mom!" they both say with a laugh.

The sun breaks and we head for the garden.

"Worldly"

I have a friend who used to have a party every year to introduce the new label of a particular French wine (Beau -- something, I don't remember). Her taste is impeccable. Her style elegant and edgy with an occassional glimpse toward the practical. She is trained in law.

I asked this friend for her house rabbit's poop. She'd never had anyone inquire before. With a laugh she assured me that she'd be pleased to see it go to my garden. "I don't know how I'd get it out of the litter stuff we get from the pet store, though," she told me. "And I don't know what they put in that. I could switch to sawdust, I guess."

"You could. Or... do you have a paper shredder?" I asked.

"I don't, but I probably should."

"Well, if you get one, you could just use shredded paper as litter. The pet store doesn't want you to think too hard about what you have around the house that will work."

"Oh," she said. "You're so worldly, I should have known that you'd have some idea on this. That sounds great. Let's do it."

And to think: a college degree and a reading of the classics only got me to a place where I could wish to be worldly. Here we stand within the evolution of our language, a culture catching hold to earthen roots by way of words.

To be "worldly" now includes some cleverness with poop.

Bees here now

$2700 in bees delivered by a Russian who drove them up from Chico in the backseat of his truck (50 colonies in small boxes, wedged in) with 130 hives, bees flying, on the flatbed, a BobCat vehicle in tow. My bee man, Philip Smith, was impressed. "The vision," he said, eyes shining, "I wish I had a video."

One suburban mother with two children under eight in tow. A cell phone with a camera only they can operate. Four jars of honey for hungry bees.

Philip and I share the love of bees. For their pollination, their ruthless devotion to community, each being EveryBee, the queen the workers All.

It's about getting our hands sticky. It's about breaking out of classrooms to get our sensory experience by nature's design. It's about the invisible umbilical cord that holds us close to the hive, the fields. It's about learning the pathway home.

The boys and I spun open the tops of Ball jars, slathered honey by hand across the combs that would hang in deep frames side by side in cubicle hives. This tinkering isn't in the bees plan. We invade their sacred rhythm to support ourselves in the nourishment we provide them. Each uprooted colony hungry. "It's like landing them in a home with the refrigerator stocked," I told my sons.

Their hands so sticky. The honey, liquid gold, slid into upturned caverns and set. The bees flew around us, in our hair, our clothes. My boys quietly honored the bees on their foreheads, cheeks, wrists. "Look," they said. "Look. Isn't she beautiful?"

I took the last full frame to Philip who invited me to shake the boxes of bees into their new hives. I was not wearing veil or gloves. Philip's ease and expectation of peace is infectious. Hat tilted against sudden spring hailstorms. Clothes untucked. "Philip gets stung fairly often, and it doesn't seem to bother him," I told the boys.

"I've only been stung a few times today," he said. The boys snapped pictures on the cell.

I went into the hives, took the box full of bees, and shook it as instructed. They fell out in balls. They crawled into my sleeves. I stopped taking care not to touch them and rested with a more peripheral sense of their traffic. I shook them out from under my sweater. "This is a celebration," I told Philip. "My first time without protective clothing. Suburban mom turned beekeeper."

"I've never thought of you as a suburban mom," he said.

"You didn't know me before I kept bees," I said.

When dark clouds opened and let loose over the bee yard, I took my small swarm and drifted back across the fields, over the hill, and into our city. I called a friend on my cell to report the triumph: "I didn't even get stung!"

We took a cart at the grocery store and began our rounds. So much food in packages, plastic, paper. And then, the sting. Inside my underwear, a bee. On aisle seven, city girl took her reckoning. Or was it baptism on the wing?