Prepare to be amazed

September 26, 2013

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That’s what my son says each time he’s about to show me his greatest latest feat—leaping off the couch into a “triple double flip”, Did you see it Mama? Or beating his Papa at pee wee golf. Mama, did you see it!

Leo, before you, nothing in my life would change much, really. I would leave the bathroom and when I would return, the bathroom would be as I left it.

The same with the kitchen. The bedroom. The living room. My heart. I would leave and return. Leave and return. And always it would be. Mostly. The same.

Before you I never thought twice about how simple magic really is. How I might actually have the power to make a parrot talk. 

But now I do.

This morning when I left the bathroom, the rug was brown, the tub porcelain, the floor tiled. When I walked by just minutes later, wait. What? There was Gumby, somehow having sailed safely over Bathtub Falls and now expertly navigating Shag Swamp in his bright yellow boat, giant blue flowers beckoning him into calm waters.

You change a room Leo. 

My beautiful kindergartener, you have changed all the rooms of me.

I wasn’t prepared. 

But I am amazed.

 

spring

April 14, 2013

Wikipedia defines spring equinox as a time when we are aligned with the center of the sun. A daily reader tells me “…even auto pilot is right only 10% of the time.”
 
So I let myself sway…dark to light…villain to hero... My son walks across the house with a book on his head. Stands on one leg and hops down the street. Our desire for balance is strong...to be in the middle…neither on or off, over or under.
 
Today I am drawn to the center of this moment. It is weeks past equinox and I am in my parent’s condo in Florida. My father and son play good guys/bad guys in the guest room which is ours for the week. I am neither hot or cold. Young or old.
 
I am in the center of my life.
 
My birthday falls two weeks beyond spring equinox. My mother reminds me I was born two weeks past her due date. I must have known which side of the middle I wanted to be on, always. Spring.
 
A beautiful breeze blows through my parents home and it smells and sounds and feels like the best part of childhood. It softens my skin and reminds my spirit how much it loves to move from here to there.
 
At 51, I spent my first 50 years falling in love. One, two, three, four, five times I fell. Then I became a mother. Now I float in love.
 
I've always wanted to live to 100. That leaves me 49 more years for family, poetry and being. Bright. Swaying. Bending. Blowing. Becoming, still. Now.

Small boy, large box

February 25, 2013

It’s almost cliché: How in one afternoon a box might become a rocket, club house, pirate ship and dragon lair filled with treasure. Many articles have been written about its simple perfection as toy. So when a friend said she was about to recycle her old moving boxes and did anyone need a particularly large one, I said yes.
 
We played phone tag for a week to coordinate a pick-up and on the arranged night, it was raining or snowing or doing some weather that was not convenient for fitting a large box into a car that, although not small, seemed suddenly extremely compact, and as I drove home with my knees in my chest (having moved the car seat up as far as it could possibly go), I thought “Am I crazy? It’s just a box.” And I turned the windshield wipers up to a faster setting.
 
Then my heart started grinning. I knew Leo would wake the next morning and say “Mama!” and jump into that box and turn it into a rocket, club house, pirate ship and dragon lair filled with treasure all by the end of the day, which happened to be Valentine's Day.
 
Valentine’s Day. As a poet, I have to admit, my expectations are high. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with February 14th. Would the one I love gift me with something that proved how much I was loved?
 
February 15 was worse. Whether I got a gift that made me feel loved or didn’t get a gift that made me feel loved, it was now over and I’d have to wait another whole year to feel it again. Like the saints the holiday is originally named for, I have been a martyr for love.
 
But Love is a brilliant and persistent teacher. As is motherhood.
 
I now find little conversation hearts (real and metaphorical) hidden everywhere in my day. “U Rock”.  “Be Mine”. “Soul Mate.”  Sometimes they greet me first thing in the morning. Sometimes I sit quietly at the end of the day and savor their messages.
 
And sometimes when I can be a true student of my heart, all I need to do is ignore the weather, make a little room in my car, and give Love a ride all the way home.

The Amazing Sky

January 31, 2013

Mama, I can’t even tell you. I just don’t have words for what I feel for Sky. I can’t even bare to not kiss him all night long.
 
We have a new kitten. Sky. He just turned 10 weeks old. My son just turned 5 years old and is teaching him kitten tricks, like how to balance on top of a scratching post. When Sky succeeds, Leo cheers “The Amazing Sky!
 
But now Leo is trying to fall asleep with this new kitten purring in his arms. And love is keeping him awake.
 
Many tuckings and re-tuckings-in later, the memory of Leo’s first night in my arms floods my entire body. I too, could not bare to not kiss his tiny newborn self all night long. To stare at him in wonder. To wake every few minutes and check if he was still here. Still alive. Still mine.
 
Love has kept me awake all night, many nights since.
 
To help me practice patience with this new layer of bedtime routine, I breathe in the relationship I see weaving itself between them. I have a front row seat to Love. The instant-ness and slow unwinding of knowing. How we become who we become to each other. And then become more.
 
When I started writing this post, I laughed. So this is why poets write poems about cats! I have had 5 amazing cats in my life and as much as I loved them, I never once felt the urge to write a poem about them. And as much as I love poetry, I’ve never really wanted to read a poem about a cat.
 
But this morning a cat poem found it’s way into my inbox from a daily list-serve and I gobbled it up with joy. And a poem for Leo and Sky? A boy and his first kitten? I am going to have to write that. It is, after all, an occasion that deserves to be marked.

Becoming

January 5, 2013

My son brought home a gift from school, a bulb in a small glass jar, filled with clear stones and water. Instructions to make it bloom: Add a little water every day.

I am not good at growing things. I don’t know what color my thumb is, but it is not green. This is one of many myths I have about myself.

Still, I put the bulb in the sunniest window, with its tender shoots rising out of it, and add a little water. And it keeps growing.

Now I notice two buds where there were none. I point them out to Leo and he is beside himself. How tall our plant is! How alive it is! He doesn’t question the magic of nature. He dances around the room with it.

I watch this bulb in a glass jar. Everything about it seems impossibly vulnerable. No dirt? No blanket of earth? I see the roots drinking water through the clear stones over which I pour clear water. It is all visible…the growing, the becoming.

We rarely get to witness that. I only see it in my son when I look back at what he was saying, thinking a year ago, six months ago, and what he’s saying now. How it feels fast and slow at the same time. The way a poem can reveal an entire lifetime and a single moment in one line.

Process. Faith. That magical combination of doing and letting go. Action. And surrender.

We grow ourselves, and we witness each other growing.

Today I open my eyes and there’s a flower blooming in a jar of water. Today I open my eyes and it’s a new year.

Happy 2013 to you, who has found me here, yet again. May you grow. Bloom. Become.
 

Winter Solstice, 2012

Wednesday, December 19

It’s taken me a long time to get comfortable with darkness.

Particularly my own.

Poetry…reading it, writing it, seeing the world through the eyes of it, is how I’ve shed light on things from a very young age. It’s how things that feel dark in my head become visible in my heart. How things that feel unbearably light get some ground under them.

I am just now knowing this…the how and when poetry has become the reason for so much of my life.

A warm hello to you who has found me here!

This blog is the beginning of a new business, my new business, which is the beginning of a bright new path of poetry in my life…to help people honor the most important occasions in their lives with poetry.

It is a stab in the dark.

My stab in the dark.

Which, on the eve of the eve of Winter Solstice, is exactly what poetry is to me.