keeps me yearning

I am revisiting this space after years of inattention. Not sure why this one got lost in the drafts almost three years ago. It seems worthy of pulling out, dusting off and sharing. Interesting that the haunting of belonging persists: it followed me to France two years ago and again to Minnesota this spring. Sometimes I still have to convince myself that I am worthy of this land. But I realize it is less about convincing and more about acting. Belonging is an act, not a feeling. It’s about seeking reciprocity for the generosity, majesty and ferocity of this place, for this life.

I was split open this weekend.  Celebrating the life of my Grams.  Back roads led us to cemeteries where her life was remembered by the stories of those she left behind.  There was such an extraordinary sense of belonging–she to that place and to the people who settled there generations before.  Though her home was never my home, it was the most consistent place in my life.  A place I visited every year until I turned 40.  After four years away, it was good to be back and heartbreaking to leave that lush, abundant, thrumming, story-filled land  that has provided for so many people for so very long.

Coming home to the thin air and blue skies of Colorado, to a land carpeted in shades of yellows and brown decorated by ribbons of green following shallow, tumbling rivers meandering from snowless mountaintops, my life-long search for belonging was called up.  Do I belong here?

These are the thoughts that are helping me:

I am grateful for the courage, tenacity, and adventurous spirits of my ancestors who left their homeland for new opportunities.  And I am grateful for their commitment, openness, and resourcefulness to carve out a new home in a new place that endured for six generations.  I can call up those qualities in me, too.

Four of my first five years were lived here. There is something that touched me and molded me because I chose to come back as soon as I was free to choose where I lived.  I have been here ever since.

My children belong here.  All of their memories are of this place. And many of mine are, too. I cannot feast on the stories of where I came from alone.  New stories are woven from the threads of this land and they are sacred, too.

My ancestors were farmers and gardeners.  They tamed the land to provide for the people. I, too, navigate the delicate relationship of providing for and being provided for by the land where I live.

But here on this land there is a spirit fiercely independent of people.   The land here reminds us that there is something about us that doesn’t belong.  There is an austere wildness that demands awe and respect. This land does not yield to molding so easily.  I imagine it is a bit like the ocean for those that feel at home on the edges of our continent.

It is that quality of land that drew me in. And it is the land that keeps me yearning to belong.

just wild enough

The roar of the spillway is missing this year, though the water level is creeping up.  It looks like the inward flow is from the South for now. 

I’ve spent the last couple of days wandering the north shore of Boedecker. Favorite neighbors are returning: the diving grebes and merganzers; the pelicans, who always seem far too grandiose for our Front Range reservoirs; the yellow-rumped warblers, phoebes, and bluebirds all dining on flying invertebrates once again.  The bustle of spring is intoxicating, especially after such a damp and cold spring.

I also spotted new-to-me shore birds: greater and lesser yellowlegs.  They are flying through on their way to the Far North where they will carry on with breeding and raising young in perpetual daylight before passing us over in the fall– the lake just a pond then.  It struck me what a gift these migratory birds are.  They patch together this modern Earth that has been parceled into cities, suburbs, croplands, vast wilderness, and bits and pieces of land and water that are just wild enough. 

To know them is to see our world whole.

those few simple notes

Dawn has been extraordinary this winter.  Colors and clouds surpass the boundaries of language.  The sky seems impossible.

At the rise of the sun, the male black-capped chickadees sang their spring song.  They’ve been singing for at least three days now.  The first sign of lengthening days.  It’s as if all the possibility of spring is packaged in those few simple notes, fee bee-be: the promise of warmth and green, the smell of soil coming to life and blue mustard flowering, the sound of running water and widgeons calling. We are lifted from darkness and carried into the light….by a little bird.

The story I need to hear

 

I sat at first light this morning, the thinest thread of light suspended between dense clouds reaching from the earth into the great above.  I wasn’t sure I would see the sun this morning and that was OK.  But low and behold, that mighty life-giving miracle of energy found that thin thread of space between darkness and sang its song of color for two breaths worth of time before heading back under cover.  The sit spot always gives the story I need to hear.  Today’s story: the light will always find a space to shine.

honey bees

Honey bees rouse hungry
the only thing to eat:
cranberry-colored blossoms on the maple tree.

The maple tree’s branches are bare
no leaves to feast on the sun.
The maple tree rouses
to make love with the honey bees.

this place is home

Home lives inside the heart
and my heart dwells here
on the shores of water borrowed from the other side of the mountain
on land that is hard and forgotten.

My heart mingles with wild plants that are maligned by most–
I find them miracles–
tenacious plants that chose this place and persist.
They have not forgotten the Earth.
Let us not forget to thank them, those maligned plants,
for they have a wisdom of their own.

I chose this place too
and, like them, I’ll persist.
I have not forgotten the earth.
I love all her weeds and thank them.
I seek their wisdom,
for mine has been forgotten.

And just like them, one day I will move on,
and I will have awakened an ancient wisdom that belongs to all beings.
I will leave behind love,
a love that persists.

My heart dwells here,
this place is home.

chicken vacation

the chickens are on vacation

their eggs are nowhere to be found

it seems they must be exploring 

something loftier than laying on the ground

olive ridge

 yellow blue moon in the eastern sky
three boys: one tall one six one small
flash lights darkness

night games

a few short years
darkness will be home
to a teenage boy

my son

(glorious
each individual
and the whole of them)

this moment is truth:
rejoice in them
that is all there is

to do.

ping

As I write, jars of peach syrup “ping” as they cool. Fifteen pounds of plums picked from the neighbor’s neglected tree sit on the counter awaiting the same pureed fate.  All three boys are in bed after a full day: some school, some sword fighting, a visit with friends, and lots of reading and being read to.  Their bodies wrestle under the sheets after another well-lived and perfectly ordinary day.  At home.  

H O M E.  

It’s a little bit location.  It’s a lot of other things: contentment, service, commitment, gratitude, work, imperfection, love.  My feet are sinking into this dirt.  This grass is plenty green.

I think the robin knows

she sits on her nest as if that is all that there is to do
can i just sit on my nest like that?
as if that is all that there is to do
i’d like to

is there anything but the nest?
it seems we all think so
but how big is the nest?
perhaps it is as small as basket of twigs
perhaps it is as big as the universe

I think the robin knows.