roots shaped by water & stone
becoming the water altar
Everything inside me is covered in deer tracks.
When I look, that is what I find. Deer tracks and sacred Sun and wing feathers. Medicine paths through quiet forests. Nepalese fire starters and incense rollers in Kathmandu. Juniper smoke. Ferns. Meadows of green. Ancient and remote waterfalls. Herds of bison. Dancing feet, bare and echoing bells across canyon walls at dusk.
there is no book
more profound
than the Silence
of your own mind -
open palms to sky, and
empty,
empty,
empty.
Gazing inward, I find.
Milky way Qigong, blue green breathing into and out of cosmic vision — symbols from another world — inside me lives a river, quiet and serene; turtles, canoes, birch bark trees; headdresses and sacred rites, messages written in stone — inside me lives a knowing, a remembering, an inner-dimensional glue destined to hold earth to the pulsing web of the milky way’s creative dreaming.
Inside me lives a vision.
This land is changing us, shaping us like soft clay in her firm and awe-inspiring hands. Today, cool wet earth against our bare feet, the smell of rain, a nation of clouds coloring skyward memory. Yesterday, sweat and dust, desert sun cooked sage leaves, surrendering heat, and dust, and…
I found a hidden cove, trickling green, sprouting beneath roots shaped by water and stone. A cottonwood thick and old, housing birds and bones, here, I knew, I’d found the home for our water altar.
I thought I knew each nook and cranny of this land until, yesterday, barefoot and bushwhacking, I discovered an ancient stream bed galaxy, stones from inner earth sounding planets and I smelled the old whispers of the Nuciu. Here, we will lay our offerings.
— We become (becoming, became) the fragrances, forces and melodies of our daily meanderings. This land is molding (holding) us in her image. The wind, the earth, the white crowned deer.
when you
carry
water,
you learn
the way
the water moves
and
moving like her
you begin
to know
the way
the water
speaks.
Slowly, inevitably, we become that which what we hold. Like mirrors, we reveal our world. What seeds fall in the footsteps of humanity?
(Water carries her memory)
The wild sage, silvery blue and green, became a part of me when I ran into her sprawling arms, moving stones along the earth. Our meeting tore open my leg, blood was our greeting, and now, tattooed in dark blue scars, she has become part of me.
Inside me lives a forest.
The hornet, hungry for bear meat and bacon, landed beneath my arm and just like that, became a part of me, etching her mark on my tissues and cell walls.
My daughter, drinking of my body, her beauty filling my eyes, becomes part of me.
This clay filled soil, cracked and life-giving; these snow melt streams; this holy mountain; these cattails bending beneath juniper leaves…
Inside of me lives a star cluster.
The songbird cries through the early crest of dawn. My daughter’s feet, shaped like sage leaf and wild rose, run gleefully across the meadow. My daughter lives in the forest of my heart, shaped by the sands of her memory and the pulse of the living earth. She, too, carries seeds. So we go.
Hum, humming in the morning light. Deer tracks in the dust. A good rain is coming.
open p(s)alms to sky,
we empty, to
empty, and in
emptiness
we fill
the bones