A Burning Heart

This week I am burning things to the ground.
I am fire where my feet touch earth.
It pools in my eyes and seeps
out of every pore.
I have been holding it in
with pieces of wrapped sinew,
waxed leather and lung.

Trying to breathe, trying to inhale oxygen, in a world where the air feels sparse and coarse.

I break relationships.
I break rules.
I break regulations.
This week I broke the surface of calm.

Just enough to scratch.
Just enough to shift
like tectonic plates.
I made mountains out of imperfections.

I set the trees ablaze.
Scorched the roaming hills,
until the landscape was naked.
Bare boned.

Nowhere to hide.
Open and unabashed.
I stand before you.

An Interpretation of Pain, Joy, Want and Love.

I’m not fond of the word; I don’t enjoy saying it
I don’t enjoy living with it
It haunts me.
It disrupts me.

It lives in the hollows
The temporary recesses between breaths
Traveling by way of map
Of neural pathways
Of circuitry following systems sending messages to each other
One speaks.
The other can’t hear.
Doesn’t respond.
The way they should.

It stores itself in my spinal column
Cervical vertebrae (C4-C7)
Bone spurs.
Degenerative discs.

It lives in my cerebellum
Screaming to muscles in my neck and shoulders
And I am.
Handful of medicine each morning
Shots of botox every three months to keep zombie muscles
from involuntary movement
Like a marionette on a string
One string to pull my neck to the left,
To violently grab it
To shake it, contort it
Like a car accident
Like whiplash
A spasm here and there
A twitch

The accompanying depression,
the insomnia,
the ever present knowledge that there are far worse things
Far worse things…
Still I ache every day
There is no cure
This is not cancer
This will not kill me
And still there is no cure

It lives in a room of skin next to me,
Some may say within me
Some may say my body.
We are roommates here
Life without parole.

She lives quietly.
She lives quietly and neatly and she is guarded cautiously
Kept in a carved wooden box lined with silk,
tucked behind my rib cage
Squeezed between blood and breath.
She sees through my eyes and drinks in words like water
She longs to fix and create
To birth and rebuild.
Sometimes I watch her drowning…
She tires so quickly.

All these things
They come and go as they please
Some sort of an open door policy where my body is used
as more of a vessel than a conduit
I want.
They want.
We want things together.



The love lies deep.


Unfair and unjust?
Cruel and blind?

Love is a necessity.
Love is a verb.
Love is an element.


Inner Wild

wild (v.)

wild (adj.)

wild (n.)














I would never truly be a woman you could tame.



An ask. A thank you.

  1. An incantation, a prayer, an ask.
  2. A thank you.








This is the type of depth I seek.

2. A thank you.


What is clear? (Liberated Lines: Clear)


Writing from Our Word (response to shamanic drumming and visualization)









Where the Heart Lives

My heart lives in many different places, in many different times. The place of my heart is often outside myself, tucked in the forest…really it could be any forest, but I love the quiet beauty of places most people don’t see as beautiful. I love swamps and bogs and old rotting trees where  pileated woodpeckers hide and my son calls out to mourning doves in such a perfect tone that they answer him, they converse for what seems like days.

My heart lives in the peat comprised of so much dead matter building on itself, creating a space no person can enter, it will swallow you. There is something eerie and beautiful about swamps and bogs, the myriad of life, the morning dew resting in the cup of a pitcher plant.

Several times a year I find myself sitting on a bridge in East Callais, Vermont, feet on the edge of a fen (a particular type of bog.) It is silent aside from birds singing and crackling of twigs as animals roam through the forest. I wonder how deep the bog is. I think of how my body would be preserved if I were to throw myself in and surrender to the thick layer of peat and moss where cattails would become my arms and my hair would be a ragged mess slime molds and fungus. I find my feet dangling off the edge, the sun beating down on my face and I read the landscape like I read a book. The familiar words like the worn path. There is no sign leading to this bog, it is secret to most and when I first visited it felt like home, like I had known the landscape for a long time. I can sense the animals watching me, I want them to watch me. I don’t need to see them, but they know I am there.

I watch the birch trees on the other side of the bog, standing strong like soldiers protecting this ancient tomb. My heart longs to be part of this, part of the decomposition and the death that brings life to the surface, part of the mystery beneath the peat. I step quietly on my way there, passing old stone walls that were used as pasture, I see evidence of strong storms from hundreds of years ago where trees were knocked down, the ground pillows and cradles beneath their roots, I count the whorls on the pine trees and remember how long this land has been untouched, unaltered.

I climb over fallen trees and dark shadows to emerge in a bed of ferns, the oldest living vascular plant that lies in front of me like a bed. Just like the bed of ferns I used to nap in when I was a child, where I played with faeries and used moss as a pillow for my weary head. I notice the spores and what a brilliant strategy it is to disperse yourself like that, the let the wind carry you as it carries my hair, as it carries the red tailed hawk above me. I sit in the ferns and remember that feeling of innocence I had as a child. The ferns are the gateway to the bog, a darker and more mysterious side of myself dwells there.

My heart beats with the sound of spring peepers and crickets and again I am brought back to a silent place where I think, this is where I shall return, when I become ash, when I become peat, when I become truly silent and I can disappear here, where no one can see me buried beneath, where I become part of the hundred year process. There is something magic to me about the idea of letting yourself go, to decompose, to rot and become a bigger part of a living organism containing hundreds of other organisms. This is my peace and like the waves of the ocean, it beckons me in. I stick a toe in, just to see and the peat feels warm on my feet, like thick mud. It sucks my toe in.

This is as far as I will dive for now, but someday I will return and feed this ecosystem, or one like it. This will be the resting place for my heart, my bones. Untouched, no box, no skin. I am free in this bog. I lay down on the bridge that truly leads to nowhere and I let the sun touch my face, soaking it all in until I force myself to leave, wandering back into the shadows of the forest, back to the ferns with patches of light that shine though. Back down the beaten path where my feet pad along the pine needles. I keep that bog with me.

I am also ugly and deep like the bog, in my shadows, in my heart. There is beauty in accepting the ugly, in walking among the shadows. I can taste the air, damp, moist and soil like. I leave this place knowing I will come back, to wonder again, to bask in the sun, to watch the predatory plants, to walk in the footprints of deer. I leave a piece of my heart here each time so I know where to find it when I need it. The bog knows when to call me. My heart lies in many places, but the forest is the blood within me. My heart is a fragile ecosystem in a state of metamorphosis.


I study the way water caresses the shore, the gentle pulse and pull. No thought, just free movement.

The crash of chaos turned soft, like wrapping yourself in a white cotton sheet fresh from the line, cooled by strong summer winds. Fueled by dragonfly wings.

I watch the maps the water creates, a cartographer leaving tales of currents and fresh rain. An old sea.

Open to the sheer beauty, the truth of time and the look in my ancestors’ eyes, how they visit me in dreams. How easily I overlook such meaning. Lost.

It’s become easier to close myself, to bury in earth and walls than to wind toward the sun, trusting growth.

Open like tears that flow down my face each time I hear Moonlight Sonata. The way Beethoven or a forest floor, a waterfall, holding my son’s hand, a bed of ferns just feels like home to me.That kind of beauty, inherent and vulnerable, young yet a lifetime, a library of memories.

A trail of fear lies behind, boxes and parts of me strewn across the country. I return each time, to this shore looking across state borders, always looking west, mountains lining the horizon. Lost in sunsets.

I want to feel the stillness, the calm within the storm. Forget about before or after. Stop trying to determine my own future. Just flow. Water washing over my toes. This simple silent beauty. A quiet connection to it all.