Inspirited (52)

I can hear the trill of a bird, a familiar, much-loved sound, but if I once knew who was making it, I have forgotten. My mother gets up from her computer game to wrap the fuzzy orange tube scarf around her cat, protection from the sliding glass door I’ve opened ten inches, desperate for “real” air and a connection to the earth. “It’s okay,” she says to Trie. “It’s okay.” Her voice is kind of sing-song, but it doesn’t bother me today. My mother goes back to her game, and I think how it’s likely just this reassurance she is wanting to hear, too. The familiar bird trill is further away now, maybe two yards over, and I hear a house finch singing next door. Yes, I think. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.

Welcome (21)

I sit, wordless, wondering what will come. Welcome, she says to me. Do not worry. All will be well. Words come, my self reassured by my self. All will be well. Don’t worry. Be happy. (Like the song says.) So simple. So true. So damn hard. I am weird and wonderful one moment, pulled into shark waters the next. But always, always find my way back again, tears drying on my face, something eased or healed inside me, blessings raining down, wetting my head.

Spent (15)

When I stop, even for a moment, my bone-deep exhaustion starts to sink me. I begin to fall asleep in guided meditations. I have become one of those people I used to watch sometimes in sangha whose head drifts lower and lower until they wake with a jerk and place themselves upright, only to begin the nodding off process again. I drink more yerba maté at sunset. Swimming makes me feel alive while I’m in the water. I have become too tired again for real joy, only a deep gratitude—bone-deep like the exhaustion, cell-deep—for that huge, orange crescent moon last night when I turned off the living room lights, for the appearance of the red-tailed hawk in unexpected moments, for the early morning birdsong and the mornings I wake with a quiet heart to listen, for the two ravens speaking in the neighbor’s tree, those round sounds I love so much, like rolling percussive taps of hollow wood. For moments without anger. For each time I am tender and kind.

Dispatch (13)

I sit beneath the lime green umbrella in the corner of the yard and drink my yerba maté. I remember the moon and look for her in the sky. She is right there, only a turn of my head, not behind the neighbor’s tree or hidden by the umbrella. My daylight moon. I turn back to study the top of the ridge before me in search of movement or the silhouette of a hawk perched on a shrub or the bare branch of a dead bush. Once I saw a deer grazing at the very top of the hill. I’d always wondered if they climbed the steep rocky sides. I let my mind drift, drink my tea. Later I wonder if I can still see the moon, and I turn to look again. There is writing in the sky where the moon was. For a moment, I think it is a message from the universe. It startles me to find it there, but in that first second, the possibility doesn’t seem odd at all. Why shouldn’t there be a message in the sky for me? In the next moment, I realize it’s skywriting. “Narek,” it says. Or maybe “Marek.” The word is moving north, the letters beginning to come apart. I see the moon then, the waning crescent just beside the “k.” Behind the name is a perfect heart, holding its shape as it follows Narek across the sky.