Returning

this land, my earliest paradise, was lost
to me for many years.
i am the prodigal,
though i did not leave willingly.
i return on a pilgrimage of reclamation,
gathering up what has been discarded,
what can be salvaged.
i imagine it will be an arduous task
but am surprised to find it effortless.
my returning opens up a space
inside me.
what is here now is not what i knew
or ever wanted;
nevertheless, i take it to my heart.
i am ready now, i think,
to bear this new reality.
the earth rises up to greet me
like a long-lost friend--or daughter--
enfolds me in her arms and
i drown in abundance.

yes

the world is my monastery.
i will chant prayers under my breath
at all hours of the night or day.
with pure attention,
wash clothes and dishes,
feed my family.
i will feast around the table--
break bread, drink wine,
hear the sound of my own laughter.
i will welcome every stranger as the Christ,
offer sanctuary to the exile
even when the exile is myself.
i will sit in the silent cell of my heart
distilled down to one smoldering
flame of desire;
see burning bushes everywhere.

life is my canvas.
i will cast out my creativity
like seeds in a field
and wait in anticipation
for a harvest of joy.
i will take note of--and play with--
color, movement, texture,
incandescence;
swing my arms wide in
explanation and demonstration.
i will fall in love a thousand times
and a thousand times more;
be mesmerized, enchanted, seriously delighted
and not once
and not once
silence my voice or hide my heart.

when i press into my life,
i am like a tuning fork
vibrating with a
recurrent, resounding
yes.

self-portrait

i don't care about your
certainties and your correct answers.
tell me instead what it is that you love--
and why.
tell me have you made friends with
loneliness and disappointment;
are you intimate with beauty and gladness?
do you let life's daily humiliations
return you to the ground of your being
or do you pretend they don't exist?
do you let the sharp piercing
of sorrow or joy
move you to the edge,
take you through a doorway,
so that you can shed your skin
and emerge transformed?
tell me, have you mined the secrets
of your shadow self,
felt the curse of it and
turned it inside out to find the gift?
do you know how to breathe underwater
and do you know what it feels like to fly?
tell me.
tell me and
i will listen.

here now

in that liminal space between day and evening
when the mysteries flame forth,
catch fire with the blaze of the dying sun,
then burn down into a smoldering blue light,
i was walking the circuitous, ancient path of the prayer labyrinth,
soul-deep in silence and offering my heart’s prayer to God
with the fervor of one who is seeking yet has already been found,
when i heard the voices; sadly, not of angels
but of humans.

i looked up at the noise and saw them
coming along the bamboo-lined path.
the little boy broke away from his mother and
ran out onto the stones of the labyrinth with me.
irritation surged up,
my agenda altered and
my centering meditation fractured.
but remembering the enticing words i’d heard earlier—
the call to walk through my moments and days with
uncharacteristic leisure, relaxed, unhurried,
present—i was chastened. . .
and reminded of my life back home with two young boys
who disrupt my quiet, prayerful spaces
with uncanny regularity.

“aha, a metaphor of my life,” i smiled to myself
as i watched the child trying to navigate
his way to the center of this unicursal path.
and i, reluctantly, let go of my original purpose
for being in this space.
i have been asked to love whatever comes,
to take it all “with great trust."

my soul’s labyrinth toward divine union,
the perpetual enchantment, the persistent invitation,
is to see and touch and taste God in the ordinary
everydayness of all things and in all places,
and to lay down my solitary visions and my ecstasies,
to find the Sacred
here, now.