Ahz mah (So what)

Home is a silent meadow. Although meadows aren’t silent, really— bees and insects drone, birds chatter, life hums everywhere, pushing up into the sunlight and down into the soil. How is home like that? Home is where wild ideas scatter and take root, and love is the sunshine, the wind, the rain, the pollinator and this would be more believable if I actually knew a meadow, or if I could recall having ever, myself, been in a meadow, not merely imagining it second-hand from photos, films, and Mary Oliver’s rapturous poems. Home could be like that though, I imagine. It could be devoid of the sounds of busyness and commerce. It could be spacious, in primary colors, humming with unscheduled life. #MetaphorDice

Once, years ago, while I sat quietly in a forest in Central Massachusetts, a thought came to me so clearly it was as if I heard it said out loud: Love everyone, yourself included. That is work enough for a lifetime. At the time, I think I most needed to hear the “yourself included” part. Lately, though, I find that the “love everyone” message is more compelling. What is love? The question has occupied poets, philosophers, dreamers and song-writers throughout human history. Try to define it and you run smack into one of the most profound mysteries of the human experience. But I want to define it, because the love we yearn for is not about “chemistry,” or infatuation, or lust, or obsession. The love we yearn for is not even about “liking.” What is love? Love is not a feeling. Love is not an abstract concept. Love is a verb. Love is something we do . So here is my working definition of love: Love is radically accepting, and nurturing the growth of, a human being.   The “radically

  Pebbles Once there were two vintage apothecary jars. This one I kept, the other one I gave  as a sharing of my heart, filled with water and ocean pebbles clinking against the thick glass— Jersey shore pebbles, iridescent  shades of taffy, cotton candy, caramel, mocha— each one a remembrance of an encounter with the ocean​— vibrant and sparkling like  smooth young bodies lying  on the sand, wet skin glistening in the summer sun.  But the water  has long since evaporated,  and the cork stopper  won’t budge now,  and the pebbles are pallid shades of yellow, grey, brown. And the jar I gave away?  Maybe lying dusty  in a storage unit, or forgotten  in a bottom drawer, or long ago discarded, crushed by the metal jaws  of a trash truck, pebbles scattered  in a midwest landfill far from the ocean. Pebbles - for R. A vintage apothecary jar filled with pebbles sits in my meditation space  alongside an old photo of my parents  at the Jersey shore. The thought arises:  There was another jar give

 Another toss of the Metaphor Dice: my birth + broken + drum He was playing poker across town with the guys,  laughter and cigar smoke mingling  with whiskey and sodas. She was anesthetized in the women’s hospital, the surgeons bantering about golf and  martinis, the machinery droning. Someone washed me, wrapped me, placed me  in a tiny crib in the nursery of other tiny cribs, last name and gender handwritten on a card  above my head.  In the cacophonous symphony  of a city that never sleeps,  my birth was a broken drum—  drowned out by the buzz and clatter  of post-war efficiency  and the blare of horns  on Amsterdam Ave. #MetaphorDice