christmas eve

if at first it feels like loneliness
and missing my family
then on further inspection
it's the feeling of wanting to
give something, and compassion:
who is suffering tonight?
and the feeling
of how much my past means to
me

while emptiness dances with tradition
and non-attachment with memory

i fold laundry, send texts
and brush the cat
talk on skype to my sister in new zealand
where christmas has already come
in the middle of summer holidays

i'm waiting to feel that familiar feeling
and
all i want is to let go

yet when doris writes in susan's letter to
kris kringle,
"i believe in you, too"
i start crying
for something that hurts so sweetly
as Christmas

Dream Yoga

1
every dream i have had
has become a deep and poignant
element of my personal history
an accumulating landscape of my
separate identity

meaningless to others
inexpressible in poetry
inexpressible in art

2
in dream yoga
one becomes lucid
and controls the dream, by being aware that it
is unreal

as is our waking life

this teaches us to have clear thinking
and know the nature of reality

3
i find that i don't want to control my dreams
they delight and surprise me with a heart pain
which is the source and ground of so much waking experience and memory

they arise mysteriously, spontaneously
i explore my experience within the familiarly strange
in ways i fear to do in waking life

they are my one place of experiential freedom
where i do not avoid the mystery of pain
they are an un-careful place
a counterbalance to the necessity of disipline
they are a wild place
where i live by instinct, wits and insights

they are that time of suffering that we all look back
and are touched by,
that difficult time together we made it through
that made us as one

4
in terms of letting go and seeing clearly
my dreams are the distillation of what i think of
as my personal samsara
and oh, i'm attached.

conditioned

to love
you!

love my father
(as a new friend)
love my past lovers
(for the future they make possible)
love my friends
(for the intimacy)
love my crushes
(for the self-reflection)
love my mother
(as my self)
love myself
(as my lover)
love my rooms
(as my creation)
love the world outside
(as my home)
love men
(through the chaos)
love women
(through the confusion)
love beings
(it's uncomplicated)
love my community
(in it's complexity)

love silence
(for abundance)

love sound
(for the teaching)

love breath
(for the ground)

- for robbie.

snowy day

a small black bird
flying past a forest
white with snow-leaves
on a white sky

remembering her moment

in sleepy meditation
i remember a day

her day, not mine
where she and a friend walked the streets of montreal
for hours
and only talked about what was happening
in that moment

is the day as unforgettable
to her as it is to me
who only heard about it
after the fact?

Fall

Wooooooo!
drunken robins
falling leaves
the world in flight!
yellow
in an envelope of silence
in the woods
woooooooo!
like an out
breath!
or a wind ....

ready

through the lobby windows
i am surprised to see rain
and i go back upstairs to put on my boots

*

it's quite cold today
this early thanksgiving
and i feel ungrateful

i meditated on irritation
while the teacher talked of gratitude
i meditated on disatisfaction
while the teacher spoke of abundance

and i swore repeatedly in the shower
while crying
and feeling sorry for myself

afterwards
i didn't have the feeling of dryness
and tiredness
you get after crying
i felt fine
i put on my nice clothes
i walked down the road
i ironed tableclothes and folded napkins and set the table
with lovely china
and enjoyed a lively thanksgiving meal
with twelve people and two dogs and a guinea pig

afterwards
when i came out into early evening
it wasn't raining anymore
but it was still cold

i am ready for winter

self-conscious

to speak
and risk what happens
to us all

or
to be silent
and dream-believe
i am not-arising?

to speak
risk it all
and then to be silent
and know it

quivering

the deer and the plane

riding my bicyle in the fields
i see a white patch in the distance
among the yellows and purples and greens
i look closer
it is a deer
watching me from across a
stream, so still
then, suddenly, bounding away, higher than
the goldenrod

coming down the path at the university
i hear a sudden noise
look up, and see a fighter plane,
flying so low, i've never see one so low,
taking up the sky
black mass against the blue sky
propellers spinning
i am struck, immobile, terrified
awed

the first thing you think
as you freeze and stare is
will you crash into me?
myself this small thing in the fields
watching, amazed
and then it passes
and you bound away into the fields
marvelling at the strangeness

Birth and travel

I dreamed this morning

Of a long road to water
Bravely trusting in the need of a friend to find it
Bravely travelling
Of the unexpectedly short road back
The long road there, part of the need

Of a house by a flowing stream
snow covered, made of branches and trunks
With wide doors

Of laying my body down next to hers
during the pains and heat of coming childbirth

The centre of necessity
The road there and back
Always waking before the final return

american sign language

signing under the moon and
red yellow green leaves
dusk in the park

signing on the line between
shorn soy fields and the hedgerow
at bright noon

signing in the kitchen
under quiet yellow light
the smell of cooking and night air