Snuggling against your body
I feel your warmth
The rise and fall of your breath
My own heartbeat
As I press my chest into your back
My face fits cozily
Between your neck and the pillow
This is everything, I think
This is everything
love
Star Gazers
Oh my love
I yearn for simplicity
Where have our minds taken us
But to places we already know?
For these days that remain
Let’s run barefoot through the grass
Dance naked in the starlight
Create a new language with daisies
Drink in the love of each other’s bodies
While we still have bodies to love through
Let our hearts be our compass
Let mystery be our guide
Junked
Your meager heart
Will never know
The beauty it denied
I gave you mine
Its love overflowing
You glibly tossed it aside
Inheritance
I hear their screams of silent disapproval
Feel their arms, clutching me, holding me back
“Don’t go out there. You’ll die. It’s not safe for us.”
My belly’s a stone
Ingested before I was born
I’ve tried to throw it up
Doesn’t budge, it’s mine now
I carry it with me
This inheritance
This heavy key to the past
This memorial to those before me
This museum housing their lives’ dreams and losses
Maybe it’s not something to pass
Like a kidney stone
Or to be removed like a cancerous growth
Perhaps I need only to lovingly lay it down
At the feet of those whose dreams I am now living
Perhaps their burdens are not mine to carry
But mine just to remember, and know
As I move forward into my own life’s dreams and losses
To be remembered, one day, and known
By those who come behind me
Easy Go
Before I’d even had a serious love affair, there were things I seemed to understand about them anyway.
There were songs about breakups that for whatever reason captured my imagination and moved my emotions. My heart knew what they were about.
One that really resonated with me then, and still today, is a little known song “Tell Me on a Sunday” from the musical “Song and Dance,” with lyrics by Don Black and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The musical is not great, and it’s not a great song musically (sorry, Mr. Webber,) but what the song says is lovely, and it always comes to me when I think about how difficult it is to end something that was once beautiful.
Tell Me on a Sunday
Don’t write a letter when you want to leave
Don’t call me at 3 a.m. from a friend’s apartment
I’d like to choose how I hear the news
Take me to a park that’s covered with trees
Tell me on a Sunday please
Let me down easy
No big song and dance
No long faces, no long looks
No deep conversation
I know the way we should spend that day
Take me to a zoo that’s got chimpanzees
Tell me on a Sunday please
Don’t want to know who’s to blame
It won’t help knowing
Don’t want to fight day and night
Bad enough you’re going
Don’t leave in silence with no word at all
Don’t get drunk and slam the door
That’s no way to end this
I know how I want you to say goodbye
Find a circus ring with a flying trapeze
Tell me on a Sunday please
Don’t want to fight day and night
Bad enough you’re going
Don’t leave in silence with no word at all
Don’t get drunk and slam the door
That’s no way to end this
I know how I want you to say goodbye
Don’t run off in the pouring rain
Don’t call me as they call your plane
Take the hurt out of all the pain
Take me to a park that’s covered with trees
Tell me on a Sunday please
Here’s a nicely acted version by Marti Webb:
Highway Robbery
Life is a one-way road
Cannot go back, only forwards
So why do I feel stuck in time
At times moving backwards
Or worse yet, stalled
on the side of the road?
Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: One-Way
One of my favorite songs from the early 90’s was Tom Cochrane’s “Life is a Highway.” I love the lyric and the music. It always made me feel so full of hope and youthful joy, and still stirs that up in me upon listening today. So when I am feeling a bit stalled, I put it on to wake my hope up!
Life’s like a road that you travel on
When there’s one day here and the next day gone
Sometimes you bend, sometimes you stand
Sometimes you turn your back to the windThere’s a world outside every darkened door
Where blues won’t haunt you anymore
Where the brave are free and lovers soar
Come ride with me to the distant shoreWe won’t hesitate to break down the garden gate
There’s not much time left todayLife is a highway
I want to ride it all night long
If you’re going my way
Well, I want to drive it all night longThrough all these cities and all these towns
It’s in my blood and it’s all around
I love you now like I loved you then
This is the road and these are the handsFrom Mozambique to those Memphis nights
The Khyber Pass to Vancouver’s lights
Knock me down and back up again
You’re in my blood, I’m not a lonely manThere’s no load I can’t hold
A road so rough, this I know
I’ll be there when the light comes in
Tell ’em we’re survivorsLife is a highway
Well, I want to ride it all night long
If you’re going my way
I want to drive it all night long
Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, yeahLife is a highway
Well, I want to ride it all night long, yeah
If you’re going my way
I want to drive it all night longThere was a distance
Between you and I
A misunderstanding once
But now we look it in the eye, ooh yeahThere ain’t no load that I can’t hold
A road so rough this I know
I’ll be there when the light comes in
Tell ’em we’re survivorsLife is a highway
Well, I want to ride it all night long
If you’re going my way
Well, I want to drive it all night long
Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, yeahLife is a highway
I want to ride it all night long
If you’re going my way
I want to drive it all night long
Come on, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, yeahLife is a highway
I want to ride it all night long
(Yeah, I want to drive it all night long)
If you’re going my way
I want to drive it all night long
All night long– Thomas William Cochrane
Heart Beat Ditty
Lay your hands on my body
Play me like a drum
Let our bodies’ percussive rhythms
Make our hearts begin to thrum
Gratitood
I practice gratitude every day, so when Thanksgiving comes around, it is just like brushing my teeth to take time to acknowledge all in my life that I am appreciative of.
You see, I am a member of a tribe of gratitude list makers. I post what I am grateful for (and why) daily.
The “Grat List” that I am a part of was the brainchild of the wonderful fitness expert and life coach Erin Stutland. I joined it in 2011, when I regularly took a live Shrink Session class she was teaching at the time, and it has been a blessing ever since. (More about Erin’s class and how it changed my life here.)
The Grat List is a place to share gratitude, as often as you wish.
Some, like me, post pretty much daily.
Others pop in as they want or need to. “Need to grat!” “Feeling down…time to do a grat list!”
It is so much more than a space for expressing gratitude. There’s no one way to share, but somehow the format has evolved into writing a list of ten gratitudes, ten things to be excited about, and some brags thrown in for good measure.
What’s beautiful is how the list has become a virtual safe space, a place where we share wishes, heartbreak, fears, dreams, successes, prayers and, above all, love and support.
We ask “the list” for good thoughts or prayers, advice and help. We hold each other’s dreams and hold each other up.
I am ever grateful today, and every day, for the Grat List and its magic and power, and all of the souls- past, present and future – who make it the beautiful safe space it is. (Super extra gratitude for Erin, who is about to give birth to a real living child soon!”)
Here’s my list today:
I am so grateful:
To be alive, for my health, for my returning vibrance so that I may do the things that give me joy, for the wisdom of my body because she has healed so many times, for my huge heart because it keeps me loving this life, for my husband, who is so loving and wise, for Miracle, our cat, for her furry love and unconditional love, for the ever-flowing abundance within and without me, in every area of my life, for our warm, live-filled home, for fresh, healthy food and clean water, for the privilege of being able to do what I love for a living, for music, and how it connects me to my soul
I am excited:
To be flexible and of service today, to pick up the Irish family members at the airport, to see my sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews, to enjoy a beautiful home, to share a loving afternoon and evening of laughter, to get there and back safe and sound, to make cole slaw late tonight, for Julia and her exciting audition Monday, to help her prepare, to get off book for the web series shoot, to work on the audition sides with joy and ease, for JC going to Hawaii, for Shayna’s song to win the contest!!
I brag that:
I love Life and Life loves me
I am enough just as I am
I am connected through words and this blog to amazing people like you!
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
Lost and Found
That black night
That night he came into her room
A part of her soul flew out the window
And left a hollow space inside her
A forever-empty place
A place as dark as the night
A hole that held shock and horror
In place of her innocent, free-flowing love
There can be no recompense
Nothing can ever make up for that loss
Even calling that piece back to her
Reuniting with her crucial center space
Cannot change the moments, the hours, the days, the years
Of being without her essential self
Yes, there is healing
Yes, there is repair
But the shape of the heart is forever changed
On a good day, she feels she is stronger for it all
On a bad, she wishes she’d gotten the chance to find out
Who she’d have become without his interference
That black night
New Religion
I believe in Life
I believe in Love
No longer believe in lack
Or that I do not belong
I’ve converted
I see the light
I admit it
I am a neophyte!
Beyond the Skinny Branches 