Writings

These transcripts were translated from audio and may not entirely reflect the written version.

Soup

I am forever fighting the unforgiving and tattered face of time. Tick-tocking like a barking dog at my heels. I have already sold the slim slots between every hour to things that no longer seem important. I am trying not to just squeeze you in to the agenda of doing. You with your quiet composure of slow movements suspended beside me. You having always asked for me to be with you in ways I couldn't understand. Today I am listening to the song wanting to be sung, the metrono

In The Beginning

In the beginning there was gasoline and too much stress. The weight of a thousand sorrows strapped across his back, too much for one man to bear. That would be Grandpa Robison, my grandfather's dad, my mother's grandfather, this fatherhood being passed down through two poor hands stretched out across the garage, reaching. How for the sheer will of not being able to endure the depression, he picked up that can of gasoline, that rust in the garage for emergencies can of gasolin

The Train

I thought if I just said it fast enough,words wouldn't get in the wayof this runaway train barreling towards you. I believed it could stop just in timeto carry you like so much royaltyjust waiting to be. But the real pace between here and thereis a slow dot on a mapwe have both already visited alone. I hope when I meet youthat the distance between uswill not have been hurried, all our zippers and buttons just so,as if the wind of each other's longingwouldn't at last strip us

At Esalen

In 1949, communist China took the heart out of love. They were trying to make the written language more accessible to the illiterate, to open up the world to those who did not yet have access to books and directions, to writing letters to lost loved ones. Reading poetry perhaps to a devoted wife, to coloring large folios with "Happy Birthday" to a child you have always loved, with or without the symbols, the black on white, the elegant stroke of brush-on calligraphy. There's

Harvest

What's coming to harvest is a hearty wheelbarrow full of someone else's hope. What did I plant? Did I tend? Did I remember to water? The other day when I decided to give my voice a break, I replanted and de-headed and pared away the brown clingy mass of a succulent pot that had gone mostly unattended under an eave out back. I stuck my hand slowly into the old cheap gloves, worrying myself over saber-toothed tigers, spiders, or angry ants. I hadn't pulled a weed in years. My g

Enough

Dear one, thank you for bringing your whole heart, even the tattered unresolved ache of infinity. Thank you for allowing your little self to rest for a moment from playing large and for listening as if your life depended on it. It does, you know, depend on it. I like how you allowed yourself to feel into the crevices of everyone else's belonging. How you could be more than a moment with them, even as they felt the impossible aloneness that spoke for them, the unbearable separ

Peace for the World

Last night I came home from the rainfall of falling rain in the forest in Ukiah. My heart stops to think of it, both going and leaving, how there is perhaps too much transience in the difficulties of letting go. I saw the red bark stripped from the madrones, such beautiful arching towards sky, her naked flesh, a smooth chestnut, a wishing bone, grace. Learning to live into the promise of peace draws arrows from my tender quiver. Too timid to aim at anything but emptiness. My

Choosing The World Less Traveled

I don't know if it's true, but I like to imagine it could be. That there are no rules, no already informed secret intel in my upbringing that would make me who I have become. Me, a tiny soldier following orders I didn't even realize were being given. I wanted to be magnificent, and I wanted this for you. I wanted not so much to shine as to be a part of the light itself, wiggling my way into the brilliance of being like a tractor on autopilot. I wanted you to shine also, your

How We Love

I have loved like a loose and wild locomotive, derailed, chugging sometimes, often unchained and smelling like failed brakes or thunderstorms when lightning burns a forest and the dead beauty of it all pinches your nose. I have fallen in love, I suppose, with every single person I have been with for more than 30 seconds. I mean really been with, where I am all in, so present as to disappear myself in seeing them, listening to the fire crackle, catching sparks. Sometimes even

What Binds Us

Love, grief, forgiveness, hope. The long history of back and forth believing in one another, or at least in ourselves, to keep fighting for the other. How I have had to borrow your courage sometimes, to just look at the world in the eye and not buckle. You are simpler than me. Take your coffee black. We'll eat at the same meal or the same restaurant every single day, never even considering that to complain would be an option. You wear golf shirts and polyester slacks that hel

Bus

I was pretty excited about the old school bus rambling down the dirt road towards me. Painted pink and orange and red, but faded desperately and chipping as if it had spent the last 17 years in the Mexican sun. I knew who would be in there. A bus full of granola chomping hippies with long hair and hairy armpits, beads and shark tooth necklaces, the smell of patchouli. It's 2024 and they looked exactly like I did in the late 80s and early 90s, having traded in my platform heel

What Went Wrong

I am forever trying to correct what went wrong. As if the simple act of breathing for the last 50 years through my mouth instead of my nose, maybe why I have not heard from my son in weeks. I eat Strauss organic ice cream in three servings entirely gone, hoping that maybe the sweet fat comfort of a thing I have abandoned will bring me back to belonging. The heart shatters not at once, but in many fits sometimes, and it's all you can do to glue it back together by keeping just

What Happened

What happened was I let my own fiercely independent mind take a roller coaster ride outside the soothing walls of the meditation this morning, so I missed the first half of what I was supposedly meditating on, and this is almost the theme of my life. Curious enough to hop back into the circle, I saw I was making choices and begging freedom to slap my feet with sunshine as I peddled down the summer path to play. My decisions are the root, the root of the root of the of the bul