if you can still cry
it means you can still breathe
and if you can still breathe
it means you are still alive
and if you are still alive
it means you still have some work to do
A Rose blooms when she is ready
When She is ready
When She is ready
and not a moment too soon.
no
is a necessary magic
no
draws a circle around you
with chalk
and says
I have given enough
McKayla Robbin
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to all the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
Louise Erdrich
From The Painted Drum: A Novel
I’m not okay today.
So, in the absence of okay,
what else can I be?
LET IT BE KNOWN
I worship the Goddess.
The one with tangled hair
where insects nest.
The one with blood-soaked thighs.
The one who crushes my concepts
with her razor teeth
and spits my mind into the wind.
The Wild will call you back.
Through half-remembered dreams
and sunsets painted
in burnt sienna
and vermillion flames
she will call you back home.
The coyotes will wake you
from your sleep
with their clarion call
to keep your eyes
wide open.
How long have you been sleeping?
How much have you forgotten?
I need a song
I need a song like a river, cool and dark and wet,
like a battered old oak; gnarled bark,
bitter acorns,
a song like a dragonfly:
shimmer – hover – swerve –
like embers too hot to touch.
I need a song like my father’s hands:
scarred, callused, blunt,
a song like a wheel,
like June rain, seep of solstice,
tang of waking earth.
May you awaken to the mystery of being here
and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.
May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.
May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers beckon.
I counted my years and realized
that I have less time to live than the time I have lived so far.
I have more past than future.
I feel like that boy who had a bowl of cherries.
At first he gobbled them,
but when he realize that there were only a few left,
he began to taste them intensely.