“What are here to do, but help each other and get through?”
~ Mark Horstman

Who’s life in midstream isn’t informed by the solutions of the shipwreck?
I fell asleep in my clothes last night. I work 2nd shift at a fucking bank. My church held a meeting the night before to decide if we were woman enough to let homeless drifters into our building, mortgaged to a bank, in the midst of a global pandemic, in a nation at war with its mind.

I’ve got 20 bucks to my name until payday and maxed out credit cards, a mom that worries, an ex that flumes. I realized just this year that if I didn’t stop drinking I would die, and die alone. And those are just the more obvious defects. I am no knight in armor. I seek no rose.

And yet… .
I am drinking Ethiopian coffee and eating Chilean oranges on a sunny day in November surrounded by the gentle mountains I love. We communicate with satellites and...

I am again in this season and quiet city
Sleeping with the windows open
Won’t you come in and join in my
Dreaming?
I grow bored directing you to extremes
With my sleeping mind.
In this season, once again,
Come in
Let your name become safe in my mouth again.

~ for Christine

Jericho Brown reminds us that you’ve
Not written anything
Until you surprise yourself
In saying that which you hadn’t planned
To say.

Which is to say,
That to give space to the scream
I feel rising in me,
And perhaps in you as well
I stand naked in the shower
Or in front of a mirror if I
Manage some associates degree in narcissism that day
While also managing not to eat half a pizza the night
Before.
And love myself in a way that
Is as innocent and curious as
A child recognizing herself in a car window
Winding through the mountains on a clear day.

The parents bickering over directions,
Or the looks coworkers offered each other
At last nights’ cocktail party.

The scorned double dutch invitation of girls
Whose mothers took the time that morning
To set cornrows,
And plate breakfast.

The rough plaid flannel shoulder of the boy
Who doesn’t even...

Just a note of thanks to DeWayne, Virtuous, Torin (hope I spelled that right), and Alice for leading a wonderful experience yesterday. Thank You!

For Aidan’s sake, and the sake of collective memory, and community some thoughts:

Turn Jim Crow on its head.
At the height of the Jim Crow era, lynchings were community events. There were food vendors, advertisements in the paper; children gathered wood to burn victims. The entire community gathered to destroy a person and reinforce a toxic culture.
DeWayne suggests we make the celebration of black and brown people’s accomplishments a community event. We could celebrate a person or organization reinforcing positive culture.

Use the momentum channeled through the Community Reparations Commission, Mtn. Business Equity Intitivate and Asheville Equity Office to apply our “average” heroics to further the community’s equity efforts.

Hold...

Grandfather is worried
about ants and cockroaches on the sill.
But gives no care to the air
and nothing for the river.
How many here are like this?
Playing the wars of the last generation?
/separations/
How many avatars and prophets do we need?
God is One and redone.
The geometry is in the threes and goes on exponentially.
It can not be suited to each’s need until we return to the Freedom of one.
Honing all needs, all energies.

Me? I struggle with recovery.
With Freedom from the things
/I used to hide/
my misogyny.
Living amends for poor southern women and gay men.
For blackskin and Mexican.

With crossing questions: What we keep and let go?
The compassionating and compassionate.
Who shall be fired, who furloughed?
What will we part with, to repart
I ask questions rudely and forget what the Cherokee said to Sugaree.
I forget that Ani'yunwi'ya would never call Themselves...

Bruce Mulkey asked me to share a report on the board retreat at Taylor Ranch with our beautiful community.
Humbly, I will begin with the poem the Lord of dreams offered as I awoke this Sunday. Inspired by Laura Collins’ observation that in the Gaelic tradition, the wild goose is considered an avatar of the Holy Spirit:

Trí Ghé Fhiáine
three wild geese (Gaelic)

As the first frost comes
I find myself familiarly waking in a new house too early
Full of friends and strangers
Confusing my right and left, over-trusting GPS,
Underscored by memory.
Surrounded by strong, wise women.

And so it was as I crested the hill
One already brought the Word.
One brought the wood.
Three wild geese moved over the waters.

Later, down to shirtsleeves, a calico albino and braided donkey
Observed our full company
A circle in the Sun
21st-century apostles, iPhones connecting the one in Zion
We sit...

As the first frost comes
I find myself familiarly waking in a new house too early
Full of friends and strangers
Confusing my right and left, over trusting GPS
Underscored by memory.
Surrounded by strong, wise women.

And so it was as I crested the hill
One already brought the Word
One brought the wood.
Three wild geese moved over the waters.

Later, down to shirtsleeves, a calico albino and braided donkey
Observed our full company
A circle in the Sun
21st century apostles, iPhones connecting the one in Zion
We sit,
awaiting Pentecost.

Today it seems
All the valley of Caruso
Is Mowing
The dogwoods are out
The East Folk of the Pigeon flows
Clear as the caldera I swam in before I knew you
Cutting starfruit for the first time
Amazed for the first time at the beauty in the world as yet unseen
Someone should get on a plane
It would be a shame
To miss
All of this.

I find, since you have been gone,
The feeling of a poltergeist in the house.
A crash in the basement
Where a painting has fallen.
A blind disturbed here or there.

It is feeling only.
A true ghost would excite the dogs.
As does the smell of your perfume
Opening a drawer
We shared.
A true ghost would not leave me to sleep
Peacefully
In the high midday sun.

But, then again, they have barked at the door you left open
Many times
In leaving
Which is now securely barred
Against all human reason.

“There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.”

• Albert Einstein

One thing you notice about the wedding
At Cana
Is that Mary knows what’s up.
It’s sometimes subtitled Jesus’ first public miracle.
Suggesting a currency of private miracles along the way.
I wonder if Jesus, in a fit of humanity, ever tripped his brothers
Hands in his cloak, sitting criss-cross apple-sauce
When they were being insufferable asses?
How much instruction in miracles did the Madonna
Provide
In order to recite her one and only line of the Gospels:
“Do whatever it is He tells you … “

Yesterday the man who lives in the blue Plymouth with a plastic sheet for a windshield
behind Market St.
Startled me walking with Aidan late into the night
Startled not by the man, I had seen him before, but by the humility of his home.
This man...