Poetry & Writings
I’ve never been much of a poetry reader.
As much as I’d love to name Mary Oliver or Mark Nepo as my muses, the truth is, they’re not. What moves me to write isn’t someone else’s words, but my own inner weather.
I feel things deeply, sometimes too deeply and poetry became a way to give the unspoken somewhere to live. A place to pour what the body feels but the mouth can’t say.
It’s like trying to write about God, or love, or the mystery of being human, the words never quite get there, but they reach toward it.
That reaching… that’s the art.
For me, writing is less about crafting perfect lines and more about letting my insides breathe.
It’s how I pray. How I make sense of things. How I remember that beauty and ache can coexist.
These poems are pieces of my process, glimpses into the places where I’ve softened, broken open, and found myself again.
If they touch something in you, then maybe it means we’re not so alone in all of this after all.
To My Darling Daughter
My darling daughter
How our love has never faltered
Full of lessons and beauty
Humbled by verses of futility
You are the muse of my remembrance
To love and nurture
With the deepest reverence
For life
For you
For me
For all of eternity
You are a gift to receive
My darling daughter
A gift of eternity
Distraction - The Siren Song
It calls us, it takes us, it deadens us
Alluring, asleep.
Self-abandoning, while I weep.
The gnosis within whispers songs of truth:
This isn’t the way.
Distortion bleeds in
I don’t know how to stay.
The siren song beckons again.
My body collapses inward
Stuck and stagnant,
I dissociate and freeze.
The gnosis within whispers songs of truth.
Quivering with resistance,
I pray to stay.
I ask God every day
Show me the way.
Distraction is the siren song,
Alluring and asleep.
I pray to stay.
The Process
Extraordinarily ordinary
Sometimes painfully present
Other moments struck with awe and beauty
The process
The warmth of a mug between my palms
The sound of birds reminding me to listen
Waking my daughter up
am I slow and present with her
or do I rush her awake?
Letting my disconnect steal the beauty of my life
Start again
Let the extraordinarily ordinary moments
connect you back to your life
Can you hear the hum of the refrigerator, a kind of quiet background prayer
Your child’s sleepy footsteps padding down the hallway
The shared silence between words
Do you relish the sameness of the mornings
another day of waking your children,
making them breakfast?
The process
asking us to be with life,
in presence,
in reverence,
in love
What if it’s not more healing we need,
but more presence?
More connection
in the process
The mundane
life has always been showing us,
offering a container to connect
with its magnificence
all along,
right under our noses.
The Process.
I’m sorry
Please forgive me
Thank you
I love you
Start Again
Faith
Built in the moments when everything feels wrong,
broken, distressed.
Faith
What it feels like when everything inside is being undone.
The purge.
The surrender.
Naked on the mat,
bucket in hand,
in a room full of strangers.
And still, choice.
I have choice.
To walk in faith,
or to walk in fear.
Faith demands everything of me.
It does not come when I feel safe,
or when the light appears at the end of the tunnel.
No
Faith arrives in the dark,
when I am questioning everything,
when fear and doubt scream so loudly
I can barely hear the whisper.
But that whisper
it calls me.
And I must seek it,
otherwise fear wins,
every time.
I’m learning that faith and fear are twins,
bound at the hip,
each giving shape to the other.
So thank you,
and fuck you,
fear.
I choose faith.
With both feet.
With all of me.
Because that’s what faith demands
all of me.
A rollercoaster that begins in fear,
and lands me, trembling,
in the arms of faith.
Fear is the doorway.
So I keep walking.
Heart open, knees shaking,
eyes lifted to what I cannot see.
Faith doesn’t ask me to be fearless
only to keep saying yes.
So Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
FUCK
YES
The Holy Undoing
There comes a moment in every life
when the scaffolding that once held you together
begins to collapse.
Not because you failed,
but because it’s time to build something truer.
For me, that moment began at thirty-three.
I thought it would be the year of arrival
the career breakthrough,
the love story,
the clear path.
Instead, it was the year of unraveling.
I said goodbye to relationships I loved,
to the security I had built,
to the identities that once made me feel safe.
I was being stripped bare,
and I didn’t understand why.
The deeper I reached for control,
the more life asked me to let go.
I used to think devotion meant discipline
prayer at dawn,
consistency,
perfection.
Now I know devotion is a wild kind of love.
It is the willingness to stay present
inside what is real
even when it’s uncomfortable, uncertain,
or unbearably tender.
Devotion isn’t something you do.
It’s the way you live.
It’s the way you breathe.
It’s how you return.
When you stop performing
and start listening,
when you let God find you
in the middle of your mess,
when you let love become the teacher
this is all there is to it.
Becoming devoted
is not a straight path.
It is cyclical
life, death, rebirth,
over and over again.
It asks everything of you,
and gives everything back.
It’s not about arriving somewhere holy.
It’s about realizing
you already are.
This was written in the in-between
the quiet, messy, miraculous middle
of becoming.
It’s for anyone who’s ever felt lost
inside the noise of their own life,
who’s ever longed to live
with more depth,
presence,
and aliveness.
If that’s you
Welcome.
You don’t have to try so hard anymore.
You are already on the path.
You are already becoming devoted.
Let Love Arrange Me
I release control
Before I began this writing ritual, I didn’t plan to have an opening prayer, or invocation, not anything formal. And yet, on day one, it arrived. Out of nowhere. A few words just appeared, asking to be spoken. I didn’t know where they came from, I didn’t know why, but I said them anyway.
And now, that opening invocation has become part of my practice. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t prepared. And somehow, it’s become a lighthouse. A recalibration. A remembering. Something that pulls me out of performance, out of control, out of old paradigms, and into listening, into presence, into myself. Each morning, it reminds me why I am here, and who I am when I am fully here.
Opening Invocation
I open to the voice that speaks beneath words.
I soften my mind and widen my heart.
Let only truth move through me.
Let love arrange the language.
May these words serve the ones who need them.
May they serve me too.
I release control.
I receive the next breath.
I write as prayer.
I write as listening.
I write as love remembering itself.
Today I notice the subtle desire to control
to know where I am being led
to use these words to get us somewhere specific
Such an innocent quest
And so I say again
I release control
I trust where the voice beneath the words wants to guide me
This practice keeps teaching me something I didn’t fully understand when I started. Control closes the heart. Surrender opens it. Following the words as they arise without expectation, without trying to get somewhere, is a devotion all its own. It brings me into curiosity, into wonder, into presence.
There’s a line I love from the invocation: Let love arrange the language.
What a concept. What a prayer.
If we could stay in that pocket of love, beyond the thinking mind, beyond needing to know, what would it arrange? What would it reorder? What would it teach? How would it move me?
I keep returning to this idea. We are all oriented differently, and that’s exactly as it should be. Some of us are built to question, to analyze, to dig deep with intellect. Others are built to hold multiple truths, to feel, to expand, to wonder. Both are gifts from God. Both are design. Both are holy.
And if we can see it that way, maybe we can also hold the ones whose orientation contradicts ours as sacred. One way of seeing doesn’t cancel the other. It amplifies it. And that is how consciousness grows, not by sameness, but by contrast. Each perspective asks us to explore consciousness again, from a new lens, with more questions, with more trust.
This morning, in prayer, I told God. I surrender. All in. Two feet, full presence, full aliveness in what I choose to do. And I release attachment to the outcome. Where it goes, what form it takes, how it unfolds, that is not my business. That is God’s. That is love arranging the highest order of things. Even if I can’t understand it. Even if it doesn’t serve my mind’s definition of my highest good. I trust.
If my mind cannot understand it
my devotion can
My devotion can say yes
My devotion can say thank you
Maybe I’m wrong
Maybe I’m naïve
But this is how I want to live
Wide open, in reverence, in trust
Not controlling life
But letting it move me
Not waiting for proof
But walking with faith
I choose Love
I choose God
I release control
I receive the next breath