Category: Uncategorized

1. Always be kind when you are trying to be strong.
2. Make sure you notice that other people are sometimes selfish assholes, even though they do really care.
3. Maybe your maybe is a maybe, really, really.
4. There is no need to stop sleeping.
5. And then, again, you are made of golden light and a little bit of chocolate.
6. Send off kisses and see if they return with any sort of zestiness.
7. Become fierce when you feel like you want to fit in.
8. Offer always with both hands and notice your emptiness.
9. Notice the intensity and take it as a sign that “something will happen.”
10. Surrender Dorothy and Toto too.
11. Craft the perfect then go for shitty.
12. Burn down the barn and then stand in wonder.
13. Delight, if there is delight never dreaming it will end, ever.
14. Become swept away by tea induced meandering stories.
15. Proudly declare: “This mess is all because of me.”
16. Stop, just stop, and then run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.
17. Keep your eyes tightly shut, encouraging imaginings that have not a wit to do with reality.
18. Recall how your body responds when anyone plays the flute and plan accordingly.
19. You are you, that is enough of a riddle, please don’t feel you need to solve more than that.
20. The end is the beginning.

Bainbridge Island | July 16, 2025

Say the two kitten sisters will live forever side by side even though they occasionally try to wrestle the other into submission.

Say it’s OK to be biting, wrestling, absolutely free.

Say the feeling of the moment is taking your breath away,  melting your heart even while it is crushing your pride and demanding you surrender.

Say to yourself.  Simply surrender, go free.

Say you do not feel financial lack even though nothing is certain and all your safety nets are untended, full of holes.

Say you are whole, complete event though  you know not how to reconcile the reality of what IS with either of these concepts.

Say you have a plan even though you know with absolute certainty that you do not have any inkling of ANY actions that might fit together in a sequence of possibility leading to an outcome.

Say you are OK.

Say it’s hilarious.

Say that eating dinner simply, without fanfare together with eyes focused on the future is enough.

Bainbridge Island | July 16, 2025

 

It is no small thing to trust yourself.  To do the thing that you want to do when you want to do it, even though you might not have received an invitation.

It is no small thing to trust yourself.  You must dig deep below the worry.  The calculating of risk and reward must be set aside, completely.

It is no small thing to trust yourself.  To know that though there have been many years of effort there is still no end in sight.  Progress has been made, patience may lead to completion.

It is no small thing to trust yourself.  Especially when envy and comparison shadow your viewpoint, making your way feel inadequate, even clumsy.   It takes effort to rise above all that.  You do it again and again.

It is no small thing to trust yourself in the unknown places.  To feel exhilaration, even joy, versus anxiety.  You must continue to know deep in your bones that all will be well.  Part of you is dying.  Part of you is still here, connecting.

It is no small thing to trust yourself.  To react and then let that reaction blow through as you root your feet into the earth once again.  This grounded place is the only place you can truly trust.  Abide there.

Bainbridge Island  |  June 19, 2025

 

No longer a single drop.

You have become the ocean, welcoming the salty water into every part of you sifting out whatever is not for you.

Undaunted by waves on the surface.  You dive deep.

And sometimes, you create waves that swamp the boats of unwelcome intruders, easily.

You have become the ocean.  Delighting in the beauty of the coral reefs; schools of shimmering fish grow even more beautiful in your imagining.  Your imagining is limitless.

You respond to the pull of the moon and most days you reflect the sparkle of sunlight. At night, the stars glimmer on your surface.

You have become the ocean and for some odd reason you seem to be drawn to see yourself as a single drop.

(I’m not going to write about the constrained, ridiculousness of that idea.)

I love you and please remember what is true, really, really.

Bainbridge Island, WA   March 20, 2025

That day I saw beneath dark clouds a single eagle soaring

barely discernable in the distance

yet I knew it’s passion and strength,

it’s confidence to know

with each feather of it’s being the wisdom of each breath of wind.

The way it knew how to ride the updrafts, eyes piercing the shallows for fish who knew not in that moment their lives were being eyed,

eyed for eagle dinner.

That day I saw beneath dark clouds a bright spot spreading across the far horizon

determined to rise, determined to illume the day, with such brightness.

We all stood drenched in light, in awe of our transformation,

warmed by joy, our laughter rang.

That day I saw beneath dark clouds a vision of a purpose

that for me would be my bright light.

 

Generously illuminating every life I touched,

giving and receiving

gathering and dispersing,

every moment filled with golden shared wisdom.

That day I saw beneath dark clouds an end to my sadness,

a soaring of my heart toward my way of illuminating the world.

Words of thankful praise sprang from my lips.

I was amazed and awestruck and then,

I realized

just in time

that I longed for coffee.

A way to begin again,

all that I was about to set aside, before that day

not so long ago.

May 29, 2024 | Bainbridge Island | Wild Writing with Kevin

Whatever winter did to us is done now,  the blame, the surrender,  the healing;  it’s all complete.

I wonder what the green spring skin growing over all of this is intending?

I hope it won’t break my heart and yet that is the nature of tenderness.  The nature of new tender shoots includes the fierce gentleness required to allow them to unfurl.

Last night standing by the side of the road, unwilling to return to what was, maybe that was the beginning of the green skin growth?

Maybe the beginning was the coziness of the 3:30am cup of tea, the sweet essay I read that included cows and Vermont and the possibility of calm?  The deep sleep after all that, even with the nightmares, had me awaken refreshed and at peace.

The life force tending the green skin is definitely clearing a groove, creating new pathways to journey, healing old and new wounds so easily.  (Actually not easily, let’s say relentlessly.)

And yet, I do respect it’s intensity, the fierceness of the determination to breach the river bank that I have tirelessly tried to maintain.

And now, I allow.  And, hope for faith in the act of surrender.

March 20, 2024 | Bainbridge Island | Wild Writing with Satu

• Because I can’t have what is happening now be the end of my story.
• Because I have been thinking of propagating plants and if I end up with a new space with lots of windows I will create LOTS of plants.
• Because I love Kevin, that is mostly it.  The rest of it makes me tired.
• Because I yearn to spend time with my sisters and one good friend sometime soon.
• Because I believe that my path is worth walking even though it winds through some dark, deep valleys.
• Because having a boat named “Surrender Dorothy” is a dream yet to be lived in to. Those adventures are so very enticing in my minds eye.  Waking up on the water.  Light glistening.  Witnessing first Light and last Light every day…and the stars and moon.
• Because I was given a spiritual name and have yet to become all that it promises.
• Because I have not yet learned how to be a true friend, to give and receive in balanced joy, not that I wish to track the scales.
• Because I do believe there will be a new chapter of my life that will be life-giving, flourishing and truly abundant.
• For more clothes and dinner parties and dancing and kittens.
• To experience the relief of having the last few years make sense and be a gift vs a tragedy.
• To become a leader of influence without position or authority.
• To finally understand the measure of my life’s worth in non-financial terms.

Seattle  April 4, 2024

 

What my father didn’t know when he died unexpectedly on January 13 so many years ago was that my love for him would forever be frozen in time.  The love of a 9 year old girl for the person she trusted, admired and treasured more than anyone else in the world.

What my father didn’t know was that I would eventually find another man, Kevin, whom I would love, after much time had passed grieving his loss.

What my father didn’t know was how I was indeed crafted, molded by the small tiny moments we had, most of them fuzzy in my memory, moments of full expression and discernment:

• • • Cursing at the cows
    • Traveling to Bill-Do’s bar for a beer (and soda for me) then on our way home, making sure I knew NOT to mention this to mom.  “Tell nothing of the place with the tall stools.”
    • Riding the tractor, smelling the freshly cut hay.

What my father didn’t know was how much I thought of him.  His bookmobile driving, cow milking, tractor steering gentleness.  How could one who did such intense work be so very kind and patient?

What my father didn’t know was how much I did not appreciate being left with Mom.  He hadn’t an inkling that all the difficulties both financial and otherwise that his death created would all lead me to become something way beyond what he might have imagined possible.  Maybe he knew all along what the plan needed to be and the timing of all that needed to occur.  The sacred timeline.

Here is my truth:

We never get too know what would have been if the thing that happened had not happened.  I will never know HOW I would have been different now if events had not happened when they did.

If my father had not died?  I will never know.

If I had not written daily for 11 days straight?  I will never know who I would have been without this practice.

And that my friend has something to do with faith, surrender and the complete and total easing of control…maybe even the absence of free will.

January 13, 2024, Bainbridge Island. 

Inspired by Portrait of the Poet as a Child by Elizabeth Knapp  via Laurie Wagner Wild Writing Day 11.