In any one moment

there is closing,

holding the center,

sheltering its

tender heart.

In any one moment

there is opening,

unfurling, one

soft breath after

another, revealing

you, revealing me.

I wait for the irises all year.  Same with the peonies.  There is something so extravagant, so sensuous about both that it is nearly impossible to do anything during their brief time but admire, investigate with my camera and savor.  You can’t really pick the irises.  They wilt qiickly, folding wetly inward on themselves.  The peonies are better, but also lose heart soon, dropping reams of petals, their heavy heads falling.

So I spend time outside every morning, when the dew fall is heavy, looking at them through my lens, lying in the wet grass to catch a different angle, another way of seeing.  Last year, I was shocked by the sexuality of the irises – their mouths opening like labia, the lift of their petals echoing what Georgia O’Keefe must have seen (I can feel her fierce pleasure) so many years ago.

But now they are pure potential.  Ripening, preparing, gathering themselves for that final concert of color and scent. I like to think that each day, we are also pure potential.  That we have the possibility for greatness:  great invention, or kindness, or pleasure.

This year, my feeling of that potential is fractured by the absence of my daughter.  I am missing  the resonance, depth and delicious enjoyment that she brings to my life.  It is as if the bass notes are faded, and the music of my days feels tinny and thin, painful even.  Having lost both of my parents, I can honestly say that this absence is worse than a death.  In death, there is a resolution, there is finality.  With this, there is none of that hard comfort.  It is only  unrelenting, an airless, suspending unknown.  I never knew that I was this vulnerable to an injury of heart and soul.

And yet perhaps in that unknown lives that pure potential – the possibility for beautiful resolution, for opening, for truth, for love, for harmony.  I pray, I pray.

My friend Lisa Daigle sent me this poem-gift in response to my post Thank you Universe.  Thank you Lisa!

 Song For the Salmon, by David Whyte

For too many days now I have not written of the sea,
nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents
we find between the islands

For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon
threading the dark streams of reflected stars,
nor have I dreamt of his longing
nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn

I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes,
to the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt,
nor the enormous plains of ocean swaying beneath the moon.

I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean
opening its white hands on the seashore,
nor the salted wind, whole and healthy
filling the chest with living air.

I have not heard those waves
fallen out of heaven onto earth,
nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction
of a thousand miles of ocean
giving up its strength on the sand.

But now I have spoken of that great sea,
the ocean of longing shifts through me,
the blessed inner star of navigation
moves in the dark sky above
and I am ready like the young salmon
to leave his river, blessed with hunger
for a great journey on the drawing tide.