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If my bones could speak

If my bones could speak they would tell you about how I wore them into battle like a cage and how I quivered on their insides as my heart shivered in my chest and my blood was sent thump-thumping out into the corners of my body.

If my bones could speak they would tell you of their aches and how they hurt in the mornings when I close my eyes against the cheerful chirp of my alarm clock and I brace myself. Because I know that in motion lies pain.

If my bones could speak they would tell you of a hundred thousand minutes spent dancing, and of how the music lingers in them even now and how my bones sing to me at night if I’m very still and very quiet.

If my bones could speak they would tell you that we used to be invincible and unbreakable and when the little kids played at taunting, when they sang about sticks and stones hurting their bodies — my bones knew that words were still more dangerous.

And they whispered to me their fears.

If my bones could speak they would tell you of all the times we fell or walked our growing hips into counter corners and door knobs. They would tell you of the times we forgot how tall we were and bumped our head. They would tell you of the moments when we ached with fever and curled up in pain.

If my bones could speak they would tell you about they way the vertebrae of my spine jostle together when we run and how this prevented us from fleeing the feelings of isolation that grew inside of us, blooming into those strange and shifting years that linger between childhood and self-actualization.

But most of all if my bones could speak they would tell you about the day I failed to hear them for the first time, and about how their voices grew louder until my bones clamoured in my body and I felt them shake me to my core but still I could not hear their voices, had forgotten the timbre of their tones.

If my bones could speak they would tell you of the day they woke up alone.

Author’s note: If you’d like to hear this piece in my own voice, check out the video below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V0ahdXdPvM

As always, I’d love to hear from you… what do your bones have to say? Let me know in the comments below! (And if you liked this poem, please share!)

Girl, age 11

When she’s 11 she climbs trees and splashes in mud puddles and runs races in the pouring rain. When she’s 11 she thieves apples from the neighbor’s tree and puts earthworms in the neighbor boy’s hair and she laughs because nothing has ever felt so free.

When she’s 11 she builds forts. She topples couches and ransacks closets for sheets and blankets and sleeping bags. And then she fills the living room with imagination until it becomes a jungle that can only be crossed if she slithers through on her belly like a snake.

When she’s 11 she lives each moment fully and she looks forward toward the adventures she is sure will be waiting for her at ages 12 and 13.

And at age 11 she can’t imagine beyond that because then there is high school and surely that is so. far. away.

But at age 11 the future looms vast and oh so bright that sometimes it hurts her eyes, but even that is exciting.

–

At age 11 she falls from a tree and it hurts and she falls from the monkey bars and that hurts too. But at age 11 she doesn’t let these things stop her because at age 11 she still remembers that not-so-long ago she learned how to walk and she still remembers what it was to fall down and get up and fall down again.

At age 11 she isn’t afraid of falling and she still dreams of flying and sometimes when she wakes up in the night she jumps from her bed because she’s still half-convinced that if she could just jump high enough she might discover her wings.

And at age 11 maybe she’s just starting to doubt because she’s done a lot of jumping and climbing and falling and maybe she’s struggling just a little to hold onto that hope.

But at age 11 she’s still trying, just in case maybe this time is the first time she’s right.

 

Author’s note: If you’d like to hear this piece in my own voice, check out the video below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nERX7ijZJbQ&list=UUaSxUNXZlcurR4VKBdOc-vQ

As always, I’d love to hear from you! Let me know what you think of this poem in the comments below! (And if you liked it, please share!)

A letter to my teenage self

The thing I wish I had known when I was a teen…

Is that the world is both so much bigger and so much smaller than you think it is because I know that it feels like you are smaller than an ant and larger than the blue whale and what I want to tell you is that both of these things are true and that it is possible to still be beautiful even when you don’t feel that way because I know you and I know you’re feeling like you don’t quite know where to put your feet or how to move your lips to make people like you.

And what I want to tell you is to be brave and to worry less about what those other people think because the truth is that not everybody is going to like you. And you’ve got to learn to be ok with that.

And I want to tell you to stop and turn back and don’t go this way because this way lies madness and I found madness but I can’t tell you to stop because you’re no longer you, you’re me.

And what I’ve learned from you, and maybe what you’ll learn from me, is that we’re in this thing together…

 

And that together we’re going to do just fine.

 

Author’s note: You can hear me read this piece aloud in the video below!

http://youtu.be/8hBHW59ujcY

 

As always, I’d love to hear from you! Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Letter to the ancestress I never knew

I heard you.

I never knew you. I still today know nothing about you, and yet I heard you.

You were a voice that reached out to me from beyond the vale of three lifetimes as I retraced our footsteps and found my way back to the country I know you called home.

I heard your whispers in the trees on the banks of Loch Lomond and felt your smiles in the warmth of the sun on my skin as I climbed cliff-sides in the Scottish highlands. I felt the the brush of your breath across my skin in the cool night air.

I never knew you. I have never so much as seen a picture of you, and yet I felt your presence all around me.

—

I grew up a child edited out of my own past, and yet decidedly still connected to the personal history that lurked in shadows and unspoken places. I remained connected to those people and places, always once removed from the stories I grew up with, stories born of parents who did not speak of their parents, and of grandparents who talked only of themselves.

I grew up divorced from the personal history that ties each of us back to belonging, back to one another along the vast network of human lineage, back to the shared heritage that can be traced back to a pair of common ancestors: grandfather and grandmother of the human race.

I grew up alone; separated from this vast network of interconnected lives, of interconnected histories.

I grew up rootless.

—

And yet I discovered myself unexpectedly rooted, tied not to a story or a history of self but to a history of place.

I grew up rooted to a small patch of Pacific coastline, a land of ancient redwoods and rocky beaches and the vicious, aching cold of the ocean’s waves.

I grew up among the trees, and learned to speak with the tongue of that place. I learned to walk among her spirits and greet them in our shared voice. I learned to let the ocean’s rhythm soothe the pace of my own fragile and faltering human heart and learned patience as I watched the winter’s rains linger and the summer’s winds blow.

And one day in the summer’s sun I excavated my heart and buried it by the sea shore, where it might be lulled to sleep, cradled in the rocking palm of the ocean’s tides.

And then I left that heart behind.

—

I wrote the words because they asked me to and I said, “I live in a beautiful world and it has deeply influenced the person I have become. My house is nestled in a clearing, surrounded by redwoods and spruce trees. I live near the ocean, and when the wind comes from the west I can taste its brine on my tongue. This natural beauty has infiltrated my psyche and greatly influenced my outlook on the world. It is a part of me.”

And then the call and came I walked away.

I left behind those rocks and trees I knew so well and moved 3,000 miles away to a place from which I almost couldn’t feel the fragile flutter of my heart.

And I was rootless.

—

I never knew her story, and by extension will never really know my own, lost forever are those chapters of my pre-history.

I grew up in a culture that moves forward without looking back and in doing so I fear we leave behind our stories, our wisdom.

Who today still cares to honor their ancestors, to cherish the guidance left behind in foot-shaped prints upon the Earth?

And this is why I cannot help but wonder, if I could hear her voice today— a voice reaching out from beyond the veil of time—

What would she want to tell me?

Are you paying enough attention?

It’s a thought that plagues me in moments of stillness: moments that capture me, like

great heaving breaths taken
in an instant as
head breaks water’s surface,
and for a shining, crystalline moment

I remember what it is to breathe.

Are you

Or maybe this isn’t an experience you have.

But my life is often an exercise in full-body immersion as I sink into mind and computer and achieve a state that’s nearly

 

dissociated

 

from my body.

And the sudden-ness of breaking free startles me, in the moments when I find myself back inside my body —

often with a thump.

This is when it hits me over the head how the hours have slipped by and I fear that I haven’t really been living. That I have instead been so completely wrapped up inside my mind that I’ve forgotten what it means to have a body. Forgotten what it means to sit in my body, to sit with my body, to

feel myself me.

And maybe if I weren’t me this wouldn’t be so much of a problem. Maybe I would relish the hours spent consumed by other, the moments when self falls so entirely free and I become one with machine.

Or as near to such a thing as can be.

But I find that art requires presence

That I cannot speak without tasting the texture of my tongue.

That I cannot see without knowing the slippery slide of eyelids upon eyes.

That I cannot feel without the dancing rhythm of my heart, thudding away inside my chest.

 

That I cannot know what I am seeing/thinking to speak it without first knowing that this body in it’s infinite
wisdom and fragility
is here and now and right in this very moment           with me.

 

And, so, I ask again:

Are you paying enough attention?