I hear it every evening for a week, the inelegant squawking, a volley of silver screeches fired like arrows into the gathering dark. The night is closing in. It has not visited this place for many moons and now the inky blue skies deepen - only well past midnight, far into the middle of what would normally be night. I hear the bird call while I am elbow deep in pearly hot dishwater, and this time, I abandon the house, to see what I can see of this voice, so solemn, unmelodic, and continuous.

I step into the cool grassy blue and what could almost be called darkness wraps my heart in a breath of joy. I follow the screech towards the tallest tree, whose feet brush the pond. I hear it clear as day now, and I walk faster until I see something set into the violet sky that makes me stumble with delight - a star. The very first one, shed like a blossom from heaven’s wilting white lilac. You’ve come back to me, I think, and then I see her - the fat, shadowy owl. She is perched on the tallest branch. Like an abuela in her handwoven shawl, a small steady hunk of life, bobbing, watching, calling the stars, calling the night to come to her. And the night answers. The air is full of the conversation of owls. I kneel in wonder on the wet earth, and she dips and swivels and looses arrow after arrow of that bright, serious call.

I am glad the others answer her, but I wonder why they do not sit together, sharing a branch. Wouldn’t it be easier? Then they would not have to call so loudly. But then maybe they would have less to say, maybe they talk about the birches and the rabbits and the roots they can see from their particular perch. I think of my dearest friends, scattered far around this earth, each on our branch, calling.

My eyes are playing tricks on me. The spruce is so black it is like a void cut with a razor blade out of the lavender sky. When I look away from it, to see the first star crowning open air, the sky flashes and pops, a negative image of the tree burned into my vision like a bolt of lightning, flowing like a waterfall of light from the headwaters of this first star. My eyes are red hot and troubled by the late summer pollen, and so they are challenged by their work of seeing. Everything around me swims and shimmers in the half light, little dots winking and swooping and dipping like swallows, dancing to the one-note song of the owls. Like it is the first star who is calling, and the crackling, luminous air itself is the answer.

driving home from anchorage, august 11

The summer sun sank, neon as an electric rose, into the green marshes at midnight. She was ribboned in fog, like a great glowing coal dipped into the water and letting off blue steam.

“That sun is muddy,” remarked Hazel.

“I see what you mean,” I replied, with the admiration of one poet for another. To see things for the first time, isn’t that what we want, as poets? To see, not with the boredom of repeated teachings, but with eyes alight with wonder and strangeness? This muddy, sunburnt sun, sinking red faced into the warm earth after exhausting herself on another blazing summer day. And when Hazel and I saw birch trees through the window, she considered them for a moment, before pronouncing with a sigh, “those trees look heavy.” How silly of me, for I had not even considered the weight of a summer forest surrounded on all sides by city streets.

Later, at 2am, halfway home, the orange serpent of a crescent moon slithered above the horizon, peeking her golden eyes over the remote mountains, tasting the night with her fiery tongue. Hazel cried like a mourner, a pure and inconsolable bereavement of spirit, and then calmed, sleeping deeply with a half smile on her face.

This was the miracle: the black sky returned to alaska, like a mother raven covering us in her wings, her multitudinous stars like chicks waddling after, tucked snugly into her black feathers, peering out at us again.

Exhausted from the drive home, stepping from the house past 3am, into the first true night since May, I took this in. The wonder, the relief, the return of the dark. It spread my vision. Stars everywhere. Friends I recognized. The luxury of a black expanse. For a while I watched a determined satellite crawling across the big dipper like a snail, and then, all at once, a shooting star burst in fiery blues into being, skated east, and then was utterly gone. It felt strangely like laughter. This twinkling incomprehensible play, always there, was at last cut loose from the tyranny of the sun to be revealed in its raven wing darkness, to be seen again as though for the first time. What light, what light, the darkness can reveal.

Spring hurts. It is the most painful of seasons. This gives me hope that death, like autumn, will come on softer than birth. I was born in the first days of spring, with the scalpel, torn like a bulb from the soil of my mother all at once, too shocked to cry. And each year in spring, spears of light stab the earth, shaking the seeds from the dark comfortable curl of their bed. Time to wake up. We come to the door of the new day dragging the blanket of the underworld behind us, blinking stupidly in the light, consternated now that what we wanted is so near, demanding that we meet it.

It hurts until we begin to move.

Nettle tea like dark green blood gives us strength. The birches weep sugar water. I devour fiddleheads, feeling monstrous to cut short the elegant and long awaited rapture of an unraveling fern. It will uncurl within the forest of my body instead. The days lengthen, but still fall grey as stones. A chill clings like mold to my fingers. We hack at the mud to make way for plants we hope will come. Rain floods the naked earth, and then, at last, out of the muck, little green apostrophes emerge like promises. The robins come, boomeranging through the yard with chests of fire. The grey jays come. The sparrows come. We are all hungry. In spring hunger long precedes the feast of summer, and it hurts, to want and want, to wait and wait, to half give up and yet cling to hope that the limp dead grass and granite skies and dark mud will give way to some unfurled delight, something festive and flirtatious, that we will soon pass from the hunger season to the lands of more than enough.

But then, we do.

The cranes came back early one evening, crossing snow-crowned alpenglow peaks and the blue belly of the bay and bone-white glaciers cold as death. They come back to us as heralds, as archangels who have not the density of spirit to stay through the long shadowed dark. They returned in a perfect V, their handsome bodies lit from beneath in pure liquified gold and dragging in their silver feathers threads of the next dimension, pulling open the curtain of this three act play of summer. We stood beneath them, and the flitting thrum of their wings was holier than the ringing of cathedral bells.

And I saw a beleaguered sunflower emerge from her nest of wet shadows, brand new growth but already dog-eared and scrappy, with the husk of her old self still clinging stubbornly to one leaf. She looked like she had a hard season. Still, she made it out, and now her lust for the sun is driving her up, up, up, ardently making that long, precarious journey towards bloom.

Xoxo

.

.

.

Oh photonic pleasure box,
  Oh burning crystal palace,
      Oh god of all gods,
          Oh keyhole in the blue ceramic door of the sky,
                                    Oh heat,
                                 Oh treasure,
                              Oh golden coin, 
                    Oh source and subject of all desires,
 Oh headwaters of this frenzied frothing river of aliveness,
                              Oh flowering star - 

To the watchful, boundaryless sun,
I bow,
I beg,
       You give me your light and I hunger for more. 

You are the seed of all seeds,
     Bursting into bloom by the billions 
               upon finding a muddy, fertile earth to catch you. 
          Your hedonistic heat drums in my heart,
                                       flows warmly and darkly through my veins. 

You give equally to the world 
                   and to the black void of space beyond it. 
You show no preference beyond the desire to burn,
                 give,
              reach,
            touch,
and flower,
  millenia after millenia,
         the alchemical furnace of what you are
                                                singing,
                                              singing,
                                             singing. 

In grey winter,
   the false spring of the north,
                        I am humbled,
                           crushed,
                              besotted. 
          I know I am helpless.                    
I have no will to live 
       beyond that which you bestow upon me.
    I have no ability to bloom 
                        without your touch. 

So touch me. 
     Fall upon me like a waterfall and make me green. 
            Do not burn me to a vengeful desert, 
                    do not abandon me to the chill of darkness. 
Let us walk quietly together and observe the hawthorne flowering,
    the cascade of thrush and robin song,
       the gangly rhododendrons articulating their thoughts 
                    in profuse and clownish blossoms. 
Let the lemon balm teach me about your sweetness,
   Let the feathered cedars show me the elegance of heaviness
      and age. 
Let the pollen drifting like stars stir me into bloom.

Our rowdy miracle endures.

A perfect balance strikes again,
         a tilted axis,
       a bemused half smile,
    a migratory flush,
another springtime.
   We are unkempt biology,
        secret garden,
           a flowering blue jewel in space,
               a harmonic fifth voice wandering in from the ethers,
                 an elemental meeting grounds, 
                       excruciatingly fragile,
                              tenuous,
                                 fickle,
                                   fleeting,
                 yet as stubborn as the faceted splash of lichens
                                      that have painted the rocks
                                                         for millions of years. 

                                Light becoming life.

                                 Oh how can it be.
                                        So simple,
                                    so sumptuous,
                                  so quick to come
                                         and to go.


      Oh praise be 
             to the budding,
                                   the perpetual,
                                              the intoxicating,
                                                       and the most intelligent crystallization
 

                                                            of the sun. 

happy beltane season. xoxox

For an age, a wicked king has ruled the land.

But when the flood comes, his gold will be as stones in his pockets,

dragging him down into the deep.



( We each are but one vertebra on the snake of time,

bound to her as she spirals through our centuries,

devouring, shedding, and creating anew. )



When the king is drowned,

will we dive into the sea to scavenge his heavy treasure?

Or will we learn to move with the storm,

becoming rain,

becoming wind,

becoming tree that bends without breaking,

tree that retains the capacity and will to give fruit,

when the storm breaks

and the sun returns,

illuminating the transformed territory 

of our new world.



As we traverse the landscape of storms, we must not fall to confusion.

Are the whirling seabirds a threat?

Though they call and caw, they are only scavengers, hungry for scraps

– the cackling voices of the spectacle.

It is the cliff edge you must watch out for,

unless your own wings are now ready.

Against that sudden drop, your arrows have no use

– so let us study the mechanisms and mystery of flight,

how to tame the air,

how to ride it.



As heavy as the king that hoards,

so light are the seeds 

of the lowly and ubiquitous dandelion

– for in truth, is this not her kingdom?

Everywhere her sun faces and moon faces smile skyward.

Everywhere, on all lands,

do her kind live in plumpness and plenty.



Humble dandelion,

employing the technology of air and lightness,

giving away all you hold dear to the first passing breeze

– may you be our steward, our trailblazer, the one we model ourselves after.



May we, too, give our gifts so freely,

as sweet as sugar

tossed across the green bowl of the earth.

love to you all in these changing times xoxo

Awakening again

to glimpse the sunrise teeth of mountains from a dark cocoon of blankets, thick drowsy dream nets slipping off to find myself here, again, to bleary eyed behold the world. Blue bay. Pink snow necking lilac ridges. aThe watercolor sky a great grandmother throwing open the gate of her flowering yard in welcome.

The way things are. Cold. Putting on two pairs of socks and two sweaters and my winter coat to brave the icy corners of the still sleeping house.

Or sometimes, awakening in the starlit hours before dawn to the cracking laughter of a new fire blooming in the hearth, lit by loving hands. From bed I listen to the snappy banter of sparks, and I watch as orange flecks of flame drift past my window, having escaped through the chimney to mingle with the stars.

Slosh water, murmur kettle. The coffee gives me back desire. A flare of flame melting cracking ice. Life seducing me again. I want it. I move for it. The old door caws like a crow as I swing it wide, and I tail the dogs into the snow-drenched yard. Cold crystal breath. Where is the moon this morning, what is the mood of this sky, this day? Moose tracks, rabbit tracks, ermine tracks, the snow is such a gossip, she gives up the land’s secrets to me each morning, she spills the tea, stories scrawled across the white page.

I trace my imperfect circles around the house, forest, pond. The sweat lodge is an iced and frosted cake, moss layers tucked beneath the snow, cradling the cold sleeping stones of ancient volcanoes. When they are hot they make the sweat lodge a furnace of dragon eggs. For now, they are sleeping, resting, dreaming of the fire that made them. Me too. Our time will come.

The dogs go mad with delight, flitting between branches, smelling the rippled skin of the earth, giving kiss after kiss to the world they love. Anxious shouts of “Naani, come!” harsh the melody of the morning. I’m always keeping a fretful gaze on that wild-eyed husky, who cannot fully abandon her wolf ways. She just might slip away, chasing the scribbled invitation of a rabbit, and never return. She’s cute – but she’s a killer. Exuberantly fluffy, strong as an ox and just as ready to pull a load a hundred miles, one frozen full moon eye, one eye like summer oak and pond and warm clay on bare feet. She loves me, but she is not more loyal to me than to her own destructive, hungering joy.

Naani is my maestro, guru of how to love this goddamn cold that persists and clings and frosts and stays and makes no room for spring. No magnolia blossoms here, no bees, no flouncy flirting daffodils. The queen of winter reigns. And every morning as I gather my strength to brave the cold, Naani breaks free from the house to roll in the diamond snow in perfect, perfect love, leaping up and gazing at me as if to say, oh my god, my god, can you believe this shit?

And you know, I hardly can. Who could believe the majesty of this crystal season, this rainbow snow, this pure cold air, this angel planet, these big butterfly blue skies, these forests chattering with chickadees, and the slim silver knife of a hawk thrown across the yard. I am well fed on the gifts of this season - the naked embrace of long black nights, the rich compost of who I no longer am, the lodge of dreams, the thousand written words, the slow, the rest, the dark, the be still, the get ready, the mycellial net within me shimmering now with light, slowly moving outward, upward, onward, toward fruit, toward flower, toward the future we must make together.

And behold the gift of befriending Naani, this sweet wolf only visiting for a season to impart her wisdom, our buddha of frozen mornings, a hedonist and devotee, shedding her coat all over my house like the winter sheds blizzards, immoderately, the clock of her body promising me that spring is, in fact, on her way.

But not today. Today, dry snow, crunching boots, burning fingers, golden sunshine that does not heat the blood, glacial ice bobbing on the bay in harsh wonder - and Naani, begging me to love it with her. I will. I do. Let me always love like this, like a husky with snow on her nose and wild lust for the horizon in her yin yang eyes.

In addition to sharing two poems below, I want to re-introduce some of my other offerings.

Both of the pieces below were generated during one of my weekly writing circle. We meet every Sunday at 11am PST on zoom, and write together. I offer prompts, subjects, styles to explore, sometimes images or music meant to get the creative fires crackling. People share if they want, not if they don’t. I have been religious about this weekly practice for almost three years - and it shows. My writing has blossomed into something I deeply enjoy - and that is the primary point of creating, isn’t it? I feel fluid, adventurous, and delighted as I write. My favorite part of writing circle, though, is other people’s writing. It is a joy to receive the myriad styles and forms and devotional odes and surprising hilarities that bubble up in these weekly classes. I leave each class grinning and inspired. I am looking to expand the classes this year, so if you are curious about this space, I encourage you to drop in. The classes are entirely donation based, a labor of love that feeds our community spirit. Message me for the link.

I am also continuing to offer tarot readings and astrological mini-readings and deep dives. I have been working with tarot for over a decade, and see it as a language of archetypes and that circumvents much of the logical mind and speaks directly to the soul. The readings are a collaborative exploration into the deeper substrate of the current moment, examining potential pathways forward, hidden resources, possible traps, and available blessings. I have recently renewed my astrological studies, because the astrology of this year is just so out of this world, so volatile, and so brimming with potential. I offer a deep study of your personal birth chart, as well as a look into how this year’s transits will show up for you particularly, and how to ride these waves of transformation with skill, fluency, and ease. I also look at partners’ charts, how the two charts work together, potential challenges and innate gifts. If any of these offerings interest you, write to me! All of my work is sliding scale and accessible.

Now, the poems. The first is an epitaph of sorts, a bundle of roses left on the tomb of this Time. The second is a love poem to the body. Enjoy, keep creating, keep nourishing and dreaming big dreams for the green seasons to come.

X

Chloe

THUS ENDS THE AGE OF AMBITION
entombed in the metal and stone towers which once operated like clockwork, elevators rising and falling, water pumping through pipes like blood, people sleeping, cooking and working in a perfectly managed order – for a time.
Oh Ambition – look what we have built.
From the sharpest obsidian blade of an arrow, to an ever innovating wheel - first stone, then wood with spokes like sun rays, then rubber made of the scabbed-over wounds of a bleeding earth. Speed, we wanted it. We got it. War, we mastered it. We became it. We got lost within it. From bare teeth to stick to blade to gun to pandora’s riveting bombs – Power. We chased it. We were swallowed by it. We accomplished it. We ran out of it.
The buildings, phallic altars to our own immortality, will be unmade by the gentlest amongst us – the climbing vines, the squirrels and pine martins, the spores and starlings, the curling ferns and the gentle laughter of the wind. Curtains of rain will put out the smoke of our angry, desperate, and heroic fires. For yes, we were heroes – conquering the lonely mountain, finding out what we could do, just how far we could go. Proving ourselves to our deadbeat dad in the sky who told us we were sinners, we were mortal, we were small and weak and temporary. Oh how we showed him, that jealous god. Look at us in our fine suits, our cars as slick as bullets, look how we outrun the darkness, how we choke the life within and without into order, into genius – our great lego towers, our pride, our monuments.
And now they crumble, or begin to. Yet perhaps we may toss some of the fruits of our ambition through the doorway into the next world – for can it all have been in vain? Bloody, yes, it was – but was it not also beautiful? We would never have lost so much without our ambition, yes, but we would never have come so far, into the intricate computer-chip weaving and luminous libraries and interlocking mandalas of cities and cinema and sensorium – can you imagine? What it cost us, to be so driven? From the dusty plains of distant lands, spear in hand, hunger in the belly, our minds spinning, solving, striving for more.
Are you proud of us? What comes after the prize is long since won? What happens when the clock itself collapses in on us, when the lego tower made of our ambition sprouts legs and crawls away?
Maybe it will be the age of mercy, of surrender, as the great waves of the earth pull the rug out and the blankets up over our heads, as the machine runs out of fuel, as the great technology of the sun sends solar flares, tells us to put away our toys now, clean our room, and get ready for storytime, bedtime, and dreams.
Tomorrow is another day, my love. Another age.
Rest, now.

ODE TO THE BODY
I step out of the house and I bring my body, this electric, magnetic, humming bundle of sticks – my divining rods, my wild horses, my roving starship, my loyal companion dogging all my footsteps.
I step from the house and the two cups of my eyes fill with sunshine until it splashes over the edges and warms my skin. Refraction, prismatic, chimeras of forms, forms I pull from this photonic ocean, and a busy laboratory in my mind always printing labels, cross referencing, attaching footnotes, making meaning, meaning, meaning.
My eyes are these wet jewels, full of living fire, priceless kaleidoscopes which float across the land collecting beauty, texture, shade. My feet are lily pads. My soul hops between them, hop, hop, hop, never missing, never getting lost in the boggy marshes beyond my body’s limits – not yet am I subject to decay or dissolving, not yet will I abandon these rafts and swim unencumbered in the daunting depths beyond.
I gallop, hop and stumble, slither through the tangled and elegant jungle gym of the forest beyond the house. Branches scratch the back of my neck, a drop of ice cold water tickling me like a bug crawling down my spine. My spine is the piano on which this song is played, a perfect unhinged melody which never seems to end – now quiet, now raucous, now tormented, now an opening harmony of bliss, bliss, bliss. A spider wove the fine webbings of my nerves and now she sits in my cerebellum and tugs – now this thread, now that, and I am her puppet, her steed pulling along this heavy sledge, driven by feeling, by great aversion and longing for pleasure. My hands are two monkeys leaping boldly from branch to branch, or maybe butterflies, alighting here and there, feeling with proboscis, curious, so curious, sniffing out the truth. In them I have invested much of my power, twins I have raised and set loose to do what they will in the world. All this, my bundle of sticks, my herd of caribou, my fire and my smoke – all this madness, just stepping out the door.

Lviv is a rock in the black ocean of history. The shifting tides of borders have washed up and over the city again and again. She has been Lwów, Lvov, Lemburg. She has been Polish, Russian, German, and Ukrainian. She has been sacked, invaded, rotted by fascism, torn through by famine, a metropolis of artists, a haven for scholars and poets, a heaven and a hell.

Through it all, she has remained; a gnarled old tree around which history churns. She is who she is. A city of elegant stone buildings, ornate Polish and Italian architecture. Looking up, you see gryphons and dancing cherubs and masterfully carved swaths of fabric crowning the streets. Bare-breasted goddesses hold stone balconies upon their backs century after century, their muscles still showing the strain of all they carry.

In my first days in Lviv, when the walnut leaves were still a luminous yellow, I watched a magpie land on a windowsill. She preened her rainbow feathers and then took flight, causing a chunk of stone to tumble from the windowsill and crash into the earth, leaving a cloud of dust behind. So light, the magpie, and so heavy the stone, but so mighty, so merciless, the hand of time upon this place. A once wealthy city has not the means to repair itself, and sinks, day by day, back into the earth. In many places the statues have lost their faces, and stand like mourning ghosts, blackened by rain and paying silent witness.

The air raid sirens come in the night like a fist pounding the door, like a plot twist in a dream that takes you down a dark crooked hallway. I could not sleep through them, and yet there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but lay there and listen to this wailing in the streets. It became existential, a warning that we are too far down a path we didn’t mean to take. Danger, they moaned. Something is wrong. We’re not safe here. Yes, I know. I remember. You won’t let me forget.

The cobblestone streets are full of bars and cafes, pretty women in fur coats, flea markets with antique treasures, shops selling cherry liquor and chocolate croissants and embroidered cloth. Life goes on. Gaggles of teens collapse into giggles as they walk by, pale and sucking on their vapes. Women push strollers. Men in fatigues bear the stone cold expressions afforded to them by war, sometimes missing a foot or an arm. Techno music bleeds from basement clubs. Strangely, mirrors adorn each street corner in the central district, asking if you’re willing to see your own reflection, and asking if you’re able to see beyond it.

Though the people I meet are kind and warm, nobody smiles in the street. That was hard for me to get used to. This solemnity is an Eastern European thing they say - but in Lviv, it’s something more. In Poland it is a polite and somewhat haughty disinterest. In Lviv, to smile in the street is almost obscene. The war drags at the ankles. There is no escape or end to the grinding losses, nobody expects it to get any better, and as the last autumn leaves fell and darkened to mush in the streets, a harsh, grey city was exposed, with little comfort for the people who must still take the rattling old railcars to long work days, speaking in hushed tones about their neighbor who has disappeared, presumably kidnapped and fed to the insatiable front line.

This has happened here before. The record skips. Our downstairs neighbor, a babushka in black, wails and cries each night, inconsolable in her grief, once even driven to throwing plates and chairs into the walls, and though I cannot understand the words she cries, the meaning is clear. She has been robbed of what was most precious to her. I wish I could join her, throwing dishes at the walls, smashing mirrors, and then helping to sweep up the glass afterwards. I wish I could help. Instead I observe. Sometimes I hear a man’s voice trying to comfort her. Once, I came home late, and the man was at her door, obviously pleading to be let in, a grocery bag at his feet - but she would not unlock the door.

People love their dogs in Lviv. Pomeranians swarm the streets, their silliness a remedy for hard times. They are so fluffy they look like they would dissolve in a bath, accompanying their serious lipstick-wearing women. Leashed huskies strut proudly with their families, eyes like chips of ice. Each night there are crowds of people outside of the shops selling hot cherry liquor, and it would be a lie to say there is no joy, no merriment. Couples take photos beside the gaudy Christmas decorations. A man and woman play music in the street, violin and accordion. Once I saw them compel a mob of passing school children to stop and sing a folk song - one they all knew the words to. A well dressed business man pulls handfuls of crumbs from his pockets to feed the iridescent pigeons, and smiles at their cooing, murmuring delight. And the babushka selling yellow flowers in the market does smile at me, a smile that ought to halt every army on earth, and I stitch together my few Ukrainian words to tell her that her flowers are the sun. She smiles, she knows the worth of her flowers, she is unafraid of the past or the future. Lviv is also a city that has remade itself after each famine, war, and calamity, and knows the sweet as well as the bitter.

All of my friends in Lviv smoke too much, even though the air is poisoned by generator smoke and soviet-era gas stoves and exhaust from too much traffic. In my last winter weeks there it became overwhelming just to walk down the street and breathe this stagnant toxicity, which presses down on the city like a bad mood. I got sick, I began having paranoid dreams of poison falling from the skies. And everyone we met there chain smoked. Maybe there is something to be said for befriending the poison. Maybe it helps.

But then again maybe not. There seems to be no end to what a human being can get used to. Who can say if this trait has been beneficial or devastating, on the whole. We have survived terrible bleakness - some of us, anyway. But hyper-normalization has numbed us into trances with catastrophic conclusions. Best to stay awake to what is poison and what is medicine. To retain the ability, and the responsibility, to tell the difference.

On my walk home through a snowstorm, I see a swastika tagged on a streetsign, and I feel sick to my stomach. I just finished a book about Lviv during the second world war. A city that was a third Jewish, before the ghettos and the trains, is now less than one percent. I begin looking around for all of the people who are not here. It is hard to train the eye to see what is missing. The man who coined the word genocide was a Jewish lawyer from Lviv. How could it have all gone so wrong. I feel suspicious of the young men in buzzcuts strutting the streets in their army fatigues. I wonder what they have done, what they believe.

The next night I pass the same sign and look up hatefully at the tag. I see that someone tried to scribble out the swastika. Surprisingly, it helps. Surprisingly, tears of gratitude and understanding spring to my eyes. Hate does not, and will not, have the last word. Love never gave in, even in hard times, even when it had to go underground. Still, I ride the bus for an hour, it fills and empties and fills again, and there are no men between the ages of 25 and 50. Brothers, sons, cousins, dads, neighbors, friends. They are gone, vanished, like so many before.

My friend tells me about his grandmother, born in the work camps. He tells me about the Ukrainian women in these camps who saved fish bones from soup and pulled threads from their own clothing to embroider in secret. They taught each other the craft, they retained the patterns. They wrote poetry and sang songs. And they lived. They knew their medicine.

We are in a tea house while my friend is telling me this. The ceilings are the curved brick archways of an old wine cellar. Candlelight and soft music envelop the space, and pretty women in earthy, hip clothing bring gentle-voiced couples their tea. My friend’s eyes are big and bright, as he tells me about the history of the work camps - his own family’s history, and so his history too, on the heels of which he fled to Lviv, having escaped the bombing of his apartment and city not so long before. He tells me that he had just finished renovations on his home when it was bombed, laughing at the irony, shrugging it away like an inconvenience.

He is brilliant and kind, eager and sensitive, smiles easily and asks constantly, “how are you feeling?” He told me about how as a child his grandmother constantly warned him that his parents could die and he could be taken to the orphanage at any moment. She lectured him that everyone dies, that he needed to be ready. He tells me, laughing again, about how he was scared of her as a child. And that he knows now that though this felt like trauma to him, she meant it as a gift. So that he wouldn’t be as shocked as she was, when the world collapsed beneath him. So that he would be tough, and strong, and survive, like she did. As he talks I think about what it costs to survive. And what it takes. And what it means.

I see a sweetness in my friend, that his grandmother could not afford to preserve in herself. I see this sweetness caught in the violent tangle of history. I see it fighting for its life. I see it in Ukraine. In the people I love. And even in myself. In Lviv I can touch a root fire that endures winter after winter. It is red and alive, running underground like the city’s ancient river. And I see that places like Ukraine are full of teachers. That we do well to kneel at the altar of wounded places and listen to what the earth and her people have to say. That trauma doesn’t necessarily become wisdom. But it can. And when it does, it is the medicine we seek.

The global paradigm is fraying at the edges. The weitiko tower is crumbling under the feet of magpies and starlings. The dark storm of the kali yuga builds on the horizon, come to swallow our age. And it is the wisdom born of these edgeland places, these abandoned places, that has the marrow, the low light, and the hand stitched maps we will need to find our way through.

We live in time’s ashes, ash cities fashioned in the belly of the fire, forming fragile crystallizations of past passions. The shifting gloam of old coals surrounds us, as does the pop and impatient hiss of green wood tossed recklessly to the flame. Do we sacrifice what still lives, and immortalize what long ago ceased to flower?

Who here mourns the women burned into the earth?

Their murderers are deified in marble and gold, painted wearing red silk and furs and self-satisfied glares, painted in burgundy and black and pomp and angry, precise, glorifying strokes. We pay homage to the glory and the gore, the conquering eyes, the madness of jewels and cherubs and stigmata and swords. While the true loss is only hinted at, in Mary Magdalene’s abject grief – the goddess in blue weeps, death in her hands, oh what have you done?

I walk past room after room of this horror, overworked frames and dark canvasses praising that road from Rome I so wish we had never taken – to arrive at last in the shimmering ponds of Van Gogh and Monet, a French countryside alight with gentle laughter. I weep with relief. After so many centuries of brutality and violent worship, see how our softness yet endures, emerging like a fragile blossom from the snow. A spring breeze blows apart the curtains of history, and through these painters the earth reveals its psychedelic soul.

Dash and curve, sparkle and settle, dance, whorl, oh look how they saw that it all blends together, that there is no self, no master, no portion separate or set apart from any other. They saw in the iris marshes a more worthy subject than any king – and not one iris only, sharpened into beauty’s blade, but the swaying jungle of them all, their movement, shade and luminosity. I am fed by their humility, to blur the faces and paint the fields, to spend a lifetime on ponds and haystacks, to forego the heroism of photographic detail and instead express the living spirit beneath.

Intuitives. Impressionists. I love them all the more for the centuries of caged minds that came before them – they come with an offer of cool, clean water, an invitation to roll in the grass, to kick off our shoes and our aspirations, to become earth again.

How the splotches of violet and chunks of green play like two beloved dogs, tumbling raucously together while the motherly blues hold them, pale light cracking and gleaming beneath. I sip the rose gold sunrise, or maybe I feel its gentle affectionate touch near my heart, like the first breath of a woodland morning which is both sweet and cool. Here in these canvasses, the land is giving flower after too hard a season. They are a promise kept, a fugitive peace stealing like dawn across the minds of the people. They are gifts of rolling joy and sweet sorrow, they are the coy blushing smile of a goddess who was never tamed, they are vermillion pink kaleidoscope gardens and indigo fields of tired earth, and they are, for me, remedy and devotion, triumph and release, the escape from history of a feral and luxurious love.

Women,

But especially these women here with me,

and the women who branch off of them like so many fruiting boughs,

heavy with sweetness and flower.

Women who love the land.

Women who cried with me over the copper fox

on the side of the highway,

and helped me peel its skin

from its luminous rainbow-weave fascia.

Women who cried with me into the green river,

where our tears rippled that hurried rush of folding jade.

Women who cried with me in the garden

as we washed my blood from the sheets.

Women who handed me hearts as big as basketballs,

as heavy as Dutch ovens full of stone soup.

Women who snuck with me onto train cars

And into parties

And hotel swimming pools.

Women who held my bag and found my wallet,

Who sat with me while I packed my suitcase,

Who came over,

And laughed,

And stayed.

Women because I love to give them beautiful things

and they love to receive them.

Women because they ask and wait for the answers,

as open as a valley to the wind.

Women because they are curly and wavy and spirally and disorderly

and irrational

and drawn to the darkness

because that is where the light is born.

Women who share songs and pockets of seeds

and second and third cups of tea

and sorrows and clothing and advice,

but not too much,

and compliments and secrets

and squares of chocolate

and time.

Women who claw through the brambles

and crawl through the caverns

with bloodied knees and a knife between their teeth,

hunting their own brilliance,

evading capture,

leaving tobacco and chunks of sap and blood and old lovers

and ocean agates and poems

as offerings

along the way

to their own becoming.

2025, Alaska

I recorded the poem as a voice note while I walked on the beach with Bella this week, you can listen here, or read the written poem below:

SPIRIT COUNCIL

We come from many places
 	to arrive at the meeting grounds
 	of this moment.

The grandmothers look serious
 		   and even the unborn children who join this council
          	       fold their wings somberly.
 	They implore us with wide eyes,
         		wondering what we will decide.

        We burn copal and artemesia and send this holy smoke
 				to mingle with the smoke of bombs
 			                                 which now permeates
 								our dreams.

Here we meet again, 
on the knife edge of all possible calamity.

You have been summoned.
                              We gather to mark this moment of no return.
What divided us is crumbling,
it is the rubble we now sift through,
it is the puzzle we cannot solve.
 			On all sides, danger.
Nuclear risk, multiplying extinction, the tedium of war,
      the abstracting algorithms 
                          which would have us confuse hunger
                                                                     for food.
Are you, too, haunted by fear?
 			That our compliance might cost us more than our minds?
 		That the children will not be stirred 
                                        by botanical desire, 
                                             babies suckled on the teat 
                                                               of holograms?
                            Oh 
    that the bold and enigmatic earth 
                      may fall?
                                      Her complexity ground into fine white powder, 
                                 not even flour for bread,
                             just chemical ash, 
                    the toxic waste of successful economy. 
                 The world dumbed into submission, 
                                 no longer foraging in springtime, 
                                  no longer migrating upon currents of wind, 
                              no longer singing in mothertongues.

We must re-code this glitch in the weave of consciousness 
before our ferocious and flirtatious wildness 
 						recedes forever, 
with no one to even remember her.
                 May empire, and not nature, be the dream we wake from.
 						To turn our backs 
  					is only to exaggerate this clownish violence.
 					With the courage of deathlessness, 
 						we look evil in its broken face, 
 							and if our knees buckle, 
 							it is only to land on the earth 
and pray.
We may not be able to bare this love, 
           				     but without it, 
 			       we will not survive either, 
 			     without it we will go under, 
 				       anesthetized, 
     an assisted suicide for a world of beings 
 						who might yet live.
The council is unanimous.

We will not go that way, the way of dread, the way of numbness. It is
decided, the stones cast, the compass set, the babies swaddled, the
seeds tucked into skirt hems and coils of hair. We are making a caravan.

The way is narrow, 
 		the passage contracting to a mere pin-hole of light,
  						but light nonetheless.
 	And when we cannot see through this tunnel, when the night is blinding,
we will dance in the darkness, and we will feel our way out into open
   				air, hand in hand.
 	We will outlive our own deaths, 
to come again to this great meeting, 
to continue our work, 
to love without end.

        We will braid the hair of the ancestors, to weave a rope, to make a bridge, 
 			 to open a road to the star nations, 
 			       where the fires of our lodges 
 				        do not go out.
 		     We will walk the flowering road back home.
          The spider goddess will teach us how to balance on the tightrope 
                                                    between worlds.
                  The corn goddess will feed us with songs of the future.
      		                                 and you?
 				You will show us 
 				     the meaning 
 				          of Love.
You, the one who dies a thousand times and still can wonder. 
     You come back to us now, 
                 to the sounds of our drums. 
                                      You come leaping like the undammed rivers, 
                                  beyond the fog of forgetfulness, 
                             beyond leaden footsteps, 
                      beyond the fear of the times, 
               beyond ashes, 
to arrive here,
   with peace 
 			in your hands.
                  Oh look how you kept the flame lit.
                   Look how it dances in your palms.
 					For a thousand lifetimes you went out, 
 						into the pathless wilds of untamed time, 
 			and now you return home with all you’ve gathered, 
your baskets overflowing with perfect wisdom. 
 								and just in time.

Come to the table, and we will make ready the offerings.
 	Nothing shall be withheld.

We call you, One Whose Bones Made a Loom, Whose Days a Weft.
    We call you, One Who Dreamed Love Where Once Were Nightmares.
         We call you, One Who Bloomed in Midwinter.
     We call you, One Who Made a Road of Honey.
               We call you, Courage.
            We call you, Kin.

 				We call you. 

Welcome to the country of light.

It comes on like four cups of bitter mescaline you gulped with hubris. You sat through all the stolid grey stubbornness of springtime thinking, did I take enough? Will it ever come on? I don’t think it’s working. And then, in a mighty head rush of green, green, green, it hits you. The carnival of perpetual light. Summer has arrived. Songbirds adorning the pale midnight skies. The thrush’s voice like an enchanted fountain, trickling and dripping across latticed branches, making you homesick for the fairylands to which you will never return.

The season of flower is all around you.

A long gone friend taught me to put my whole face in the flowers. You can’t truly know a flower, he said, standing high above, like a conqueror. You must kneel, supplicate yourself before her beauty, give her your eyes. Then you see and are blessed.

The lupines have magenta leopard spots, freckled around the open mouths of their blossoms. Not the deep periwinkle blooms at the top of the stalk, but only the hidden ones below that are pink and paper white. These flowers are spotted wildcats, purring in the shade.

And the simple dandelions are the first to come to the carnival. They arrive like gold coins spilled from the purse of the sun, unabashed joy, unembarrassed yellow, heralds of this sun season, promising easier days to come in the fields of green, gold, white. Before solstice they have all turned to moons, to crystal balls who, when you wish to see your future, disperse merrily, whispering, your future is in the stars, child.

This is the summer the daisies came, not a single one was here last year and now they bend and spill with such rampant luxury over the hillside, sprays of gladness, so friendly, so light and elegant and amicable is their walk upon the earth. And the late blooming lilac, this is her year. She is so laden with heavy perfumed blossoms that her silk-leaved branches sag, and she gives all she can of the riches of the goddess, Lakshmi milk, giving and giving, purple as a magic carpet caravan making for the moon.

By midsummer the robins, so well fed on garden worms, are almost spherical. They are contented rusty puffs of bright-eyed pleasure, so fat and yet still somehow skating through the air like deftly thrown daggers. And by midsummer you have almost forgotten that night ever existed. The sun dips below the mountains just before midnight, drenching what is left of their snowcaps in labial, rose-petal, heart-chakra pinks. And the clouds blush pink too, seducing the mind to get naked and open its legs. Summer. Greens and Blues. Blue sky like a ceramic bowl, like ultraviolet cello song, like polished turquoise, like kingdom come. Blue water like embroidered silk, like ruffled blue jay wing, like a heavy wish filling your pockets with stones at high tide.

The green plants race each other towards the sky. Do they know they race towards autumn, towards death? Maybe they simply don’t care. Plants so well fed on the light, forever alive in this delight, growing as they long to, as they must. So much growth it overwhelms me. The chickens disappear under the pushki and alder, feathered dinosaurs stalking through their dappled jungle, with eyes so clever, so orange, and not at all unkind. The weeds carpet the garden again and again, the calendula smiles open, and in spite of myself I open too, drinking in more and more light until even the fear leaves me, the fear of knowing that all this warmth and beauty will not last. My fear is carried away by the swallows scooping mosquito larvae from the pond in bountiful mouthfuls, saving us from that which hunts us and wants our blood.

My fear of loss is softened by the raindrops drawing perfect circles in the pond’s brown mirror, raindrops that caress the stained glass perfection of the indigo irises, whose stalks are woven through with crystal cobwebs spun by fat yellow spiders. The iris blooms only briefly, and she sings her mantra, Loss, yes, sure, but so what? Have some more beauty, and some more, and be glad. My tears join the pond’s muddy banks, and she drinks them gratefully, as though they are gifts, until I believe that they are.

These are days almost long enough to squander, days when dawn comes at three AM. They are the starless days - but not really starless, only so awash in the starlight of our own sun that all other stars bow offstage as she performs her solo kaleidoscopic opera of whirling, climactic, heart-melting song.

How can a day be so long, we wonder. And fatigue is the ailment of these summer lands. You can sleep when you’re dead, rest when winter’s black skies encase the days. For now the sun steals sleep until waking life becomes the dream, when morning is all night long, when birds keep time and the time is now, when order melts and you can watch the plants grow before your weary eyes. And you hope you are loving it enough, harvesting enough light that the memory of it will feed you in the long dark to come.

It is equally in exhaustion and delight that I collapse into this season, the season of the light. In relief, I give it up. You win. I surrender. Yes to this impossible loveliness, to a summer day that lasts weeks and weeks, yes to life and wanting to be alive, yes to opening the mud-caked husk of my heart and exposing the wet honeyed aliveness inside, risking all manner of pain and disaster to be this open. Yes to risking it. Yes to loving again and not counting the cost. Yes to walking this road in any season but especially in this season, the season of the flower. Yes to summer’s bonfire consuming the hard-earned winter strength and turning it to heat, bliss, flame, smoke, sky, and finally, memory. Yes to your wellspring eyes across the fire, across the yard, across the years. Yes to green, curtains and waves of it, green that shimmers, green that laughs. Yes to right now and yes to forever, yes to you, yes to me, yes to this earth, yes to these years, yes to letting go again and again, yes to life, yes, yes, yes.

thanks to all the friends who visited, for the medicine we made, for the songs, for the photos I didn’t take, for the sweetness of this summer gathering, and for the many wonderful occasions still to come.

From a distance it looked like a real mountain, pink as alpenglow and rising out of the mottled desert. The desert, though, is full of mirage. Driving through red mountains studded with juniper and prickly pear, the flat pink wall appeared more uncanny the closer we came. It fell like a glitch upon the eye.

We came to the town first, cut through by rusted train tracks. A ghost town, one you might see on the twilight zone, with all the simple folk conspiring to conceal some rank horror. One side of town was lined with broken building faces a century old. Across the street were the new buildings, aggressively boring, a corner of lawn diligently kept green and short. We stopped at the gas station and knew it wasn’t somewhere to linger. I pulled a sweater on over my dress in spite of the heat and didn’t make eye contact. Everyone in the town was there for the mine. Even the nurses, the schoolteachers, the bankers. Like ticks all feeding off of the same dog.

And then the mine itself began to come into view, as we wound our way up the mountain. It was vast. Monstrous. Each bend in the road revealed its scale. It was a war torn planet abandoned to robot vultures, crawling with machines. A total disaster. It went on and on until I was seasick. Nothing at all salvageable. Not one living thing, nor paw print, nor nest, nor fossil, nor geologic archive. Destruction beyond thought of repair, erasing forever even the memory that it had once been a thriving ecosystem. Craters. Dust. A world ground into powder, diligently, expensively, day after day, year after year.

At the border of the mine, one mountain still stood and faced all she had lost. She was freckled in white quartz, her red rock glittering with mica, trees curling their boughs like sculptures of fire. She was the survivor, made to watch each of her kin as they were consumed by this plague, as it crawled up her skirt. What took the earth millions upon millions of years to make, these machines undid proudly, blindly, in a few decades. There was nothing I could think of to make it better, no possible route to repair what had been done. I sang to the mountain, a lullaby in an old dead language, and tears ran down my cheeks.

Around the bend we stopped the car. There was a spring slithering down the red mountainside, and we followed the water to a creek bed that led up into the mountains. Soon we could not hear the drone of the machines. We followed the water.

Glassy water bubbled in crystalline pools, frothing diamond white, cold and glad, amidst rocks the color of rust and burnt oranges and sand. Juniper trees and manzanitas with their leaves of powdered coins twisted from little islands and along the banks. Clusters of quartz crystals and veins of granite laced the creek bed. Moss dribbled from the pools, electric green.

It seemed contrived, so elegant was the arrangement of each detail. Like a garden for the gods, complete with fountains and mosaics, it was all excessively pretty, luxurious, hypnotic. Speechlessly we climbed. Acorns tumbled down the rocks from some hardy desert oak. Caves and animal dens dotted the hillside, sanctuaries snuggled between stone. The water laughed, sang, the joy of water in the desert, the impossibility and miracle of life. So generous, so unlikely.

At one pool we found a local resident. A toad, his skin like pearled sand, exactly the color of the rock beneath him, encrusted with spots that could only have been minuscule moons, with eyes like swirling Jupiters. Even the sheen on the toad’s body matched the frothing bubbles of the crystal pool by which he sat. We watched him breathing for a long time, and he allowed us to, unconcerned, with no inclination to mistrust us, as though nothing bad had ever occurred. We watched the rapid pulsing of his delicate skin, the grip of his tiny hands upon the rock. It was almost unbearable, how perfect, how relaxed, how strange and lovely he was.

When we hiked back down, leaping amongst red rocks and criss-crossing the jingling creek, we took great care to watch each step. It would be a tragedy as great and irrevocable as the entire Morenci mine all over again, if we crushed that toad, who bore some holy mission in that place we did not feign to understand. We never saw the toad again. We wondered if he had been there at all. Perhaps he was a mirage conjured by the desert, or by our own longing for life to prevail.

And then we left, put the mine and the toad and the creek and the Martian craters behind us, driving up into the snowline and the repetitive story of the pines. The creek hung like a vision in our minds - a gift, but also a burden. Like spring water draining rapidly from cupped hands, we caught a glimpse of what we lose, as we crash our way into an uncertain future. As humans plunder the crust of the earth for metal, with machines, for machines, we could pause to notice what wildness stubbornly remains in our way, and why it might mean something to us, an entanglement, an obstacle, a riddle whose answer is our own salvation.

In the Arizona desert there is a pure sweetness, an unrepeatable arrangement of stardust and atoms, a masterpiece of biology and geology and god, being crushed industriously into pink dust. Forevermore. And there is a toad, I hope, on the edge of an icy spring pool, humming with intelligence, his heart marking a rhythm of life that, even at the edge of oblivion, remains to savor such implausible beauty.

X
Chloe

1.

On the great swingset of the sun I have swung all the way, landing in this snow drenched field, flung here from the midnight glow of summer solstice. Summer where I walked in purple light that was both dawn and dusk, and ran my fingers across purple lupins who bobbed like floating balinese temples, flowers that seemed immortal though I knew their blossoms would soon fall and wither, leaving only humble palms of foliage, and then nothing.

Still they seemed immortal, so handsome they were - and doesn’t all life seem immortal in its prime, in that flood of vital strength, unhurried beauty basking in continuous days and days of light? And when I am biking down the sunlit summer streets, or swimming in the saltwater of the mangroves in Mexico, don’t I feel immortal too? Don’t I feel certain, unhurried, content in a power that could never wane?

And now what’s left of the lupins is buried under a foot of snow, and the sun visits only briefly, tipping her golden hat in our direction, a coy wink over the mountains and she is gone again, leaving us to the darkness and to the chill born there.

When the winter storm shakes the house with rattling wind, when the trees break their backs under the weight of heavy snow, when nothing seems to come of the days but too much time to think, then do you feel mortal? Then can you imagine the candles burning low, the woodpile dwindling to splinters and a cold hearth, cold ash? A dog that was bounding and well in the summer now gazes at me bleary eyed, asking without words, why is there pain? And of course, what answer could I give? In the summer daylight I luxuriate in time’s generosity, I feel youthful, I am an orange cat rolling with its tufted belly to the sun. There is more than enough time.

In winter I cup cool time in my palms, and it drips away. I try to catch it in my mouth, to savor every precious drop - drops that taste like spruce tree icicles and breath at dawn and coffee and hunger and spiced, aromatic joy. In winter I know it will all be over too soon, and I will go out like the fire does each night, slowly. I will go out, marveling even as I dwindle to the the rustle of settling ashes.

And yet. When the hard crystal ball of the moon bathes the snow in purple light, purple light again, I remember. Though we may fade like the fire into darkness, we are immortal as the night, immortal as the space between stars.

2.

The two moose in the white yard appear like ghosts, like ghosts because there is something so unreal about their hulking bodies, their curved brown backs, their hooves as wide as dinner plates. But they are the very opposite of any pale, insubstantial phantom. They are hot blood and muscle, bone and antler, steaming breath, roving eye.

The moose speak to me of heaviness, like the bone-deep tired that drags me into a warm burrow of sleep, like the dark and heavy earth drowsing under the in snow. The sun herself is heavy now, neither of us can muster the strength to rise at a respectable hour. She crawls groggily over the mountains at eleven and makes her way across the sky like a snail carrying her hulking load of light. I stumble through the kitchen dragging my own load, my many contradictions, my gifts and my aversions, my power and my weakness, my deepest longings and my seductive apathy. This bundle is my own moody winter sun, throwing handfuls of light in my path, and then crawling back into the bed of darkness.

Heavy are the long nights, but love can be heavy, and heavy can be good. A weighted blanket, a fat old cat purring on your chest, striped fur and contentment spilling across your body, paws kneading you like dough. Heavy says, you are here.

In the yard, the younger moose kneels to nose the clover out of the dry snow. She looks like she is praying, front body leaning down in reverence of what spring left behind.

I think she says to me, if you are heavy, get low, look to the ground.

3.

The sun sparkled snow is dusted with crushed, shattered rainbows. Who ground up the rainbows, in what mortar, to make this powder of jeweled light? A remedy for soul sickness, tossed like sugar into the morning. The melting butter of the golden sun, the giant raven sailing low through azure sky, and the rabbit tracks whispering of hidden worlds - all this gorgeousness and nobody to show it to, nobody to ask, do you see, oh do you see? I am alone with the dogs, who are busy sniffing the trees, gathering news I could never dream of, the world being so impossibly, frustratingly elegant whether we notice or not. My tears trail down, my fingers burn with cold, my feet ache, and I turn back. What miracles burrow and warble and slip away, under our noses, behind our backs, around the bend, just out of reach?

May this darkest day bring you joy. With all my love,

X Chloe

I was winging it, as usual. Trying to trust my gut that staying put in this mountain town was the best thing for me. But I was certainly scared. The instability of our tangled systems of safety had never felt more frayed, more untrustworthy, more prone to collapse.

I went in the bookstore out of habit, seeking the comfort of voices wiser than me, but the books were in Spanish, which I couldn’t read yet. A young couple entered the shop and we met eyes over the disorderly table of mystery novels. Our eyes agreed, “yes, this is very unsettling.” We engaged our new protocol; concern, questions, advice, allyship. We shared our stories.

They told me that they had recently come out of ceremony in Guatemala. That the abuelas and abuelos had told them that a storm was coming. That the storm was very strong. That it would upend the world. The abuelas said that one could either be in the eye of the storm, observing, or along the edges, getting pulled apart.

They said the storm would last ten years.

Desperate as I was for any certainty, I clung to that moment and this firm, manageable number of years. Ten years of storms. Someone said it, why not? Now, though, I have to laugh. Who can really predict the weather? We seem to be in the age of storms.

I went through big change this past year, my own little storm, and in the middle of it something so beautiful took root. That “something” was Love of course - what else? And in the most unlikely moment imaginable.

I wrote this piece about my storm. You can listen to the audio (I recommend headphones), or read the text. I share it with you as an offering, and as a reminder that Love - persistent, wild, borderless Love - will not be delayed by mere storms, as frightening as the howling winds may be. Love will find us wherever we are, and make her nest at our feet, rain or shine.

Have heart.

(this poem features a musical landscape by Mary Rose aka Murz, poetess in her own right and musical powerhouse. I will share her upcoming album when it is released. )

The time came and disaster struck.

I did not escape it.

I did not try to.

A dragon roared

and my walls all slid apart

in the trembling of the earth.

I clung to the edges

but nothing remained standing,

least of all

myself.

The temple smoldered,

the offerings burnt,

my chest a smoking cavern.

My beautiful city was wasted.

It laid in glittering heaps,

went on for miles.



I thought it was the end of the world.

And it was.



I abandoned myself to heartbreak

but not to defeat,

Never defeat.

I laced up my boots and combed the fields of my own collapse,

gathering weeds,

salvaging supplies,

reading the signs.

I’ve lived through the end of the world before.

I was surviving.



And then,

At my word,

You were there.



Like a herd of deer who come to graze in the crater of a bomb,

You emerged from the wild,

a sign of life.

Two full moons shone in your eyes.

True to your nature you flew to the very epicenter of my disaster.

You are drawn to the aftershocks,

to the moment when the structure fails to hold,

to the worst things imaginable.

You are what comes after.

Not savior, but peacemaker,

magician,

rebel,

sneaking past the guards of time,

opening doorways into other worlds,

nearby worlds,

just a slight adjustment,

just a breath

away.

You placed yourself amongst the rubble and before me.

You were a conduit,

a companion,

a blue fire,

a gentle place.

I did not know what to make of you.

You were a gift of fresh and wild water,

a transparent pool of melted snow.

I was lost in jungle fever dreams,

Lost in the smoky mirror.

I was not sure I was ready

for peace.

I wavered

and the sadness in your eyes loomed, ominous,

A drowning storm.



And yet.



Without knowing how

or why,

We began to work together,

as though we read a common map,

passing threads back and forth without confusion.

It was

easy.

I handed you the tool before you asked.

You remembered the missing ingredient before it was forgotten.

I left but called for you in the darkness.

Our voices found each other again and again.

Something began to take shape,

Many invisible hands rapidly weaving.



When we met

the moonlight coated the shards of my spent city in wet silver.

When we kissed

the winter gave birth to floating jewels,

hummingbirds as drops of living fire in the frozen snow.

When we made love

god revealed herself to me,

a blessing,

a metamorphosis,

an eternal light,

a faith that even destruction

is only love making way for herself.



You built a twelve sided pyramid

in the crumbled lands

of my heart.

We walked the broken streets

and found each artifact precious,

useful,

The perfect key

to our puzzle.

The signs multiplied,

made a faceted prism out of the days.

In the origin we took apart the story and remade it.

The rabbit became the moon.

The past became a ritual of initiation.

The future became a horizon rich with mountains,

a sunrise opening inside us,

a promise

we will keep.

And this morning your eyes shone soft and radiant

with happiness,

wide open skies,

deer slowly crossing the meadow.

In your eyes the ease of flowers already in blossom,

a steady place,

the sadness washed away

by this spring rain.



And it gave

me

joy.



If we’ve found the secret door in the garden wall,

and if we are the keys,

if what was asked for has already been given,

and received,

then what is left?

To slowly unwrap this present

like a kiss,

To the majesty of minutes

and years.

To take

our time.

To allow god,

in all her feathered grace,

in her infinite detail,

in her perfect wildness,

to land bright eyed in splendor,

at home

amongst us.

SOUL SEEDS / SMALL TIGERS

I want you

to uncrumple

your wings,

new

but no longer wet with birth.

Gently unbend them, rest them,

sort your feathers.

You will need them

soon.

A great wind is gathering at your feet,

A cliff edge is calling out your name,

Nothing will ever be

the same.

Mysteriously,

this world has one place

for only you.

A place where only your voice,

your hands,

your sharp bright eyes

can make us whole.

Make us whole

by giving back to us

what you see.

Like a cat you will die nine times

Or a thousand.

Every year

a new heartbreak

will crack you like a shell

and a new part of you will emerge,

raw

and alive

for the first time.

Stop letting cruelty destroy the magic of your words.

Stop wrecking yourself

by searching the mirror for anybody

but you.

Stop hiding

in the cloak

of their hatred.

Sometimes,

this world does not know how to love you,

so you must show us.

I see

how you quiver,

overfull with your own potential,

electric,

crackling,

an arrow about to fly off

in any direction.

Wherever you go,

the wide sky will hold you

in her glittering net

and perfect

black

arms.

You only have to remember

to look up.

When you fall

(and you will fall)

She will be there,

watching you

as you rise again,

exactly

like

the

sun.

Do not fear making mistakes,

you will make a thousand.

Do not fear losing love,

for love is an endless energy

and never leaves us

forever.

Love changes form

like a dance partner,

running backstage to switch into new shoes

and a different mask,

and then dashing back out to you

to continue

the dance.

Try on many masks yourself,

wearing them lightly,

knowing that the real you is the hidden being

behind them.

Our world

is falling apart

and falling together,

shaking

with change,

and we are stitched together

by earthquakes

and heartaches

and songs.

Heat rises.

In the midst of so much fire

the old maps are burning.

So draw your own.

Trace them between

your freckles and your scars,

between all you've lost

and all the magnificent love

that made you,

between who they told you to be

and your most distant

wish.

And whatever you do

use your claws

to cut a path

through the lies.

Scattered all around you in every direction

are seeds.

Forgotten stars hidden

in the dirt,

and whatever you choose to water,

with your patient love,

and your gifts,

and your will

to live,

little

by little

by little

will grow.

So grow.

my desk is currently piled with poetry books, three tarot decks, four mugs, tangled embroidery thread, and two open journals. as it should be. it is time to gather our sources nourishment close in preparation for the coming winter.

I wrote this poem in 2017 and the world has only burned more ferociously in the near-decade since. I am currently working on several spoken-word poems, and hacking away at the unwieldy terrain of my book. I’ll share new work soon. For now I hope this poem sweetens your day.

X Chloe

 I will be beginning another round of writing circles at the end of August, and I am always booking donation-based tarot and astrology sessions. But I wanted to use today’s newsletter to share about an incredible humanitarian aid project.

First, a note on disasters.

Although we do not celebrate disasters, we also cannot avoid them. The compounding crises of our world crowd in at the edges of our thoughts, our social media feeds, our neighborhoods, our dreams. Being more aware than ever of how connected we are, many of us long to be beneficial - and many of us are. But we often also feel dread, powerlessness, and a paralysis of action. How can we move towards crisis, and each other, in life-giving ways? Rebecca Solnit writes, “Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.”

Altruist Relief Kitchen, or ARK, is dedicated to responding to crisis in a way that is innovative, sustainable, and feeds community. This project was founded over a decade ago by my partner, Lucid. ARK builds off-grid field kitchens out of recycled materials, to serve meals to people in need, in remote and dangerous places around the world.

The kitchens cook entirely on wood-stoves, meaning they are independent of fossil fuels and the electrical grid. ARK has served food at disaster relief sites around the US, at the Tijuana border supporting migrants, and is now active in Ukraine, with kitchens opening soon in Tapachula, on the border of Mexico and Guatemala, and in Türkiye.

ARK-Ukraine has already served 186,000 meals to women, children, elderly, and disabled people fleeing the war. ARK hires local people, mostly women, to manage and run the kitchen, empowering people to care for their own communities, rather than imposing external systems that often do more damage than good. The current kitchen is managed by a single Ukrainian mother, Aloka, and everyone working in the kitchen has been directly impacted by the war.

Because ARK is not dependent on fossil fuels or utilities, they have continued serving food throughout blizzards, missile strikes and nationwide blackouts when others could not. Now after two years, even as the war accelerates, ARK is one of the last kitchens still serving the refugee shelters in Lviv.

ARK offers Humanitarian aid that is so flexible, it could be applied almost anywhere. Many well known humanitarian aid organizations waste ungodly amounts of money, and little of the aid donated ever reaches the people who need it. ARK hires locals, sources materials locally, and is an environmentally sustainably model, so no resources are wasted.

This model is going to change the world and change the way humanitarian aid functions. We all know that in the coming years, we will have more and more need of emergency response for those suffering from wars, climate disasters, and other crises. Extractive capitalism will continue to thrash violently. We will continue to need effective ways to reach the people who need help the most, to alleviate the worst effects of collapsing empires and ecosystems.

ARK does not just provide basic necessities. Inherent in the structure of ARK are the values of community and healing, of mutual aid, and of the centrality of relationship. ARK creates microcosms of beautiful, thriving community even in, and especially in, places of collapse, of loss, and of disaster. 

If this project speaks to you I encourage you to get in touch. There is a place for you. Right now, ARK needs support. The current kitchen in Ukraine is in danger of shutting down. Without more funding it will not be able to continue to serve food through the coming Ukrainian winter. We are seeking fundraising support, the expansion of ARK’s network, connections with helpful organizations and foundations, contacts for places to give presentations about ARK, and any other help that can ensure that ARK continues to grow and thrive.

the ARK website: https://www.altruistrelief.org/
photo archive of ARK-Ukraine:  https://www.altruistrelief.org/ukraine-2023
donate to ARK: https://www.altruistrelief.org/donate

With faith for our emergent, collective humanity,

Xoxo Chloe

I have been moving perpetually since November, and finally have landed in majestic Alaska for the summer, although it’s taking me time to realize I can begin to unfurl my roots. You know when you were a kid and you spun and spun in circles, and then when you fell into the grass, the world kept spinning around you? I feel like that.

I leave you with a Mary Oliver poem. I always return to her when the muse feels far. They say when you are inspired, write, and when you’re not, read. Mary Oliver, John Trudell, Rainer Maria Rilke, Saul Williams, HD, Janet' Fitch’s White Oleander, Walt Whitman, Marge Piercy, these are my council members… who are your favorite creators, the ones who give you life?

Until next time

X Chloe

The Waterfall
By Mary Oliver

For all they said,
   I could not see the waterfall
      until I came and saw the water falling,
         its lace legs and its womanly arms sheeting down,

while something howled like thunder,
   over the rocks,
      all day and all night –
         unspooling

like ribbons made of snow,
   or god’s white hair.
      At any distance
         it fell without a break or seam, and slowly, a simple

preponderance –
   a fall of flowers – and truly it seemed
      surprised by the unexpected kindness of the air and
         light-hearted to be

flying at last.
   Gravity is a fact everybody
      knows about.
         It is always underfoot,

like a summons,
   gravel-backed and mossy,
      in every beetled basin –
         and imagination –

that striver,
   that third eye –
      can do a lot but
         hardly everything. The white, scrolled

wings of the tumbling water
   I never could have
      imagined. And maybe there will be,
         after all,

some slack and perfectly balanced
   blind and rough peace, finally,
      in the deep and green and utterly motionless pools after all that
         falling?

My Grandmother died some days ago (she is in the top right of the photo above). I was lucky enough to be with her and much of my family in the days right before she passed, circling her bed in her tiny apartment, listening to her favorite opera arias, bringing in lemons and rosemary and lavender from the blooming springtime outside. She knew me as an articulate writer and always urged me to hurry up and get published, but I mostly feel wordless and clumsy in trying to express how I feel, both about the past week, and about her in general. Those words will come in time. For now I want to share this old poem that I dedicated to her. Even surrounding her deathbed, there was plenty of good natured joking and giggling, and I managed to make her laugh (or smile at least) right before I left; a parting gift, from her to me. She died the next afternoon. May we all be so uniquely ourselves, and so unshakeable in our commitment to what truly does (and does not) bring us joy.

Ode to Laughter

Feral

Rebellious

Wisdom-keeper,

Overflowing cup

of Madness,

Accidental

Prayer

and Welcome

Unlooked for

Untangling

Of the heart,

I worship

Most seriously

At the altar

Of laughter.

Laughter that comes in

Unannounced,

Bursting down the door

Of the worrisome meeting,

Ignoring the office hours

Of the mind,

Wearing magenta and yellow,

Arms full of fruit,

Grapes spilling to the ground,

Jewelry jingling and gleaming,

Everything askew,

Everything shaken loose

By this sudden visitation

Of hilarity,

Absurdity,

Cleverness,

and joy.

Laughter cracks open

The heavy shell at our center,

The calcified stone,

It bursts all at once into butterflies;

Frantic

Graceful

And everywhere.

Laughter,

Caught between eyes

In a crowded room

is a diamond unearthed

In darkness.

With a stranger

Laughter like this

Is a prophecy of coming friendship,

It is a green shoot

Breaking through soil.

A storm of circumstance might blow it away

Or a great story might begin right here

With this small sprout

of happy understanding.

Laughter,

Language beyond translation,

Revolution against boredom,

Balm for oppressive memory,

There are many kinds of laughter

And I love nearly all,

The only laughter that I don’t

Pray with or to

Is the mean-spirited laughter,

An imposter,

Not joy

But simply bitterness

Pretending.

True laughter melts,

Flowers,

Seeps through cracks,

Bubbles,

Flutters,

Does back-flips

Or curls up like a dog

To sleep snugly in the heart.

With an old friend

Or an every-day companion,

Laughter is a crucial medicine,

Scrubbing off the mold

of mundane habit.

It becomes a home,

an archive of shared moments,

A whole joke can be told or re-told

in one glance across a room.

Reluctant grin,

Crinkled eyes,

Escaping tears,

Silent shaking

Waves of laughter that rise and fall,

Unbothered happiness,

Momentary liberation

From all that chains us

To the ground.

Laughter forgives.

Laughter can raise

The white flag of truce

During a battle of

Egos and wounds.

Laugher simply does not care

Who is right

And who is wrong.

She knocks down traffic cones,

And spins in circles like a four year old child,

Dirt on her face,

Hair flying like clouds

Or banners of triumph.

We celebrate existence

with our silliness

and our willingness

in spite of everything

to enjoy life

and each other.

The people I love most,

And they are many,

All meet me in the house of laughter,

And it is there

In that blanket-fort palace,

That year after year,

Loss after heartbreaking loss,

We come again to worship.

It is in the house of laughter

That we braid together

Our souls.

For Grandma Josie, with all my love