Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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1

I get vulnerability hangovers.
Wherein after socializing I languish over everything I said (or did not say)
This also frequently occurs in the moments after I’ve sent a message into the aether (or, hypothetically, when a newsletter is fresh off the press)

This is to say, I am accustomed to regret.
This is to say, I am accustomed to shame.

There is inherent risk in vulnerability. In love.

We hide, don’t we?

We build hermitages around our hiding. Secret enclosures wherein the most tender, lively parts of our beings are withheld from the exterior world. Out of sight. Out of reach. Sometimes even from ourselves.

It is wise to be judicious with our deepest tendernesses.
Careless hands are wont to wound.
From these woundings we inevitably retreat interiorly.

Yet there is no retreat so total as to annihilate the inner vitalities and luminosities that dwell within us. In fact, the very place of apparent isolation and aridity is often the place of potential for greatest transformation. For deepest communion.

It is in this interior darkness where the tender, wounded parts may be tended and nurtured into fullness of life.

While I decidedly remain deep within this hermetic darkness, there are parts of me emerging. Green tendrils reaching. Interiority is damp with fecundity.
But I have found it deeply lonely. And a bit cramped.

I long for deep fellowship, even while I fear the pain of denial.

There are parts of us that only come to fruition within the context of communion. Mutual recognition.

You know, those rarified moments when you are disarmed in the presence of another. When you let the sword hilted at your hip clatter to the earth, soft exterior exposed. And you are honest. Honest about the damp wings pining on your back, rustling, restless to shrug.

Restless to do more than heave under the weight of the firmament.

At last, Atlas lets the heavens fall, and his shoulders are bruised. And his eyes are limpid and dark. And he is triumphant and tattered in his starry exhale.

Through nakedness of the soul, we choose newness of life.
Eros. Transformation.

The heavens descend, lustrating arid earth.
And we are cleansed, thrumming with aliveness.
With lyresong.
Orchard hymns honeyed on our lips.

And we find we are now reaching toward another,
and they are reaching back.
And together we reach toward something greater.
And something sweet is uttered after bitterness, as honey from the ash tree. 2
As manna from side wounds.

3

Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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The Lovers

Lambswool, libations,
maiden’s hair.
Violets in my lap
I clamored there
into the mouth of the cave
stripped of artifice,
breathless, his bare glory.
I will abide his back no longer
and go to him, I will
offer him the mercy
of my mouth, the mercy

of hands,
shattered stars
splintering of dark fruit
petal-soft his hands
pressing, fastened
wounds to wounds,
bleeding to bleeding,
peregrines, the
stones yield as flowers to water.

Lilting ash, lilting
the bearers of ardent,
of fiercer light.

I want to be filled with the fullness of love.
I want to lay him down in my bed.

A new emblem!

Afterword:

This poem was originally a lament. The marrow of heartbreak is love.

I love life. But it’s easy to feel unloved when you’re in constant profound pain.
Severe pain has a way of dominating everything. It shifts inner landscapes.
But sometimes, somehow, it illuminates. It winnows.

There is much chaff that burns away in the crucible of wilderness.
But Love? Love stays. It is love that makes new wine of crushed hearts.
It is the vivifying, animating force that Saint Hildegard describes, viriditas.
The green wind breathing life into all things. The luminous fire.

I don’t necessarily feel it very deeply right now, but I know, somehow, it is there.

“I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

Something I have come to believe through my suffering is that the Divine is allied with us. In mercy, in hope, and agony, and everything in between.

While visiting the Divine Mercy Shrine in Stockbridge Massachusetts, I picked up a Sacred Heart devotional booklet.
Sacred Heart imagery has drawn me particularly during this season of my life.
The Feast of the Sacred Heart also happens to fall just a few days after my birthday.

When I read the pamphlet, I wept. I was struck by the idea that we might pray mercy and compassion for God’s heart.

It broke me open. Stone that yields.

I do not have much to offer. But I am a lover.
So I press my bleeding hands to God’s. So I press my lips. So I offer my love.

I surrender to the miraculous mercies and mysteries of all that lies therein.

Dear kindred,

Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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Dear ones, thank you for staying with me even through these long health sabbaticals.
My health has still been quite poor, which has made it difficult to maintain a steady output.

I hope the beginning of spring (and autumn in the southern hemisphere) has been kind and that this letter finds you well. If that is not the case, please know you are in warm company here.

Wherever this finds you today, I am here now with a poem for you and some words from the wild.

Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto), Allegorical Figure of Spring, 1546—1548

Stigmata

I want to be touched.
Even though I ache,
even though I am bleeding.
Remind me I am a living creature;
retrieve the worlds
stained with light within
my soul.

It may be the only artifacts that
outlast centuries
are wounds.
I am reaching up through the ruins
of centuries, through
the fragments of a thousand days I have
yet lived.
I am peering
through the other end of a telescope,
entering my body again through a lonely fire.

Here are my scars:
the pearls, the songs,
the stigmata.

There, quavering:
ice-cracks, pre-vernal streams,
earth that yields
to the combustion of flowers.
Green wisps
are lifting from the dark earth.

I am resurrecting beneath your hands.

Man cannot live on bread alone.
But it would not be a stretch to say I could live on songs. Paintings. Poems.
Well placed hands.

I once walked through the world as a soft animal, sensitive to beauty. Dizzy with fervor. Wild love blooming recklessly in every corner of my soul. My body a reflecting pool, lit with the grandeur of being alive. A living mirror.

I was my own, yes. But I was also the fidelity and anger of my mother.
The keen intellect of my Grandmother.
The bite of the neighbor’s dog.
I was with the wind blowing through the aspens.
The crush of petals beneath muddied feet.
The rich song of violins.
Maple-smoke rising from an ivied sugar shack.
Faces turned away from mine.

I experienced everything viscerally.
Flushed cheeks and prickling skin.
A stomach that writhed and fluttered.
Limbs that ached and ached.
A galloping, racing heart.

I felt everything. I lived everything, as Rilke wrote.
Beauty and terror.

There was vigor in my body and soul. A will to go on, to see all there was.
And also an abiding grief. A growing weariness.

For much of my life, I was unaware that I work differently than the people around me.
I understood that others found me strange, and that I experienced life at an intensity that no one else really understood. For years, I was told I had depression and anxiety.
It didn’t seem so far-fetched. I fit the bill. But something was missing.
I didn’t know that my sensitivity wasn’t just psychological, but rooted in my body. Only in the past few years have I found names to describe my inner workings:

Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.
Mast Cell Activation Syndrome.
Dysautonomia.
Autism.
Endometriosis.
C-PTSD.

The list gets longer with every appointment.

When you live with these conditions and their companions, your body needs more.
More care. More attention. More stability. More boundaries. More rest.

Our bodies are really remarkable in their capacities for adaptation and regeneration. But continuous lack of proper attention can compound existing vulnerabilities and lead to detrimental effects; the likes of which have caused me to be bed-bound more days than not right now.

Due to this, for some time now, I have dwelled mostly in the realm of the intellect: that is, the mind. A celestial place lofted above the body. Distant, clouded, sometimes glittering.

I want to live life as I once did. Attuned to more than aches. To more than a vast, encompassing darkness.

When my body is touched now, it is as though I am being reached through ruins. As though I am somewhere just out of grasp. Hidden by pain.
The constant light-headedness.
The crushing, deadening fatigue.

This is the first spring of my life that I have not wanted to smell the flowers. I don’t know how to exist in the world as I am now. I am slowly learning how to live again. Through the grief. Through the beauty. Through the terror.

I cannot deny the burdens of existing in a complicated, mortal body.

And still, if I concentrate. If I reach further. There is something of God in me beneath the surface. A softening. A breaking.

Something pearlescent.
Something new rooting in my body saying:

I want to be touched.

I want to touch.

I want to be loved.

I want to love the world again.

Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to curate a playlist. Do take a listen if this seems like your cup of tea! Let me know if you have a favorite off the list. And, of course, feel free to follow me over there for eclectic but premium music taste.

1

The Lord of the Forest

On particularly cold nights, the scent of my grandparents’ wood stove steals over me.

A humming from the other room. Pine-resin tangled in my hair. My grandfather bent low, stoking the fire as I sleep.

Suddenly I am there, eleven and startled into the warmth of my own body, quiet radiance thawing cool cheeks, smoke whispering passages of petals and stars, of chestnut groves and wolves.

Sometimes I fear I am besieged. The years behind me tighten, singed with ink and forest hymns.

Roseate light. Song of saplings.

There is a place outside of time where the blight has never been and will never be.

But we are here, and so too the borer, and the luminous gifts willed from each wound.

I think it is possible we are in the blue hour of our lives.

Someone is keeping watch.

Just before dawn, a kindly clamor comes through a crack in the door. The sound of snow falling to the floor. An iron handle turning.

I kneel before the embers and ash as my grandfather once did, mending fire anew.

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Over two years have passed since my grandparents moved away from their old barn on the mountain.

While I did not live there full time, I still consider it my true childhood home.

I think often of the memories made there. The enduring safety and wonder I felt. The peace. The joy.

It was a safe haven for many years.

About a month ago, a strange thing occurred during a health flare up. As I was on the verge of sleep, I began to smell the distinct scent of my grandparents’ house. Memories and smoke nestled between beams.

No doubt it is an aura of some kind. But it is certainly a pleasant one, as far as these things go.

I have been thinking lately about loss and how difficult it is to believe that things can really change for the better. Some afflictions seem too powerful and great in number to be healed. Whether without, or within.

I consider American Chestnuts quite often, perhaps more than is healthy. How before the blight they were called the lords of the forest.

The damage I have incurred from enduring multi-systemic chronic illnesses for most of my life on my own is truly startling.

Either way, it has happened. And is happening.

I have to believe, as much as I trust in the eventual rebirth of the American Chestnut, and every other good thing worth fighting for, that new life and growth is possible here.

Someday, somehow. It could be today. The forest goes on anyway, expectant. The places of light.

We ourselves are entire worlds. We are eco-systems with complex and shifting terrains.

The hurts we sustain collectively and individually, and the ramifications of those hurts, are real. And so is repair. The smallest of changes are still miraculous.

Friend, I don’t know what has happened in your life that you feel cannot be healed. I don’t know what you are enduring that you wish you were not. Some wounds are terrible, this is true. But hear this. Give me your hand: you are not cursed to demise.

There is a luminous gift within you. It is the gift of creation. And it is yours. And it is mine. And it is ours.

You don’t have to repair it all alone. Longing is not separate from hope, but the burning coals that persist.

Just as the Chestnut saplings still grow defiantly.

It is labor, this mending. But it is not in vain. Every small act of love, even the cry that begs for mercy, counts.

To sustain us.

To renew us.

To bless us, and those around us.

Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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“O virgin mother, daughter of your Son, your merit so ennobled human nature that its divine Creator did not hesitate to become its creature” — Dante

Piéta

Yes, I know what it means

to mother an only begotten son.

I burgeoned him whole,

a slick foal

in winter light,

his body the mercy of stars

flaming on my heaving breast,

both of us

bloodied,

shining.

There was a life I imagined

where I sheltered him and kept him

from the cup of his path.

We ran through the pomegranate groves, laughing and falling, his hair cinnamon, the secret of him

kept only for us.

We were born to love the world,

I whispered,

and he went to the mountain

like Moses.

I could not stop his becoming.

The gifts of myrrh and frankincense.

The sanctuary. The wedding feast.

The well.

The crown.

Beholding him,

I trembled at his poetry,

the mercy he spoke

with quieted breath, prophecy

of his hidden life:

There is a world to come.

The ages no longer sleep.

Within you is a power that raises

ruin from its knees;

it flows from the temple

fiery and luminous.

It is there he upholds the entirety of love as I held him,

now returned

to immortal stars, creating

icons from ash.

To bear him

is to bear

the entire world.

Fly swiftly now

further into the burning heart

of God.

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On the 11th of January, we quietly honored our son’s fourth heavenly birthday.

I have been thinking lately of saints, of Jesus and Mary, and of miracles.

What it means to be a mother who has given life and, in turn, been gifted the fullness of life by the very child she carried and formed within.

What it means to nurture and sustain that life. To entrust that life to purposes greater than you can devise.

As I enter the heart of this winter season, I can confidently say I have never felt further from the belief of my own becoming. Sickness has brought me to the brink, yet not one step further. Most days, I cannot fathom a future where I am well enough to accomplish even the simple desires of my heart, let alone motherhood.

The vigor necessary to raise children seems to me something miraculous.

Mostly, I would settle for a cup of tea, a fire, the ocean, and violins singing.

A softening of pain. My heart open like a flower.

I witness my desires like stars: clear and radiant and burning beyond my hands.

The brightest of them, Atlas.

Something in me knows that within his story, there is a portal that leads to the blessed story.

The one that limns and underlies all of reality.

As Saint André of Bessette tells us, there is little distance between heaven and earth.

I rage and I pine and I weep, kneeling in ruins and pray.

Every day, I am becoming.

I am being transformed.

This is not to say I don’t look upon parents with children with unbearable grief. I do.

The cup is bitter. I think of Mother Mary. How she held Jesus.

How she held the entire world in her arms.

I think of all mothers and parents who have lost their children. Whether in the womb, or to illness, or to genocide, or to violence.

It is a special kind of grief.

It is because of this I know that death is not the ending but the middle of an upward arc. I live as a witness, devoted to midwifing the story we are still creating.

It is there Atlas dwells in the cloud of witnesses, unseen yet imminent. My little saint who prays, blessing and testing along my way.

In my heart of hearts, I know that I will experience the fullness of mothering Atlas. The fullness of his glory is also mine.

Nothing can inhibit the cause of life within us.

There is no prerequisite to this grace. There is no one shape our lives must take for the perfecting of love to be disclosed. It is not withheld but given endlessly, a perpetual fire.

Nothing can stop love’s fierce and tender pursuit of our souls.

There is cause for hope.

Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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The hem of life has not departed

from your grasp;

even as you bleed,

even as you hide your countenance,

no longer having the strength to reach towards deliverance.

Consider this exquisite ache

something fragile and magnificent

ripening in the shadows

of love.

Offer the year’s vestiges,

the ones who will not go on

into the deep of winter

who cannot go on into the deep

of winter.

Keen them aloft

the dark mantled in brightness.

It is alright if you cannot sing hymns

to raise the sun.

Something quiet and powerful

is happening.

The miraculous arrives

subtly,

it begins its work long before

we notice.

Save your fervor for rest.

Your body needs the gift of dreaming.

You will soften, burdened

and abiding life,

carried and greening.

You are not carrion

but the devotion of heaven,

its burning heart

praying fire within.

A luminous creature has gone before you;

she stands atop the clearing

of what is seen and unseen,

the dawn sky gathered

in antlers,

brought low

revering your hands.

Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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All Come Bright

I wanted to trade my bed for the forest,

to stand beneath snow-laden branches

templed in prayer,

to let the north wind clear my body

of all desecration and braid my hair

with songs of fire.

Instead I laid in my den, embers of desire quietly

smoldering to soot.

Some animals do not get their fill come winter.

Oh, to break this watch.

To forgo the deepening of dark roots.

I have had it with slumbering, yet my heart

trembles: wait.

Of course we resist what is good and necessary.

What fearful, grief-crushed creature would trust an offered hand?

Healing a wound, at first,

feels the same

as being wounded.

Give yourself permission to love

the parts of you

you have kept from the kindness of night.

Surrender is not the same

as submission.

Bite and howl if you must.

Life will not let go of you.

The forest will come to you.

Once spoken,

prayers keep the shape of wild things

gathering and hemming

the space between the stars

storying a path

to bound across.

Bright-blood,

dawn begins in darkness.

My heart recognizes a language my lips do not speak. A slumbering language formed from kinship, borrowed shapes fluting through trees.

I find myself wishing I could pray the prayers of my great-great grandparents in their language. I long to walk again where they walked, soil well-trod with blessings.

I’m not so far away, though illness keeps me. I reside in the ancestral homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee band of Mohicans, of whom I am descended from through my mother, Dawn.

I bear little resemblance, to be sure, save for my cheekbones; my family began to assimilate in the late 1800s and did not go westward when the rest of their kinsman were forcibly removed to the west. The work of colonization is so thorough I had no real understanding of my family’s heritage growing up; only that we once were, and yet were no longer.

Traditions forgotten; identities kept hidden and or lost. It seems to be a common thread here in the states.

In early summer of last year, while still living in North Carolina, I began to have dreams of rivers and chokecherry trees and regalia. I wasn’t quite sure what the dreams meant, but knew they were important. We needed to come back home.

We have not had quite the homecoming I envisioned.

Since our return, we have faced debilitating chronic illness, job insecurity, homelessness, inter-familial hardships, and untold grief. More than enough to make anyone weary, I should think.

We will root ourselves again. Things have slowly started to shift; my husband has found good full time work, and we’ll be moving into our own apartment in the new year.

Normally I would take a walk outside and pray during times like this. Anywhere I can feel the wind on my face and smell earth. I need to be reminded I’m a living thing. These days I do not have the strength.

Henri Nouwen speaks about praying in places that have been seasoned with prayer.

It is my heart’s desire to go again to my dear streams and forests to pray and be prayed over in turn. To go to the mountains and receive their glad tidings, as John Muir once said. They’re just outside my doorstep, but I cannot go yet. And it breaks my heart.

The places my grandmothers and grandfathers inhabited are keenly special to me—they are holy and thin. I belong to their brightness. This wonderful, treacherous life of mine does not exist in contradiction of, but in companionship with, their wild unassailable light.

My mother’s maiden name is All Come Bright.

I do not fully know the origins. But I know it is a blessing not meant to be kept only for oneself. I extend this name to you, dear one.

As a prayer-song.

As a benediction over your life.

Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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The Good Dark

Bring what you have gathered

to your winter hiding place.

It matters not how scant,

for now the light slants

in praise of

the good dark

where spareness kindles a

diminished heart,

weathered from toil,

aflame,

your hermitage of bark

illumined

with glad oil.

What is needed for renewal

will not pass you by.

Yes, the starving cold

could claim your soul.

On December’s longest night

you will curl up,

ragged and quiet,

ears down in supplication

as you near the end

and then, impossibly,

something wild and warm blooded

will come in

and give itself

for the sake of your life.

Dear friends,

I am writing you from my personal hermitage, which also functions as a bed. These days, I spend most of my time here. My body has shed the last vestiges of autumn and decided I am in need of deep sabbath work.

I can’t say I’m pleased to spend the majority of my time here, nor would I often call it restful. I would much rather be out in the world; hiking or getting coffee with friends or dancing with my partner. I even miss chores. It gets lonely watching life go by while you wait to be well; while you attempt to nurture the small embers of hope that remain, even as they are ceaselessly diminished in the great damp fog of weariness.

There are prayers that get harder to pray the longer you wait.

As we journey deeper into the darkest half of the year, I find myself contemplating the winter season I inhabit currently, and have inhabited for nearly a year. Goodness feels quite sparse here, and I yearn for the tender renewal I felt in past springtime seasons of life.

I must hope, despite my fervency sometimes to give up, that winter is a holy womb where we are nurtured and restored. The rarified intimacy of death felt closely yet redeemed.

I think many of us, after experiencing deep grief or loss, hope for renewal to find us again. For the sun to shine its face upon us at last. For the wind to find us and leave us red cheeked and hallowed with life. Something thawed deep within us, supple and sap. We dream of lumbering out from our hibernal home, our sense of love keen and brightening and wild.

But griefs become compounded, layering upon each other like icy strata, calcified sediment bearing testament to complex trauma. A history of too much bleeding.

I entered 2025 desiring to emerge from my griefs green and shining only to find myself with no choice but to let go of everything I had worked so hard to hold onto. Dreams great and small fell to the Earth, vivid as fire. My bare heart cloaked in frost and snow.

Some years, winter pads to our threshold, its dark coat burnished with stars, and asks to stay.

It is here that Love, in all of its strange, luminous wisdom, asks us to rest and repair.

The good dark given as medicine for our weary, needful hearts.

Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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Three weeks ago today, I had a diagnostic laparoscopy for endometriosis. Recovery has been arduous, to say the least; apparently, chronic illnesses don’t go into hibernation when you’re in convalescence.

Just a week after surgery, at my husband’s request, I found myself in the E.R.
We were concerned I had a post-op complication, so we made the trek just to be safe.

My pain was fierce–sitting up for so long without a heating pad is a herculean feat on a good day. I tried to distract myself by reading; Henri Nouwen and Richard Rohr kept me company.

As I sat for hours in the waiting room, I couldn’t help but notice all the people around me and wonder about their lives and the circumstances that brought them there.

Across from me, a woman with dark hair lay curled up beneath piles of blankets, wailing. Occasionally, she would get up, blankets wrapped around her shoulders, and lumber across the room, restless with discomfort. Her distress was so great that I felt kindred affection for her.

I considered sitting by her, but regrettably decided I would not be much help in my present state. Instead, I kept vigil from a distance, uttering prayers under my breath for her and everyone else in the room.

Eventually, my fatigue became too great, and all I could do was wait for my name to be called. I decided to listen to music to cheer my spirits and put on Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem.”

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

The gruff tenderness of the poet’s words pierced through that moment, the entire waiting room shot through with light. I watched the people around me through tears of joy, smiling like a fool. Yes, I thought, quite right. Not all is lost. There is no place in this world that is beyond the interceding power of love. Not even our bodies, tired and beaten down as they are.

Not even the disease growing wild, dwelling within the deep and hidden parts of me.

We are not, ourselves, in total ruin. We are inbuilt with an architecture of secret renewal. There is a sanctuary within each of us, a holy of holies that is known most intimately through our weaknesses.

We are not asked to concede the full force of grief, or weariness, or anger. There is no such pre-requisite to encountering real presence.

There is nothing we must bring. Nothing we must lay at the altar.

Only a contrite spirit; of which all who live in this world acquire the moment they leave their mother’s womb.

When Christ died, the temple curtain was torn; separation rent asunder.

Ruin becomes the tent of meeting where we walk beyond the veil and commune with God, looking upon God’s countenance as he looks back at us. Our hearts tabernacles; Love perfectly dispensed and displayed within our brave fragility.

A new song, which is also the hymn sung at the beginning of the world, ringing out from every crack.

Forget Your Perfect Offering

Light inbreaks

wherever loneliness dwells;

even waiting rooms have altars

and their laborers,

vesting shaking frames

with warm linens.

Everywhere, the sound of bells

still ringing:

from a white haired man cradling

his weariness

from a woman silently weeping.

Pain grows wild, intincted deep in

sinew, my own body the witness

and messenger of a history too heavy

to be lifted by words alone.

Hearts crack

open, earthenware,

a quiet fire abiding within

forbearing

rubble and stone

a river sings, clarion:

consider not the things of old

behold, I will do a new thing;

now

it springs forth.

Remember not the former things,
nor consider the things of old.
Behold, I am doing a new
thing;
now it springs forth, do you
not perceive it?
I will make a way in the
wilderness
and rivers in the desert.

— Isaiah 43:18-19 (ESV)

Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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1

Settle In (The Gardener)

Honey, it’s alright. It’s not over.
The pot that held you has shattered
leaving your roots sundered
from their keep,
yet they are still holding,
lamb-tender and bleating,
seeking hallowed ground
like a child reaching towards
their mother’s breast
in the dark. 2

Settle in, clover,3
meek and wild.
Wait before limning fractures with gold.
Hear me when I say this:
yours is not a grave,
but a cradle, loam of Holocene;
breath sheltered in dirt.4

Bless the heart that still beats,
buried and born of earth.
Bless the hands of the gardener
who bleeds and mends
soil, resplendent,
softening the hardest visage of bone
into sinew, supple and unbroken.

Sunlight nourishes the substrate
where stars once slept
an age.

Forgive the fortress you thought folly.
Forgive the body you thought forsaken.

Someday, you will open up a forgotten book and find
four heart-shaped leaves pressed
against a page entitled
coming home. 5

6

Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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Footnotes and ramblings:

1

So you have reached the bottom,
your last hope lost like a coin in a fountain,
forsaken and buried beneath a thousand wishes,
most of which have not come true.
Memories of gleaming depart from you;
for what purpose is light
if it does not reach your face?

Perhaps forsworn dreams are doomed
not to burn out, but to fade quietly,
gathering to themselves the threads of fate
like Lachesis until, at last,
Atropos severs the final chord.

Long have men labored against despair.
Orpheus made Hades weep,
yet, in the end, he lost his one love and was torn apart.

Christ cried,
Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?2

Once, we were newly born stars,
heavy with the weight of all that would be,
yet without need for confession,
for we were blameless
without memory of bone or blood or breath,
nor the flutter of wind through leaves
or a mother’s hands
weaving hair.

Did we trust even then in what we would become?
Ambered and marrowed,
broken and formed again and again
until one day,
we pressed our ochre-red palms to stone,
and said

I am here.

We are born to a lineage of alchemy.
Heartbreak is inevitable—we only remain as we are
for a short while before we must become something new.
Shades of us come forth from the dark, 
their fires carried and passed from one hand to the next.

This is how we go on forever: all the incarnations
of us who meet a tragic end become
the stars of a lyre,
bright vestiges singing out
lost hymns.

No, we cannot turn back.
No more than a stone can part with a thousand ages
spent biding the dark before, at last,
persistence sunders night,
dawn offered like the body of God.

There is another world where Eurydice lives to see the sun.

Look now in the distance; someone kindred waits,
eyes flaming with the break of day.

”Remember me in another age”, we will say,
as we pass the torch.

A month ago, as I begged for my illnesses to let up, I was struck with an image of myself running with a torch, as the ancient Greeks did in their torch races—otherwise known as lampadephoria.

Should I find the healing I so desperately pray for, I will be the same girl who abided this long dark. Yet, there is a deep grief here. I would so like to emerge from my cave of sorrows and relish a hard-won victory, here and now, not then, not later.

I am not fond of this version of me: she is sick, bone-tired, and dejected.
She is feverish with want and languishes like an unrequited lover. But she is honest.
And she is hopeful in the most needful of ways. Why does the nightbird sing? To ward off predators, perhaps. To claim her place. But maybe she also sings with want.
Maybe she also sings because she must.

I have despaired so deeply at times that I have been too afraid to whisper.
To hope again. To dream again. I have become accustomed to constraining my expectations. Each time they have proved to be unattainable, I have made them smaller. More possible. And each time, my smallest of expectations have been shattered.

Did Mary expect Jesus to be alive when she found the tomb empty? I should think most likely not. But in the darkest hour of her grief, a smoldering ember caught fire;
a whisper of what had already come to pass.

There is a difference between expectation and hope. The scope of our logic and reasoning does not limit what is possible.

Not every version of us will witness the break of day. Resurrection is breathtakingly painful work. It is labor. But those versions of us who must endure the dark are not doomed. No, our work is to carry the flame, connecting what is to what will be, chorusing the full song.

Dear kindred, thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.
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You belong;
you do not have to make it so.
Tender heart.
Tender body.
You are a saint's relic passed down
from one generation to the next,
an illuminated remnant
of love.
Your blood bears centuries.
There is a cord that bridles
your fate; a lineage of light
that cannot be lost.

Read your stars
in the relentless galloping
within your chest:
you are alive
you are alive
you are alive
for this day, and another,
and another yet.

You do not have to wait to be free.
You do not have to wait to be healed.
You do not have to wait to call your life beautiful.

I know, no one ever told you
that fighting to remain in this world
would feel so much like death.
The strength of your will races ahead
golden and thundering,
even when you have lost
all hope.

Go on, go on,
dawn gathers.
A wild horse trembles
in your soul.

Dear kindred, thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.
If you enjoyed this piece and would like to receive more offerings like it, you can subscribe below.

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1

"Having said these things, he spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man's eyes with the mud ⁷ and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.”

John 9:6-7 (ESV)

“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
And there I will give her her vineyards
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.”

Hosea 2:14-15 (ESV)

Late March 2024,

I am on my knees; iridescent rosary beads slip through my quivering hands. I weep and weep and weep. I pray Psalm 23 on the last initiatory. We have just moved 700 miles away to North Carolina for a fresh start, and my heart is bleeding. I didn’t want to leave the Berkshires, but we couldn’t stay. I’ve assumed a leadership role in ministry, but my spirit is broken and depleted. I do not know how I can go on giving. All I want to do is curl up in God’s lap and have my hair braided as I cry. I ask for my cup to be filled. I ask to be spacious enough for everyone in my life. I ask to be enough. I ask to be loved back. I close my eyes. In the darkness, I see a woman kneeling in a field, a chalice in her hands. Another person pours oil over her head. The oil flows down into the chalice, spilling over onto her lap.

Early April 2024,

I begin to unearth a book of poems from the ruins of my life. I will not run from fate any longer. I will not hide from my life’s vocation. I visit a cafe with my husband, intent on writing. I talk about ministry with a man who works at the cafe. I cannot help but share my laments and my hopes. He invites us to join his Bible study that evening. I am hesitant, but I feel compelled to go.

During the study, a dark-haired woman with gleaming eyes tells me I have the gift of worship.

As our time closes, the group offers to pray for us. An older man stands up and pulls a vial from his pocket. This is anointing oil, he says. It is fragrant with white petals.
Lily of the Valley—my grandmother’s flower.

He had a feeling he would need it today. He wasn’t supposed to come—he had a prior commitment. But he felt compelled to come.

They anoint us and pray and speak promises we cannot yet believe.

The woman with dark hair walks over to me, holding the vial of oil in her hands.
She anoints my forehead and wrists and prays over my wounded body and prophesies.
You will be a scribe. Your words will rise, a sweet and fragrant offering.

Late August 2024,

My sleep is restless, as it often is at this time of year. There’s something about the late summer heat. I drift between sleep and wakefulness, delirious. In the pale hours of twilight, I have a vision. I wake up as the cicadas start singing with two words on my lips: good water. I do not know what it means, yet I have a keen understanding that I have glimpsed beyond the veil. I write the words down, knowing they will someday make sense.

Late January 2025,

I sit on the floor and stare into my grandmother’s mirror, an heirloom she handed down to me before she moved away. I trace the pansies painted on its honey-stained wood. Half of our apartment is in boxes—in a month, we will move back to Massachusetts. We have a plan, but it is not foolproof. Christoffer will need to find a full-time job, and we’ll have to save up before we can find a place of our own, so we’ll have to stay with friends for a time. I am not well, and I am afraid I might never get better. Old photos lie scattered on the floor—artifacts I have carried from one place to the next. I am so good at endings—I know how to mourn them. How to carry them within me like a child. It is the beginnings that I cannot trust, yet I cannot help but yearn for them. What is a scribe but a prophet?

Late February 2025,

We have returned to the Berkshires at last. A tugging ache in my stomach wakes me from sleep. I notice it is early morning; the sky is dark blue but brightening around the edges. I am weary, but I cannot fall back asleep, for the pain is too great. I keep my eyes closed, surrendering to the dark necessity of such a moment. In the thin place between waking and sleeping, I feel cool mud pressed upon my eyes by tender hands. Tears slip down my face. Thank you, I whisper. Thank you.
I write a prayer:

Bring me to the pool, Christ.
May I emerge green and shining
with clear sight
may I glorify heaven
with my healing.

Siloam (The Prophet)

A great darkness always precedes
a greater light.

When all is shadow,
acquaint yourself with subtle shifts
and movements:
the chitter here, the clatter there,
scent of fox, soft leap of rabbits.
Notice the wild roots and petals
splayed beneath your feet:
black oak, white clover,
blue violets.

Hew your dreams into a divining rod;
let them lead you where vision
cannot.

Gather fallen stars along your way—
hem them into your garments, bind them
around your neck.
Say to yourself: I gleam.

Do not devour your agony.
Do not keep quiet.
Do not listen to the voices that tell you
to go back.
Heed the whispers of the guides who prepare your way.

Forgive the treachery of your body.
Abide the clamor of your heart.
Fear is not the prophecy; the prophet
always turns away before they bring
deliverance.

You are not lost in these woods, my love.
There is an archway in the thickets in the exact shape
of your frame.
This darkness is not mere death;
each annihilation
is a hidden doorway.

You will not enter on your knees.
You will not bleed any longer.

You will feel the damp wind of cool streams,
you will smell the bright sweetness of fruit,
you will hear the sound of wings, and you will know
you have arrived
at the place of promise;

there is a pool there
that has waited.

Late May 2025,

John 9 gives us an intimate glimpse into Christ’s process of delivering miracles. Upon meeting a blind man, Christ creates a salve from the earth and his own substance. Then, he places the salve upon the man’s eyes. And yet, the man does not instantly see. Time passes between receiving the blessing and the eventual fulfillment of it. But this time is not spent passively: Christ invites the blind man to actively participate in his transformation.

Wading into the ancient pool and washing the mud from his eyes is a necessary act of co-creation. The space between receiving the mud and emerging from the water is liminal and holy. It is a birth canal; a communion of heaven and earth. The mud is a burial and a restoration; a crucifixion and a veil torn in two.

For nearly two months, I have remained in this liminal space as I have navigated the hardest health crisis of my life. For weeks, every time I ate, my body thoroughly and systematically rejected the food, regardless of what it was. I lost 10 pounds in two weeks. My previously managed, though admittedly not well, health conditions spiraled out of control. My body was sensitive to everything, a howling and wounded animal, unwilling to trust. I became so weak and dizzy that I could not go outside. I couldn’t have a cuppa to soothe my spirits. My mind was so delirious from fatigue, pain, and hunger that I could hardly read or communicate.
All the heartbreak, illness, betrayal, and rage from my past 24 years on earth demanded to be felt in its entirety. No more, my body growled. No longer.

In my darkest hours, I have always found oracles:
Visions glimpsed in the thin place between waking and sleeping,
great blue herons, rising above misty rivers,
hares, hopping into the forest,
well-placed crow feathers,
fox bones,
flowers,
poems,
scripture.

While in the maw of suffering, it is necessary to devote oneself to noticing harbingers of hope, for they bind us to our future. And yet, this time around, I could not see them. And if I did, I was not aware, blinded as I was by my pain. For the first time in a long time, God and the Earth felt silent. I walked in the dark, terrified that my fate was annihilation.

In my dreams, I stood over a grave. A bright blue bird flew to me, inviting me to follow it. I walked away from the grave, and we entered a dark wood. I followed the blue bird until I saw a clearing, green and luminous. Before I reached the wood’s edge, I fell to the earth, howling with grief and pain.

In another dream, I ran up to my mother, and she turned her face away.

I love life. I love it so much it hurts. It made me weep, watching how the world came alive as I withered. Wait, I wanted to say to God and the greening trees. Please don’t leave me behind. I’m meant for life, too.

But even then, the healing mud covered my eyes.

Siloam is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Shiloah, which comes from the verb shalah, meaning to send forth. Shalah can refer to an emergence, as a branch or a bud would emerge. Another form, shilluhim, refers to parting gifts.2

As I write this, it is mere days after a diagnostic procedure. Soon I shall have answers. On June 7th, I will turn 25. I am weary, but I have more strength and mental clarity than I did in previous weeks, and I am hopeful about beginning treatment.

Loam still covers my eyes. Yet I know this darkness is sacred and havened, even as I fear desolation. I walk clairvoyant, gathering stars and heeding the voices of the many guides who spur me on. 3

I speak prophecy.

Dear kindred, thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.
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1
You have made it through another treacherous night.
I know, you are still so tired and afraid of what is to come.
But listen, the wild geese are singing
and the robins
and the mockingbirds
and the ravens
and the swallows.

Your wounds, dreadful as they are,
soften with the thin blue light
and surrender a
whispered song.

Once, in the second grade,
you took a field trip to an old farmhouse nestled
between streams and flowers.
It was the sight, no doubt, of some battlefield or another,
but time was not such a terrifying thing back then; it
merely moved through you like wind
in the trees.

You were struck then, not with an air of past violence—
but with a resonance
hidden in the floorboards.

There, as you sat on the oaken ground, breathing in
the scent of wool and freshly churned cream,
a woman bent down and touched your hair
and called it flax.

It was then you remembered
your true song–
one that cannot be devoured
by death. Light broke through

the thick and aged glass
and each precious fear
was threshed
into gold.

2

Dear kindred, thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.
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1


Every March the roads
recall when they once
were rivers, the snowmelt joining
rain to make vernal streams
of asphalt.
Spring arrives quietly at first,
she tapestries the cold earth in
a quilt of fog.

The houses—frosted and
candle-bright—illumine
the blue and loamy
dark as if they are the first
stars spoken
into existence.

Snow will come again
before winter is over.
The north wind will blow,
glittering and glacial,
a fated vestment anointing
the hills.

The trees will shake in the night
as if they are women laboring, their frames
commanding the precipice
of life and death.

At dawn,
the Crows will call
over and over and over again,
invoking an ancient song.

Look closely.
Dare to walk humbly
to the Water Birch, and introduce yourself.
Tell the wise Elder your name,
as is proper. Then offer
the only gift you have
to presently give: a prayer fluttering
wildly within your chest.

The words do not need
to be marvelous.
You do not need to prove
your magnificence
or your humility.
Yes, you have a lot to learn.

Like how to spin light
into sap.
Like how to weave need
into prophecy.
Beginnings often look
the same as endings.

Given time, water carves
cathedrals out of stone.

Mountains were birthed from the sea.

The way of water is
soft as it is calamitous.
Remember, it whispers.
Fashioning empty places
into wombs.

Dear kindred, thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.
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Wishing well

2

About the poem:

This poem began in defiance.

Some people will not love you as you are—in part, perhaps, but never in full. To be misunderstood is a great tragedy. But an even greater tragedy is to be dishonest.

For years, I have maintained a constant posture of defensiveness. I have consistently diminished my presence so as not to disrupt other’s notions of who I am.

I have abdicated my power to those who claim to know better—to be wiser.

To this I say: no more.

I know who I am. She calls to me, wild and familiar and foreign.
She is everything I once was and everything I will someday be.

She is a healer.
She is a soothsayer.
She is a wise woman.
She is not wayward—far from it.

God runs through her veins like sap.

Dear kindred, thank you for being here. It means much more than you know!
If you enjoyed this piece and would like to receive more offerings like it, you can subscribe down below.

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Wishing well

Let the spider stay for winter.
Watch how she gathers the dark 
into gossamer, spins a song of 
silver and ice.
Imagine her weight in your palm, 
slight as a feather, barely a whisper
of wind.

She is something you are not, 
with eight legs the color of 
winter branches, red-brown and 
burgeoning,
eyes deep as a new moon,
and a mouth fashioned for dark sap,
the likes of which run in your very veins.

Kith calls to kindred.
Something within your heart 
keens to her, yearns for her
to turn and recall
your face.

Do not look away from this longing.
At dawn, walk out into the snow 
with a hot cup of tea and name them all, 
the bright and wild familiars that flit away
from your footsteps into 
the brambles. 

Beneath a grandfather pine listen as a 
crimson song cries out in a language 
you once thought lost.
Notice how she is closer than the distance
that separates you, so close your breath hitches
to hers.
Tell her: do not be afraid. 

God, whoever God may be, must be known 
in memory—a hymned story
reverenced in marrow.

When it is night and the snow-clouds have parted,
look to the darkest portion of the Southern sky.
Somewhere, hidden in light, 
there is a galaxy being forged
at the beginning of time.
The spider has not yet arrived, 
nor the crocus or the cardinal, 
the fox or the sea.

All is frost and star song, and the word apart 
has not yet been said.

Dear kindred, thank you for being here. It means much more than you know!
If you enjoyed this piece and would like to receive more offerings like it, you can subscribe down below.

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Wishing well

1

Who is she that burned the chord?
Held it, lampwick, in fire
offered prayers of pearl and garnet, spoke
child come forth shining.
Who is she that quickened my soul, midwifed
the hymn of my name?
There is a long-forgotten language hidden in 
moss and stone, bramble and sap.2

Just as my mother and my mother’s mother,
I was born beneath the light of a waxing crescent.
My hands a chalice of yearning, damp
lilac blossom
in the starry dark.
All that is left of my mother
is moon-water, river-song and 
wind breathing 
through the birches. 

I try to divine the old ways,
recall the recitation of meanings, 
the patterns woven from mist and evening sun,
robin calls and winter buds.
Once, I might have known
the weight of a new calf in my hands,
how to read the shape of clouds,
the smoke and the light, the hay scattered
in the byre. 

There is no tender hand here
to stay my wanting brow. 
To answer the hitch in my breath, 
the breaks in need
of tending.

I am still only a child lost in a far country,
its tongue like ash upon my lips.
I search for the words 
that my mother once spoke–words untaught,
found in marrow:
white flowers and honey, 
streams and frost.

What I cannot put to verse, I will weep.
What I cannot weep, I will put to verse.

I will learn the dark language of the earth
bird-cry and petal-soft, untamed and ruinous.
I will gather a holy well where there is emptiness.
To the mare of my heart, fallen and
whimpering, I will sing:

bone to bone,
blood to blood,
limb to limb
as if they were mended.3

When I was a child, I felt very old. Grief hewn and sharpened, fox-wise and toothsome. I knew the boundary line of loss like the back of my hand. I was a wild, wounded thing; in want of softness yet so very afraid. Fear and a desire to be loved ruled everything, though I hardly knew how to express this. When I wanted to be kind, I was cruel. When I wanted to be cruel, I was kind. I had no sense of self, save the title of self-proclaimed poet (this has somehow always stuck). Everything else was transient as mist at dawn.

It’s a difficult business raising yourself. Losing a mother is a twofold loss—it is the loss of the person she was and the loss of the person you would have been with her raising. I was only ten.

My relationship with my mother was complicated. I was a spirited and willful child—to put it mildly. In childhood, children are a mirror of their parents—water reflecting moon and shadow. At times, my mother didn’t like what was reflected back to her. My mother, like so many women, carried a lifetime of trauma, both her own and inherited—and all the repressed grief and anger that comes with it.

My mother was our family’s matriarch without the due recognition. Faithful, headstrong, and steadfast; she was our family’s primary provider. Outside the home, she was a caretaker for disabled adults. At home, she performed most of our household’s domestic labor on top of raising three young children. As a child, I could not recognize her as she deserved. I only saw a fraction of who she truly was; a darkened vignette. When I was fifteen, I learned that she once wrote poetry.

As an adult, I have begun to mythicize our story. Collect the fragments of our past and future, both real and imagined; the shards of devastation and loneliness and hope.

Because my mother is spirit, gathering wisdom and knowledge is not something that has been bequeathed to me through conventional experience. I have labored for it. Common knowledge has never come easily.

I didn’t know how to load a washer until I was eighteen. I didn’t know yes, you must sweep every day, multiple times a day— and wipe down the counters! until I was twenty. At twenty-three, I learned you must shake out your clothes before putting them into a dryer.

But then, of course, there is uncommon knowledge— deep wisdom that gleams in secret. Wisdom that is only found hidden in the dark.

In this blessed dark, I have been mothered by the old stories—stories once passed down from mothers to daughters. Stories of thresholds at the cusp of spring. Stories of gems laid over a mother’s womb to bring safe birth. Stories of charms incanted over brokenness to bring forth mending.

This poem was born out of deep, unbridled yearning. Of the wild, howling grief of a girl in desperate need of mothering hands.

Here, I have found an unbroken lineage.

Here, I consider the ways that I am still mothered, even as I cry in the dark, asking to be held.

Dear kindred, thank you for being here. It means much more than you know!
If you enjoyed this piece and would like to receive more offerings like it, you can subscribe down below.

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Wishing well

1
Clouds get caught
winter loam in my hair, thick
sediment of lambswool
shorn
by a careful hand.
Here I wait without
sun or stars, the wind
keeping
time.

No omens appear, save
the truths I have already found
etched in hands and rivers,
empty cups and
dark leaves.

I am weary and cotton-headed,
Heaven’s lambent glow
a far memory I cannot
glean.

What gives prayer power?
I hear the past echoes forward,
retrograde.
One hundred years ago, my
great-great-grandmother whispers my name;
tucks a poem
beneath an ash tree
in the snow.

Here’s the truth:
the chaliced wine is already holy.
The whole of creation thrums impossibly
alive even when it seems
to be standing
still.

This earth is a great blue heron,
poised and magnificent as she
watches and waits, cloaked in a thin mist.
Every shiver, her ardent
devotion.

We are ancient even as we are formed
in our mother’s womb.

We are only briefly mortal.

Even now, our blood cries out
to the glittering hem of the universe
where the stars of our original birth
have yet to
vanish.2

Yes, we are stardust,
and to stardust we will one day return
oxygen
calcium
carbon
iron

our exhales only
an exchange.

Dear kindred, thank you for being here. It means much more than you know!
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