BE HERE

This Is Enough

It’s not enough to know anymore, she sings.

The clouds look like frosting spooned

over the mountain, pillowed lavender.

My hand drapes down my leg, tenderly

I kiss each knee, then where wrist

meets palm, lips touch soft skin.

This is enough.

Water jewels like eyes turning red

to gold in light where the trees were

cut. Hawk cries, over and over.

Wind sweeps, my fingers tangle with fir

needles, why hello,

I say to each branch waving.

Mist kissed

on the hillside, eyes closed, spine

curved along the bend of the earth.

This is enough.

Walking down the path

I begin to think—I am alone—

Be still! Listen.

Arms tingle, heart beats,

face flushed, breath. Sky

the color of peaches, mourning doves fly.

This is enough.

If poetry is perception, what is my body but a poetic language all its own?

When the mind has tired of concepts, unable to string together conclusions—

Is this happening to you, too?

I find myself in a familiar space, but everything seems unrecognizable. The mind cannot grasp the changes taking place, in between thought and formation—floating but stationary, standing on ground alone in a field, wind sweeping all around me. And the horizon—it appears endless without the solid body of a mountain in view.

Infinite possibility—

He asks what excites me about this new season. I see nothing in my sight, which leaves a blank space to fill. I ask him if he too is moving blindly—

How do you know?

Lead. Signs will not make decisions for you. I choose in alignment with myself while being receptive and discerning.

I remember a woman who spoke of a net that appears only after you jump from the ledge of the rock.

The mind loves frameworks of verbiage to catch it.

Last night she read a poem likening the language of words to some unfuckable lover. Words can only do so much for a person; they are figurative.

So what is real?

I left my car for a walk in the rain, scrambling up the edge of a hillside, switchbacks carved through rock and soil. My thoughts turned just as sharply with each step until it stopped me—the other one who speaks for me—

Be here.

I am still. I breathe. I feel the pounding of my heart.

Listen.

I begin to tune in—to here—and like a slow, drawn-out stretch, my attention realigns into some new synchronous spacing, and I walk the ground in a way I did not before. My hand involuntarily touches bracken fern. I look up at the spotted towhee when it makes its prehistoric squawk. There is an effortlessness in how my arms reach out, head turns, eyes close, inhale deepens, exhale releases. I feel I am in the current of a gentle breeze, veering off trail, eyes drawn to a clump of snowdrops tucked under blackberry canes and a hidden swale of pooled moss, velvety as carpet. Daffodils call me down to kneel. I stand up again, keep moving. I am no longer thinking about then or there, only this—here.

There is another way to move through the world, and its motion is derived from instinctual direction. Like the child who wanders with curiosity and amusement, everything appears before them as some new wondrous kind of now. Hands reach out, little fingers widen, face smashes into flower heads, body curls up beside the hot belly of a canine. This is what it feels like to be here.

To pull yourself from the mind’s future, from its past, from each side of yourself, and gather all parts back into your center. No more fragments.

This is wholeness.

A bevy of doves appeared in my front yard last week at a moment when I was distressed. Grief and fear took hold of my mind to a low I thought I could no longer access, but there I was, deeply entrenched. The quick, muffled clapping of wings caught my attention, and the soft white and gray bodies of these delicate, lamenting birds—I felt it reverberate through me—

Peace.

The more I embody my experience, rather than analyze it, I find the right words come after, and a path forms more clearly. People meet around the corner unexpectedly, a message arrives, time bends, and somehow we find a way without an outline, without prediction or projection. We can synchronize with an unseen current that guides us into a net of holding. These are momentary, split-second movements, unrehearsed.

It is not enough to know by thought. We must feel our way forward as sensate beings, kept by this tangible, physical body—to relearn how to move with energy. Like the stumbling kind of embodied children, like the nature of an animal.

Be here.

*Poem quoted and written to “No Fun” by Novo Amor, Gia Margaret