I’m grateful our new president speaks of feeding all children, not just a few.

Viktor Frankl wrote:  What is to give light must endure burning.

As a world dealing with crisis, we’ve been doing that.  Now we energize change.

Embracing and beckoning, I rise early these days, receive and integrate what roots in the dark.

Mark Twain said:  A better idea than my own is to listen.

William Butler Yeats wrote: We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

I cultivate quiet and remember back.

In 2006, my cat Mandu passed away after I finished nine months of cancer treatment, chemotherapy and radiation.  I felt he stayed with me to absorb the poison and help me through it. I wrote this poem for him.  

Essence

Cat Mandu allowed us entry to his death,
stayed under the table on the rug
where we watched breath slow,
a final moist purr come to rest.

We wrapped him in a blanket,
carried him outside and dug
where Coast Miwok once lived,
and deer now stand, soul sentries

for all that is past. I placed a stone
engraved with words, Hidden Treasures,
then simmered in the sound of air,
a door passed through.

I pick up a stick,
touch like a wand the nerve running
from ring finger to heart.
A chime gathered, departs.