How many times have I gazed at you?

And yet —
I do not truly know your face,
or the lacy chasms which drape your neck,
or the navel of your world,
or the smooth expanse of flesh
where nature does not seem to have hurled
her missiles at you.

You move so fast,
sliding up the sky.
I can’t even keep track of you
in my viewfinder.

And yet I try
to capture your image
in order to see you better.

But the truth is, you wax and you wane
and you will never look
exactly like this again.

…

I heard chatter at my neighbor’s house this evening.
She got the vaccine. And she hasn’t seen her kids,
or grandkids, in eleven months.

It’s weird, this chatter. I’d almost forgotten
the sound of something we once thought
was normal.

I’m so thankful for some of the new silence
in this world. But the innocence of children’s
voices. That’s what I miss.

She’s only gotten one shot, my neighbor.
And this worries me. I’m not sure she
should be this carefree yet.

But I get it.

What’s worse? Loneliness or death?

Well, death of course.

But loneliness can clobber you…

They’re poking their bright little heads up from the earth, ready to greet the warmer days of spring. It always seems like it isn’t quite time for them to appear, and yet here they are, dancing in the breeze, their ruffled skirts blazing brightly. Most of the following photos were shot with a fixed 85 mm lens with a f/1.8–5.6, which creates a nicely blurred background with a sharp plane of focus on the flower itself.

While practicing yoga, the poses themselves are so often the focus of the practice and the target of perfection.

But, really, isn’t it the transitions between āsanas or between moments in life that matter more?

The second that we arrive in what we have idealized in our minds as “the pose” is just a “freeze-frame,” a snapshot of what we perceive as the expression of the āsana we were working towards.

One of yoga’s greatest gifts, it seems to me, is to teach us that, just as in life, the moments of passage between poses is just as important, and…

It feels like we’ve had both winter and spring in the same week here in Southern California. The first of the daffodils have sprung from the earth. And we were simultaneously blasted by a ferocious winter storm which flooded the streets, dropped hail, and left a magnificent patina of snow on the local mountains.

I caught your glance today. And my gaze
stayed, for just a moment, with the slant
of your chin, and with the weathered lines
beginning to creep in around your eyes, like vines
trailing into the abyss of memory.

Who is that woman in the mirror?

I remember lipsticks in tiny white tubes,
samples from my grandma, who was
ahead of her time and sold Avon to the
neighbors but gave the testers to me and
my best friend, Stacey, to play with
in the screen porch that
summer on the lake.

She seemed old, my grandma. …

On broken wings we learn to fly,
to soar, to glide into realms
we may have never expected
to inhabit.

But life is like that.

You can’t always plan it.

And, sometimes, those fractures,
those ruptures from the reality we knew
make us stronger, gift us with a new view
of the endless heavens and the
soft breast of the earth,
and of the possibilities birthed
during those moments of free-fall,
when we see all of the missteps,
the times we tucked
ourselves into balls of wounds
that held us, heavy, to the ground.

But, like the wounded bird, we…

Like Maharāni Denali, flirting
with the mirror of the lake,
sometimes hiding behind the breath
of the gods, and, at others, allowing
a full glimpse of her visage,

you are the pose that mothers all others,
and yet is rarely seen
in all of its profound simplicity
of purity and totality.

As a dream slips free from dreamless,
nīdra sleep, entire forests of trees
emerge from your granite shoulders
to trail down your sloping torso,
rooting in the soil at your feet,

where the shadows of your essence creep into the breath of the crow and the scream of the…