Finding My Way Home

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

What I have learned:

If you cannot love yourself,

you cannot truly love this

world,

with its harsh passions

avowed to setting you free.

The fish on your plate

is a gift from the sea -
who asks for your

salty tears in return,

The air asks only to play

in your lungs,

The swift that you re-member

that you can fly.

I’ve walked barefoot in mud

in order to find my way

Home.

It’s the only way I know how

to reconcile my longing for

a Mother.

Choose to be.

In the end,

You were the only one really capable

of loving yourself

enough.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

Published in "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World" 

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The Annual

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

Your presence would

terrify me

if it weren’t my desire

to be destroyed.

I am like the flower

who yearns to drop my

petals so that I may

go to seed,

and bloom anew as

an entire meadow

perfuming the sky.

This self is a limited

concept –

It pushes hard against

my inner skin,

saying,

“Let me out!”

The tight-bodied seed

of me cracks open.

The unfurling sprout of me

rises through the soil,

wishing to speak only

in the plural.

This is how I live –

rooted and

reaching for the sun.

And this is why

I choose to die

an annual –

So that there is more

of me to give myself

to you.

© 2012-2014/Jamie K. Reaser

From "Re-Union: Coming Home to Each Other" (a work in progress)

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The First Sounds of the Morning

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

What if you dedicated

the first sounds of the morning

to gratitude?

What then?

Might the birds, having just

limbered their wings and

stretched out the toes that

gripped all through the night,

comment on

your voice at dawn?

Might the trees who have

known so little appreciation for

their shade and fruits,

cry,

like lovers cry when the

moment they never believed

would come

is suddenly a memory?

Might the sun, a

Master of Power,

finally learn what it

feels like to receive warmth?

I’ve heard the jack-in-the-pulpit

silently rendering a sermon,

and watched a muskrat put his

hands in prayer position

just before nibbling off golden

flower heads

as dawn pinked.

I’m thinking that it would be good

to realize that we are home

every morning,

and to give thanks for the

privilege.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"
Published by Talking Waters Press

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Walking Through the Garden

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

We could make a life

out of this little black pebble,

and this bee-dancing flower,

and the wispy cloud skating

across the hot blue horizon.

I don’t know what the robin

wants me to remember of

its morning song,

But I do know this –

Everything around me is

choosing to live,

And has a way of collaborating

in the great conspiracy of

“what ifs.”

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

Published in Coming Home: Actively Learning to Love this World

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Taking a Walk

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

The turkey vulture’s rocking,

dihedral shadow crosses over me,

the road, the meadow, the mountains,

and a future

that can only be scripted

by those aspects of me

apprenticed to longing.

My feet proceed:

One, two, three four.

One, two, three, four,

Like someone has told them

that what is at the end 

of this journey is so 

worth the

effort.

Upon my approach,

a pair of brown thrashers rise

from their dust bath

cup,

emptying the Earth body

of their bodies.

I kneel and finger the

lingering warmth. 

Do they know that I look

upon their effort to rid

themselves of parasites

as a hand gesture of

the Beloved?

This is what it is all about,

isn’t it?

How we choose to See things.

© 2012-2015/Jamie K. Reaser

Published in "Sacred Reciprocity: Courting the Beloved in Everyday Life" (www.hiraethpress.com)

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The Oriole by the River

Image: origin unknown

The oriole chortling by the river

is so much more than simply a bird

glimpsed in the bush.

It is a never-again moment

witnessed,

and shared.

How can I not but feel split open?

I am an innocent,

but one who has willfully surrendered

my heart to Life’s intent to grow

each one of us into something

larger than the body can contain.

In saying - “Yes” - to whatever this is,

I have invited my own undoing.

Anything that has emerged from an

egg,

a seed,

a cocoon,

or a mother’s womb

knows the awe-full process of

breaking from confinement.

What pain.

What ecstasy.

Destiny lies in the way we view

the world when we first open our eyes.

We are so small in the context

of this big and bold and expansive

universe of possibility…

Question 1:

Will you succumb to fear,

crawling back into homespun captivity?

Or...

Question 2:

Will you choose to fully emerge,

embracing vulnerability as your savior?

I can’t help but wonder what that bird

thought when it first peered,

naked,

beyond the rim of its edgy nest cup.

Reflecting upon a moment

by a river,

I have such gratitude for its wings.

© 2012-2016/Jamie K. Reaser

From "Wild Life: New and Selected Poems" (www.hiraethpress.com) 

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At the Heart of the Meadow

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

Don’t stop on the edge of the meadow.

You cannot take the pulse of the

wildflowers from there.

Intimacy is at the core of all things.

You must get thickly into it.

You must lay your fears down

at the threshold

if you hope to release the small

of your back into the cradle

of whatever it is you love.

And look up at the sky.

Or let gravity pull you into another.

I have known what a day is like

without ecstasy,

what a night is like when the

loneliness you keep in empty company

fills you so full of void that

you can’t hear

the stars singing.

Such moments were not intended

for anything that breathes.

If the long grasses sliver the length

of your legs, say:

“I am wounded,”

but do not make an event of it.

Instead, look back at what

you have

trampled upon

and offer apologies

in the form of lavish praise.

It is the beauty that you see

there that will turn

your scars

into skin so sensitive

that it longs for

touch from the living.

I once saw a doe come to

nurse her newborn fawn

in the white-blossomed

rose thickets.

She knew to place that which

was most precious

at the heart of the meadow,

and to nurture it there.

Why would she have done

anything less

if she could do this?

And I can do it too.

When the indigo bunting sings,

“Sweet-sweet-sweetie-sweet,”

I wonder if you’ll meet me there.

© 2012-2018/Jamie K. Reaser

From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World" 
Published by Talking Waters Press

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