When it Shows Up

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

When it shows up,

you should go outside and make offerings;

you never know what form a god, or

goddess, will take.

Sometimes it’s a wild thing, but more

likely a cat, or a dog,

once it was a sheep, really,

today, a white pigeon

- not a dove -

that I gave seed in my grandmother’s

cereal bowl, painted by hand with a fruit decor,

by someone who might now be

someone’s angel, or just gone,

I won’t claim to know how these

things work, although I do have

my ideas. As, I’m sure you have your own.

Who has lost their way?

Standing on my door step, I often wonder

which one of us

most longs to be found.

© 2014-2019/Jamie K. Reaser

From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"

Published by Talking Waters Press 

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Every Evening

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

I am like the mother who has never

had children, and so is mother to them all.

I cannot rest until they are where

their four legs should be at nightfall:

in the barn,

on the antiques and bookshelves,

boxes and baskets,

several on beds, one with a

head on my very own down pillow.

How could we settle for anything less than

a sacred ritual? “Are you safe?” We ask

the other.

And, we don’t stop searching,

not

until we hear,

in some language,

“Yes.”

© 2014-2019/Jamie K. Reaser

From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"

Published by Talking Waters Press

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Just

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

Who says, “it is just?”

Oh, Lord. It has been me.

Is the dervish just whirling?

White skirts entrancing white roses

and also the white sun.

Is the witch hazel just blooming?

Golden, spidery blossoms,

and in autumn for goodness sake!

Is the chestnut-sided warbler just here

and then gone? No! Think of it thundering

those tiny wings across the Americas.

Twice a year.

You can’t do it. Not once. Nor can I.

Words can lead us to grace, and they can

call us away from the inherent sacred. “Don’t look.

Something might change you.”

OH!

I must stop.

This life is dedicated to Earth-praise,

to loving this unordinary world.

Words are my activism.

And, they are not just words.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

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

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At the Turn of the Day

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

At the turn of the day you must agree to one thing:

To love this world more than you fear it.

Go forward with your disappointments. Watch

how even the light chooses a place to die, beautifully. We

can never know what becomes of unutterable

questions, or why we were made for this particular 
life and not another.

I find it useful to be delighted:

something just happened that I can’t explain.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

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

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These Bones

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

It seems that I am forever
trying to fall in love with these bones, and the flesh that keeps them hidden away so that they might remain

mostly unspeakable.

This is your story too, if you are

honest about it. Being human.

***

When I was a little girl, my mother dressed

me in brightly colored bathing suits so that

I could be spotted way down the beach;

even then, I had a penchant for wandering.

I bent over sand buckets to identify shells for

delighted old ladies and gentleman, handed

sharks’ teeth to astonished little boys,

but gathered the round, white vertebrae of

ocean-going fish for myself; a wild child seeks

adornment from the sea.

All you need is some string and you

can make a necklace.

And, there have been other bones:

Turtles left to the elements at roadside,

the deer the hunters lost to forest secrets,

dogs piled high at the end of an old road in

the middle of nowhere on a day that I had dedicated

to being charmed by birdsong and birds,

and I have visited museums, many of them,

where bones stare back at you, begging you to

remember a life that you never knew, to

imagine something when it was ensouled

and might have chosen to eat you for being so

close, or it might have run. But, it wouldn’t

have stayed, not like this. Not this still, forever.

These other things are so easy to love, like this

stark day with the sycamores bearing their ribs.

***

They say that poems should have good bones.

Stories can be ligaments and tendons.

***

I wonder what our Mother feels in that moment

when we walk away from her for the very

first time,

and later when she hears us remark:

“I have been abandoned.”

How easily we abandon ourselves

to stories in which we do not belong.

***

Here, on Earth, we live such a story.

Being human.

***

I love all the old stories – the ancient ones –

in which ancestors are more than just bones,

just bones,

especially when the ancestors were not

just human like they are now,

in our way of speaking of

the world as not needing us.

***

Maybe, someone will adorn

themselves with these bones,

my bones.

It could, perhaps,

be me.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"

Published by Talking Waters Press 

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Like An Old Goose

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

I’ve heard people say in rapid passing, “You must

be clever to find the words that describe a day.”

This astonishes me. Always. Isn’t a day simply there,

turning about, perhaps like an old goose situating

herself on a bed of down, in the gratitude-chamber

of your heart?

Nestle deeper.

Be still.

Crack open.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

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

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Boundaries

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

These old meadow-larked fields have their

tumbled rock walls with golden lichen suns,

and the forest, its shaggy edge.
My cabin has a magnificent mahogany

door, solid and rich vibrant brown,

salvaged from someone who could not love it

like I can; do not give away privilege to the

first hellos and last goodbyes of any given

day unless there

is great joy in it, and some amount of longing.

Boundaries have their place.

When I first moved to this mountain land, I

raced about in the thick duff putting up

‘No Trespassing’

signs on any tree that would agree to hold them.
But the trespassers and those big black bears take

them down: one malicious, one curious.

I’ve calmed a bit about the lines, well, more

accurately, somewhat surrendered, now making a

mark with silver paint, brushing on my grief for feeling

the need to do this at all – to say ‘No!’ because

the sacred is not always understood on sight.

What does one make of a life like this?
How many marks are needed

and in what form

for a woman to be heard?

“This is the threshold of my home.”

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

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

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Ginseng Thieves

I found them on knee, on a Saturday morning,

early, digging three-pronged ginseng.

I told them to stop. And, go. And, was

only semi-polite about it.

They seemed surprised that I could arrive

there, just then, and spot

them in their leafy camo, such baggy pants,

and that I could speak a thing or two about the blond

roots (they’d broken most of the root hairs) gripped in

their pocket-buried hands, to which

red clay still clung, hopeful, that I’d get it set back

within this Earth;

It still had work to do:

this world needs holding.

***

This is what it is like to suddenly

realize that you are inhabiting

your belonging:

The forest had called out

to me by a name

I knew.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

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

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Sunflowers

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

There are many kinds in my garden.

I grow them as teachers.

I love them; how they embody joy

in a way I find curious and, on days that

I won’t tally,

elusive.

What is it like, I wonder, to be the thing

on which soft bumble bees alight (they are soft,

I have petted them) to collect their dusted gold,

or butterflies – the fritillaries, sachem skippers,

and monarchs – nectar their brave, dazzling lives,

or a differential grasshopper sits long enough to

complete his survey and report unto God

about the things going on down here?

If I chose not to plant them, it wouldn’t be such

a happy garden, and this could be one of those

unlived lives that catch your eye at check out.

It’s true.

I’ll tell you that Summer has gone and they – the

sunflowers - are now bent at the waist by

the weight of their heads, looking

like skinny monks at prayer seeking

emptiness

as fulfillment.

This is when I begin to listen most carefully to the soft

om resonating across the beds of straw at their feet.

Hear now, the wisdom gained from two months

of standing still,

and in the last breath of a well-seasoned death

that I record in my cells,

a vow of endless servitude:

“Now, I shall feed the birds.”

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"

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