Please do not stop your tears from falling.

Do not hide them in shame

or berate yourself for their presence.

Welcome them

and let them shimmer in the light of day.

There is something sacred in them.

Every drop carrying

the tenderness of a heart

capable of loving deeply.

I no longer sweep my shining pieces
into dusty corners of fear.

I no longer hide
the truth of who I am.

There is such quiet peace
in being seen by my own soul.

There are gifts that quiet brings:

a hand reaching out,

the joy in my dogs’ eyes when the clock strikes home,

a red light offering just enough pause to notice a bird in flight, carrying my heart above it all,

morning light through the barest sliver of an open curtain,

breath and movement dancing with the breeze.

I am in love with these flower photographs.

And already,
the flowers themselves are gone.

Maybe that is the quiet heartbreak inside them.

So fleeting.
So impossibly brief.

Perhaps that is part of the beauty too.

You cannot always wait for another season,
another mood,
another someday.

Sometimes beauty asks to be witnessed
while it is still blooming.

Or perhaps it is something deeper still.

The sorrow of knowing
that every living thing arrives carrying its own ending.

And yet…

perhaps the beauty was simply
that it happened at all.

What if I carried myself
with the quiet certainty
of someone who belongs
to her own life?

Shoulders unclenched.
Spine awake.

Joy lingering in me
hours after returning home.

Simply alive.

you may hear them, the wild things
that beckon in whispers on the breeze,
calling out to you
in a language whose secrets are lullabies
hidden within gentle sunsets

There are evenings
when sorrow arrives without warning,

soft as a shadow,
quiet as a leaf falling
in an empty room.

It touches the surface of my heart,
and something inside me opens.

This is my sacred place within Sugarite.
The place where my hands touch the earth,
where my tears have watered the soil,
where I lean my forehead against the dancing oak
and let life move through me.

The place that knows me
in every season.

I shall visit,
rest my head upon the shores of my being,
and watch as the wind carries it away,
the canyon returning it back to me.