“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
Matsuo Basho
Not The Birds
Down, hear where we are
Faces of what we face, forgetting
light, buoyant, instruments
of the oxygen gods
Light in the Garden of Movement
I love the uncomfortable place I am in. I love the mystery of not knowing how I’ll get to the next pose. I love that I could choose to neglect the garden of movement but that I choose to inhabit the uncomfortable mystery of watering seeds, flexing with the weeds, and waiting to see what wonders flourish. I love the sounds of nearby gardeners working on their own mysteries. Their movement nourishes my own. Their occasional glances over at my garden scatter sunlight on my pursuit.
Let Your Love Curve
So the vital organ forgoes friction for freedom
A new arrangement attunes-
It plays and soars abroad
On the still curve of the night
A muscle at large is meter chasing rhyme
No rest and no contraction
Just pure expansion for keeping tempo
with a fugitive song bound to peak and fade
The Weight of Flight
When there is nostalgia for touching
anything at all
There is coming down for prayer
and wishing you were here
To kneel before this
The one question, the next verse
The Heart of The Heel, Part II: Recycling Life Thematics
Then, as life will often have it, love entered, and the most crucial pivot of all landed her due north of her dreamed-of destination, in the heart of the heel. And just like that - the house expands. The work of being at home is now a lifelong project that involves the ongoing practice of take-off, landing, longing, and embracing the air space in between that allows for, and demands, a durable infrastructure of love.
The Heart (and The Tart) of The Heel, Part I: Evoking The Magic of Puglia
While probing the Pugliese playground with her two young, sunlit daughters in tow, Hilaree evokes the magic, the color, and very often, the humor of her adoptive habitat on the Italian Adriatic through her photography and storytelling, and the through the turning of local fruits and fixings into art: @tartoftheheel.
The Wanting Space (Revised)
Miles of trekking above the timberline to stockpile a vision
Tuned me in to the fertile valley of the deep,
Seasoned the endurance of my heart space,
And led me to this blooming meadow
Ognissanti
I'm not ready for immersion but the feeling of these damp steps beneath me will become a perennial part of my being. I lift heavy hands to mouth thinking only about breaking suddenly into from veganism to vegetarianism. I taste nothing new. The sensation of being relinquished and forgotten here, deep in the fall, will stay with me for years.
The Salt of You
Stories that remember your body
are new to me
but memory gravitates and I flirt
with the idea of dipping into you
one toe at a time until
at long last,
I am submerged in the dense salt of you.
Two Hips and A Doorframe
Don’t consider
where the road leads
Just. Let’s. Walk. Together.
Both in and out of time
Your hip is on mine