God is a redwood forest.

I remember places I've never been and things I've never done.

I was walking today with some friends through the ancient growth redwood forests, where trees are growing from trees, cavernous roots exposed, bark twisting around the trunk like it was being spun as it grew.

Surrounded by ferns and loamy ground and trees so majestic I was saturated in my own insignificance, I felt deeply at peace. Monumentally calm. Returning, finally, to a home I'd never occupied, laughing with souls who've never stood there with me.

I thought, suddenly, of a guy I went on a date with another lifetime ago. We were discussing meditation and, while I knew of its benefits and uses, I didn't think it was a proactive way to change the world. He fought viciously with me about it, saying Buddhist monks must have had it wrong all these centuries, etc etc. I simply said that we could agree to disagree. Now I understand more fully what I meant, something I couldn't fully express then because I hadn't experienced it yet, but knew it was the way for me.

Being surrounded by true greatness and consequently being humbled by your own mortality, insignificance, grand purpose, is true meditation. At least by my standards. I breathed deeply. I moved intentionally. I felt a welcome wholeness that shored up my inner reserve and it said boldly to continue onward, dear one.

God is a redwood forest. It's my goddaughter asking for me in a far-off desert. It is my parents praying for my happiness before a meal. It is my best friend reading two years worth of blogs and telling me that he loves me, feels closer to me, and is thankful we belong to each other.

That's what love is, you know. At the end of the day, love means that a bit of you belongs to them and that a little part of them fills up that equal space in you. When I'm feeling lost and scattered to the winds, I remember that...my soul is a patchwork quilt of the people who have loved me in this wild, brilliant, terrifying life, and because of their bits, I'll always go bravely forward.

We're all just different views of the whole.

I re-discovered this poem I wrote a few years ago last night as I was editing my collection thus far. It's about one of the first children I was ever a nanny to. Her mom went crazy and abandoned her, then eventually came back, but only on the condition that I would never be allowed to see her again. Her dad was so sad and conflicted, but I made it easier for him, saying simply that she is her mother. It was my first loss of a child I loved, and it devastated me for a long time afterward, and made me scared of loving any of my other friends' children the same.

Still, she carries a piece of me in her love-quilt.

My Secret Keeper

There are kiss-off competitions
in the front room.
They ensue for hours before dreaded bedtime.
Zoe holds my face prone
her shocked expression, where's the camera?
while she kisses the corners of my mouth.
I can hear the victory chortling in her lungs
seconds before the outburst spills forth.
On the evening of her sixth birthday,
she is the epitome of childhood perfection.
I wonder if she'll remember this clandestine utopia,
years from now, as a defense to self-loathing.
Her hair is the soft curling of branches
loving each other, swirling in sisterly dance.
The indent above her lip makes me believe
in the story Bogey told:

it is an indentation of the angel's finger,
pressed to your lips to keep your vast knowledge secret.

My secret keeper; her mouth is shut,
but the hidden treasures her soul knows
flow over from her eyes.
Hidden in that star-swirling: the nature of God.
In my dreams, God is a child,
holding my protesting mouth closed while she kisses me,
laughing triumphantly.