The finished pieces: poems and prose that began as field notes, observations about myself or others, and kept going. What starts as something noticed in the body eventually asks to become something written. I write to be a more grounded person; to be clearer about my life and my place in the world. A field note tells me what I saw. Writing tells me what it meant, and sometimes, what it cost.
This poem names two nervous systems. One carries pain like a stone, the braced body under chronic load, still holding a threat it never healed. The other sets it down in the open light and observes and learns without the constant brace. The difference isn’t how much pain arrives. It’s whether the system can let it move fluidly from a place of fear to a place of trust. Trusting that you can hold and manage whatever flows through you.
Desire is the nervous system’s movement toward what it cares about, the impulse to reach before the mind has found its reasons. What’s notable here isn’t the absence of struggle. It’s that the body reaches anyway, leaning into the weather rather than letting it decide, and that leaning is its own kind of aliveness.
The real subject of this poem is less about romance and more about the trade every act of preservation makes. An album, a pressed petal, a poem, even a field note like this one…none of it is the living thing. It’s what’s left after you decide the living thing was worth keeping, in whatever form keeping is possible.
You cannot ruminate mid-plunge. The nervous system doesn’t have bandwidth left for anything but the here and now. That’s the same demand Ripples makes of love: not a state you ease into, but a shock you enter fully, which is precisely what clears the noise and tells you, unmistakably, that you’re alive in it.
Attention is a nervous system state…a rehearsal of presence in relationship with the world.
On heartbreak, the imagination, and the mysterious way love returns after loss—an excerpt from Aligned, featuring the great John O’Donohue and a poem.
I would go into the woods behind my house. I’m not sure if I was escaping, exactly — I think what I craved was predictability, and the woods had it.
A poem for my children, and the Rockwell Kent painting that inspired it.
What a deer can teach us about the difference between fear and suffering.