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.
Seven shells, seven unreachable worlds — and what the chiton’s falling-apart armor knows about what really holds a life together.
The comms officer of the winter woods. A palm-sized bird with a sky-swallowing voice, and what the flock that trusts it knows about courage.
The special operator of the bird kingdom…and what its silent, sightless precision teaches us about attention.
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.