Sustenance comes in so many ways. To be within this place, to eat from it, is a profound and practical tie to everything that is.
All of us exist within great cycles of living and dying, giving and receiving. There will always be suffering along with thriving, and we all have some measure of choice in how we work with that reality.

What I’m saying is, we were animal and insect and earth long before we ever were humans with a language. Sometimes we need to listen as
animals and insects, listen as earth,

to really understand.

Somewhere in the wilderness,
I asked this of the oracle:
What is love?
And the oracle replied:

Love is sky. It is freedom, also shelter,
blue and fathomless, openness and storm.

I went to Ouray to read poems at the Opera House while a wildfire raged outside.

Renounce your body. It
is nothing, was nothing.
You are now part of the updraft,
of the sagebrush on the rising air,
one with the horizon
and the vast expanse of West.

…while another singular,
irreplaceable species of warbler
falls into twilight, into extinction. I think,

I am in love with that bird:

with all the fleet and perfect sweetness of its final song on planet earth.

It is winter, and your presence is requested.
In the winter, when it’s time to go
deep, deep inside yourself and find the stillness,

This age-old waning of the sun
has come for eons over this same view:

Mountains slowly smaller over millennia,
the sun, by fractions and particles,
smaller too. 

all the tiny silences
that have made up, thus far, the giant silence of the universe.