Make a Bow

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. -Walt Whitman 1819-1892 from PREFACE T0 LEAVES 0F GRASS



Sunflowers have been roving my near earth in droves this summer. Wild fields. Community gardens. Ellen’s garden. My parents’ garden. Sunflowers with heads the size of newborn babies. Tall, skinny, sweet, and hung-over men. Three meals in one.

Sunflowers are new beginnings. Roses too. Roses are everything.

My parents have become Ohioians of Lake Erie, which is home. My home gave sweet summer back to me—adorned me with feathers and turquoise jewels. Fed me orange-vanilla twists, bike rides to the cove, a body of water to become a yogi mermaid child, a full-size bed for sleep then another full-size bed to keep, right food, oodles of moula, soulful lolly-gagging, aunties' martinis, a handful of lucky stones, wizzzzdom from mid-June to Colorado.

I go everywhere to never die.

The beetles only leave the roses to die.

My mother drove me though hundreds of windmills and sunflowers. Scrubbed my new bathroom and laid my new kitchen. Told me every single story. Brought Deepak Chopra’s The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life. She fell in-love with my new campus, the mountain effect after all. Certainly she sang.

My parents honor the Zen Proverb: Leap and the Net Will Appear. They’ve embossed it on a pillow in the family room.

Naropa University is a rigorous magnificent wonderland. Boulder is a twirling kaleidoscope at noon, a channel to heaven (heaven is here), and Saturn’s return. T’ai Chi will write the book.