Our Basket

Can we fit these singing mountains inside the basket
your heart reeled me into?
Or maybe the rivers, the sunsets and the coyote?

photo by j. ruth kelly, 2017, all rights reserved, Taos, NM

Can the energy flowing between our hearts, our minds,
our body
fit inside or…
will the weave burst, filling our laughter up all the way
to the top of every
split second of
divine timing?

Everywhere I turn the words fall silent, singing depths and I’m left
with gratitude.
For you. And.
For those friends who are closer than the closest.

Our basket tips, overflowing with abundance,
like the way your eyes drew me to you
and the way my tears fell easily with the friend of friends who
brought me to your heart, to hers, to my own heart…
and to this place,
this now…

this forever measures out the next time and place
of happy faces pushed against each other,
skin blending souls blurring lines and distinctions…

’til we find we’re scrambling
for more to fill and overflow
the reunion of souls.

 

jruthkellyLeave a comment

All The While…

relentless roil of thunder
reverberating through every layer,
every sigh and song of loss
reaching past and gently tumbling
all these walls fretting against fear.

weary feet follow the deep drumming
and hope’s heart skips beats all the while wondering,
all the while summoning some ancient reckoning.
love and courage beckon beyond the edge,
a plunge for those whose languishing days
are over…

 

photo by j. ruth kelly, 2017, all rights reserved

jruthkellyLeave a comment

Awakening

gentle turning within
disrupting, kindly disintegrating
all the walls surrounding precious seed
now spilling elixir, filling the soil of soul’s untamed bounty.
an unnamed fullness unfolds.
wholeness insists outside old stories…
and the fall, the loss grows richness where we land…

photo by j. ruth kelly, 2017, all rights reserved

jruthkellyLeave a comment

Airborne Over Santa Fe…

All awe-filled and full.
Sun’s beckoning lands me west
of all the madness
posing pretend love
and telling tall tales to fill
a yawning divide
no lie can hide now.
See, I see you more clearly
and all I can do
is fly far away
building sweeter ways to love
beyond the carnage.

photo by j. ruth kelly, 2017, all rights reserved

 

jruthkellyLeave a comment

A Harvest Calls

When the winter stole my song, all the lovely bits of me blew away
and the night chained the dirt of my soul to the earth,
a forest of dead leaves and berries cloaked my blood.
So I wailed into the mire, a sort of siren sob for ice and snow, but no.
The season remained anchored to an epoch, bored by all my ire
and, instead of relenting, carved notches in my throat,
binding my voice to memories of long ago, whispering secrets stored in lifetimes past.
And so I listened.
And the notches cut deep, freeing waters dank and tired.
They ran in rivulets down my neck and into the valley hardened by hope’s abortions,
flooded all the flotsam jamming up my flow and washed old corpses out to sea.
And I listened more
as the ice and snow melted down into my core, warmed by embers unseen.
Then a new song gripped the heart of every screenplay refusing tRuth,
wringing out the lies, peeling back the armor ancient,
fucking the mindlessness out of every habitual, knee-jerk bullshit
reactionary presentation.
Stripped, disintegrating but the truest hum emanating.
Out past the dirt and mire, through the cracks in my grave…
a harvest calls,
a song is freed,
and these feet remember the dance.

j. ruth kelly, 2017, all rights reserved

jruthkellyLeave a comment

At What Point…

At what point did my love for you end and my need for you to validate my fantasy about myself, about life, about love itself pick up, posing “love” surreal, impossible?

At what point did my desire for you end and my need to be craved, to be proven to again and again that I was desirable, that I could control you and could control just how much you reached me, truly reached me, begin?

At what point did my fantasies distort who you are in my eyes and at what point did those fantasies alienate you from me, me from you and even you from yourself?

At what point did my hopes blind me, then bind me to a hopeless mirage in the desert of a reality nonexistent while you stood there simply being a feast as I starved needlessly?

(How many of us ever get to really see each other, feel and know each other beyond the bullshit we are so convinced is real?)

At what point do any of us know beyond our projections dawning on the pretend horizon of our insecure need to be exceptional, to be anything but as human as the rest of us?

Do we reach the end, the bottom of the trunk so full of all those masks we believe we are and we hope won’t fall off, showing our unwashed beauty?

At what point will I walk permanently naked into the moment and not reach for the nearest defense mechanism to shield me from what it means to be free from the ancient pride hide?

Take me there, to that point.

I weary here of the shields and notions of perfection and the quiet desperation made by so much noisy needing to make a meaning that already thrives and will live beyond my dying…

j. ruth kelly, 2017, all rights reserved, pointillist spiral by j. ruth kelly

 

jruthkellyLeave a comment

Revelation 3/9/17

“Love… Thy will be done
I can no longer hide, I can no longer run
No longer can I resist your guiding light
That gives me the power to keep up the fight

Love… Thy will be done
Since I have found you, my life has just begun
And I see all of your creations as one perfect complex
No one less beautiful or more special than the next
We are all blessed and so wise to accept
Thy will, Love, be done

Love… Thy will be mine
And make me strive for the glorious and divine
I could not be more, more satisfied
Even when there’s no peace outside my window, there’s peace inside
And that why I no longer run” (Martika)

Let this be so for all who discover a long-buried essential element of their souls, a suppressed or feared aspect of their being. I stand with every layer in celebration, and in gratitude for inclusion in each gentle and courageous revelation. Love, thy will be done…

jruthkellyLeave a comment

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis aka Alienation

I so often wrestle with whether or not to express what CFS/ME does to my life, how it shapes the landscape of my mind, my will. More often, I choose to sparingly articulate how it impacts me, simply in the interest of sanity. But I find, as more and more people wake up to the truth of this disease, that it is becoming more empowering, less overwhelming to go ahead and speak up. The ignorance is melting away as people realize it’s not a psychological issue but a real assault on the body.

As Jennifer Brea experienced initially, so did I. Fever over 106. Pneumonia for the first time in my life. Early 20s. Never. The. Same. After my primary care physician sent me in many different directions seeking a diagnosis, we landed on the diagnosis of CFS. And the alienation began right there in my doc’s office, with her set of prejudices awaiting me like a box, a prison cell.

Brea’s TED talk speaks to so many of the issues confronted by those who walk this path. Her words, in their affirmation of the validity and impossibility of the struggle, bring balm to those who have suffered this illness for a long long time.

jruthkellyLeave a comment

All Angst Aside…

Take me, every ounce of this flesh and bone, pulse and blood of being, down that road,
that road long avoided, long ignored. Take me down that road, past all the detour signs and the “do not enter” and “wrong way” warnings. In the night, we journey. Past the sleeping towns and the slumbering souls barely breathing, we ride. All angst aside, all in, all gone on oppression, take me down that forgotten highway where only my body’s direction may lead as my soul receives and gives, leads and follows on a path of ancient knowing.

Photo by J. Ruth Kelly, All Rights Reserved, 2016
Photo by J. Ruth Kelly, All Rights Reserved, 2016

jruthkelly2 Comments

The Church of May

You leap beyond all
despair and hopeless falling.
Fiery woman, live;

no spire reaches
past your own sacred lightning,
flaring out fierce love.

Stomp and squeal delight
against a night of constant
yearning. Your love’s dance

blurs us past façades,
awakens all our hoping
towards sun’s warm call.

Photo by J. Ruth Kelly, All Rights Reserved, 2016
Photo by J. Ruth Kelly, All Rights Reserved, 2016

“May” is one of my daughter’s nicknames. On this day, pictured here as blurred trees and a church held steadfast against our movement, Marion drove us around to see some of the more lovely parts of Pittsburgh. Our trip to see her began with her trademark spontaneity and abandon when we drove up to her home. She leapt up and out the front door into the 1am cold night air and squealed with joy and then down the stairs, doing little run/skip/dance moves out into the street to reach into my car for a huge hug. And that is the best of the “Church of May.” She reveals, at her most fiercely loving moments, what we’re all made of and what we’re all here for … no matter how dark the time. We are the sacred, spiritual, divine-as-love.

 

 

jruthkellyLeave a comment