> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.poetowl.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How are you spending yourself? - URL: https://www.poetowl.com/how-are-you-spending-yourself/ - Published: 2023-05-19T16:21:36.000Z - Updated: 2025-12-11T16:03:55.000Z - Description: From the Journal | May 19, 2023—Feeling poem-ish - Author: Kimberley Pittman-Schulz - Tags: Wild Now, #Migrated-1737742637626, #Import 2025-01-24 10:17 ##### For those new to this e-community, I periodically offer my readers & clients snippets from my daily writing (*tidied up a bit* ;-). --- If on phone, turning it sideways (landscape) best displays poetic line breaks. #### May 7, 2023 | Sunday Here on a path not walked in a long while tendrils of lush weeds whisper, *Give us back our wild*, the human hands that cleared a route no different from the green hands reaching across to close the opening you stopped entering. The heart is like that, a trail inward, a wildness closing around an absence, an aching presence. Out of longing or earth-lust, you crouch, pulling away berry vines, tough Salal, shoots of Salmonberry, spruce seedlings, sweating with focus, looking for the bare soil that once held you, joy in roots and snails, low thermals warm at your ankles, saying, *Yes, this is the way forward.* --- #### May 10, 2023 | Wednesday What if you could hold light as if a luminous bird in your cupped hands? Speaking softly, with kindness, your voice a song so soothing she lets you draw back her shimmery feathers, go beneath the downy fluff, and see what holds her together, all the places she’s been, tiny scars of hurt and healing, what came before and before, all the stories that matter over time. Then, releasing her, you are part of her, this span of holding and curiosity, layered in, the light flying on and on. --- #### May 15, 2023 | Monday Bending over a wet head of lettuce, how do they find us? How does the ruffled leaf, veined and red-edged, bring back the dead? My mother’s hands are beside mine in the cold water, washing away flecks of dirt, probing for rebel slug or tiny beetle hidden in the heart where all leaves root, holding tight to core. *“Never cut, always tear,”* my mother says, as I work each leaf, standing alone in the kitchen, humming, arranging ragged pieces on a plate. --- #### May 18, 2023 | Thursday Looking up from my notebook, up from the depths of thought, a swooping and gliding, figure eights, no, more complex, slipping over the surface of pond, brushing rushes and fern tips. What bird is this? Mid-day now, the sun has burned through coastal clouds, bright on the water. Not a beak, not feathers, but wings that flutter and stretch opaque, fleshy, fast, erratic, golden fur embracing a mammal face, looking sideways at me, banking, pulling higher. Hello, bat braving daylight, are you *a sign, omen, strange angel?* Part butterfly, part fox, she flits and hunts the air, the pond reflecting her passing, her mouth opening, letting out a language I can’t hear, letting in other wings, the tiny meat of gnatty, flying things. Is it hunger or curiosity that brings *you to me? Thank you either way.* Suddenly gone, odd how the pond feels empty. Like every other loss, I add her to my bag of living memories, called mind, called body, called maybe you’ll come back to me. --- #### May 19, 2023 | Friday Walking in woods between mud and broken moonlight, one foot’s slippery, but holding its ground, the other in air, suspended ever so briefly. Will you join me? Even if you stand still, the earth spins and flies through space, the oldest form of time. Your body is another, a soft, pulsing purse, each breath a penny spent, once and gone. What better way to spend ourselves than sharing a walk, mud on our soles, moonlight in our hair? --- ##### How are you spending yourself? Who might you invite on your journey? Would love if you shared in a comment below, so we can all learn from each other.