Fruit of the Loom

© 2026 Hector Viveros Lee

     For a New Beginning

by John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you

All the water

© 2026 Hector Viveros Lee

A Community of the Spirit.

by Rumi 

There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.

Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,
if you want to be held.

Sit down in the circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepard’s love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.

Don’t accept consolations.
Close your mouth against food.

Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.
You moan, “She left me.” “He left me.”
Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

 

Lovely one

© 2026 Hector Viveros Lee

     What in your life is calling you,

When all the noise is silenced,
The meetings adjourned...
The lists laid aside,
And the Wild Iris blooms
By itself
In the dark forest...
What still pulls on your soul?

 

--Rumi

Queen Mary 2

© 2026 Hector Viveros Lee

     Love—is anterior to Life

by Emily Dickinson

 

Love—is anterior to Life

Posterior—to Death

Initial of Creation and

The Exponent of Breath.

ticket

© 2026 Hector Viveros Lee

     If the house of the world is dark,

Love will find a way to make windows.

--Rumi

We are everywhere

© 2026 Hector Viveros Lee

     Gamble on Humanity

by Ayisha Siddiqa

What if the future is soft and revolution is so kind that there is no end to us in sight.

Whole cities breathe and bad luck is bested by a promise to the leaves.

To withstand your own end is difficult.

The future frolics about, promised to no one, as is her right.

Rage against injustice makes the voice grow harsher yet.

If the future leaves without us, the silence that will follow will be an unspeakable nothing.

What if we convince her to stay?

How rare and beautiful it is that we exist.

What if we stun existence one more time?

When I wake up, get out of bed, my seven year old cousin

with her ruptured belly tags along.

Then follows my grandmother, aunts, my other cousins
and the violent shape of their drinking water.

The earth remembers everything,
our bodies are the color of the earth and we
are nobodies.

Been born from so many apocalypses, what’s one more?

Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire.

But for what it’s worth, I’d do this again.
Gamble on humanity one hundred times over

Commit to life unto life, as the trees fall and take us with them.

I’d follow love into extinction.

FEAR NOT THE NIGHT

© 2026 Hector Viveros Lee

FEAR NOT THE NIGHT
by Robert Nathan

 Be not afraid because the sun goes down;
It brings the sunset and the plover’s cry.
Before the colors of the evening drown,
The stars will make new colors in the sky.
Night is no enemy. She passes by,
And shows us silence for our own heart’s good;
For while we sleep, the roses multiply,
The little tree grows taller in the wood.
Fear not the night; the morning follows soon.
Each has his task to make the earth more fair.
I t is by these, by midnight and by noon,
That she grows riper and her orchards bear.
Her fields would wither in a sun too bright;
They need the darkness too. Fear not the night. 

To be of use

"Jumping In Joy" by Fountain_Head

To be of use

by Marge Piercy

 

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

 

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

 

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

 

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Carrion Comfort

 

"Despair" by romainguy

Carrion Comfort

By Gerald Manley Hopkins

 

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,

O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

 

   Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,

Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród

Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year

Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

hope

 

"Avalanche Lake- Path In The Woods"

hope

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

 

Hope has holes
in its pockets.
It leaves little
crumb trails
so that we,
when anxious,
can follow it.
Hope’s secret:
it doesn’t know
the destination–
it knows only
that all roads
begin with one
foot in front
of the other.

The Gravel Walks

"Gravel on a beach in Thirasia, Santorini, Greece"

The Gravel Walks

by Seamus Heaney

River gravel. In the beginning, that.
High summer, and the angler's motorbike
Deep in roadside flowers, like a fallen knight
Whose ghost we'd lately questioned: 'Any luck?"

As the engines of the world prepared, green nuts
Dangled and clustered closer to the whirlpool.
The trees dipped down. The flints and sandstone-bits
Worked themselves smooth and smaller in a sparkle

Of shallow, hurrying barley-sugar water
Where minnows schooled that we scared when we played -
An eternity that ended once a tractor
Dropped its link-box in the gravel bed

And cement mixers began to come to life
And men in dungarees, like captive shades,
Mixed concrete, loaded, wheeled, turned, wheeled, as if
The Pharaoh's brickyards burned inside their heads.

*

Hoard and praise the verity of gravel.
Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.
Its plain, champing song against the shovel
Soundtests and sandblasts words like 'honest worth.'

Beautiful in or out of the river,
The kingdom of gravel was inside you too -
Deep down, far back, clear water running over
Pebbles of caramel, hailstone, mackerel-blue.

But the actual washed stuff kept you slow and steady
As you went stooping with your barrow full
Into an absolution of the body,
The shriven life tired bones and marrow feel.

So walk on air against your better judgement
Establishing yourself somewhere in between
Those solid batches mixed with grey cement
And a tune called 'The Gravel Walks' that conjures green.

 

On the Mystery of the Incarnation

 

The Annuciation by Boticelli

On the Mystery of the Incarnation

by Denise Levertov

 

It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.

Ceasefire

 

(c) 2023 Mohammed Salem / Reuters

Ceasefire

 

Someone

Very far away

Picks up a page

 

Torn from a book

That has not

 

And puts the page

In their pocket

As if it were  a leaf

 

© 2025 Beau Beausoleil

Against Content Warnings

 

"During The Famine Young Child Dying In The Gutter, China [1946] Geroge Silk [RESTORED]" by ralphrepo

Against Content Warnings

By Sara Abou Rashed

 

We stopped

counting

the dead

 

but they

 

stayed

 

dying.

 

¤

 

I refuse to give

 

my horror

 

the intimacy

 

of a name.

 

¤

 

If a word

 

announces

 

what

 

who shall

 

remember

 

how?

War News

"Vietnam War" by tonynetone

 War

News

 

The volume

of the

killing

is so high

 

so terrible

in its

working

machinery

that we

can hear

it in

our sleep

 

We get up

and roam

the house

looking for

our own

distressed

body in the

piercing

fragments

of news

 

And in

the early

morning

we will

begin to

hold

ourselves

in the arms

of our children

 

Beau Beausoleil

The Key To Making A Resolution Stick

 The Key To Making A Resolution Stick

True healing requires integration, not rejection

Sweet Community,

Throughout the past years, I have written extensively about the vast changes I experienced in myself immediately after my cancer diagnosis. Even amidst what I formerly imagined might be the most turbulent experience I’d ever face, life began to flow freely. A new sense of peace found me—not in the absence of hardship, but in ceasing to resist it, in learning to meet life as it is.

The change was so profound that, after a lifetime of thinking of myself as the most nostalgic person in the world, I stopped experiencing nostalgia. Where I once pined for the “good old days,” I found myself almost never reaching backward in time. I couldn’t long for something better because I had never experienced anything better than living with a wide open, unguarded heart.

It was such an enormous shift that even during the hardest days of cancer, I would walk around thinking, Thank goodness. Thank goodness for this healing. It sounds strange, I’m sure, but I was wildly more joyful. Opening my eyes every morning felt like opening a gift. In that place, a negative social media comment couldn’t impact me. I wasn’t even bothered when my dentist removed the wrong tooth! I became a more loving partner and a far more compassionate friend to myself. Even on the hardest days after chemo, I turned my kitchen into a dance floor. For the first time, I befriended the birds and squirrels in my yard. I felt at home in the world.

When I spoke to my friend Ethel about how grateful I was for this healing, she was happy of course, but cautioned me not to think of cancer as the well from which my wishes came true—lest I unconsciously send a message to my body that illness was welcome in my life. I was grateful for Ethel’s insight, and her words reminded me of something the poet Franny Choi once wrote: “I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life.”

As the new year approaches, many people are considering how to change their lives. How to change themselves. While the world lists its many resolutions to be “better” than the year before, I want to share one of the most important lessons I’ve learned from changing a lot in a very brief amount of time:

The more we change, the more we must commit to loving the people we were before we changed. The most transformative moment in my journey these past years was realizing that New Me wasn’t extending love to Old Me. This realization hit me in the middle of the night. I woke up and saw that I didn’t just dislike Old Me—I was terrified of Old Me. I feared returning to being anxious, blaming, defensive, and closed off. I hated the idea of returning to a life filled with chronic dissatisfaction, bending to the weight of others’ judgments, and chasing the approval of the world.

That night, I began to understand something profoundly powerful: in rejecting who I had been, in pushing that person away, I was caught in a resistance that would do nothing but recreate Old Me. The harder I tried to sever ties with the person I had been, the more I found myself embodying that self. Only when I began to offer Old Me compassion, kindness, and love did a more permeating sense of freedom begin to emerge. When we hate ourselves, we suck all of the air and light out of the room of our being. And nothing can grow without air and light. My therapist says that shame is the least energized, least alive state we will ever experience. But love and acceptance are accelerants for growth.

As I reflect on this journey, I see that true healing requires integration, not rejection. The path to becoming more open doesn’t lie in casting aside the versions of ourselves we no longer wish to be. It lies in honoring them, thanking them, and embracing them with tenderness. Each version of us is a stepping stone, a necessary chapter in the unfolding story of who we are.

So, as we stand on the brink of a new year, let us resolve to love who we have been. In loving those people, I trust we will all root ourselves more gracefully in who we are becoming.

See ya next year!

Love, 

Andrea Gibson

LOVE LETTER FROM THE AFTERLIFE

1907 Raffaele Mainella public domain

Paloma introduced me to Andrea Gibson. In this time of political upheaval, moral wasteland, of conflict, war and genocide, or paralysis as to how to respond with integrity, agency, and love, we need poetry to remind us of who we truly are.  

 The letter/poem that brought me to tears. Rest in Power Andrea. You left too soon.

 LOVE LETTER FROM THE AFTERLIFE

My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?” In my back pocket is a love note with every word you wish you’d said. At night I sit ecstatic at the loom weaving forgiveness into our worldly regrets. All day I listen to the radio of your memories. Yes, I know every secret you thought too dark to tell me, and love you more for everything you feared might make me love you less. When you cry I guide your tears toward the garden of kisses I once planted on your cheek, so you know they are all perennials. Forgive me, for not being able to weep with you. One day you will understand. One day you will know why I read the poetry of your grief to those waiting to be born, and they are all the more excited. There is nothing I want for now that we are so close I open the curtain of your eyelids with my own smile every morning. I wish you could see the beauty your spirit is right now making of your pain, your deep seated fears playing musical chairs, laughing about how real they are not. My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving. I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before.  Do you understand? It was me who beckoned the stranger who caught you in her arms when you forgot not to order for two at the coffee shop. It was me who was up all night gathering sunflowers into your chest the last day you feared you would never again wake up feeling lighthearted. I know it’s hard to believe, but I promise it’s the truth. I promise one day you will say it too– I can’t believe I ever thought I could lose you.

…..

Thank you for being here, wonderful people. 

I adore you.

Love, Andrea

(c) 2025 Andrea Gibson 

 

A Prayer among Friends

 

Artist: Theresa Babb, public domain

A Prayer among Friends

by John Daniel

 

Among other wonders of our lives, we are alive
with one another, we walk here
in the light of this unlikely world
that isn't ours for long.
May we spend generously
the time we are given.
May we enact our responsibilities
as thoroughly as we enjoy
our pleasures. May we see with clarity,
may we seek a vision
that serves all beings, may we honor
the mystery surpassing our sight,
and may we hold in our hands
the gift of good work
and bear it forth whole, as we
were borne forth by a power we praise
to this one Earth, this homeland of all we love.

 

"A Prayer among Friends" by John Daniel, from Of Earth. © Lost Horse Press, 2012.

excerpt from “A Great Wagon”

 

"One Tree Hill, Queensland Australia" by Lenny K Photography is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

excerpt from “A Great Wagon”

by Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

 

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

~

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

~

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.