Journey of the Heart

Hip-deep and emerging by Tracie Nichols  trailing my eyes through replete green I am hip-deep in now. daffodils. erect moss. brash onion grasses punching round blades from frost-heaved soil. Cooper's hawk drops, skims, misses, shouts his hunger and the red maple buds, and the red-winged blackbird, and the soft new air. Tracie Nichols , M.A. is a poet, copyeditor and facilitator. She works and creates under rustling trees in southeastern Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband, a very determined ginger tabby named Strider, and, for an unexpected moment, two of her adult children. Her work has appeared in four print anthologies of women’s poetry and is forthcoming in Rogue Agent Journal. If you're intrigued by the power of words to spark personal and community transformation, check out her workshops and more of her poems on her website. You can also reach her at   tracienicholswriting@gmail.com *For submission guidelines,  click here. *

The loving essence of “Emergence” arrived when my inner-waves found me moving within my heart and mind… As I move over my deepening reflections— alighting with a quiet, caring grace—I look within my heart’s silence to sing poetry. With a calm mind through well-springs gifting’s, I dance into each night and day, into the spirit’s placeless-place of immersions: flowing into divinity, coming aglow, alighting soul-emergence, for loving the Self inside of my living dream’s wakeful ecstasy. As I allow surrenderings to fall away—surrounded with love—becoming quietude with loving nature – walking under the canopies of starry sky’s vastness, watching the winds flow into whisperings that tickle all through, even evergreens and barren winter trees. I begin to see my inner-blowing connecting with sparkling diamonds of heart’s recognizing love in gratitude that meet in a dance: a dance that births and dies with snow-laced dervishes caressing white clad hills… and star-lit skies. I call f...

  It always astonishes me that every time I think I have learned something… I soon have a chance to learn it again, usually in an intensely more profound way. And so it was this past week as I was driving across the great Dallas Divide in the San Juan Mountains. It was newly spring, and the mountains were in a state of incredible change. And somehow, that change began to take place in me, too …  Wilson Mesa at the San Juan Mountains While Driving Across the Divide, It Occurred to Me by Rosemerry Trommer Perhaps when we finally see there is no point to making things look any better than they are, then whatever friction we’ve found in the world is met with rose oil and the great heavy gears cease to grind and spin with silent ease. The only sustainable plots are the ones no one has planted— ones in which flowers, grasses and trees rise up on their own. They know when to sprout, when to bloom, when to seed. Poet...

My youngest child, Esther Grace (or Tessie-G as she’s known) - aged five - asked for a poem about butterflies... The poem emerged, somewhat butterfly-like itself, from its cocoon in my mind, and surprised me. It’s a poem about butterflies, but it’s also a poem about me - and you, and Tessie - and everyone who ever feels afraid or weak or insignificant. It’s a poem about stretching and growing and transforming... and discovering wings. Butterflies by Ruth Calder Murphy Butterflies, my Tessie-G, are the bravest - and the brightest - things you’ll ever see with wings. (Except for the Phoenix,   I suppose, but it’s very rare indeed to see one of those…) Butterflies, you see, begin tiny-small and so grubby and low you’d hardly notice them at all… but, steady and slow, they persevere and grow and grow and GROW… Then, into the silent, swaddling dark they go, all alone, not knowing quite where - or what - they are, any more, ...