In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.

At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn't possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can't help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do.

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.