common ground...

love poems for friends & strangers

Dear friends and kind strangers! I have something for you. Can you guess? Right hand or left? Ready?

It’s just what you wanted! A book of poems!

Please welcome to the world… common ground: love poems for friends & strangers.

It’s a heartfelt collection I decided to publish because it’s time for kind words and beautiful thoughts. Lord knows we’re all exposed to a surplus of the opposite these days.

Today, I invite your support. Will you pick up a copy for yourself and a friend who could use a love poem? Maybe even a stranger?

I believe we’re meant to craft our world by choosing wisely our contribution to it. I intend to contribute love. Will you join me?

If you’re curious, here’s the origin story of common ground.

Last year, after sending Come Home into the world, I double-dog dared myself to embark on a new project. I decided to write a love poem every day. And I committed to one parameter. Every love poem had to be for humans.

A few years back, I wrote 33 conversations, a little book of verse I thought of as ramblings between you, and me, and God. In that adventure, the hero of my affection, pretty consistently, was some element of nature reminding me of the treasures to be found in every step of the soul’s journey. With few exceptions— dead or stubborn friends— non-human entities encouraged these conversations. They are consistently wise, these creatures.

But so are humans.

We just don’t always see it. Or… I didn’t always see it. Which means I wasn’t paying attention. Or… I wasn’t offering my earnest, loving attention.

I was forgetting that humans, too, are as flush with the divine as any other expression of life.

I wanted to learn to love God in people as deeply as I love God in the stars, the earth, the hummingbird, and the hawk. All people.

I’ve always trusted a personal truth that we each house absolutely everything. We give space to good and bad, mistake and perfection, pleasure and despair. The challenge is to love it all, in every form it takes.

Over 2022, I wrote almost 250 poems. I didn’t get to a poem every day. Some days, I returned to one in progress. Some of them found the page by a will greater than mine. Some felt like a bar fight I always lost.

I started reviewing this heap of poems on January 1, 2023. I’m thankful that others helped me. (Thank you, friends!) A couple of the bar brawl poems found redemption. Most did not. The poems that stalked me down startled me again with insights I’m still learning.

I whittled it all down, with ample help, to a collection of 64. A wonderful friend helped me typeset them and designed a beautiful cover. Her work alone is pure art. The book is lovely… a love offering for every day use.

Please help me move it in and around the world. Please purchase common ground: love poems for friends & strangers on Amazon or order it from your bookstore. If you prefer, send me a note and we can work out an exchange.

So, what did I learn from the double-dog dare?

I found something essential in these poems. I found kindness and good words. I also found strength to apply in a world beset by wounds instead of the healing of them. I think it’s important to let these words loose and I hope you will too.

I also resolved the challenge of loving all people by giving my sincere attention to every aspect of the life within us all. I found myself in everyone. I realized all that balancing between good and bad becomes a dance I’d call ecstatic. It becomes pure joy. That joy, my dears, inspires every new choice in every new moment. It affirmed my dedication to adore this precious life.

We are so fortunate, in our every misery and every thrill, to realize just what it means to be alive.

Thank you for being in this world with me.