The Tender Petals

Preface Inside a moment’s quiet delight, I have come here to find myself opening more to bloom and embrace poetry as a deeper singing. Nature whispers always in loving care, showing us a way in which to find all sacred connections within. We are truly limitless and wholly eternal, in love’s deep boundlessness of joy, as it ever sings inside us. As do all silent mysteries of existence, which are bubbling into our life’s brew. In listening deeper within on most nights, while the world around me slept, my heart would often venture inside many such blissful wanderings captivating in living love. Finding myself more immersed, relaxed and entering a laughing grace, there was an intensifying joy that spilled out into a simple nesting of love, being woven into poetry’s words that quickly formed to fly a voice that flowed, touching deeper within my loving breaths. Mind’s eye never ceased for complying to let love inside me speak. Nor did it shy away from singing out, within simple compositions that bloomed their natural instincts to form freestyle poetry. Becoming devoted in honoring each of these breaths, they sprouted and opened into poems, where I would often walk or sit for many hours, inside such lovely nothingness. For when love would come near, I could only remain inside heart, so quiet and free; and then stand and face these songs that were coming upon each breeze. In placing all trust into a full resting spirit, I would then lay my heart down, alongside a twinkling in the starry sky, or into a gusting wind on a blue clouding day. Always finding the sacred inside a sweetening dance that was floating by, unfolding into words that would come again and again; lifting to gently speak of love’s unending graces, found inside joys abiding with the flowers, grasses, leaves, rivers, oceans, sunsets, and sunrises. All our beauty hovers so near, within this moment called life. Each word grows inside us becoming more rooted, and then shoots out taller into a blossoming poem; coming near, already gifted, directly into our heart. In caring for these dear words within patience, I could only hope to share them as they came, faithfully so, into each moment’s loving of our every changing season. All time, and in fact, everything, became generous into this opening, as it gently rearranged itself inside life’s most subtle changes; as only poetry can offer through embodiments of emotions. Each moment seeks us out and finds our inner listening, enjoining within love’s most soulful celebrations. In all the poems gathered here, in this first collection, known as The Tender Petals, may we find a way to always meet inside every elation’s essence, forever singing, as only a devoted lover can; lifting up into heart’s observance of life, inside of every loving breath! Jen Walls