Hallelujah

What is a girl's capacity to care? to love? Sometimes it seems like it could reach the stars, endless. That white hot eternity, in the way you can only see its light from 20 years ago. And sometimes it all overflows, and whats left, ah lonely, too much to handle. If I died tomorrow, where would my life go? My paintings. My dog. My bed. My books. I've acquired a lifetime of objects, a lifetime of people, mourning the loss in my heart. I don't know when I'll see a day that I don't feel screwed up somehow. Like that doesn't make me deserve normal. My mind, so very terminal. Look around and you see minds deteriorating, the people you've loved disappearing. What is the world telling me? Am I at home in dysfunction  because it takes the pressure off perfection? So this emptiness is too much for me, so this is life, bearing north and going hard? Or is this life, disappearing with every step? Or is this life, the marriage and divorce of love to a man again, to a concept, to an identity? I know what I am, who we are is truly what we are when we have nothing left. I know because I have walked out into the world and told myself I would not go back, and who was when I and nothing left, was nothing but fear.

Free your mind...

Today she woke to climb the mountain...

Followed the arrows

Followed the cairns

Saw the flowers, bright yellow, heather grey, lavender purple

Found a cave, felt a cave...

Explored it nooks and crannies

Saw the light...

Up, Up and Away...

    Free at last

  We fly

 Fourteen buzzards on a line

Some days we are students,

Some days we are students of life.

Playing hooky on a mountain.

By chance

to the sun

There it is again, that crystal clear blue October sky. I'm not sure when we got here, I let the time slip by me like a cat weaving its hello between my ankles, so subtle. What a strange year.

The strange part is, I'm pretty sure you're my angel. I think you teach me every time I lay down my head, every time I take in a breath. And I just exist in the wingspan of your atmosphere, little orbit. Can I tell you how very loved you are? Its too much to say, I think, I just have to hope you know. That the grasses, the branches of the trees, their roots and the reddening edges of their leaves...they love you. The breeze, the dust it brings, this concrete sidewalk, and the rains that wash it clean...they love you. The vertical lines of this city, the spaces in between, the ripeness and the blooms...the curly ques and the pieces left behind, they love you.  

Oh lucky me, to know the sun. I know the world loves you. And I try to help you see.

When it rains...

The good from the bad

I climb the steep wooden stairs to the patio littered with leaves, reach through the screenless screen door, but the door is locked. The window. I drag a chair and awkwardly vault myself inside, and there it is: flashback. I used to climb into your window all the time, little kids just messing around. I wore a brown shirt, tan shorts. This hoodie. We got so messed up once, you couldn't keep your hands off me. Teaching you boys to shoot with cheap whiskey. I said no and you told me no. Yellow with the palm trees. I doubt you remember. I forgave you. Crawling on the floor after me and reaching, saying the grey shadows were after you, saying stay and take care of us. I escaped, and drove home like Cinderella. Swing swing. 

The Lesson.

I have a theory that we're all spiders. And maybe its a popular one. See, I think that all your relationships reflect, to a modest degree, your first sexual experience. That is to say that if your first experience was with someone you felt love for and were in a relationship with, then it's entirely likely you'll find that same scenario repeated in various forms throughout your life. Likewise, if it was dark, if it was yearning. If it was pretend. You'll always encounter those same threads. Perhaps we create the themes of our lives; perhaps they were written in the stars and destined to be. Or perhaps we seek them out, our unconscious...baiting the only love we've ever known, setting the snare of the same trap, and waiting, for the same catch, the same kill.

In the end, we're all just spiders. The crisscrossing of threads, the web we weave to catch, catch another.

You see then, how it's easy to know a person's history by knowing how they love. All of a sudden, you feel it, washing over you and into you, telling secrets and saying more than words ever could.
Sometimes like a tidal wave, awesome and overwhelming and too much. Much too much. Do you run from it's initial abundance? or do you take it, knowing it cannot be sustained.
Or sometimes, it's just a trickle. And while you put your mouth to the fountain, trying to catch every drop, taking the bait, perhaps you wonder, what is this love, where was it made? and who does it make me to have baited and caught such a thing?

You love in a tired way, not to say you are without energy or without passion. But in a way that says, you will leave, I dare not even hope that you won't leave. This love, tentative and withholding. Passed up from place to place. And me. My love says, you will leave, I expect you to. But maybe if I love you just enough, just a little, just right, this time you will not go.

Just two sponges, safe in the placid bottom of the sea. Anchored to the bottom, I'll leave you if you leave me.

And it's revealing, this demystifying, it lays the ugliness out in the open and you wonder how approach it, can I approach it, without failure. I look into your traps and see myself, and say, that could have been me, that could have been me. Maybe we could have been friends. Same trap, same catch. And here I am, here we are, and you say, just another lesson? This time, what is taught?
And I say, this time, I know what I did not know before. That you cannot plan an approach that knows no failure. That you must stand in the ugliness and open wide, and know that failure, that disappointment, that discontent, will come. That the very best you can do will never be enough, will never wipe this away, will never, ever, erase this ugliness, this scar, this misdeed of another.
Because it is not what you are called to do. And it is not what is required, what is asked of you, by another.

No, we are called to heal ourselves, and understand one another.

What is this lesson? Perhaps it has not yet been taught. But what am I learning? I am learning to walk through this life candid, and vulnerable, and trusting. I am learning that while a hurricane beats upon and threatens to topple anything that is barred shut and caught in it's path, its winds pass through a soul with open doors.

I can only feed my own fire, and send you warmth; perhaps let you hunker down next to it, and hope that, once its light begins to die, you find you'd like to come with me to find more wood. And if not, I'll send you warmth and watch you go, trailing thread.