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I’m sorry if I ever shamed you for your emotions.

Did I, or did I simply say what was true?

The other day you yourself said you cry-laugh, and I’ve seen you do it — snot and not, triggered, then bravely out-riggered. 

Its not that unattractive. In fact it’s actually beautiful  — a kind of moistured sentience, a textured perceiving — an emo-glow right in the pupils. 

People have always vilified the emotional extremes —  or worshiped them: silence, yelling, sulking, telling. 

But with you I don’t think of it like that. 

You fluctuate, beautifully, like a lighthouse, like a human being, being. You experience what we all do  — but compacted, intense — like an espresso machine drooling crema from a double-shot portafilter. 

You are acutely and emotively valid, affectional, certified by the heart, authenticated by the amygdalae, bona fide, good faith, unfaked, affectowoobly, then sure-footed. 

You are for all of us who know you well our own special emotional banquet. 

I think of you as my feeling friend, an affective millionaire, an emotive genius — undone, super fun, on the run, heart flung. 

Please keep doing this — feeling —  and of course you will, and I will too, and everyone else — blushing, gushing, singing, adjusting, anything but stuffing it, and hushing yourself or anyone else up too much. 

Do this — do anything but dodge the central nervous system, or quell it. Do anything but deny, shrivel or flatten your emotions.  

Do this. Do what you do best — rise, summit; dive, plummet; roar, soar. 

And then finally, always remember that I love you, all of you, and in doing so I love myself, and all of us — all living, reacting, trembling, responding things, the earth’s shuddering skin bags of weeping and whooping, all gorgeous fragile, feeling things. 

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When we spoke on the phone yesterday I loved your honesty — and you.

You told me you have some shame.

You too?

You gorgeous bouquet of cut flowers in a fine, crystal vase. We’re all the same — did you know that? — although we won’t say it, but you did, bravely, to me.

And yet it breaks my heart to see shame bend and crack your lovely looking glass like this.

And there you go again, down the Rabbit hole and across the watery horizon, leaking strength and beauty.

Soul funk junk,

Heart-hate drunk,

Ache-cry,

Sad eye.

Ugg!

This is dangerous smack!

This is street grade emo-crack!

Listen to me.

The cure is not in doing the enough that will never be enough.

It is not in trying to be more attractive or smarter or more accomplished. That won’t do it for thee, or me, or them or even him.

The emotion that eats itself cannot be eaten.

I know.

I’ve eaten it.

You can only be held, heard and healed by you — with the rest of us making sure you keep your arms wrapped around yourself.

The cure is love, for yourself — straight up — and the shame-eraser of a massive rain storm of total grace.

Do this: Go get a good night’s sleep, you shattered-smattered beauty thing.

Really! I’m serious. Sleep matters in this — as in all things.

And tomorrow morning, get up, and first thing go into the bathroom, and look in the mirror, and say softly to your self,

“You’re a good girl,” and say your name.

And then say, “I love you”

Say it again.

Mean it.

I am shell-shocked by the sheer hit and hellish hack of human hurt.

Our poor fragile bodies —

These gorgonized, agonized and amplified mélanges of terrified imperfection.

They break, they ache, they bake.

And yet …

To even have a body.

To even move through space and time.

To think and feel, to be alive,

To eat and laugh and love, to lose and gain again.

This, just this,

This contextualized semi-fixity of bodily permanence.

This gorgeous dire-defended-dangling sentience.

This good-sick, savory-bland, sensuous-torturous, bright-dark vivacity.

This brief, brilliant, barreling, biting dash through the thin air of our spinning, sun-smacked, rain-dashed, poxed and rashed blue planet,

This living this of this and this and this.

Ahhhhh, I love this gift of zing and zap and zest.

To lean and tilt and rise and soar.

To breathe, to see, to weigh, to choose.

To be completely and severally existable within the grace-filled, love-packed, picked and wrapped resistible.

Ah and ah and ah,

I love this life paced out within the imperfect-wonderful, immediate-possible of the material miracle.

All that love does is from because.

Because of love, because, because.

Because we met in the library.
Because I secretly fell in love with your stunningly gorgeous mind.
Because I am never sure what you are going to say next.

Because it is always honest.

Because you were my first confidant.

Because you love Shakespeare almost as much as I do.
Because I told you I loved you that afternoon in the park.
Because you told me you were honored by that.

Because we kissed in the motor home.
Because we got married at the church.
Because we lost the baby, and had the little girls.

Because you love the girls.

Because I love the girls.

Because we lived through brain damage, learning disability, heartbreak, surgery, the loss of friends, the loss of jobs, the recession and then … the divine provision.

Because we will always have that, and because you are strong, I will always love you.
Because we lived through that and didn’t quit and traveled the world together anyway.
Because our love grew old, and safe and calm.

Because we still sleep with our arms around each other.

Because you take my hand.

Because you kiss my lips.

Because you still tell me I am wrong when I am wrong.

Because you love me.

Love, love, love.

Because, because, because.

Because of love.

We love because.

Gliding, gliding — centered sure
The new mother draws her baby near.
Things hold together; the center cannot shift.

A new revelation is at hand!

Finger tips touch finger ends,
Foreheads to kisses bend.

Holy water sifting down
Glasses clinking to the sound.

The best exult!

The worst slouch hellishly toward bedlam!

Surely something new is at hand!
Surely a second, third or even fourth coming is at hand.
But even before I am on the roof,
An epiphany!
I am barely up
When a familiar rushing wind
Buries the slow churning thighs in the bottom of the next cradle.
Pitiless lens, mechanical bird, dark-dropped-death smacked flat.
What holy child is this, it’s magic hour come round at last,
Who strides confidently toward Bethlehem.

Speak up more, not less, using your own ideo-vocalized mess.

Soliloquy  — in front of yourself and everyone else-a-melse.

Monologue, dog!

You and I can flip-flop nonstop lolly pop but that gets trite fast and then we just so need to speak our favor-ite verbo-bite.

Bebop, hiphop, tipitity-top, slop-a-pop.

Ski-ba-bop-ba-bop-voc; do that thang nonstop.

Be-cause …

We have been flattened by the road-grade blade of the prepaid lexicographers.

We have been run over by the top-botched, pop-a-voc.

We have suffered weak-a-squeak.

We have sold out for safety and we have shut up way too much because we thought we were stuck-a-muck with duck and cluck.

Nope! Fess; you’ve got that vocable mess!

Unperson; you’ll worsen, but word-dive and jivity jive and you’ll revive.

See!

Be inventy.

Sync with your blink.

Que with your you and do-ba-de-do!

I sit with my latte, and my shredded wheat, my clover honey and my almond milk and discuss the hoped-for future with my bathrobed, hair-tousled, coffee-sipping wonder-wife.

We musify in the morning.

We do the back-and-forthification — which is fun — but reality keeps getting tossed into the mix, and it doesn’t always cooperate — thus there is precarity in the plans.

It is stirred into the plenty.

The sun comes up, we go to work, the day gears up, the stock market goes up, our hopes rise, fueled by interest rates and dark, rich caffeine, and then the turn, as we weary through the late morning, early afternoon, the long commute home.

The sun slants, time slumps, life leaks and floats back to the floor like a post-party balloon — precarity. Thus and so, we are temporaria  — even the wise ones, even the prescient. As the scripture says, we live move and have our being within the precariat.

Did you think it said something else?

Hatreds, hopes, happenstances; genetics, genies, jerks; accidents, illnesses, taxes — all these and more, the various and sundry vagaries and variances of any given era — these insure membership in the precariat.

Oh, life!

And yet, and yet — the persistent goodness.

I am struck always by the presistant plenty, the living-loveliness of life amidst the persistently pandemic poverties. The ghastly demons of not shirk and faint at the edges of exuberant gardens, lined with white roses.

Last week we put up an beautiful, rod iron, arched trellis at the church. And below it, we planted a passion vine.

Thus there is hope, for vine, flowers, butterflies, tendrils, the reach upward, the stunning beauty, all-passion, the inspired community.

I am shock-smitten by such improvements, everyday, constantly, the preciosities of nature — love, babies, brains, branches of community, friends, finials, finitude, infinity.

The precosities — they just keep gobbling up the precarities.

We wake up together; our fluffy black cats are at the foot of the bed.

We get up and begin the day with strong, brown coffee in white mugs.

We sit on the couch; we watch each other. My eyes are on the completely particularized universal of you — your dark brown eyes, your gold streaked hair, your red and yellow cheeks, the soft contours of your essential orange.

We talk. We discuss the bright blue weather, our deep purple daughters, our investments, the upcoming week, the cats.

We go off to work. Quickly we come home again to each other. We talk about the day. Then you are sewing. Then I am writing. Then we are making dinner. Then we are luxuriating within the warm hum, sum and jume-da-jume of our intimate, red and yellow domesticity.

The whir of your machine, the click of my keyboard, the slosh of our washing machine (our clothes stirring together) the clink of our double boiler on the stove, steaming our dinner greens — this is you and me particularly, essentially artistically.

I am Chagall; you are my Bella.

You take my hand, we waft through the house, we lift from the floor and fly to the ceiling. I sit on your shoulders, you rest your head against my arm.

You most colorful, touchable, breathable specific; you minute blue particulate within the concrete bon vivant of my purple affection.

There you go, but here you are again.

You overtake me by degrees — your green lips pressed against mine immediately follow your tan arms wrapped around me always follow your orange smile coming in the door.

You spearmint breath, you green tea scent, you chai-tea warmth — you delicious Chardonnay, you perfectly hoppy IPA, you unambiguously welcome dark chocolate thing!

You are no idealized, disembodied, romanticized you. Your pink head floats past my blue hair. You are my most definite palpability. I taste your sweet lime tangibility.

We sleep, work, eat, laugh and drink connected. We are the perpetual state of met, mixed, melded, merged — mused.

I turn my face to kiss you, our red  hot lips touch, I put my hand on your purple waist, you hold my yellow head lightly, we float past the children, the cats look up.

The couch, the lamp and the TV tip over and fall out of the front window into the bright red Pacific Ocean.

I am here with you.

You are completely palpable; this makes us, “Oh, so magical!”

I’m looking into your eyes right now.  I love you.

Don’t quit not quitting on yourself, whatever is in your heart — big, important, longing stuff like the quest for true love.

Swing tenacity’s knife exactly as sagacity has swung your willy, nilly dilly head.

Look reality in its bright, bulging, blinking eye.

Track down any self-care apathy within, jump any legitimacy laxity — kill them both.

And don’t forget to take up the continuous, scientific adoration of honesty.

If you adore emotional integrity, if you favor psychological congruency, if you pound out new affective territory — then you will not fall off a cliff at night and you will not lose all you have always hoped for.

Here is what to do.

Stare love right in the snout and speak the truth, lean in and grind out a bushel basket of openness, eat a yard of authenticity and knock back true falsity.

Shout, charge and retake the emotional high ground.

What are you thinking?

You are all that anyone could ever want — you precious cargo, you personhood of inestimable value, you absolutely gorgeous emotive mess.

You’re tired?

Okay, go watch some brain dead TV.

You’ve tried and failed?

Okay, go to bed and get some sleep.

Remember when we had lunch last week. I told you that the first three tries don’t keep the fourth from succeeding.

In the face of failure, tenacity is the still the best policy — and ontogeny.

If you can’t grow one thing then grow another, you long, glorious bank of radiant blooms planted in previous springs.

Every seed you have ever sown — even if it has died in someone else — has flowered in your own soul. 

I heard it announced on the radio yesterday that world hunger has decreased.

Only eight hundred million people don’t have enough to eat.

I kept driving: I don’t know why I didn’t pull over?

Grief, horror, and ruination!

Devastation!

Desecration!

Disambiguation!

Eight!

Hundred!

Million!

People!

Hungry?

 

This morning I cut my home-made banana bread thick.

I fill my coffee cup high.

I add milk.

Later in the day I will go out shopping, looking for blueberries, kale, almond milk, butternut squash, and also lean meat, blue corn taco shells, cilantro.

I may pick up some of the double chocolate covered peanuts I like so much.

 

Mad, mad, mad world — what is this numbing, numbered, not-knowing-knowing?

What is this crazy, chronic, crafty, killing contrast, this monumental, massive capacity for indifference, our gapping, gaping, going, going, gone unawareness of awareness.

What is the eating of delicacies in the same room as the starving?