12.22.2022

One Bright Flower — Coming Soon

Truth is so strange that I could not believe it wasn't the fiction even as I carefully sewed the squares of this quilt in my mind together one by one. Each one a gift from the universe. Little shabby seeming bits of cloth handed to me by beloved souls dressed up in stranger's skin. I understand the look in all of their eyes now. And feel how it must have broken them apart to not reach for me. To be so near me but to not have me feel more than a faint familiar glow but not know them by name.

By how they felt to me. I have been sewing for five years now.

Sometimes a single square or the pattern rising out of them as I carefully threaded them through was too much for me. And I had to put the whole thing aside because to know what I now know I knew made me feel like I was crazy. I see now that I am going to be able to wrap the world up in this quilt of mine that is finely formed of all of the labor and pain and chance encounters and choice graffiti and overhear snippets of songs and conversations. I guess that I didn't realize how beautiful it would be to sit here whipping the edges shut and see what I made by not giving up. I have cried and bled and sworn and gasped and spit and coughed and gagged. But it's beautiful.

And so I am. We are perfect my quilt of knowing and I. And now I see the end. The pattern rising up for me now. And the steps to where I am going are becoming discrete. Tack the squares. Tie the knots. Iron the thing. And begin. It is a miracle to see all I was given. That I was entrusted with by those who loved me but could only give me these little scraps of leftover yardage to let me riddle it through. Who had to let me sleep. As I must do to honor free will in those not yet ready for the quilt I carry within me. It is a one stitch at a time kind of miracle that I can see.

Blueprints

Bow down my child and rest your weary head upon the earthen shoulder of your mother. 

Bow down in the brilliance of the sunlit day and under the curtain of the moonlit night. 

Bow down and honor the Universe and your place in the Eternal whole. 

Bow down to all of the parts of yourself that held vigil for the Divine Self that has risen strong in you. 

See that you were both the candle and the match. 

The flower and the bee. 

You could not have arrived here whole without the assistance of your old bones and your wise inner sea.  You were active in them before you ever walked this Earth and the lessons they hold for you will extend beyond the bounds of mortal time.  There is nothing you will become that you have not already been.

Your past and your future walk forward holding hands. 

Cradled within them — you exist in all you see. Carried between them — you are finally home.  Held gently inside them — you are safe, perfect and free. The Divine within you surrounds you now.  The echoes in the halls of time sing for you – the very same lullabies that you will someday use to rock your child to sleep. 

You are no longer the candle or the match. 

You are fire.  A perfect flame. 

You are the pollen moving between the flower and the bee. 

The blueprints of all creation open for you now.  Hanging in the air suspended in time they glimmer and wink at what they will go on to be.  Before the wind takes them away on its current they whisper softly,

“Just wait.  You’ll see.”

Tendrils [5.30.2020]

The tendrils of love can climb anything. Simply by reaching and growing they overcome.  In their own time, rising above what stands before them and dropping safely down the other side.  Without fear or worry the vines simply climb skyward.  They turn their leaves toward the sun as they rise soaking unseen nourishment – turning light into fuel – the energy they need to forge ahead.  So too for us.  Free of fear and worry we are able to rise above all things that loom before us in darkness.  Out of the mind, rooted in the truth of the heart, we are free to simply grow, to feel the warmth of the sun on our skin as we turn our own faces toward it and smile.

Thrive — [4.29.2020]

Time is a construct. 

It’s artificial.  A manmade overlay lumped onto and imposed into the natural rhythms and cycles of life and nature.  It disconnects us from ourselves.  From the present moment and renders us weak and fragile. 

Our power lies in the present moment. 

The universe can best support us when we flow with it, which we cannot do while preparing for the future or replaying the past.  It is only in the present moment that we can tap into the broader order around us, the same force that fuels the trees and moves the moon.  That wraps us up and lovingly whispers to us gently even if we ignore it.  Our minds pull us away from feeling the unending love the universe has for us. 

The safety we seek comes from within. 

From stepping outside of time and into connection with the broader natural whole. 

There we are never alone.  There we remember what it is to be alive. 

Because we are nature, in nature we thrive. 

 

Gentleness [5.10.2020]

Sometimes you just have to wipe the slate clean.  To begin again and surrender.  There are moments in life where there really is no other choice.  The alternative is struggle and pain and regret and fear and stagnation.  If we refuse to release what is not for us then we will not have any space for what belongs in our lives.  When we resist this rather than allowing it to crumble we only delay and amplify pain. Because the more we refuse to release, the greater the pressure that builds up behind the need to do so. 

Gentleness is a flowing fluid thing.  It knows how to let go in every moment and so it bubbles and hums along like an unhindered creek tucked in its bed of smooth stones and sediment. It flows continuously forward embracing all new destinations equally – arrive, depart, embrace, release. 

By contrast, imagine the pressure that builds up in rivers when boulders and fallen trees rise in their midst.  This is what creates wild rapids.  The faster and more forcefully the water surges forward around these obstacles the more violent the disturbance to the flow becomes.  Kayakers and white water rafters track the number of cubic feet per second (cfs) as a gauge of the force moving in the river.  They use this measurement to grasp the speed and volume of water moving and what that will mean for the strength and difficulty of the water features they ride.  Rapids are classed based on difficulty with those that are angrier and more constrained – more full of obstacles – being more difficult to navigate. 

As the water surges against what impedes its movement it can create all matter of unseen difficulties under its own weight.  Riptides and holes and eddies open up – many of which are large enough to swallow a boat of rafters whole.  The more water tries to move, the less able it is to do so, the more fraught and angry the situation becomes.  This created pressure amplifies any disturbances that were already there.  And if enough pressure builds up behind them, they can become volatile angry things. 

Situations of stress and difficulty in our lives carry a similar force.  They rush up against the pain we carry from the past, the doubts we have, and the fear we hold.  The obstacles to our own growth and surrender can loom as large as the white water that boils at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  The more we avoid facing ourselves and our fear and our pain in the quiet moments, the less able we are to cope when the rains come and difficulty flows fast and hot in our lives.  Greater still is the pressure that builds up against what is fixed and immovable and unyielding in us and in our lives.  If we have such a block in our lives it dams us, impeding all natural forward motion and a force capable of lighting up cities builds up in us. 

We can only churn away at turbines for so long.

The river in us does not want to be – is not content to be – a lake. 

You see it in people sometimes. 

All major dams have spillways that can be used to release pressure from the system, but even if the surface of the reservoir above is tranquil great turmoil exists below it.  Nature seeks always to return to balance.  By damming a great river you are intentionally creating an imbalance that can later be leveraged all at once to create power.  Hydroelectric requires incredible volumes of water and pressure to operate effectively.  It does so by containing the force of the river’s journey to the sea, holding it in reserve and releasing it at planned intervals en masse.  The problem with this – beyond limiting the natural movement of creatures who live in the river and drastically reshaping the natural landscape – is that it creates a system which if pressured beyond its limit is uncontrollable. If the hundred-year flood comes the dam may well explode.

So too, with people. 

Pushing forward against the limits in our lives – self-imposed or otherwise – can create momentum to achieve and to do things with one’s life.  Harnessing the will necessary to learn and to grow.  And yet, as stressors escalate everything that is pent up in us seeks to find release and if the usual spillways people use to cope – like overworking, alcohol, exercise, food, etc. – are no longer available or able to manage the disturbance the person can violently explode.  All of the hurt and anger and pain and pent up frustration accumulated over a lifetime erupts all at once.  And in its wake there will necessarily be devastation. 

This sort of rigid system – this intractable way of being – is destructive at both ends. 

It drowns the forest and changes the landscape and forces the river to become a lake and then when and if you remove the obstacle that you created in yourself there is necessarily a potentially catastrophic and uncontrollable flood of energy.  I know people who live in this way – who accumulate, avoid, explode, accumulate, avoid, explode – escalating angrier and angrier with each perceived affront that they face.

I have watched this choice to live with rigid speed and often thought, “What will you do when something really unimaginably difficult happens and you can no longer avoid this situation that you have created in yourself by avoiding yourself?” I think of them in light of the current state of the world and expect they are somewhere between boiling white water and all out explosive emotional catastrophe most of the time. 

It is a hard thing to love an angry river that sits with its hands tied rather than going forward to simply be whatever it naturally becomes.  There is always collateral damage.  Rafters perish in holes.  Entire communities downriver drown.  It is hard to accept that unseen blocks deep down in people – unprocessed pain and self-reproach and unspoken truth and un-lived dreams – can present a very real danger to us.  Especially if we seek to be gentle streams carefully freeing ourselves of fallen logs.

Committed to carrying them off bit by bit so that they do not disrupt the water or block our way. 

Self-work is sort of like that.  You spend entire seasons removing dead old growth so that when the rain rolls in and the river rises you will not face an unseen graveyard of trees reaching for you from the depths.  You know the way ahead is clear when things get difficult because you have done the work to free the things in yourself that grasp at the water. In good times — like beautiful blue cloudless weather — I think people sometimes wonder if it is worth it to do the work necessary to fully face oneself.  But that is truly the best time to clean our riverbeds and haul off the old branches that have found their way into our lives. 

“Why bother?” one might say, “that branch is not hurting anyone by sitting right there.”

But when the sky cracks open and the canyons flood and the pressure increases those same seemingly innocent branches can become dangerous obstacles or even violent blocks to our ability to adapt and to move forward.  The branch that sits in the sun now may well be the same one that later threatens our safety when the swirling currents turn it into a projectile.  So it is in times of great stress or difficulty that we benefit most from having done the work on ourselves to cultivate gentleness and embrace surrender. 

When things are allowed to unfold unhindered we struggle less and a certain grace opens up for us. 

We may not have any idea where we are going or what the future holds for us, but we trust that by allowing what is to simply be we will arrive wherever it is we are going unscathed.  By choosing to embrace with equanimity whatever we happen to find when we get there we are set free.  No matter how many turns the path before us takes we are able to relax — to fully surrender — knowing that we are never lost.

 All roads open to a gentle heart.

Subtle

In a world so full of noise and illusion, we would do best to navigate by the stars of things we cannot see rather than relying on what seems to unfold before us on the material plane.  The linear is necessarily limited – constrained by duality and thus rigid and unwieldy.  In that space, we can do battle with our own demons reflected back at us all of our days.  Reactions that are almost always marked by the pain we have experienced, the shame we carry and the loss we fear.  It is not a reliable compass by which to navigate one’s life.  But the material world privileges the seemingly solid reality we take in with our senses and upon running it through the filter of our past experiences it renders a verdict – most often a judgment.  This situation is dangerous.  That person is decent.  The logical choice is x.  But living from such a literal place is necessarily limited.  It negates the value of what we cannot see and discounts the truth that we feel. 

Beyond logic and reason there are things we know. 

If we can learn to tune into that subtle feedback then our world can open up as if by magic.  We know so much more than we know.  Science has proven that the volume of information our subconscious mind takes in eclipses what our conscious brain can feasibly process by order upon order of magnitude.  To cope it runs this data through the filter of our past experiences and our beliefs about ourselves and the world – the ultimate self-selection bias if you will.  Because the mind will bring forward what it believes you want to glean from the river of information seen and unseen that constantly courses through you.  It is then true that our beliefs about reality shape our reality because they guide what we see and what we believe it means.  The ego and the intellect are both churning constantly for something rigid they can root into and control.  But the truth at the most basic level is that none of what we experience as firm or solid – including ourselves and everyone we know and everything that we see – actually is. 

We are all matter in motion. 

Particles vibrate in such a way that we perceive them as fixed matter.

Yet we — and all we have ever known or seen — is primarily composed of empty space. 

Space and energy. 

And once you really understand what that means on a quantum level you begin to see that nothing is in fact what it seems and an alternate means of navigating life is required.  The wisdom of the body and the innate inborn intensity of the intuition are far more reliable guides than the cacophony of voices and opinions and noise above the neck.  To learn to connect with the knowing in your bones and more directly with the energy of the people around you and the things you experience is revolutionary. 

Our entire culture is built on discounting the subtle and honoring the primacy of what we can see. 

This removes us from ourselves and from our bodies and leaves us more open to manipulation by way of the mind.  Once you learn to listen to it — to view it as your ally and your greatest teacher – the only friend you will ever have with you every moment until you die – you realize that your body will always, always tell you the truth.  Even when you do not want to hear it.  It knows and it will tell you. If you discount your intuition and the knowing voice it brings to your mind it will resort to discomfort and then finally disease in an attempt to get your attention.  In my own life, it took getting very sick to begin to understand how to listen because I had no other choice.  And as I have begun to trust myself and my inner knowing and my body’s innate wisdom I have slowly grown stronger.  No doubt because my body finally trusts that I am listening to her and no longer needs me to be doubled over in pain to get my attention. 

As a very historically cerebral person, it took me a long time and a lot of reading into the science underpinning the subtle to realize that it is discounted not because it is not salient, but because it gives us back to ourselves and makes us very powerful.  When you are connected to your inner resources in a meaningful way you are self-sourced.  You do not need the feedback or opinions of others to make your way or validate your choices.  You can clear their voices out of your head until your own truth, your own intuition and your connection to the broader whole are so powerful that you can navigate in the dark. 

Even if your senses fall away you can still know what you know. 

But there are still moments when we freeze and find ourselves at a standstill.  If the primal brain — wired for fear and always preparing for danger — rises up then our ability to access the higher centers of our brain drops away and we are no longer rooted in our bodies.  We react.  We do not think. We do not feel.  So the challenge is how to learn the pathways that exist in your biology that lead you again and again back to a thinking place and then to the calm beyond that where the path ahead is clear at the level of vibration and intuition rather than fact and intellect.  I find that I still freeze and that my mind goes completely blank sometimes, but these days I understand why and can hold more grace for myself as I acknowledge that my deep old primal brain reacted in the moment leaving me without access to my brain or my body.  That is why it is so important to cultivate roots for yourself as best you can.  To ground into your inner knowing.

To again and again return to a peaceful place where you can feel your truth. 

Meditation helps.  Exercise helps.  Breathing deep down to you belly rather than rapidly from your chest – like a distressed animal – helps.  But it is a practice.  One you must repeat.  Over and over again.  Fail and forgive.  Fail and forgive.  Fail and forgive.  Over and over again, until something in you begins to soften and yield. And slowly you begin to trust that living in a different way from a calm rooted place is safe. We are at our core animals that fear separation and pain and seek safety and connection.  We have to learn that the primary connection we so desperately seek is with ourselves – our deep wise ancient eternal selves – the spark that persists even beyond the grave.  That is the connection we most want. 

Because even if we cannot articulate it or understand why it matters we can still feel it. We know that there is something more than what we have in our lives that we desperately need and most often try to seek out fruitlessly in others. But if we find that connection, a conduit for truth and higher knowing opens up in us because we realize that we are a part of the deeper eternal whole.  We realize that we are all connected.  That sparks of this same divinity walk beside you, each one in their own human costume that we wear to this life.  You feel the energy, the aliveness of the natural world pulsing around you.  Calling your name. 

Calling you brother, sister, friend. 

All of the power and beauty of nature flows in our veins because we are also wild, sacred and free.  That is why nature is so powerful because it brings us home to ourselves, to the part of us that exists in all things.  That defies the order imposed on it by mortal man.  Quietly reminding us we can also choose to reject the primacy of the mind in favor of a faith in the wisdom of our bodies and our higher selves. 

We are also sovereign.  Also wildly powerful.  Also completely free.   

All these things are our birth right as children of the natural world.  We have simply forgotten.  Or perhaps more accurately, we have been conditioned to forget.  It is an act of will and even outright rebellion to remember and to stake your claim to yourself.  To own your energy – the only currency that really matters here.  To assert your connection to the eternal whole.  Therein lies your power.  In the beginning, it flickers in and out like a bulb about to burn up, but as we learn how to calm our nervous systems, to face our fears and slowly begin to trust ourselves it grows brighter and more consistent. 

A clear beacon.  Part universal truth.  Part sovereign self. 

And that is how you can find others also walking this path – by their vibration, by how they feel.  Science calls it resonance – the space where similar frequencies find and amplify each other.  I think that is what love is – the recognition of that innate sameness, the vibratory parity or equilibrium, the feeling that you are home – because in a way you are.  There is no resistance, no clash of opposing or incompatible energy. 

At your core the vibrations you carry resonate – meaning they move as one.

Freeing up energy and space in your life to grow.  Because resonance amplifies the innate qualities of being that each of you already hold making you stronger.  It is like your vibrational equal holds for you a reservoir, a reserve.  That is why love – real vibratory love – the feeling of seeing yourself in another – provides both safety and freedom.  It holds your truest self, but does not seek to bind or control you.  Energy stops moving when faced with fear.  Fearful we stagnate.  So love is a place that helps protect us from fear and from freezing, which gives us back to ourselves in those moments by holding that vibratory feeling of home for us.  It is a calm peaceful knowing that you are both clearly seen and gently carried.  I think that is why we can feel our match sometimes in people we have only just met because our energy knows theirs – quite literally the space in which our matter vibrates is the same and so we feel a call. 

A resonance.  Beyond words, logic and reason.  It simply is. 

My soul knows yours.  It is so nice to see you.  How I have missed you friend. 

There is an ache there on a soul level for that shared silence. 

But it is only something we can feel if we have done the work to move beyond what our senses alone can see.  It is as though we face a monumental glacial field of sky blue ice so vast and full of crevasses that our only hope to cross it safely is to release the conscious mind that will descend into fear and try to think our way out of the frozen canyons that will surely find us.  To put aside the fear that would have us freeze and fall and to instead trust that with momentum and a certain intuitive instinct we will be safely carried to the other side.  Safely carried by ourselves – our old wise eternal selves.  That is where true peace lies. And where the latent potential for all great things is hidden – all great love, all great art, all great innovation discovery and evolution — in plain sight of our intuition and subtle knowing.  Einstein opened up for us a world where energy is matter is energy.  It is in that fluid dance between them that everything in life exists.  Humming and buzzing and singing. Every single molecule, all fractals unfolding, each facet of frequency.

It is the energy in all things. The vibratory signature they emit.  That is the pure brilliance of existence.  It is the unseen world that rises up before us when we move beyond our senses into all that lies beneath.

Pavement

I find that love – like nature – has a way of breaking through if left to its own devices. Delicate little wisps of plants can flourish in even the tiniest cracks that open in the pavement which blankets the land.  The old roots of patient trees stretch slowly shaking off the sidewalk above them.  Climbing vines weaving their way up whatever happens to be before them on their persistent ascent skyward into the light. 

That gentleness overcoming the seemingly solid every time.

Water carves its way through the landscapes it moves through yielding to the order and texture of the natural world.  The porous stones wearing away before the rising sheers of granite as the river winds its way through the land.  But with patience, with gentleness and with time all paths are available to water. 

All stones yield.  

I feel like love – big L love – what the Greeks called agape – is similarly strong in its softness.  Even the hardest situations we face in our lives hold a path forward that will unfold in response to our surrender, our gentleness, but will close around us impassible if we try to push our way through by force. 

Love is both peaceful and powerful.

In nature, the impulse is always towards change and growth and evolution and fluidity – all qualities that we see as new shoots spring from the stumps of old trees and the seeds of long dead flowers that flourish just alongside the highway because that is where they happened to land.  Carried by the wind they do not question.  They simply grow.  And therein lies the challenge.  To simply and gently love.  Always.  Despite the difficulties we face and the rough terrain of circumstances that may rise up around us. 

We can still choose.  

Our essential nature moves always towards love.  Towards seeing the good in others.  The light in the darkness.  The potential in the pavement where it crumbles and falls away leaving room for growth and for earth again.  To keep our hearts from hardening under the weight of all that is broken in us and in others is where our work lies.  Sometimes as firmly as we try to wall ourselves off from the world it can overtake us, like the riotous new life that bursts open in spring.  That inherent connection, that reverence.

We are wired for love and connection.  It is our natural impulse to reach out to those around us.  To overcome those things that separate us.  It is what keeps us human.  The desire for connection and community and creation.  We are all creators here.  We can decide to grow soft and strong in the moments we find ourselves and fight to flourish or we can pout at having been left to rise up from the pavement in which so many other things manage to grow.  The circumstances do not have to be perfect to reach out. 

To connect.  To comfort.  To change.

It is our nature to love.  It is all of the other stuff we have bought into that gets in the way.  There is a certain grace in putting it all down – all the reasons we cannot or should not be loving – and to proceed with the same gentle power with which water dissolves the obstacles in its path as it journeys to the sea. 

We are only here for an instant. 

Better then to become what we might be if we too could surrender and allow our true nature to take hold. 

Trusting that what is meant for us will meet us there.

The moments between the moments

I looked up at the sky today at the sun between the trees and wondered if you can ever truly know another person.  Perhaps it is the way that we cannot ever fully see the sun.  I can watch it rise and fall on the surfaces of the leaves dancing in the wind above me.  I feel its warmth and feel it nourish the living world and heat the dark earth still cool from winter.  I know of it from the ripples it puts out into the world like wind on the water, but cannot fully grasp all that it is or will be or has been.  I supposed people are like that in more ways than we would like to acknowledge or accept.  We know them too by proxy in a way. 

By the way we feel with them, by what they choose to share or not about who they are and where they have been and what they have seen and how and what they have lived.  I supposed we can learn them in a way.  What lights them up with pure joy in an unguarded moment.  What they look like in the early morning while they are still and sleeping tucked away in the landscape of their dreams. 

We can catch glimpses of them in the moments between the moments we have with them. 

But to know another person fully is beyond the scope of the nature of our existence here on this plane, in this place.  We are all lone travelers here.  Some more willing than others to make compromises to align firmly with people they may only know in their own limited way.  So I find that many of us – most of us – block out that limitless nature of those we love because we find their unknown corners challenge us in ways that makes it hard for us to create finite certain things with them built of mortar and mortgages. 

But if we are honest with ourselves we can only hope to catch glimpses of the others around us, of their truest most closely held selves.  That is something that can either provoke in us fear or awe.  To really hold another person as an ever-evolving unknowable other that we choose to walk beside is sacred.  It holds them above the fray of the world that requires they delineate who they are or will be in human terms. 

We can see for a moment how much more we are than all we are.  That we are all unknowable.  All of us universes onto ourselves.  And there is so much beauty there.  If we can hold space for another person to be exactly who and what they are most truly then perhaps we can understand — if only in an imperfect way — what it means to walk the world as they do.  To witness them and genuinely seek to see as they see. 

And yet, most of the interactions we have, most of the people we meet, and many of those we love do not hold that middle space for us and thus cannot imagine someone could want to see them clearly.  Most people do not even really like themselves.  Many do not know themselves and so they instead reject what they do not understand both in themselves and in others.  They cling to the life raft that society has proffered for them.  Follow the path.  Built the life.  Get the job. Buy the house.  Marry the appropriate person.  Have the kids.  Make your way.  Let it pass along and know that so too — in time — will you. 

It does not have to be a choice, but it often is.  Because to build a shelter so strong you can hold the other person’s growth and potential and all the things about them that you do not know as gently as you would a baby bird while also building a material life with them can be hard to reconcile.  Often security is put ahead of authenticity and stability held above joy.  But there is a dull ache that lives in those compromises that can grow into something beyond our ability to repress or reproach it.  I think we all seek to be known.  Or perhaps better put I – for better or worse – would rather approach those who I love with curiosity and reverence than to spend my time vying for them to fit into tidy boxes that would never fully suit them. 

In ever moment, we are new. 

The light that filters down to me from the sun is unique to this moment.  And the leaves that dance between us will never appear in this particular constellation again.   Even if I come back tomorrow or in exactly a year at the same hour — it will never be the same.  So too with those we love.  So we must choose.  If we can hold their perpetual newness as they evolve — a universe onto itself — or if we will allow them to grow solid and brittle in our minds until they slip away like the dust off old logs long fallen. 

It is the moments between the moments held gently that show us for at least an instant how to look into the singular sun that shines out to us in the warmth of another’s eyes and to know that is enough.

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Beyond reason

I love you across time and beyond reason.

I have never met you, but you walk beside me somehow a firm presence in my life. Not unlike other things I cannot see but feel in my bones like truth and faith and hope. 

Tangible forces born of love and ether.

I know that you are out there also waiting for the one who knows your soul. For the day our paths cross.

The Light in your eyes is calm and clear. 

Unwavering.

Like windless water.

Smiling.

I shed layers like unwanted clothes as quickly as I can now.  Letting them fall away. Committed to removing anything impure.  Anything not of my own making, of my own Light.

I understand that we are beacons for each other.

That our unflinching commitment to find and honor our truest selves will be what guides us home.

I love you across time and beyond reason.

May your own struggles strip you bare of illusion leaving you with as clear a heart as my walk through the darkness has given me. May you be fortified for the road ahead. For your own struggles that wake you at dawn. May you know that there is no shame in the scars that give us back to ourselves. That forge us and make us Sovereign.  In my eyes, they and you are perfect.  Just as you always have been.

Stand strong, Beloved.

I am with you.

I love you across time and beyond reason.

I have never met you, but you are with me.

In the calm I feel facing the unknown.

4.10.2020

A one-legged chickadee came and sat at my window this morning.

Defying gravity with her one little leg she clung to the edge of the frame and told me I had nothing to fear. She knew the words I needed and sang them to me before darting away.

A one-legged chickadee came to my window this morning and told me that everything would be ok.

The dust of silent angels

What if Heaven is across the street from an aging office park? Available to those willing to trespass onto private land to walk down the rows of orange trees wearing their delicate blossom coats in the dark. 

I always wanted to stay there longer than I felt I should and never did sit down below them resting my head back against their short sturdy trucks to look up through their shiny leaves into the night. 

I always wanted to, but I never did. 

But once when I was feeling especially bold I stole away from the perimeter I usually traveled past the towering fig tree with its canopy of fans and fruit and I walked deep into the grove and felt like I was dressed only in the heady perfume of thousands of someday oranges. 

I stepped in mud up to my ankle and gave thanks for the trees and the hold-out farmers who still tended to their roots among the lumbering office blocks and modern apartment complexes and walked home convinced I had the dust of silent angels on my shoes.

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