#3

Brake lights guide me home. You in front of me, pulling that pop-up
trailer with your oversized pick-up truck,
You move too slow I say what the fuck and then I adjust.
I glide/bump along.
Haunting new Allison Krauss & Robert Plant song, repeated, sends me home.
I think about lost things, books and books and books-
and music. Things lost (and they are merely things, I understand this)
toss and swirl around in my head. I have moved so many times-
three times in two years in New York alone-and so it makes sense there would
be these lost things.
Still.
Does it sound like I am sad for these lost things now? As though I lament
their non-presence? I don't, no, not really.
I feel a little bit sad though, and actually in a few moments lately
the sadness has been big
but it is for the things that aren't things.
Little pieces,
non-negotiable, irretrievable evidence of my self.
Shit it's so confusing. I want them gone,
I feel sad that they are. I demand newness.
I smile when I feel it happening and it is.
I know
this too must go into the night because-
because that is what you do with grief, with hope-
you put it into the night
"with the music
up above my head."

read it again for the first time

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-Mary Oliver


(I can't get to my own words lately, I don't trust them or maybe there are too many but I am closer to knowing who I truly am than I ever have been and it is illuminating)

Buddha says what?

Coming back to take refuge
In the island of myself


(exactly)

what it was, what it still is

yesterday was the 15 year anniversary of my father's death. i was a kid then, a girl about to start growing up. 15 is such a surreal number--it feels like a small lifetime, it feels like nothing it feels like everything it feels like pain and finally it feels a bit more free.
yesterday i walked to the beach at Sturgis St. where he grew up, where we grew up, and where his ashes were spread so many years ago on a cold, bitter cold, February day. My brother waited for me there and dragged a stick through the sand writing his name, 1949-1993, and
WE LOVE YOU.
we drank a couple of budweisers and watched the sun set. this time it wasn't as cold and i wasn't so damn raw and i wondered about where to go next, how to take all of it with me.
yesterday i told my brother not to feel robbed, he got more than he realizes--he got a foundation of love that still resonates all the time. i told him we have to feel grateful for everything in life. sounds so stupid, so easy. but it is everything and i mean it and i'll say it a thousand times until i believe, understand, believe.

goodnight, dad.