A Little Before Sleep

Salty aftermaths abound, as egrets can sometimes be seen at a great distance over marshes no biped can traverse. Or else it rains, and the rain mixes with snow, and the dog and I come back sopping, and cold the way you sometimes have to be if you're going to find God outside. There are days you open the mailbox and there it is, the letter you were waiting for, and you light up inside like a polished crystalline prism. How many hours have I spent in trees, listening to snow fall, or watching the light change slowly to the blue that precedes darkness, or wishing I were someone or somewhere else? Moments go countless, as does love, as do the number of feathers on a given crow's wing, all of which is to say that the limits to mathematics are never not helpful. Slowly the old impulses fade and the need to be wrong or to pay some high price fades too. No gallows for me, thank you. Beware a man who uses the word blessing too much, who maybe makes you feel like you owe him. A lock of hair, a photograph, a kiss. It unfolds gently, Life, like a ripple that could topple marble walls, and carries us along for a little while. We are temporarily flotsam, capable in a limited way of knowing what is happening, and this insight inspires the relevant inquiry. I don't think we're going to grace any motels the way we sometimes say but I do think it's possible we will share some time near the end, when we are very old, and to all other eyes it seems futile or just silly. Truth be told, either way works for me. As always, I slip a little coming up the hill, and as always, right before it happens, I know it's going to happen. And so what? We play at life a long time before asking if there is anything else and only then do things get interesting. The symbolic tractor I am repairing leans against the symbolic barn in which I first kissed a girl and behind which all my symbolic dogs were executed. There are no accidents in language! Happiness involves chance but joy has an element of rootedness. What I am trying to say is thank you, and be patient, and give attention to what arises as I will too and what happens, happens and we will be the  ones who are okay with that, who are okay with a love without conditions. The sun rising, the sea falling. The dog sighing a little before sleep.