Back When I Wasn't Scared

Steep stairs at the foot of which ferns grow, vividly green and faintly spiraled, ascendent witnesses to what can only be called - in this writing, this way - the beneficent cosmos.

Let it rain, who'll stop the rain, raindrops keep fallin' on my head, et cetera.

Say what you will! Crows land in the driveway, oddly unafraid, and it's hard not to read into it. So the lilac bush isn't blooming, so what?

Go into it, the question of evil, and see where it takes you, see what you learn. Soft pink apple blossoms on the remaining apple trees. Rose quartz. Words we're not supposed to use, words we use anyway.

Dandelions along the flagstone path out front. How do you know God is good after all? A triangle of light ascending the bedroom wall while I work out the sentences of my latest autobiography in which one finds God after crawling a long time through cut glass to a vinegar sea. 

Manufactured consent. Cold cuts.

All these lies and the lying liars telling them.

We take Fionnghuala to be vaccinated on our anniversary, after pick up burritos at the place we used to go to when we met in law school, exhausted and stressed but happy in the other, at rest in the other.

Labels don't help really but they do help a little and so some of them are: vegetarian, feminist, activist, Christian, Buddhist, guitarist, knitter, gardener, father, mother, recovering nihilist, crazy cat lady and so forth.

I didn't really lose God until my late twenties, and I didn't lose God so much as refuse God in favor of logic, rationality, just generally the myth of objectivity, and I found my way back around fifty thanks to some very open-minded biologists and one eighth-century Irish Catholic mystic. 

You don't actually die but the part of you consoled by this fact does in fact die and is in fact already dead.

Back when I wore bandannas, back when I wasn't scared to walk away from everything.