Back at the Beginning

Can I be softer then? Oneness is not an accomplishment, more like realizing how much you love everyone. Turkey vultures high overhead.

 

The prayer intensifies, I fall forward and pray into the earth, mouth filling with dirt, fingers clutching the grass, and this is not a metaphor. The blue light is me, I didn’t know this, thank you for showing me! So the loneliness is defensive mainly, interesting.

 

I remember Robert saying at the end of a session “that was a lot of hard work today,” adding, “you didn’t do too bad either.” This longing to see the sea. Certain graves, certain grievances.

 

I rise and forgive it all, not in the ACIM way but in the old school way of gazing into the eyes of the  oppressor and loving them by refusing every thought of revenge, anger or bitterness. Love is the moon in a bower of clouds, its light traveling through you, revealing you as a prism. It is turtles and chalices all the way down, until there is no longer down, and then it is Love.

 

Dylan’s Oh Mercy in the late eighties/early nineties, basically showing me how to hang on a little while longer which, God be praised, I did. Bears wake up in the forest, I wake up in bed beside Chrisoula, and Grandmother strides out of from between the stars to remind me there is no time left to fuck around. Of course he consented to the cross, how else was he going to demonstrate the powerlessness of death, jeepers do you even read?

 

Making love in the barn – basically a kiss that deepens and extends without plan or intention – the neighbor’s voices distant and pleasant, altogether a happiness. Suddenly all these widowers, as if the cosmos wants me to remember I don’t know the end of this or any other story. Rye bread loaded with caramelized onions and marinated lamb.

 

I grew up longing for a bed that could fly. Back at the beginning again, learning to make fires without matches.