4.17.23

In front of the ocean, on my knees. I thought to myself: I ought to learn how to love on my own two feet. So I got up. Recently I have not been very good at observing. "Listening is true worship." You watched me closely, so I tried to look away. I tried to listen to myself. I looked in the mirror until I saw how our eyelashes fell the same way, just the way you said they did. Perhaps love is when someone teaches you something about yourself. Then who don't we love? Even against our will? I thought of Adrienne Rich. This process of refining the truths we can tell each other. How few people we can count to go that hard way with us. How might we do justice to our own complexity.

This gibberish. Love is a practice, taking all my words with it. What replaces the words is the way the sun looks this afternoon, wherever you are. What replaces my words, everything each word has meant, everything each word has been trying to say, borrowed from and then returned to the wind. 

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I didn't want a beautiful cinema. I wanted old faces on screen. I didn't want an elegant composition or color. I wanted to see life pouring from itself. I wanted the real texture of peace, of commotion, of time moving through us, through us, without us.  

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I went up the mountain alone. I went all the way there so I could not speak to anybody about this. I bowed my head and I thought of the snow and how quiet. I found once again the very heart of things. There was a warm body underneath all of this, after all. Under the frost, I was still human. I touched each stone like it was myself. The sensation of each of them, turning under my palms. Here I am, I am here. In the next life, I vowed to not keep keep any love secret. The earth as my witness.