CLXXIV

There’s a reason we celebrate love the way that we do - weddings and anniversaries and valentines and roses for no reason at all - because as much as we live in a world that honours independence, and the power of one, of going it alone and making a lot of things happen for yourself; none of us can truly deny the sheer joy and great relief it is to find for yourself another human being who’s willing to give you every part of them, forever, and to take every part of you as theirs. We all want to be understood and if that’s what love is, understanding, then the surest critic can’t dismantle the innate human desire to be fully known, and fully loved. Maybe marriages fail because we can’t hold on to our independence and our deep desire for an other both. We must decide. And for some, the decision is harder than once thought, the fear of losing yourself a simple byproduct of a culture that tells you to be dependent is to be weak and to be resilient is to always have an escape plan hatched that only you know about. But it isn’t true. It isn’t true. Love cannot operate in such hostile terrain, it can only ever be a shadow of itself in such foreign territory. Love is brave - to love another truly is a brave act, and a noble one, noble in the way that self serving and self seeking never could be. There's a lie going around that too many hearts are breaking over - how many more can it take? Before we all awake, to love as the ultimate letting go and getting; the most selfless and rewarding; the truest act; the noblest pursuit; the only stealer of breath, still-er of a beating heart. To be independent, in truth, is to be alone. When will they let us know it?

[Image: unkown]

CLXX

To hold in my hands completely duplicitous possibilities is to know, I think, a little more the mind of God. To think that anything is possible is to think that two radically opposing possibilities are equally available to me, in this moment. To wait for both, or either, or neither to appear. 

CXLIV

I know what the love of a good man can do. 

I wish I could say 

I could have done it for myself, 

but it isn't true. 

A good man will take the negative noise a woman can't help but hear, 

and speak louder to her. 

He'll stand before her, and block it all from view. 

He'll fill up the room if he has to. 

I look in the mirror, 

most days, 

and admire what I see, 

because the love of a good man taught me to. 

I encounter a stranger and don't waver, 

or fall 

from standing on my own two feet, 

because the love of a good man taught me to. 

I hear the sound of my own voice, 

in the hush of a quiet room, 

and I speak in strong, steady beats, 

because the love of a good man taught me to. 

I think I knew, 

all along, 

that I was worth the world and more, 

but the love of a good man let me wrestle 

with the chance that I wasn't,

and never come up short. 

We like to be self-made, and battle-worn, 

and wisdom-aged, 

and hard-won. 

But I know what the love of a good man can do. 

He took everything I already knew, and proved it to be true.

CXXXIII

Bravery is not the absence of fear but the intimacy with fear.

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Life is a good teacher, and a good friend.

- Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

CXXXII

I check the weight of all your words
temper them out
wondering if the consistency will hold.
They roll off your tongue, and I balance them
on the scales I've come to know
all too well.
Do you love me, still.
Do you want me, more.
Do you need me, at all.
Am I only counting chances.

I check the weight of all your words.
This one a little light, a little insincere.
This one heavier than any I'd ever want to hear.
Will I detect it before you tell it?
That fearful fateful forlorn truth I search for.
Will I know it before you let on
that our time is drying up
that all we've got isn't all that much, after all.

You're bearing my soul down, you know that?
This weight, just too much.
Cutting to the quick of who I am
and who we are
who I thought we could be
bearing down on all of it.
And I can't let you tear us apart.

CVII

There’s more than one way to convince yourself you’re not who you thought you were. And you’re not as good as you wanted to be. And you don’t deserve all the things you’ve been given. And you’re not enough to do the things you need to do.

I can think of many ways, in fact.

And I have tried them all. 

Yet I am still here. And my heart is still beating. And the blood still runs hot in my veins.

There’s more than one way to convince yourself that you are nothing. And yet I’m still here, and I am something, and even I cant think that thought away.

I can write words, and they can have meaning, and I can string these sentences together and tell you something more than meaning and more than words and more than what you expected. But where is the meaning in that? And where is the meaning in me. And why. I don’t know how to write between these questions swelling my mind to too-big-a-size. And its not loftiness, its not loneliness, its not letting-myself-go or locking-you-out. It just me. And they’re in my mind. And I can’t banish them if I try so why die trying. Answer the questions and maybe the words with their sense can enter in not just to the pages but to the recesses of my soul. Healing words healing the healer. Not just the patient. Not just the broken. Not just the weary. Not just the forgotten and the forlorn and the downtrodden. But healing me.

I am none of those things but I am real, and I am here.

"And my soul will hang on every word you say..."

[Image: Pinterest]

CIII

And now I breakdown in the Woolworths carpark. Because every word you say is gemstone, and moments worth their weight in bronze just breeze me by.

The moments are so few these days that I cry before I hear the end tone, and only just does my whisper mask the catch, and only just do you miss the sob, and only just have I trained my throat to quell the sobs. I look around for strangers who might look on, but even then I couldn't stop the rolling and even then I couldn't stop the shudders. And thats a lot for me.

I'm usually quite good at keeping it together.

I don't know about you but its all been a bit much lately. I don't know about you. That's the truth and it hurts. I don't know about you do you want me to? I don't know about you but the moments are so few these days and one day I'll break before the end tone. And then what will we do?

I'm usually quite good at keeping it together, but we're not right now are we? So neither am I. Every word you say is gemstone. Is that what makes me feel so heavy?


[Images Lena C. Emery]

LXXXII

Thankful for legs that walk a heart that beats eyes that see and a mind that dreams.

[Image: Cakies]

LXIV

When words don’t make sense, speak anyway, because silence is deafening.


[Image: RUSSH Magazine]

LXI

World Between Our Sheets.

When I’m in bed with you, all the world is as naught. The howls are quiet, the babes are asleep in their houses, the sky is colourless and the moon shines no light. There is no thief or betrayer, no soldier or soul-taker, there is no war and there is no wilderness. Outside there may be people, there may be voices, there may be armorers and dead things and wild things and love and lust and hate and triumph and stealth and gnashing of teeth and brokeness and retribution and regret. But inside, where it is warm, there is none of that. There is just you and me. When I’m in bed with you you are the world to me. And it is only when the morning breaks [who says it’s morning, who is an inanimate object to tell me when the getting up is right and the going out?] that you leave me, and I am nothing again. Until you return. I remain nothing. Until you return. My world. 

XLVII

Sometimes I think pictures matter more. Sometimes I think words. We see images, and colours, and vibrancy and life and moving colour. But we hear and say and write and record words. And sounds. Our tongues form vowels and we practice assonance and we do but we don’t know how to talk and those are the special moments where words are better. But go outside, taste the air, see the sky and the salt and the sun and silence or the sounds and that is the something that sometimes pictures can portray. But only sometimes. Words are only sometimes too, I suppose. Maybe that’s why I need both. Both these sometimes things when placed together make a little less sometimes and a little more always. And always is what I always want. Always is the way you make me feel, the way you make me laugh, the way you make me love. Always is the pitter-patter of rain on dirty glass and the salty air blowing my hair up and hugs and kisses and affection and tears of joy sorrow gladness frustration humility. Always things are not words or pictures but life and moments. But sometimes I like words. And sometimes I like pictures.

[Image: Unknown]

XXVI

There are days when I can't write anything but things of you. You move me in a way that no other things do. How did I get here? How did I meet you? I feel a strange feeling that you knew it would happen all along.
I sit and I think and all my thoughts are caught up on you. You're… you're… So much of me preoccupied with something I have no words to speak of. Words are failing me. Words never fail me.

I just want to see you. Again and again and again. See you and know you and love you and know you more. Again and again and again and again.

(Image: Grace Loves Lace)

VIII

H E A R T   P T 3 .

There is love. But is it enough? To brighten the darkest dark… from a distance…  is it enough? To heal the deepest wound – bruise, cut, break, sore… without ever touching or seeing or knowing the full extent of injury. Is it enough? Love that doesn’t know what it is dealing with. Ignorant love. Love that loves anyway. Is it enough?

I’m telling you that it is. I have seen, felt, known. Tested and tried and I have found that it is.

But nothing of proof. Nothing concrete, nothing absolute.

There is nothing. But my words, and my love.