I want to know.....

The Invitation by Oriah
It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon…
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.

It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.

As the trees wake up and the flowers wake up, I yawn, and hear a rumbling inside me that must mean I’m waking up too.
And it’s been a long winter. It’s been long. I found my way through the snow. The inches, the feet of it.
But it’s past me now and I like unfolding like the maple leaf, the oak leaf, the tulip leaf.
I want to have a conversation with myself. I want to see who this girl is now. I just don’t know where to start.
I listen to the spring peepers signing in their cool waters and I can only here them thrumming and I can only hear their elation's and tidings.
And that’s enough for now. So, I will wait on the lighting bug. Their arrival is days away, but I know it is coming.
I’ll stand is dewy grass, one warm July evening and I’ll whisper my secrets. I’ll ask them my questions and they’ll light up night sky. They will burn green until they land at God’s feet and he’ll know what to whisper back.

I’m meant for someplace else.

I don’t know how to explain it to you other than, it’s there, that someplace else, when I close my eyes.
It's stuck to the back of my eyelids.
Sometimes I see glimpses of it through brown eyelashes
if the light’s just right.

About loosing my nerve....

I’ve tried to keep my nerve all day. But I am loosing it now. As lights go off all over the house, all over the neighborhood, all over the universe, I feel what today was. It settles, darkly ,inside of my gut, inside of my heart. It aches, and it pounds and I have lost my nerve. I don’t think it takes much to loose it. A change in lighting, a slight shift in breathing , a faster pace of a heart beat and it is easily sent propelling up and out of your throat and poof, it’s gone. Just like that. Your former nerve is just another tragedy in the atmosphere. Without it, I cry. And damn-it, I’ve tried hard all day not to cry. I fell like I cried enough yesterday, quietly onto my brother's back passenger truck window as we drove to dinner, later softly into my jacket on the way home, and then gut wrenchingly into you shirt when I went to bed. It’s just that, I don’t think there’s any stopping it when you loose your nerve like that, in the dark. Sometimes, your throat just betrays you. Sometimes the light betrays you. And sometimes, it’s just your heart.

I try to think about where you have gone. The best I can figure is that you crawled into one of those black holes you were so fond of. There you are on the event horizon and then you go. You don’t look back, just forward into that point of no return. I read once, that while you can’t see a black hole, it can be observed by the way it interacts with other matter. And since I can't see you, but I can feel you, that must be where you are. I am the other matter. We all are the other matter and you orbit us. I think that’s where you are, but I don’t know. Sometimes, you see, I see you in things around me. I see you in flowers, sunflowers always. I see in on a certain couch, under a certain blanket watching movies. I see you at Giant Springs walking there beside the river. I feel you as the wind blow through my curls. I see you always on the back of my eyelids.
You are everywhere and nowhere I can put my finger on.

I have waited on this day for months so, as I’ve wrote before, that I can understand what years without you are like. This day is here though, and I have lost my nerve for it. Instead, I want to go back 372 days and tell you that I love you and then maybe you would have stayed. I want to go back 380 days and get on a plane. It seems, I loose my nerve a lot.

So you're there where ever that may be and I’m here, where ever this is. And I hope you can hear me when I say thank you for loving me. Thank you for loving me when I was just a girl at a concert. For loving me when I was just a girl in black and white, When I was just a girl in crazy fonts and flashing cursers. Thank you for loving me when I was just a girl on a path, with curly hair and a foxy camera. Thank you for loving me when I was just a girl who was broken. Thank you for loving me from the tip of that one hair that always sticks up to the tip of those toes that you didn’t think were to bad(although, not as “nice as yours.”) Thank you for loving me when I was just a girl, just a nobody on a green porch swing on a May morning, swinging into the morning light, ready for the day. Thank you for kissing me in the rain just because if felt like the right thing to do. Thank you for the hours of words. Thank you for all the new people you brought me and all those Waitt’s were worth it. Thank you for the lessons both flora and fauna…..and foto. Thank you, simply, for loving me, even if love is rarely simple. I figure I’ll always feel like we were cheated of time, but I’ll never figure that I went through this life unloved. And I mean loved in that big unexplainable, honest to goodness, real, unconditional way.

I love you, you see and I miss you. Still. Always.