Giving it away…


Today I gave my morning to the Habitat for Humanity.  We tore a house down and shoveled, raked, and toted the rubble to three massive dumpsters.  It was the best thing I’ve done in a very long time.  At this time in my life, I think I needed to see that just because something is standing there, a structure, brick on brick, wood and pipe and wire…

and you can stand on it, and walk around in the reality of it, and you can feel safe and warm in it, and you can dream and cry and laugh and live and love in it…

it can be completely gone the next day.  Flat gone.  Gone.  And sometimes it’s not sad, it’s not a loss, it is growth.  A new house will be built there.  And it won’t happen overnight.  It will be a house built by people who have no other reason to build it than that they want to give.  They want to give the gift of their time.  They want to give the gift of their labor and their knowledge and their willingness to work together to build something for another person.  They show up time after time, to give something good, to contribute.  I get to be a part of that.

It was wonderful!  Sweaty and dirty and wonderful.  And today, I was literally “this dusty girl”!

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Flowers can’t be Broken

Ah, your beautiful words have all wilted, sir. Like a handful of flowers, they began to die the moment you gave them to me. If your face were the sun, you turned it away. And if your heart, the earth, you tore them out by the roots. Your words became promises that never had the strength to break.

Here where I live, I can see that the sun still shines on the hills in bloom. And I realize that I prefer flowers that grow.

Magician

I open up my fingers, my hands
and he doesn’t fall through
he was already
walking away

I guess I never did
need to let go
I was only ever
holding
illusion
and he never held on at all

in the beginning
it seemed as though
he were walking straight
to me

his eyes
his words
his reach
for me

but no matter how many times
he stepped toward me
he just kept getting further
away

and now
just now
I see it

from that very first step
in my direction
he was already
walking away
from the very first proclamation
of love
the future was blooming
in black
blooming along the path
that path that goes
in the only direction he knows

he only knows
the direction to go
to get
away

Where have you been all my…
All of your what?
Your ironic existence
spent waiting
only to disregard what you wasted all that time waiting for?

you
a sad magician
moonwalking backward
toward happiness

this
your grand illusion
and now I see

you were always, are always
walking away from
and never
walking to

Thin As They Are

thin is the paper that holds these words about love
and thinner still that strains under the heavier words of trust
this paper almost transparent
a veil
actions and in-actions shine right through
and I can see
how the ink bleeds

on the back
one blot
a bird
some stranger
a crow
singular
uncaring
a taker

this can’t be you
these words could not
bleed out this
truth

I look to the window
a soft breeze is blowing
there is the sweet smell of rain
and something
new

a wind might come
sweet and soft
and blow
these papers away
they would lift up so easily
thin as they are

and I will let them
go

And the water is still now.

My heart has been a turbulent thing. I think when I slept at night, it might have been calm. Ish. I never knew how it got so wavy, so currenty, so always moving and pulling and tugging and swirling. Sometimes it was that familiar to and fro, that wave on the beach tide of emotions coming and going. And sometimes it has been a flat out storm with crashing of waves and clapping of thunder and pressure and movement and chaos. And sometimes, just that gentle lapping along the banks or swirling around rocks or branches, but always, always the movement.

Until now. Now I can be right in the middle of that swirl, that tidal pull, that current, that tug, and suddenly, by some dawn of new insight, I can still the water. I can gentle my heart.

The water is peaceful and still now. There is no push from within. There is no pull from without. There is only my heart. Every feeling that was, is. But now, it is still. There is no reaching. There is no holding. There is only stillness. There is only peacefulness. There is only love. There is only patience. And on the horizon, all sides of the horizon, there is more stillness. I can stand in this still water that is as big as the ocean. I have found the elusive thing.

And I know something now. Something kind of funny. It was all the flailing. Flailing tends to create waves and splashing and even tidal crashing, depending on the tantrum. And like a hurricane, once in motion, my emotional flailing would suck up velocity and debris from my circumstances and situations and my thoughts and attitudes and the stories I believed about those circumstances and situations. I could drum up quite the squall. And still, mid-flail, I would be convinced that I was the victim, cast away at sea, forlorn and alone, with my poor battered turbulent heart. Even if I wasn’t flailing, I was always crashing around in my heart, frantically searching at times, or going through some motion trying to make myself happy by changing what I was feeling. I was trying to hold back the tide, or dam the stream, or go against the flow. I was always doing, doing, doing. I was doing everything except the one thing that could calm the water.

I think it has taken about a month. I think it started when I just let myself be stormy. I flailed around, trying to resist the fear and the sadness and the fear of the fear and the sadness. And throughout those stormy days, I would let myself, maybe for a moment, maybe for longer stretches of time… I would let myself feel the worst of it. I just let it. I allowed it. And it hurt really really bad. Like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I don’t know how long that storm had been building, but now I know how it got that bad.

I think those kind of emotionally stormy times happen when old feelings that were never allowed, that were the result of some attitude or painful story I believed, come crashing into my present moment and collide with some emotion I am flailing against and trying to resist because the story is similar to that old story I had believed for so long. All of these stories have a similar plot. I am not loved, I should not trust, I am unfulfilled. I came face to face with all the residual thunder and lightning and hail from believing those stories for so long while never allowing myself to feel how bad it hurts to believe them. I think it’s much easier to let go of those old stories that do not serve us after we feel the pain they have caused. They may in fact be locked up in the emotion and cannot be released until the feelings have been allowed.

I didn’t know that I was unlocking stillness. I didn’t even know it existed. But now that I know how it feels to have a still heart, I can feel right away when there’s an undertow or a wave coming in. And then, I just tune in to my feelings and let them happen and let them go. They never want to stay, they just want to be acknowledged or allowed or accepted.

I have noticed too, that if I wanted to just send a ripple out, as a message maybe, from my heart to another… it would be much easier for that other sweet heart to feel my message when it is coming across a still and peaceful water.

the Golden

An hour has sixty minutes, one after another, like cars on a train and the tracks go this way until they disappear around a bend or over the horizon. And they come from that way, and my mind can’t touch the beginning of them. An hour has sixty minutes. And the hour that follows, sixty, and the hour that follows, and the hour that follows.

But what of the moments? I once spent hour after hour with you. Every moment, golden. Sixty of them at a time… golden and golden and golden. And I thought at the time they would stretch out as far as my mind could reach in both directions. Those beautiful golden moments.

And I have spent many moments talking to you in your golden way. And I didn’t know that I couldn’t stay in that place where time was more than just passing shadows and the metronome regularity of minute after minute after minute. It was more than just the passing of a grey and silent time. Those were the golden, the moments and the words.

But now, the hours of my life have become just that imperceptible ticking off of minute after minute after grey and silent minute. The muted clacking of the never ending rotation of time, cars on the track, one after the next after the next after the next.

Until, suddenly, in one of those moments there you are again. Here, and golden. A shining singular exception. And I just have to smile and say hello there, sweet man. Here you are again. For the moment.