on gloves and slipping

She found that full fragments of the stories she used to tell of youwould leave her at the most inconspicuous moments. Once she was driving when she caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror, dappled light on her jawline and her proud leather gloves gripping, and she realized she forgot how she felt when she met you. Another time she woke the dogs in the night when she gasped and sat upright in bed, sensing a stream of your laugh leaving her for good. How would she explain this if she had to?

If a stranger were to ask me who all the great loves in my life were, I would say your name several times. You as my first, forbidden love when I was coming in to my own in a strange Colorado and found you when I should never have even been looking; how something about my eyes or your voice or our providential proximity made us gravitate toward one another like magnets. And then there was you the explored love, when I found myself lengthening to reach your heights, arching my spine to open from the heart, when we never stopped listening to each other because we had so much to share.We found a constant love in the kitchen of my apartment where we were happy getting drunk just the two of us, and you held me on the counter and we cried because we felt so lucky, and we drank because we believed it would last. 

You became my partner in love and together we navigated our youth, and the mountains, and sometimes with heavy hearts we navigated our shortcomings but always decided to walk the path together.  We held each other up to the lights of our promises and you taught me what it felt like to be part of an idea that became more than the two who made up its parts. I was 22 at a Furthur show when we celebrated your birthday and you whispered who I was to you, from then on you also became the love who was my best friend.  You have been the love who protects me in sleep and makes space for me in his days.You have been the love who has given me a great sense of pride and even greater sense of belonging, the love I call Home, who spread his arms and circled around to carve out a space for us to share.

You are now and will always be my unchanging love, the one with the kind eyes, the lover of my true self, the one who stepped away to grow and who settled apart in space to seek and yet you remain.

And i often think about the way I will sit with pain when it comes to me fully. I hope I will be brave and wear it well.

and i find myself wondering just as much how Pain will sit with me, will it gather around my hips, encircling me with sweeping eddies? It would cling to my crests and I'd walk with even more of a swagger than I do now. Pain could bunch together in angry knots along my spine, or maybe it will string itself as gleaming beads around my neck and hang in the severe recession of my throat. I would glide my fingers alongside it then, without thinking, I would like the way it forced me to hold my head in alignment with the back of my gaping heart. 

Sometimes I picture pain following me as I roam through a crowd, once amidst a sea of people it gets lost momentarily and I feel even more alone. Other times it stays close behind and I don't have the energy to escape it. I hope to walk alongside it soon, I won't fear it, we share a space and I welcome the lessons it brings me so pointedly.

pay attention to the way the body shapes itself around the heart

Janus: God of Beginnings

The month of January is named after Janus, the two faced roman god of doors, doorways, arches, portals... he beckons new beginnings with his one face, while his other reflects backwards to the past. I'm looking seriously at this divine double take and trying not to get dizzy...

 

 

The body is the hardware through which info is received and the "hard copy" of all the data and programming within us. Etched in the flesh and posture of the bones are our pains and joys. Coded within our nerve impulses are our needs and habits memories and talents. Within our genes is our ancestry, within our cells the chemistry of the food we eat, and as our heart beats out our rhythm our muscles mirror our energy.