Okay, It Matters...

It matters that we are here together.

I'm walking around in a different world and can't quite seem to feel 'here'. Yesterday, as I stood in line at the store, I struggled to be present and somehow could not connect with my environment. Someone spoke to me and I never heard what they said, even though I asked him to repeat himself. Twice.

I'm being attacked by butterflies. I know it's spring and the season and all, and I love them! It's just so odd how they surround me every time I walk from my door to my car. I notice them everywhere.

My head feels fuzzy, and my body numb. It seems like I'm wandering around hypnotized, trying to wake myself with every effort possible. When will this pass? Yesterday I contemplated the numbness and started to cry for no reason I could discern. But there was nothing attached to the emotion - just tears. And those orange butterflies I catch out of the corner of my eye - or the black ones with the yellow-tipped wings - are they angels? Friends? Reminders to be gentle and patient? Or just a sign of a spring season I can't seem to feel against my skin.

Maybe I am asleep and dreaming. All I know is I will choose life and love again and again, even though the fact of my human failures (or so they seem to me) occur and reoccur and it seems I will never get it right. What if every dream is fulfilled and every need met, every soul awake in their connection and every heart welcomed freely and all there is to feel is nothing.

Love. Life. Love. Live...

Choosing To Live

There's no other choice. What does it mean to be committed to something? I'm looking at marriages of people I know, who for some reason keep choosing it over and over and over every day through hell and ever-smaller slices of heaven. But this is not about marriage to another human being. This is about marriage to life.

I sit here. here. - I am here. No doubt about that. And though it tears me, I choose to stay. I can't see why - no rhyme, no reason - no comfort or ease, no direction at all. My world crumbles but I still live. I've got nothing for you at all... nothing for me. Breath still goes in and out.

Sometimes I think I'm my father and that almost kills me. This is irony, truly... almost.

I look at these pictures and paintings and think they are not good enough for anything, not anything. I read the words I write and wonder why I still feel like a desert on fire - not the good, cleansing kind - the endless, exhausting kind. Is it burning away just the bit it means to take, or is all of me burning away with it. I don't know. Right now I'm blinded by dust and ash.

But I'm here still. And I choose that - I choose it and bless it. How can I follow a heart I can't feel? So back to faith... a big circle. Like the cell dividing to create life all over again. It's not difficult at all to comprehend that we are entirely new people every so many years - that our cells regenerate our entirety. The amazing thing is how such a weak creature can keep living. Fragile. Stubborn.

Signs of Life