Vena Debajo de Todo

   I am not surprised at my dropping back into my awe again. It always happens this way. Like a microwave's inner table spinning in cyclical bliss until the timer reaches zero. Until it all plateaus once again. The food must be heated later on. There is no need to overthink it. Your heart must resurrect. A time and a place and a time and a place and

    God is so good. Hearing people say things like this used to turn my insides out. Used to grant me judgement and often resulted in strange assumptions about what they mean when they say this. I wonder what others think when I say I love God. It could mean anything and to me, it truly does mean anything. How could there be a dogmatic approach to something so vast and unnamable? I think God is the Hindu deity Hanuman as much as I think God is my meanest customer of the day. I think God is the song I can't stop going on runs to as much as I think it is what is staring back at me above the bathroom counter. There's a lot of fun to be had in this I think. 

    Whenever God decides a hiatus is due and the aliveness of things doesn't quite catch the same weight- that's when I think about myself. A lot. That's when the convenience of duality kicks in and I decide that the mean customer crawled out of a pit of tar just to drag me down with them like we aren't the same thing. Like I'm not covered in tar, too. When God returns I laugh about this. In times like these I think I am someone. I think I am beautiful, promising, slightly aloof, kind, unsure. But I am not. 

    It takes one bird in the pond or one old man on a motorcycle smiling all big at me (with all the teeth in the world) or one pivotal book or anything so crucial in the way that it touches me- to slam me right back into my heart and suddenly God is everything in front of me. Sometimes if I can't find God I stare at my hands until they don't look like mine. I can't explain this further. All of that commotion and then God is back and I have access to the big throbbing hunker of a heart in me that gets me by. And the remembrance that I am nothing- that I am the ocean, or my little sister brushing her hair before bed, or the lipstick residue on someone's mug before work, or the bush dry grass on a desert lawn- is enormous. 

    The only reason I'm ever someone is because I love God. I love God and I am a disciple to the love that I know is the pulsing vein underneath all this walking around with eyes shut. People always bumping into each other unsure of who's really seeing things the way things are. I don't know and you don't either but I do know I love you. 

 

Not With My Mouth

    I don't hate this city. Even when it is all consuming and the water starts to fill over the edges of my brain- there's no way I could hate it. When the winter is bitter and moldy maybe I curse the pothole'd paths but I never ever hate it. Just because something is harsh and ugly a few months out of the year doesn't mean it's all bad. I have my volcanic eruptions but I'm a nice girl. This city deserves some slack. The sun is out and I get to leave it for a day. There are worse grounds to size up. 

    I love this city and I love to leave it. The ocean wailed like a mourning mother, reaching blindly for her baby. The pull of the sea air and the yearning toward the most silent beckon. I needed to get out and I needed it to be with someone who's so good that I'd pick their company over running naked to the coast alone. We ran together. It was better that way and I knew it'd be.

    I write about love so much because I'm just in it. There's no perverted morphing of my experience into anything other than what it is. When I am in love it is all love. The ocean singing for a pair louder than for a stand alone woman. All the starfish in the world have told me so. I've got my autonomy, my solitary visions, but I'm glad to have someone so good witnessing it, too. Saying that I'm a good way to be. Believing it. 

    I stood at the gaping mouth of the water and let the liquid run through my shoes. My breath felt wiser. Time tells me everything. I know I know nothing but love. Love of God and how they're there dancing in every drop. Love of Self even though that's nothing much. Nothing but something to lose. I love leaving the city and I love leaving myself. I'm not tethered to anything but an unitchable hunch that I've got something to say. Not with my mouth.