Love Unsettled

Sleeping below a winter's moon the night groans with a colder version of day. In one dream, we know each other's hands by now. In another, I sit in my room alone wondering how to make things different.

The wooded creek collects fall's last foliage. One day the air is 22 degrees, the next day it's 47. Yet one thing remains the same: gray after gray after gray. On the way to Pentwater, the solemn remains of milkweed – a parade of bare sticks standing thigh-high with nothing but cottony tufts atop to be directed by wind and snow and rain. They stand in groups in front of long, sleeping fields all the way to the highway. My thoughts wander to growing Cannabis and what that would mean for my community and family.

For breakfast, a feta-potato-chorizo omelet topped with a hint of jalapeno cream sauce. Aggravation simmers over the meal as I watch adolescent squirrels drain the squirrel-proof bird feeder. “Squirrels gotta eat too” no longer overrides or placates the intention of the feeder. One realizes one must get smarter or relent.

He reported that he intended to have me sign a copy of my book (which alone is an entirely ridiculous to consider) but when he arrived, he realized he had left it on the plane. “Well perhaps it was meant for someone else,” I quipped. This is an example of how I can mean something whole-heartedly and at the same time, feel the corruption of something entirely opposite.

accept / override / reset / repeat

Lately, considering love. Thoughts mound and heap and yet, build nothing. Whatever love is, it cannot be thought. Labels and ideas and restrictions should be rejected because they enslave. I see myself diving, using my arms to push aside water in order to go deeper and further beneath all that I have considered love to mean. Running out of oxygen, I begin to see that I am guilty of defining love, restricting love, of marrying love and sorrow together. Something more radical is at stake here. Deeper than desire, more alive than duty, beyond turmoil and chaos and conflict – love is perhaps a place that rejects all maps and calculations and efforts. Maybe love is just right now. And now. And now.