Tilt

It's raining. She calls me from the middle of the dormitory courtyard and shouts into the phone, “it's a double rainbow! I'm sending you a picture!” This girl and my heart.

Weather gusts of spring. Rain slants into screens and snowbanks with a jarring force, especially after a winter of whispery precipitation. The ground is gradually exposed after months and miles of white. Fog is released as the snow melts and lingers like a final specter of unfinished business. Over a few hours, shrubs come into view and then the deck and finally a few dog toys long forgotten. My mind zings with thoughts of planting and yard preparation. There is always another snowfall in April and the permafrost needs time to let go. And yet, daffodils dance as a shimmering mirage in the almost knowable distance.

Lately I hear geese overhead while I work in the greenhouses. The rise in temperature by even a few degrees is enough to invite an entirely new song. After sunset now, birds sing as they eek out the last bit of balmy foraging before the next icy blast.

Distance or space or elongation helps in considering what it means to open into whatever love is. To whichever love is. To whomever love is. In my most clear moments, love cannot be mouthed or scratched out with pen. It is not a penny thrown over the cobblestone sides of the well. It's not mine or yours or ours. And whatever it really is, it just is. But I most feel it as the earth's sweat – river, lake and sea. In moving itself, it moves me. It takes parts of me away, yet leaves me whole. I can't break it down into any intellectual modicum. The metaphysics ascribed added a familiar language to it for a time, but then, didn't. I don't know what to do with it . . . how to hold it, how to let it go. I can float or sink. Swim or play. I can walk away and redirect and plunge myself into bodywork or cooking or Netflix. I can face the flow in awareness and benevolence and recognition. I can drown in confusion or the power or the lack of ability to be a proper conduit.

It's March. Michigan's waters are frozen. We wait on the tilt to bring it all back.