Many Ways Light Can Bend

Where does your emotional symbioses lie?

The owl's voice returns at 4 a.m. and with it, the realization of how blind my process of self creation has been. Why was I most alive in a hungry gaze? It is because I had never seen who I really am without a reflection. There are many slants in the story of Narcissus. There are many ways light can bend.

Sunrise filters through misty pines as robins pour forth the first chorus. Gardening fills every spare moment, though it falls short of nurturing a certain life I could have chosen long ago. That matters very little now. We journey apart and together, and in this flow, everything ripens of its own accord. But I remember Oneness, and I cannot decide if that is helpful or not. What do you think of peace as a form of love?

I've found my people. They invited me into wholeness, and now I own what I never knew was mine. I am iridescent and light-wracked around the edges. I am Rachel Carson cooly picking up fragments of life from tide pools in Maine. I am Aphrodite on fire. I am Buddha in perfect stillness as everything returns to what it has always been. I am losing words on the wordless way.

I fell asleep too late in the day and woke to darkness. The neighbor has turned off his string of outdoor porch lights, and the dog is already curled up like a golden button sewn atop a pillow. The moon rides a still lake of sparse clouds and dips between Libra's scale. The smell of wood smoke moves towards an unseen horizon as I cling to the raft of wakefulness when I should be moored in bed. My pre-dark heart stirs with gratefulness for the library people, the poetry people, the gay beach club people, the transitioning people, the suicidal people, the victims of genocide, the hostages in a man's war, the untethered and the stuck people, the coming out people, the dying ones, and the ones who carry a molecule of each and every one of those people inside their bones.

It will be 4 a.m. again soon and it will be my voice which returns tonight.