Love is Destruction

Despite everything, rain thrumming the roof and spilling over eaves all night long is very soothing. Hours pass and when you count each one, a certain surrender takes place. Just before dawn, sleep finally came and the world started all over again.

In the dark hours I wondered how often we limit ourselves. When it rains on my window and I hear the universe splashing against itself on the ground, I realize that the disease and the cure is encoded in everything. We have ignored our spiritual sense in favor of the logical and practical. Have we forgotten our interconnectedness?

When my body is alone, it is not alone. I feel Other exhaling on the back of my neck. I ponder stars and moonlight and an army of emerging daffodils; and I am not alone. On my knees, inhaling the first spicy aroma of spring soil, I plunge my fingers into the afterbirth of earthworms and grubs and black life, and I feel Someone with me. I can't see, but I know. I can't work it out, but was it not You who held me against the pine in order to devour everything I had to give?

After walking the dog, potato leek soup and day old coffee. Nothing wasted these days. Nothing lost. I carry my mug with the outline of Kenya on it around the backyard, mapping spring shoots as I go. Siberian squill begins to nod and droop their bright blue, star-shaped bells. One cluster of crocus blooms in the unkept corner of the yard. There were more last year. Snowdrops by the creek still carry their delicate white burdens, but not for long. The flower report is life. How grateful one can be for the softest hint of blue.

In these days whereby a nation lets its people die and selfishness drives an economy of injustice, the nights get longer and longer. The days threaten to amass fear and frustration. Profanity and love has become so neatly divided. In our effort to cling to that which is love and lovely, we have grown weary and God has grown profitable. But that is not really Love. The Love I sense is here when time is not. It has no promise or despair. It does not belong to god or to any of the ways my thoughts try to capture and explain it. As Krishnamurti says, “ It (love) lives and dies each minute. It is destruction without tomorrow. Love is destruction.”

When I am alone and not alone, I am destroyed. Because Love is. Beloved, this.

Not Enough and All I Have

Schools are closed so kids are in the grass looking for shamrocks; this and other venerations for St. Patrick.

Week 2 of sickness. There are not enough tests for the virus, instead they give a flu and strep test; both negative. The greenhouse work continues but I am at home. After the grower's meeting, he came back and said everything is pushed back. Thousands and thousands of plants we have already potted must stop growing in order to be saved. He opens the vents and turns off the heat. From February to June, they make the money to ive from all year long. Not shipping these plants will mean financial devastation. This and other repercussions of pandemic.

Stay home. Breathe if you can. Prepare the gardens for a long time of need.

My little family, plus the boyfriend, all under one roof for the foreseeable future, quietly settle into different parts of the house to do their online school work. Kyle chirps away all day on the phone, hosting one conference call after another. All these little orbits give you time to see “the real work” as Wendell Berry sees it. I'm not sure how to do it yet, but I see it.

Affordable gasoline and nowhere to go. But we have things to burn, beloved. Don't we?

Having nothing to say and a million ways to go on saying it. One branch at a time, a climbing cardinal. Venus hangs out with the moon. Woodsmoke drifts beyond rooftops and steals a dance from the stars. Pretty soon poetry will both not be enough and all we have.

All these letters pile on the desk – unopened – unsent – you stay blameless that way. The writing follows trails cut by woodland creeks. We pass accidental orchards and crumbling steeples. Growth overtakes the way in hungry places. Writing is the offering. It may be all I have.

Don't Send Helicopters

In the 2007 post election violence in Kenya, we didn't have time to stock up on basics. We woke to rioting, no gasoline or cell phone time and a media blackout. As word of mouth began to trickle through the confusion, we realized there was nothing we could do but shelter in place. The roads to the airport were blocked. Fuel pumps were dry without a way to get more. Water became more valuable than gold. Wealthy family members pleaded with us to allow a helicopter to extract us. Of course we refused; we were indignant at the suggestion. A nation was at war with itself and we were caught in the crossfire. In the meantime, there was no extra food. Electricity and internet would come and go, along with water. In times like these, one's chaff is quickly pulverized to reveal someone almost unknown to the self and others. Yes, Kenyan family members murdered each other, neighbors, and friends if they weren't of the “correct” tribe. Police fell in line with which ever presidential candidate was of their tribe. People became desperate to stay alive. Those were the stories of other people. As an expatriate, I could only be horrified and shocked and terrified at what I saw others doing. For myself, I had to deal with what it meant to help my family survive while also assisting those around me.

This pandemic brings me directly back to those times. I am watching others behave in ways that are ugly and selfish, yet I know they just want to survive. They are scared. But the rich and privileged have all the power to buy up what they might need to hunker down and wait out this virus. They have the helicopters. It is my prayer – no – there must be a different word. I cannot find it. The suffocation of cells in my very bones cries out for the wealthy to understand: in order to truly live during and after this, they must learn of their connection to the whole. It will never, ever be enough to protect your own family and interests alone; the suffering on humanity and on the soul will be incalculable. I promise.

Between that sentence and this, magenta fully fills in all the space between pine branches. More bird song is being added to the morning chorus daily now. Dawn marks the time when I no longer have to wish I was asleep. But robins and red wings!

Also poet, there is a soundtrack to all the places we wanted to visit – to try – to linger. Gifts given and received. And those songs play when I least expect. Beck asked me about R.E.M. and I talked to him about Stipe and his music and that book written by a lover. The National, Dylan, Sia, Cohen, U2 . . . The past slips away but the songs remain. I remain. Don't send helicopters. I'm not leaving.

The Right Thing

Sick at 3 a.m. with fever and a sore throat; the virus comes to mind. Vague symptoms leave room to roam. No one is awake with me so I tend to myself – my burning muscles and my new normal. Will Lex still study abroad in Spain? Will Beck be able go to the Robotics World Championships? Along with economic disease and death, this potential pandemic has uncovered more ugly truths. These thoughts fall through my sky like rain, passing through branches, rolling off the skin with a little seepage here and there. The idea of Love is becoming more and more abstract.

I'm less obsessed, beloved, more free. Yet even in the letting go, something strange and beautiful keeps pushing to the surface like broken pieces of glass climbing through the soil to find light. I fall through it so completely. I'm just being honest. There are decisions we make for those we love and for whom love us. Of course, they make those decisions for us as well. But then there is the swift motion of east and west bound lanes. There is Ashtabula and that park near the big lake. There are the borderless kinetics of heartbeats and the secret place one goes when they are caught up in birdsong at dawn. My body is so tired of running in the other direction. Maybe that's why I must always move in pain now.

I can't say the right thing and I can't do the right thing. I just know the right thing; I let it come and go. It floats by on a river and I long desperately to wade out to it; to pick it up in my freezing hands; to take it home next to the fireplace and hold it. Let me, Lord. Let me.

Moonlight patches glow through the branches of wintering trees like a quilt draped over the back of the neighborhood couch. I might be really sick but I'm not sure. Maybe I'll call the doctor in the morning. For now there is just me again, wrapped up in midnight's cloak, wondering when I will ever . . . just . . . sleep.

Long Dead Dogs

There is enough sun at dawn to see the dog's breath when she barks. It's still cold but the shift away from winter has begun. Maybe I can wash windows soon; maybe I can feel warmth below the skin. Sun on occasion says that maybe I should move the painting so that it doesn't become faded. “Art is an investment” we said. Yet this mosaic in particular was home when we didn't know where to find it.

Off in the distance a familiar trill slices through a misty March. Though I cannot see him, I understand what he is saying; the red-winged blackbird settles the matter.

When my daughter comes home from college, I put fresh tulips in her room to say I missed you; I'm so proud of you; You make my world brighter. The boy and the girl and the mom and the dad will vote together as a family for the first time on Tuesday. We don't have the options we want but, “The people have spoken, those bastards.”

The greenhouse work persists, develops and grows more rigorous. Every day my body hesitates and lilts with pain, though it would do that now without the work. There is a pill case to keep disease and aging going in a palatable direction.

Dogs age too. She sits on the stoop shivering, close to the door, facing a world she cannot catch. Yet she doesn't come in when asked. At dinner the other night, I sat between two friends conversing about a dog sitter. One friend's son comes to stay with Kora when we have to be away so I added my emphatic endorsement to his capabilities. Only, without thought, the name of our long dead dog came out of my mouth instead. How strange it must be for deep, abiding love to live in a forgotten darkness. And, how utterly startling to have it rise and reveal itself all at once.

I love who is here and not here. The cardinal stays all winter and brings joy. The red-winged blackbird arrives when it's time and brings joy. The sparrow finds treasure in the winter wasteland and brings joy. As humans we have told ourselves to dictate where everything belongs. Yet we have forgotten that everything belongs – right here, as it is. I have no name for this or you or the deep and abiding love that insists on diving deep and resurfacing for air when it must.

Rime on roofs. Sunlight on silken strands. My own reflection in disappearing ice. Are there not infinite ways that light shows the way?