Sometimes there’s so much to say that I don’t know where to start, don’t know where to begin telling what fills each day to the brim, mostly good. Meanwhile, horrors happen elsewhere and the right side of my heart is ragged and tender. I am aware, though, that the left side of my heart, the top and bottom and all through the middle, stays soft, un-ragged. When I walk the pup, when I stir the rice, when I water the potted plants at the window, I feel softness everywhere in my body save that ragged right side of my heart. I don’t know why it’s the right side, just know that’s the spot where things currently catch—my breath, my disbelief.

After a hot, droughted summer, we finally get rain, two days here, two days there, a morning, an evening, water falling from the sky, soaking the Earth. I hear her sigh, thirst quenched. The rose bushes haven’t bloomed since early summer, have been pale and parched, hunched over—but now, despite the chill, have decided a final fling is in order. They un-hunch themselves and, no matter that it was a mere ten degrees above freezing this morning, they are full-on with peachy petals and streaks of quinacridone magenta. I want to clip a few blooms to bring to the yoga studio but can’t bring myself to make a single cut. For each stem topped with bustling bloom, there are three-four-five tiny buds further down the stem. I don’t know if they’ll ever open with the cold setting in, but I appreciate their effort, their vigor, their joy, will leave them to be who they will be in this final fling of late October.

The birch trees glow in the sunlight, the leaves buttery teardrops hanging between life and death. They shimmer in the breeze, a few descend, most remain attached for now, and either way, falling or yet-hanging, it is all the same, is it not, is all part of the same continuum? Living and dying, dying being hard to reconcile and, truth be told, living sometimes hard to reconcile, too. Hard to reconcile the way, in the name of living, some squander, squelch, dismiss, destroy, the way some forget we are woven of the same cloth, are of the same light, are all buttery teardrops. One side of the heart may be ragged and tender, but look, look how the other edges, look how the top and bottom and middle—look how everything that surrounds—is soft, is supportive, is sustenance. 

Amen. Āmīn.
We are buttery teardrops.
May light shine upon and through us all.

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
~ Toni Morrison ~