little t's

I looked back one day

and instead of the dutiful structural wall

I expected to be standing, marking the path I had been walking

the past few years:

each stone set on a foundation of Truths

most little t’s, with some big T Truths

God is Love, and Love is Real-

But that day, whenever it was exactly,

I turned around and found a little gremlin

was smashing around making a mess of it all-

even the foundation stones were crushed.

I wept, grieved for a while.

I was angry some. Heaven disappeared

and god was a deepening mystery

I read philosophers.

Nietzsche has plenty to say

But so does Abraham Heschel

and how Wonder is all he ever asked for

and god gave it to him.

I take this back to my wall.

Caputo steeps in the weakness of god:

unstable, barely functional-

I take some of this back to my wall.

Grace Jantzen reminds me that Deconstruction

is a way to reconstruction.

I take this back to my wall.

I wrestle with the gremlin for a year or two,

then decide to take a break because it’s exhausting

spending every moment in existential skepticism

and I’m just tired, damnit

god damnit.

yes, god, damn it, please.

If you’re there, if you have any power left

damn it.

and I’m just gonna take a break

and if that’s okay with you,

I’m gonna just let this go for now

so I can start breathing normally.

I go from being angry

inside the eternal dark night of my Kierkegaard-ian soul

waiting for the rubble to make itself a wall again, to pave itself

ahead of me, and

getting angry when it didn't—

To just letting the world happen to me;

listening to the words of poets

Who have long gone before me-

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Rumi.

Who have known things closer than I could explain,

“Let everything happen to you; beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Rilke.

Who comforted me in my state,

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body

loves what it loves.” Mary Oliver.

Music saved me. Theatre is my Church. Art is my prayer.

Words have so much power if you let them.

So let them.

And then, one day, you may find yourself

asking those small, eternal questions again;

the wall crumbly but giving it a go-

the gremlin tamed and even cuddly. And then

meekly, like a child whispering in her mother’s ear:

“I love you,” to which she responds

“I loved you first.”

Three years: Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.

Yesterday marked three years since I was told I had cancer.

Thoughts and words borrowed from many references, and I thank you for them.

1

Other than those two roads diverging in the yellow wood

one leading one way, the other another 

I don't believe in judgement day 

with the heavenly armed forces

pulling you up or pushing you down.

Other than those roads in the yellow wood-

what paths are before us?

It's the same woods and the same earth, the same

fiber holding it all together- those tiny atoms pulling and pushing

for or against, that gravity

of an eon echo burst that cast us out sideways

from hydrogen into

whatever we are.

It’s just legroom we scuffle about in

existence is so fragile:

temperature and speed all just so,

any more or less and we’d still be the unadorned element

H

Space is a precarious place.

There are stars burning who’s light won’t reach earth before I die.

The sun may have just exploded, just now

and in 8 minutes and 20 seconds

everything will change.

and yet somehow,

stay exactly the same

trivial, a clump of atoms inside a Red Giant and

burning until there's nothing left but void. 

It's all the same woods.

And we won’t know what’s beyond these trees

till we get there.

2

Shuffles and shambles to survive, while I 

struggle to figure out 

what that means anymore. Is it

carrying my bones to and from my bed? Is it

the space between griefs? Is it

holding a chive blossom in my hand?

Watching the sparrows fight at the feeder?

Pouring coffee?

Some days it’s too much, it's too much of

just crushing these goddamned osteo-lugnuts

rusted shut, full of shit made

in a factory somewhere

I lie half awake

Panic is my predator and she has her way with me.

I am food for Dangerous, Despondency, Despair

I have nowhere to hide

No more good face, no more God face

no more comfort that this will actually turn out okay

as I watch on like a horror film:

"Don’t go up to the attic. DON'T GO UP TO—"

But she goes anyway. See, the script is written this way

because the bard say

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances”

But it’s the exits,

it’s the exits that are final.

3

The basil's spicy scent still on my

hands

and the marigold petals will begin

to light up our summer salads.

I’m peering like a four year old,

peeking fingers through the fence,

waiting for the beets to sprout, as they should

while I look on

They whisper, "Nothing doing. I don't belong to you.

I am not your play thing. I am the great earth."

Majesty is happening under ground, and

I have to praise that.

I must give thanks unto

the worms, the feeders in the dark

who quietly, discreetly, till the soil and nourish

while nearby seeds also quietly, discreetly, creep out of their casing

and push with noiseless childbearing cries and

bear down into deep roots, reach arms up in love to the sun

To the bees committing their altruistic ritual:

"Serve the world, serve the world."

I must give praise to these little ones,

inside my doubt, inside despair

Inside the death and death and death of cells

Inside cancer, hunger, murder and space

the unending explosions of atoms: 

Praise.

To the mustard, the broccoli sprout,

the fruits of the great earth.