this life...
This life. Oh this sweet glorious, difficult, heart-breaking, delicious, magical, mystical life.
Human existence is bizarre. So many things to do, to see, to feel and they all come and go passing through our heads, our hearts, our bodies, as quickly as the illusion of time ticks across our watch’s second hand. If we even have watches anymore. If we even believe in time. Our own time and not time on someone else's standards. Time on apple’s standards. Time on our husband’s standards, our wife’s, our children, our uterus’... So many fleeting things to miss when we are all so involved in the thinking of life, the deciphering, the figuring out. Sometimes it feels easier to just sleep or run away or disappear. And sometimes it is. Sometimes the weight of things feels too heavy to bear.
Sometimes your 17 year-old cat needs to leave her Kitty body and everything else falls away and all that you find left in the depths of grief under mountains of unrelenting tears is the most human question that ever existed. The question that every single human that came before and every single human that will come after has ever or will ever ask. A question that has undoubtedly existed since before there was a language to understand it.
Why? why? why? why?
It's not logical, it doesn't add up the design of this place. What sense does it make at all to be here and do these things and know these people and feel these depths of emotion and connection and aliveness if it's all just ultimately going to end? They'll go or we'll go, right? Eventually. And we don't know what comes next. None of us can really know what comes next. We can't even really know what comes next in waking life let alone our dying one, and so we grasp and bargain and plead and explain and lie and confer and sweat and bleed and cry and cry and cry.
And then we see her bright blue eyes in a moment, in a fleeting memory, a glance, and we feel the weight of her purr against our chest and even though we know on one level she's gone, on a deeper level we know she's not. And if you asked us whether we would give up the 17 years to not feel this pain, this empty space in our heart, this longing, we would say, never.
No. Not in a million years, not for one nanosecond of illusory time. Nor would we give up those stolen kisses from our lover even though we wish there were more. Nor one second of the beautiful mess that was the alcoholic love of our lives. Nor the years of longing that our parents would get back together or the wishing that our aunt hadn't died. No we wouldn't give up any of that or any other pain-filled second in between.
Because woven through every part of that, in every molecule and every thread, in every breath of our lungs and beat of our hearts, in every blink of our eyes or bat of our lashes, in every turn of our smiles or trace of our tears lives the thing that none of us would ever dream of trading in whether we admit it or not. whether we know it or not. And the fact is we can't. trade it in. it's impossible to trade in the very core of who we are. And so we keep going, we march on, we get out of bed every morning god bless us and and we do it all again.
And we dance. And we sing. And we laugh and cry and scream and dream and create and destroy and rebuild over and over and over again. And we question the unanswerable and look to the stars, the oceans, the dirt, the sun and the moon for answers. We look to each other and for fleeting moments in spite of it all or perhaps due to it all in sickness and in health for richer or for poorer, we find it. We find it in lovers, in children, in sisters, brothers, in best friends, in strangers, in pets. We find the answers and we find ourselves. And for fleeting moments we let ourselves know who we really are.
Today is the day to celebrate that exact recognition. Every day should be the day to celebrate that exact recognition.
And if you can, hold onto it as long as you can. Hold onto the feeling of your aunt's hugs when you were four and skinned your knee. Hold onto the feeling you had at the dining room table laughing with your married mom and dad. Hold onto the feeling of your heart exploding while kissing through the bars of a rhyme with the first boy you ever loved. Hold onto the feeling of being held by your alcoholic boyfriend in the sober morning's light. Hold onto the feeling of your lover’s adoring eyes and touch. And please please hold on to the feeling of those white furry paws on your skin, the feeling of that sweet wet pink nose sniffing your tear duct to wake you up no matter how early it was.
Hold onto the silent truth that screams in all of these magnificent human moments. The silent truth that things like endings can not erase or undo. The silent truth that you will take forward with you in every moment until death do us part and then after that.
You know love. You are love. Everything is for Love. Everything is for you. Everything leads to love. Everything leads to you. Even when we think it’s being taken away—even that most painful and bittersweet of human confusions holds in it a return to the truth. Perhaps the most sacred return. But in the end it’s all sacred. Every single moment from the glory to the gutter. From the agony to the ecstasy. From the coal to the diamond. It's all worth honoring, It’s all worth revering and so are every single one of us.
This is a strange and wonderful place and whether we think we are operating under someone else's standards, apple’s, our wive’s, our children’s, our husband’s, our bosses’, or even what we think is our own….there's really ever only one and it is for that one that I am eternally grateful, eternally grateful for the all of it.
So... Happy Valentine’s Day every day. Happy You-Are-Love Day. Happy so am l.
This life. Oh this sweet glorious, difficult, heart-breaking, delicious, magical, mystical life.