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June 23 - June 24, 2023
It’s easy to look at the contours of a forest and feel a bone deep love for nature. It’s less easy to remember that the contours of your own body represent the exact same nature. The pathways of your mind. Your dreams, dark and strange as sprouts curling beneath a flat rock. Your regret, bitter as the citrus rot of old cut grass. It’s the same as the nature you make time to love. That you practice loving. The forest. The meadow. The sweeping arm of a galaxy. You are as natural as any postcard landscape and deserve the same love.
If you are awoken by a strange sound, make a stranger sound. If there’s no response, congratulations. You are the monster now.
The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be an ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument.
To invading germs, you are a jungle full of hungry tigers. To your gut bacteria, you are a warm orchard of perpetual bounty. To your eyelash mites, you are a walking fortress and a mountaintop pasture. How many generations have you hosted? What do they name the wilderness of you?
Our blood is red because of the iron we inherited from the Earth.
Our blood and breath are hand-me-downs.
You are not born to this place. You are born of this place.
Don’t fear you won’t be good enough. Just be here. Present in this dance between joy and sorrow.
It’s too late for you not to matter.
Your thoughts are spun like cotton candy from flesh and electricity
When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself. And then writes about it.
The good and the evil are happening concurrently. The choice to focus on the good is itself a way to defy the evil.
Our goal was never safety. Our success is not measured in forever. Our years are seasoning, but the meal is meaning.
It wouldn’t be poetry without you.
The fossil is the stone’s memory of the bones of the animal.
Our muscles are prompted to grow by failure, healing from countless micro-injuries.
If you can make peace with the unlikely fact that squids the size of school buses patrol the dark oceans at a depth that would crush you to paste, then I have faith you can also make peace with the unlikely fact that you are worthy of all the happiness you have imagined.
We all know facts that are as inert as chalk dust, but some knowledge is medicine.
You are a wonderfully messy thing. An impossible thing made of salt and rainwater. Meat and electricity. A dream with teeth. You’re too good for perfection.
You comprehend death and make art. You are a surpassingly strange animal, worthy of study.
We borrow our atoms. The universe owns them. The universe borrows our love and wonder. Those belong to us.
Our fingers are built more for feeling than fighting. Nerve endings prioritized over talons or claws.
The universe is an event, not a place. Don’t seek to own. Witness.
Iron in birds’ inner ears helps them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field. In other words, the birds carry within them a piece of the Earth, a talisman, which speaks to the Earth and whispers its knowledge back to the birds.
It’s all still here. The forest, the mountains, the desert.
Truth and fact are sisters, not twins.
This world is not here for us. We are simply fortunate to live here.
Every memory is a ghost and the house they haunt is you.
Your moments deserve the same careful attention as your years.
You are nature and nature will go on, but there is kindness that only you can choose to bring to the world.
The old you buzzes around your skull like a bee in the kitchen window. Don’t swat it. Be kind.
We bury our remains in the soil of our lifetimes.
To worry about death is to forget that we, the moss, and the mountains are all part of an undiminished whole that isn’t measured in breaths.
