When we live through our deaths, we are reborn. When we live through the deaths of those we love, we die. Repeat. Repeat. Ad astra. Ad nauseum. Ad infinitum.

Because love is ruin. Love is ruin. All love leads to despair and back again to love, a Mobius strip, topological.

To wreckage and back again.

To gutting and back again.

Love scoops us clean and makes us more, more than whole, overfilled, stuffed.

Love is like just like that. We don’t have to know why. It’s precocious. It’s in the garden right now gleaning fallen pomegranates so others can eat, even birds, even slugs, even you.

You’ve no choice if you choose to love. It does not tip the emotion wheel to one side, the one you like. Joy grows its roots in hell. Jung said that, or something like it. And grows its leaves in heaven.

Yin yang. Here there. One space that is t/here. I’ve said this before. All of this before. BeforeAfter. T/hereT/here. LightDark. YinYinYangYang. Chitty chitty bang bang.

No binaries or even trinaries. One. One. All one. AllOne. OneAll that reduces to our single sound, our collective O.

O of want, that old bone Pinksy saw on the shore of his imagination. O of openness. O of passage.

O as in zero, which is all, not none. I’ve said this all before. BefOre. Don’t you feel it here in Southern Utahm in our ore? Or …

Nevermind. I don’t mind. I tried here. I really tried.

Take a little ride on my donkey, which is my surrey with the fringe on top, which is an American Airlines ticket and my seat in its belly. Don’t wail. I’ll be alright. We all will.

I’m going home. I’m going home. Oklahoma, I’m coming home.

In parting, try to choose love. Because without it? What are you and what is anyone to you and why are you even on this glorious, broken Earth that we all need to share and share alike, not just with each other but with all living beings, all lands holy and desecrated, all trail leading out and out, away always away, but also back again.

Wherever you find yourself, even if you find yourself lost, you can always map your way back with love, which is greater than any one man.

Amen.