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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

To wreckage and back again.

To gutting and back again.

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

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.

Despair: The hummingbirds have left. Joy: The white-crowned sparrows have returned.

I just got really excited about a cute pill sorter.

My heart is a grenade.

I love the land. I’m just tired of being with it all by myself.

Here we are in no-time, living with what seems sudden and what’s been moving within and between us for years, decades, generations.

Now, there aren’t even fireflies to distract and enchant. There’s only darkness, even in daylight.

How slow and fast it feels all at once: both like a river carving a valley and like a blinding cataclysmic event.

All was hope and promise, soft-bodied and flashing.

Words buzz through the air like the fireflies I watched for hours on summer nights in Oklahoma during my childhood.

None of this is right. None of this is love.

Some processes take so long time is imperceptible. Some events occur so quickly even words like “instant” can’t capture their speed.

I find your orientation toward time unhelpful.

May we hold each other’s shame with care until we realize there is no shame. Our delicate shame. Our gentle shame. Our terrified shame. May we gather around our collective shame like it’s a heart(h) where we can meet and greet it for what it is: s(h)ameness and name(less).*

* also known as love

My dog smells like the desert.

Currently, in Utah, people are screaming about California condors being released in the state. They don’t want any more “Californians” here. Sigh.

Sure, you’re free to denigrate one another, but why?

A short sentence came to me suddenly, as if uttered from afar.

I dressed and groomed myself gently, as if I was tending to someone else, someone I dearly loved.

The gorge was below, just as I knew it would be. The gorge that is a fact. The gorge that is an emotion. The gorge that is a process.

My MRI earlier this week reminded me of telephone dail tones. I’d completely forgotten about that sound.

It was all a sea: the river a sea, the sand sage a sea, conscience a sea that surrounded me, that surrounds every living being.

Remember when we didn’t know if someone had hung up on us until we heard the dreaded dial tone? We’d wait, hoping it wasn’t so, then the signal would start: callous, cold, indifferent.

One thing I won’t do: Go quietly.

I saw two cups and, in my haste, mistook them for a single cup. In my mis-taking, I divided my perceived single cup and suddenly had two cups again. But they were crucibles. Contaminated and useless. Each half couldn’t contain anything, not even contaminants, without the other. We are ore. We are bright, sometimes. We are chlorinated, sometimes. We are isotopes, sometimes, that glow hot like embers, like iodine-131 or it’s cousin, I-123.

Then the bots started controlling the narrative.