March 21, 2022
Equinox, and me so tight in the grip of this intense yearning.
I want with all my heart to experience a big, booming rightness in us, as humans. A miracle of laying down of arms, of dropping our programmed, distorted behaviours. I ache in every cell of my being for us to be kind, to be tender with each other without having to prove anything. To connect with shared self-respect. To listen and hold the cherished possibility that our perceptions can shift, that we can understand the world differently.
This is the same miraculous impossible strength it takes for a plant to push through the pavement and bloom, for a tree to remain rooted and standing in gale force winds. It can be done, it is possible to love like this. We can love each other – stranger and known – like this.
I want the hard protective shell of my heart to crack open and fall on the ground. Like compost. I want to walk among other humans with my heart open and without fear.
The Hut I lived in for a few summers was on the edge of a big field and completely off grid. How liberating it was, to live in a place that had no wires, no hum of hydroelectricity or furnace, no plumbing. There was colour in the daylight hours and the golden dance of candlelight after the purple hour of dusk. Before cellphone flashlights and laptops, I listened to night sounds like a lullaby, bullfrogs, crickets, wind through the trees and the hay.
The Cabin at the shore has tree frogs, crickets and wind through the trees, and the voice of waves on rock beach that ranges from tender to relentless. I bring batteries there but the lights that plug in to them are too bright for me to listen in the soft lullaby dark; I rarely open my laptop, write with a pen by candle light, my heart open and quiet.
It is spring, 2022. We’ve been through a great deal on this planet, and now the covid fear has been quickly replaced by war fear. Except that we are focused on the people, more than the war. The people who have been forced from their homes, like other people are forced from their homes all around the world, and we are helping them. We are learning to think, and act differently.
It is spring, and the seeds that have dropped between paving stones are waking. A yearning to root and grow so intense it cracks open the hard shell and exposes all that is tender inside.
Powerful tenderness.