it's all for you

I totally lost it on my birthday two weeks ago today. Think, full baby cry on the ground. It was intense, ugly, messy, full of truth, chaos, constellations of heartbreak and frustration and it was totally amazing - it may have even unlocked this very writing I'm doing right now, I can’t say for sure, but something did.

I cried as though I were made of the ocean. 

I cried for the impossible nostalgia that I fail to prepare myself for each year that wells up like a tsunami, and then I drown. The memories of joy, loss, fear, bravery, freedom, abandonment, connection, magic, laughter, innocence, pain, contentment, the ways in which each have nestled into my bones, or is it how they've taken to the ether around me? Time as the captor, as the container. The gratitude for it all which can only be measured by infinity, like the horizon, not ever really knowing where it begins or ends. The time I hitchhiked on the back of an old red pickup truck from the edge of a tiny fishing village in Costa Rica at eighteen, where I had been living alone, into the jungle and safe bungalow of a kind soul. How she fed me and listened to me, how it was a full moon, how we howled and danced, and how nobody, except her, ever knew about that moment until now. How nearly fifteen years later I went back to the very same place and had the urge to disappear into the memory of that certain galaxy of freedoms, so powerful, that it nearly swept me away. How there was no reason and every reason to worry, and how from here, everything is sand.

Because memories are their own afterlife, and are as much paradise as they are disaster. 

And now nearly ten years after I returned to my life as it was beginning to resemble now, I write into the echo of a new moon in Gemini that calls us (me) to communicate from our hearts. How I go mining the channel between me and the world for the words to hold us close. And then also, today, it's Luna's second birthday which fills my heart up with emotion so primal and so proud that I want to tell the world about what a precious fate it is to have a person like her in my life. My teacher who brings with her lessons on magic. Born at 5:24 am, the memory of her birth waking me up just then today, so I could trace the folds of time with my fingers before the sun rose above another day. I do all this while winding around an uncertain terrain, as we do, finding the path of most forgiveness, because, what I've learned best of all so far, is that love is the anchor, the levity, the gravity, the ground and limitless sky. It's the sick and the tonic, it's all we need and also can be so hard to have. 

I don’t know, I’ve spent a lot of time in this life trying to get it right by the desires and ideas of others to find that I am so bad at it; I don’t conform well. Like, I generally feel like an alien when it comes to standing in line or filling out paperwork. But what I am learning to traverse now is the field from which our memories and our present moments collide in our collective pursuits to connect, grow and create. And to trek with self-love, compassion and the allowing we need to be our best selves, perhaps not all of the time, but at the very least, often enough so that we can look back in order to look forward while feeling it all, and sometimes, we will feel more than just fine.

Happy Birthday, dear Luna. I love your light and I love your dark.