The Beating of My Heart

All is well. Just sharing some pictures that make me smile. They are beautiful to me in their fierceness and stregnth.

I am incapable of leading with my head instead of my heart. That will mean higher highs and lower lows that at this point in my life seem to have very sharp edges. This is nothing new and it's not likely to change. The only promise I can give you is that I'm unlikely to write about it again. [and there was much rejoicing!! yay! yay!]

-To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.

-Anna Louise Strong

Backpedaling

To Have Without Holding
Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

I stole this from Oh the Joys. It was just too beautiful not to share and every time I read it, I speaks to me differently.

Yes indeed it is hard to love wide open. To have and not to hold.

Perhaps I was scared and went looking for trouble.

"I believe it is possible for two people to look at the same thing and see things completely different."