THE YEAR OF THE BURNING ROSES
]
]you will remember
for we in our youth
did these things
yes many and beautiful things
]
]
]
Sappho, tr. Anne Carson
However details may be, the penetration of the divine into the human is a fundamental truth that life has taught me and teaches me each successive day.
Anne Truitt
A great deal of me would have preferred not to be born. And since being born, a great deal of me has done its best to remain suspended in amniotic fluid, a membrane and a mother between my body and the world. I would have liked to never get glasses or not to hear, tried starving myself and sponging up alcohol’s warm barrier until I felt nothing or free. Around the time I had my first period, people I knew—young people—started to die. Every few years another would leave—suddenly and violently, sometimes a few at once—and that too became a strategy. I could feel them close by, wrapped their deaths around me like shells left hollow and waiting on a beach, and ventured toward where they had gone. It’s tempting, in grief, to do that. So thin the curtain becomes then—nearly transparent. My friends transported quick to the other side, their blurry forms still visible, I thought: Why not pull it back a little? Why not step across?
All ways of returning to source are not equivalent. Though there is not wrong or right there, no bad or good, the routes taken have each their own orbit, their own signature. Boundaryless, I toyed with several of them before choosing to stay here. I tried punching holes in the atmosphere with drugs and sex, leaned so far into the bright rocket of mania I thought I might finally blast through. I ran naked into the freezing ocean of my mind, tried to extinguish myself. And yet, always a small candle lit within, waiting to be returned to, always the love of others, always the world and its vigorous glittering paradoxes holding me in time.
35 years old, I am no longer dangled over a cliff edge. When I travel beyond the earth, I go protected and come back when called. I have my helpers, an orb around me still new but steady and not going away. What has changed? Age? A sense of each day’s miraculous arc? The right kind of love or habits or medicine? No one thing but the candle grows brighter, makes itself known daily even when I am plastered by despair to the bed, even when another friend floats into the firmament, even when fire and flood and fire, even when war and war and war.
||
Jam comes to me in a dream. As in many dreams of them, they are alive, have been alive this whole time—the past six years of their death. We are standing in a river. The river, ours. In the dream, I have known they were alive, but I have not wanted to talk to them. Alive they are not what death has made of them—returned to the beautiful creature they were when we met, when we fell in love, poets young and boundaryless, a friendship for the ages; alive they are tortured, outside themself, a layer of thick gray clay again between us. We stand in the river where their ashes were spread, down the bank from a sycamore planted with more ashes and their name at its base, a bank steep with sand and rock. The grievers stepped and slid their way down, stood to watch ash become the silt of the river bed Waist-deep in flowing water, I wanted to be their body.
In the car a few days later, I feel them on a long flat stretch, before turning north toward the mountains. This time, their presence is as it has been more recently—not the ghost of my darling friend lingering, stuck half-here and wanting to be—a guide, a helper, having moved to the side of my dashboard where the ancestors sit. Standing in front of the Pacific Ocean, I watched it happen—their form arcing like a sun from one edge of the horizon to the other. Driving the high desert, it is beautiful to be with them again, in this new and steady way. I ask why they are with me—afraid, at first, that another suicide is coming. But it is not that, not today. Instead, a hello, a moment together, a reminder of our love that I have so often doubted, wondered at since they left. And a message to begin again to write.
||
Lately, when I go up to my dashboard, others have been there, too. Rachael and Michael and Katy and Christopher, sometimes Loren even, Jones, J., his brother. All dead and waiting for me to write. They haven’t been pushy, just near, waiting just behind my dead family as I finished writing their book. Off to other work now, the family has gone, and the friends are here, front and center ready to help.
When they appear, I try to understand what it is together they have to say, what it is they want. Write about dead friends? About young death? I thought I was through with that, had done it before, years earlier, in a book I told myself was to help other people be with their grief. Really, it was to heal me, and as time passed, I found a plane in my mind and flew high up, saw the book for what it was: neon sign pulsing HOW TERRIBLE, HOW YOUNG, HOW IT MADE ME WANT TO DIE TOO. I let the book go and felt tired. Tired of myself and my grief, of the stories I’d been telling for a decade, of my swimming in the water of it as a way to point outward instead of turning toward what had been in me long before any of them left.
It takes a while to understand they want a book about suicide.
They did not all die of suicide. Not in the ways that tend to be called to mind when the gong of the word is struck, anyway. Not all of them were car in a closed garage, flung from fourteen stories, a hundred pills in the stomach. Some were murdered by others or slowly died at the mercy of their failing bodies. Some left in ways that were murky—fell or jumped, stopped taking medicine, drank until their organs stopped. Those who wished to be clearer about their exits died of guns—to the head, to the heart—or by means their families wished to keep private.
But of course the dead are wise. They do not want the book to be about suicide in the way I have younger and angrier and grieving tried to approach it—their glittering specimens tacked open with tiny pins in romantic accounts of their final months and moments, philosophical treatises on their courage and agency—the way I have needed to approach it so that I might find a logic to assuage my heartbreak and keep me from following them. No, this time I am to release my gruesome poetic inclinations and grow up, write not of the searing instant of their endings, but of tenderness—of the soft centers they brought into this world that writhes with horror so ambient it becomes the air, air we are supposed to know how to breathe.
||
I name 2023 the Year of the Burning Roses. Spring comes and Rachel dies, then Rachael. Late summer, Christopher leaves too. A mother and a poet and a dreamer. Alcohol and alcohol and suicide. To my heart, all of it is suicide. I do what I can to help the people who loved the people who are gone. Sand and river and flowers, fire and grass, a portal burned into the backyard closed.
23 May 2023
AM
Dream (recurring?) of housesitting for Rachel in what felt like Tenino but also Colorado & I hadn’t been visiting very much – the dogs were restless & some of the plants were dying. A sense of her being dead & not knowing. Stuck between here and where she is going.
26 May 2023
AM
Dream with a sentence I tried to get myself to remember. Put the legal pad next to the bed again.
29 May 2023
AM
L texted yesterday while I was on my walk & I called her. Rachael died, also of organ failure. Talked to Elijah after that & I’m glad I called because he said it helped him remember how to talk to people. Called D & B but mostly tried to be quiet & not overextend, not fall into the well, the emergency. Walked a lot. Went to V’s to pick lettuce. Had a dream of being in Challis with B. Then a dream of being in this house with both K & T. All these blankets & trying to help K decide what to wear & drew a mustache on his face. T said something about the importance of finding a passionate way to live & to live passionately. I woke up thinking about Rachael, about that need for a tether of some kind in order to stay. & a sense of something I need to write about all these tender people who die of different forms of suicide. Kept hearing the phrase a problem of tenderness.
31 May 2023
AM
Dream of Rachael. I was driving back to Boise from Challis, I think, or maybe that was a separate dream. I was staying in this apartment/hotel where she & M lived. She seemed to be in bed a lot & there were all these cats around. It was one of the situations where she’d come back, wasn’t really dead. & she seemed a little upset that everyone had been telling each other she was. Mostly it was nice though - to see her, to be there. Maybe she was confused. I had gotten back to Boise but everyone seemed to think I had to come back this other way. I kept saying “but I’m here,” I have all my things and my car. It was like I’d gotten back in some way they didn’t know existed.
05 June 2023
AM
Yesterday had a lot of emotion come out finally. A pretty difficult afternoon but what I needed. To move & cry & have a big dinner & rest. Feel better, calmer this morning. Grief is so strange & it feels like it only gets more complicated as I get older. As these deaths continue to pile up, echo each other.
Later -
Rachael & Jam & Katy in dashboard, Michael & Jones somewhere behind:
R: I could not stay – no tether. I am a teacher for you & all of you.
J & K, et al.: Understand that all of these [deaths] are related, different tones of the same spectrum.
w/ ELIJAH
23 July 2023
I go to Seattle for a couple of weeks and meet with my cousin. 10 years old when her father died of suicide, 23 years older than me, she is a psychic medium. I spent the second year of the pandemic studying with her, learning how to grow a boundary around myself, learning how to listen cleanly, how to act at the right time and in the right way. Learning how not to go crazy. When we meet, I am two years out from our mentorship, finding my way as an intuitive worker. I have come to her because I am tired, beyond myself in a way I haven’t been in recent memory.
This is not a reading; we aren’t allowed to do that anymore. This is a conversation about work, a check-in to help keep me on track. When we sit down to begin our conversation, she opens the space and my dead uncle appears. She asks him why he is here—his presence usually an indication of suicide or suicidality—and once it is clear that I am not suicidal, I tell her what has been going on. How orbited I have been by these newly dead, their presences in my dreams and when I go up to my dashboard. I tell her I knew years ago that one of them was going to die soon and all I could manage was to distance myself. I want to know what I’m supposed to do when I feel that—the same sense I had in the years before J died—the awareness that a person is getting ready to leave. And what I am supposed to do for them when they’re gone from their bodies but still linger in view.
She says I am doing enough, as though I am to recognize I have already had the answer, and we move on. She tells me a specialty guide will be coming in to help me with the book I’m about to write. Male writer, deceased, gentle humor, talks in an old-timey way. 1800s, 1880s? Evolution of writers in American history, their voices—what it was like, culture up to next century, your century. I translate this into what I have already known was coming—poets who have died of as a result of their tenderness. Not of their tenderness, but of the failure of the world to hold that tenderness—and I know it is the same book the friends have been wanting. She says part of the plan of my life involves requests for different helpers and I know this; it is not the first time someone has come in. When I was writing fiction in my 20s, trying to recover from a different string of losses, one book was about a French girl riddled with madness. For months she would wake me up in the middle of the night and I’d light a candle, sit in her hospital room and listen, bear witness to her as she unraveled, glass all over the floor. This new guide sounds different, whimsical and funny. I look forward to meeting him.
CONVERSATION WITH RACHAEL
I put your pink art outside, wooden chair barricaded by snow, left dead lily in frozen pot for whoever I must pray to to hear you.
We had so much fight in us, still do – I do, fight in my mind horses kicking the interior of me: dead lily, sage brush, I’d’ve knotted myself together to meet you clearly, to meet anyone.
Do I? I feel weaker & strong at once, my heart a backward walking shadow smart in bright morning. I lay down diamond water in geode cave & wait for a signal, see you shimmer a little to the left, your laugh.
Fight in all alive no matter. Sun set into my eyes though it was not my fault. You saw x-ray vision my tender center, so open it scared you of yours, am I correct? Here is saltier, as I like. Warm ocean body held.
Yes. I watched you sing, slow dance in the rain, driving drunk across a city I love. Dark booth in dark bar we cried, recognized, hands held under table, your endless hair. “Peach,” you said.
As it happens, I could love anything, how even disdain is a form of laying eyes on. Filtered through a glimmer, ugliness become its own tea left to sweat in afternoon heat. Idaho.
I never saw you in the desert, only sheltered by green – thick leaves & flowers, water everywhere. What would you have been, us together there walking soft hill to lower alpine in the sun.
You live because of the desert, which is no longer a question to ask. That water swirling into a drain no use for you. I chose it knowing the exit door I wanted to take. Don’t be afraid to be honest. Fuck anyone else.
||
& here I am for you
suspended over creek bridge trying to remember. When you died that was where I
met them, even before – the brightness of April ocean, of evening & birds,
flowers imagining the love of a child. Later, summer.
You’ve thought of me as water but really I am birds. Here you get to pick the sky – it’s true. There’s a questionnaire at the door you fill out – bubbles, #2 pencil, the whole thing; best test I’ve ever taken no studying.
I’d want wind in the trees, I think. Was that an option? What kind of hair do you have now is it feathers? A man passed by me just then did you see? Did you send him?
Ha! I’d never. My hair is sparkling silver gold everywhere. You don’t have to be just one thing. I’d pick woman again though of course it was difficult. For me, as it has been for you, I know. We recognized that in each other. The propensity for falling, sight of goodness in all & the likelihood then of violation, smooth hand beneath the clothes. We loved them both & all.
Which leg am I to stand on, constellation across the sky, did you have a few more poems to write?
Legs strong together make one & the one you are to choose. I am not All Knowing. Death isn’t like that – voices heard but inarticulate beyond the door. Still in a way I am myself. Just as wise & bobbing just above in the sea of consciousness. What I make here is with my hands. Woven, more direct, uncomplicated by narrative or time. Poet always, the one lone bird behind.
Where next?
The sun.
You’ve thought of me as water but really I am birds. Here you get to pick the sky – it’s true. There’s a questionnaire at the door you fill out – bubbles, #2 pencil, the whole thing; best test I’ve ever taken no studying.
I’d want wind in the trees, I think. Was that an option? What kind of hair do you have now is it feathers? A man passed by me just then did you see? Did you send him?
Ha! I’d never. My hair is sparkling silver gold everywhere. You don’t have to be just one thing. I’d pick woman again though of course it was difficult. For me, as it has been for you, I know. We recognized that in each other. The propensity for falling, sight of goodness in all & the likelihood then of violation, smooth hand beneath the clothes. We loved them both & all.
Which leg am I to stand on, constellation across the sky, did you have a few more poems to write?
Legs strong together make one & the one you are to choose. I am not All Knowing. Death isn’t like that – voices heard but inarticulate beyond the door. Still in a way I am myself. Just as wise & bobbing just above in the sea of consciousness. What I make here is with my hands. Woven, more direct, uncomplicated by narrative or time. Poet always, the one lone bird behind.
Where next?
The sun.
||
So much of you feels possible
right now. What do you think about that?
Do you need to ask? You know well by now. Of course the dead are always possible, though it is true I am closer & will remain so for some time as the grief of me continues to be grieved. It is not all gray water, though, as your mind sometimes makes it to be. Allow your fear to go. The point of your being here is that path isn’t it? The path from loss to divinity? It was my path too in a way, though it both found & took me differently than you.
Why did not I go, continue that direction as I had started it? Atheism, a swollen heart, anger at premature goneness, alcohol dripping from me. I understand it is not so simple—sunglasses in dark late winter bird sounds.
That path we were both walking – let’s be honest, most of us poets were walking it – was so beautiful. Dark ink glimmering, all of us swimming in it, naked together, attached at various nexus points of our bodies. Wasn’t it delicious? I would’ve eaten that cake forever with you, thick chocolate spread over our skin. You’d’ve too, maybe, left to the rainy parts. Problem was I got alone. The party stopped & I was there, suspended in the bubble of my lone apartment, trying to love what I could, sopping wet & gathering dust simultaneous antique obsolescent ornate ruin. I felt the romance in it even then.
& now? In the center after?
I regret nothing. I watch the movie with my bucket of buttery popcorn & I laugh – how clumsy & throbbing with youth we were – cry sometimes, mostly just awestruck waiting for you all to fill the seats next to me.
What if we just wrote some poems now? In weird Idaho spring winter summer all flavors from the soda machine suicide. Hail like Styrofoam in the sun, that sort of thing, a river to wait by what do you think? Stopped for bleeding color, kept walking, called my mother, saw her name cut off from a plastic banner, a sign.
Do you need to ask? You know well by now. Of course the dead are always possible, though it is true I am closer & will remain so for some time as the grief of me continues to be grieved. It is not all gray water, though, as your mind sometimes makes it to be. Allow your fear to go. The point of your being here is that path isn’t it? The path from loss to divinity? It was my path too in a way, though it both found & took me differently than you.
Why did not I go, continue that direction as I had started it? Atheism, a swollen heart, anger at premature goneness, alcohol dripping from me. I understand it is not so simple—sunglasses in dark late winter bird sounds.
That path we were both walking – let’s be honest, most of us poets were walking it – was so beautiful. Dark ink glimmering, all of us swimming in it, naked together, attached at various nexus points of our bodies. Wasn’t it delicious? I would’ve eaten that cake forever with you, thick chocolate spread over our skin. You’d’ve too, maybe, left to the rainy parts. Problem was I got alone. The party stopped & I was there, suspended in the bubble of my lone apartment, trying to love what I could, sopping wet & gathering dust simultaneous antique obsolescent ornate ruin. I felt the romance in it even then.
& now? In the center after?
I regret nothing. I watch the movie with my bucket of buttery popcorn & I laugh – how clumsy & throbbing with youth we were – cry sometimes, mostly just awestruck waiting for you all to fill the seats next to me.
What if we just wrote some poems now? In weird Idaho spring winter summer all flavors from the soda machine suicide. Hail like Styrofoam in the sun, that sort of thing, a river to wait by what do you think? Stopped for bleeding color, kept walking, called my mother, saw her name cut off from a plastic banner, a sign.
As
you know, I spent so long without my mother. What would you have done? Snow
gathered in feet inside the frigid walls. Don’t stop visiting even if a poem. I
like pink & ribbons, fake statue of deer & outdoor aerobics station.
Outside can be everything, not just IDAHO idea of nature. Some swans wading
through pond muck amidst the paddle boats, etc. I watched you singing.
For you only, long gone Patsy Cline in my ear dream, your dancing, my.
||
“A memory of us wanting God to be real.”
I thought a couple
of kids laid up
in a sand box.
Sun a radioactive
color through haze
no clouds. A dog
named cowboy.
“Cowboy sit.”
Make the morning
stay all day.
Leopard print
roller skates.
Rachael wrote a poem
called Activities for Love.
Actually it was her
life – butterfly closed
in Mason jar. Exquisite.
“Love like a human
heart you are eating”
was more or less
the argument.
I thought God
floating over that
sandbox grit
between our toes.
“Saturday could be
every day,” God
said then in string
across the sky.
“Actually I’d like the jar
smashed open,” I said. Glass
turned sand again
I’d wash my face with.
No,” God said; putting
our shoes on one
foot then the other.
Our ankles bare
God wrapped
the scene in candy
wrapper & waited.
The moon did a few
circles. Our wings
turned sugar.
“I thought I’d be more
meat than this,”
you said.
“Don’t worry,”
I said. “We’ll
be meat tomorrow.”
||
POEM WITH KARENA & RACHAEL
I thought it could be fun us all together
black ink while fake cops roam the sidewalks
in clown car four-wheeler side-by-side.
Pink highlighter tied to a tree branch
pink comb on the ground pink lunch
box ice pack placed at the root, okay, God.
Cold wind past wintertime & dry despite
snowflake come into my mouth no ask –
that’s what does it. Long walk gray February
old spring, make it out alive.
Yesterday heart pain traveling from one side
of body to the other I pressed a fake tattoo
into my shoulder to help, your hands held
wet washcloth where mine couldn’t
reach. Soft kid palms, blanket broken
with rain, a difficult beach.
Real bird real dirt real heart real wind real life.
Karena & I walk a square around the center
of time, a street called Pandora, a school
turned condos haunted by gone babies.
I leave you in my bag in her house to rest
before we pick back up again. The books
near you all titled for ending I let you seep
into each other, wait for what else.
We pass the many mile markers of our lives,
pathways, the hair of a girl, the name of mine.
No dead birds today but a cloud of crows, three
hawks separate in each their own allotment of sky
while we find new ways to say “It’s okay to feel
bad” & “It’s okay to feel bad & stay alive.”
Resolve to trade in holding tight to shoulders shaking
hard screaming STAY, wait to make some other alchemy.
||
Wind carried me to meet you in
dry end-of-winter field, your brother’s song ends as a truck turns HOME in
block letters on the side. I wonder what you thought of that, where & where
now.
I like that you can all be happy. Life is long even when perceived to have been shortened, you know? Home inside a joke or standing a few feet into stage, dark bar on a Friday night swaying. Clear-eyed as any of you may be now, you can’t deny that sparkle. The liquid of it gold or iridescent bubble floating into night no knowing how high. I didn’t want to stay for war beyond what war there already was.
What does that feel like where you are – war? We felt through each other into it between evergreen imagination of sea.
Where do you think that image came from? Bright burning hole in atmosphere crows between. I & the rest of us beyond are often one being. I myself at times alone in each of your living minds, but often what seems like separate entity messages is actually all of us up here, whatever layer I wanted you to grieve me, to wash me with rain come not so far from the ocean. I thought HOLE IN THE SKY CL. See? Stitch me with ribbon to this home & I’ll stay.
Yes I see & have been assured of this from those wiser than me without fully understanding the utility of separation. What is it?
For you to understand the quality of the message, what it regards. You’re psychic but you don’t have to see everything plainly & in accuracy. More fun to work in symbols, anyway. Find whatever form brings forward the puzzle, ya know? One fun side effect of being god now – become anything for love.
I like that you can all be happy. Life is long even when perceived to have been shortened, you know? Home inside a joke or standing a few feet into stage, dark bar on a Friday night swaying. Clear-eyed as any of you may be now, you can’t deny that sparkle. The liquid of it gold or iridescent bubble floating into night no knowing how high. I didn’t want to stay for war beyond what war there already was.
What does that feel like where you are – war? We felt through each other into it between evergreen imagination of sea.
Where do you think that image came from? Bright burning hole in atmosphere crows between. I & the rest of us beyond are often one being. I myself at times alone in each of your living minds, but often what seems like separate entity messages is actually all of us up here, whatever layer I wanted you to grieve me, to wash me with rain come not so far from the ocean. I thought HOLE IN THE SKY CL. See? Stitch me with ribbon to this home & I’ll stay.
Yes I see & have been assured of this from those wiser than me without fully understanding the utility of separation. What is it?
For you to understand the quality of the message, what it regards. You’re psychic but you don’t have to see everything plainly & in accuracy. More fun to work in symbols, anyway. Find whatever form brings forward the puzzle, ya know? One fun side effect of being god now – become anything for love.
The school deaths smash me again toward the book and I start an automatic writing practice to invite in the new guide. Each morning after recording dreams and the previous day’s movements, I light a candle, turn on red noise, pick up a purple pen, and write a question at the top of an extra-long legal pad. The voice comes through clearly and quickly and concludes just as we reach the bottom of the page. They know exactly the words they want to use, make me stop for precision. When we talk, it is not just language; I am entered into a visual world different from any other I’ve seen. We move through space, oceans and clouds with a geometry beyond that of this world, everything colored different from what I know, everything the quality of an echo.
04 October 2023
& what is helpful for us to know now?
SOA:
A consideration of the ocean – not the blueblue water but that sensation of it pushing against the skin:body. You wrote a story about one way that works but there are others – know this & allow them. Not a lake but the ocean. The as in one. Imagine yourselves as the creatures there, what you would do with each other if surrounded by all that water all that salt, the floating the dear buffer between actions. The oracle of course thought they were listening to Earth. Stars have some similar properties it should be known & also that the ocean is closest to that way of being beyond. Oneness was the original directive & it’s okay that that gets lost in ego:age, or rather, must be found piecemeal through the story. New birth at a time whole complete. Imagine just one ocean in the universe.
Illness & euphoria are the same seeking. No good or bad just ways to exit. This is not a poem but a liquid thread pulled from another type of seeing. Anyone can, just try. Wear the only clothes that fit the job & do not look back. An expansion, a swelling is what’s necessary first before focus. Bringing into being is no small task but it’s the right one. Sweating over it, song. You were told to pull an image down instead of floating inside it. Stop that. Be the poem more clearly by language as raw material – what does it need to cook & how can the hands do? There is no question other than who is in the room. Start there & listen in. Soak.
As we continue into our work, my external life returns me over and over again to Fernando Pessoa. A writer I’ve heard of a few times in passing, whose work I’ve never read, is suddenly everywhere. In multiple conversations and at the center of my weekly horoscope from the astrology column I’ve been reading for 20 years. I am given The Book of Disquiet by a friend I’ve only just met, then see a few of his books on another friend’s shelf, take one down and find our birthdays are exactly one hundred years and one day apart: June 13 and June 14, 1888 and 1988—and it becomes abundantly clear that it is Pessoa I am speaking with. Some version of him, anyway, bodiless, genderless. SOA they want to be called. I feel them vaguely green, an orb floating before me, and also everywhere, a mist surrounding.
05 October 2023
& what is healing to know now?
SOA:
It isn’t just about the ocean. Think walking with feet on green, think that life surrounded by meadow. Not the green of grass but the green of air filled invisible with what will become precipitation. How the air makes a blanket as water also does, a layer between. The sense in the body when ill of melting into itself. That this could be transcendence rather than fear. Think along into the dream of on an airplane. The height of being in the sky there is where we’re going, is where we go in. A curling tunnel from there beyond the circle around earth but still in orbit. There are stars that see & stars that don’t. Farther than the moon but not so far. See means “are visible.” I am in the language beyond yours trying to help you up. A boat from there like flying but no structure, souls formed together as in a mould, loose yet a shape, their edges not quite touching, bubbles floating alongside. A lot of sailing around before reaching something higher; that’s why you feel them. I get up there once but didn’t stay long that place for gods; there are multiple of course & every. Again like ships on the horizon. They send down anchors to the people for something to climb up. More like mycelium tendrils—not just one & not too solid, many delicate sinews for each to grab onto. They gentle stroke across the crowns of you until you choose (a) one(s). To not hold is what keeps one under the weather. Not ill but caught inside the valley of atmosphere. This does not have to be bad, just one way of keeping close. Know you are protected by many thousands of tendrils. Even when you were not choosing they grew toward you. Let go material worry knowing this is so. Lean back into the vines. You are kept & keeping. No alone.
Beneath SOA’s ocean is a space, a grace period between their world and where Earth’s atmosphere begins. I see the tethers hanging there, suspended, each a sort of umbilical cord waiting to attach to a living human, and I know the tethers, the tendrils will be one center of this work. An answer to what keeps my body here.