Christmas Reconstructed

So the deep freeze has set in. It was the first true winter night the other night, with the sky glowing white and the snow not drifting, but rather on a mission. I'm walking quickly and carefully, trying not to spill hot coffee on my mittened hands. Smoke hangs frozen over chimeneys and the cars look like they are breathing along with us in this night air.

I can't help but wonder where spring will thaw me, but that is still so unimaginable from here, one foot in front of the frigid other through crunching snow and humbling wind. How can anyone get anywhere like this? How do they get anywhere from here?

Somewhere right now is having a heat wave. The thought of it pisses me off, but with the seasonal vitamin D deficiency, a lot of things get my ire up.

Back at home, chill still in my bones, I'm wrapped up watching ancient Christmas specials, a modern tradition as true as wrapping paper. I am conjuring the days when I myself set out cookies and really believed they were destined to bwecome more than a late night snack for my folks. I remember laying in bed, unable to sleep, wishing for sleep, dying for morning, listening to the radio chart the course of the tiny sleigh it had spotted in the sky. I am curled up here in my stiff, cold, adult body, trying to induce memories from a time when snow was a hobby; a reason to rush home after school, white gold to burrow through, climb on, no sense of cold or the looming darkness. I am excavating my mind for the sound of ripping paper and the smell of fresh crayons, and my heart for the thrill of all those bows and all those toys, and the warmth of a holiday meal only my Jewish grandma could do right.

And this year I am lucky enough to have not a pocket of presents, but rather a closet bursting forth with moments I am grateful for, people who fill me, and tiny fractals of commercialism carefully selected to make those I love smile. And underneath my cold, tired, adult body I do have a childlike heart overflowing with hope and gratitude, and despite my shields, and in spite of your surprise, I do feel joyful even through the commercials, and the weather, and the family politics. So I am sorry if you can't see my spirit, and can only see my elbows out for two whole shopping days left, and I'm sorry if you don't believe it because you've heard it too many times over too many years, but regardless of faith (this all has as much to do with Jesus as it does with pancakes), may the season fill you with warmth and smiles and hope. And may you share that with everyone.

Open Letter To Lost Love

Oh Love,

those were good times. From the delicious moment I met you that fall so many memories ago, through years of transforming together – we are wholly new as we stand here now, and even then, not as we predicted. We have proven, my dear, our own lack of future gazing, but I will keep the snapshots we painted over with our plans, and I will place them under plastic – no, glass – for the perusal of future generations, romantics and rubberneckers, and yes, for my own guilty viewing of our tapestried past.

In exploring myself here to give you this goodbye, I find tucked away all the things that led me to love with you. Never have I met a tongue so sweet and sharp, or a spirit so steeped in inarticulable truth. And I cannot discount how you loved me, or whatever you want to call it, as part of the equation. The way you lit up when you saw me sparked my soul. And beheld by you my dear, I felt immaculate.

But growth is funny and it often leads us away from what we thought were our dreams. The infatuation had its fling with us and moved on, gone to seek more unsuspecting targets I assume. Still, when I call on that part of me that longs for someone, misses the touch of someone or the sound of a laugh, there is a hollowness there. And when I wonder where to place my excess love and affection in your absence, I disperse it into the sky and hope it goes where it is needed.

Though I still hold you near, and though I still hold you dear, I know that this is a profound goodbye that I never meant to write this way, but sometimes we can only write so much of our fates.

Thank you for the memories dear, the candy, the pictures, and the lessons too. May you be filled with and surrounded by love and may your smile always be real.

Best wishes,

D.

Scream

The ancient mystic poet Rumi once wrote something to the effect of: we don’t meet the love of our life; we have carried them with us in our hearts always.

The shaman warriors of ancient Mexico believed that death was their constant companion, the silent witness to even their most menial task.

Whether it is soul mate or eternity, the gods and goddesses we have created and forgotten over the years, or the ghosts of those who have passed through and are waiting to pass through again, I have felt that omnipresence. I have felt the cameras trained on me in the rain through my night-time soliloquy, and felt the presence of a director, intent and silent with jaw clenched as my various dramas explode into climax and silence. I have fallen asleep sending prayers to faceless princes and princesses, dreaming of them and their solaces and knowing they were only an encounter away. We have all known the shared smile with a stranger that says just briefly, this moment is ours and will always be, or the penetrating look from someone you’ve never seen that suddenly says “I have known you; or could”. I have felt the silent he, she, it, the eternal death lover it may be, flee from my questions, built from my klutzy language, only to return in my times of quiet to whisper the wisdom it wishes to share across my skin and envelop me and my fear.

And somewhere in there is the subplot of our existence, the esoteric aspect of things that seems so intricately crafted that we can hear the laughter of the guide at our side, and we know that whatever we may call her, it is utmost that we befriend her.

Myself, being an extremist of poetic proportions, say we should celebrate this sweet being with the fervour we normally reserve for orgiastic summer holiday weekends. I want to throw lotus petals at the feet of the Warrior Princess. Oh nomadic mystic, oh fantasy slut, I want to take your goddess, god, om self to my breast and make you my queen.

Let us all then send some laughter and lust and heart wrenching emotion into the universe for all that we cannot see.

Scream with me…

Lover's Plea

First I want to say that I'm sorry about the typos in my last entry....seems the intricacies of editing still elude me, but I do promise to get the hang of it. But that is neither here nor there, and not nearly as important as my newest entry, my Lover's Plea....

I want to feel your proximity on my skin. I want to watch you drown in passion and I want to know that you want me to drown too. I want you to run free and wild through the jungle of my hair. I want you to sit across the table from me in awe and desire, enthralled with both my spirit and mortal vessel, obsessed with wet memories of last night and this morning.

Dear Lover, I plead for hungry kisses along my thigh at first morning's light --- the needy pull of your body to mine. I crave stolen moments and lusty glances, and a call to create a universe within our intimacy and ecstasies.

I throw myself Lover, from my pedestal to your ears, from my longings to your loins. I cast my crafty spell and air my sacred plea: Lover take me.

Autum Meanderings

I wake up and dedicate my day to the sun that presses on, ignored today beyond the dreary clouds. Just outside the trees drip art like fireworks now, as the geese, who often know better, take their leave before it's too late. I'm trying to build a fire in my heart to burn through the pending season of isolation and light deprivation (and it looks as though it will be a long one).

Autumn always proves to be dipped in nostalgia. Soups and schoolbooks and crunching leaves, and I think it is often that that we cry for, though the promise of ice, and flu, and the loss of legs under layers of cloth may be valid enough reasons. So I am burning a fire built on the seemingly vanished passions of days gone by; steamy jazz bars and the art of seduction, the care of artful language when all the words seemed new. I kindle the fire with smoke filled rooms and torch singers, and in the memory of the blinding flames that burn inside even silent revolutionaries, I will add flowers in rifles and the lonely torture of chasing endless dreams.
To all those on this journey with me, may this fire warm us through this season.