Monday, with sun through the windows

To the group of teen girls in my shop, on an August Monday; the day school starts for the year:

I love your banter. You've long-since finished those drinks I prepared for you. And for the last ninety minutes, you've sat laughing, and recounting your day.

You excitedly trip over each other as your stories about AP History, or Kevin from homeroom, or the cafeteria drama, escalate. You throw back your heads with laughter and find every reason to garner another smile from your circle.

You sound like a bunch of chickens. But don't stop.

I hope to God you are all as confidant in the hallways of your school. That you will walk with your shoulders thrown back after graduation. I know you might not see it now, but you are careless with your laughter among the circle of friends. Your conversation is too innocent, too loud, to hold mean secrets about others. It is freeing to see.

I hope you maintain this poise, I hope acne or embarrassing social faux pas, or the words people might say to you, don't change you in a negative way.

May your conversations always be so boisterous.

May you remember these moments as you age, may you continue creating them, too.

A lovenote

You lie suspended between the worlds of "if" and "are". A polarity between perhaps and definite tangibility. And there you sweetly rest until all the shortcomings of this physical world, of my own mortal incapabilities and every reason you cannot be here now will part ways to allow your miraculous entrance into our lives.

I will never be ready for everything you will bring with you, and at this moment I have never been more ready for you. Perhaps as time elaspes it will bring with it enough grace to further fortify my strength for you. What I do know is that surely you are coming, for how else can it be that my heart misses you with such a deep love and breathlessness, though I have never held you in this lifetime? It is as though your first lesson to your parents might be that of patience. I must believe we'll get you here in time, however long it might take. We're ready whenever you are, too. There is so much for you to see.

April 11

On the eve of our nephew born I imagine you might be scared,

thrilled,

perspiring,

anxious. 

Ready. 

Am I right? Are you any of these?

Exuding creativity in its ultimate form, your body made a child. 

And soon I can imagine holding him, bundled.

Skin soft and hair like one thousand pieces of thread

meticulously aligned against the sweetest, smallest scalp

as the tender weight of everything that makes a human is easily held in the arms of another. 

Welcome to our world, Cannon James. May you think, be loved, find peace, and astound us. My hope is for all of this and more to be yours, and perhaps in the most surprising of ways, too, should you find some luck at the turns. 

As the day awakens

What of the disappointments from this life do we reap?

May they not bring to us only sorrow (but certainly that in order to later be enamoured by joy) but also a remembrance of themselves we might carry with us. And not to dismay, but to remember. Perhaps reminders close to our hearts, maybe a string around our finger to convey of us the inevitable human fallibility but moreso, resilience. These are things unseen that we carry with us.

We carry with us these invisible tokens of our journey and choose to share at our discretion. Reminders, memories of loved ones lost, of failed attempts, of disappointments encountered. My prayer is they augment us to a deeper character. May we not become brittle and stone-faced in their wake. 

And furthermore, may our unseen joys be equally as wrapped around us. At the end of our journey through life, may the rich imbalance of love and peace against strife exist. 

Moxie

Tonight I toast to those of us who were invincible in our youth. Us for whom the stars glowed overhead at night, the katydids singing to us to late into evenings spent searing dreams across our hearts. We glowed with wonder at everything we could do. Our lists were as long as we were tall and no tired adult would tell us that what we wanted could not be acheived.

Tonight I want to brandish that spirit back into our thoughts and to cease its service as merely a blanket of memories keeping us warm; that we might not yet, not ever, forget the invincibility of ourselves in which we believed; that we might find a way for our then to elbow its way into our now. 

May we once again be rich with wonder,

to find ourselves with the time to lay against the blades of dewey grass and be, 

to forgive our pasts,

knowing that our shortcomings and our failures in this present time were always meant to be a part of us; that they have the capacity to shift our spirits and yet may we not disparage of ourselves because they exist. 

Perhaps we will realize the best parts of our ethereal selves and seek not to provoke the wounds. May we realize a strength of spirit instead. And may it be there we seize life, unfeigned.