On warm autumn afternoons we sit in the sunshine and put fallen leaves in our hair, weaving them in and out, trying our best to glow, to transform the sun’s rays into phosphorescence because we are star dust, after all. We laugh because we should always dress ourselves with nature, we should grow vines instead of hair, always expanding, reaching for more. Our legs are really trunks and our arms limbs, branches of waving fingers and follicles in the wind. Comet collections of amino acids and eyelashes, we were synthesized by the energy of Light and so why these skin clothed cells that can only absorb so much before we burn?

Nashville, TN 2014

On days that bring rain, we sit on our back porch and listen to the drumming of the water on tin roofs. We watch the wind bend without breaking, and ask Why? Our bodies shiver with the rhythm and the shaking and the mist until we can’t contain it, and we shimmer and stomp and howl until we sigh with exhaustion. And then, in the silence, we watch raindrops quiver on open leaves, vibrating ever so softly, never asking WHY? Nashville, TN 2014

      “If I’m a bird, you’re a bird.” We brush up against each other, we lean against the multitudes of gratitude between us, steady, humble. We have each other, we are each other. The present moment is infinite, there is no tomorrow or future to fear. There is only our breath, perennial and portable.

       Habitual worries struggle to manifest in the present state of joy and bliss. They have no room to take root, to predict the trajectory of grief so familiar and worn. Loss has no more power, there is nothing to lose when You/It/I are everything. This is IT. This is turning in circles so fast we are sitting still, this is flying through space in our sleep, this is alive and feeling and being. This is connectedness, community, carefree. This is blessed Uncertainty, cautious revelry, timid joy. This is patient Hope. This is blossoming consciousness rooted in Love.

“We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe…

What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.”
-Alan Watts

Chicago, IL 2011