broad arms.

There are times when there seems to be little to say. I know there's nothing to say, you reassure everyone. The path is long and you don't always know where it will lead you. The path is long and sometimes you must go it alone. The path is long and it is also very short.

I don't know terribly much about Natasha Trethewey, but that she is the new poet laureaute, comparatively young, and has something beautiful to say about patience and art.

"I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened and started writing what I knew, even then, were really bad poems. It took me nearly 20 years to find the right language, to write poems that were successful enough to explain my own feelings to me and that might also be meaningful to others."

Love is good and compassion makes the broad arms that hold us all. I am quite guilty of forgetting that. Sometimes we need to be those arms and sometimes we need to let them hold us. Say I love you. Say it again, again, again, again, again. Never stop.

death shudders.

There are some places that I live my life in. There are a couple of offices, the kind with humming fluorescent lights and fans and refrigerators. There are trains, the cars on the red line and the orange line and the green line. There's the bus home at night. There are low-lit rooms, a bedroom, a kitchen. And for the time being, these are the places that I am living out my days. There will be new places, different places, other places, coming days. I will carry some things along with me and others I will lose.

The clouds broke just now, just outside my window, and it has lightened my mood. The clouds have been very dark here, for days it seems. I saw a pink sunset over a church and I felt a little peace seep into my bones.

I have always had a strange relationship with place. I have always been desperate for it, but I'm never able to quite own it. If that doesn't make sense, I'm afraid I can't explain it any better. If it does, then our souls have the same longing and that makes me feel a bit less alone. And hopefully you the same.

What is strange is the goodbye. When I leave a place, I feel the same deep sadness each time. It is a sadness fueled by knowing that the next time I see those features, the landmarks, their light will have changed. I know well the feeling of looking at place where you were and knowing that you won't be there again. When my own sense of loss is so fierce, I often wonder how anyone can say goodbye to a childhood home or a place where they have lived for years. Perhaps it's only because I can't imagine it.

be here.

Some while ago I read something, I can't remember where. A post on a blog or maybe an essay. It was about fear and this reassurance: Anything could happen, but it usually doesn't. I've been letting my brain chew on this thought for a few weeks now.

I carry a lot of fear around with me. I don't usually acknowledge it to myself, or even anyone else. I am afraid of losing things and people that I love, afraid of people dying or abandoning me, afraid of them abandoning themselves, afraid of change and the unknown and feeling out of control. Usually my fear is something I push back when it surfaces. But lately it has been fighting it's way through, sharp pricks and wet eyes. I am forced to confront it every day and I am confronting it now head on. I am tired of living with the constant expectation that something evil is just around the corner.

Over the weekend, I read a piece in the latest issue of Poets & Writers that was about writing as healing and discovery in the face of a spouse's death. I read the first sentence, "On the night my husband died..." and immediately the black hole opened up in the pit of my stomach. Death, there it is, looming over me and everyone else I love.

funerals & clasped hands.

I walk by a funeral home every day. At least twice a week, there's a crowd outside, gathered after a funeral. I stare those people down. I can feel loss and death on that corner, underneath my fingernails, creaking in my elbows and knees. I dwell on those people, perhaps too much. The loss of another human being, a life, someone who was loved. I don't want to see, but I can't turn away.

In return, I also devote myself to beautiful things,

Such as this wonderful wire sculpture by Gavin Worth,

crazybrain.

I have been turning my brain over and again, trying to sort things out, trying to make some sense. I have things to say, but when I start to type, my eyes glaze over a bit, maybe I black out for awhile - then I look up and see nonsense all over the screen. Probably because today I have crazybrain. Do you know the feeling?

My mind is full, but almost violently, like thoughts are ricocheting against the inside of my skull too fast and hard for me to hold onto them. It happens. Sometimes life overwhelms us, sometimes for no apparent reason. It happens.

I used to feel the desperate urge to write at these times, but I was completely paralyzed by the chaos, by my inability to organize the thoughts and make sense of them. I have begun to understand that I can let myself ramble sometimes. There doesn't have to be an order, there doesn't have to be an end-product. So it's weird and you sound crazy in the head - so what? The process of writing, even if it's a bit wild and frantic, can be it's own sort of therapy. I read this book about a year ago. The lesson I took from it: be kind to yourself and let the act of writing your story be a way to heal.

It also has taken me some growing and learning to understand that exploring the depth of human feeling means sometimes you are afraid. Sometimes you don't understand where your thoughts come from, sometimes the brain doesn't make sense for a day. Just let it be. There's nothing wrong with you. If you're a thinking person, you'll have questions you can't answer and feelings you don't understand. Just let it be. Keep thinking; plumb the depths. A human being is a piece of work that doesn't always make sense. Just let it be.

I won't share all of my wild and frantic freewriting, but here's a piece from today. No prompt, untimed.

I have crazybrain today. Why am I scared of losing people? It takes over my head some days. I don't like it. I hope I'm not the only one out there who gets crazybrain and who calls it crazybrain. I mean, I started crying at my office. At my office. Do people really do that? I know that if I want to go anywhere with my writing I have to take the leap and cut the veins open and just put it all out there but I am afraid to do it, being so vulnerable, afraid people won't love me and yes, I'll admit it, sometimes I want to write because I want people to love me and acknowledge me and acknowledge my experience. That is something to say. Get it together. Get it together. There are hard things in life. We all know this - some dwell on it more than others. I am obsessed with loss, in particular the loss of people. I know it's weird. I'm especially obsessed with thinking about how people deal with the loss of other people. The feelings that they have. What are those feelings like? What do those feelings look like when you close your eyes? What do those feelings taste like? What color are they? I feel like a zombie my eyes are glazed over don't know how to get the words out days so long days long days long blankblankblankblankblank. Ok, here's what I really need to say. It's fear. It hurts to lose the people you love. You'll survive because people do, but it would hurt. But the more you let yourself love someone, the more it will hurt when one day they're gone. That is a terribly morbid and depressing way to think and I don't believe I'm doing it consciously. But it's there. I'm living for what-comes-next instead of now and I don't mean to and I don't like it. Ah man, I am crazy in the head today. What the hell. Loss loss loss. That woman's blog, the one who lost her husband suddenly. The woman at church who's husband died in a sudden accident. The sign on the door of the hair salon, "Closed: death in the family." Seeing the face of a woman who has just lost her husband. Those feelings must be the most acute form of loneliness. To be known by others is a very deep human desire and to have it fulfilled and then destroyed, to know that everything you shared with a person is now only known to you, man that is human suffering. And here's where I get hung up: it happens all the time, everywhere, every day. People lose spouses, fiances, girlfriends, boyfriends, parents, grandparents, children, friends. It happens and people pick themselves up and carry on. They get out of bed in the morning, they walk the dog, they go to work, they come home and make dinner. And yes, some people have that great holy thing in the dark that they can reach out to in fear, and maybe that helps and maybe that's the point and maybe that's why we have it. It happens all the time. What the hell. Write it out.

Yes, I am scared to show the crazy thoughts. But it's good to know we aren't alone. It's good to talk and to talk about hard things. It's good to be with other people and to let them inspire you.

There are bad things in the world. There are also good people. It's important to be reminded of this often.