Letters to a World Worth Loving

A collection of poems and personal essays on remembering what it means to be human.

2021

In the Beginning -

In the beginning there was the Goddess and She felt such pleasure.

She was made entirely of nerve endings and where her heavenly form ended and the next line of atoms began, danced an electric beingness.

The atoms that comprised the emptiness made love to her and her to them.

She slept in an electric, pleasure dream.

“I love you” she spoke aloud, but the atoms did not have vocal chords. And although she could feel trillions of them saying “I love you too”, she longed for more.

What if I could create another being in my image, who would feel what I feel and then we could acknowledge it in one another?

One to commune in this euphoria with. My creating them will certainly be a gift. For how wonderful it is to exist, I do know.

And so the Goddess bowed in service to the Darkness. And conjured from their pleasure a likeness. But the likeness was not a replica, because her pleasure was not her totality. It was a portal simply saying “You exist”.

No, the likeness was not a replica. The likeness was much more.

The likeness was awareness manifest. A brilliant lightness. Staggeringly strong. The type of strength that is born solely from the act of a woman claiming her pleasure.

The likeness illuminated the spaces between them, the Goddess glowing luminescent in the likeness’ orbit.

And there were two. Darkness and Lightness. And so naturally they were dancing. With no way of knowing who was dancing around who.

Encircling one another in our first holy communion nonetheless.

Encircling one another in holy acts.

Seven Sacraments.

Heat, Tension, Energy, Calm, Cool, Rest, Becoming.

Generating and dispersing fragments of lava and rock and carbon and rising the birth of new molecules and formations of atoms dancing in homage to the Goddesses who they once made a bed for.

“We love you so much.” they danced, as they created all other living things.

Trillions of eyes and organs and roots and blooms and trombones and croissants and you and I on a porch saying “Love Will Surprise You.” as if it were actually a book about how we fell in love at the very beginning of time because it’s true- it’s where we all come from.

Becoming a Wave -

In my room in the sun’s light,

I do animal things.

I writhe around and push into warm spots

or melt-

pressing to melt.

I admire my wild body

its curves and lines

they glow

for me.

I turn my face toward the sun,

like all animals do. And the sun, she

speaks back to me

Slowly, she drips

a steady message

through beams of light-

they seep into my pores.

Organizing behind my exodermal sieve,

A call to become light. And the sun, she

instructs me as to how.

I try to tell others-

but the language is beyond me

all I can muster is “you are not you”

Meanwhile I am turning-

almost without effort

from a particle

into a wave.

Time is a Goddess -

Time is a Goddess who minds you dearly.

There is no emergency. You do not have to know. You do not have to decide. It will unfold for you, in perfect timing.

Time is a Goddess who minds you dearly. Trust her. You are blessed with the materials of space and motion. Cultivate these things. And one of them is you. Cultivate an inner knowing of yourself.

Even when rushed, frantic, and forced, you have managed to become (blossom). There is no emergency.

Homes within homes -

I am part soil.

I am part rain.

I am forming clay.

I am one thousand acres, taken shape and shifting still in every direction.

I am powerfully vast, deep and wide and expanding still in every direction.

I breathe this way, deeply and fully.

I speak this way, deeply and fully.

I love this way, deeply and fully.

I am rooted in perfect timing.

I breathe this way, effortless and playful.

I speak this way, effortless and playful.

I love this way, effortless and playful.

I am one thousand acres, taken shape and shifting still in every direction.

I am all of the hills, all fields, all mountains, all of the rocks and every crevice, all of the plants, every seed, moss, petal.

I am all of the rivers, all rain, all dew, every single drop anointing myself.

I am all of the insects, all animals, every wing, every paw, every tongue, every heart beating, every eye that sleeps.

I am all seasons, in an everlasting dance, each one birthing the next.

I am many dwellings.

Homes within homes.

Home in all forms.

A list of shiny things that I can see-

The disco ball at a roller skating rink, iridescent confetti streamers wrapped around the tree branches in my backyard, a wet pearl in an open shell, star, glass, my body in the sun, your body in the same sun, bodies of water in the same sun, a prism

Crow -

Even when the people are asleep

the massive dance goes on.

Do you wish to hear it-

the tongue of the crows

who gather daily in ceremony,

discussing at length- the Otherworld?

More than to listen, but

to believe them.

To know that they mind

the turning wheels

of giving and grieving, in this

cemetery.

Do you wish to taste it-

how the earth offers herself

to you?

How she offers you as well?

How you ripen and rot,

along with all fruiting bodies,

daily, lunarly, annually, and finally?

How small and vital.

Our River -

Gathering on the front porch

with its paint peeling

aged in the hot sun

we breathe in

One of us is cooking

something savory and deep

and the pleasant cat

curls itself at my feet

while I am sipping something sweet and strong

(like all of us)

One of us is hanging linens on the line

One of us is floating naked in the river

One of us is upstairs making love

One of us is holding a baby on their hip

One of us is laughing

One of us is consoling One of us is being consoled

In the evening we play music and

All of us dance

and in the morning

All of us are gathering blankets, books, and

baskets of fruit

for another day spent at the banks

of our river

3 -

There is a nightmare recurring deep inside of the collective unconscious. Unfurling towards and protruding from within the trillions of eyelids of all the living things that sleep.

It is an underlying entropy at the heart of all of creation and all that is unsettled is unsettled due unto it. All that fades, dissipates, pales, and decays, is a repeating, outstretching, fractal-linear expression of a missing piece.

It is the crack in the wall. It is the measure twice, cut once. Still off. It is the fear of the dark. A space that needs to be filled with something. Is it paint? Is it a monster? Is it a goddess?

The empty space is that one third is 0.33 repeating, two thirds is 0.66 repeating, but three thirds which is 0.99 repeating, we have called whole. We have called it one.

But three thirds is not whole. And 3 does not exist.

You might take a banana, and cut it into 3 pieces and say, but here are three pieces and those are three parts of a whole. And I would say, no, that’s a banana. It’s not a number. Three pieces of a banana could never possibly be equal. Look, that one is visibly smaller than that other one.

Sliced bananas, like all objects are representations of mathematics we’ve accepted as a basis for one type of functional reality.

When the Universe is your Muse, and your Gaze upon her is divine, then the mathematics she employs in order to propagate via her designed system that is Life, are, in a word, sacred. The numbers enact sacred roles, as if gods and goddesses themselves. Perhaps 3 is then, Batara Kala, Nergal, Titan, and Shiva.

The Fibonacci sequence, also known as “The Golden Mean/Ratio”, also known as the conch shell and the proportions of the human body, and the way trees grow, and the entire Universe itself, is: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, … and so on. This is the logic driving the fractal sequencing upon which all of creation is based: 0+1=1, 1+1=2, 2+1=3, 3+2=5, …

The creation sequence contains 3 as a fundamental building block. And if 3 is entropy, then everything beyond the number 3 in the sequence is subject to the entropy that it is once it has been consumed.

Therefore, only the numbers 1 and 2 live in a reality where nothing rusts or rots and also where nothing grows or becomes. Yet, they are the origins of both life and loss.

The sequence’s logic is that it propagates itself by making love to the number which precedes it. Making love to its origin in some act of gratitude. And then again, offering the entirety of itself to the number which is born from that previous act. The logic is generational, incestual, and exponential.

You might imagine our origin story as such:

“In the beginning, there was nothing (0) and something (1),

The something stared into the nothing,

And the nothing stared back,

In the act of gazing at the nothing,

the something realized its something-ness.

In that it was not nothing, and so it must be something.

And thus it was so.

Something was something.

And in looking at its own something-ness,

The something existed beside itself-

as an observer of the something it now knew it was.

I exist, said something.

This was the first act of making love: (1+1)

And thus it was so.

And, in some grand act of homage to that first love, the self,

Something turns its head in a direction it never knew existed,

For if I exist, you might too.

And there was something else, it was(2).

I will not be like nothing was to me, something said.

I will show you that I can see you.

Yes, yes you do exist!

This was the second act of making love: (1+2)

And thus it was so.

Something saw something else and something else saw something back.

From this, must come another something, they thought.

But what more could possibly exist?

We already have nothing and something.

Perhaps it is another nothing.

Then, we’d be surrounded by nothingness.

Perhaps it is another something!

And with uncertainty,

the conscious lovers both gazed together down the line to see what they had created.

There it was, staring back at them, as if it had been waiting for eons.

Not something, but not nothing, it was (3).

And 3 looked at 2 and said, with a smile,

You see me, but I am not really here.

This was the final act of making love: (2+3)

And thus it was so.

Everything after would be enacting a play, as 3 was merely a specter of a dream had by two lovers who could not bear the thought of being surrounded by nothingness, however happy they may have been.”

Only when a third dimension is introduced, can a thing truly live and also die from doing nothing at all but sitting on a rock. In this way, the first and second dimensions are dimensions before time, or at least, they reside frozen as if in crystalline. Or just, non-existence. Like before birth and after death. Some nebulous hereness which is void of time (anxiety).

At the very edge of that string of repeating nines, by which the number is unending, where any measure is captured upon itself, it is not a sum of its parts.

From here to there. Under or above. Us and them. Falsified categorization [comfort] of complexity [reality].

Rearranging items in an equation can change the outcome. The total sum shifts. An earthquake. A tsunami. The entropic fractal is more like, something seismic happens here, from some tiny empty space far away. Amplification. A wave.

If 3 is entropy, and a sequence containing it is the design of all dimensional and living things, then which number in the sequence is joy? Which is love? Which is irony?

It takes three quarks to form an atom. Quarks are our smallest known forms of physical existence. They each have ionic charges of either two thirds (0.66 repeating), or one third (0.33 repeating). No quark has a charge of 0.99 repeating. At our smallest, we are constructed from the heart of entropy, and will return.

If 0 in the sequence is no quark at all, then 1 in the sequence, is the first quark, and 2 is the second quark, and 3 is the faulty catalyst that allows those three quarks to form a new thing called an atom, still not entirely whole itself.

Then as the sequence goes on into infinity you might find you and I in a cafe in some strange city edging towards death because we are living. The plant on my windowsill includes sequence number 3,453,289,093,476,278. And if you have 6,783,900,211,675,738,937, maybe I have 6,783,900,211,675,738,936. So although I came just before, thankfully we exist within a long tradition of looking back in order to make something new.

Troves -

In the morning I walk

the shore covered

with shells,

some more broken

than others.

They arrive in troves-

after traveling long distances.

They arrive as if on holy pilgrimage,

as if with a prayer in their throats,

as if with a purpose.

They arrive-

after being in some perfect form for so long,

they arrive to return-

to be broken down again,

to become material.

To return to the mass

which minds the exact shape

of the place where others

will arrive tomorrow.