It’s the lies we tell ourselves that are most pernicious.
They course, like poison
through our veins

When we think of our hearts, we often think of romance. We forget sometimes that love is other things too

That in the next chamber over, the sky
the mountains,
and the way the trees sway
in the space between them
is a part of us too

That these things can move us in a way that’s different from the way people can.
That both are love connections integral to our experience Here

And if you could sail the waters of your heart, one chamber to the next, what might you find there? What landscapes would rise up from the core of you, to greet you, as your boat touched upon their shore? Which places speak to so deep a part of you that without them, you wouldn’t be who you are

Make time in your life to visit these places like you would an old friend. Not just in your mind, but out here where new adventures wait to be unfolded too. Get out there and immerse yourself in the world, the familiar and the new. Get so lost in the scenery that for a moment, you forget you aren’t a part of it. And take a piece of it with you when you go

There are chasms between what I know and what I think I know.
There are rivers where the light divides me, body from soul

and there is fire that leads me from my own heart
to the heart of you

Just like the sun can warm your skin
and seep down, into your bones
it’s words that can reach in and touch your soul

And I will paint
a beautiful world

I’ll write every word
that I’ve kept locked
beneath my tongue

to stir the color in your petals,
and the light inside your heart

I was born in springtime
many years ago now.
Before the nine months prior,
I was nothing

I did not exist.

It’s because of this that I’m certain
I haven’t always been Here

Which makes it hard to explain
when I’m sitting by the lake,
nothing but air and color
blue sky
blue water
the smell of everything
green and breathing
in the white of the sun,

that anchored in moments like these
I am filled with a different kind of certainty.
That this place has always been my home,
and I have always been Here to feel it

that I’m not part of one segment
that begins and ends
alive,
right now,
between the two dates
of my tomb

because I never began
and I’ll never end
and somehow,
I will always be right Here

When we lose someone, we don’t just lose them Here, today.
We lose every future day

People will say to focus on the memories,
the good times,
to hold them close and glowing, always,
in the crumbling chambers of your heart

they’ll say there will always be happiness there,
back then, where we’re still with them.
And there’s a gratitude that comes with that

But that is not why we grieve.
Memories are not what we lose when something ends
—no, that comes much later.
What we lose is the ability to form new memories.
The chance to refresh what will, now,
inevitably fade
No matter how reluctantly we hold on
No matter how deep we root our fingers
into wisps of images that will now
only degrade
in our desperate grip,
changing and corroding, ever so slightly,
each time we replay them in our minds.
Until they only resemble what it is we have lost,
what we yearn to relive, and remember.
Until their glow dims to a heavy echo
in those chambers of our heart

that is why we grieve.