I have the answer for you right here.
In this book.
In this story.
In this poem.
In this dogma, political party,
Bumper sticker,
In this thing I heard on npr

I will leave it on the table
By your bedside
In the kitchen
In a conversation you might overhear
In a song I turn up on the radio
In the art I hang on the wall
In the food that I eat

But that is all I can do
To help you find the answer
Because it’s your question, after all –
And after all that I love,
And always will,
And always have,

What do you?

Soon comes the reckoning –
You’ve pushed it off as long as you can
You’ve had your cocktails 
And long winter naps 
And you’ve read your books
And binged your shows 
And you’ve swallowed whole tins of cookies and cakes
And now you stand with your hands over your eyes
Like a monkey emoji

Before tomorrow even comes 
The weight of it is heavy 
The days just grim numbers like your bank account
Like your weight
Like the number of hours in the day 
Like another year done and gone

Maybe you can skip it altogether with 
A countdown to summer, 
Or spring vacation,
Or a box of tissues and a tight grip on what you’ve already lost

Lets burn it all down; all our fears about what may come
All our grief about what we’ve left behind;
Put it in huge piles made of cartons and boxes and bills
Of wrappings and trappings and glitter 
Let’s gather in circles around great fires
Made of old regret and worn out decision

Let’s decide to love this life 
Wholeheartedly 
And engulf our worry in the
Heat of right now;

There is nowhere to hide in the open field
The only thing that will withstand the burn
Is the sky full of stars
And a heart full of wonder.

We’ll let the sparks climb up the darkness
In clusters and alone
Lifting us off the dread and debris,
And leading our gaze 
Somewhere new.

I bought pink tulips and put them in a white vase. I put the vase on the kitchen island.

And there it sits, surrounded by a half eaten bag of almonds, a crumpled ball of red foil wrappers, several used coffee mugs, a box of bandaids, a stack of books, a stack of dishes, a paint brush, a rawhide, scissors, sticks, salt, pepper, vitamin B12, advil, a half painted canvas, and a wooden bowl full of onions and candy canes.

It seems fitting – me trying to shove a bit of beauty into a chaotic and neglected world. It feels like where I am right now. Where my soul is. All fragile and pink and half finished and lost in a sea of debris.

My heart sinks with the weight of this ugly contrast. With the utter absurdity of pink tulips in a dirty kitchen. One or the other has to go, but I haven’t the energy for either. And since both are staying, I might as well stop painting the dividing line.

I look again and try to see the whole island as beautiful. To see it as a small city, where humanity lives in all its permeations; where diversity surrounds central park, and sidewalks are littered with surprise. Maybe the whole island is a work of art.

This idea seems a tiny bit huge to me. Because beauty lives in a white vase, or not. But art lives in the center always, from within one’s own place of perspective and intention and from the fragile pink of the soul. Wherever we place it, it belongs. Whatever we name it, it exists because we make it so.

The snow is falling sideways off the bay
So all the trees are two-faced;
Half with,
And half without —
Every branch on the left is white,
Every one on the right is not.
And every trunk claims one audacious stripe
By the grace and howl of humanity;
But each belongs to shelter and wind
No matter where in the woods you might stand.

Deep in the heart of it, beyond all of our history and experience, there is an untouched place where longing lives; where every single one of us return, at some point or another, either slowly or always. This place knows the secret of wood smoke and winter – this place is where we yearn to belong. We were made to; to live in village and tribe and cluster and to the stars and galaxies and worlds.

And while we yearn to belong to each other, we also must learn to withstand the wilderness, because we yearn to belong there, too. We relate to the single star; we search for a stretch of untouched beauty in order to reclaim ourselves and our place in it all. We know our experience is ours alone.

Yet in our modern isolation, if left to our own for too long staring at screens and talking across airwaves, we swallow ourselves whole, and become vulnerable to fear and negativity. Without sustained connection to our selves, and without true connection to others, we stand naked in a winter field, and the base instinct for survival breaks apart what makes us human, at the heart. We belong to nothing now, except endless icy depths.

And here is where fear gets dangerous and armies rise with hate; here is where we go when there is nowhere we belong; with no learned resilience to the elements, and no safe way across the great divide, we are left on thin ice, and grab the first frayed rope slung in our general direction.

We need more ways to get each to the other, and back again. This constant dance between distance and intimacy, between solitude and solidarity, is an essential part of the human experience, but we must find better ways than single-minded cause or isolating despair. There must be a way to hold the complexity of our individuality without splintering from one another completely or becoming blind to nuance and critical thought. There must be a way to belong without being bound to dogma or by our shared disappointment in humanity.

Are we truly either completely alone, or tethered to one another so tightly that we are lost forever to our own souls and selves? Are we either one, or the other, and in being so, do we splinter from the whole and stand in stupid absolutes that are illusory at best – and dangerous at worst? Is our entire world a political debate, a vote for this or that? Must we choose sides, or could we choose connection?

Why not unite from the place that holds us all – separately and together? From this ancient, eternal yearning within each of us, that belongs to only us, and yet also speaks to all of us? From this deepest, purest human desire to belong, we could span entire worlds.

Why is love so quiet, and longing so secret? Why don’t we call each to the other to say that we are here? Why don’t we let each other go in their own direction without casting them out for all eternity?

Why don’t we march toward something greater side by side, across bridges and frozen fields?

Why don’t we dream out loud?

In the winter at 5:00 pm, the emptiness is the worst. I feel a lonely draft in the corner of my heart. What I am missing, what is it I want, what makes me so sad?

Is it the gray and steady flatness of the sky and trees and field? Or the way the windows in the houses glow, while wood smoke and stars surround me?

Is it the way I feel dull and exhausted, even with Matt Damon and kettle corn and couch?

Is it the voice in my head, ever yelling and telling me I’m not half the woman I could be if only, just once, I’d get it right, I’d do it right, I’d stop being lazy?

Sometimes the world disappoints us; what it gathers around, what it gives back, what it does to hearts and minds and souls. Oh so far beyond disappointed, in the terrifying way we dismiss, diminish, marginalize, bully, cast out. The way we are poisoned by words and water and false and ugly prophet. The way we are harshly judged, and judge others, and judge ourselves. The way we drift through time, alone. And drift through space, without.

Sometimes the strip of blue sky at the end of a long winter day, caught between orange and steel, just isn’t enough. And as it narrows and lamps turn on, and TV’s too, and cars pull up to eat nachos and watch concussions and cheer for patriotism, I am sad.

Sometimes the world turns away, before it comes back again. In the dying light we see the weight of shadow, and feel the coming of the night.

Frozen grass, like the surface of a dead moon, stretches out across the field.
There’s still time before the planet dies white
But nothing can be planted
And nothing can be reaped

By standing in the groundswell of summer, with the heaves and hills
Left by tractors and time
Or in the sheltered berm
Where all the leaves are braced.

You’ve walked here before, you know every knoll and knot
All the twists you’ve wound around;
Where you landed first,
Where you fell.

And each rutted footstep marks where you used to stand
But you don’t quite fit now
In this unforgiving landscape
In this unyielding shape

Still, there’s a trail; a solid, hardened, toughened path
As proof of life
Like a wrinkle on the face of
Every early morning walk

Oh change, don’t obliterate my world!
And fall across the earth I’ve come to know
Leaving me snow blind and deep, where
Even the fence posts at the edge of space are buried!

Hold fast to gravity all that’s fixed and firm —
Infertile, yes,
But settled and solid
And set in stone!

Untether me from this frozen ground, where all my history traipses,
And I may melt into rivers and rains
And pour across the landscape
In a flood of the unknown.

They tell me spring will come and that others wait to welcome me
But first, you erase it all
and I’m left in the wild white
of change.

I don’t want to have a nice day.
I want to have a remarkable day, a passionate day
A life-changing day!

A day where paint flies like clouds across the bluest canvas
And I write a symphony
And a conversation with a refugee teaches me something entirely new.

These ordinary moments of bread and salt
Of snow and boot
Of curling dog and sun —

Help me to notice these
The way that I notice what’s missing;

Because I may not be curled under the covers in love
Or on a boat in the Pacific Ocean
Or wandering the streets of India seeking higher ground

I may not be planting a community garden in the city
Or building houses with Jimmy Carter
Or standing in a field while a thunderstorm brews

But I’m here;
Impossibly, remarkably,
Ordinarily
Here!

Wherever I am let it be new;
Won’t that change the world as well?