Those of you who know me probably know me well. To further worry a worn cliche because the pain of its visceral image feels accurate, I wear my heart on my sleeve. My instincts developed when I was a very young child surviving the counter culture.

Those of you who know me well know that my pain and sorrow are close to the surface. I am a thinkingthinking, feelingfeeling being. My grace is often clumsy but I bear it and I walk with it. My optimism is pitchy at night, like yours. I am afraid when I am afraid, and immersive before I am ready, and I wish I would not suffer fools, and I do not suffer them gladly.

There are peaks and there are deep river valleys that are garbagefull in the most emerald jungles whose serenades sound like screaming sometimes, depending on an outlook, vista, veranda, lanai. Sometimes Honesty and Hiding battle there like giants I forget when I wake up. I dreamed a fierce hunter licked my lips and caused me breath at dawn, and the birds rotated singing around the corners of our houses.

Everything is nothing, including our cries and our laughing. Everything is nothing, including our bliss and our errors. Everything is nothing, including our ancestors and their code.

Everything is nothing, and the wound itself can heal our time together, and all the way down the long long line, and all the way up the long ladder of the stem, of the nerve, of the spine, of the dream, of the wound remembering itself and licking breath into being.