You Are Here To Love
Each Thanksgiving, if I can, I like to go for a run down at the beach. While H walked Carter Cash along the beach path, I slogged through 1.3m alone. I'm considering doing #mileaday just to get the blood pumping over the next 30 days. But, we'll see, I don't want to set my sights on anything that's too ambitious.Don't let these picture fool you, our life is not perfect, though we both felt pretty good here. H and I are going through a shit time, but I'm choosing to feel safe, to focus on the good, to settle into the cracks of grief and let the light shine through.The ocean view was so clear. My legs can still carrying me along. I wrote a bunch of cards to send out to people who are hurting and who are supporting us as we hurt. I'm responding to loving text messages, taking hot showers and cuddling up in flannel sheets. I'm letting H cook our Thanksgiving dinner and he encouraged me to spend time today playing with paper, printing photos, writing. (Did I mention he's the best?)So I'm sending love out to everyone - whether you're grateful, happy and stuffed full of turkey goodness, or you're hurting, depressed and this holiday season is sucking so badly you'd just prefer it be over before it even starts.---I sent an SOS to Jill last weekend, knowing she would have words that cut to the heart, that don't tip-toe around the crap, but look you straight in the eye and acknowledge how you're feeling so completely, you wonder how you could ever live without literature and the friends who know just want to say. So I share this quote with you here, in case it helps you this weekend:
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP
We are here to risk out hearts. Yes. That beach run, listening to H cook in the kitchen downstairs, Sujan Stevens Christmas music on, a phone call with my grandmother, holding printed photos of our life together, sipping hot tea - these are my apples. I am loving, I am swallowed up.I am grateful, for all of it.xo