Little Weirds(15)

I started to understand how to move away from near-misses with dead pink meat and into the live animal world, getting wild and gentle kisses from better animals. Instead of asking the old questions that sounded like “What is wrong with me?” I would start asking important questions like “What if I only dreamed gardens, what if I ate carrots because what if I were a pleasant rabbit? What if I got a crown for doing nothing but being who I am, what if even just one plant said hi to me or a tree bashfully bowed as I walked by, what if my dog knew what I meant when I wave to him? What if I could always be a little bit on this island in my mind? What if I could always be a little bit naked, a little bit kissing everything, an unplundered trove of my own love?”





A Prayer

As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love.





I Was Born: About to Bust

I was born on the boundary line between cold and hot, at the intersection of the two elements that make a clap of thunder.

I was born at the time of year when the sun wants to warm the earth but the winter has frozen it almost to the point of permanent frigidity. I was born when living things remember to wake up again. I was born just when you think that birth won’t happen, because it has been cold for so long.

I was born on March 25, at the outermost reaches of winter, between the end of cold and the beginning of thaw that spreads out into warmth and richness that both is inevitable and requires patience.

I was born at exactly the time when anything alive is saying, “LET. ME. BURST! Let me get to the most beautiful and ornamental and essential version of what I can be. Give me space to bloom and present the blossoms to an ecosystem that will drink from my nectar, celebrate my petals, sniff me, pick me, take me home, make your body smell like my lovely scent.” I was born during the moment in the cycle when almost every single live thing is inclined to mate, to grow, to point a snout skyward and sniff the air, to create.

In the very grooves of my being is the desire to bust open, and the certainty that it is right to begin to live again even after long periods of cold and darkness.

I was born a hospital baby in Boston, Massachusetts, at 11:17 AM, and I was choking on the cord that connected me to my mother. I was born and the first thing that happened was that I was made free to live. Then I was loud. Then I never wanted to go to sleep.

I was born and I was a baby and right then, the crocuses were trying to come up and there was still snow.

I grew up a little bit and I tromped through still frozen woods and I would see the little crocuses pushing up and I would be so thrilled to see them, and so achingly worried about their survival, about them being killed, or not having the hardiness to live through the night. It always seemed that the crocuses did not know what was best for them, that they had put their heads up too early, that they were too fragile and wouldn’t admit it, and that they had come up when it was still dangerous.

Are they forcing it? No, somebody always needs to go first. I know this. I go first.

I was born in the time when crocuses show that they are holy because they are fragile but excited to pop up and they are brave enough to wave the flag of the change of season. There is a recklessness to that thrusting up. I contain that in spades, as they say.

A few weeks after I was born, the apple blossoms exploded with sleeves and sleeves of perfect pinks and there were wild daffodils in the woods, sprouting as trios, and pond-shaped areas of lily-of-the-valley that smelled so good that it would maybe almost hurt me because of how much I wanted them to be there.

The pretty things gathered to live just as I arrived.

We would cut whole apple blossom branches off and bring them inside. Bring that wildness into the house! That billowing fragrance, bring it in on fragile boughs with green inside of them under that thin bark!

I was born and everything in nature seemed like arms reaching out. I was born and the wildness from outside put itself inside of me. That wildness was my first baby spirit food. I sipped it right down before I drank milk from my mother.

These are the events that put their sequence in my bloodstream, and so I am a creature of this realm that rushes up and out, at the start of the spring.





Nice Things to Do for Tipping Yourself Toward Gentleness and Simple Joy

Go for a walk outside.



While you are on the walk, if there is a person with a dog, look at the dog and say, “Hi!” Say hi to the dog first. And then look up at the person and laugh—a small three-bubble laugh—and say, “Hi,” kindly, as if they know that their dog is great and you know it too, as if it’s normal to say hello to the dog before hello to the person, as if it is normal to say hello to a dog at all, as if the person and you understand something together. You don’t have to decide what that thing is. It’s about the feeling and the feeling will most likely be there, and the experience begins and ends with that.



Put on very fancy classical music and make yourself sit still and listen to it. Say the names of the different instruments to yourself in your head. Horn. Violin. Harp. Cymbal, baby! Now, of course imagine the orchestra and the instruments and use what energy you have left to imagine different animals playing the instruments. Break a few rules. For example, if you want, a horse can be sitting in a chair or playing an instrument that obviously requires fingers. It doesn’t matter. It’s fake. But the feelings that you will have when you think of the thing will be real feelings.