loss.

We cling to our personal stories...
Hold them tight to our fearful hearts...
And yet... my story is one of loss.
Eternal lessons of detachment dropped on my head like a skipping frame of this falling coconut, again and again and again.
I fall asleep with my chin resting upon an open page in the leather-bound book where I record my story... I flip through these smudged and worn pages saturated in words attempting to articulate my soul's rushing waterfall of emotion... Coated in salt from tears that have rolled down my cheeks and dried here.
One eye closes and I sing my shadow a lullaby.
The other closes... I urge myself to let go of tomorrow and thank my yesterday...
And then I sleep.
But the tides of memory pull me under and slam me against the jagged reef that lies below this seemingly serene seaside.
My words paint a mask upon my face reflecting OM, so you think I'm at peace...

So- do you really need my story?

I was born and then reborn
again and again
and I die a thousand deaths
and will die a thousand more and I fall in and out of love a hundred times a day, like my father...
I'm born by the sea, in the desert, as a gypsy.
All my earthly possessions torn from my clutching fists by the rage of an arsonist... And then by the scornful hand of fate...
And twice, a redish glow from the smoldering embers and rubble provided just enough light to lead me through the darkness...
And through seemingly endless claustrophobic, murky tunnels.
The only sound is an echo of my heavy footsteps dragging across the cobblestones.
The otherside of loss is terrifyingly empty and vast.
Clear like the day after a storm. A windex-d window I'm not sure I want to look through just yet.
But why do we fear space?
Vinyasa Krama means carefully placed step...
When we are gifted with space left behind, we hurry to fill it, topple into it with our old selves, versus holding the space. Sitting with the emptiness and deciding how to fill it in a way that can best serve us.
I believe angels are space.
They stand around us in a ring...
The intangible essence of those I've lost...
I've lost.
Our whole lives, she and I would laugh until we couldn't breathe... Her life was ripped from mine when she was blindsided, slammed by a police car flying silently and carelessly through the november night. Her last breath was taken, muffled by the sound of twisting metal and shrieking tires. I imagine it was a gasp... searching for air.
I've lost.
I would put him to shame when I'd make him arm-wrestle with me and win... Now shame surrounds the memory of that arm, and the last time he ever pressed a needle into it. He could never win.
I've lost.
We lived a fairytale wedding until we began to weave eachother out of the fabric we were sewing... And I found myself empty. I found myself colorless without him.
I have lost.
Countless friends departed, a lover lost, two homes destroyed, a lack of color.
A lack of color.
We hold the crayons to fill in these spaces held by spirit.
But the battle with apathy is one I fight.
Why create?... when history tells us it will end...
This scaffolding we build will collapse in time...
This ink with which we draw our lives will fade in the sunlight and the paper we draw upon will decompose back into the planet...
Where is the mark we seek to leave behind?
Perhaps its the space...
Perhaps that's why the scriptures preach the departure into angels...
Maybe there's a little truth to all that.
I envy stability... And even stagnation.
My life has never allowed me to understand contentment...
But maybe its that I actually HAVE understood contentment, and like a moment of enlightenment in meditation... Once you realize you're there, you're not there anymore.
The proverbial rug is pulled from beneath us so we can stand in a new place and see this room from a different angle and learn the same new thing again... We learn what we already know. What we're already said.
The falling coconut floors us again.
Knocked out cold.
But I choose to stand back up again.
Though crippled and bruised, aching and discouraged...but inspired by the end... Which actually is the beginning.