Whole Before Night

Photo copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved.

Dormant body, darkened veil, dim ray, whole before night.



All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Water

Photo copyright Aji, 2015;
all rights reserved.

What you see above is what we've been doing all week.

Mostly, Wings has been doing it. I've been helping directly here and there, but for the most part, my job is to pick up the slack when it comes to other tasks, freeing him to make sure that the water you see flowing in that ditch eventually makes it across pretty much all 25 acres of land.

It's all done by hand.

We're both exhausted.

This year, we hired his niece's husband to use his ditcher. There have been years past when Wings has dug them by hand himself, although in more recent years, it's usually hiring a couple of guys to help, or (as this year), hiring someone to do most of via tractor. But all of the waterflow management and diversion is still done by hand: shovels and sandbags and earthen dams, all changed periodically to ensure that the water gets where it needs to go.

Yes, I've done that, too.

Where the Thunderbird Flies

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

I snagged this shot today. Mostly by accident.

Oh, I was trying to get it, but what you don't see in the photo, just out of range to the viewer's right, is the massive raven harrying the harrier. He'd chased her from the west field up into the middle willow on the banks of the pond, thence upward and over and over and around and around, spiraling higher, heading north as they danced in combat.

It was nearly impossible to catch her, and I didn't actually think I'd gotten anything in the single shot I managed to get off before they disappeared over the ridgeline.

She's going to put in an appearance elsewhere.

I'm setting up a new site — well, strictly speaking, it's already set up, but there's nothing there yet. It's going to be a home for my fictionish stuff, stuff that mostly really isn't fiction at all, but . . . certain things must be changed, and so I can't really call it what it is in spirit (and mostly in fact). Stories that have been rattling around in my head and heart and mostly my soul for too many decades to count, spirits who want their stories told, even if only one person ever actually reads them.

The title of this post is the subheading of my new place. This one will remain in daily use, of course — for Wings's art, for substantive pieces on the issues of the day that are part of my portfolio, if not necessarily by choice, for whatever else I feel like sharing here.

The Interstices will be for my version of art: Words, my words, in short form and flash form and poetry and possibly even things longer, punctuated by my photography. 

Actually what it will be is . . . me.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Through the Pines

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

It was the sort of day when the sunlight itself is a shackle around her wrist. It's a day whose significance she doesn't want to remember, hard on the heels of another such. She'd feel less trapped if the light were gray, less hard-edged, with comfortingly familiar clouds hovering protectively.

Instead, the world is raw and exposed, like the soft golden wood of the piñon latilla lying castoff on the ground before the elements finish stripping it of its shriveled and weathered bark.

Better to focus on the latilla; its ghosts are much older, and therefore safer.

It's seen everything, of course — entire worlds that have come and gone, passing out of existence into the netherworld the silly and shallow creatures negligently refer to as history. They have no idea . . . .

Because the past is never past.

Nowhere is that truth more evident than here, beneath the light of this near sun. Oh, there are ghosts, whole worlds' worth, in the land where she is from: ancient ones whose now mostly invisible footsteps leave tracks ten thousand years old and more. Their prints speak and sing, of life, and love, and joy, and pain, and hope, and death, and a deep and abiding hunger that yet goes unsated.

But they are so old now that their willingness to touch the living in this world is attenuated, diminishing mostly into nothingness. They've seen so much that, like the great soldier pines of their own world, some of whom still live in this one, they now mostly watch, observant but detached. They know the folly of involvement. Still, they join the larger sentinels in their eternal watch; ever so occasionally, their spirits may yet be needed.

This place is likewise old, but newer in its recent ghosts. Their ruin still exists, mostly overgrown with chamisa and sage and the winds of a thousand years and more now, but she knows they still return sometimes . . . perhaps to pray, perhaps to dance, perhaps to set their descendants' affairs aright in spite of those unruly children's own behavior.

Perhaps to hear and feel the wind passing through the boughs of the ancient piñons once more, to hear its song.

Perhaps that is enough. 

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Starling Drives Out the Ghosts of Day

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

A starling sits, atwitch, upon an old dead branch of a tree on the ground, his feathers ruffled by the water in which he has just bathed himself. He twitches and turns some more, looking vaguely indignant and more than a little cold and unhappy as the wind riffles through the layers of his wings.

He's a beautiful bird, all bright pencil-yellow bill and iridescent robes, with a short sharp voice like a clear crystal bell.

She was always told that starlings were nasty birds, dirty, something to be chased off, not welcomed in.

Now, she can welcome them, feed them, invite them to stay.

Sometimes, it seems that all she need do is the exact opposite of what she was ordered to do as a child, and she can be sure it's the right thing.

"Pretty"

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Small children are Nature's perfect narcissists. Their entire existence is centered in their senses, including feeling — emotional as well as tactile. Fully-realized humans they may be, but they are not, as some would have one believe, merely adults in miniature. They haven't developed the capacity for most interrelationships, except insofar as responding to the effects of those interpersonal connections on their own bodies and lives.

It's a pure form of narcissism, one come by entirely honestly.

She understands this with benefit of hindsight, and not a little formal education. She understands that much of childhood existence is something to which blame cannot be logically (or morally) assigned, yet that doesn't unravel the multifarious strands of guilt that have braided themselves over and around and through her soul.

#TooLateNow

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

April tenth, her thoughts filled with death and taxes.

She learns from Twitter that it's something called National Siblings Day. It only registers because people in her timeline are posting photos of themselves with all of their sisters and brothers.

It hits her that, over the course of a half-century, there are no photos of the all of them together. Not one.

She mentally hashtags it #TooLateNow and moves on.

She's been doing that her whole life: forcing acceptance, compartmentalizing to keep it accepted, and failing that, at least to keep it forced. There's never been any other choice.

#TooLateNow.

Erasure

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Erasure
Is so easy

A trick of the light
Of the mind
A sleight of hand and blink of eye

And then I am invisible

To you

But it's the invisibility of artifice
Of what you have created of whole cloth
Of smoke and mirrors
Of the hobgoblins of your own mind

Why does my existence bedevil you so?

Your discomfort is palpable
A living, breathing, pulsating thing
It stands between you and the world as it is
And it is your discomfort that necessitates my erasure

You are not accustomed to it
You are accustomed to being able to mold
The world into a shape that is pleasing to your sight
One that discomfits you not at all
Nor disturbs your rest
Nor your self-satisfied and self-congratulatory existence

But my existence does not depend on what you wish to see

Yes, you can draw a veil over me
Like fog, like snow, a wisp of smoke
A pencil wielded by god itself
The eraser end scrubbing out your view of me
Rendering your worldview comfortable again

And yet, I remain

As the fog hides the mountains
As the snow covers the earth
You can see neither, yet both are there
And will be there long after we are gone

Like them,

I live
I breathe
I work
I write
I love

I am here

I am

Despite your best efforts.





All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Four Corners

Some days, two worlds is one too many.

There are days . . . .

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

There are days . . . .

This is one of them.

It's all dried sticks and barbed wire, dead blooms on a broken fencepost.

Hope is a dead thing, too.

It'll come back; it always does. Eventually.

But there are days when the pain and the pressures are just too much to pretend anymore.

No comments; no questions; no substance tonight.







All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

First Grade; First Lesson

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Her name rhymed with that of a genocidal European dictator, but in 1929, the world hadn't yet heard of him; even his own people didn't know his name. He was still struggling to acquire a political audience, but within four short years he'd be well on his way to launching his campaign of extermination.

But in 1929 in the U.S., a different sort of extermination campaign had already been under way for well over 400 years. She was a willing, even eager cog in that campaign's machine, one who had honed and polished her hate so perfectly that it was a tangible thing, dipped in acid and glistening poisonously.

She was, of course, in the perfect position to execute her own role: a teacher of first graders, one responsible for shaping the minds and characters and spirits of the area's youngest generation when those minds and characters and spirits were at the most impressionable.

Like all good fanatics, she took her work seriously.

Memories Like a Falling-Down Fence

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

On days like today

My memories are like a falling-down fence

Listing under a lead-gray sky

The posts that seemed so strong and firm in early childhood

Were soon betrayed for what they really were

No foundation

No root

No inherent strength

Nothing to support the boundaries they insistently set

That was actually a good thing.

Had they been stronger

I might never have escaped

But escape I did

And have

Never fully, of course

Those posts, they move

They will always try to follow me

To fence me in

To reach me with their barbed strands

And pull me back into a place where I don't belong

Cutting, piercing, not flesh but spirit

Drawing forth blood and pain

But scars heal
As do tears
And tears

And even broken,
Limbs and heart alike reknit but roughly
It's better

Better than what we would call
The fenced place
That name we know so well
Not only of the land
A reservation of the spirit

And so the fence falls down
Its posts no stronger
Than those that tried 
And failed 
To contain
To hold
To bind and bound
Our ancestors' spirits

I took my chance long ago
Stepped over that falling-down fence
Memories are all that remain to bind me
And they, too, have begun to descend to the earth
Leaving a path

Strewn with wire
But a path

And like their spirits
My own is wounded
Healed
But it is free

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Evicting Ghosts

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Is the week over yet?

Saturday means I've outlasted this round of ghosts. For now, but now is enough. 

Of course, reminders keep coming around, hammering insistently on that door in my brain that I was forced to close off long ago. It doesn't help that I never learn; I see things that I know will crack that door ajar (or blow it off its hinges), and then I go and read them anyway. Like a train wreck: Can't stand to look; can't look away.

So.

I can expect tonight's dreams to be more of the same. I wish I could force my dreams into particular channels, but that doesn't work for me. What comes is what comes, like it or not, and I usually don't. Sleep is mostly a period to be gotten through until morning.

For now, the white willow gets my conscious thoughts. A ghost tree itself, perhaps, but one that feels welcoming to me, like one of the hallmarks of home. Tomorrow, the pond beneath it will still be white with yesterday's snow, even if its own branches have reverted to gold.

By Saturday, the ghosts that have taken up residence in my mind will be shut firmly back behind the door for now, evicted from my thoughts and denied entrée to my days.

The snow will be gone — most of it, anyway. The willow will be there. 

Welcoming.

And I will still be home.





All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

No Road Out

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Sometimes, you need a road out.

Problem is, the road doesn't go anywhere.
I'm not writing "for" anything, or anyone, except myself. Sometimes I just need to get it out of my system. If you feel like reading a downer, feel free, but before you do anything else, take this to heart. I am not looking for sympathy, help, or advice. If you're thinking of doing any of those things, or of telling me what works, what I have to try, what will fix it . . . don't. If you think for one moment that, in all the decades I've been dealing with my illness, there's anything out there I haven't tried, you're nuts. Also, two of the features of this complex of medical conditions are an unusually high rate of sensitivities and side effects to various substances, and an equally high rate of drug failure. So there's a lot out there that I've tried, with no success (or affirmatively negative results), and frankly, a lot of Big Pharma solutions that I've tried only to have them fail to work at all or cause a crash within days, or subsequently get black-boxed and/or pulled from the market entirely.

I've written before about my particular complex of conditions, and they are complex. Most of them also go back to childhood — hell, to infancy and even earlier. My family has always been notoriously unhealthy, a toxic combination of long-term poverty, nutritional stupidity, and and really virulent mix of genetic factors. Some people just shouldn't have kids, for all kinds of reasons; I think my family covered all those bases, and then decided to take some sort of twisted victory lap.

At any rate, on top of all of that, there are a couple of old injuries that have haunted my entire adult life, and are now getting worse. Sustaining a really bad concussion last August has now taken those effects to new heights, or maybe I mean new depths. Since mid-August, I've been in trouble. Real trouble. I crashed, hard, around September 1st, and if you've never had an extended personal experience with autoimmune conditions, however much you think you understand what I mean by "crash," you don't. It's not an "exacerbation"; it's not a "flare." It's hell. I endure them periodically, and eventually pull out of them after whatever length of time my body decides to take joy in inflicting misery on me.

This, time, though, it's been five months, and it's still not over.

Not only that. It's getting worse.

Every morning when I get up, it's worse than the last. The pain is excruciating. My balance is completely torched. Getting up is agony. The only thing worse is staying in bed.

I haven't had a headache-free day in months. Hell, I haven't had a pain-free day in . . . well, pretty much ever. Yes, that includes childhood. When people talk about being "pain-free," I don't believe them. I can't get my ahead around what such a state of being would be like. It's like a unicorn — a mythical, magical thing that exists only in fairy tales.

But now . . . I don't know what to do anymore. I'm not getting any younger, and I'm terrified that this is my new normal. Not that I've had a "normal," you understand, but normal for me meant the ability to sublimate pain to a really significant degree. I actually have a high tolerance for it; I've had no choice but to develop one.

Now, though? This is the kind of pain I can't get away from. Head, neck, shoulders, back . . . I'm never free of it. Ever. And nothing — NO.THING., nothing, so don't even go there — helps more than minimally and very short-term. And that's not even going into all that's effed up everywhere else in my body, from arms to hands to hips to legs to feet. And all the associated and opportunistic problems that accompany these kinds of conditions.

So, yeah. I'm scared.

And you can expect me to be grumpy; chronic acute pain does that to people. You wanna unfriend/unfollow, do it. I get it. Nobody wants to hear it, and everybody's secretly worried that it's somehow contagious anyway. I get especially grumpy when I see constant bullshit, using of other people, gaming of systems, all the unfairnesses of life compounded by people lacking in ethics, morality, decency, or even basic humanity. Lot of that going around lately.

So this is it. I honestly don't expect improvement; this is, in all likelihood, the next in a long series of cascading, deteriorating, degenerating slides. All that remains is for me to get my head around and deal with WHAT IS.

Because I already know there ain't no road out.



No comments. No sympathy. Please, just . . . don't. I'm not up to what basic civility requires.


*Addendum:  Just to be clear, this is not a money issue. It's a limits of science/medicine/technology/whatever issue. All the money in the world wouldn't fix it. So please don't interpret it that way, because it has nothing to do with this.
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Dreams and Nightmares

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

I'm trying hard to hang onto the feeling I had night before last.

It's not really working.

My sleep has been badly disrupted lately, not at all unusual in the middle of an autoimmune crash. I'm used to it, frankly. But what that means is that the rare occasions, however brief, that I manage to hit REM are especially important, so I'm mostly grateful when I can remember a dream.

They're not always good, but "not good" does not equal "nightmare." These days, the nightmares seem to be reserved mostly for waking hours anyway.

Last night was almost a complete loss not hat front. The night before wasn't a whole lot better, but I did manage at least one short episode of REM. The dream has stuck with me.

In it, I'm kneeling on an old hardwood floor. I'm surrounded by people, every face white as far as I can tell; no one I recognize, although in the dream's internal logic, I probably had some vague idea of who they were generally, if not personally. 

We're all in an old single-story building whose latest renovations date maybe to the '70s. One big room with a lowish ceiling, old wooden plank floor, wooden support posts and beams, a scaled window on the far side and a slight dais in the center. Facing it, I'm off to the right side at the front edge of the crowd, all of whom are seated or kneeling while a pompous white guy declaims from his seat on the dais. I'm already ready to leave, and then some. It appears to be the kind of meeting room you'd find a a retreat in a national or state park or forest reserve, and I get the impression this is some retro-hippie "get in touch with the wilderness" kind of thing. No wonder I want out.

Declaiming dude announces casually that they're going to be letting one of "them" come out, without specifying what "them" actually means. And then there's no warning; suddenly, someone has opened a door around the back wall where all that's visible is the glow of harsh overhead lighting, and out comes a cat, bounding directly toward the crowd.

And by cat, I mean of the large and wild variety.

Only it's not bounding toward the crowd; it's bounding, in a half-pouncing, half-loping stride, toward me.

It's so utterly negligent and careless on the part of our hosts, and so imposing, that everyone in the room gasps. Except me; I don't even have time to be afraid. The cat comes straight up to my left side where I'm kneeling, joints aching, and puts its muzzle up to my left ear and the side of my head. I can feel its breath on hair, its whiskers brush my skin. It sniffs me for a short moment.

It licks me repeatedly on the ear, then turns and saunters out of the room.

I have no idea what to make of it.

Of course, yesterday was visited by a couple of different nightmares, both involving loss of very different kinds. One wears a human face, and breaks my heart. 

The other is the kind of theft that fills me with righteous fury: exploitation, appropriation, all for racist purposes and with racist effect, and stealing directly from Wings and me, from other Natives, and symbolically from every single Indian who has ever lived (to say nothing of other cultures, but the most egregious were those taken from ours).

I have not been as angry as I was last night in . . . I actually don't remember when. The kind of anger that I almost never experience, the kind that is unhealthy, for me. And it's not the act of the theft itself, in the abstract, that fans the flames; it's what it means, what it represents, and with what sick, twisted poison it forcibly associates us without our consent.

I've had a migraine for days, and today was no exception. Add to that the lack of sleep last night, the effects of yesterday's sorrow and anger, and it has made today something to be gotten through, not lived.

I don't like people who steal, use, exploit. I don't tolerate misuse and abuse of others. And I'm seeing frankly far too much of that in recent weeks. In venues where no one would expect it, at the expense of some in no position to recognize what is being taken from them, much less to fight back.

Yes, this is the stuff of my nightmares. But my eyes are wide open. I see.

I also don't forget.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

  

Journey

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

I awakened this morning at home

Or so I thought

Not this home,

But one from long ago, on the land where I was born

Where my people have lived for ten thousand years and more

Climate change is speeding up

In the space of one day, we have gone

From below zero to 49 degrees.

And so last night, we had fog

In January

Something I would have thought impossible here

At 7,500 feet, 

At the foot of mountains that dwarf those tiny hills of my childhood

Fog, and an east wind

And overnight, it crystallized

Tiny geometric fragments, perfect in design

White-hot ice

Closed around every branch, every leaf, every blade of dormant grass

At home, this would be spring

April

The catkins as fuzzy with snow-like crystals as with their own gentle covers

The branches weighted and freighted, white over silver gray

The willow by our old pond, the one where I was not allowed to play

Drooping, dropping, dripping, draping its ice-heavy branches 

Gracefully over the surface of the earth

Like a frosted blanket

But no

This is here

And the fog has turned the high desert mountains into 

My old home

Just for a day, a dawn

And like that child I was

I play in it,

Transported

Until my fingers turn to ice like the willow's gentle arms

A journey in time

In space

In season

In distance

Magic

Copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Not a Blue Moon

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

She smiles down on all of us.

Some days are Mondays in the stereotypical sense. Forget blue; I should be so lucky. Blue's my favorite color, and if we were to get a genuinely cloudy day? I'd feel exactly at home.

But the anticipatory fatigue that used to accompany Monday mornings, the sense of last week's tasks yet undone having multiplied in intensity and urgency in the two days away . . . that was here in full force this morning. It matters not in the slightest that for us, Monday is a day like any other, weekends included; all are days of hard work. There remains that psychic something that attaches itself to the coattails of a Monday morning that I can't shake.

Cold and irritable, joints screaming at me, I had to forgo coffee long enough to get my balance. But no . . . the dogs wanted to go out, so that they could chase the coyotes tarrying under a sky fast approaching with dawn firmly in hand.

And then I remembered: full moon. 

Jacket. Camera. Fumble with useless arthritic fingers to get the lens cap off and the power button on. Dodge the dogs while keeping staying upright, on my feet instead of less comfortable regions.

In the mornings, my illness is at its very worst. My hands shake; I'll tip over as though drunk if I turn too fast or too far, or for no reason at all. Predictably, the first few shots were useless. I missed, entirely, the pink glow of the dawn clouds enveloping her face; she dances far too fast in her final dance beneath the breaking dawn, descending to sleep while her husband ascends across the sky to begin his own workday.

But I caught a few shots. This was the final one. 

A short time later, I returned outside for morning prayers in the icy air. I did as I usually do, giving thanks, asking for help for those who need it, asking for ourselves nothing save that on this day, we be given a good day. A good day takes care of everything immediate; tomorrow is another like opportunity, and one to address then, not now.

While I was outside, something had occurred that we very much needed. The day was already good. 

And still Grandmother smiled down on us, until she slipped from view below the horizon to take her rest for the day.

She's gold, not blue; the blue is her robe, her sky blanket. As I write this now, she is rising from her bed between El Salto and Pueblo Peaks, clad in shades of so dark they're near-midnight. As she makes her way across the sky, she'll changer her regalia a few times, ending again tomorrow in a warm cornflower shade, perhaps, like today, shot through with threads of rose and gold. 

But whatever her dress, she'll smile on us again.

Perspective

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

The way ahead is a hard road

Cold and growing dim as dusk descends

Beset by sharp switchback curves

The kind that have taken more than one unwary traveler unawares

And taken from them all they have

Look at the road 

And be lost in it

In its doubts and dangers and despairs

Trepidation

Tense and wary, breath quickened as the light fades 

Traveling into darkness but dimly known

The bare branches of a red aspen the last marker

The last tendrils of color before rounding the curve into the void

Stop

Look up

The bare branches of the red aspen are a marker, yes,

But of what?

Look down, and they keep the gates of the flowing gray river

Unwinding like a ribbon,

That pulls inexorably into an unquiet future 

Eyes raised only inches, and the ribbon disappears

The bare branches of the red aspen are no longer Cerberus in willowy form

But a herald

Of light, of warmth, of a place to rest, 

Rocked in the cradle of the very earth itself

Safe beneath a blanket of sunlit clouds

Perspective

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

_________________________________________

Every year at this time, it's the same: An upcoming marker brings unbidden thoughts, unwelcome memories, threatening to swamp the promise of a new year in darkness before it begins.

i have to remind myself: Step back. Step forward. Look up. A path that seems dark and forbidding, beset by unquiet ghosts, is not the whole of the journey. For every ghost lying in wait, there is a countervailing ray of light.

Perspective. 

Unless otherwise noted, all content on this blog, including text and images, are copyright Aji; all rights reserved; may not be reproduced in any form without express written permission.

Of Light and Long Shadows

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

It is very old, this place

This place that we call home

For a people who have lived here a thousand years and more

The mountains hold the eternity of ancestral memory

I, two thousand miles and more from my own home,

A home unrecognizeable to me now, one my grandfather would not know

Yet feel the pull of the spirits who live in this place

The peaks are old beyond time

The Old Man, stony gaze ajut from the eastern face

Keeps his silent watch above the treeline, 

Sun and moon and stars all that ascend above his brow 

And still I hear his voice

Like the peak he faces, wrapped in the folds of a forest blanket

He makes his wishes known upon the wind

To the north, the female peaks sit silently

Their bodies deliver their message — words unneeded

And apparently unwanted

Before they are lost to sight beneath night's dark blanket

The sun touches them one last time

Its light slanting through the chamisa, carrying the words yet whispered on the winds that circle the ruin

Turning the old ones' voices into shadows, long and tall and strong

That speak of sacred trusts.

Listen.

What We Are Given

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Some days are for tears.

Some days are for blinking them back.

Some days are for holding onto them tightly, in a miserly fashion, like a secret treasure locked deep inside where no one can see.

A gift; a curse, a cross, a cleansing. 

But tears are tricksters: They cleanse only when they flow. Bottled up, bereft of eyes to fill, of cheeks down which to fall, they cut and wound and inflame.

Today, I thought, was not a day for tears. They tried to come, unbidden; they knocked on the door of my heart all day. I squared my shoulders, slammed the door, shot the bolt.

No time.

Oh, it hurts, this incessant knocking on my heart. But I have a secret: I'm used to pain, and I can ignore it. If I ignore it long enough, the knocking will cease. Or, if it doesn't, at least I'll have grown immune to the sound and pulse.

I almost made it.

But some gifts will not be denied.

A beloved friend sends me news of the visitation honoring another friend just gone, of grief and loss and celebration all braided into one. 

She sends me an image: my words, given form and being. 

She sends me a gift that touches me beyond description, a gift from people I've never had the privilege to meet in person, a final gift from someone we both loved who now rides the light.

And the tears, locked inside a willfully icy heart, melt and find their way out.

These gifts we are given abrade; they heal; they demand recognition; they deserve honor.

And so the heart fractures and yet reknits even as it cracks, joined together by the warmth of the tears as they fall.