I love the earth the day after the day after a big rain storm. When the hillside in my back yard is still dark and visibly wet, where it had been light brown and dusty. A faint green stubble of tiny shoots covers the formerly dry and dead packed dirt. Overnight pink chrysanthemums have shot straight up and opened-out, “Ta da!” The jasmine I planted last July and nursed through hot months of bloomless drought finally sprouts buds, light green, incipient flowers folded inside but peeking out, like white lace. I go to take a photo of them with my phone and only through the view screen do I spy it, under a dark green leaf hood, almost unseen, the first little jasmine flower already born.

“Stress can be sexful,” she said to her longtime confidant. Then dissolved into laughter. “What did I just say? Sex can be stressful!”

Band name: 20% Tiptoe

Our emotions are a physical process of our bodies, like breathing, like farting. There’s nothing to be gained from critiquing them. Or attaching to them too fiercely, grabbing on for dear life. Though gentle attention is always nice.

Divide is conquer.

“Whatever you suppress is knocking at your door every day.” –Sweet Elise, aka The Diamond Cutter

Western magic—casting spells—is directing your attention to your intention. Eastern magic—meditation, yoga—is directing your intention to your attention.

Like a true WASP, I have been taught to suppress the parts of myself that might upset the people around me. But not letting myself have emotions is not letting others have theirs, too, isn’t it?

For every inaction there’s a no reaction.

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Suppressed emotion.”

“Suppressed emotion who?”

“Why the hell are you asking me?”

Writing is how I try to slow down the world while I try to figure it all out.

Like many lit’rary types, I have a full-time narrator in my head, writing and rewriting the tale of my life even as it’s happening.

Time Retardant—a needed invention.

Everyone was very concerned
That everything work out
For everyone concerned.

To look around with wide eyes and an open spirit at the fantastic richness of every aspect of this world, this universe that we somehow exist in, I feel like you just have to come away with more questions than answers.

That seems true to me whether you look at it from a scientific point of view or a religious one. Or both.

No matter how we look at those ultimate questions: Why do we even exist? Why is there a universe at all? Where did we come from and what came before us? Where will we go and what will come after us?

I find more comfort in the questions than in answers that seem dreamed up or unearned.

Give me answers that go as deep as the questions, or I’ll keep dancing with the questions.

I love the day after the day after a rain storm…

Image credit: Me! (for once)