Your naked body should only belong to those who fall in love with your naked soul.

I trust

 when you come home to yourself 

there are flowers lining the front porch 

that were left from all the women 

you were before

Walking with the One Who Waited

 Step by step,

I walk toward the part of me

I thought I had to leave behind.

Not because she was wrong—

but because the world didn’t know how to hold her.

But I do.

I feel her now,

in the hush of the hills,

in the wildness of the land I’ve claimed as my own,

in the curve of the horizon at Sky View Ridge.

She’s not gone.

She’s waiting.

The girl who loved deeply,

felt everything,

believed in beauty—

even when no one believed in her.

The woman who bent

so many times

to keep the peace,

to carry the weight,

to be good,

to be strong.

She’s here.

I whisper into the morning light:

“I didn’t forget you, not really.

I’ve been walking toward you my whole life.

I just needed the courage to remember.”

Each step brings me closer.

Closer to the love

I always looked for in others—

but which lived inside me

all along.

I ask her now:

“What did you long for?”

“What dream did I bury to belong?”

“What part of you still aches to be seen?”

And I listen—

with all of me.

I hear her laughter in the trees.

I feel her sorrow in my knees.

I see her light in the sky above my cabins.

She is not gone.

She is not broken.

She is not too much.

She is me.

And I take her hand—gently now—

as I walk the land I’ve claimed for healing.

For beauty.

For return.

I say:

“You are the love of my life.

And I’m not abandoning you again.

Not for anyone. Not for any version of me

that shrank to survive.”

Step by step,

I walk back to myself.

To Kathi.

To home.

To love.

Blaming

 

Choose kindness

The kindest people are not born that way,

they are made. 

They are the ones that have experienced so much at the hands of life.

They are the ones who have dug themselves out of the dark, 

who have fought to turn every loss into a lesson. 

The kindest people do not just exist,

they choose to soften where circumstance has tried to harden them.

They choose to believe in goodness, because

They have seen firsthand why compassion is so necessary.

They have seen firsthand why tenderness is so important in this world.

The future is the past

 People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

Fluent, from the book, Conamara Blues

 I would love to live

Like a river flows,

Carried by the surprise

Of its own unfolding.

~ JOHN O'DONOHUE

C.S. Lewis

  To love at all 

is to be vulnerable. 

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. 

If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. 

Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; 

avoid all entanglements. 

Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. 

But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, 

it will change. 

It will not be broken; 

it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, 

irredeemable. 

To love is to be vulnerable.

Make love

 let me taste the thunder

you swallowed to stay small.

let me trace the part of you

they tried to tame.

let me feel the echo

of your uncaged howl.

let me undress your survival patterns.

take off your “i'm fine.”

let me kiss your shadows

that never learned to lie.

i want to kiss the skin beneath

every mask you forgot

you were wearing

to get by.

i want the cry you buried

the year you stopped coloring

outside the lines.

i want to feel the pulse

of who you were

before you became

someone else’s acceptable version

of alive.

i’ll hold you

where the world didn’t.

i'll make love to the you

who never got permission

to exist.

i’ll worship your wounds

until the blood turns

back to wine.

Against the illusion of separateness

 "There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny."

~ Pablo Neruda

You get lucky by staying in the game long enough for luck to find you.

Forgiveness

 Forgiveness isn’t always about setting someone free ~ it’s often about setting yourself free.

I read somewhere, ‘You keep forgiving someone until you unlove them.’ And I felt that. Because when you love deeply, you want to believe in the best of someone, even when they keep showing you their worst. So you forgive. Again and again. Not because they deserve it, but because a part of you isn’t ready to let go.

But something happens over time. Each forgiveness chips away at the illusion. Every disappointment brings clarity. And one day, without realizing it, you wake up and the love that once felt unshakable has faded. Not out of bitterness, not out of anger ~ but out of exhaustion.

This is how some of us let go. Not in one sudden act, but in a slow unraveling, in the quiet realization that love should not have to hurt this much.

If you’re in this place, know this: Forgiveness does not mean you have to stay. It does not mean you have to keep the door open. It does not mean you have to keep setting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.

Some love stories don’t end with fireworks ~ they end with a sigh of relief. And that’s okay. Letting go is its own kind of love~ the kind that finally includes yourself.

Raw mornings

 mornings come raw

full of emotions

unable to stop

pouring from every orifice

unstemmed, steamy, infantile,

all woman—

tears and laughter

of pain and passion

sweeping as a hurricane

across my heart

and then—spent.

there’s no filter at dawn.

the truth of me

spills before I remember

to be polite,

before I tuck myself in

to someone else’s comfort.

the wildness,

the holy ache of feeling too much,

is mine.

has always been.

i wake carrying ghosts—

lovers, regrets,

soft traces of old joys

like perfume on a scarf

left too long in a drawer.

i am stitched from moments

that cracked me open

and from the light that poured in after.

some days,

i want to be held.

others,

i only want the sky

to witness me:

bare-faced, puffy-eyed,

gutted and glorious.

a woman

who survives her own storms

and still sings

in the aftermath.