Your purpose is to love – and be loved –
You are beloved –
The beloved –
Just like every –
last – one –
of –
us

Your Existence is Gift
Your Joy is Mine
Your Happiness is Everyone’s
Who stands beside you

This is how you do healing
in this world –
You keep on
BEING
YOU.

This poem was written the day after my 21-year-old and I discussed our current moments living in this world, the wide and narrow aspects of global, societal, and cultural dynamics of our fellow human beings, both far and close, the push and pull of human nature around safety and security from the beginnings of Time and the beginnings of Story and Myth. He is one of the great joys and gifts of my life and I learn from him more than I learn from any of my credentialed teachers backward and forward across time. He came to me through the portal of my own body, and I watch him in wonder as he makes his way through this human life.

This poem holds some of what I told him toward the end of our conversation, as well as some of the thoughts I experienced driving to work the next morning, listening to a song he sent me: Bottle of Advil by Julia Wolf. (Here you go: Bottle of Advil)

When the written version of this poem came pouring out of me through pencil on blue paper I thought of Rumi, and then Emily Dickinson.

I’m sharing it here because it feels salient. I didn’t know the second definition of salient as a piece of fortified land projecting outward and being exceedingly vulnerable until just this moment when I searched its meaning. I’ve noticed that so many of our words and phrases grow out of military language, and I’ve intentionally avoided as many of those as possible throughout my time as a writer. I almost changed the word salient above to something like “valuable” to avoid the warring association, but I decided to leave it in. It feels salient. And rightly vulnerable.

May you be well,

A.

After I photoed the poem and published this post, I went outside to the morning fire. I slid the blue-lined paper with the blue-lined words into the open space between the pyramid of logs. It flashed yellow and transformed to white ash in an instant, then dissolved above the melty-orange coals, a new energy.