Everything is clear today.

Though I see the haze from mountain fires that find their way to the valley where I am, my eyes seem clearer. I can see everything.

It pops out at me, like a long lost friend. not overwhelming, like most days, but subtle with a smile. I watch the setting sun glow between the fence boards, and cast shadows through leaves in trees. The sky melts dim blue, and rests, sizzling off the long day of burning sun. The wind blows, but everything sits in place, roots deep with age, like it always has been since I’ve first seen it.

“Im closer to home than I’ve ever been before,” I tell myself.

The wind kisses sweetly on my shoulder as I sit. I reach to touch, as if someone placed their gentle hand upon it. “Time is fleeting,” sounds and echoes through my still body, so I nuzzle my cheek against my shoulder where love rests easy. It is familiar. The wind breathes like water spills and fills me whole.

Each day is like new chapters ready to be written-

With the busy hand, the eager tongue, the loving embrace, the determined mind, the diligent feet that travel and the sun that comes up anew, and blares it’s eager grin upon aging faces- Every day we fail. But what’s a life without failure, able to start again?

We do a lot of things through life- Say what we don’t mean, travel the world to find ourselves again, bite the hand that feeds, find forgiveness through our darkest pain, learn that the love we seek in others is in us all along, burn bridges we never allow ourselves to mend, capture pictures and reels of life that play through our minds all our waking days, held captive in untouchable archives of our hearts- remnants of beauty and pain.

Timothy Halloran once said, “The opposite of love isn’t hate… the opposite is feeling nothing at all.”

Life is a fleeting moment of all the colors of what love is- embracing every emotion. How can we ever experience beauty without pain, ever wholeness without suffering?

“These are just thoughts,” I tell myself. But never meant to be locked away.