How We Love

I have loved like a loose and wild locomotive, derailed, chugging sometimes, often unchained and smelling like failed brakes or thunderstorms when lightning burns a forest and the dead beauty of it all pinches your nose.

I have fallen in love, I suppose, with every single person I have been with for more than 30 seconds.

I mean really been with, where I am all in, so present as to disappear myself in seeing them, listening to the fire crackle, catching sparks.

Sometimes even the rage in me boils for having to love this thing in front of me, some bullshit attitude trapped in the heart of another person, making them ugly and mean and even evil.

But love I must and do until at the very least the darkness in me can let go of its chokehold, can soften, seeing the broken sorrow under all their animosity, finding compassion.

Loving like a hurricane is what I did in my youth.

Seven-story tall tsunamis wreaking havoc on the shore of some unsuspecting corridor.

Love bombing the entire nation in a town the size of a thimble so I could play Monopoly with hearts like a board game missing some critical pieces.

I've loved tenderly also.

The sweet knowing inside me from before I was born.

Namaste-ing my way through AA meetings and group retreats and even in my home at dawn.

Loving myself has become a parkour session, hurdles and pull-ups and chin-ups and child pose and shavasana on the inside 1,000 times a day until everything frightened has found a partner and easier, we say, to love with another.

The way I love my guy Larry, who hates to be called my boyfriend, is indestructible favorite cashmere sweater with rainy day movies and nowhere to go.

I could leave the door open here, sleep with my back turned to the open door in a dangerous town on a crime-riddled street, surrounded by people with nothing to lose.

And I would, not because of how he loves me, but because of how I love him, be okay.

Some love I've pulled like daggers from my throat and thrown my words at moving targets, trying to catch them with my naming, my devotion, how I have tried to be loved back.

But inside my safest love where there is God and my heart and mother nature and everything Susan says happens in the East.

Yes, there in the East with God or good or however you want to hear that unnameable spaciousness, I can be found on a good day during some single random moment when I have namaste or shavasana or prayed or meditated my way back to right here where I am breathing.

The heart, she said, the core, beautiful corazon, blood pumping, yes, the eternity of now.

Now I don't like to get too far off track when there are bills to pay and deals to close and somewhere that hope lives, even poems to write.

But love seems worth noting to have been there through all of it.

Larry asked, what do you pray for this morning? And I said, for God to help me.

Help me get out of my own way enough to manifest what I'm capable of.

For an agenda of loving, I said.

I swear, only hours ago, I said to pray to be loving and kind and hospitable. And then this, last minute writing opportunities, Mary Oliver, the queen, la reina de corazon, poet's heart.

How I love my children is a broken windshield wiper continuously or maybe religiously still trying to wipe away the cautionary weather with dull blades nonetheless trying.

Loving something that moves away from you is harder than loving a thing in your pocket.

Transitory love is a candle wick in a silly wind. You know you will get it eventually.

We'll build a little cave with your hands and ask a friend to strike the match.

It's there, just not quite yet.