What Went Wrong

I am forever trying to correct what went wrong. As if the simple act of breathing for the last 50 years through my mouth instead of my nose, maybe why I have not heard from my son in weeks.

I eat Strauss organic ice cream in three servings entirely gone, hoping that maybe the sweet fat comfort of a thing I have abandoned will bring me back to belonging.

The heart shatters not at once, but in many fits sometimes, and it's all you can do to glue it back together by keeping just busy enough that you hardly notice time has stolen something precious.

Sometimes I think if I can just love hard enough or so completely that I am not even aware I am loving, as if I were the act itself, like birds on a wire forgetting they even have wings,

then the little ember inside me, always trying to ignite, will catch wind and me and the birds and the very sky itself will be ablaze with well-being and everything broken and lost and sorry will be found at home in this tender heart I miss you through.

I thought that if I just tried hard enough and worked until work became the general state of homeostasis and I could keep growing and building and producing business relationships, fine young men the world would admire,

then maybe eventually my constant need to find matches to keep the little ember glowing would quit herself, given over to a more modest burning, a light of being that included all things.

Thank God, I thank for humor and animals and the way hummingbirds at the feeder basically talk to me now when the dispenser is empty, beating their unapologetic wings at the speed of light as close to my passing as they dare.

Hello, hello, we're empty.

I like to think I was an overflowing vessel and that I was able to share my resources where others were empty.

But the allure towards what was missing was always stronger than the satisfaction of what was present that I think perhaps too often.

And between great gaps of pure gratitude and exhilaration that maybe I missed the boat on being right here now with the people who come from my bones.

Family like a dugout huddle on a baseball team, everyone's position outfielders, a singular attempt at mastering the game of life, only thinking I'm on a team.

I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but you know it is quite possibly only in a fit of inky desperation on these blank pages that I can see who I have been and who I am becoming in spite of my best efforts to love wholeheartedly.

My son is at a Buddhist monastery. I've not seen him for nine months. We've spoken twice.

The other one is deftly defying middle-class mediocrity, playing high-level sports, chasing a dream he had since he was seven.

Both are doggedly and without hesitation giving every single thing about who they are to a pursuit of something bigger than themselves, and through it perhaps they are finding, or even just looking, for that thing they were given inside the womb:

a little fire demanding a forest to burn.

You think it would be easy to walk away from an invisible cage that has no ceiling.

But the mind is up there pacing around, forgetting its reason for being.

The heart, a little whisper on the wire. 

Fly, birds, fly.