Author: mriverswright

7/27/21: Closer

Soundtrack:

‘Mornin’.

** Editor’s Note: The author supports this song’s wonderful melody, rhythm, dancing, use of shadow, the concept of surrender, and its original draw – the word, “closer” – but not its catchy repetition of the way-too-often-condoned-and-normalized concept that the speaker cannot self-regulate around a woman. Both/And, not Either/Or.

7/21/21: Clouds of Gnats

Walking the dogs through the sticky afternoon air, I had to keep waving away a cloud of gnats that came with us. I wished I were carrying the mail or wearing a hat so I had something to swat away the bugs. As soon as I’d wished for it, it came, and the two turkeys who must have dropped it were looking at me from 100 yards down the street.

7/10/21: Sometimes, David Whyte

SOMETIMES, by David Whyte

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.

from Everything is Waiting for You