Nothing / Everything

Nothing prepared me for this.

Nothing could prepare me for this.

Being stuck in hesitation, knowing there is something to say but not quite sure that I can trust the stream of my words to carry me there without all those things that happened when someone looks at the stream and screams, “My cabbages, you are flooding my cabbages” or “this is unprecedented, a spring flood in May – not cool.”

Nothing prepared me for the depth of unknowing one has to go through to stop caring about those cabbages and those needs for time appropriate floods.

The words start rising up from the heart. Very slowly – almost unsusceptible but the weight/wait could drown, what? A mountain, a feather, all the words as yet unformed?

Nothing can be very heavy. A weight in some unlocatable place. Is it the stomach or the chest?

Nothing could prepare me for the death of my father and how grief is not something you can charter or name.

Nothing could prepare me for hope and the way the sun keeps rising every day of our lives as if it is the first and the last time and who cares because the birds are reminding me that although my bed is warm and my father is dead the early morning sun has a way of turning the trees across the road into golden, standing things of aliveness and all the birds are waking up to the unbelievable nothing of another day starting, another night fading; the stars are but a memory and there in the corner is the pink rose my mother planted when she still loved her garden.

Everything

Climb every mountain, swim every ocean, just to be with you and fix what I've broken.

My neighbors have now listened to the first few lines of this song twice so loudly that it drowned out everything.

I want everything to swell up like this music louder and louder until it's hard to hear everything else, ever, even though it's really tacky I need you to see that you are the reason.