It is Valentine’s Day. I am sitting on my couch, alone, morning coffee in hand, wrapped in an exquisite quiet. Every now and then, my eyes fill with tears, as they have been doing from the moment I awakened. Sometimes I brush them away but mostly I let them fall, whispers from my own heart, spinning their sweet cocoon.

All around me, beneath the silence, life is humming. My life. Deliciously unfettered, cracked open just a little more by a keen and expanding awareness. I may be companionless but the contentment that laves me is full and generous, a gift of love so spontaneous its purity makes me weep. It is as if all the love I have ever known, and all that is present in my life right now, have descended upon me, reminding me of how blessed I am. But there is something more, a deeper embracing, in which I can almost feel the ripples of my existence widening, flowing toward uncharted joy, a feast of divinely orchestrated good.

Yet, this moment is all I want. I feel as if I could rest here forever, steeped in hushed celebration and tender homecoming, having answered the heart’s only plea.

Beloved

Will you let me in?

The voice would whisper

in the unbearable quiet

of her emptiness when the mind

stilled and the chaos of her day

was waning to a dull and placid remnant.

Sometimes it seemed an actual presence —

a shadowed being haunting

the graveyard of her endless excuses.

She imagined her fear uncoiling,

the release of a thousand paper chains

slipping past the gentle breath

ballooning, and strange, in their wake.

Will you let me in?

The yearning flashed from her furthest memory —

insistent, heady even, if only she could

pause long enough to absorb its bearing,

abide its nettlesome promise:

a trade of saboteur for sovereign.

Will you let me in?

The supplication now a hounding,

bolder than those vestiges of safety,

the well-worn tatters of her

cloak of undeserving.

Sometimes she opened her mouth

as if to drink it in,

receive its beauty like a lover’s kiss.

And in the moments when she laughed,

she was lifted by a shock of

joy pulsing beneath the

cycle of sameness, her wall of

stories, the bricks of her denial.

But on some nights she simply wept,

the cracks seeping their longing into

conscious thought, and sending her, tender

and trembling, to the altar of her salvation.

Here, she made of her tears an offering,

teetering closer to the edge,

the call, the risk to touch

a teeming, fragrant fullness.

Will you let me in?

This time, she seized the courage

to answer, mustering her yes from

a bruised fragility, knowing its balm

lay in that fierce and faithful embrace.

Will you let me in?

Yes, Love, yes.

It was the night that she learned

how to fly.