Valentine's Lines

For my Small Ones

Do you know how wide love is?

How tall or deep or heavy?

Do you know the shape of love?

The weave or thread or softness?

These things I may not tell you

We may wonder and muse and smile

But the secret of love is this

my small one

Our hearts become the universe

and inside them turns the love we feel

Our hearts become as endless as the sky

full of the flight of birds

and breath of wind

Our hearts become as deep as the ocean

pulsing with current

and twisting with life

These hearts they fill

fill and feel

Feel and grow

until everything and everyone we have ever loved

can fit inside

Like you and you and you and you

And that’s when you know

How wide and tall and deep and heavy

How soft and weighty

That’s when you know that the shape of love

is you.

BL

2/14/13

Happy Love Day... kiss the ones you love! {Mmm-wah} 

To Live By

"I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first...

You walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree; there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your minds, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten back the test results and they're not so good.

All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough."

- excerpts from novelist Anna Quindlen’s Villanova Commencement Address, June 2000

What Life is Made of

"I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first...

You walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree; there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your minds, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten back the test results and they're not so good.

All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough."

- excerpts from novelist Anna Quindlen’s Villanova Commencement Address, June 2000

In February

February is a thin-skinned month

pebbles bruise and

slide under my skin

The month in which I lost

my father

and almost lost myself

The month I realized

I was a borderland girl

as I wandered this world

and the next

seeking the lost one.

In February the pebbles tear my skin

never bouncing off harmlessly

In February I learned to grieve.

These years later emotional memory,

muscle memory rises, has imprinted,

still blindsiding me

still forming

the daddy-shaped piece of my puzzle

I’m still wandering the borderland

still searching for that piece.

Whether I realize it

or not.

BL 

2/10/13