If you call on love, but it doesn’t answer
don’t assume it is indifferent,
or yourself unworthy.
Not if you call with the most
wounded and sacred parts of you.
Not if you call and then go running.
Not if you’ll bleed all over it after
it has licked and groomed itself
to shine like a full moon
in your midnight.
My dear, your sun will rise.
It will shine bright enough to
find the source of your bleeding.
It will shine on a Tuesday when
you were expecting rain,
and you’ll see that the blood
has stopped spilling onto sidewalks.
You will stop cowering from the
shame of carrying family secrets.
The shame of loving a mother and
a father in the same sentence while
everyone is watching and listening.
The shame of being a woman who
really only knows how to love a woman
with your whole heart gleaming.
The shame you held when you didn’t
realize it wasn’t yours to hold.
Shame is love’s lost child.
Hold it close in the folds of the
flesh left hanging in midlife.
Let shame be lost in the you that is
becoming stronger.
That is filling with the healing
elixir of understanding.
Let shame be the meal that
plants a desire for your hands
to stir their own ingredients.
Boiling herbs until their flavors marry
perfectly inside your nostrils.
Boiling until all that is left is
the savor of perfection.
This is what we are given in life.
The choice to eat only what is given,
or to create something when
our tongues are tired from
not savoring.
When you call on love make sure
you can see it clearly.
Make sure love sees you too.
Make sure you have a place for it, but
don’t force it if it doesn’t fit easily.
If you want it to have a place in you
make enough room for it to grow,
but don’t expect it to
fill you all the way up.
That is your job alone.
To let life fill you up, but to know
what to scoop out so that love can
be planted.
Tend to your garden instead of
folding in half and weeping
when love knows there is no
place for it.
Unfold and rise up and
let your hands be thick
with the evidence of your tending.
Love will find you when
you’re making other plans.
It will come and softly whisper,
“I’m ready.”
Because love rarely comes
in yelling and cloaked in
fluorescent colors.
It sneaks in like a whisper,
and takes on the texture
of your life.
