all tears are made of one substance / For our deepest sobbing to be eloquent / the ability to stay above the water //

1.

An almost unbearable love.

To allow yourself to feel the depth of love you have for someone or a place is as overwhelming as allowing yourself to feel their loss. Their absence.

It is the same feeling.

That is why all tears are made of one substance
Tears of love and Tears of grief.
Are made from the same water.
The same source.

The way love and grief are made of the same substance
are one pool, one ocean -
arriving in different waves.

Both here to humble you.
Both here to open you.
Both here to connect you.
Both hold your greatest potential.

2.

Love and grief -
to keep them both alive and tangible in the same moment.

To be present with love while navigating grief.
To be present with grief while navigating love.

To feel the unbearable magnitude of both
and let it open us to the beauty of existence,
whatever we are moving through.

To remain soft. And honest. And loving.
Even in absence.
Even in boundaries.
Even in anger.

Can you imagine being angry with the force of a volcano,
a rage descended from earthquakes,
and still be graceful?

For our deepest sobbing to be as eloquent
as loving the sky, the cliffs, and the sea.

To feel gratitude for your own potential
in the moment of rupture.

To stand at the edge of losing something
and feel the love within it.

3.

I have no ambition to be someone in this world. I have the ambition to serve. And it’s impossible to serve when you are floating. I mean floating with no land or raft in sight.
Eventually, you lose the ability to stay above the water, like the inflatable unicorn I had as a child, the one I floated on in the pool. When I didn’t feed it new air, we could no longer play.

And I want to play. I want to participate in life.
More than anything.

I’ve been on the run for such a long time that I started to believe I’d passed the point of returning home again.

I’ve been trying to build homes on bridges but bridges are not places to build a home. They are air castles in the sky.
With enough will and imagination, you can rest there for a while. But eventually, they need air… like my unicorn.
And even air is expensive these days. After living on the brink of poverty for so long, the air in my own body no longer feels capable of sustaining more life, in the air castles, the unicorn, or even my own resilience.

What if I have not passed the point of returning home again?

Maybe what the moor and the death trees I’ve been spending so much time with have taught me is:

If I really want to be present,
I might finally be ready to return home again.